Хлоя Нейл - Firespell

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’smissing ,” 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 havepower ,” 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.”

I couldn’t argue with the logic—it probablywas a trap.

But still. It wasScout .

I shook my head. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe this. All that talk, and you bail when someone needs you. Trap or not, you make an effort. You make a plan. Youtry .”

Smith looked away. There might have been a hint of guilt in his eyes, but not enough to force him to act. “I’ll call the higher-ups and alert them,” he said. “But that’s all we can do. We aren’t authorized to send out a rescue team. It’s not done.”

“It can’t be,” Katie put in, this time quietly. “We just can’t do it.”

Guilt—and maybe grief—hung in the silence of Enclave Three.