The Essence (The Pledge 2)

I could remember, when I was little, staring at my reflection for hours and wishing I looked like Brooklynn. Wishing I had her dark hair and dark eyes. Wishing that my skin was the color of baked honey rather than colorless milk.

She could never be you, I heard a dusky voice whisper. She could never contain the kind of power you contain.

My fingers gripped the edge of the sink “Not now, not now, not now . . .” I dropped my head, repeating the words as I willed Sabara away.

Closing my eyes, I counted.

One. I took a breath and held it, trying to find the strength to crush her.

Two. I imagined shoving her, pushing until she was buried deep inside of me once more.

Three. I let the air out slowly and opened my eyes again, blinking against the harsh overhead light.

But the face staring back at me from the mirror was no longer my own. It belonged to a woman with wild red hair and red-hot eyes. Her skin was the only likeness between us: white as alabaster.

I startled, my hands—and hers—flying to cover my face.

But before I could breathe, or even blink, she was gone. It was me again, staring back from the other side of the glass.

Only me.

I trembled, no longer sure I could trust myself. No longer certain my eyes hadn’t deceived me.

And then I heard her voice again. Trust me. Trust . . . us.

There is no us, I insisted silently, biting my lip until it bled between my teeth. I felt frustration uncoil, and this time I knew it was my own.

That couldn’t have been her. That couldn’t have been Sabara in the mirror staring back at me.

Sabara was dead.

“You’re dead!” I shouted, my voice determined and angry, daring my reflection to shift once more. Daring my eyes to see her.

I don’t know what I thought would happen in that moment, but what I didn’t expect was for the world around me to disintegrate into utter pandemonium.

It was the blast that came first, rumbling the floor beneath me and splintering the mirror into a million tiny shards until my reflection was unrecognizable, even to myself. Instinctively, my arm shot up to cover my face as I crouched low. My fingertips clawed the edge of the porcelain sink for support. Above me, the electric lights flickered and blinked.

For the briefest moment, as my heart hammered painfully, I thought the worst of it had passed with that single explosion, and I allowed hope to fill me as I breathed again.

But then a second blast ripped the air, and everything around me went black, the power failing at last. From above, I was showered with broken ceiling tiles, sharp and unforgiving. I ducked beneath the lip of the sink, squeezing my eyes closed against the dust that choked me as I tasted my own stomach acid rising in the back of my throat.

Over the ringing in my ears, I heard screams and shouts, cries for help that filled the hallways beyond the closed door, reverberating in frantic discord.

My eyes widened as I was suddenly aware that the bathroom wasn’t completely cloaked in blackness, not in the way it should be.

Pale light sparked from my skin, turning me into a beacon of sorts . . . A living, breathing beacon. I searched the rubble around me, trying to gain my bearings, and realized that there was a second source of light, faint but visible, coming from just beneath the closed door.

Scrambling toward it on my hands and knees, I moved recklessly over fallen debris, razor-edged pieces that nicked and abraded my palms. I dropped onto my stomach as a third explosion shook the ground like an earthquake, and this time I heard something else as well: the unmistakable sounds of gunfire.

I couldn’t stop myself from wondering whose weapons those were. Who was firing upon whom.

The door, when I finally reached it, was warm . . . hot, even. And I worried about what that might mean, about what I would be walking into if I tried to go out there. But I couldn’t stay here, cowering in the washroom. It might end up being my tomb if I didn’t at least try to escape.

More screams found their way to my side of the door, piercing me, and I held my breath, bracing myself as I decided to go for it. I had to.

I used the handle to drag myself up, and I eased the door open. Outside, the hallways were blanketed in gloom, and the acrid taste of smoke choked me and singed the hairs inside my nose. I tugged at the hem of my shirt, lifting it to cover my mouth. But I couldn’t stop moving; I had to get out of there.

Students rushed past, pushing me out of their way, and I heard more shouting and more shots fired. I kept my head low, but I stayed on my feet and kept moving, trying not to trip over the debris in my path. The only thing I could see was myself, my own skin, and even the light that came from within me couldn’t penetrate the thick, black clouds that billowed everywhere. It reflected off the smoke, making the smoke look as if it were coming from me, as if I was the source of all this destruction.

“Zafir!” My voice rasped, but it was lost in a tide of shrieks and chaos.

I reached a door and I slid my hands over it as I slowed to peer inside the broken pane where a window had once been. The classroom beyond was choked with the same dense smoke that filled the hallways. But some light filtered in through the third-floor window on the other side of the room.

Beneath the teacher’s desk, I could see three younger students, barely older than Angelina, huddled together. Hiding. I recognized the small black-haired boy who was coughing so hard I worried he’d swallowed too much of the roiling smoke—there seemed no more room in his lungs for real air.

It was the first boy off the bus that morning: Phoenix.

But it was the body of the instructor lying on the floor beside them, her eyes large and unblinking, that made me realize I couldn’t just leave them there. Half of her skull had been caved in from a fallen chunk of ceiling plaster.