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“Marvin!”
I look up from my textbook, the half-turned page suspended between the covers, my brain continuing to absent-mindedly force it to a standstill with my telekinesis. You can’t get any fucking studying done in this place.
Marella comes flying towards me, dropping down heavily into the seat next to mine. She slams my book shut, catching my fucking fingers in it as she does so, the bitch, and stares at me with wild eyes.
“Have you heard the news?” she asks, her chest heaving.
“No, Marella,” I tell her, pulling my fingers out of my book. “I haven’t seen you in three days, because it was the weekend and then we got a day off for the Tribunal. You haven’t had any time to tell me shit fuck. What’s the news?”
“They found an elf in the Forbidden Cities!”
Well, there’s no way I’m getting back to studying now. If I show vague interest in literally anything, Marella’s going to go on a rant about it. And, well, I am interested in this.
“Go on,” I tell her.
“So, there’s this blonde chick, Sophie, right? Sort of darker hair than mine, freckles but not as many as you, taller than both of us but shorter than Alysha —”
“I don’t give two fucks how tall she is, Marella,” I say. “Was she the reason there was a Tribunal yesterday?”
Marella nods, undeterred by the interruption. “And — get this — she has brown eyes.”
“Brown eyes?”
“Yeah! And her knees bend backwards like a horse.”
“That one’s really weird.”
“And she goes to Foxfire now.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I think she’s in your next class, actually.” Marella pokes the cover of my book. “That one.”
I pat her on the head and shove my book under my arm. “Well, in that case, I should go meet her. Spot her weird knees out in the wild.”
……
Sophie, it turns out, does not have knees that bend backwards. I’m a very odd mixture of relieved and disappointed about this fact. She does have brown eyes though. They’re very pretty.
Is it living with humans that give you this much anxiety, or is Sophie just really jumpy? Is that just how she’s programmed? I accidentally drop my book about five desks away from her, and she falls off her seat, looks around with her eyes as wide as physically possible, and clambers back into her chair, gripping the sides of her desk so hard her knuckles are white.
I want to pull her apart and put her back together to find out how she works.
……
I find Marella making plastic forks float around her head with her telekinesis.
“You good?” I ask her.
“Sophie’s dead.” The forks stop moving for a moment before they drop like flies. One lands on my shoulder prongs-first before bouncing off to god knows where. Ow.
I notice she’s tied her hair up with a green scrunchie. Only about two people have died in Marella’s lifetime, and Sophie was one of them. The other was some homophobic authority figure. Marella wore bright red for an entire month, and didn’t stop whispering to me during the moments of silence we had to observe for him. This is just about the most respect she’s ever shown anyone. I’m impressed.
“That explains why she wasn’t in class this morning,” I say.
“Dex is also dead.”
“That explains why he was also not in class this morning.”
She gives me a look that says shut the fuck your face. “Are you coming to their Planting?”
“I didn’t really know them that much.”
“Well, you can come anyway. It’s after school today.”
“Do you have anything green?” I ask her. “I tend not to prepare for these things. You don’t really expect immortal beings to die.”
“Indefinite lifespans, not immortal.”
“They’re basically the same thing.”
“They’re not.”
……
I push Marella’s bright green socks down from my knees and notice as she walks towards me that her hair’s down. No scrunchie. Has she given up on Sophie and Dex? They’ve only been dead a few days.
“Surprise, motherfucker,” she said, sitting down next to me. “You can give my socks back now, they’re both alive.”
There should be a button I can press that will surround my head with question marks, because sometimes you can’t quite convey your confusion with an expression alone. Still, I attempt to do that, and it works a bit, because she explains, a bit.
“So they didn’t fall off a cliff, it turns out,” she says, “their deaths were staged and they were actually kidnapped and tortured by some rebels.”
I am left with more questions than answers.
……
“Hey Marella?”
“Mmm?”
“How come Fitz is skipping school again?”
Marella frowns. “What?”
“Fitz. Golden Boy. He was missing school until Sophie got here, and then his attendance was perfect. And now he’s skipping again.”
“Oh.” She grabs Jensi’s juice box while he’s not looking, skulls about half of it, and then returns it. “Alden’s dead.”
“Why is everyone dying?”
“Well, he’s not dead,” Marella says, as Jensi shakes his juice box, confused. “His mind’s broken.”
“That’s basically dead.”
“That’s why I said he was dead. Dipshit.”
“So Alden’s dead, which is why Fitz is skipping school. And also Biana, presumably.”
“Yes.” Marella laughs. “You’re a real genius, aren’t you, Marvin?”
“Did you drink my juice?” Jensi demands of her.
……
I watch Fitz walk across the cafeteria, Biana a few metres behind him chatting with Maruca. Marella’s late, so I can only assume.
“Sorry,” she says, pushing past the hordes of people going to class. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Martin! Hey Martin!”
“Alden’s been healed, hasn’t he?” I shout at her, my voice dull.
“He sure as fuck has!”
“Sophie did it, didn’t she?”
“She sure as fuck did!”
I miss the days before age twelve where the only things I was confused about was where the stars were and how to read runes.
……
I’ve started to notice the look Marella gets in her eye whenever something happens concerning Sophie. It’s the usual gleam of gossip, but also something that could either be described as concern or “what the fuck”. There’s also just the smallest amount of lust. Marella has a great love for anything that could get her killed, including MILFs, sharks, and whatever shenanigans Sophie’s gotten into this time.
Before I can even open my mouth to ask, she answers.
“She’s been banished to Exillium. Along with Dex. And Biana. And Keefe. And Fitz.”
The Fitz bit shocks me a bit. Golden boy, banished to Exillium? I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am, really, because he also likes Sophie and therefore probably sharks.
“What for?”
“The ogre king went to Kenric’s Tribunal to pay his respects and she wiggled her way into his mind.” Marella grabbed food off my plate and bit into it. “She said it felt like marshmallows. I have no idea what those are, but I’ll find out.”
“They’re these squishy sugar things. Did you say she read the ogre king’s mind?”
“Tried to. It was only marshmallow stuff in there.” She sucked the juice from my food off her fingers. “I think my brain’s only marshmallow stuff, sometimes.”
“Marshmallow stuff, the latest thing Sophie’s up to, and pretty girls,” I add.
She laughs. “True. You’re about the same, I think.”
“I also have pretty boys in my brain, though. And I think about you, sometimes.”
“That’s nice of you.”
……
“No news about Sophie today,” Marella announces before she sits down.
“There hasn’t been anything for a while,” I note.
“There hasn’t.”
We sit in silence for a bit.
“Oh, shit, wait, forgot something! Someone flooded half the ogre kingdom. There were so many casualties.”
“What the fuck.”
“No confirmation that it was Sophie, but. I mean. Everyone’s thinking it.”
I’m certainly thinking it. Sophie has a… very bad track record for things like this.
……
The whole school is ushered out of the building and onto the grass outside. I shove through the crowd, looking for Marella. As I near the front, I notice Sophie’s standing in front of everyone, along with a bunch of important people.
Of fucking course.
I catch up with Marella towards the left of the crowd. She’s standing with Jensi. She’s got that look in her eyes again.
“Remember Keefe?” she asks.
“Hot blonde guy, two years above, pretends he has a deep voice but he doesn’t?”
“Yeah, that guy. He just blew up the admin building. While Sophie was in it.”
“Just, completely shattered the ceiling,” Jensi adds. “Not a scratch on her, either.”
Is her skin made of iron or something?
“So not Sophie’s direct fault this time,” I say.
“It’s the Domino effect,” Jensi corrects me. “It’s cause of her that he’s in the Neverseen, which is why he blew up the ceiling in the first place.”
“Neverseen?”
“Evil rebel fuckers,” Marella clarifies.
What the fuck.
……
“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” I say the moment Marella opens her mouth. “I know it this time.”
“Alright,” she says, resting her chin on her fist. “Go on.”
“So, Atlantis was almost flooded by the Neversaw —”
“Neverseen.”
“Shut the fuck up and let me finish — but then the chick who flooded Atlantis the first time actually stopped it.”
“Good job,” Marella says, “but no. That was ages ago. Old news. They found the oldest Vacker guy, and he lost all his memories. They’re letting him be a normal part of society now. Fitz is pissed.”
“Fitz is always pissed.”
“Fitz has a right to be always pissed, but yeah. He is a bit.”
“Is Biana also pissed?”
“No idea. Haven’t seen her in a while.” She sighs. “Shame.”
……
“Surprise, surprise,” Marella says. “More news.”
“Is it about Sophie this time?”
“Not even remotely. You know the oldest Vacker guy? How he lost all his memories and was let back into society? Turns out, he lied, and he’s still evil.”
“What a fucking shocker.”
“Who could have possibly predicted that?”
I reach across the table and swap Jensi’s half-full juice box for my empty one. “So we have an evil dude just running around the Lost Cities, killing people left and right?”
“No, Fitz killed him,” Marella says. Jensi throws my empty juice box at her.
“Stop fucking stealing them!” he says.
……
I grab my dusty-ass Imparter off the shelf and call Marella.
“What’s up?” she says. Her hair’s tied up into a messy bun. She looks tired. There’s a silver-haired girl behind her. Wait, scratch that, black-haired girl. Silver-and-black-haired girl.
“Why’s school cancelled?” I ask. “You know everything that goes on in the world. Enlighten me. Also, who’s that?”
“This is my girlfriend, Linh,” Marella says. “She was the one who flooded and then saved Atlantis on those two separate occasions.”
“Yeah, I can see why you’re into her,” I say. “You shark apologist, you.”
“Well, school’s cancelled cause the Neverseen’s after us,” Marella says, gesturing between her and Linh. “Well, not us specifically. Well, yes us specifically, but also the Vackers and Keefe and Dex and her twin brother and Sophie, as well. It’s for our safety.”
“Well, I have an education to finish, I don’t want Sophie to keep fucking it up,” I complain. “Is that it?”
“I’m a Pyrokinetic. But yeah, that’s it now.”
That’s honestly the least shocking thing I’ve heard since I was twelve.