Chapter 31

My heart jumped. I was racing toward the ladder before I knew what I was doing, pushing people aside for the first time in my life. A few sneers shot my way, but I didn't care. And even though Coen was calling after me, I refused to slow down.

Fergus must have snapped. Must have discarded Coen's earlier warning and decided to mess with Gileon for fun. And if Gil had been hurt, his teeth knocked out or worse…

As soon as my feet landed on the floor below, I was flying downstairs. I didn't know how I could help, what I could do, but I knew I had to be there. Had to stop it, somehow, before my sweet, too-innocent friend was hurt beyond repair.

But when I finally shoved through the dense, circling throng in the foyer and beheld what had happened, I lurched to a halt.

Gileon was standing upright, his brow furrowed in concentration, but there wasn't a scratch on him. Not a single trickle of blood or blossoming bruise.

Fergus, meanwhile, was spitting blood through a mangled mouth, bobbing before Gileon with his fists raised. There was no sign of mold or other magic, just the two of them facing off in a circle of eager onlookers. As the pieces slid into place, I realized that Fergus must have tried to trip Gileon, and Gileon, in turn, had knocked his tooth out.

And suddenly, I was trying really, really hard not to smile.

Fergus roared and barreled forward again, the whites of his eyes screaming with popped blood vessels. Gileon wasn't fast enough to side step him, but just as Fergus brought his elbow back for a punch, he managed to catch his wrist, hold it back with ease, and bury his own bunched hand into Fergus's face again.

"Oooh," someone in the crowd groaned.

Jenia's scream cut through the gasps as Fergus whipped sideways and crumpled to his feet. She broke through the onlookers and sank to her knees beside him, shaking his shoulder.

As Coen sidled up beside me, folding his arms over his chest and passing me the most suppressed smirk I'd ever seen, I caught sight of Fergus's face: mangled jaw, shredded lips, blood-drenched chin… and a few more yellow-stained teeth scattered on the floor around him.

Fergus had tried to poke at Gileon for the last time.

From across the room, I caught the dazzling flash of Wren's triumphant grin.

Gileon's victory was about the only thing anyone could talk about for the next several days within the Wild Whispering sector, but even that topic dwindled away as the second quarterly test drew near.

"Mitzi Hodges claims she overheard Mr. Conine saying we just have to convince a snake and a mongoose to quit fighting this time around for the Predators Prey test," Emelle said during Spiders, Worms Insects as we tried to coax out pill bugs from some mangrove roots in the arboretum. "No riddles this time, so it should be easier to pass."

She'd been very careful not to mention Lander's name since he'd disappeared with Quinn at the formal, and I hadn't seen Lander himself to ask what his so-called "talk" with Quinn had been about. I almost would've thought I'd been imagining a spark between my two friends if Emelle hadn't also steered clear of the topic of her random hookup anytime I tried to bring it up.

I studied her, watching as she pressed her lips to the bottom bark of the mangrove tree and emitted a peculiar cwip! cwip! cwip! sound that was supposed to lure the pill bugs out. When nothing happened, she withdrew and bit her lip in frustration.

"Emelle," I began for what seemed like the hundredth time, "about the other night…"

"Oh, look!" She shielded her eyes from the strip of sunlight through the canopy and twisted away from me. "Here come Rodhi and Gileon." Okay, she still didn't want to talk about the Element Wielder formal. Noted. "Guess they're not having much luck either."

Indeed, the two were traipsing toward us, Gil's head brushing the branches above, with absolutely defeated expressions. Our other classmates were scattered in pairs throughout the rest of the arboretum, too, but we hadn't witnessed any of their failures or successes yet, and I hadn't seen Ms. Pincette since she'd released us with instructions.

"Any luck?" I asked them.

"Well," Rodhi said morosely, leaning against our tree, "I managed to get one little roly poly to poke its head out, but it took one look at my face, said—what did it say, Gil?"

"Ah, a demon!" Gileon mimicked.

"Yeah, that." Rodhi slumped against our mangrove tree. "Thankfully Ms. Pincette didn't see that. She was too busy scolding Jenia—which just reminded me why I can't give up on that wonderful woman, even after all her little rejections." He closed his eyes. "I've never been so turned on as I was just now, listening to that."

"Ew," Emelle said.

"Scolding Jenia?" I asked, ignoring everything else that was wrong about that statement.

"Yeah." Rodhi sighed dreamily. "Jenia was bitching about how Gileon is a ‘brute unfit for civilization' or something idiotic like that, and Ms. Pincette said, ‘the only one unfit for civilization is standing right in front of me, Ms. Leak.' God bless her."

Gileon frowned. Despite everyone's continuous congratulations and Wren's continuous gloating, I knew he was still feeling guilty about sending Fergus to the sick bay yet again. And I had a feeling that Jenia knew he was feeling guilty, too.

Which was why she'd called him a bully, loud and clear for him to hear. To hurt his feelings. And that made my blood hiss in my veins.

When would it stop?

After a few more of our failed attempts to draw out the pill bugs, Ms. Pincette came trudging our way in her high-buckled boots, her chestnut hair tucked neatly behind her ears as always.

She didn't even ask us if we'd succeeded before snapping, "Class dismissed. Please practice over the weekend. These things are wrecking the root systems around here." I lifted myself off the trunk of the mangrove along with the others, but Ms. Pincette added, "Not you, Ms. Drey. If you'll follow me back to the classroom, I would like to discuss something with you."

Rodhi's head jerked our way. "I'd be happy to volunteer in Rayna's stead."

"I'm sure you would, Mr. Lockett." A wry smile slipped through Ms. Pincette's pursed lips. "However, this is a discussion relating to Ms. Drey's deficiencies, not yours."

Deficiencies? I guess I hadn't been doing too well in class ever since the cockroaches—none of the insects ever seemed to want to listen to me—but I'd been listening and practicing and trying, so…

When Emelle quirked a brow at me, I said, "Go ahead. I'll meet you guys back at the house," and followed Ms. Pincette back toward the classroom.

She didn't speak the entire way there, her posture arrow-straight as she picked through the undergrowth until we'd reached weed-cracked cobblestone again. It was only when we came to the classroom door that she glanced back—but not at me. Over my head, as if to make sure nobody had followed us.

Then we slipped inside. She closed the door behind us and clicked her way to her desk.

"Here." She rummaged through her drawers and brought out a massive tome, which she thumped onto the desk. "Extra reading for you, Ms. Drey."

I inched forward and angled my head to read the gold-gilded lettering beneath its thick coating of dust: Creepers and Crawlersof the Past, Present, and Future.

"Oh. Thank you?"

Ms. Pincette's attention latched fully onto my face. "Open it."

I did so, reaching out to grab the edge of the cloth binding. The pages crinkled as I flicked through them, finding insect diagrams and pages upon pages of miniscule text. Ms. Pincette cleared her throat.

"Open it to page nine hundred and ninety-nine, I should say."

Feeling like I was definitely missing something by now, I sifted toward the back of the book and stopped, breathless. The entire text had been whited out and inked over with…

"A map," I whispered.

Ms. Pincette inhaled through her nose.

"I do love my spiders, but I'm capable of talking to birds, too. Specifically the seagulls who just migrated back to the island a couple weeks ago." When I continued to stare, she added with a sigh, "They're immune to it. The shield."

There it was again, that word. Immune. What could Coen and a seagull possibly have in common that would warrant their safe passage through the dome?

Before I could ask that or squint too heavily at the whorls and lines of ink and the tiny descriptions scrawled in the corner of each page, however, Ms. Pincette slammed the cover shut right in front of my nose.

"As I said, extra reading to make up for your deficiencies in class. If you dare tell anyone else otherwise, even your very best friend in the whole wide world…"

"I won't," I said quickly, not wishing to hear the tail-end of that warning. Even as I said it, though, I felt the words dry much too quickly on my tongue.

How could I keep this from Jagaros the next time I saw him, when he'd been the one to suggest such a thing to me? How could I keep it from Coen, whom I'd allowed back into my mind after the formal?

Worse yet, how could I keep it from myself? From that obsessively churning, constantly buzzing part of me that wouldn't be able to focus on anything else with a map of the world imprinted in my mind's eye?

But I locked those worries away and made myself take the burning intensity of Ms. Pincette's gaze.

"Thank you for the extra reading," I said.

"Study hard, Rayna."