About the Dark by helenrena

weird white T-shirt with no sleeves, but only a
pair of narrow bands over his shoulders. An iffy combination. But
still, if Fox turned his collar up, his white shirt was almost
invisible, and Fox looked almost like guys in Business Gift mags. And that’s where our luck ended because my dress, white and
long, with torn ruffles and a plunging neckline, was a wedding
gown, and the only time a teenage girl with vampire-pale skin,
thigh-long hair, and cardboard soles might slip by unnoticed while
dressed like me was probably Halloween. Which had happened two
months ago.
    And yet it was Sinna’s attire that I figured
would do us in. Out of cruel perversity, the gods had supplied him
with a loose suit of seizure-inducing periwinkle. With a pattern
printed all over it. No, the color, I believed, was okay. After
all, people couldn’t wear sensible colors day in and day out. But
the pictures—I don’t even know how to put it—they were surreally,
grotesquely bad. It was a nightmare captured on cotton. Imagine a
herd of bloated, dandruff-ridden sheep. As one, they were all
squinting at you, their matchstick legs splayed under them as if
these beasts couldn’t hold their own weight, and their mouths, evil
and crooked, emitting strings of gigantic Zs. What these letters
signified I had no idea, but altogether this suit was far too
sensational for someone on the run.
    So our clothes and our ignorance of the
world—I slid a pawn across the chessboard—that made two reasons to
stay put.
    The third reason was Fox. He didn’t look
human, or at least not normal-human. If his talent, time, wasn’t
tattooed on him, I’d have sworn he were a color, because where it
came to time, he couldn’t twist it, not even a second forward or
backward, but his colors were amazing. His hair, eyebrows, and
irises were the hue of dark red tulips. I could just picture him
playing with his colors when he was little and then forgetting to
change them back. Or choosing not to. Still, whether a time or
color, Fox would stand out, which, added to Sin’s and my
clothes, would make people remember our motley crew, and then the
gods would have a picnic of finding us.
    I knocked a king off the chessboard with my
pawn, trying to recall my fourth point. Oh yes, money. We had none
because the gods for some reason never carried even a dime.
    And my fifth reason? I couldn’t remember it,
and it was the most convincing of them all. It drove me nuts, but
presently, I came up with yet another reason: Sinna’s smell. The
poor soul reeked of rubbing alcohol. Yesterday, very late in the
evening, the gods had taken him to a doctor. Given us no
explanation, naturally. After an hour or so, Sin had returned, told
us the doctor had drawn a blood sample from his arm, and made us
all but drunk with his alcohol stench. Then, since it had been
pretty late, he’d simply gone to sleep, and now, even if he took a
shower and washed his clothes, there was no time for them to
dry.
    We were so not going to pass for normal
people out there.
    I got to my feet. “Listen.”
    Demi looked up, and we both saw her
reflection in the steel door—she was rolling her eyes. “Ev, we’ve
been here for fifteen years,” she said. “We heard all your friggin’
reasons before. Do you suggest we rot here?”
    “Ev.” Fox stood up and put his arm over my
shoulders. “I know you’re unhappy with my decision to try to escape
this hellhole. You—and Sinna—would much rather we mastered our
talents and then showed Horgreth and the gods how wrong they were
to mess with us.”
    “Exactly,” I began, but Fox didn’t let me
finish.
    “There are just two problems with that, Ev.
One small and one big. So the small one is this: have you ever
considered that there might have been a mistake and we might not be
gifted in what our tattoos say at all? Because we’re fifteen—in
fact, fifteen and three quarters in my case—and we haven’t had even
a glimmer of any of our alleged