They were unfamiliar, but I reached for them.
Because in spite of their features that harked from all around the globe, their hardened eyes and uncertain gazes looked like mine.
Time waited as I studied them.
The first was a guy with softly tousled coffee hair, a chiselled, square jaw and thick, straight eyebrows. His warm skin evoked the memory of the western winds of Sereia. I felt like some of my old friends would've swooned over his greyish green eyes, looking carelessly annoyed. Even though Saoirse would've laughed herself hoarse. His stare was piercing, perfect smile too practised, skilfully relaxed. His clothes were that of nobility—tailored and quietly embellished. With his upright, casual posture and body that had soft skin covering hard muscle, the only thing to describe him was as a magazine doll. One with power.
But power was not all we needed. It certainly wasn't for the man in front of me, with a thin, scraggly white scar streaking under his left ear and purple streaked under his eyes.
Next to him, a girl teetered nervously on her toes, looking like she hadn't eaten a proper meal in months, but her thin fingers were continuously pulling up her too-small top, pulling her threadbare cloak closed over her substantial chest. The way her clever hazel eyes darted around, as if watching for a potential attacker, made me purse my lips in disgust. On this journey alone, I'd seen far too much of the disrespect of men. Far too much. And I shuddered to think she could be a victim of the same tragedy Mama went through so many years ago.
The girl smiled tentatively at me, brushing back her curly shock of carroty hair, and I made myself move on.
The boy on the other side of the redhead who had looked at me with such cautious hope in her eyes had his hand pressed over his, as if refusing to show them. Unnerved slightly, I took in his laidback stance, easy hand at his side—
"Let's play a game."
"You think everything is a game."
"Yes, but this one might come in handy."
"Mhm?"
Saoirse propped herself up, pointing into the distance. "There. You ever realised that guy—" I looked, not knowing who she pointed at. "—there. There! The one with the fedora!"
"Ohhhh."
"He never takes off his right glove. See? There are secrets on that hand."
"You're a bunch of baloney." I ribbed her gently.
"Hey!"
"Saoirse?"
"Mm?"
"What's this game called? And why are you so good at it?"
"How to read people." She never answered my second question.
—which rested on an almost hidden knife tucked in his belt. He seemed ashamed in spite of his casual posture. I'd almost forgotten about the game Saoirse made me play once. But years later, her uncanny knack for reading people was helping me out. I refused to look away—I needed to find out what was wrong.
Finally, he lowered his fingers, tugging his hair over his eyes. The locks were so dark they were almost navy in the sunlight. His thin, hooded eyes sparkled with shadowed light, dulled by the film over them.
I knew he was like me. Had fought. Was likely still fighting, somewhere out there, to stay on that ledge that pushed off people deemed less than. People like him.
People born without the gift of sight.
"Welcome," the dark-haired boy rasped. In an ominous voice, filled with a desperate terror for what was yet to come, he whispered, "The circle is complete."
Like magnets, the other young man, the girl and I inched towards each other, fingers interlocking.
But the blind adolescent held his hands out to his sides.
His eyes flashed gold, locks of hair shuffling in an electric wind as a blinding rainbow of colours—white, red, blue and brown—shot from his palms, mingling and twisting wildly.
Alarm flashed in my heart, but none of the others moved.
They encircled the four of us, crossing over and around us.
Air, fire, water, earth.
Streaks shot up and down from the rope of colour, the ones descending downwards melting into the clouds, the ones going up forming a dome. We all looked up to see the bands meet in the middle, twisting to form the gilded top of…a cage.
I turned, pulling on the bars, but they wouldn't yield to my hands. They stung—barraging my hands with burning fire, frosty ice, howling wind and biting earth all at the same time. To my horror, lurid green vines wrapped around my fingers, fastening them to the bars.
The stripes of colour encircled the one I had been watching, the bars of the cage he'd summoned closing in slowly. Until he was mummified in his own cage, made up of all the elements.
Waves of horror broke and rolled off the redhead. Her eyes were fixed on the vines sinking into my skin as I tried to pull my hands free. Cages—she had a thing with cages. The brown-haired man looked around, as if he weren't used to being closed in—a caged beast.
Rays of sapphire swirled around his hands, water flowing around his body with a careful precision. Clear liquid flashed out from his shoulders, spattering down through the clouds in a shower of aqua sparks. When the process finished, he was still there—but he seemed apart from us, like he was closed off in a glass case made of water. His eyes glowed gold.
The redhead's pretty, earthen eyes darted around faster, catching the sun streaming through the cage's walls, lightening until they too were a beautiful, rich honey colour. Faster than sound, a spiral of dull brown swirled like a dancer's ribbon around her slim body, until they slammed into the fog beneath us, until she was standing on solid ground, tearing apart and lashing together with every jittery movement of her feet. Her own little island.
They were making shields, I realised. I looked up in horror to see a claw descending from the roof of the cage.
The hand, four brutal claws attached to it, morphed into a four-pointed spear. Finally, the vines snapped and I broke away, panting. The pointed ends came crashing down on us all just as a blazing wall of living flame flared up from my feet. I started to close my eyes, bracing for the rocking motion of impact, but instead, just as the first of the four iron points hit the floor before us, the cage, the three young Gifted and the whole foggy, sun-swept landscape flaked away and disappeared.
-----
Eleven sand dunes, a bit smaller and shapelier than the others, formed a barrier before me in a perfect line. Weird. I didn't remember them being there before. Under a blanket of stars, I lifted my left arm incredulously.
Healed.
Healed.
Not even a whisper of pain; all that remained were two tiny dots in my left shoulder.
But I couldn't remember why I'd expected more than that.
I couldn't remember where the dots come from. Perhaps a snake had bitten me while I was sleeping, and the wound had healed by itself. I remembered the agony, I remembered thinking I was about to die—but the memory was fuzzy, as if it had only been a dream.
Thinking hard, I shouldered my backpack and set off in the direction I'd been walking. East.
The dunes didn't stop me. I didn't know why I expected them to. Why I thought there should be one more standing along with them.
A part of my mind had been erased.
I didn't remember falling asleep. Didn't remember a snake striking me in the shoulder, didn't remember day giving way to night.
A small segment of memory, gone. And I couldn't get it back.
I looked up, seeking the warmth of the stars, twinkling down from galaxies far, far away. Burning bright for millions of years.
"The stars are beautiful tonight." I mumbled awkwardly, the random words floating away into the abyss of the night.
Spinning around like a dancer on a gilded stage, I walked on through the sand dunes, the stars like millions of watchful eyes beneath a dark sky—a silent audience to a young woman whose spirit burned bright.