Page 7 of The Tribes of Magic
We’d just made it to the end of the street when Bronte broke the silence. “Are you all right, Savannah?”
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
She held my gaze. “You just look tired, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I guess I am. Yesterday was a rough day.”
“Yes, it was.” Bronte swallowed. “I miss Kylie and Asher too.”
“We’re going to get them back.”
“I thought…” She swallowed again. “…I thought Kylie was dead. In the video playing on the news, her mother said she was dead. And that’s why she tried to poison the Spirit Tree.”
“Kylie is not dead. The Templars have her.”
Bronte’s eyes narrowed, drawing together. “How do you know?”
I didn’t tell her about the video Conner had stolen from the Watchers, the video that clearly showed Kylie’s magic mark hadn’t faded after her supposed death. The mark that meant she was still alive.
“I just know she’s alive, ok?” I said. “Trust me. We’re going to get her back. We’re going to get both of our missing teammates back.”
“I hope you’re right, Savannah.”
Bronte played nervously with her picture-perfect fingernails. She looked so ruffled, so unlike herself. The events of the last few days had definitely taken a bite out of her self-confidence.
“It’s just not the same with two of our teammates gone,” she said quietly.
When the thirty-one Apprentices had arrived at the Fortress, the Program Managers had separated us into six teams, each one with five or six people. But after our two teammates were kidnapped, Team Gold Getters was down to just three: Bronte, Dutch, and I. It didn’t seem possible that we’d be winning any gold medals like this, even if Bronte was the star of the Scoreboard and Dutch wasn’t far behind. I guess that was mainly my fault. I was scraping the bottom of the Scoreboard. I didn’t score well when people like the General made the rules.
“No, it really isn’t the same without Kylie and Asher,” I agreed.
I really missed Kylie’s nervous chatter and Asher’s jokes. I missed their banter. I even missed their totally mortifying teasing about my ‘boyfriends’.
“But we’ll just have to carry on without them,” I said.
Bronte and I stepped onto the crowded train platform packed with Apprentices. The buzz of their lively conversations roseabove the distant cry of the kookaburras in the nearby forest. The lights on the tracks changed color, signaling the train was near.
I turned to Bronte. “In fact, let’s try to win this little Scoreboard competitionforthem.”
The team with the most points at the end of the Apprentice Program won a boatload of extra resources for their hometowns. That meant more food, more clothing, and more Apprentice spots at next year’s Choosing. We really had to win this.
Too bad we didn’t have a chance.
Bronte was obviously thinking the same thing. “Even before we lost Kylie and Asher, winning the team challenge was looking difficult, Savannah. Now…” She sighed. “Now it’s impossible.”
“Sixteen years ago, we lived in a world without magic, Bronte. And now we have Spirit Trees that can transport us to different realms in the blink of an eye, Knights who can wield powerful spells, and Gaia is about to sit down with a Court whose influence spans more worlds than we ever dreamt existed. Nothing is impossible,” I countered.
“Perhaps,” Bronte replied, frowning. She did not look convinced.
“Today we’re working with Ainsley’s team at the Summit. That is an opportunity.”
“An opportunity for what?” she asked.
“An opportunity to show them—to showeveryone—just how special and awesome Team Gold Getters is.”
The train came to a stop. The doors swished open with the ease of butter melting over a hot stone, then we stepped inside, joining our teammate Dutch by the window.
Two stops later, a large cluster of Apprentices departed the train, heading toward the Black Obelisk. And at the next station, another Apprentice cluster disembarked, then headed east, intotown. My brother Dante and my best friend Nevada were among them. Today their two teams were working together.
