Elements

Chapter 11

That night as I lie in bed, I practiced what had become my nightly routine. I would pick through my mind trying to come up with some vital piece of information, something that would tell me who I was. As usual, nothing was revealing itself to me.

But tonight I was going to try something new. My memory was always triggered by some knee jerk reaction, instinct, or experience. No matter how hard I looked, I could never simply find something in my mind. So tonight I was going to ask for some help jogging my memory.

"Anita? You still up?" I said to the ceiling of our shared dorm room. I still had yet to have a good night's sleep in here. Then again, it had been a weird week.

"My god Ella! You scared me!" Anita's voice replied. I took that as a yes."Im an insomniac and I was almost asleep!" This was news to me. It occurred to me how little we really knew about each other.

"Really? I didn't know that! But anyway, back to my question. Would you like to help me with my memory problem?" I pleaded with her.

"'Of course! what can I do?" Her eagerness made me smile as I got up to turn on the lights. I had to be quiet or we'd get punished for being up after lights out. I sat down on Anita's bed next to her and explained my idea.

"Well... I don't know..." She was far more reluctant now that she understood the role she would play. "What if I really hurt you? Or if you really hurt me?" She said in a worried voice.

"We have to try! Please Anita!" I dropped down on my knees and begged like people did in cartoons.

This earned a grin from my friend as she replied,"Fine. Ask Mrs. Wren if we can use the building you train in for this tomorrow. If she agrees, we'll try Wednesday afternoon." I gave my friend a hug and thanked her a few million times."But only of she agrees!" Her face was serious once again. "If we are doing this then it can't be out in the open, an we need room to do it."

"You've got it Anita!" Could I ever ask for a better friend?

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"I can't believe she agreed to this" I said to Anita as we walked into the back building on Wednesday. I had told Mrs. Wren I wanted some extra practice with Anita, to get a feel for my powers in combat. This was somewhat true. I would be getting extra practice with her, but our main purpose was to stimulate my reflexes. For some reason, I doubted Mrs. Wren's opinion on jogging my memory had changed since that first day here.

The way our little exercise would work would be fairly simple. Anita would stand in a corner of the room and use her powers to make me think I was being attacked. My "attackers" would come at me however Anita told them to, so she would adjust their attacks to my strategies. After each attack, Anita would tell me any patterns she had noticed and I would try to make something out of it before the next wave.

"Ready?" Anita asked. I saw her in the far corner of the room, so she would be away from my line of fire... or water or ice or whatever I protected myself with.

"Ready."I confirmed. I was prepared to fight anything she threw at me.

The first attack was simple, but fast. Three men, each with knives, lunged at me one at a time, to fast for me to think about what I was doing. When the first one lunged, he had hardly taken his first step when he fell on his back- the result of a random patch of ice that had appeared in front of him. I quickly surrounded the floor around the other two with ice as they rushed me together. They too slipped and fell. I surrounded them with coffins of stone to finish them off.

I looked around for Anita and when I saw her, her violet eyes stared back at me, incredibly wide. Her mouth hung open.

"What?" I asked her. Had I grown a limb or something? Then again, it wouldn't be the weirdest think that had happened to me.

"You just knocked out three armed thugs in less than two seconds. That was nuts!" I stared back at her and then burst out laughing. She looked at me like I was crazy but I didn't care. I was on the floor gasping for breath.

"I.... can't... Breathe! I thought... it was ... something... terrible! You had me thinking I was going to die or something!" I couldn't remember the last time I had laughed like that. Probably because it was no longer a memory I had access to.

Once she realized that I had not, in fact, lost my mind, she began to laugh with me. I'm not sure how long we laughed for, but we eventually got back to the original focus: retrieving my memory.

By the time the bell rang for dinner, we established one thing: I had clearly had copious amounts of training in combat. This however, created more questions then it had answered. Who had trained me? Had I gone to another school like this? what all had I been trained to do?

I knew finding information wasn't going to be easy, but it seemed as if I was taking one step forward and three steps back! I pondered the questions I had come up with and asked a few more. Anita and I ate in silence and occasionally voiced a theory or a question. As usual, we sat alone at a table in the back of the room.

I strayed from the topic of my past and wondered for a moment about Anita. There was still so much I didn't know about her. What if I had never come along? Who would she sit with at dinner? who would she be friends with? I felt guilty for making her an outcast like me.

"Stop that!" I was jerked from my thoughts as Anita scolded me sharply.

"Stop what?"

"I can tell you're thinking about me. You were staring at me. What's going on?"

"I was just... wondering what would have happened if I hadn't gotten on that bus... if we never had met." She looked at me with a little smile on her face.

"Probably, I would still be right here, away from everyone else, except I would be alone. Trust me, I'm better off." I smiled back at her, though I was still unconvinced. She was pretty, smart, and incredibly powerful. Anyone would be lucky to have her as a friend.

I was just the lucky outcast she sat next to on a bus.