They wasted little time in leaving the large corridor, Marek pushing her along with a haste that seemed unsustainable.

"You should slow down," she said.

"Don't worry." The boy didn't sound out of breath. "I won't tip you out of your chair."

The purple fireflies followed them like an electrified mist. Some darted ahead, looping around in the air so quickly that they made burning wheels of light in the darkness far ahead of her. "That's not what I'm worried about." A lie. She was holding onto her wheelchair for dear life. But it wasn't her only worry. "You'll tire yourself pushing me about like this."

"I won't." He sounded as if he'd just been smiling. "My powers don't let me get tired that easy."

Lucky him. Still, she didn't relax. "That must be nice."

"Don't get too jealous, Ellsworth. Everyone's always asking me to move furniture on my days off."

If he had been trying to make her laugh, he had succeeded. Nothing more came to mind for her to say, however, so she didn't bother continuing the conversation. Quiet was welcome after all the talking she had done with her friends in the newsroom, and her attack had taken its toll. Cool sheets and a soft bed sounded very welcome right about now.

A firefly drifted down onto her right hand, tickling her knuckles with its legs and shoving thoughts about sleep to one side. Well-fed curiosity was worth breaking the silence for. "What are these things?" she said.

"They're what they look like — fireflies. But not real ones."

"Not real?" The firefly on her hand fluttered its glittering wings. "You could've fooled me."

"Grab one and you'll see."

Elise tentatively reached for the firefly. It winked light in a soothing pattern even as she plucked it up. The insect wasn't pliable as she'd expected it to be, but hard and cold like metal. Her fingers traced along its ridged body, testing it. No, not just metal. It felt like glass, too. She brought the firefly closer to her face. Except for the gauzy material of the wings, metal and glass was exactly what it was made of. Inside its clear belly tiny gears turned around a tube of violet liquid that flashed and darkened at different intervals. A soft, insistent hum emitted from that tube, strong enough to thrum into the bones of her fingers. The firefly's legs, made of the same black-painted metal as the rest of its skeleton, wiggled uselessly for purchase. She gave it a little shake, but all that did was make the legs wiggle faster.

Amazing. The device was so small and yet so sturdy. "Are these yours?" she said to Marek. "Did you make them?"

"They're part of Rambling, a kind of alarm system. You can tell what sort of alarm it is by the light." He paused. "Purple's a medical emergency."

"Because of me?"

"Because of you."

That was good to know, even if it destroyed some of the charm. She let the firefly go. It didn't drop far before taking flight, then zoomed off to join the others. Another question rose to her lips, one that filled her face with a familiar and unwelcome fire. "What kind of medical emergency is solved by a kiss?"

Her wheelchair jumped a little as Marek's pace suddenly slowed. He quickly picked it back up. "With a fit like that, the only thing to do is to shock a person out of it," he said. "There wasn't a pitcher of water around, so the choices were a kiss or a slap, and I don't hit girls."

No, he just insulted them, like he'd done in her defense at breakfast. It'd been deserved, certainly, but punches or kicks weren't the only way to hit someone. "You don't mind being mean to them."

A dismissive noise. "If you're troubled by what I said to Abriana Adesso, you ought to stop feeling sorry for her. She's never felt sorry for anyone except herself."

The memory of being sprawled over grass while Adesso stalked towards came back so strongly that Elise flinched. "I know," she said.

"Do you know because you remembered that just now?" he said.

She flinched again, this time for a different reason — startlement. "How do you know that I've got any memories back?"

"That's what usually happens with an attack like that. It means memories are shaking loose."

Oh, of course. He knew something about this sort of thing, as if it were commonplace. "How often does this happen?" she said. "How often do people in this town come up with missing memories?"

Marek slowed down again, this time so he could steer them into a much narrower corridor on their left. The fireflies followed, though there seemed to be less of them now. "When I first got to this town, I met this kid," he said. "Thirteen, same age as I was, but you couldn't tell with him. He was just a little guy, with mousy hair and the kind of face you'd fight to remember. That pipsqueak could play a mean game of poker, though." The wallpaper over the wainscoting turned from the dark of night to the deep grey that came before dawn, casting enough light to separate paper sky from paper earth. "But the orphanage staff, they were always giving him this medicine."

Orphanage staff? Marek had grown up in an orphanage?

Clouds flowed on the walls, spotted by the faint pink of distant sunrise. It was a peaceful contrast to Marek's tale. "They jabbed him with these big old needles that left bruises on his arms. Day in, day out, he got those needles, until one day he didn't."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Her stomach tightened in anticipation, yet Marek's next words did not surprise her.

"He gave 'em the slip."

The speed of the wheelchair decreased, not all at once, but slowly. As Marek continued speaking, she saw in her mind's eye what he described, like an old movie projected in a pitch black room.

"Everybody was ordered to look for him, except for the little kids. They were herded off the grounds so they wouldn't get in the way of the search, the staff said. But that was a lie." More pink tinted the clouds and the sky close to the horizon. "They told the rest of us, the ones old enough to really use our powers, that we had to take Platt down at any cost. That our time had come to be brave and help the grownups." Marek laughed, but there wasn't any humor in it. "Then they turned tail the second we trundled off like the good little idiots we were."

For a while, he said nothing more. The wheels of her chair rolled like the wheels of a tank beneath her, loud and relentless.

"But we didn't need to find Platt," Marek said, "because he found us. Or he found them. The staff, the doctors, the nurses. Everyone who'd ever stuck a needle in him or ordered it to be done. He caught them at the front doors and made them scream."

Heart rabbiting, she gripped the arms of her wheelchair more tightly. Red splotched the silver screen of her mind, the same red that filled the sunrise wallpaper on either side of the corridor. She imagined a tangle of bodies crumbled in an entryway, so mangled that they looked like great piles of ground beef left to soak in their own blood.

"Most of the other kids ran when they heard it." Marek's voice grew so low that she had to slow her breathing to hear him. "Stupid of them. The building had been locked down. Only the guard and the supervisor carried the keys that would open the doors, and Platt had got to them first."

The wheelchair crawled along as slowly as Marek's story did. "Five of us didn't crack, so we kept going," he said. "The screams had given way to other sounds ... these wet sounds, like a dog tearing into raw steak." He cleared his throat. "And that was what we saw. People tearing into one another like steak. The kids with me, they tried to run, but Platt saw 'em. He told them things." Marek cleared his throat again, but it didn't work. His voice strained as he spoke. "They were animals, Platt said. Animals in a jungle that had to eat to survive. He twisted their minds with words, just words, and when he saw me ..."

Elise reached back for one of his hands to comfort him. His fingers jerked at her touch, but stayed on the chair handle.

"When he saw me," Marek went on, in a stronger voice, "he hesitated."

It seemed impossible that a freak like that would do anything as human as hesitate. "Why?"

"Because he was a mean poker player." Something like admiration tinged Marek's words. How could he find anything to admire about a murderer? "Most people had nothing to do with him, but I'd play cards with him since he was so hard to bluff."

"You were friends?" No, that couldn't be true.

"Is anyone friends with the Devil himself?" The walls around Marek and Elise remained blood-red, frozen in perpetual dawn. "But no matter how hard to bluff he was, I got him that day. Told him it'd be okay. Told him that I'd help him. Told him so many lies that I can't even remember them all. Then when he got close enough to me, I took a swing."

Her wheelchair stopped. Part of her wanted to tell him to stop, too. She would have, if it didn't sound like he was somehow relieved to share what he had done. So she waited instead and kept her hand on his.

A sigh. "Skinny as he was, that little bastard could take a punch," Marek said. "Sent him clean through a wall and into another room. Still breathing, but not awake. That broke his power over everyone else — the ones who were still alive, anyway."

The words I'm sorry almost left her. She caught them just in time. If she hadn't, Marek might have thought she was feeling pity for him again. She was. It probably wouldn't have mattered to him that it was a different kind of pity than the one she had felt over his worn clothes. It was best not to say anything that could have been misinterpreted. "That must've been hard for you."

His fingers tightened on the handle, and she held fast to them. "Others have had it worse." He started pushing the chair again, which was her cue to pull her hand away.

"What happened to him?" she said.

"The town goon squad came to the rescue — late — and gave him his medicine. Last I heard, they shipped him to a comfortable cell in the Factory."

That sounded ominous. "The Factory?"

A voice echoed out of the dark in front of them. "It's a research facility where very bad monsters are brought to fritter away the rest of the days in unbelievable despair and torture." Gerver stepped into the light of gas and fireflies, pressing his customary cigarette to his mouth. He exhaled a ribbon of smoke. "It is also, as I am required to inform anyone who mentions it, a complete and utter fabrication created by enemies both foreign and domestic, so please don't ask about it again where I can hear you, as it's tedious in the extreme to constantly warn people about things that don't exist."

Marek said, "Eavesdropping, sir? You really should get better hobbies."

"As riveting as your conversations undoubtedly are, I was only following this." He opened one of his dead-white hands, releasing a firefly into the air. "And 'strategic attention' is the preferred term, not eavesdropping."

That seemed to be a joke. Then again, he was the Combat Professor, so it might not have been. Strategic attention might well be part of his curriculum.

The firefly reached its brethren. All at once, they turned the eerie green that fireflies were said to give off. Elise gasped, something that no doubt made her sound foolish, for she had been doing a lot of it lately. The fireflies flew off into the darkness that Gerver had emerged out of, streaming through the black corridor like hundreds of tiny falling stars.

"It must be a fine thing to look upon the world with wonder."

She tore her gaze from the retreating green glow, forcing herself to look at Gerver. He, like Marek, didn't seem to worry about making people hate him. "I can't help it," she said. "My mind's been manipulated, or so I've been told."

The professor glanced above her, beyond her. Marek spoke. "She had an attack like the ones Platt used to give his victims."

That word — victims — lanced through her.

It's more likely that the victims were targeted for their looks, not how they got their powers, reminded Marek's voice inside her head. When he had said that at breakfast, his coldness had alarmed her. But she hadn't dug down deep into herself to find the anger beneath her alarm. She could feel it now, as if she had stuck her hands into rich, loose earth to pry up the sucking roots of a thirsty, thorned weed.

A victim? She wasn't one of those, she was

Slender, pale, dark-haired.

someone who'd survived, and she refused to believe

If there's a killer, he has a type.

anything else.

"That's not true," she said, only to herself. "That's not me ..."

Speaking to herself didn't keep anyone else from hearing her. Gerver dropped his cigarette to the floor, then crushed it beneath the heel of his shoe. Livid fury writhed in his horrid face, a sight that both fascinated and repelled her. "Be wary of games, Miss Ellsworth. You've never been a great player of them."

"Stop telling me who I am!" She covered her mouth as if she could recapture those words and the anger in them. A hopeless gesture, unless she had the power to turn back time.

If what she had said infuriated Gerver any more than she had already done, he did not show it. His face turned blandly disinterested, and he turned his back on the two students. "This isn't a conversation for the corridor," he said, then began to lead the way into the watchful labyrinth that was Rambling, leaving Elise and Marek no choice but to follow.