Young Writers Society

The next day, Zita awoke to crumbs falling from her ceiling. She brushed them off her face with a groan and sat up, looking around for the source.

“‘ood ‘ornin’,” Emily said from her cross-legged position above her through a mouthful of frosted cookies, “‘ant un?” She asked, holding out a cookie.

Zita shook her head, “I don’t exactly have a sweet tooth. What time is it anyway?”

Emily gulped down her food, “Ten. kivvien told me about your training, exciting. You’ve got two hours, you sure you don’t want one?” She waved the cookie in from of Zita’s face.

“I’m a cyr, sensitive to sweet, remember?” Zita rolled out of bed and went to tame her wild bedhead. She heard Emily’s ‘oh’ as she shut the door and got to work, to no avail. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it had twisted into dreadlocks overnight. She huffed and dropped the brush.

“Why don’t you just tie it back?” Emily asked from the doorway, snacking on a chocolate bar that seemed to have come from nowhere.

“I’d rather not.”

“Then let me help,” Emily chirped and skipped over, scooping up the brush before Zita could say a thing and starting work on the tips of her hair. Zita huffed and dropped her chin into her hand.

Soon enough, (half an hour later), Emily dropped the brush in satisfaction, “There.”

Zita looked up from the crack in the porcelain she had been picking at and examined her reflection. She shrugged, her newly smoothed locks bouncing almost hypnotically around her shoulders, “Can I go get breakfast now?” She asked, her stomach rumbling as if on cue.

Emily nodded cheerily, “Go ahead.” She swept an arm toward the exit dramatically, “my lady.” Zita rolled her eyes as Emily giggled and hopped back up to the light fixtures.

Breakfast, it turned out, was already over, so Zita began her wandering around to find something to eat. The halls were sparsely populated with only the occasional kid or business person probably in town for some meeting or other, so Zita was alone when she came upon a dead end on the third floor. She sighed and turned around, ready to go back she came, when footsteps echoed toward her. As soon as she turned around she found the owner right in front of her.

She jumped, “Oh! Anders! I didn’t see you there,” She calmed her breathing the momentary spike in her pulse.

“Hello, Zita is it?” He asked, extending a hand for her to shake.

She nodded, “Yeah, who told you?”

“You’re not as obscure as you seem to think. Not a lot of kids say yes to the combat training, believe it or not, and even fewer actually befriend any protectors before they even get an offer!” He said all this with laughter in his voice, like the idea that she thought herself unnoticed was the most preposterous thing he had ever heard.

“I find that hard to believe,” She said skeptically.

“You must be hungry,” He announced suddenly, “I didn’t see you at breakfast, but, lucky for you, I know where they keep the good stuff.” He winked and waved her after him down the hall. A tiny warning bell dinged in the back of her mind, but she waved it off. Food was only a trap when the people around her wanted to hurt her, and if Anders wanted that he wouldn’t be leading her away from the secluded corner into the more populated area of the hotel.

“So, I’m sure you’ve inferred by now that many of these attacks are most likely caused by a mole.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder.

Zita frowned, “Maybe…”

He chuckled, “It’s perfectly fine, it just shows you’re clever enough to take on the role of protector. What I wanted to ask you is, who do you suspect? Explain your thinking to me.”

Zita tilted her head, wheels once again turning, “What if you’re the mole?” She asked in her perfected monotone. Not a thing was given away by her voice.

Anders gave her an impressed smile, “For all you know I very well could be. I would like to assure you that I am not, though, I couldn’t be. You see, what the directors know is blown out of proportion quite often. It’s a sort of...defence, for catching moles like the one we’re dealing with now. I don’t actually know the location of, say, Carlin’s stops, or Imani’s, since they move around so much.” He glanced over to see if she was listening and found she was.

He nodded his contentment and continued, “The only ones who could, potentially, learn all of the stop locations is a protector. They move from stop to stop all the time, and they talk to each other, which is vital, of course, but the result is them knowing the locations of several of the stops outside their zone. We keep a detailed record of who interacts with who on their rounds if you would like to see them. The records are kept near where we held the meeting yesterday, just draw a symbol like this,” He traced a spiral in the air, then slashed his finger through it from top to bottom, “and press the center of it on the top left corner of where you came in last time and the record room will open for you.”

They came to a set of metal double doors and pushed inside to find a busy kitchen. The conversation drifted into idle small talk as they wove their way to the back, where the leftovers were being prepared for their shipment to one of the city homeless shelters. Zita grabbed herself a bread roll and some rather heavily salted eggs before making her way out to the dining area while Anders excused himself to go do something or other. She didn’t particularly care; she had food.

After scarfing down her brunch like a starved werewolf, she jogged to the ballroom, which happened to be as easy to find as Kivvien had said it would be. When she got through the plain, heavy, oak double doors, she found herself the center of attention in a half-filled room. She blushed and choose one of the illusions on the wall to stare at until the eyes turned away. As soon as they did, she looked away from the fake window and examined the faces around her whilst skirting the edges of the room.

She vaguely recognized two of the kids from Imani’s inn, but other than them the only familiar face was Ash. The girl was twisting her long scarlet hair into an over-complicated seven-strand braid as she sat in the half-lotus position on the floor. She spotted Zita and flashed her a cocky smirk, showing off her two extended canines like snakes’ fangs.

The door opened again and everyone looked up. Anders strode in, twin blades strapped to his back and a dagger on his forearm over the plain grey T-shirt and baggy jeans he wore, somehow making the casual getup look like battle armor.

“Welcome to your first day of class, to first-timers and return students,” He announced loudly in the echoey room, “We’re going to start with some simple exercises and work our way up to weapons and magic. We start with push-ups, give me ten and do a lap. When you’re done, gather in the middle of the room.”

The whole class acted as one, immediately dropping down and beginning the exercise. Zita completed the push-ups easily and got to the lap, finding that Ash was the only other person up and already halfway around the ballroom. Oh no, you don’t. Zita sprinted to catch up but was surpassed instead by the next finisher, an elf boy who was surprisingly light on his feet. She was ultimately the fourth to the middle out of the sixteen in the class.

Anders waited with his arms crossed and watched as the last kid huffed into the middle of the ballroom. He stared at them, a statue, for a long moment. Zita seemed the only one able to breathe.

“If you thought that was hard,” He said finally, “you’re going to be too sore to get out of bed by tomorrow.”

The last finishers sucked in breaths, their eyes went a little wider. Ash surveyed her fellow classmates like a wolf would watch a flock of sheep. I guess that makes her the wolf in sheep's clothing, Zita thought with an internal laugh. She stuck her chin up and looked Anders right in the eye. Challenge accepted.

Anders had not been kidding. The warm-up was less a warm-up and more a way to spot the weak ones, the ones who couldn’t handle the hard stuff. Said hard stuff turned out to be, drills. Lots of drills. Each student got wooden practice weapons, capable of little more than bruising at the kids’ current strength, and they were taught the basics.

Zita tested the weight of the broadsword she had been handed. It was too light, too unbalanced. She wondered how she knew that. It wasn’t like she’d ever held a sword before. Anders demonstrated a move. Slash, then thrust when your opponent is off guard.

“You’ll want to go for non-lethal area’s when you strike. We don’t want unnecessary deaths, regardless of your opponents’ previous crimes.” Anders demonstrated the strike a second time on the practice dummy he had conjured from a storage room a few doors down. The practice sword hit the target in the shoulder.

“Of course,” He continued, “different spots are more or less lethal depending on the species of your opponent. Striking the shoulder of, say an elf and you very well could kill them, but hitting anyone with vampiracy anywhere except the neck or heart won’t make any difference at all. Keep that in mind.”

Zita eyed the row of identical dummies along the wall. The illusions lit them from behind with false moonlight, dulling the bright colored splotches of paint that adorned them. Each was a different species, and each had a different sloppy paint job. Red for lethal, yellow for incapacitating, green for no harm done. She squared up with her chosen opponent, a large troll not unlike the one that had chased her down after her escape. That was quite a long time ago, she thought absently as she slashed. To her surprise, the dummy moved to block with its own wooden sword.

She was knocked back a step with her own force and almost fell from the weight of her wings. Zita grit her teeth and adjusted her stance. Anders liked surprising them apparently, so she would return the favor. She mimicked what she saw him do, one foot slightly in front of the other, stance wide, knees slightly bent, and struck again, this time faster. The dummy, equipped with the strength of a real troll, but also the sluggishness, wasn’t fast enough to block and her jab hit home. Kind of. The troll managed to turn on its pole, something she hadn’t expected with its lack of legs, and her strike merely grazed his arm.

She made the mistake of glancing at Ash. The vampire was much less troubled by the task than Zita. She had already taken on two dummies, evident by the red words floating above the heads of the two to her right. She was working on a merman now, the gravity around her apparently shifting to match what it would be like underwater. Ash used her sword to disarm the merman, and while that floated slowly to the floor, she hit him in the side of the head with the back of her blade. Cheater.

Zita tried again. And again. And again. Finally, she disarmed the dummy. Its wooden weapon clattered to the floor following her mimicry of Ash’s move and she slashed at its singular pole that served as a leg. Wood banged against wood and the dummy slouched, the red words that she couldn’t read flicking on above its head like someone had flicked a light switch.

The clapping of a single person sounded behind her, “I see you’ve started the real basics,” Anders said, impressed, “Where’d you learn that?”

Zita inclined her head to Ash, “I saw her do it.”

Anders looked her up and down, “So you just...copied her?”

“Isn’t that how most people learn things?”

“Oh, yes, but most students don’t survey their surroundings enough to pick up on that sort of thing in the first place. That was actually one of my later lessons, it seems you won’t be needing that as much as the others,” He chuckled and patted her shoulder, making her flinch. She had been fighting off the why again. Why did she know to look around? The answer was not a friendly one.

Anders didn’t seem to notice and moved on to guide the elf boy from before on how to take on a larger opponent. Zita moved to a free dummy in the seemingly endless line and tried the trick again. She couldn’t repeat it so easily with every dummy being so different, with its own weaknesses and its own strengths to match the averages of the species it represented. They spent the whole day like that, Anders occasionally singling out a student to show a new trick, which a few others, Zita included, would pick up on and copy. No one, save Ash, had anything mastered. So, naturally, Zita avoided looking in her direction as she failed for what felt like the four hundredth time to disarm and knock out a mermaid with the air fighting against her.

Anders was right. They would be far too sore to function the next morning. Nevertheless, Zita got up and dragged herself down into that ballroom to endure another day of that. And she did again the next day. And the next day. Until, finally, she had a day off. With Anders absent at a private directors meeting, Zita decided to follow the advice he had given her on the first day of training, before she had arrived at the ballroom. She was going to look at the archives. 

A/N

I tried to make this one shorter than some (most) of the others, so I hope that's appreciated a bit. Not much get's done in this chapter, in my opinion, but I have been trying to knock off more major plot points per chapter to make things move a little quicker and stuff. I've barely brushed on the good stuff, believe me, so I'm trying to get there as quickly as possible for you guys. I know it's not too likely that all that many of you will read this, as I've been seeing that the later chapters in stories stay in the green room for longer because the chapters before are just so hard to find with the way the site is set up without having to click through several different pages to get there. 

Anyway, tell me what you thought, in general, and then the specific stuff. I'm seriously interested in what you guys predict for future chapters, so tell me. I'm planning something huge/ish and then something bigger and bigger, afterward. Basically, lots of foreshadowing and escalation and kill me now and all that jazz *awkward jazz hands*