When Sawyer Sylvester was a child, she was bullied relentlessly.

Growing up in the Bible Belt, being half-Filipina was about as different as anyone in Huntsville, Alabama could expect or wrap their narrow-minded minds around. It didn’t matter to the children that she had grown up among them since infancy, nor that she was a kind-hearted, sweet child with large brown eyes and a willing smile. To them, she was a foreigner, an outsider.

She was teased for her upturned cat-eyes and high cheekbones. Both were traits donned on her by her deceased mother. It was painful to know the things that kept her close to the mother she had never known caused the biggest rift between her and her classmates.

They called her a myriad of racial slurs, pushed her, threatened her, or ignored her altogether. The mean girls took special delight in pretending to like her, only to freeze her out the next day. No matter what Sawyer did to win their approval, she was cast aside and ridiculed. She never seemed to learn from their past indiscretions, an innocent part of her always wanting to see the best in everybody.

It seemed, some days, that even her teachers were in on the cruelty, turning a purposeful blind eye to the torment she endured, oftentimes punishing her for the misdeeds of others.

The other kids did not seem to notice her eagerness to please or her desire to be a part of their inner circle. It was almost like the harder she tried, the more she was taunted; until one day, something inside the little girl snapped.

It was the beginning of ninth grade, and Sawyer had bloomed into the early stages of womanhood over the summer. Almost overnight, it seemed that her preteen breasts began to poke through her loose-fitting top, and she dropped the remnants of her baby fat like beads of sweat. She had also started her period a couple weeks before, much to the chagrin of her overwhelmed father.

“You remind me more and more of your mother every day,” Gregory Sylvester told her, pain in his voice as he studied her face. “One day, you are going to be a great adventurer, just like she was.”

“Was she a great adventurer?” the girl asked, her eyes shining at the fact that her father had brought up the woman without being prompted. It had always been a touchy subject, and Sawyer eventually learned that it was easier to ignore it than ask her father the burning questions that had eaten away at her since toddlerhood.

“Oh, yes,” Greg said, smiling. “She backpacked all over Asia and Australia before coming here. But she barely started her tour of America before we met and fell in love. Sometimes I feel like I held her back.”

“And will I marry someone like you?” Sawyer asked hopefully, wishing away the tears in his eyes.

“You will marry someone better than me, in a better place than this,” he promised. She didn’t know it then, but his words were laced with regret that he was unable to move her away from the town with his meager resources and disability. It was a source of shame he would take to his grave, feeling as if he had failed not only his wife, but his only daughter, too.

Sawyer started the school year with a renewed hope, the promise of womanhood not far off. Her mother was fresh in her mind when she kissed her father goodbye that morning, and he offered her a few words of wisdom before she left.

“All of this will be meaningless in a few years,” her father had promised her. “You must get through the test that is high school, and good things will be waiting for you, See-Saw, I swear.”

And she clung to that faith as she skipped out of their trailer and toward the public school a mile from the park she called home.

It was an overcast day, Sawyer remembered. The rain was prognosticated, but it held off until she reached the steps of the school with only moments to spare.

“Hey, chinky eyes!” Dawn Lawson called as she slipped into the corridor. “Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s pink day today?” Sawyer looked up and realized that, indeed, everyone wore some form of the color pink in honor of the anti-bullying day. The irony was not lost on Sawyer, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

Ignoring the overweight tormentor, Sawyer hurried down the hall toward her locker, but as she did, Dawn grabbed her by the knapsack and pulled her back, causing the smaller girl to fall to the floor. Her classmates began to jeer at her as she ambled to her feet, clenching her teeth to keep the tears from falling, and she brushed herself off.

“Hey, look!” Jamie Vincent yelled. “Sawyer grew tits! I thought she was a boy all this time.”

“Maybe she still is!” another one of the menaces chortled. “Half girl, half boy!”

Sawyer stared at the ground, well-versed in what to do in such situations. She had hoped that high school would be different, but in such a small town, how could it be? It was the same cruel faces in a different setting.

Just let them get it all out and then they’ll grow bored if you don’t react, she reminded herself, and it might have worked. The entire matter would have been forgotten in a matter of a couple of minutes, the bell would have sounded, and everyone would have gone about their day as if nothing had been said. Sawyer would have packed the scar away upon another one, and there would have been nothing remarkable about that Pink Shirt Day… if Dawn had not opened her mouth one last time.

“Well? Are you a girl or a boy, Sawyer? Sawyer is a boy’s name, isn’t it?” the chubby brat demanded, pushing her. “Let’s hear if you’ve got a low voice or a high squeaky one.”

Don’t react, don’t react, don’t—

“Hey, chinky eyes! Which is it? Did your chinky mom have a chinky boy or a chinky girl?” Jamie cried.

“She doesn’t know,” Dawn announced before saying the words that would seal her fate. “She killed her mom when she was born.”

What happened after that was a matter of speculation and second-hand information pieced together by police and witnesses. Sawyer herself remembered very little about the matter, and she relied on the accounts, for no one had any other explanation for what occurred.

All that was known for a fact was that Dawn Lawson’s jaw was subsequently wired shut for six weeks and Jamie Vincent was unable to ever play any sport again, his dislocated knee permanently damaged.

The incident was quietly brushed aside without any charges laid on the condition that Sawyer be removed from school and not brought back. The fear in the students’ eyes when she left that day was something she would never forget as long as she lived.

It made her feel alive, invigorated, and in control for the first time in her life, and despite the fact that she still wore both Jamie’s and Dawn’s blood on her clothes, she held her head high as her father led her from the school of her nightmares.

Something changed in Sawyer that day, and looking back, she was never sure if it was for better or worse. Gone was the naïve girl who believed that a kind word or a helping hand could solve anything. In her place was a woman who suddenly understood that if she wanted something in life, she needed to assert herself. She loathed that it had taken her almost fourteen years to figure that out.

“Um… miss?”

“Hmm?”

“No rush, miss, but, uh, there’s a line forming behind you.”

Sawyer stared at the barista blankly, realizing that she had been lost in thought for several minutes, and she chuckled with embarrassment.

“Whoops,” she remarked lightly. “That’s what happens when I can’t decide between hazelnut and chocolate.”

“We have a chocolate hazelnut croissant,” the teenage boy suggested helpfully, and she nodded, grinning. She had no interest in anything sweet at all, but she wasn’t going to admit she had been lost in a daydream.

“Sounds perfect.” She turned her head back to look out the coffee shop window, but the girl who had so closely resembled her childhood nemesis had disappeared down the busy block. Sawyer was sure it wasn’t Dawn, anyway, but she could not help wondering what the woman would do if they ever again crossed paths. I would like to think she would shit herself.

“Ten dollars and fifteen cents,” the barista told her, and Sawyer slipped a twenty across the counter, glancing over her shoulder at the annoyed line growing at her back. Offering them an easy smile, she accepted her change, left a tip in the jar, and moved aside to wait for her latte and breakfast.

“You’re too young to remember,” the older man standing near the espresso machine commented. “But there was a time when people weren’t so impatient.”

A half-smile touched Sawyer’s lips as she studied the clean-shaved bald man out of the corner of her eye.

“I might be impatient if I was standing behind the spaced-out girl during rush hour, too,” she replied, casting him a sidelong look. “I can’t really blame them. Actually, I think they exercised a fair bit of decorum.”

“Ah! An empath,” the stranger chuckled. “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

The hairs on the back of Sawyer’s neck rose, and she eyed him, noting his overpriced suit. There was something out of place with him. He didn’t belong in the coffee shop near the college.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said slowly, unsure of what to make of the slight alarm she was feeling.

The man turned his regal head to the side, and she took in his profile, wondering if she knew him. Something in her gut was telling her that she had, but she couldn’t place him.

A take-out cup of coffee appeared, and a weathered hand reached out to grab for it, his back to Sawyer now as he moved away, though not before she caught sight of the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Her heart paused, and she gaped at the man as he disappeared out the door without so much as a backward look.

“Wait!” she yelled after him, spinning to chase him.

“Miss? Your order!” the teenage barista called, his voice fraught with confusion, but she was already on the crowded street, her eyes peeling north toward Cumberland River for any sign of the stranger.

It was as if he had vanished into thin air.

No way, she thought, her shoulders sagging dejectedly. You’re imagining things. There’s no way that man was one of them. Or… maybe he was one of us?

It was hard to say, considering she did not know exactly what she had gotten herself involved in.

“Miss?” There was a tap on her shoulder, and Sawyer whirled, posed to strike. “You left your order.”

Exhaling, Sawyer thanked the perplexed kid and took the bag and cup from him, shaking her head as if trying to knock some sense into herself. Left alone, people brushing past her on their way to work and classes, Sawyer gazed blankly about, as if seeking direction.

It had been a year since she had last heard from The Order, and some days, she was sure it had all been a weird dream.

More like a hallucination, she thought, gritting her teeth as the memory of what she had done flooded back to her.

She had managed to make herself believe that none of it had happened, and over time, it had become easy to forget. After all, they had disappeared as quickly as they had surfaced, the emails and encrypted texts abruptly stopping, as if The Order had never existed in the first place.

No, Sawyer repeated to herself. Even if you did see the tattoo on that guy’s wrist, it was a coincidence. Lots of people have that symbol. Yet as she willed herself to continue up 21^st Avenue toward Vanderbilt University, she couldn’t shake the idea that the man had been there to see her. If he had been, I’ll know soon enough, she reasoned. Contact will be made, and there’s nothing I can do until that happens. If that even happens.

Readjusting the backpack on her shoulders, she glanced at her cell phone, partially to check the time, but mostly in anticipation of a text. Her pulse raced even minutes after the encounter.

Which was probably nothing at all. Get to class before you flunk out of another course, she warned herself. You just got yourself back on track after last year’s fiasco. You can’t afford another distraction. The entire reason you moved to Nashville after Dad died was to start fresh.

She reasoned that at least she had gotten out of Alabama like she had promised her father, determined never to return to the place of her childhood torment. But sometimes, she found herself insurmountably lonely in the big city.

Being a loner had followed her from state to state, and while she was no longer regarded as an outcast in the blossoming city of Nashville, Sawyer could not let go of the deep-rooted insecurity the children in school had ingrained in her. Making friends had not come easily, despite the inherently friendly nature of the other students at the college. While she aspired to be warm, there was an aloofness that kept others at bay when they spoke to her, and Sawyer could not boast about a big circle of friends.

Which was why she had clung to the idea of The Order.

Go. To. Class.

Sawyer shoved the idea of the underground group from her mind and picked up the pace, knowing that all of her dawdlings had caused her to be late for her morning lecture. Whoever the man was, whether he belonged to The Order or not, she still had a life to lead outside of the fantastical world to which the group had led her.

Dragon hunting would have to wait.