Selection (Book 2 of P.O.E. chronicles)

Chapter 10 Onward

“Why do we have to go this early?” I heard Emily complained behind me. We were walking through the streets of Yunan Citybase. Everything was quite but there were surprisingly some people already up and about, wheeling around fresh vegetables and fruits. One old man even had a cart of pigs.

“We don’t want to draw too much attention.” Ho replied patiently; he was walking in the front while the blond hair lady, Elizabeth was walking at the rear of the group. I stole a glance back and saw Tom drifting in the midsection of the group all by himself. He had obviously made no effort to befriend anyone. Not that I was surprise. That guy doesn’t warm up to people quickly.

Although I would probably count a group of hooded people walking in the middle of morning as weird, no one actually paid the slightest attention to us. Bemused I extended my mind around me and immediately felt a distortion around us. Someone in the group was either disguising us or covering us as we went.

Shrinking back before that person noticed me I looked around our group, curious to know who was sustaining the illusion. As I looked around I found a man in the other group looking around with a frown on his face too. Feigning interest in the old man that happened to walk past us with a carter of apples I observed him with the corner of my eyes.

He looked younger than I would expect for a ‘graduate guard’, probably in his early twenties. He was Caucasians with tawny dark hair and bright blue eyes. He was also very handsome, surprisingly so. A few girls in our group (including Emily) kept shooting him furtive glances. This was good, so he wouldn’t noticed me staring.  

We kept walking forward at a brisk pace, avoiding the people on the increasingly crowded street as much as we could. There were the occasional bristles past however they usually just shrugged it off as if they were used to it. They probably were.

It didn’t take us all that long to get out of the City gates. The guards simply let us past through when they saw Ho at the front. We were instructed to keep the hood of our jacket up to cover our faces so the guards couldn’t see our faces.

Outside the gate, the forest was exactly as I remembered it. The tall dark bamboo loomed over the sky like a never ending veil caging us in. Insect noises resonated around us and memories of infamous insect Legres flashed through my mind. I was sincerely glad we never had a run in with those things. They were most abundant in the old Africa.

After bashing through the vegetation for an hour we arrived at a clearing. Looking around I saw that this wasn’t a natural clearing. Although the marks were not recent, but you could see stumps of bamboos littered around sparesly, most of them burnt. A few groups were already in the clearing, including the Hunters.

The leaders exchanged nods and I saw Maria smiling brightly at the handsome illusionist in Tom’s group. The illusionist gave her a crooked smile in return before frowning back at our group, probably still trying to find me. I mentally made a note that those two had a thing going on; the dynamics of a family guard was just complicated.

It took another hour before everyone arrived at the clearing. Meanwhile the leaders set with each other, in a deep discussion of the plan ahead whilst the rest of us milled around like headless flies. I wasn’t sure if we were meant to do something together or what; but everyone were either too nervous or too excited to try.