Firespell

“So your weirdo friend’s gone AWOL?”

I glanced behind me. M.K. stood in the doorway, arms folded across a snug, white button- up shirt and the key on a silver chain that lay across it. She must have upgraded from ribbon.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I turned around again, picked up Scout’s bag, and slid the strap over one shoulder.

M.K. huffed. “Everyone is talking about it. Her room is trashed, and she’s gone. We all thought she was a flake. Now we have proof. She obviously went postal. She’s probably tearing around downtown Chicago in that gigantic coat, raving about vampires or something. I mean, have you seen her room? It was practically a fire hazard in there. About time someone cleaned it out.”

I had to press my fingernails into my palms to keep the overhead light from bursting into flame.

“I see,” I blandly responded, turning and heading for my bedroom door. “Excuse me,” I said, when she didn’t move. After rolling her eyes, she uncrossed her arms and ankles and stepped aside.

“Freak,” she muttered under her breath.

That was the last straw.

With no fear and no thought of the consequences, I turned on M.K., stepping so close that she pressed herself back into the wall.

“I’m not entirely sure how you finagled your way into St. Sophia’s,” I said, “and I’m not entirely sure that you’ll be able to finagle your way out again. But you might want to think about this—threatening the girls you think are freaks isn’t really a good idea, ’cause we’re the kind of girls who will threaten you right back.”

“You can’t—,” she began, but I held a finger to her lips.

“I wasn’t done,” I informed her. “Before I was interrupted, I was making a point: Don’t mess with the weirdos, unless you want to lie awake at night, wondering if one of those weirdos is going to sneak a black widow into your bed. Understood?”

She made a huffy sound of disbelief, but wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I’d actually scared the bully.

“And M.K.,” I said, stepping away and heading for the hallway door, “sleep well.”

She didn’t look like she would.

19

I took the route to the basement that Scout and I had taken a couple of days before. I wasn’t sure how many paths led to the enclave, but I figured I had the best chance to get there if I stuck to the one I (almost) remembered.

I found the side hallway and the basement door, then took the steep stairs to the lower level. This part was more of a challenge. I hadn’t been smart enough the last time to play Gretel or Girl Scout, to lay down a trail of crumbs or blaze a path back to the railcar line and the Roman numeral three.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t learn from my mistakes. And there were plenty of mistakes, my luck having apparently exhausted itself. Fortunately, I’d left early, giving myself plenty of time to get to the enclave, because it took me half an hour to find the metal door that led to the railcar tunnels, and I had to backtrack two or three times. Each time I found the right route (read: eliminated another dead end from my list of routes to try), I made a little mark on the corridor wall with the yellow chalk from my bag. That way, if I made it through the evening without being beaten down by Adepts, I’d be able to find my way upstairs again.

The possibility that I wouldn’t be coming back—that I was about to dive into something nasty in order to save my new BFF—was a thought I kept pretty well repressed. The risk didn’t matter, I decided, because Scout would have come after me. She’d have come for me.

I’d heard someone say that bravery was doing the thing you were afraid to do, despite your fear. If that was true, I was the bravest person I knew; the lights that flickered above me as I walked through the hallway—an EKG of my emotions—were proof enough of that.

At the metal door, I reached up on tiptoes and felt for the key Scout had pulled down on our first trip to the enclave. I had a moment of heart- fluttering panic when I couldn’t feel anything but dust above the threshold, but I calmed down a little when my fingertips brushed cold metal. I grabbed the key, slipped it into the lock, and unlocked the door.

It popped open with a whoosh of cold, stale air. My stomach rolled nervously, but I battled through it. I pulled out the flashlight, flicked the button, and took the step.

But I left the door open behind me, just in case.

“All right,” I muttered, swinging the beam of the flashlight from one side of the tunnel to the other, trying to figure out the message Foley had given me.

Look for the tags, she’d said.

While I was willing to do a little backtracking in the tidy limestone basement, backtracking through musty, dirty, damp, and dark tunnels wasn’t going to happen. I needed the right route the first time through. And that meant I needed an answer.

“Tags, tags, tags,” I whispered, my gaze tracking from railcar tracks to concrete walls to arched ceiling. “Gift tags?” I wondered aloud, even at a whisper, my voice echoing through the hall. “Clothing tags?”

The circle of light swung across the curvaceous graffiti that swirled across one of the walls. I froze, my lips tipping up into a smile.

Turned out, Foley hadn’t meant the gift kind or the clothing kind or the HTML kind.

She’d meant the spray paint kind.

Graffiti tags.

The walls were covered in them—a mishmash of pictures and words. Portraits. Political messages. Simple tags: “Louie” had been here a lot. Complicated tags: Thick, curvalicious letters that wrapped around one another into amoebas of words I couldn’t even read. However abandoned these tunnels seemed now, they’d been the site of a lot of spray painting, a lot of artistry.

I walked slowly down the first section of the tunnel, moving the circle of light from one wall to the other, trying to find the key that would decipher the code. It was hard enough to read them, much less to decipher them, the letters intertwined, the tags overlapping.

My eye caught a short tag in tidy, white letters, which was centered over an arch-shaped opening that led to the left.

MILLIE 23, it read.

I stilled the flashlight and stared at the tag.

St. Sophia’s was located at 23 East Erie, and I’d bet money that Millie was short for Millicent—Scout’s first name.

I peeked inside the tunnel and aimed the flashlight beam at the arches at the end of that part of the tunnel. One was blank.

The other, the one on the right, was tagged MILLIE 23.

“Very clever, Scout,” I said, and stepped inside.

Thirteen tags, thirteen tunnels, and twelve minutes later, I emerged into the final corridor, stopping before the arched, wooden door of Enclave Three.

I wet my lips, tightened my fingers into a hand, and opened the door.

Heads turned immediately, their expressions none too friendly.

Smith stared at me, eyes wide, fury in his face, hair matted to his forehead. “What the hell are you doing here? And where’s Scout?”

“She’s gone,” I said. “And I need your help.”

“Gone?” asked a skeptical voice. Katie stepped beside him, her slim figure tucked into capri-cut jeans and layered V-neck T-shirts beneath a leather letterman jacket. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

“She’s been taken.” I ignored their gazes and looked to the folks more likely to actually believe me.

“She got a page at noon,” I told Michael and Jason, both in uniform, both moving closer to me as I began to explain. “She thought it was strange, but she went anyway. Said she had to go back to her room. She didn’t come back to class, and when I got back to the suite after school, her room was trashed.”

“Trashed?” Michael asked, a pale cast to his face. “What do you mean, ‘trashed’?”

“She has all sorts of collections—books and sculptures and these little houses. All of it was on the floor. Her pillows were slashed. Someone tore the sheets off the bed, emptied her drawers. And then there’s this.”

I rearranged her messenger bag on my shoulder, revealing the skull and crossbones. “It was still in her room. She never goes anywhere without this bag.”

Michael slowly closed his eyes, grief in his expression. “They lured her out.”

“Wait,” Jason said, “Just wait. Let’s not jump to conclusions.” He looked at me. “She didn’t say anything about meeting someone somewhere? About where she was supposed to be going? About what the emergency was?”

I shook my head.

“What about her cell phone?” asked one of the twins—Jamie or Jill, I wasn’t sure—stepping forward. She brushed a waterfall of auburn hair over her shoulder, as if preparing to get down to business. “Do you have it?”

I glanced down at Scout’s messenger bag. It had seemed empty after I’d taken her books out, but there was no harm in checking. I slipped a hand into the side pockets, then the interior pocket. Nothing, until I heard something clank against the snap that kept the front flap closed. I looked closer, found a small slit in the flap, and when I reached in a hand, touched cold, hard plastic. My heart sinking, I pulled out Scout’s cell phone. Too bad I hadn’t found it before, but at least I had it now.

“See who called her,” Jamie quietly said. “See what the message said.”

I slid the phone open and scanned her recent calls, recent texts, but there was nothing there. “Nothing,” I announced. “She must have deleted it.”

“We usually do,” Michael said softly. “Delete them, I mean. To protect the identities of the Adepts, to keep the locations to ourselves. Simpler that way.”

Unfortunately, that meant we wouldn’t be able to figure out who’d sent Scout the text. But if she’d erased it as part of her standard Adept protocol, then she’d assumed the message was from another Adept.

Had the person who’d sent it, who’d lured her out, been in this room?

“They’ll use her,” Michael said. “They’ve taken her, and they’ll use her.” He walked to the other end of the room, picked up a backpack, and slung it over one shoulder. “I’m going after her.”

Smith stepped in front of him. “You will not go after her.”

The room got very quiet, and very tense.

“She’s missing,” I interjected into the silence. “Like Michael said, she was lured out of her room, she’s been taken by one of the evil Reaper guys, and we need to find her before this messed-up situation gets any worse!”

Smith nailed me with a contentious glare. “We? You are not one of us.”

“Really not the point,” Michael said, stepping forward. “We can debate her membership later.”

“She doesn’t have power,” Katie put in. “She’s not one of us, and she shouldn’t even be down here, much less giving us orders.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Whether she has power or not is irrelevant.”

Smith made a disdainful sound. “You aren’t in charge here, Garcia.”

“If one of our own is in danger—”

“Hey,” I said, interrupting the fight. “Internal squabbling can wait. Scout’s gone, and we need to get her back now. Now, and not after you guys have gone a couple of rounds about the enclave hierarchy.”

Smith shook his head. “We can’t worry about that right now.”

Michael made a sound of disbelief, as if words of shock and awe had caught in this throat. I took the lead on his behalf.

“We can’t worry about that?” I repeated. “She’s one of you! You can’t just leave her . . . wherever she is.”

When no one spoke up, I glanced around the room, from Paul, to Katie, to the twins, to Jason. Guilty heads dropped around the room. No one would look me in the eye.

I put my hands on my hips, the fingers of my right hand tight around Scout’s phone, my link to her. “Seriously? This is how you treat your teammates? Like they’re disposable?”

“Getting dramatic isn’t going to solve anything,” Katie said, crossing her arms over her chest. For a cheerleader type, she managed a bossy, condescending stare pretty well. “We appreciate that you care about Scout, but it’s not that simple.”

I arched my eyebrows. “The hell it’s not.”

“Katie’s right.” Those words from the boy I’d almost decided to have a crush on. As Jason stepped forward, I was glad I’d stuck to “almost.”

“If we go after her,” he said, earnestness in his blue eyes, “we put ourselves, the city, the community around us, at risk. Being a member of the team means accepting the possibility that you’ll become the sacrifice. Scout knew that. Understood it. Accepted that risk.”

My heart tumbled, broken a little that this boy was so willing to give up our friend for the sake of people I wasn’t sure were worth the sacrifice. And that included him.

“Wow,” I said, honestly surprised. “Way to play well with others. Your whole existence is about saving people from Reapers, but you’re willing to let her be a ‘sacrifice’? I thought being Varsity, being Junior Varsity, being an Adept, was about being part of something bigger? Working together? What about all that talk?”

Smith shook his head. “It’s just talk—only talk—if we dump our current agenda—the kids who need protecting—to find her. Think about it, Lily—they’ve managed to lure Scout into their clutches. They’re probably using her as a lure for the rest of us. To pull us in.” Smith shook his head. “If we’re lucky, they’d just try to indoctrinate us. If not”—he glanced over, green eyes slitted shut—“the Reapers would be setting us up for a nasty night. In which we play the role of toast.”