Errant

Loyalty

Our final test arrives unbidden, in what seems like minutes instead of hours. I know what's coming, but hours of mentally flailing around in panic does little to assuage my fears or give me any ideas of how to escape my fate. At one point I even consider sneaking out. It is a coward's idea, made more difficult by my attachment to Quinn, Claire, and Rowan. Tempting though it may be, I can't bring myself to run from this, and with it, my only chance at learning anything about my powers. So I muster some sliver of willpower into my steps as I follow Quinn's bulky form downstairs, to the very heart of the resistance.

My Errancy, usually a source of panic, is a strange, calming weight inside of me while everything falls to pieces around me. I shouldn't take solace in what will condemn me today. My blessing and my curse.

We reach the very bottom of the resistance. We are so deep that the pink rock of the higher grounds is entirely lost, replaced with black rock that yields no warmth or mercy to the hallways.

Arlette halts us in front of two iron double doors. I fight the urge to look at my locket. We can't possibly be here already.

The room is massive, lined with stone columns that reach up to the ceiling, but I barely notice anything in it. My mind is a blur, and right now the room is synonymous with a mausoleum. It is certainly dark like one, and instead of the warm glow of the lamps that I am accustomed to— the warm glow of home— regular torches burn in brackets on the wall. The black smoke stings my nose and burns my eyes as it rises to the blackened ceiling.

We file in, slowly. I need to calm down. I have to calm down. But the effort of breathing alone is enough to make my entire body shake. No one notices. No one can notice, trapped as they are in their own fears.

Arlette splits us off, placing one trainee in front of each column. I want desperately to remain close to my friends— to maintain some semblance of normalcy and safety with the group, but even that is ripped away from me. I am now ten feet away from the people next to me, and at least forty away from the people directly across. It's then that I notice the drains in the floor. Why would they need drains?

I close my eyes and lean against the column, my shaking now almost out of control. I grit my teeth together to keep them from chattering. Footsteps enter the room. I refuse to open my eyes until a pair of the footsteps stop in front of me.

I take a chance and face reality again to find Rowan. He bends over to adjust his shoelace, but a 

part of me knows that this is just a ruse. He is here to remind me of something.

Momentary relief floods through my body, weakening my knees. The shaking calms as the sight of him clears my head. The message in his green eyes is clear in the brief second we make eye contact: Don't panic.

There is something else going on here— something worse than any final test or initiation. I can feel it in every hair on the back of my neck, in every bone of my body. But I take a deep, rattling breath anyway. The shaking calms.

Rowan pauses for an unnoticeable moment before rising and allowing his gaze to return to the group ahead.

I turn my attention towards the center of the room. It isn't just Morran judging our test. He is flanked by a group of older men and women. A few I've seen around the resistance— in the hallways, the archives, the mess hall— but the rest are unfamiliar.

The older men and women file into the very center of the room, with Morran leading the way. Arlette and Rowan slink back into the corner of the room to watch. Arlette's face is pale and pinched, a spark of anger behind her eyes. Her lips flatten together in disapproval.