Хлоя Нейл - Firespell

and I didn’t really have a lot of friend-rescuing supplies to choose from.

“First aid kit,” said a voice in the doorway.

I glanced back, found Lesley there, already having ditched the uniform for a pleated cotton skirt and tiny T-shirt. In her hands was a pile of supplies.

“First aid kit,” she repeated, moving toward me and laying the pile on my bed. “Water. Granola bars. Flashlight. Swiss Army knife.” She must have seen the quizzical expression on my face, as her own softened. “I said I wanted to help,” she said, then returned her gaze to the bed. “I’m helping.”

The room was quiet for a minute as I took it all in.

“Thank you, Lesley. I appreciate it. Scout appreciates it.”

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled absently, then moved toward the door. “Just make sure you tell her I helped.”

“As soon as I can,” I murmured, just hoping I’d have the opportunity totalk to Scout again. I stuffed the supplies into the bag, and had just closed the skull-and-crossbones flap when visitor number two darkened my doorway.

“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.

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 awhoosh 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.

Graffititags.

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.