The Young Elites

At first, all I feel from him is rage. He glares at me with murder in his eyes. “I’m going to kill you,” he spits out amid his pain. “You’ve attacked the wrong Elite.”

I harden my expression. No, you have.

His rage changes to fear. Terror pours from him—it only makes me stronger, and I throw all the extra power back into torturing him. A part of me is horrified at what I’m doing. But the other part of me, the part that is my father’s daughter, delights in it. I’m heady with pleasure—it washes over me until I feel like I am a completely different person. I walk closer to where he writhes and look on patiently with a curious tilt of my head. I open my mouth to speak, and my father’s words spill out of me.

“Show me what you can do,” I whisper in Dante’s ear.

Somewhere in the midst of swirling darkness, I catch sight of Violetta cowering in the corner, her terrified eyes fixed on me. She has the power to stop me, I realize through my haze of exhilaration. But she’s not.

Stop? Why should I stop? This is the boy who told Enzo to kill me. He has threatened my life from the moment I joined the Daggers—he tried to kill me right now. Just like everyone else. I have every right to torture him. He deserves to die at my hands, and I will make sure he feels every last moment of it. All the rage and bitterness I’ve held in my heart for everything now reaches a peak. My father’s image replaces Dante again, his body bent backward in agony. My smile turns dark and I twist harder, harder, harder.

I will destroy you.

“Stop, please!” At first I think it’s Violetta screaming this at me, but then I realize that it’s my father. He has resorted to begging. His heartbeat increases to a violent pace.

Something inside me screams that this is going too far—I can feel the darkness taking over my senses. My father—Dante—gasps. His scream cuts off as his face freezes into a trembling picture of shock. Harder. I try in vain to shove it away, to regain control. I can’t. A real trickle of blood runs from his lips. My heart trembles at the sight. That isn’t supposed to happen. I am a conjurer of illusions. Can even the illusion of pain eventually trigger something real? Again, I reach out to stop myself. But my father’s ghost only laughs, mingling with the gleeful whispers in my head.

Keep going, Adelina, and no one will ever command you again.

I feel something snap in Dante’s heart, a breaking of strings.

He freezes. His mouth stays open in a silent scream; his lips are stained red. His fingers twitch, but his eyes are glazed. The darkness in me that took over my mind now vanishes in a rush—I collapse to my knees, suddenly unable to catch my breath, and lean against the wall in exhaustion. I feel like I’ve returned to my body. My energy shrinks away into nothingness, just like that—my father’s ghostly presence disappears, and his voice melts into the night. Violetta stays where she is, staring in stunned silence at Dante’s body. I do the same. The chaos out in the streets rings in my ears like an underwater scream.

I wanted to hurt him. To defend myself. To get revenge. To escape. But I didn’t just hurt him. I made sure that he will never again lift a finger against me.

In my fury, I killed him.

Baliras are violent when provoked. But be silent and still,

and you may yet see the frailness under their enormous size,

the way they wrap their fins around their young.

—Creatures of the Underworld, by Sir Alamour Kerana

Adelina Amouteru

I’m not sure how long we stay in the alley. Maybe a minute. Maybe hours. Time loses meaning for a while. I only remember leaving that narrow street in a stupor, my hand clenched tightly around Violetta’s. There is a corpse lying on the ground behind us that I don’t dare look at again.

Somehow, we manage to stay hidden in the shadows, the chaos in the city working to our advantage. In the heart of Estenzia, the steady presence of Inquisition patrols has quickly turned into teeming numbers, more white cloaks than I’ve ever seen in my life. Broken glass litters the streets. Shops owned by malfettos are smashed, burned, and destroyed—their owners dragged from their beds, still in their shifts, and thrown into the street to be arrested. The palace is taking its revenge for what we did at the piers.

I am taking my own revenge.

We continue on. It seems like the night sky has started to lighten . . . dawn already? We must have stayed in the alley for some time, I think as we go. Sheer exhaustion suddenly hits me, and I lean into a wall to steady myself against the wave of dizziness. Something happened in that alley. What was it? Why does everything feel so out of focus? A memory comes to me clouded and half formed, as if I had witnessed it through another’s eyes. Someone had been there. A boy. He’d tried to hurt us. I can’t remember beyond that. Something happened. But what? I look at Violetta, who returns my stare with wide, frightened eyes. It takes me a moment to realize that she is frightened of me.

Perhaps I do remember. Perhaps I’m forgetting on purpose.

“Hurry, Adelina,” she whispers as she hesitantly takes my hand. I follow numbly. “Where should we go?”

Through the fog in my head, I murmur back, “The Fortunata Court. This way.” If I can just talk to Raffaele, I can explain everything. Enzo will listen to him. I shouldn’t have left them behind—this has all been a terrible mistake.

I lead us through the waning dark, past burning buildings and wailing people, the air filled with the smell of terror. I stop again when the darkness in my stomach becomes too much for me to handle.

“Wait,” I gasp out to Violetta. Before she can reply, I lean forward and heave. What little is in my stomach comes spilling out. I cough and retch until I have nothing left. Still, the darkness churns in me, relentless, bringing with it tides of both nausea and comfort. I teeter between revulsion and joy.