Lucas.

My first instinct was denial. I hadn’t seen or talked to Lucas for over four years, but I knew he didn’t have a Gift. At least one that he’d told me about. After all those conversations we had, if he had a Gift, he would have mentioned it, right? Right?

Lucas. Friends don’t lie. I know Lucas. I knew Lucas.

The Lucas I knew was born without a Gift. But his name in bright white letters above me painted a different story: that he had a Gift and a strong one. And suddenly, I felt angry. Angry at a boy I haven’t talked to for years because of a lie he might not have even told.

Lucas.

There’s a name for when you repeat a word so many times it loses meaning—semantic satiation. Right now, Lucas’s name felt meaningless in the same way that a bird’s chirp or a horse’s neigh did. Like a group of sounds instead of a word; a pool of syllables where there should’ve been a name.

I took in a deep breath and grounded myself. In the Culling, stray thoughts were a luxury no one could afford.

A group, I need to form a group, I reminded myself.

I knew I was weak. It was a fact I was all too familiar with. Unless there’s skin-to-skin contact, the most important part of my Gift doesn’t work. But Vera wasn’t weak. I’d seen her rip apart wood with a flick of her hand, and blast a boulder away with little effort.

As much as I didn’t want to rely on her for the first part of the Culling, I have little choice. I looked for Vera’s name on the list and found it near the top. She has a combat power of 83, I realised with a smile. I began to look for Vera as the other initiates around me began to move too.

“Kira!” someone shouted. I whipped my head around to see Vera waving at me and made my way towards her, smiling.

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“Do you want to form a group?” I asked.

She nodded. “Of course. Now we just need to find someone else.”

She paused and looked around. “That guy over there–” she pointed at a short boy with dark hair standing alone near the corner of a building “–doesn’t seem to have any friends. ”

I frowned. Her assessment was harsh but not entirely untrue. From a distance, I swept through the boy’s mind and nodded at Vera. “I think he’ll work,” I said finally, “his name’s Christopher. He’s a teleporter, what’s nice. We should probably come out with a plan to approach–”

“Hey, Christopher!” Vera shouted, far too energetically for my liking. The boy startled, popping out of existence and reappearing next to us.

“What?” he asked, only mildly annoyed.

Vera held out her hand. “Want to join our group?”

Christopher quirked one eyebrow questioningly but shook her hand anyways. “Sure,” he said, not even wondering how we knew his name.

Well, that was easy. I watched the other initiates scurry around as they tried to form groups and felt a glimmer of hope flutter in my chest.

“So what’s your Gift?” Christopher asked me.

“I can read people’s minds,” I answered reluctantly. While I knew that knowing each other’s Gifts would be useful, I had a feeling he wouldn’t completely trust us if he knew we could read his mind.

He didn’t seem to care though. “There’s more to it isn’t there? Mind reading is too weak of a Gift to get you into the Culling,” Christopher said bluntly. Slightly offended, I was tempted not to answer him. But before I could decide on what to say, Vera answered Christopher for me.

“If she touches you, she can mess with your mind as well. Make you forget things. Make you go to sleep. Boring stuff,” Vera shrugged, then smiled suddenly. “Do you want to see something that isn’t boring though?”

I shook my head almost pleadingly, already knowing where this was going, but Christopher ignored me. “Yeah.”

Vera raised her right hand in a fist towards the forest outside of the academy. The air pressure around us slowly rose until it became hard to move. Vera grinned madly as she mimed an explosion with her fist. “Boom,” she whispered.

There was an explosion of air, and where there was once a thriving patch of trees, was a crater more than ten meters wide and four meters deep. Vera laughed, Christopher stared, and I whispered under my breath, “Show-off.”