Chapter 3

“Your brother,” Acacia repeated, not sure why she sounded so surprised. Annice shrugged again, and Korii looked like someone who was supposed to keep a huge secret but blurted the whole thing out in front of the person that wasn’t meant to hear it.

            Acacia glanced at Janessa and Kenrii again. His hood had been blown back, revealing his face. Acacia could definitely see the resemblance, between his and Korii’s light ash-blonde hair, black clothes, and pale skin.

            Acacia started searching through her mind, wondering where she’d seen him before. He just looked so familiar. She didn’t realise she was staring at Kenrii until he shot her a look that seemed to say, you better look away now or I will kill you.

            Korii cleared her throat. “Umm…why are you staring at him?” Acacia whipped her head around. “Err…nothing,” she apologised. “Sorry.”

            After a moment of awkward silence, Korii stood up and left to return her tray and leave to her dorm for the night. Acacia waited until Korii was out of sight before standing up to return her own tray. As Annice and Acacia trudged up the stairs, Claris caught up with them. “Hiya, where’ve you been? I waved you over to my table.”

            “We didn’t see you,” Annice pointed out. Claris looked uncomfortable, so Acacia changed the subject for her. “Have you ever heard of someone named Kenrii? Korii said he was her brother, and then she acted super weird about it,” she intervened.

            “There’s a Korii and a Kenrii?” Claris clarified. “That sounds interesting.”

            Acacia told her everything that happened in the cafeteria with Korii and her brother, plus the strange feeling she’d had about Kenrii. “What’s wrong with her acting weird?” Claris wondered out loud. “She seems normal. Maybe she didn’t want you to know she has an older brother?”

            “I’m not sure,” Acacia admitted, “But she wasn’t acting normal. Trust me, I know Korii,” she added when Annice and Claris gave her sceptical looks. Just then, she saw Janessa hurrying up the stairs towards the Lockers Hallway.

            Acacia narrowed her eyes. What did she find about Kenrii and Janessa that was so suspicious?

 “Okaaaaaaaaay, but…even if you knew Korii was weird, what can you do about it?” Annice pointed out. She often found holes in everyone’s logic, even though sometimes it hardly mattered.

            “I…don’t know,” Acacia mumbled, suddenly wondering why she was so affected by Korii’s weirdness. Claris could be right. Korii liked being a leader. Maybe she hated Kenrii bossing her around as her elder brother.

            “You know what? I think you should just ask her tomorrow, y’know, during Ability-Making session,” Claris said, grabbing Acacia’s shoulders and pushing her up the stairs.

            Sure, Acacia thought, easy as pie. After saying goodnight and goodbye to Annice and Claris and pretending to enter her dorm room, she sneaked off to the Lockers Hallway, where Janessa had been rushing to. The hallway was mostly deserted, giving it an ominous aura.

            She tip-toed to the end of the Red House’s ruby-red lockers and Black House’s onyx-black ones. At the end of the row was the Dusters’ resting-room, where the school cleaners—or in their case, Dusters—rested while waiting for their next shift.

           It was big enough to fit about three dorm rooms, but since the Dusters were always so busy, they couldn’t clear up the room, so it was cluttered with stacks of scrubs, rows of brooms and mops and dustpans, racks of rags and worn-out pieces of fabric. Big green trash bins stunk up the whole place, the black bags lined along the room’s walls amplifying the stink.

           Acacia opened the door to the resting-room, scanning the darkness before taking a cautious step forward and…

          …slipping on a puddle of water. Grumbling about Dusters needing to dust themselves, she picked herself up, massaging the part of her butt that hit the floor.

           Suddenly, there was a yelp at the other end of the room, and mops at the opposite end of the room crashed onto the ground, banging the dustpans that collided with the cloth rack in the middle of the room, which toppled forward and slammed into the loose cupboard of scrubs in front of Acacia.

            The cupboard tilted to the side—a little too much for comfort. Acacia knew her feet should have been guiding her out of the resting-room, or even better—dashing away, but they were currently glued to the spot in fear.

            The cupboard should have crashed onto her like the mops to the ground, but a bolt of lightning—or electricity—appeared out of nowhere and zapped the cupboard, splintering it to pieces. The wood fizzed with purple, green and white energy, filling the room with a firework-like crackling sound.

            The figure who had zapped the cupboard gasped when Acacia’s eyes fell on her.

            “Wait! Don’t run, who are you?” Acacia shouted at the person, who—must’ve been a Telekinetic—floated off the ground and flew head-first to the door. Whoever it was was wearing a black cloak, the hood completely obscuring his—or her—face.

            The last thing Acacia saw was the person open the door and throw an electric orb at her feet, making the world explode in a smoky mess, and more things around her collapsed as she fought to get out of the room.

                                                                                   zvzvzvzvz

            “Psssssst, Estrella, are you awake?” Acacia whispered, tiptoeing into her dorm quietly. She’d made it out of the Dusters resting-room without anyone noticing and had crept back to her dorm. Estrella, her roommate was in bed, her blanket pulled over her head.

            “Of course I am, dummy,” Estrella hissed back. The lamp on Estrella’s table clicked on. “Where have you been? And why do you smell like smoke?” she demanded.

            “Let me change and shower first, then I’ll tell you, okay?” Acacia replied. Estrella tapped one the wooden table impatiently, and Acacia grinned. Estrella’s impatience drove them apart sometimes, but they were still close friends.

             After taking a lengthy shower to get the smoke smell out of her hair, she plopped on her pink and white striped mattress, her long auburn brown hair dripping on the bed.

            “So? What did you do? Burn down part of the school?” Estrella smirked. She was sitting at the foot of her bed, braiding her jet-black hair.

            “Of course not, what kind of person do you take me for? A lunatic?” Acacia said. She then explained to Estrella what happened in the Dusters resting-room. When she was done, Estrella whistled. “Did anyone catch you? If yes, you’d have detention to last the month.”

            Acacia shrugged. “No one saw me—thankfully—though the Electric Elemental-who-is-also-a-Telekinetic might not be so lucky. I mean, it should be quite easy to see someone in a black cloak floating around school after curfew.” Then again, so was a girl creeping around the Lockers Hallway at that time.

            Estrella continued braiding her hair, deep in thought.

            Acacia looked around the comforting dorm room she shared with Estrella, glad she was out of the dirty, untidy resting-room. The familiar shiny gingerbread-brown wooden walls and floor covered the entire semicircle-shaped room, and shelves of books lined the curved walls, making the blue door look squashed as Acacia and Estrella each had their own personal shelf at each side of the room.

            A golden crystal chandelier hung in the middle of the dorm, its tiny crystal facets reflecting off the beams of light around the room. Their beds were in front of a glass paned window, giving them an amazing view of the school and the cities beyond. There was a private bathroom at Acacia’s side of the room, but she wasn’t going into detail for that.

            “I actually might know who the person was,” Estrella said, breaking the silence.

            “Who?” Acacia prompted. Her mind ran through a list of suspects.

            “This is just a guess, okay? So don’t freak out, but…. Maybe it’s Korii.”