That boy was definitely worth a few more hearty insults.

He was in the rest of Lilly's instruction periods; he spoked terribly about anyone and anything anytime he got the chance and, as he was incredible with magic, everyone had to know about his amazing skills. Lilly, who was too terrified to even try twisting her hands or position them the way the loony-looking Instructor Benjami showed them, watched with painful indignation as he gloated to anyone who would listen about his skills. 

Lilly could not stop seeing Hailey Vatakai inside him.

Kaitlynn leaned over as Instructor Benjami admired the patch of grass grown in the boy's hand. "Don't let him get to you, Lilly with two ls."

"How were you just going to walk away from him earlier?" Lilly asked, planting her hands on her hips. 

Kaitlynn wiggled her fingers like she was waving to an invisible friend, and seven silver droplets of water drifted from her palm into the air. "He's just not worth stealing my joy." 

"You are awfully positive."

"And you are awfully negative." Kaitlynn waved her hand, and the water droplets disappeared.

"All you pansies," Instructor Benjami announced proudly, "watch Maxy here! He knows how to grow vines from his wrist, and that shows some serious control!"

"It's Max," the boy corrected him.

"That's what I said." 

Instructor Benjami looked like a mad scientist—his dark hair stood up in every direction like it had just been jolted with static electricity. He had a spiral-shaped scar curving around his left eye and wore a patchwork jumpsuit of many faded orange fabrics. He was barefoot, extremely jittery, and spoke in a squeaky nasal voice.

The training room they stood in was about the size of a classroom in Eldnac, an airy, colorful space with many windows. Tiny humanoid creatures with gray leathery skin and ruby eyes peered at the Privates from the plants at the windowsills.

Instructor Benjami said his job was to teach them the art of perfecting the thought-process behind summoning magic. "Become one with the spirit of the magical river," he would say, wiggling his fingers like a wizard or a psychic. "Don't think of yourselves as trainees. Think of yourselves as trees bending to the bright rays of warm summer sunshine. Drink in the sweet milky taste of magic. Be one with the sweet milky taste of magic..."

"Is he on something?" one boy asked Lilly and Kaitlynn at one point in the instruction period. Lilly didn't doubt it for one second. 

For the next two instruction periods dealing with magic, Lilly's anxiety decreased. Things were going well. Many kids struggled to make their magic work the way the instructors wanted, and Lilly was happy to slide into that group. She kept her hands low, her eyes on the ground, and her breathing deep so she wouldn't give in to the sweaty, shaky catastrophe anxiety made of her body. 

She could keep her magic a secret. She could. 

Lilly believed that until the last instruction period of the day, where everything went to hell. 

The moment the Privates stepped into the training room, a large rotunda capped with stained-glass supported by dark mahogany walls, the atmosphere settled into a general feeling of creepiness. Perhaps it was the picture-less, colorless walls, or the shadows that seeped out from the edges of the room and created long round shapes that spread over the granite floor, or the fact that there were no plants save for a patch of rotten roses poking up from a hairline crack on the far side of the room. It was, in the purest sense, very un-Shifter World.

 When the instructor walked in, the atmosphere sunk from creepy to terrifying very quickly.

She swept into the room like wind rushes through an open window on a stormy day. The silk cloak fastened at her throat was liquid black as it trailed behind her; her black hair was bunched into a messy braid lazily tossed across her shoulder and her skin was a cool umber-brown, which made the sunbeams falling through the rotunda look as if her forehead, cheekbones, and hands were smeared gold with paint rather than kissed by unsolid light-shapes. Her presence was magnetic in the purest sense of the word...the way she walked, the way she held herself, how she was able to capture the entire room's attention simply by entering. 

"Well," she snarled as she took her queen's place in the front of them all, her a voice velvet-skinned snake, "you all look terrified." 

No one spoke. 

After a stunned pause, she demanded, "Line up!" Movement shivered through the room as the Privates staggered into a lineup that had to curve around the walls at the ends. Lilly couldn't help but notice that this line looked much better than the one Instructor Sankem told them to make earlier that morning.

"My name is Instructor Stevia," said the woman. "I'm here to teach you the dynamics of your magic. You can turn a spark to a wildfire and raindrops to tidal waves and sand grains to landslides. Magic is a sliver of your infinite spirit breaking off and becoming embodied. If you can learn how your emotions tangle with your spirit and how your spirit, in turn, produces magic, you may be able to use those emotions to your advantage." 

Lilly's blood bristled with cold, the sort of cold that froze organs mid-function and stopped breath on its way out of the lungs.

"There's a cycle," Stevia continued, orange sparks jumping back and forth from her hands. "Anger creates rage; rage creates violence. That's why wars start. Violence creates rage, and all that simmers down to anger. This cycle of emotions can spark magical violence or magical defenses or magical weakness. So—" she stomped her booted heel to the ground and spun to face the right side of the lineup. "We're going to get angry and see how your magic creates violence. We're going to turn our anger into a tool that helps us control our magic so we don't make magic go weak. Starting with...you."

With a long, dark finger, Stevia gestured for Max to step out of the lineup. He sneered that magnificently cocky sneer of his and stepped forward.

"What's your name?" Stevia asked him.

"Max."

Stevia turned her back on him to face the opposite side of the lineup.

Luck is such a slippery beast. It plays cards to make life more interesting, and for this reason, it is always on its own side, wanting what's best for it rather than what's best for the parties involved. Unfortunately, luck did not cater to Lilly at that moment. 

Lilly did not think this was fair at all. 

When Stevia rested eyes on her and beckoned her out of the lineup, Lilly took this as luck laughing in her face and uneasily stepped forward, still trapped in cold fear. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. 

Just don't use magic. Easy, right?

"Your name?" Stevia asked her. 

"Lilly."

"Let's see what makes your heart tick, Lilly."

Lilly looked at Max, whose fists were clenched. His eyes blazed fire-bright. "You want us...to hurt each other with our magic?"

Stevia clasped her hands behind her back. "Angry, Lilly. I want you to make each other angry, and then I want you to turn that anger into a tool you can use to defend yourself."

"I'm not an angry person," Lilly persisted, although this was one thousand percent a lie. "And I don't believe in using magic anyway...who needs magic when you have fists, right? And—"

Stevia's smile cut her off. The instructor snapped her fingers, and with the sound of a trumpet blast, flames crackled to life around her forearm. A dense black cloud of smoke belling outwards from her clenched fist. She grabbed at the flames with her other hand—she actually took fire between her fingers—and pushed it towards Lilly.

Lilly saw the intense concentration in the taut lines and bright eyes of Stevia's face before her vision was swallowed by orange, white, and black. The fire-cloud roared, crackled, snapped, and Lilly barely had time to stagger out of the way before the fire caught her shoulder and hurled her backward. She tumbled into the wall behind her.

Lilly ground her molars together.  As the fire disintegrated to embers, she was able to register the shots of burning anguish ripping through her shoulder and down her arm. "Ow!"

"Get up," Stevia snapped. 

Lilly clenched her fists, brought a hand up to the scorched fabric at her shoulder, which was slick with blood and tender from the fresh wound. Tears of pain sprang into her eyes. 

Get up. 

Lilly did not want to get up. Through her tears, she could see Max, arms crossed, lips still twisted into that same sneer. 

She did not want to get up. 

"Controlling what we do comes when we know how our emotions control us," Stevia said, and the room was quiet, quiet. There were murmurs from the Privates but they sounded miles away. "Once we know how we're controlled, we can fix it, change it. We can fight it. The goal of this instruction period is to learn to not let your magic or any attempts at fighting get the better of you when you're emotional."

"Are you scared?" Max asked Lilly. 

Lilly got up. 

She didn't want to, but sitting still while pain and anger controlled her would only throw Max into an even more egotistical palace. She didn't have to use magic to fight him—she'd used wit and her perfect peculiarities to battle people all her life.

As she climbed to her feet, dizzy and quite sure she'd collapse, Lilly said, "Not even a little." She then threw her hands up to block whatever Max had planned next, as Max had raised his fists in offense.

The floor around her feet groaned. Granite cracked apart in small fractures. Lilly took an uneasy step back.

Briars curled upwards through the small openings in the floor. Lilly gasped in surprise as the vines clasped around her calves, her knees, suffocating the feeling from them. Thorns from the maroon-colored vines ripped through her pants and punctured skin. Blood flowered, dripped down her legs. Lilly fell back against the fall, determined not to fall to her knees, determined not to let him win, determined to ignore the pain in her limbs. 

"I bet those thorns feel like you're getting stung by wasps," Max taunted.

The thicket kept growing, slithering up her thighs, snapping around her wrists.

Max hissed, "Beg me to stop." 

Lilly looked up at Stevia; the instructor gripped her hands together and placed them behind her back, eyes narrowed expectantly. "Don't just cower against the wall." 

Max's vines wound tighter, tighter, tighter around her body, climbing up to her waist, winding around her arms. One particularly evil briar dug into her stomach. Red lines pounded at the edges of her vision.

She would not be beaten. She would not cower against a wall while he attacked her with magic. 

Lilly screamed. 

It was a scream that filled her whole body, a scream that tingled her toes and fingers, that tore her throat up, caused her head to pitch forward with force,  rattled her skull, filled her brain with high-pitched ringing. Suddenly it didn't matter if she used magic in front of everyone or not; it didn't matter what the instructors would think if they found out she could steal from space. All that mattered was making Max so angry he could hardly breathe or think or move.

The scream that pealed from her throat was blood-curdling, all-encompassing as it echoed off the walls of the rotunda. It never ended. She screamed harder, louder, smacked her hands back against the wall...and there it was again—that butterfly trapped in her wrist: magic's current. Pressure rushed into her bloodstream, pounding straight from her heart to her fingertips. She was like an animal, a feral, wild, crude thing with hot blood on the skin of her legs, her arms, her burned shoulder. It hurt so bad.

She curled her fingers into fists; her scream frayed into a wet cough.

It didn't matter. All that mattered was destroying Max until his body was a bloody pulp.

It matters. They can't know.-

She sprang from the wall. Thorns ripped fabric in her lower pant legs and the vines tore her pants to rags. Lilly charged forward, gasping and screaming, a savage flame ready to swallow him whole. She tackled Max to the ground.

The two of them staggered back and crashed into a wall of kids before falling down, down, down. Now everyone was screaming. Lilly didn't need to steal from space to send Max to the dentist for dentures at thirteen.

Max raised an arm to cover his face. Lilly shoved it out of the way and smacked him hard on the cheek; his face whipped from east to west in the matter of a half-second, and the force of her smack split his scarred lip wide open.

"You're evil," she spat. "You're evil! You're awful!"

"And you're crazy?" he shrieked back, spittle flying into her face. He reached up, grabbed Lilly by the hair at the top of her scalp, and yanked it to the side. Stars swam in her vision and she reached to tear that lip open wider—

And then Stevia was there, hauling Lilly up by the arms and yanking her away from Max, crying, "What's wrong with you? You are not an animal!"

Angry tears dripped down her cheeks. "You said I had to make him angry!"

"I also said don't let it get the better of you!"

"Magic would have been a lot better than mauling my face!" Max clambered to his feet, wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand. His briars dropped dead on the ground across the room. Stevia released Lilly's arms.

The room was filled with light and heat, pressure and tension. Lilly's anger was wildfire in her body. She could feel the sizzling desperation of magic in the pads of her fingers. She looked at Stevia, at Max, and through the grind and pull of terror in her head, thoughts pushed each other around. They were anxiety-thoughts, the what ifs, the oh nos, the oh craps, the they're all going to kill mes. 

 "I was born without magic," she lied through ragged inhales.