Powerless Revision 1 (5 page)

“Ok, I got it. She neutralizes special gifts.”

“No, no, no. Let me ask you this. What can you do?” The woman responded that she could change the temperature of water. “Ok, now imagine that you couldn’t do that and nothing substituted for it. That’s how she is. No power, ability, gift, whatever you want to call it. There is nothing unique about her.”

In his frustration, the volume of his voice increased, catching the attention of the other people at their desks. It pained Mira to hear herself spoken of this way, and she looked down at the floor. The woman’s jaw dropped a little bit and she stared blankly at Kevin.

“One moment please,” she said in a polite tone, which contrasted with her deeply disturbed look. She got up and joined a circle of the workers that had already formed. Heavy whispering, at times with emphatic gestures, punctuated their discussion. Kevin and Mira looked on, unable to hear any of what they said.

“Is it going to be ok, Dad?” she asked, slouching.

“I’ll make it ok,” he said, putting his arm around her and pulling her a little closer.

A moment later, the woman returned to her desk. Struggling to suppress her emotions, she sat down and reviewed the document. Again erasing what she had written on the bottom part of the form until the surface became rough and thin, she pressed her implement to the paper hard and scrawled a single word, “powerless.”

“We are prepared,” she said, taking a sudden deep breath, “to offer you preliminary approval. No one has ever been turned away before, but then again those who aren’t cut out for it know better than to apply. Let me ask you, are you sure this is what you want to do?”

Mira, suddenly feeling herself under the spotlight, experienced a flush of defiance sweep through her mind. It insulted her that someone thought she couldn’t do something.

“There is nothing else I want more. You’ll see. I’ll be great at it,” she said firmly.

“Ok,” the woman replied, “but you’ll need to get final approval from Corey. You are an unusual case. The senior class instructor is Ogden Fortst. Class starts this coming Monday morning at eight am. Do you know where his schoolhouse is?”

Kevin nodded his head and took the document. She added that he needed to return it once it had Corey’s seal.

“Thank you for your help,” Mira said to the room, already knowing that everyone would be watching her leave.

Descending the stone staircase back to the courtyard, both Kevin and Mira enjoyed the satisfaction of their accomplishment.

“Look at that, a senior already. Cut the foreplay and get right down to business, right?” Kevin joked, and Mira smiled.

“Do you want to see your new schoolhouse?” Kevin asked. Mira nodded her head.

“Ok, I’m going to set up a meeting with Corey. I’ll tell you how to get there. Head outside of the gate and—”

“You mean alone?” she asked. Kevin walked down another step so he could stand eye to eye with his daughter.

“We’re not always going to be around to protect you, and if you’re going to be walking to and from school everyday then you might as well get used to it. Remember, no one knows who you are, so they won’t know you’re any different unless you tell them.”

Mira nodded her head, swallowing the necessity of it.

“Good, now from the corner of the outpost closest to the forest, you’ll see a small path marked with a large white stone. Just follow that path and you’ll get there, ok?”

Mira nodded her head, gave her father a hug, and watched him slip underground.

***

All on her own, Mira slowly meandered through the courtyard, peeking over someone’s shoulder here and doing a little eavesdropping there.

One man in particular caught her attention. Wearing quite a lot of metal plating, he leaned against the wall outside of the Darmen Exchange office. His eyes scanned the crowd, and Mira wasn’t sure which one of them was the fearful one. Still, the people entering and exiting the office paid him little attention, dangerous or no. He looked to be in his twenties, making Mira realize that she had not seen another person that age.

Leaving the courtyard behind and walking through the gate, she turned left and strolled toward the edge of the forest.

She came across a large piece of marble with dark streaks cutting through it. A path lay just next to it, and Mira decided this must be her path. Before setting down it, she noticed a slightly smaller granite rock nearby with another path, and a slightly smaller limestone rock with its own path. Taking a moment to examine this place, she admired all of the rocks and their paths. The rocks got smaller and smaller down to a hefty chunk of quartz and volcanic glass. The paths, some of them criss-crossing only a few feet in, looked so jumbled and bunched that they couldn’t possibly lead to different destinations.

Tempted as she was to pursue every single path, surmising that each led to the schoolhouse of a different grade, Mira returned to the large white piece of marble, which was almost as tall as she was, and started down its narrow path. Leafy boughs hung overhead and stray branches vainly tried to stop her. The sounds of the forest, the birds, a babbling stream, the wind in the leaves, enveloped her.

Walking farther in, and feeling the sanctity and contentment of her environment fully, a jarring and unpleasant sound suddenly invaded her peace. A pair of voices, shouting, carried themselves to Mira’s ear. Taking another twist of the path, the forest revealed a clearing, a frail-looking wooden structure, and two teens having a heated argument.

“That’s not how you do it at all! Don’t you know anything?”

“It would work if you would just listen to me and stop being such a baby!”

Mira froze, trying to remain concealed and hoping to get away before being seen. But her first step in retreat landed on a crunchy leaf, which sounded like the cracking of bones.

“Who is that?” the girl yelled.

“I don’t know,” said the boy, still arguing, but he turned to see what it was. Feeling she had been caught, Mira emerged.

“Hi. I’m sorry. Is this the senior schoolhouse?” she asked timidly of the approaching figures.

“Yes, yes it is. What’s your name?” said a handsome, stringy boy of dark complexion.

“My name is Mira Ipswich. I’m going to be going to school here,” she said. The boy smiled.

“Oh, great! My name is Vern Porter. It’s nice to meet you,” shaking hands with her. “Who are you?” he asked.

The question had come so quick and it caught her off guard, but Mira remembered the words she heard in the blackness of the tent:
Your greatest strength can be in hiding your weakness
.

“Oh, you don’t want to know what I can do. It’s dangerous!” she boasted. The boy mustered a suspicious smirk. “Well you can’t be more powerful than Aoi here, or else they would have taken you away to the capitol a long time ago,” he said, referring to the tiny, black-haired girl with two sizable front teeth beside him. “She is as strong as her heartbeat.” But before Mira could even begin to ponder what that meant, the girl had already stuck out her hand.

“My name’s Aoi Watanabe. It’s nice to meet you,” she said through a devious smile. Hesitantly, Mira reached out and took her hand, ready to say that it was nice to meet her, but her hand was crushed in the shake and something very different came out.

“Oww!”

“It’s pronounced “owie,” actually,” Aoi said, emphasizing the final vowel sound and then giggling to herself. Mira immediately knew she wasn’t the first person to fall victim to this. Vern, again, looked mildly amused.

“Ok, you don’t have to tell us now, but you won’t be able to hide for long. We’ll have the Tournament Trial as soon as class starts and it’ll have to come out then. But I predict the result won’t be too different from last year,” he gloated. Aoi scowled at him with piercing, malicious eyes.

“Yes, of course, the Tournament Trial,” Mira fibbed. “I know all about that. What happened last year, anyway?”

At this, Aoi erupted. “If I could have just gotten my hands on you, you would have had a mouthful of dirt!” The venom in her voice startled Mira, but Aoi calmed down and shifted her attention to Mira. “Vern has an attractive force, so you think it would be easy to get near him, but it’s not. And that’s why he’s class leader—because he finished the year top of the class—and I’m not…yet.”

A distinctly smug and satisfied expression formed on Vern’s face as he folded his arms. Mira wanted to know more about what “an attractive force” meant. But Vern’s grin enraged Aoi and she went off before Mira could say anything. “Things are going to be different this year. So you can just wipe that look off your face!”

“Maybe the real reason you’re upset is that Fortst asked me to help out because I’m class leader, and you’re here as punishment.”

“What are you being punished for?” Mira asked, unabashedly curious.

Aoi hung her head and spoke very softly, in almost a whisper. “I may have accidentally broken something.”

“It was a house, Aoi!” Vern boomed.

“I break things! Ok? It happens. They shouldn’t have made that house like that. It was just asking to be knocked over. It wasn’t my fault!”

“What do you mean it wasn’t your fault? Everyone saw you drop kick it.” Aoi just shook her head, fuming. Mira decided to change the subject.

“So what are you doing here, anyway?”

Both Vern and Aoi turned to look at what they had walked away from when Mira arrived. A group of large boulders and some divots in the ground lay before the entrance of the schoolhouse. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t look like much progress had been made.

“We’re trying to make a pathway leading to the entrance. But we’re not having any luck getting these stones into the ground.”

Mira walked over to analyze the work area. She couldn’t be sure, but she guessed that they had been digging up these boulders and then trying to press them back into the ground, leaving half-buried rocks that were still half as tall as Mira.

“How are you moving these rocks around?” Mira asked. “Oh,” she added after Aoi put her hands together. “Why don’t you try breaking the rocks into pieces? If you can lift them up, and then bring them down hard on another rock. That should create some flat surfaces along the break point. If you carve out thin slices from these rocks you will only have to do a tiny bit of digging to set them in the ground.”

Vern and Aoi, resumed their places in the workspace, reasoning that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. Mira, hustling out of the way, watched as Aoi yanked a boulder that was as large as she was out of the ground and held it in her outstretched arms. Vern shouted directions to her and she maneuvered over toward another stone.

Once in place, Aoi slammed the stone down as hard as she could. The rock cleaved in two. Without a word, Aoi went about preparing to shatter the remaining pieces and the other stones.

Only then did Mira finally get a chance to fully survey the schoolhouse she had come to look at. Her notion of an impressive institution of learning met with resounding disappointment. The building before her had thin wooden boards that light could sneak through, an uneven cement foundation, and a shingled roof that surely leaked.

Getting the okay from Vern to go inside, Mira walked up the three cement steps to the door, which had a basic metal latch. Opening it, she felt even she could break it without much effort, and rust from the latch rubbed off on her hand. Inside, fifteen desks stood before a lectern. A heavy black board hung against the far wall, which had caused a crack in one of the wallboards, allowing in more light. A few materials, some for teaching and some for repair, lay in the far corner.

The only point of interest for Mira was a bird’s nest nestled up in the rafters, but that led to droppings that found their way onto a few of the desks. Mira sat down in one of the uncomfortable wooden seats, listening to the crashing of rocks outside and trying to find something optimistic in this disappointing place.

She thought about the two students she would be studying with, Vern and Aoi. The one seemed full of himself and the other much too volatile. Maybe the rest of the students would be easier to get along with. The promise of having a real teacher stirred some delight within her. Even the dullest, dreariest setting could be transformed under the guidance of a thoughtful and inspiring teacher.

Feeling like she had seen enough, Mira left her seat and went for the door. Outside, Mira’s eyes widened. Thin stone slabs speckled the ground and a number of shallow holes had already been made. The work would be finished in no time. She walked along the edge of the forest, sure to stay out of the way. Before leaving, she turned to address the pair still hard at work.

“It was nice to meet you. Good luck with the path!”

Sadly, neither of them broke their focus longer than to mumble a quick “yeah, bye.” So much for immediately striking up deep friendships, she lamented.

***

Retracing her steps along the forest path, Mira returned to the gate of Corey Outpost, where her father patiently waited for her. They immediately began the walk home, and Mira noticed her father behaving meekly.

“So did everything go alright with the form?” she asked, surprised to be the first person to speak.

Kevin roused himself. “No problem at all,” he said. “The meeting will be soon and then you’ll officially be a member of the class. How was the schoolhouse? You’re going to be spending a lot of time there, you know.”