Page 38 of Anchor

Cassie hadn’t waited for me, and I was thankful for it. Right now, I needed a moment to myself before I even opened that folder to read what it said.

“Congratulations on your victory!”

The words were so foreign to me that I almost didn’t turn to look, thinking they were talking to someone else. But it was Cameron’s assistant who’d called after me from her desk by the door, with a big smile on her face, flushed cheeks, and she waved at me excitingly when I met her eyes.

“Big fan!” she then said.

To me.

Big fan—of me.

I wasn’t a rude person by nature, never had been. On the contrary—I hated rude people, but in those moments, I was literally speechless. I had nothing to say, no word came to mind, no thought that made sense except the one that wanted me tokeep moving, run, get away!

So, I did. Without a reply, I practically ran away to the end of the hallway and down the stairs like my ass was on fire. I kept my eyes to the floor and my head down, the folder to my chest tightly until I made it to the showers in the locker room because I knew they would be empty. No shifts started or ended at one in the afternoon, and I was right. Nobody was there.

I need a moment. Goddess, those two words had been such a slap to my face, and I needed a good, long moment to justbe.So, I went to the last cabin, closed the frosted glass door, and sat onthe tiles at the very corner with my eyes closed, hoping I didn’t throw up, at least, as I hid away from the world.

I hoped in vain.

It was true. Everything Cameron said was true—it said so right on a two-pages long document inside that folder she gave me, signed byThe Council.Only one signature, but I had the feeling I knew who it belonged to—the Whitefire woman who’d drawn her sword with the bone handle from thin air. With it, she’d waited for me to as she waited for me to do magic, tofailso that she could cut my head off. Or maybe stab me in the gut?

Could be.

They had expected my magic to bedifferent—some had evenhopedfor it—and it had been. So fucking different, yet they couldn’t even tell.

The fucking Council, andthey. Couldn’t. Tell.

Which was fishy as hell to me, not that I was complaining. I got to keep my head on my shoulders, but it made me so awfully suspicious of everything.

Why did they insist that I’d gotten lucky to have my color back? Why couldn’t they tell that my magic didn’t feel like my magic, that it was different from the magic I’d had my whole life? What kind ofdifferenthad they been looking for when they asked me to do a spell for them? What did the Blackfire councilman think I’d turned into?

Why, how, why?!

So many questions, and the buzzing in my head didn’t stop even when I threw up and cleaned the cabin floor, then went to the sinks to clean myself up, too.

All the while the folder stayed with me.

People watched me. As I hurried to the offices—what were basically cubicles, except bigger—everybody in the hallways stopped and turned to look at me, and I could have sworn all of them whispered my name.

I hated it. I hated it so much I had no idea what to do with myself when I finally made it to my desk, which was down the middle of the leftmost row in the large room. The cubicles were surrounded by meeting rooms and offices of the team leaders, and the one right across from me had been Michael’s. The door was open, but the office was empty. They’d even taken out his desk as far as I could see.

More than half the cubicles were empty. The teams didn’t often spend a lot of time by their computers unless we had to prepare a report. Agents were always out in the field, except today every team available seemed to have decided to stay in just to make me miserable. Just to make me sweat even more until I finally sat down on my swivel chair, put that folder down, and closed my eyes.

Breathe, Rora, breathe,I reminded myself, and it helped somewhat. My heartbeat slowed down and my hands were no longer shaking—until I turned around, sure that everybody had gone back to work already, but found their eyes on me.

They were all standing, rising on their tiptoes to see me through the cubicles’ plastics walls. I turned around again, biting my tongue to keep from cursing out loud.

What the hell was wrong with these people? It was just me—the same girl they’d worked with for the past year. Nothing about me had changed—well. My magic had, but apparently even the Council couldn’t tell. Madeline could, but she pretended she believed that it was because the Rainbow had made it more powerful, hence why the color of it had become red—which was bullshit. The power of magic had nothing to do withthe shade of the color, only the intensity, and my normal orange magic had been plenty intense since I was eighteen years old.

So many questions, and these people staring at me when they hadn’t even offered me a hand when I was in need made it worse. It took me longer than I like to admit to get my thoughts in order, to open that folder, and read the whole thing again.

Nothing had magically changed. The letters, the words, the signature at the end remained the same as the first time I read it. They really wanted me to lie about being Mud. They really wanted me to get out there by the end of the day and talk to those reporters, and give a statement, say that my magic was weaker then, but I was never Mud. I was always a Redfire, and I’d entered the Iris Roe same as all other players—withthe permission of the IDD, of course, which I’d requested beforehand because I was an IDD agent. Atrainedagent—and that’s why I’d won.

They wanted me to lie to the whole fucking world.

“They’re waiting for you,” someone said, and I looked up to find Fernand, a fellow agent looking at me from the cubicle next to mine with a smile on his face and a flush to his cheeks I didn’t think I’d ever seen before.

“What?” My mind was elsewhere—on those letters still, on the fact that my body was shaking slightly, and the fact that it had all started to feel like a dream to me. Not real life, no—there’s no way this could be real life.

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