Unseen

Will let go and stepped away. I stood there for a moment, watching him, and then turned and picked up our plates and glasses. “I’ll take them back,” I said.

He didn’t speak, not even to thank me. I felt his gaze on me, heavy and hot, all the way back to the food hall.

When I came back out, Will was nowhere in sight. I missed him, and hated myself for it; I had no business longing for any man here, including Will, whatever odd attraction had developed between us. I was here for a reason, and that reason had just crystallized for me in a single haunting image—the desperate tears in Zedala’s eyes.

I went back to the barn and picked up the hay rake. As I did so, a pair of arms came out of the shadows behind me, grabbed me from behind, and attempted to yank me backward into the dark.

I suppose that Laura Rose might have screamed, but in that moment I was not Laura Rose. I was Cassiel, and Cassiel didn’t cry for help.

Cassiel made others cry for help.

I drove my elbow backward with as much force as I could, and felt it co

He caught my hand barely in time, and I belatedly realized that I knew him.

Merle. I had almost forgotten about my fellow implanted agent, since he’d been put into another work cycle altogether ... but here he was, hiding in the dark.

“What do you want?” I hissed. Around us, the horses stamped nervously, catching the rush of adrenaline from our bodies. Merle looked worried. Haunted.

No, he looked hunted.

“I think they suspect,” he said. “Get a message to Rostow. Tell him I need extraction.”

“What did you learn?”

“Not a goddamn thing except how to run a plow,” he said. “I can’t find a way in, and they don’t like questions. I think I asked one too many.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“They don’t threaten anybody,” he said. “But one day, you just wake up in the cornfield, I’m guessing. Contact Rostow. Get us an exit.”

“I’m not going,” I said. Merle let go of my arm, and I stepped back. “I can’t leave. Go if you wish, but I’ll stay.”

“You stay and you’ll end up one of them,” he said. “Or worse. Something’s wrong here. I’ve been in cults before, but this one’s a whole new rainbow of wrong. It’s like it changes you inside out—not like brainwashing. I can resist brainwashing. This is something else.”

What it was, I realized, was the low-level tingle of power in the camp. Pearl’s influence, breathing around us, infiltrating our every thought, breath, heartbeat. Merle could feel it, even if he had no idea what it could be, and it had frightened him. It was eroding his sense of self, corrupting him from within ... and it was doing the same to me, only for me it had created this false link with Will.

“I can’t go,” I said, as gently as I could. “But you should. As soon as possible.” Merle, in struggling to keep his sense of identity and purpose, was making himself a target. They would know he wasn’t one of them soon, if they didn’t know that already. As good an undercover agent as Merle might have been in other circumstances, here in this place he was in grave danger.

“I’ll let you know when it’s ready,” I told him. “Go back to work. Be careful.”

He nodded, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gray shirt, and took a deep breath. Even so, he didn’t look himself, I thought.

“Stay cool,” I said. “You’ll be out soon.”

He nodded again and walked out into the sun, head down. Even his body language seemed wrong, when compared to the alert, confident strides of the others in the camp. I could see it. So could others.

Merle was in very real trouble.

I went back to raking the straw as I sank into a light meditative state and reached out for Rostow to deliver my message—a minor enough effort, and a nearly imperceptible use of power, but it still felt more difficult now, as if the walls around the camp were psychic as well as physical blocks. Perhaps it was only that something inside me longed for this life now—the simplicity, the clean and straight lines of it. The honesty and trust.

But the trust itself was a lie, and underneath was a black lake of toxic betrayal. I knew that, I did, but even so, it was difficult to separate knowing from feeling.

I reached out for Rostow, but before I could deliver Merle’s plea, I heard shouts from outside. No one shouted here, not in that particular tone.

I looked out to see that it was the girl, Zedala. She was ru

Mariah, her teacher, had stopped at the edge of the field, and stood watching her with a stiff, unforgiving expression. Next to her was another teacher in a green scarf, who extended her hand toward Zedala.

The next step the girl took tripped her, and she plunged flat onto the ground.

No.

Into the ground.

I dropped the rake and ran out of the barn. Around the edges of the field, the workers had all stopped what they were doing, but no one was moving to interfere.

Not even Merle, who was standing near the fertilizer cart, clenching his fists.

Zedala didn’t come up from beneath the ground.

I took in a deep breath and ran forward, shoving the two teachers out of my way. I got only a few steps into the field before it opened before me—not my doing—and I plunged down into a thick, heavy darkness of fertile tilled dirt, worms, and the sharp chips of rocks.

I could reach her, I realized. They didn’t expect me to be able to maneuver through the dirt, to use my own Earth powers to guide me to Zedala. But if I did, it would betray me utterly, not only to them but to Pearl.

The frustration made me scream silently into the darkness of my temporary grave.

I couldn’t save her. I could only hope that their goal was to punish, not to kill.

After what seemed an eternity, I felt the ground underneath me pushing upward, expelling me into the air once again. I rolled over on my back, gasping and choking, wiping the black earth from my face with trembling hands.

Zedala was lying crumpled and weeping twenty feet away. She was filthy and terrified, but she was alive.

I coughed up dirt and blinked up at the bright yellow sun, which was blotted out by one of the teachers. Not Mariah. This one was, I was sure, an Earth Warden, and a potentially quite powerful one.

He was also very, very young—no older than Zedala, but with a shimmering cloud of power surrounding him that was unmistakable to the eyes of anyone with a gift. Possibly, I thought, the most powerful Earth Warden I’d ever met, besides Lewis Orwell.

He had dark, empty eyes that held no pity, no reluctance, no doubt. The eyes of a fanatic.

“Go get her,” he said to Mariah, who ducked her head in acknowledgment and hurried over the rows to grab Zedala and pull her to her feet. “Take her to the box.”

“No!” Zedala screamed, but only once. The boy-Warden stared at her, and the next time her mouth opened, nothing came out. The panic and terror on her face spoke loudly enough, though. It was a horrible sight, but when I looked around, I saw that the gray-clothed workers had all turned away, intent on their own duties.

All but Merle, who was still watching, with his fists tightly clenched.

And, standing in the shadow of the corner of the barn ... Will, whose clear gray eyes were fixed not on Zedala, but on me.

The two teachers dragged the girl away. I was left alone to stagger upright, slapping dirt from my clothes. Will strode forward, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out of the field. Once I was on hard-packed ground, he took my shoulders and shook me, hard enough to make a rain of dirt fall from my body.