• Chapter Three


    The sound of their entry threw me off, and I almost missed the windowsill. I just barely got a hold on it; I was holding myself only with the tips of my fingers. The rough surface scraped at my skin, and the ledge dug into my hands.

    How close were they? Had they seen me right away in the darkness?

    I didn’t dare waste my precious few seconds to look back. I managed to pull myself up enough to hook my leg over the ledge and shoved at the window. It opened without resistance, the bottom opening out and up, leaving me only about a foot to squeeze through. Well, it was better than nothing. I just hoped I wouldn’t get stuck.

    Just as I dropped my leg out the window, the guards reached the wall. One tried to leap up from the floor to grab my foot, but I was out of his reach. Another climbed my stack of boxes. When he stood up, the boxes fell over, and he fell to the ground, but not before making a grab for my leg.

    His hand wrapped around my ankle just before he toppled over, almost yanking me back down. I cried out at the rough cement surface scraping harshly against my thigh as my body was jerked back inside.

    I caught myself with the bend of my knee on the outside ledge, the corner biting into my flesh. I tried pulling myself back up, but the guard was too heavy. I kicked at him with the foot he’d grabbed onto, desperately trying to hit anything that would make him let go.

    He reached up and grabbed my calf with his other hand, trying to get a better grip and pull me down.

    I kicked even more fiercely, more desperately, and my shoe struck his face.

    Yelling out in pain, his grip loosened, and I kicked him again. He let go, tumbling the short distance to the floor, and I pulled my leg up and dropped myself out the window. It was a bit of a tight fit, but it wasn’t too bad, and again I found myself hanging by my fingertips. I looked down. The earth looked about four or five feet below me. I figured it was a safe enough drop. I clenched my teeth to fight back a scream as I fell.

    My feet immediately slid out from under me when I landed, and my bottom took the brunt of the fall. It hurt, and all the nerves in that area went numb.

    I squeezed my eyes shut for just a second, then I turned and ran for the trees.

    Glancing back just before plunging into the darkness of the forest, I saw the guards had unlocked the door and were sprinting after me, shouting the whole way.

    I was engulfed by the shadows, crashing through the undergrowth almost blindly, arms extended in case I crashed into a tree or bush. My toe got caught on a tree root and I fell forward, sprawling across the forest floor.

    Shakily pushing myself off the ground, I craned my neck to peer at my surroundings.

    I found myself in a small clearing, moonlight shining down and outlining the world in silver. A thin layer of snow still covered the ground of the bush-lined space, seemingly glowing in the dim light.

    As my heavy breathing began to slow, I cocked my head to listen to the forest. An owl hooted somewhere in the night and crickets chirped all around.

    Then I heard them. They crashed loudly through the bush, snapping branches and crunching fallen leaves. They were getting closer.

    I couldn’t stay here. They would see my prints in the snow.

    So I pushed myself to my feet and kept running, my leg burning from scraping against the windowsill.

    After a few steps I stopped, listening carefully for my pursuers, an idea quickly forming in my mind. What if I led them the wrong way. It would be rather difficult for the guards to find something that was in the opposite direction, wouldn’t it?

    Listening for the guards behind me, I decided by their fairly distant shouts that I had enough time. I doubled back, jogging briskly back to the snow-covered clearing. Then I turned around and walked backwards across the open space, being careful to step with my heel first and place my foot exactly in each of my previous prints. I hoped it was dark enough that they wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, just the prints of a girl out of her mind running from some guards for a reason not even she was aware of.

    I took a last second to glance back and inspect my handiwork. It looked convincing enough to me. I just hoped they were in enough of a hurry that they wouldn’t inspect it too closely. There was always a chance they could find a misplaced, overlapping shoeprint and realize what I’d done, pick up my track elsewhere. My real tracks. That would not bode well – not for me, anyway. For them, sure; me, not so much.

    Slipping as quietly through the trees as I could, I pressed on. At one point, I heard the guards’ voices shouting behind me, not too long after I’d left them my deceiving – at least, I hoped they were deceiving – tracks for them in the moonlight, and I guessed they’d found my prints. I froze, turning my head to listen. Would they fall for it? Or would they realize what I really did and come after me again?

    Soon their raucous cries grew quieter and receded into the distance.

    I breathed a sigh of relief. It worked. I couldn’t believe it had actually worked.

    As I continued through the trees, the fear edging off a bit, I had to laugh quietly to myself. I mean, could they be any less stealthy?

    Along with the fear, the adrenaline coursing through my veins began to dissipate, and the aches and pains of my escape steadily became more and more noticeable; my scraped up thigh and fingertips, and a dull ached in the bend of my arm. I didn’t feel I had time to look at it.

    The boundary wall loomed out of the darkness in front of me, and I followed that until I came to the edge of the tree line. The next patch of forest lay ahead, on the other side of a thin meadow that seemed to stretch into infinity. I glanced around the empty, starlit meadow, then half-limped, half-jogged to the other side, keeping close to the wall, within the darkness of the shadows.

    I made it to the trees unseen, and once I was engulfed by the shadows, I slowed to a walk, searching the darkness around me for some place to hide out ‘til morning. There was no way I was going back to my room tonight. My pride wouldn’t let me.

    As I clambered up the branches of a tall cedar and wrapped my legs around a relatively thick branch, lying forward on my stomach, I got to thinking, maybe I’ve gotten myself in a little too deep this time.

    ~*~


    “Hey!” I heard a voice calling below me.

    I opened my eyes, squinting in the morning sunshine filtering through the leaves and onto my face. I lifted my head and gazed around, confused. I couldn’t remember what I was doing in a tree through my early morning haze. Then I remembered and almost fell out of the tree when I heard the voice again. Had they found me after all?

    “Find a nice perch, little bird?” he called.

    I peeked over the edge of my branch, expecting the worst and afraid of what I might find.

    But it wasn’t a security guard. It was a young man with shaggy brown hair sweeping over his forehead, smiling up at me glistening white teeth and sparkling hazel eyes. It was Noah.

    I broke into a gleeful grin. “As a matter of fact I did!” I called back to him.

    Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I felt a shock of pain lance up my arm. Sucking in my breath, I glanced down at my arm and slapped a hand to my mouth. It wasn’t that at all, but something about it was just, I don’t know, kind of gross.

    The end of the needle from last night was still embedded in my skin, forced in so far that only the end poked out. The skin all around was an angry red.

    I lowered my fingers from my lips, grasped the end of the needle between two fingers, and slowly withdrew it from my flesh. I bared my teeth in silent pain as the long, thin piece of metal slid out.

    “Are you all right?” Noah called up to me from the forest floor, sounding worried.

    “Yep,” I lied, as, finally, the other end slid out. The whole thing was about an inch long. I was lucky it didn’t go right to my bone.

    I flicked the needle to the side, having nothing else to do with it, and swung my uninjured leg over the side of the branch, dropping to the next, and so on until I hung suspended a few inches above the earth.

    “You’re not going to turn me in as soon as I touch the ground, are you?” I asked, only half-joking.

    He just laughed in reply, and I dropped to the ground, grunting as I landed heavily on my bad leg and staggered sideways.

    Noah stepped forward and caught me before I toppled over completely. “Hey, you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

    I nodded as I regained my balance. “Yeah, I’m-”

    “What happened to your leg?” Noah exclaimed, all trace of a smile vanished from his face.

    I looked down. Some of the fabric of my jeans was ripped and dried blood was crusted in the blue denim from mid-thigh down to my knee. My clothes were wrinkled and dirty; my hair tangled with sticks and twigs, and my make-up was probably smeared from sleep. I must have made quite a sight.

    “Umm,” I stammered. “It’s just… a little road rash… kind of.”

    Noah raised his eyebrows while somehow still managing to be frowning. “It doesn’t look like it.”

    “Oh, it’s nowhere near as bad as it looks,” I lied. In truth, I had no idea how it was. It felt bad, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. “So, you’re not going to ask what I’m doing sleeping in a tree?” I inquired, changing the subject while awkwardly picking bits of tree out of my hair.

    “Nah,” he replied coolly. “I already know.”

    “Do you, now?” I attempted to smooth out my shirt with my hands.

    “Mhm.”

    “What was I doing then?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “You don’t, really, do you,” with a smile.

    He just smiled a kind of half-smile, like he knew more than he was letting on.

    We were quiet for a moment, the birds chirping merrily around us, and I found myself getting uncomfortable under his steady gaze.

    “I should go,” I muttered; my voice seemed loud in the silence. “I’ll head into class and hope no one notices anything too out of the ordinary.” I turned and started walking away.

    “Wait!” I heard Noah call out behind me, and I turned. He stepped closer to me and reached out his hand, gently pulling a twig from my long hair. “There,” he said, his voice low, as if murmuring a secret no one else should hear. He smiled his little half-smile again, but it was somehow different. Maybe it was the strange, faint glow present in his chocolate brown eyes, the new sort of softness in them. “Now there’s nothing but extraordinary.”

    At a loss as to what to say, I just smiled and walked through the trees, back to the building.
    I could feel his eyes on my back, and the feeling seemed to remain even when I was far out of his sight.

    ~*~


    I made it through all my classes almost without incident, except for a few kids asking about my newly developed limp or what happened between me and Claire, since we hadn’t spoken to each other all day—which I never answered, not directly—and Mr. Beckitt catching me drifting off in math again.

    I’d had my chin resting in my hand and was drawing little non-sensible doodles down the side of my paper, when Mr. Beckitt made his trademark throat-clearing, “ahem!” sound. I looked up to see him standing in front of my desk, staring down at me and my doodles with raised, disapproving eyebrows above square glasses.

    “Miss, Ashta,” he’d said, clearly annoyed, a distinct, aggravated pause between the strained words.

    I just set my pen on my desk and folded my hands on my lap, gazing down at them demurely.

    “It would be greatly appreciated if you were to actually pay attention,” he continued tightly, each word short and clipped. “This is the third time I’ve caught you drifting off this week, and I must have had to remind to pay attention almost every day this past winter. It’s getting old,” he added as he turned and strode back to the front.

    I picked up my pen and, for the rest of class, tried my best to pay attention, but it was difficult. My and Claire’s fight from yesterday kept replaying in my mind, and underneath that lay Noah’s words from this morning. Now there’s nothing but extraordinary. It was strange, yes, but it still made my stomach do a flip and my heart beat faster every time I head his voice, repeating the same words over and over in my head. Now there’s nothing but extraordinary. Now’s there’s nothing but—

    The words were rudely interrupted by the usual announcements over the speakers. It was the usual short list of names to stop by the office before heading up to their rooms, or outside, or to the cafeteria, or wherever else they were planning to go.

    I started to tune them out; then I heard “…and Ashta. Would these students please come to the office for messages? Thank you.”

    My thought were momentarily distracted from “nothing but extraordinary,” and were shifted to feelings of dread over what my message might contain. Surely it was about last night?

    I stopped by my locker to drop off my math books (I’d already washed my gym shoes and shoved them back in my locker this morning) and reluctantly made my way down the hallway to the office, nervously fingering the strap of my bag.

    I stepped through the glass doors, gave the secretary my name, and she handed me two envelopes. I walked back out the doors into the hallway and leaned against the wall to inspect my mail. The first envelope was the standard size for an envelope, short and wide. The front was blank; no sign of my name or the name of the sender. I turned it over and opened the flap, pulling out a piece of paper and unfolding it to read the printed letter. In short, it was telling me to return to my room immediately after receiving this letter, rather than going for a walk outside or stopping by the cafeteria, which doubled as a sort of restaurant after school hours. It was signed from “administration”.

    Tucking the letter back into its envelope, I looked at the second envelope. Not as wide as the first, it was about the size of a card envelope. It was a pale blue color, like the sky covered by a thin layer of white cloud, with my name scrawled across the front in perhaps the messiest writing I’ve ever read.

    When I opened it and pulled out the paper, I found it was a short note written in the same messy writing. It took me several seconds to make out each word. It was an invitation to meet someone in the cafeteria after school. And the barely legible chicken scratch at the end translated, “Noah”.

    My stomach did its usual nervous, giddy flip, and I grinned broadly as I walked across the polished floor to the cafeteria, tossing the letter from administration in a nearby garbage can.

    Standing in the doorway, I searched the cafeteria tables for Noah. Then I spotted him, sitting at a table by the window, an empty chair across from him. His head was turned away, but I could still see enough of his face to recognize him. I walked over, weaving between tables, chairs, and kids, and sat down in the vacant chair in front of him, pulling off my sweater and draping it over the back of my chair.

    He looked up at me as I sat down, a look of relief flooding his face. Smiling, he said, “I was beginning to fear you weren’t going to come.”

    I smiled back and laughed lightly. I decided not to tell him about the letter from administration. Instead, I replied, “Sorry, it took me a while to decipher your… writing.”

    He laughed. “Yeah, sorry, penmanship was never my strongest asset.”

    We were quiet for a bit, him just gazing across the table at me, and I stirring the ice cubes in a glass of water that had been placed in front of me with a straw.

    Eventually he broke the awkward silence by asking curiously, “So, what possessed you to run for it when you had nowhere to run?”

    I paused in my cube-stirring, starting again a few seconds later. “So you do know what really happened.”

    He shrugged. “I never said I didn’t.”

    “But you never said you did.”

    He raised his eyebrows at me. Thankfully he had the good grace not to say anything more as I realized he was right.

    His little half-smile was back, and he leaned back in his chair, resting his elbow on the back. “In all honesty, all the guards know about you.”

    “They do?” I couldn’t keep the disappointed groan out of my voice.

    He nodded. “Yep. We were all sent out to search for you last night. Lucky I got your part of the forest, eh?” He winked at me.

    I smiled and nodded my head. “Yea,” I replied uncomfortably. As I said this, a tiny little thought nagged at the back of my mind. I couldn’t exactly define what this doubt was trying to tell me, so I simply banished it from my thoughts, and for the next two and a half hours we sat at that table and talked. We talked about everything from favorite books, to past experiences, to our best friends. Somehow I let it slip that I’d gotten in a fight with Claire yesterday, and he asked, “So that’s what you were so upset about when I came by?”

    My face started burning with embarrassment, and I refused to meet his eyes. “Uh, yeah… I’m not exactly proud of that.” I cleared my throat self-consciously, wringing my hands on my lap.

    “Don’t worry about it, Ash,” he assured me. “Everyone needs to lose it sometimes.”

    I smiled gratefully at him, changed the subject, and we continued talking until it was five minutes to six. I glanced down at my watch and swore out loud. “Sorry,” I apologized.

    Holding up his hands, he said, “Hey, no worries. I’ve heard worse.”

    Hastily standing up, I apologized again, saying, “I’m sorry, but I really have to get up to my room in, like, the next five minutes. I was supposed to be there right after school, but… I kind of came here instead.”

    Noah stood up as well, and as I started to reach for my sweater he came around the small table and pulled it off the chair before I could pick it up. He held it out to me for me to put it on.

    I hesitated only a second before moving forward and turning around. “Thank you.” I said as I slipped my arms through the sleeves.

    Gently smoothing the fabric over my shoulders, he leaned closer and murmured in my ear, “I’m glad you came.” He was so close I could feel his breath ruffling my hair, even the heat coming off his body.

    “I’m… glad you invited me,” I managed to whisper. I stood there, frozen, for a few seconds longer than necessary, Noah still standing close behind me with his hands on my shoulders. Those seconds seemed to stretch into minutes. Finally I pulled away, and his hands slipped from my shoulders. Turning back to him, I smiled and, my voice returning, I said, “I’ll see you around, then.”

    He nodded and sent me his half-smile. “At the edge of the forest closest to the doors at noon?”

    “Sounds good.” I turned and started walking away.

    “Hey, Ash!” Noah called after me.

    “Yeah?”

    “I hope everything turns out all right with your friend.”

    “Me too.” I ran out of the cafeteria and up the stairs to my room with just seconds to spare.

    As soon as I opened the door and slipped inside, I felt a needle sink painfully into my neck and I felt my senses slipping immediately. I was aware of my body sagging and felt someone catch me in their arms. Everything was a blur; I couldn’t make anything out. My last thought before slipping away entirely was, what are they doing to me now?