Miss Quick

Chapter Seventeen

I blink and scrunch up my face. When I open my eyes, my vision is more focused. "No, I'm Maria," I mumble. My mouth is dry and tastes coppery.

"It's okay, we know. When that other girl - well, woman, I guess, was shot...you turned back into Ariah."

I lift my arms slowly to my face and look at them. They are indeed mine, and when I sit up I see the rest of me is mine, too. My hair is back to its normal color and my jeans are too long.

I look around. Standing back a few feet is Chaste, and standing slightly behind him is Sadie. The room we're in is wrapped in dingy gray blocks on three sides, and the floor is cement. The fourth wall is made up of criscrossed iron bars. In the middle of them is a rectangular block of cement with hinges. The door.

But something's wrong. Besides the change of environment, I mean. Someone is missing.

"Uh....where's Sm- oh." I stop myself, the memory coming back. I take a shaky breath, suddenly remembering everything. Two bullets, two bodies, one dart. One hand.

However, someone is still missing. "Where's Carlos?" I ask quickly, changing the subject.

"We don't know," Chaste says.

"Well, what happened when I got knocked out?"

Tara sits down next to me. "Right after they shot you with the dart, the men sort of...swarmed us. You screamed, but at first I didn't know what was wrong. Carlos ran over to you but was pulled away, and the rest of us were grabbed. They pinned our arms. But they couldn't pin Carlos, because of his ability-"

"Which is?" I interrupt.

"Strength," Tara reveals. "He was too strong to be pinned, they could barely hold him. I think he actually broke one of the guy's arms."

"Is that what the cracking noise was?" Chaste shudders appreciatively.

"Anyway-" Tara casts him a look "-they had all of us, but they couldn't get him. Then one guy hit him over the head with his gun, and another shot him with a dart. He was out cold.

"So they dragged us and you out of the school and put us in the back of this van, except for Carlos. They put him up front, maybe to watch him. They asked Sadie and me our abilities at gunpoint. When the van stopped, they blindfolded us and threw us in here. And that's everything, except for...."

She pulls something out of her pocket and puts it in my hand. It's the dart, and it looks strangely familiar.

"This looks like the darts from my task in the forest," I realize.

"The hallucinogenic ones," Tara says meaningfully.

"Oh...now the crazy hallucination I had makes sense. I didn't know they knocked you out, too," I add, turning it over in my fingers.

"But do you know what this means?" she prompted. "Whoever kidnapped us probably interfered with your task that day!"

"So you mean...the dart thing...I knew there was something odd about it!"

"But why would they go to the trouble to do that?"

I shake my head. "No idea."

Sadie walks over to our circle hesitantly. "So...who could it be, who's doing all this?"

Tara shakes her head. "I don't know."

"I know," a new voice says.

"Who was that?" Chaste asks the empty hallway. The four of us fly to the bars and peer between them. But there's no one there,  just more cell doors exactly like ours lining either side.