Even though it was early May, I had a new New Year's resolution: stop passing out. Coming back from unconsciousness was not a pleasant experience, and I was starting to make a habit of it. The recovery room would not become my second home if I had any say in it.
And apparently the cosmos agreed because this time I woke to a tangle of branches overhead that intersected a perfect blue sky. The branches were more green than anything I had ever seen. Moss almost the color of limes draped from the bows and new leaves peeked their unfurling heads out. Someone must have been force feeding me dirt because that's all I tasted. And the smelled. Pure nature. Nothing like those artificial tree shaped car fresheners. This was the real deal.
I couldn't get enough of it. Lungful after lungful of the rich air while I tried to get my ducks in a row.
I was laying on my back. Beneath me was a surprisingly comfortable forest floor. I now understood why it could be called the carpet of the forest. There were still dead twigs and pebbles that ground into my shoulder blades, but the dirt was unpacked and the moss soft.
The air and dirt were both cold. Not cold enough for me to worry I had frosted over the whole world but cold enough for me to want to sit up and curl my arms around my knees to keep my warmth to myself.
Sitting up proved to be a challenge. Worse than the challenge of getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning. Then it was Anna versus Anna, a battle of wills. Now it was Anna versus Anna, a test of not passing out again.
As soon as I tried to right myself, my head started to swim. I remembered the Nothing syringe that had been stuck in my arm at the assembly. How long ago had that been? It had been past dusk then. Now the shadows were shrunk to nothing. Noon the next day, then. Or the day after that. How many syringes had they stuck me with?
I sat up in slow increments to make sure I didn't find myself unconscious on the forest carpet once more.
Around me stretched the same thing as far as I could make out. Trees so green they hurt my eyes, brown dirt grown, blue sky. There weren't many varying shades. This was a trichrome sort of place.
"Hello?" I called out as loud as I could. It was a relief to find my voice was still working, barely raspy from disuse. So I hadn't been out for months.
There was no answer so I tried again. "Hello!"
In hindsight, shouting into the woods after apparently being kidnapped by my school may not have been the safest option. But what was I supposed to do? Run and hope I found civilization to help me. There was no telling how far safety was from my foresty bed. And no telling if the nearest city was full of good Samaritans or employees of Paramount Lake.
It turned out that, although dumb, shouting brought about the best results because someone shouted back. "Anna?"
"Stitch?"
The boy in question stumbled through the brush twenty yards to my right. "You're alive." Stitch was a pretty cool guy. Not just in the he's a swell guy without even trying kind of way. He was level headed in the worst of situations, collected during conversations, one step ahead of the rest of us. I expected him to have a fully formulated plan by the time he found me.
But when he came into view I remembered that he was just a kid.
Stitch was a mess. Twigs and leaves were tangled in his bowl cut--yes, he was rocking a bowl cut somewhat successfully. There were dark circles under his eyes like he had been awake for three weeks straight instead of under the influence of the Nothing syringe. When his voice broke as he called out, "You're alive," I beat back the dizziness and got to my feet to meet him.
I hadn't hugged Stitch before. I had very few interactions with him before the Phantom fight except for our carefully curated conversations. From the way his arms latched around me like he was clinging onto an older sister, I would have guessed that he had never been hugged. The kid was starved for affection.
He was the first to pull away.
"Have you seen anyone else?" He shook his head, as mute as Miguel. "They should be around here somewhere. Take me to where you woke up."
It wasn't a far walk. Just over the lip of a slight incline, barely out of sight from my own resting place. That gave me hope. What were the chances Paramount Lake had left only the two of us here? The others had to be close.
Starting where Stitch woke up, we made a loose spiral outwards. Our path grew more and more skiwampus the further out we went. Eventually, we ran into a small lake on one side that neither of us felt like wading through to keep our pattern. Then there were outcroppings of rocks that were impossible to traverse so we wound our way around them. As long as Valentine, Ariana, or one of the others wasn't lounging on top, I figured it would be fine.
With Stitch at my side neither of us felt the need to call out for our peers. My temporary lapse of common sense was over.
A football field away we found Diego, flat on his back, wings retracted and hidden. His eyes were open in a glassy kind of way that made me worry he was dead. Then he blinked slowly at us like he was clearing sunspots from his vision.
"I would think this was a dream, but the two of you are the last people who would show up in one." The only difference between him and Lucia was that he didn't notice when he was being incredibly rude, and she made a special effort to insult me. It made Diego easier to deal with.
"Good to see you too, even in these less than exciting circumstances."
"What do you mean less than exciting? We got kidnapped. That is real superhero stuff."
I cocked an eyebrow. "Superhero?"
No blush warmed his neck when I pointed out his mistake. He didn't even have the gall to shove his hands in his pockets and look ashamed. It could have been because he didn't have pockets, actually. Diego was rocking the gift test jumpsuit with its suspicious lack of pockets--if anyone should have pockets, a superhero should. Had he been wearing that when we got ambushed in the auditorium?
Had I been wearing one? Definitely not. I was in pajamas. But I was now, and so was Stitch. The suits were designed to feel like nothing. Even with whatever technology was woven into the fibers, it felt weightless. The electrodes in my suit were buzzing so subtly I wouldn't have noticed if I weren't straining to feel them. So we were being tracked. Monitored at the very least. About to be electrocuted to death if I was feeling really pessimistic.
"Vigilante sounds dumb. And I'm around two social outcasts. I can afford a faux pas here and there." Diego was blunt. But I could get behind that.
Stitch didn't appear to mind either. He helped Diego up with a hand. Quite a sight, if I do say. A twig of a kid helping a slightly less twiggy, slightly older kid up while they both looked like they might pass out. The finest of entertainment in this part of the mystery forest.
"Let's find everyone else," Stitch said.
Eventually, we did find everyone. Like Stitch, Diego, and me, we had all formed clumps of people wandering around aimlessly. Lucia, Julien, and Miguel. Alek, Foster, Valentine, and Mona. Malee and Evan. Ariana and Cody. That was all of us as far as we knew. Unless Paramount Lake had pulled a last minute prank and thrown the younger students into the wilderness with us.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Evan asked what we were all thinking. He threw in a few curses with the question for good measure. I couldn't say it didn't sum up my feelings. "They could have at least given us instructions when they ditched us in the middle of nowhere. You know, 'fight to the death' or 'don't die of exposure.' I would be fine if they told us to play the ultimate game of hide and seek, but no. We have the least considerate school board."
"Why do all of our options have to end in death?" Ariana asked. She and Evan had been dating for longer than Julien and me, which made them pros at fighting over every little thing. If there was one thing my class could agree on, it was the graduation and their inevitable breakup would be the healthiest thing for all involved parties.
So of course they started bickering. "I don't know what kind of game of hide and seek you grew up playing, but mine didn't end in cold blooded murder."
It got us all arguing over what we were sent out here to do. No one dared bring up the possibility that Paramount Lake wanted to cut ties with us. Maybe after my multiple stunts over the past week they thought our grade was too reckless. Too unruly to ever save a city. Maybe they passed us all off as tainted by Eleanor. Maybe we had the worst test scores in academy history.
Finally, Mona shouted everyone down. "If you all weren't so concerned about being right you would realize they did give us instructions." That caught everyone's attention just long enough for us to shut up for a minute. "Merriweather told us to win just before we passed out." She stopped and recalibrated her words. "Just before most of us passed out. I think half of you had already been poked."
There was grumbled dissent from all sides that she shut down immediately. "I never said they were clear instructions. But it explains those." She pointed to Lucia's chest and then to Julien's. Julien was so taken aback by the sudden attention that he stumbled back and little and tried to hide whatever it was she was pointing out: a crown was sown above the academy emblem we all wore.
The team captain sign.
Lucia had the new accessory too. Ariana and Alek, our normal team captains, did not. Apparently normal didn't apply within these woods.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"We pick teams?" Lucia's usually sure voice slipped a little. She sounded a little lost as she asked a question none of us knew the answer to. The forest must have been affecting her too. "That's what team captains do, right?"
"But what are the teams for?" I reiterated. "What does it mean to win?"
"We'll figure that out later."
I ended up with my back pressed to a rock outcropping, next to my peers like we were ready to pick teams for a game of outdoor dodgeball. It was easier to think that a dodgeball championship was the only thing on the line. Not the enigmatic "win" the academy was pushing us toward.
I was having flashbacks to laser tag. What if no one wanted me on their team? Could I convince Mona, Stitch, and Miguel to ditch the party with me again? Maybe we could start another gang fight. Then Principal Merriweather would realize we were too dangerous to be left unsupervised and airlift us out. That sounded more promising than the stress of being picked last.
In front of us, Julien and Lucia were duking it out via rock, paper, scissors. They had decided on best four out of seven. Winner got first pick. Julien was dumb to agree to it. He was notoriously awful at the game. It came as no surprise when Lucia easily beat him. He was too predictable. He managed to get in one win near the beginning, but the score still ended up being four to one.
Lucia grinned. "You pick first."
Like she had just insulted his gift, the crowd gasped. Was it a power play? At the very least it was unexpected. As far as I could tell, Lucia had nothing to gain from giving up first pick.
Julien was just as taken aback as the rest of us. There was something distrustful in his eyes. Good boy. The others might have thought of him as a pretty boy with a lack of brains--to be fair, sometimes he was--but something was going on upstairs. He wasn't completely helpless. Cautiously, he took her up on the offer. "Valentine."
Okay, maybe I felt a little hurt that he chose his sister first and not me, his girlfriend. But I tried to be understanding. They had years of experience working together. We had three months and a few years of friendship. She had a useful power. I could make some mist for a minute and then accidentally burn my friends. We had sort of but not really broken up a day ago. It was an obvious choice, really.
I still didn't like it.
Lucia did. "Interesting." I could see the cogs and gears whirring around behind her eyes. She had a plan that he was playing right into.
"Your go. Unless you want me to pick again." It was almost a threat.
She surveyed us like Diego wasn't her obvious choice. Maybe Miguel is feeling particularly familial today. Instead she said, "Anna."