Magnetic Moon
Magnetic Moon
Salmah Abdulkadir
Annie had known from the beginning that there was something wrong with this plan.
As soon as she had entered the scene, her eyes had begun to blaze. She landed hard on hands and knees. When she sat back on her heels and lifted her stinging palms, she saw that they were concealed by elbow gloves. They were a soft shade of maroon and made of leather. And they matched the rest of…What was she wearing? A school uniform?
The outfit consisted of only a few colors. A dark burgundy tie was tucked into her collar with a gray sweater vest over it, and her knee-length skirt was pleated into white, gray, and maroon. Annie stood up on one knee at a time onto feet clad in gray combat boots. She was barely recognizable in this outfit—but then again, that might have been the point.
When she looked up, there was someone wearing an even better disguise than hers. The lean, dark haired and straight-nosed teenager glanced down at her briefly before he proceeded down the railroad tracks on his own. He looked extremely different , and not just because of the identical gray and maroon uniform sweater vest he wore. His hair was lighter than it used to be, still dark but not black as ink anymore, and curtained his face. His infamous eyes were unaltered, just as she would expect them to be. But this boy carried himself more confidently—more like the doctors at that hospital so many years earlier.
Ceren, a person's personality can never truly change, you know. What changes you see are only in how they express it.
Annie, forgetting her pain, sprang to her feet and ran to Ceren at full speed with her arms outstretched.
“Ceren!” She slammed into his back, making him stumble and nearly release the glass-encased device in his grip.
“Yeah, okay.” He grimaced, peeling her away less than gently. After telling her apathetically to detach herself from the floor, Annie's brother briskly turned around and continued navigating the gray hallways. Annie gaped at him, crestfallen. He was scrolling through his tablet, which seemed to vibrate nonstop with messages—offers and harmonies, she knew, not common conversation.
“Umm, he-llo?” she cried, grabbing his shoulder and roughly turning him around. “Wake up! Ceren, what are we doing here? The EYE-"
“No touching! No grabbing, no pushing and shoving, no screaming my name like you think I've gone deaf. You can't touch me here!” he snapped, cutting her off. “What’s your problem? Can’t you get off my back for once?”
Annie was taken aback. Whoever this boy was, he wasn’t her brother. Behind the professor’s back, Ceren had always taken anything even remotely related to the EYE Institute extremely seriously. Annie quickened her pace until her calves ached to keep up with her brother’s powerwalking. “So where are we going?” she asked breathlessly. She glanced around. Reality had fused with her excitement at seeing her twin brother again, and she hadn’t processed her surroundings until now.
Ceren stopped, and Annie narrowly avoided colliding with him again. He finally turned around to face her. His outfit matched hers, but he wore gray slacks and his boots were black. Her cape was plain, whereas his bore the EYE’s silver insignia stamped on the back. He cupped a hand to his ear. “I’m sorry, we?”
Annie shrugged. “Yes. We. Don’t you and I go to the same school?”
He just studied her wordlessly for a moment with an expression that drew his eyebrows impressively close. It was like he was looking at a stranger. She was worse than a stranger to him now, she realized: someone he had once known and cared for, and had now forcibly, unknowingly forgotten. Someone who’d already lost her chance at any semblance of connection. “Hurry up, or I’m going to be late for orientation,” was his only comment. He swung back around to grab a door that was about to close. Annie shivered, attracted to the gust of warm air sweeping out from the building. The door nearly slammed shut in her face. She closed it quietly behind her and released a shuddering breath.
“Remember,” she whispered to her brother, “you can’t touch anything.” But she’s sure there’s no way he could forget.
At first glance of Annie’s tired eyes, it just appeared to be a normal school. A tall, sturdy building of spotless white brick and no windows. Then she saw a glint from the corner of her eye. As soon as her head began to turn, the two guards that had been flanking them encircled her and slammed her against the wall. Her vision exploded with stars. At the sensation of her skull cracking against the cinderblocks of the wall, she merely blinked, dazed. “Hey!” she heard Ceren shout. There was some fumbling, then her brother grabbed her arm and hauled her upward. She stumbled around blindly for a minute and the floor rose to greet her face until she was yanked up again. She felt woozy, like she was underwater. The guards had moved back to their original positions, staring straight ahead as if nothing had happened. They were soldiers, she comprehended, noticing their uniforms and badges through her abstract, spinning view.
“Ah, wonderful!” exclaimed one voice, full of false cheer.
For a minute, Annie stared stupidly at Ceren, unable to discern the origin of the voice. Ceren had one hand locked around her arm like a choker, apparently tired of letting her fall. Miraculously, the tablet was still in his other hand. He used its stylus to pinpoint something several feet in front of her. She struggled to focus on it, doing a double take when she saw the woman who had spoken.
A chill ran through her when she saw that there were people, probably teachers, and administrators, receptionists, concealed behind thick glass walls. From her perspective, the front office of this school would be more accurately described as a cell. Ceren raises an eyebrow at a woman in a pantsuit, waving merrily at him from a desk behind the glass. If this was the entrance, then the rest of the school must compare to a maximum-security prison. Annie slowly approached the cubicle. What was it that made this place so dangerous?
Ceren drew in a sharp, pain-filled breath beside her. Annie instantly turned and tracked his gaze to rest upon a gaunt, gloomy silhouette trudging around the corner and towards the glass compartment. He walked with his head down and hands limp as if chained. When the student lifted his head as he turned the corner, the pair got a good idea of exactly how long it must have been since his last meal—but that wasn’t why Ceren gasped. He recognized the boy’s hypnotized gait and glazed expression even before she did. She had never witnessed her brother’s spellbound disposition when hosting a Wanderer, a time traveler unfortunate enough to be caught between dimensions and locked into his powerful body, but Meira and Malia had.
They’d warned her that he was almost magnetic for Wanderers, that he must’ve given off some kind of alluring or protective aura. It wasn’t hard to attract time travelers. People of all eras were more drawn to him than ocean tides to the moon.
It must have been a similar case for this boy.
The most shocking thing about the appearance of such a character was how some aspects of him contradicted others. He may have looked emaciated and ghoulish, but his hair was damp with oil and combed neatly to one side, as if he had just taken a shower. His hair was as fair as her own. She gawked at his unblemished cuticles, moisturized skin, polished gray boots, and pressed uniform. He reminded her of Ceren, despite herself—a flawless, sparkling weapon on the outside, but deteriorating on the inside. He was a boy who had been pushed to extreme mental, physical, emotional limits just to see how far he could go. He was a slave crowned a king, a pauper dressed as a prince. He was many things, none of them meaning free.
Annie turned her head to look at her brother again, and somehow, he was different. His blue-green eyes were glossy; his jaw was tight. Like a stranger with his fingerless gloves pressed over his mouth, as if he could feel himself beginning to shatter.
She watched the blond boy approach the one side of the glass with a great deal of caution. He glanced around self-consciously, revealing gray eyes darkened with paranoia, before shuffling close enough for his breath to frost the glass. He slowly, painstakingly lifted a hand and pressed his wrist against the window. The adults all paused their office work to watch him do this, as if staring at him was the highlight of their day. The boy accepted a click and the appearance of something written against the glass, so meticulous it looked typed, as permission to retract his wrist. The small print on the glass expanded, then shimmered and faded away. Annie peered closely at it.
It was nothing less than her brother’s own signature.
Ceren dropped his stylus, and shards skidded across the floor.
He wordlessly kneeled to gather the pieces, but she was watching the largest fragment. It waltzed across the floor like a top before landing abruptly at the blond boy’s feet. He jumped back as if the glass pen was a weapon. Before he had the chance to even consider returning it to them, though, a long, skeletal white hand violently snatched the broken glass off the floor.
Annie nearly choked when she stepped back to see the owner. She found herself craning her neck at what could only be described as a fraction of a person. The feet looked mortal enough; they’d been shoved so tightly into her black stilettos that her ivory skin swelled with arteries. Her feet cut off at the ankles, and that was where the blackness began. From legs to neck, there was empty space, as if she were wrapped in a cloak of pitch. Her jagged, ivory Disney-villain face was punctuated with a jawline that could cut diamond. She had a cute little nose that turned up, rounding out her wide periwinkle eyes. Annie would never figure out how she did this, but her hair was a perfect sheet of silver interrupted every so often by wavy cerulean horizontal lines. They created a rippling effect when she tossed her hair back. This woman could be in her early thirties.
Annie could feel tears scorching her eyes in shock at this nightmarish creature of floating head and shoes.
She flaunted the expression of the Cheshire Cat, analytical and clever. A sparkling megawatt smile was etched upon her face. It was so wide and unnatural that it quite literally covered the entire bottom half of her face—in fact, the corners of it grazed the back of her neck. Annie seized Ceren’s arm in a terrified death grip. She was pulsating with fear, which seemed to conduct into him until his whole body was vibrating, too.
The woman-creature glided toward the unlikely siblings, forcing them quickly backwards until they hit a hard wall of muscle. The soldiers crowded around them, slowly laying their hands on their bows expressly to intimidate them. The woman interlaced her long, branchlike fingers and gave them a loud crack. Her nails were long, glossed, and painted black, refined to look like claws. She wiggled them, her eerie grin expanding.
Suddenly, she thrusted her hand out at Annie. Her metallic gaze seared right through the trembling girl, like she could see into her soul. Annie nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Chessie,” the creature mumbled in greeting. Her voice was muffled, like she was genuinely struggling to speak.
Annie stared from her pointy claws to her bloodless face, frozen. Ceren nudged her. She slowly extended a hand in return, meaning to lightly shake the woman’s fingers, but her wide, earnest expression mutated into sinister glee. She grabbed Annie’s right hand in her left and Ceren’s left hand in her right (she took the moment to slip the glass into his hand), and with one firm pump, she sent a ripple through their arms that nearly dislocated Annie’s shoulder. Annie made a noise that could only be described as “!!!”
The fractured woman waved the lingering soldiers away. “Oh, harmless. Harmless baby cadets. They must not have detected your identification. Very good news Bruddy not killed because of you, Annie dear.” It was beyond Annie how she managed to derive the moniker “Bruddy” from her brother’s name. “Bringing a friend after swearing allegiance to the EYE deserves no less than Elimination.” She giggled harshly, and Annie’s heart rate spiked. She and Ceren shared a hard look. “No worries, pet—it won’t happen again. Your brother here should have taken care of that.”
Well, there was no time for that now—the siblings watched as Head and Heels hustled away, her sides seeming to thin out and disappear as she turned. Chessie beckoned them with one hand over her shoulder like a beady-eyed aristocrat summoning her faithful puppies. “Come along, now, children. Soldiers, you may resume your posts straightaway.”
No one moved.
Chessie sniffed, regarding the two of them with disdain. “Quickly. It’s not safe to be standing out here, in the open.”
Ceren frowned. “We’re standing in the main office of a metallic-glass school, surrounded by members of the United States military, with a scary feline-person in front of us who just stepped out of a bulletproof cubicle. You can imagine we’re just dying to come with you.” He waved his stylus in the air, restored to its original condition with not even a crack to speak of. “So what’s the danger here? You?” He pointed it at Chessie. “Them?” Referring to the glass wall.
Chessie huffed loudly. Her wizened feet sauntered over, neither he nor his sister shrinking away this time, and she deftly snatched the stylus out of Ceren’s hands. “You. You are in danger. You are the danger!” Ceren stared at his hands and made a choked sound. Annie shot Chessie a smirk of approval. She doesn’t think he’s been caught off guard so easily since meeting the Ravenwoods. “And for God’s sake, are you dense? Don’t wave that thing around like a banner.” She sniffed haughtily and shoved between them. She proceeded to seize each of them by the arm and drag them alongside her.
Ceren hissed at the unwelcomed touch, but Annie widened her eyes, pleading with him. Don’t. Don’t let her know who we are. Ceren closed his eyes and swallowed hard, and when they opened, his pained grimace had been replaced by a reluctant smile. But both of them watched a small, inky black word brand itself onto Chessie’s wrist. Annie covered her mouth.
Oh, no.