I float in an ocean of blood.

   Wait, no. Not an ocean. Leaves. I float on red leaves that carry me from tree top to treetop. I face the sun, and the clear blue sky, and the hot weather, and the breeze against my skin. It's a nice dream. I like it.

  I realize I can swim in the ocean of red leaves, but I don't know how to in real life. In dream world, I do it easily, propelled by some force that just lets my glide. I go beneath the cloud-ocean of leaves in the sky, diving into it.

  Suddenly, the leaves turn into water. Crystal clear, blue water that surrounds me in a way that makes me feel weightless. My red hair comes into my view, dying the water in front of my face. But then something other than my hair is coloured red.

  And a body floats through my vision. It's Sammy. He's wearing only white clothes, but they're smudged with black coal that doesn't go away with the water. All the flows off him is blood from a red wound on his neck.

   And then the wound moves. And Sammy's face morphs into dad's. His wound is to the head, and it flows out blood into the dream water so quickly I have to push away from it. The body somehow follows me, and it morphs again.

   Jarvis has a wound on cheeks. Like somebody's cut a smile into his face by force. I scream, but the dream water doesn't let out any bubbles of air.

   The feeling of loss of air doesn't go away even after I think I would have drowning in real life by now. It's a constant pressure on my chest, and when the face morphs, I just keep kicking and screaming away.

  It follows.

  But this time, the body is actually moving. It stays in the water in front of me with a face I recognize.

  Bella, from a few days ago, stares at me with her superior face and cheekbones. She isn't injured at all.

  But then a realization dawns on my that makes the water in front of my face thick. You don't have to be injured to be wounded.

   The face morphs again, and I know the dark skin of Orion before it fully changes.

   He looks almost blue in the water, and his hair bounces through the last remaining current of blood as he stays. Suddenly, he's got his bow in his hand. And the quivers on his back.

  I guess even my dream mind knew he'd was even more out of place without them than he usual.

  Somehow, he speaks through the water. His voice is clearer than the blue liquid we float in. "Would you like me to teach you to shoot, dear?"

  "No." My dream self replies, and I have no control over it. "I like my gun."

  Orion's face morphs into Barron. Barron has a tattoo of a scorched tree on one side of his face. I don't know why it's there, but my dream self pays attention to it. For some reason, instead of just asking, I reach up and poke at his corpse-like skin through the water.

  His face feels like it stiffens to my touch, and I let my hand drop in the water.

  I expect Barron to speak, and so, I suspect, because I expect him to, he does. His words draw more blood dye into the water from his mouth.

  I don't understand what he's saying. He must be speaking in Finnish, because nothing he says is even registering as words in my dream mind. Then it adjusts. And suddenly I can understand him.

 "Wake up." He says.

  I blink at him.

  "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" He shouts it, and the blood from his mouth starts to cloud around me. It shakes my shoulders. "Wake UP!"

    I sit up straight immediately, and bang my head into somebody else's. We both call out.

  I'd take the pew closet to the alter and furthest away from the door. I'd fallen asleep on it when I heard one of the boys' heaving breathing in sleep from the make-shift bed behind. But it's day now, and I don't know how long I'd slept for.

  My head hurts from the collision, and I put a gloved leather hand to it.

  Eli groans, and I realize he's on the stone floor, resting his head on his arms at the empty space on my pew. "What the hell is your head made out of!? Steel!? Oh, God!"

  "Sorry." I say, and when I move my hand down my face to rub it, the leather slips on wet. I was crying. In my sleep. I rub them away and hope nobody else sees.

  Of course, Eli does.

  He squints at me through pain. "How are you?" He asks, and squeezes his eyes shut. "Truly?"

   "I'm fine, Eli." I say, and my stomach growl on queue for me to make a sighing sound.

   It doesn't draw his attention away. "Well, that's a lie."

   I heave a chuckle. "How'd you know?" I ask. I sling my legs over to sit up normal on the pew, and I rubs my face again.

  "That the answer everybody gave when I asked them this morning." Eli stands up, and I notice the lack of throwing knives on his thigh. He doesn't look right without them now, once I've seen how well they suit him. Then I see his head is still messy from waking up, and I give him a chance to reequipped before I mention it.

  I feel my gun behind my back as I lean against the pew, and I take it and place it onto my lap.

    "You know," Eli glances around the church, "of all the things in the world, of all the hardships that people have to endure just to get to their eighteenth birthday, and so on, of all that, you would think that the least you have to worry about is people judging you based on how you answer the question 'how are you'."

  "That's pretty deep for first-thing-in-the-morning." I tell him, and he laughs.

  "True though, is it not?"

  Eli walks away with saying just that. He strolls down the isle, knocking his fists against the wood of them as he goes. I guess it's to re-awake everybody that fell back asleep, because three heads poke up.

  The one behind me is Terra, and I remember his seizure last night as he looks genuinely frightening as he wakes up.

  Barron is the same from the opposite side.

  And so is Orion.

  I wonder how many bad things they're woke up to in the morning for a simple knock to startle them. How many times waking up to something like that would actually lead to a life-threatening situation they had to fight their ways out of. 

  "You bunch of wimps." I provide loudly, against my thoughts. "All of you. Get up. Rise an shine!"

   They all swear at me to shut up, and I laugh.

  * * *

 The quay is calm.

  The sun shines through speckles of white clouds in the sky, and the breeze is cool. The only thin blackening the view it the puffs of dark smoke that surround the city in the sky. It's high-up, and I can only see the bottom of the vat if I squint enough, but it's there.

  I turn back towards the sky above the sea, and take a deep breath in.

  It's salty.

  "Oh, my dears. I want to swim in it." Orion says, and I realize that we're all stood in a line at the end of the dock like we're about to jump in.

  "It's probably freezing." I say to him. He shrugs, making the quiver of arrows on his back clang. He's secured the black and white long knives with a lid, and I suspect it's because he doesn't want them falling out if he should be knocked to the ground.

   To accompany his shrug, Orion hands his bow to Eli. He takes off the quiver and hands it to him, too. Eli has to drop his guitar case to hold them, and then piles the lot up in the center of the dock behind us.

   Orion puts his hands out, stretching them as if he were about to fight with somebody. And then when he claps them together, a ball of red light appears in the air.

  It looks like a ball of yarn, with wisps of the smoke-like colour floating away as Orion makes it spin. He makes it grow larger, steadily moving his hands apart as if coaxing the thing to do as he wishes.

  Then he makes a gesture like he throwing a beach ball into the ocean, and the red light acts as the ball as it splashes into the dark waves.

  "Wait for it." Orion tells us. "Wait..."

  And then the water turns bright blue. Only some of it, as far as I can see perfectly clearly, before it turns back to dark. The light blue spreads like dye, seeping around and changing the segment of ocean clear and bright.

  Then Orion takes my gun from my hand, and pushes on my back. I fall off the dock, yelping before I get time to close my mouth. The water that hits my face is warm.

  It soaks my hair, engulfing me into it. It feels nice for a moment, until I remember that I'm no longer dreaming. And I start to panic as I crawl against the current to go up, to the surface. I reach it with a sharp intake of breath.

  Orion and Eli and laughing at the joke that they think is harmless, but Terra and Barron aren't.

  With me gone, there's room for Barron to turn his head and glare at Orion. "You moron! She can't swim! She nearly drowned when they took us to the pool in year four!"

  Orion's smile drops.

  Then he reaches his hands out again, towards me. And I'm being lifted. The water doesn't cling to me like I thought it would once I escaped it, and the air against my face is so welcome that I don't realize that I'm floating. When I do, I look down.

   "Hey." I say, as Orion makes a gesture that sends me back towards the dock. "I don't knoow what great uncle you got those gifts from, but let me tell you; you should use them more often."

   "I know, you dears don't appreciate me enough." Orion places me beside the pile of his bow, and I fall over from the landing. "I'm a damn genetic miracle. I don't deserve all the shit I get."

  He uses some form of telekinesis to bring his bow and quiver to him. He takes them right out the air.  "When we find some bolts, I am also a robot. No arguments, the rest of you are our servants."

   Orion doesn't even need to look my way when he waves his hand, making my gun and Eli's guitar case float. I grab the silencer of the gun before returning to its place leaning against my shoulder.

   "You don't look like a robot." Eli says to him.

   Orion glances at me before speaking. "Well, dear, what are they supposed to look like?"

   "I don't know, more robotic I guess. Not so human." Eli pokes at Orion's face, dragging the skin on his cheeks to prove a point. "Look at you. Little baby, you are."

  Orion smacks his hands away with the arm that isn't holding his bow. He makes disgruntled noise. "Nah, took years of selective breeding down the line of my family to get me to this."

   Eli pulls a face.

  "Hey, I'm hotter than you. We agreed that years ago."

    "Oh, no. No, you can't pull that thing from when we in year five and you nearly got push down a chute and burned to a crisp. That isn't the kind of 'hot' we're talking about."

  "Since when?"

  "Since you started talking about selective breeding."

  "Which, obviously, your ancestors didn't agree with. And made your sorry-ass infinitely less hot than me." Orion flicks his hair around, posing like the constellation he's named after with his bow. He pulls an arrow from his quiver, loading it and aiming it at the sky.

   Eli suddenly snatches the bow, the arrow, pulls the quiver from Orion's shoulder, and throws them back towards me. Then he pushes Orion off the dock.

  He swears on his way to the water.

  "If you're such a genetic miracle that draws people's eyes, why aren't you the hooker, huh?" Eli shouts to him.

  Orion gets enough air in his lungs to answer. "Because I'd just stab them if they tried half the things with me that you say they tried with you, ass-hat!" He swims over to the side of dock where Barron and Terra are stand, safely away from Eli.

  Eli looks to me. "And that's why I'm the one that keeps him fed."

  I'm not sure how to react, so I laugh.

  Orion starts to pull himself back onto the dock, but stops. He falls back into the water. "I'm bleeding." He says suddenly. "Holy shit, I'm bleeding."

   I run to the edge of the dock as quickly as I can stand up. And he's right. His magic seems to be fading, and the ocean is turning back to dark blue. And Orion starts to shiver. But then the dye of blood floats to the surface.

   It pools around him until he notices it, and he swears again.

  "Nah, really, it's fine. 'Tis but a flesh wound so you can all stay up there gawking at me like freaking seagulls." Orion winces when he grabs onto the edge of the dock. He counts himself in, and swings onto the wooden panels. He lies on them with his hair stuck to his face in an ever growing pool of blood.

  It drips between the gaps in the wood.

  The wound is on his leg, and when he sits up, Orion pulls at the fabric covering it. The blood is too thick, and on his skin, even he can't see anything. He wipes it away quickly, swearing from contact. The crimson sticks to his palm, and I can smell the copper form here.

  A bite.

  The wound is a bite.

  Small, half-rounded, and running deep.

  Orion manages to pull apart the skin to glance exactly how deep, but it hurts too much. "From the books I've read, there's nothing in England that could do this. At least, not eighty years ago."

  Barron glances over the edge of the dock. "Can you make the water clear again?" He asks Orion.

  Who makes a face. "Oh, yeah, sure. Let me just cast a magic fucking ball of warmth and clarity while I'm BLEEDING." His sarcasm gets a glare from Barron. "No. I used to have a pack that held this coat in it that could heal any wound that wasn't fatal, but that's still in the city. Probably burned from being so close to the edge of the wall by now."

  Still, Karma seems to pay Orion back for the words. Something must start to hurt intensely, because he swears. He doesn't hold on to his leg like that's the source of the problem, and just pushes the balls of his gloves hands in his eyes. They're soaking wet, and water drips down his face. 

  Orion sighs. "Okay, okay; I can't do shit with just myself, but--" He blinks like he's casting his mind back to remember something. "Magic doesn't only come from the soul, and I think there's a incantation that'll help."

  "No--Don't kill anything. Orion. Orion, no. Stop it. Don't kill anything!" Eli sounds like he's had to say that a million times before.

  He doesn't listen.

 "Ego occidam, Pisces." Orion says, and I glance at Barron, thinking he's speaking another language that he'll understand.

   He shrugs.

  "It's Latin." Eli explains to me, and Orion starts to speak it again. "Every language has Latin in it; it's basically every countries mother language. So, of course, that's the language in which spells are going to be spoken."

  I nod in understanding. Orion continues to speak in Latin like it's nothing. "Can I try? At some point?"

  Eli shakes his head. "Trust me, it won't work. Like he said, it comes from the soul. Or...something. Only people like Orion can say that stuff and it'll actually work."

  Wow.

  Orion's more unique that I originally thought. He can speak, Latin for one thing. I guess it isn't as much of a dead language as anybody thought. The thought crosses my mind that the kind of gifts he has couldn't have gone to a more deserving person.

  Going from that, I wonder if Eli has any gifts. If it's the hardships that make you special, he should be powerful.

  But then I remember that I like being looked at like I'm the strongest thing on Earth, and I push the thoughts away. Confidence is key.

  Fake it till you make it. I think.

  Orion throws something into the water. As it soars through the air, I notice it's another one of his power-circle-energy-things.  It's coloured red like his own blood.

   After the splash of it hits, there's stillness in the waves for a second. And then fish with sharp fangs for teeth floats to the surface. Dead.

  "Piranhas." Terra points out. He looks to Barron. "How the hell did Pirahna's get to England?"

   "If these bolts are so obsessed with being as little like humans as possible, they let mother nature run its course as much as they can." Barron gestures to the fish. "Maybe this was her plan, and it's just natural."

   Orion winces, and swears again.

   "Does that mean that, maybe, they've gotten to have poison in their teeth?" I suggest when none of the boys say anything abotu Orion's condition. "Maybe?" I emphesise sarcasitcally, and I almost know I'm right.

   Because Orion's turning pale. His face sinks, and he slumps in his position.

  Eli actually starts to turn worried. I wonder why he hadn't before, but then I see that Orion is trying to form magic between his hands. It's a white orb of light, but it's weak. He pushes what there is of it towards his leg.

  It has no effect.

  "I can't heal it, it doesn't work. It's not just a flesh wound; she's right." Orion swears again. "It's venom, Eli. It's poison."