The Shifter World

Elliott Way

Lilly was awoken by a scream.

She jerked awake to the bloodcurdling sound, her heart leaping to her throat. To her right, Matilda yawned and Wyx exclaimed, "The green mustard is going to overthrow us all!" 

The blurry edges of sleep fell away from Lilly quickly as she kicked off her covers, swung her legs around, and tucked her cold bare feet into her boots. She opened her dormitory door to the sound of many quiet voices and other doors squeaking open. Thin gray light fell in from the windows across the room and battled with the dim red embers glowing from the fire fountain. 

"What time is it?" asked a groggy Kaitlynn, who had just emerged from her room. She wiped her eyes and sniffled. 

"Too early," Lilly yawned. 

 A girl stood at the fire fountain, clutching a crumpled piece of paper in both of her clenched hands. She turned around; Lilly recognized her as Alkalai Kietjé, and the distress on her face was palpable even in the dimness. Her lips quivered and tears dripped from her chin. "I—" she gasped. "I c-can't believe—" 

"Spit it out!" called a boy to Lilly's left. 

Kaitlynn stepped through the crowd and put an arm around Alkalai. "Take your time," she cajoled gently. "There's no rush." 

Alkalai rubbed her eyes with her fist and shrank into Kaitlynn's embrace."My mom s-sent me an earth-letter. I had to c-c-come out here to read it so I could see." She broke into full-on shrieking sobs, and Lilly wrapped her arms around herself to fight the scared chill slithering up and down her back. "Storm announced his—his presence in Shezekia. H-he made the b-beasts and k-killed my little s-s-sister!" 

Voices exploded through the room. Lilly's guts turned to ice. Some people rushed to embrace Alkalai, but most of them erupted into gasps, tears, and cries of their own. 

An hour later, Lilly sat beside of Kaitlynn, Max, and Zander with the entirety of the Privates around the fire fountain. While some occupied the couches and rocking chairs that surrounded the fountains, most people sat on the floor. They were all discussing Storm; theorizing how the Bloom might have killed him, why the Bloom faked his death, what he was doing back, how Alkalai's mother had said in her letter that the beasts were Storm's creation. How could Storm even make monsters if his magic revolved around the weather? Did he simply make monsters to wreak havoc on the Bloom or was there another reason? 

"I just want to know why," Lilly had interjected at some point in the conversation. "What made him so sick that he had to create beasts that are destroying the Shifter World?" 

At this, Max barked a wry, bitter laugh and said loud enough for everyone to hear, "We had a government that sucks. We have a government that sucks. There is no way around it." 

As the sky turned a lighter shade of gray and thin sheets of rain rattled against the windows, the conversation went round and round in a hundred different directions. None of the Privates were going back to sleep anytime soon. They all knew they had to be ready for instruction periods and get to breakfast in the next half-hour, but none of them were feeling very motivated to leave the warmth of the fire fountain or each other's presence. 

Just as Markus Zazzahime was claiming that Storm was actually an alien in disguise preparing the world for his alien-companions to take over, the double doors of the dormitory opened, and Instructor Amaranth entered. She paused at the threshold of the door, striking as ever in her training fatigues and her long black braids adorned with silver rings. 

"I see you've all heard the news," she said, and Lilly couldn't tell if that was flatness, bitterness, or solemnity in her tone. Amaranth folded her hands across her stomach. "Miss Alkalai Kietjé, my dear, whenever you see fit, visit Instructor Centurie's office. Your mother and a grief counselor are waiting there. The rest of you need to get dressed and ready for training. There will be an assembly in Treasurer's Place at eight." 

As it turned out, that hour gave Lilly a lot of unwanted time to think. As she got dressed and shot abrupt answers to Wyx and Matilda's questions about Storm, thoughts snaked in about her mother. If Storm was alive, what did this mean about Emma? Was her mother locked in a cell somewhere, getting tortured on a daily basis, or had she been dead for years? How would Lilly ever go about finding out? And because Storm was alive and because he tried to steal Emma's magic, did that mean Storm was out to steal Lilly's, too? 

He didn't know she was alive. Melissa had seen to that the morning Emma transferred her powers to Lilly. Melissa told everyone that Emma's baby didn't make it out of the power-transference alive. A day later, Melissa said she found an orphan on the field after the final battle between Storm and the Shifters, changed Lilly's name from whatever it had been before to Lillian Cart Ci and simply called Lilly her cousin from then on. No one knew that Melissa and Lilly were biologically cousins except for William. William Ci knew the secret. 

Maybe William Ci had answers to all these questions. 

Lilly didn't know how to find him to ask. She also didn't know if she wanted to know. 

So Storm thought Emma's daughter was dead. Storm thought Emma had accidentally killed her daughter and there was no one else who had space-thieving magic in the world. 

Right?

Or did he know?

Why was this all so confusing and scary?  

"You just spat blood out of your mouth," Kaitlynn said, jolting Lilly from her thoughts. 

"What?" 

Lilly looked down to find red, pink, and blue foam sloshing around a sink drain. She hadn't even realized she had come into the bathroom to brush her teeth...she'd mechanically gone through the motions of her morning routine while trying to sort through her thoughts. Her mouth stung. Apparently, she'd scrubbed her toothbrush against her gums so hard that she'd irritated them. 

Lilly washed the sour tang from her mouth, then ran water over her toothbrush and said, "How can a man that controls weather create monsters?" 

Kaitlynn shrugged as she tucked her hair into a braid. "I don't know, but if he can do that, I bet he can do almost anything."

Anything. 

A man who could create beasts and storms and apocalypses wanted space-thieving magic and she had space-thieving magic and if he knew she was alive, the Shifter World was in a whole lot of trouble. 

Lilly was dizzy. The sink blurred. Her heart felt as if it were sprouting vines that stretched out to wrap around her ribcage. She realized that her hands were shaking and her mouth was dry and her pulse was throbbing in places she didn't think it was possible to feel heartbeats. 

"What's wrong?" Kaitlynn asked softly. 

"I don't feel good." Lilly forced a nod, ran her toothbrush underwater again. The water from the faucet should have been a whisper, but her ears heard it as a roar. "Go on to the assembly. I've just gotta use the bathroom." 

"I can wait." 

Lilly's stomach flipped inside-out and upside-down and she realized she was going to puke up everything she'd eaten for the last five years in the next five seconds. 

"Just go and save me a spot," she gulped before ducking into the nearest bathroom. 

She heaved her guts out into the toilet, the foul scrape of vomit against esophagus rubbing her throat raw. When her stomach calmed down, she stayed on her knees, sputtering and gagging, hands gripping the sides of the toilet so hard her knuckles were white. Time passed—ten minutes, fifteen. The bathrooms and dormitory were both quiet now because everyone was at the assembly.  

She dragged a sweaty hand across her mouth, staggered to her feet, and caught herself against the door to the stall. The world swayed with the surge of her heartbeat. 

Chill, you brat, she told her heart. 

Everything would be okay. Answers would come in time. 

She swayed again, not believing everything will be okay for a second. 

No sooner had she opened the door to the stall did she hear a crash coming from outside the bathroom. 

Then there was a scream from outside the dormitory. 

And the world crackled with thunder outside Elliott Way. 

Lilly paused in her tracks. A reaction of screams and curses trailed from the first one, and there was another sound, too, a sort of rushing...like river rapids or gusts of wind through trees or strong wings flapping through the air.

A siren went off, bursting through the ceiling from Elliott Way's PA system. Lilly raced out of the bathroom and stalked towards the doors. The magical current jumped between her fingers. Was this some sort of drill the instructors had cooked up? 

More shrieks and screams from outside the dormitory. The asthmatic siren sobbed overhead as the rushing sound quickly became deafening—Lilly realized that the rushing was not louder because it had increased in volume, but rather because it had increased in proximity. 

The siren tapered from its constant wail to Instructor Centurie's young, stern voice:

"CONTAINMENT BREACH. CONTAINMENT BREACH. EVERYONE WHO IS NOT IN TREASURER'S PLACE NEEDS TO MAKE THEIR WAY THERE IMMEDIATELY. ALL WINGS AND CORRIDORS ARE GOING TO CLOSE OFF IN FIVE MINUTES." 

Lilly was four feet away from the doors when an oblong shadow stretched over the walls, over her. 

She looked up.

A monster crawled upside-down on the ceiling.

Lilly stayed where she was, eyes burning, heart palpitating. The monster was long, incredibly long; its scaly body was the color of horsefly-infested dung. Many legs jutted out on either side of its body, thick and meaty, each ending in claws that challenged butchering knives. Its face was covered in stubs and horns and spikes, and its long snout bared yellow teeth and purple gums as it sneered.  

Commotion came from outside the doors; the voices of many anxious instructors filled the clearing outside. Lilly dropped to a crouch and tilted her head towards the doors, desperately praying the monster wouldn't see her. But how could anything on the ceiling not see her when she crouched in the middle of an empty dormitory?

"...in Instructor Amaranth's office," Sergeant Josey was saying, tone tight as a copper wire. "The scorpion has flooded the whole floor with poison."

"Poison?" gasped a chorus of other instructors.

"It's going to seep out of the office and eventually make its way over to Treasurer's Place. We've got to get the trainees out of there," Instructor Benjami said. Lilly had never heard him sound so serious. 

She glanced back up at the monster on the ceiling. If the beast the instructors were talking about was in Amaranth's office, did that mean there were two beasts in Elliott Way? Did the instructors not know about the one inside this dormitory? 

Lilly pressed a hand to her mouth so the monster wouldn't hear her fast shallow breaths.

She could slip out of the doors and be intercepted by the instructors, soldiers who knew what they were doing. She could dart out in a low crouch like she learned in conditioning just a week before. She could—

Suddenly she was flat on the ground and couldn't breathe.

Lilly groaned a muffled mph! as the back of her head hit the floor. A giant claw dug into her back; another pressed against the lower half of her face.  Daggers of agony shot through her face, her head, her chest, her back. Two very large, very green eyes filled her vision. 

Monster, Lilly thought. Holy crap. The beast.

"Don't speak, dear," the monster whispered, the rough skin of his lips cold on her ear. He sounded as if he gargled with gravel every morning. "Or I'll cut your throat so you're a half-inch away from death and that would make for a very uncomfortable ride for you."  

Lilly had no desire to be nearly decapitated by claws larger than her head, so she stayed quiet, forcing air through her nose.

"Anyone who touches that poison will die," said Josey.

Lilly shivered in the beast's grasp. 

"Josey," Amaranth instructed, "take attendance of everyone in Treasurer's Place. Line them up by rank and call their names in alphabetical order. Send a flare for anyone who isn't in the lineup. We'll break the windows and make sure everyone gets out safely if we need to. Benjami and Kamaria, look for stragglers. The rest of you can help me kill the scorpion."

There was shuffling and the sound of boots clicking on wood. The instructors were leaving. They couldn't leave! The monster waited until there were no more sounds coming from outside the doors before moving his claws away from Lilly's mouth. He straightened, and Lilly propped herself up on her elbows.

She trembled.

"I'm so glad you're here," the beast said, licking his mouth with a plump purple tongue. "Before we leave, you're going to help me find something." 

Lilly inhaled, willing words to come alive on her tongue. "We?" 

"Don't look so grim," replied the beast. He gestured to the doors with his head. "Your adults will be able to disarm the scorpion before she does too much damage." 

"You didn't kill me on the spot," Lilly said through numb lips. "Why?" 

"Easy. I'm not here to kill you. Storm told me to get a girl with blond hair, gray eyes, probably sassy, and who smells like lobsters. Well, really, I knew your scent, so all I had to do was sniff it out to here." 

Beasts were looking for her. 

Storm created the beasts. 

"I'm not your girl," whispered Lilly. 

"Really? So if I grab you, you aren't going to use space magic to kill me?" 

So Storm knew she could steal from space, and he'd sent monsters here to kidnap her. But how did Storm get the beasts through the magical defenses of Elliott Way? From what Lilly knew, Elliott Way had expensive magical barriers set up by Bloom Officials to keep anyone or anything that was not a Shifter out. "I don't have magic, you wasp." 

"I'll take the chance. I'm looking for something else, too, and while you're in the dangerous position of getting nearly-decapitated by me, perhaps you can tell me where a talented man can rip through the air to get into the magical dimension?"  

"I have no idea what any of that means," Lilly replied. "Everyone keeps talking about how scary all eleven of you are. I shouldn't have believed them. You're just...cute."

The beast tossed his head. "You think?"  

"Absolutely. You're big and stupid and ugly." 

"Sassy brat. Weren't you taught to speak to your monsters with respect?" 

"Actually, I was taught that a little sass never hurt anybody." 

What an absurd contrast, the beast must have thought, to see a girl cowering in his shadow and yet hear that same girl speak like she owned the world. Lilly continued with the same bouncy bravado, carefully shifting so that she was sitting on her knees. "How did you even get into Elliott Way in the first place? Isn't it protected by magical barriers or something?" 

"Try psychics. They're very helpful." The beast prowled forward, tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. Lilly clenched her hands together and raised them to her face. 

Behind her, the doors of the dormitory banged open. Lilly scrambled to her feet and whirled around; Kaitlynn, Zander, Max, and Wyx stood in the doorway. She was able to see each of their faces morph into surprise before something sharp dug into both her shoulder blades and dragged her backwards. The monster pulled her close with two of his arms (legs? They all looked the same). Lilly slammed into the side of his body with an indelicate flomph before his tail circled around the rest of his body, blocking the doorway from view.

Lilly writhed in the monster's grasp. The beast snarled, "Welcome to the party. This one's mine." 

"Don't be too cocky," Max growled. "Lilly infects Elliott Way with it enough." 

The beast yelped—he let go of Lilly as his tail swished to the side. As she staggered forward, she saw an army of thorns as long as her arm embedded in the meat of the monster's tail. The beast slammed the end of its serpentine body into the floor, and the walls shuddered with a thunderous groan. The fire fountain choked on its flames and sparked. 

Lilly staggered into Kaitlynn's arms, gasping, trying to work out the question of why on earth they were here, but Kaitlynn simply said, "Felt bad about leaving you vomiting alone," and Max added, "I wanted to see you get picked on by a monster." That was all the discussion any of them had time for, because then the beast hissed, "Bad move," and his jaws yawned wide. 

There were teeth, rows and rows and rows of very yellow teeth. 

And then tentacles erupted from the beast's throat. 

There were too many of them to count, dark purple grotesque monstrosities slick with slime and decorated with fat black suckers on their undersides. 

Lilly, Zander, and Kaitlynn scrambled to the right; Max and Wyx dove left. Tentacles whipped around Lilly's vision as she crawled on her hands and knees towards one of the stationary desks the Privates used to write letters to their families and crawled underneath it. A series of ground-shaking crashes reverberated around the room—SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! slam—four of them, each one for her friends hitting walls or floors or other desks or chairs or the fire fountain. Lilly glanced up to find a tentacle hovering above the desk. 

She gasped. 

The tentacle slammed into the desk and smashed it to pieces. 

Wood splinters. Black suckers. Ink from exploded pens. Bloody hands, bloody shirt. The tentacle swept around the mass of wood, paper, and burst ink pens and curled around Lilly's wrist. At the same time, the monster swung his muscular neck towards her, sucked all his other tentacles into his mouth, and spat, "Stupid space thief." 

"Ugly beast," Lilly hissed back. She threw her hands in front of her face. 

"Like we've practiced!" Wyx's tiny voice screamed from the opposite side of the dorm. 

But when fear swallows you whole, you forget everything.

So much for being a soldier, she thought.

She stood there with her arms raised like an idiot, waiting and begging and pleading for magic to come and help her. The beast yanked her forward with his tentacle, and for a second all she could see was a fat scaly body with many stubby legs. Kaitlynn screamed and hurled a blast of water in the beast's direction. An explosion of fire detonated on the beast's opposite side. The monster swept his tail around, and Lilly couldn't see her friends, but she heard their grunts—Kaitlynn's soft uh and Zander's louder groan—before the beast had her in his claws again.  

"No!" She squirmed and jerked and gasped, but the beast simply hoisted her up like a rag doll so that her head was right beneath his foul-smelling mouth. He sucked his final tentacle back into his mouth, and there she dangled—helpless, twisting, screaming. 

Magic. She begged it to work. She begged for an asteroid to slam into this monster, or for a stream of radiation to pulse up his nostrils. Something, anything. Magic, please. Please please please.

She couldn't feel the magical current between her fingers. There was no fluttering in her wrist. 

She was so, so scared. 

Why wasn't her magic working? 

The monster moved towards the giant windows across the room.  "If you won't tell me where the magical dimension is, I'll get the Board Members to." 

He used his giant tail, smashed through the glass, and scuttled up the wall.

The world turned into blurry shapes—black walls with gold etchings, monster legs, the ground growing smaller and smaller. When they reached the roof, the beast dropped Lilly on the steep pitch; the momentum from the drop sent her sliding down the smooth obsidian. She clawed for handholds and only found one when she nearly tumbled off the ledge, where the roof's eave was rugged enough to grip. 

She dangled, legs kicking, lungs contracting, fingers slipping. The ground was a thousand feet below her. 

It was a no-think-just-do-and-deal-with-the-consequences-later situation, a situation she never would have been able to handle if Instructor Kamaria had not drilled the Privates for two hours every other day on rope climbing. She gathered all the strength in her biceps—which wasn't much at all—tightened her abdominal muscles, held her breath, and shoved herself up onto the pitch. She paused to make sure she was balanced, then climbed up onto the nearest ridge and craned her neck up, up, up.

The beast had wrapped himself around one of the facility's many thin spires. He looked down at her and grinned, baring his many, many teeth. His dark purple gums glittered wet with saliva, and his dark eyes filled with joy. Joy. Joy in monsters was electricity in veins and worms in the heart. "We need to get the Board Members' attention if they're going to tell me where to open the magical dimension." 

The beast opened his mouth, his grotesque tentacles swirling out from his gullet. Lilly ducked her head, bracing for impact—

The tentacles slammed down, and the roof shuddered beneath their weight. Lilly fell forward on the ridge. 

"You'll cause us to break through the roof!" she screamed. Now that she wasn't preoccupied with falling, she could feel the blood waterfalling from twin wounds on her shoulder blades where the beast had gripped her. Her whole back was ice-numb. 

"Close your eyes, then!" the monster yelled back through his tentacles. 

Lilly did not close her eyes. She gritted her teeth and dug the heels of her hands into the ridge. She took everything she knew about magic and put it into action. Everything she'd learned in Elliott Way so far ushed to the front of her mind. 

Calm body. Relaxed hands. Clear mind. Courage.

She could do this. She just needed to calm down. 

She called magic. She called courage. With Wyx's encouragement in the quiet solitude of her dormitory room, she had been able to steal giant glowing flowers from distant parts of space and grow them in the palms of her hands. She'd gotten to explore wild orange crystals stolen from who-knew-where and golden moon-rock that vanished when exposed to sunlight. She'd robbed some corner of this universe of a tiny chittering creature that was somewhere in the folds of her bed right now. Stealing in her dormitory was all whimsy, all fun. But this was important and this mattered and if she'd didn't calm down and get her fear under control the monster would cave Elliott Way's roof in and it did not matter if people saw her use space-thieving magic and she did not want to die. 

Calm body. Relaxed hands. Clear mind. Courage. 

Lilly felt the spire shudder against her body as the beast slammed the end of his thick tail into the shingles again. "Come out, Board Members!" he shouted in his rugged baritone timbre. "Get out here or I'll send your precious facility into shambles!"

A fracture in the obsidian spiraled from the base of the spire the beast was perched upon down to the ridge Lilly desperately clung to. The beast hit the obsidian again with one of his tentacles, and black particles exploded upward in response. 

Calm body. 

It'll be okay. 

Relaxed hands. 

You've got this. 

Clear mind. 

Don't look at the stone. 

Courage.

Don't look at the ground, either.  

And in the space between breaths Lilly felt it, the deep, heavy thrum of energy pulsing just beneath the skin of her fingers and the delicate flutter in her wrist—the magical current. Lilly exhaled, lifted one of her hands, and made a circular gesture. Magic tangled in the veins of her palms—she could feel it as jolts of ice through her nerves, racing through her hands, coursing up her arms. The air turned thunderstorm-thick around her, humid and negative, as if every electron in every atom in the atmosphere near her had exploded its energy. 

Something huge hurtled from the sky.

It burned bright, searing through the steel-gray sky with white light. It crashed into the monster, the spire—the beast and the monster went down together. 

Both the spire and the monster crashed into the roof. 

The roof, in turn, shook like an earthquake. 

Lilly clutched the ridge again as the roof folded in on itself, not quite ripping open but making a very large dent that groaned louder than any monster, any thunder, any cataclysm. A moment later, the beast burst into mustard-yellow gas. He took the broken spire with him. 

"Lillian Cart Ci!" called a voice from below after a full minute of shocked, horrified silence. 

Lilly jerked her chin around and saw an audience spread out on the messy hillside in front of Elliott Way. Most noticeable of all were the Board Members, who stood in front of the rest of the trainees and instructors. Of the three of them, Instructor Amaranth looked most radiant; her hands were thrust in front of her, ready for a war. Her expression was that of perfect, serene calmness despite the chaos of chatter and rustling trainees around her.

Lilly closed her eyes and called back, trembling, gasping, shivering, "Please help me down!"