Strains

We’re in the courtyard again. Caiden opens the first gate for me and instead of heading to the next one, he takes a sharp left. There are three other, smaller outposts here that are severed from the main library building. All of them are made from the same black stones that make up the library and its foundation.

Caiden goes to the building in the middle. He hands me his candelabra while he fishes out a key from his cloak. I take a giant step back as he swings the door outward, revealing shallow steps into black nothingness.

Something deep within myself stirs uncomfortably, like distant seasickness.

“What do we want from down there, exactly?” I say.

“A better lunch than your facilitator made you.”

I chuckle to hide my uneasiness. “Okay, but you first.”

I follow a few steps behind him and try to lighten the floor as best as I can. Last thing I need to do is to kill myself in some dark pit. Still, with every step we take we just go deeper into the darkness, until I can’t hear the chirping birds outside anymore. In the silence, the growing nausea in my stomach churns. I’m not even sure I’m hungry anymore.

I put a hand against the wall to steady myself.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, it’s just creepy down here,” I lie.

“Oh, well luckily for you, this is it. Give me a sec.”

He walks beyond what I can see in the under the candlelight. A torch a short distance away begins to burn, before another and then another. Light fills the room at the base of the stairs.

I didn’t realize the narrow stairwell had opened up into a huge stone chamber. Torches lined the walls of the stone bowl until they met a stone archway in the center. It was a cold sort of foreboding that made me happy to stay up on the stairs.

Caiden pulls a bag from his cloak and leans over. There are some items littering the floor, but I can’t make them out from this high up. Once the bag is filled, Caiden climbs the stairs again.

“Got it, let’s go back.”

I nod and follow him at his heels out of the creepy place.

***

He locks the door behind us while I catch my breath. The air is much lighter out here. What was that place?

“Does a picnic sound good to you?” Caiden asks.

“Sure, I think I’ll have to go back to my room afterwards though.”

“Fair enough.”

We gather my things back in the library and walk to the koi pond in the flower garden. Technically, it lies in a grey area on the very edge of the academy boundary. It’s as close as Caiden is willing to get to the academy grounds.

We tuck ourselves away in between the camellia bushes. Caiden pulls off one of his cloaks and sets it down as a blanket.

“Guess they have multiple uses, huh?”

Caiden sits down on the makeshift blanket.

“These?” He pulls at his collar. I nod in confirmation.

“Dulling my other senses helps me hone my psychic abilities. The complete darkness in the library and these seem to help as well.”

I sit across from him, the bag of whatever he got from the dark pit in between us.

“So how many layers do you have under there? Don’t you get hot?”

“Three, and the hotter the better.”

That doesn’t sound comfortable. The one we’re on top of is already duvet level thick. I pull at the bag.

“So what did you grab from the pit?” I ask.

Caiden pulls the bag from the bottom and bags and packages fall out of it. They’re snacks, and they look like they’ve come from all corners of the earth. I don’t recognize a single package. All of them are in a different language.

“What was all of this doing down there?”

Caiden grabs a box and places it in my hands.

“That place used to be a portal to the living world. It was sealed long before the other one was. Still, items still regenerate to their arrival point open portal or not. Apparently, the students of old loved having snacks while studying for classes.”

“You live off of snacks?” I ask, taking a bite out of a strange cookie filled with some kind of jelly.

He laughs. “Better than dressing-less salad.”

“Good point,” I shove a donut in my face. “So there are multiple portals here. Learn something new every day,” I gulp. Never class related though.

“Yes, all are closed except for the broken one in the council headquarters. It’s the one they reserve for troublemakers or whoever they’re afraid of.”

I nod slowly, remembering what Matthew had told me. The portal was sealed 100 years ago, but I somehow ended up here. I was lucky to be avoiding their attention thus far.

“Do they…really use it?” I ask. I don’t have a reason to doubt what Matthew told me, but reassurance would be nice. And I’m more likely to get a direct answer from Caiden than Matthew.

“Yes. Can’t be sure of when they last used it though. Not everyone who comes here is a good person, Elizabeth. Before the portal was closed, it was important to keep the ones with evil intentions from causing mayhem on Earth.”

That wasn’t the response I thought I’d get. Here I was, looking for answers for myself, and I hadn’t even considered those who were sent away before me. Sure, my classmates have been jerks, cruel even, but I can’t go so far as to say they should be sent into some abyss.

“But how could they just banish someone? You’d think the truly bad would go to hell and not here, right? Why would the universe give them powers?”

Caiden sifts through the snacks and grabs a bottle of water. He cracks it open and takes a long sip.

“Fate is cruel.”

“Sending people through a portal to nowhere doesn’t sound much better.”

Caiden shrugs. “It’s out of our hands. We’ve created our own prison, can’t complain about the wardens now.”

It’s surprising how he is so nonchalant about this. This is the same guy who was adamant about not taking a single step back onto campus. Even if it meant that he would have to sustain himself on pastries and old bottles of Ramune.

The longer I stay here, the more I realize it isn’t much different than the world I left behind. Morals and principals were things you only stood up for when it was safe. I yank the top off a bottle of a mystery liquid and try to drown my salty attitude. It doesn’t work. I’m pissed. Pissed at the world I live in now, pissed at the one I left behind, and pissed I can’t do anything about it.

“So much for heroes.”

I pull the bottle away from my lips and wipe away the sweet cherry dribble on my chin. I did not mean to say that out loud. I look over to Caiden and my stomach knots instantly. Darkness has washed over his face as if we were back in the library.

“We weren’t always this pathetic.”

“No, I didn’t mean-“

He holds up his hand. “It’s fine, I’m not offended. Believe it or not, we used to do good for the living world. It was actually a graduation requirement. You could do a charitable act in the living world, anonymously of course, or you could bring something back to Near Elysium.”

I shrug my shoulders gently. “Those two things don’t seem equal.”

“It’s actually pretty complicated to bring things into Near Elysium and there are restrictions as to what you can bring back. You’d need council approval first and it has to benefit Near Elysium in some way.”

“That wasn’t in the handbook.”

“No, it’s a newer rule. Supposedly written because of your facilitator and his graduation stunt.”

I lean forward.

Caiden rolls his eyes. “I don’t know how he did it, but he got an entire car through the portal.”

Matthew has a car? I stifle a laugh. As long as the portal had been closed, I bet it’s one of the first ever made or needs to be pulled by horses. No wonder I’ve never seen him use it.

“And you? What did you do to graduate?”

Caiden looks down. Is he blushing?

“I brought back some books, it’s not as flashy as a whole car, but suitable for a librarian, right?”

“Definitely a lot more useful,” I say. That makes him smile. It’s insecure and so easy to see in the daylight. He doesn’t like Matthew, and it makes sense. They’re the only two psychics in this world, and so different. Matthew is so suave and flashy while Caiden is quiet and withdrawn. It’s probably hard to find friends as a psychic, I can hardly control my anxiety whenever I’m near Matthew. I doubt anyone would risk putting their whole selves into view if they weren’t forced to. Yet Matthew has dang near a fan club dedicated to beating me up for being near him. Even before he vowed never to set foot on academy grounds, I doubt Caiden had the same fans.

“So, enough of all that, how have you been? I know your classes aren’t going well, and I assume Matthew hasn’t changed, but what about everything else?”

“Like what?”

“Have you made any friends?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Just enemies.” I finish the cherry drink and break the glass against the ground. The sound of its shatter hits my ears as the bottle vanishes.

“Careful,” Caiden says.

I raise an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the only way to recycle things here?”

Caiden shakes his head and sighs.

“Insensitive as ever.” He gathers the wrappers scattered across the cloak and puts them back in his plastic bag. Once he finishes, he takes the bag and stretches it outward, as if he’s going to dump it into the river. Instead, it ignites into a ball of fire and only ashes hit the stream.

My eyes go wide. “I, I thought you were a psychic.”

He smiles slightly. “Only my friends know I have two strains.”