Mandy Barely's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Mandy stepped back from the cabin door and felt a sting bloom on her left wrist. She pushed up her sleeve. A single ring sat in the skin, pink at first, then darkening as she watched. The boy had said her name at dawn. That was all it had taken. She pressed her thumb against the ring and her thumb came away cold, like she had touched the inside of a window in winter. She could not work this out on the porch. The cabin held the boy and whatever was finishing him, and her drawing was useless against a mark already starting. She grabbed the charm rat off the chair, folded her drawing into her pocket, and ran down the path to the old farmhouse the camp used for storage. It stood half a mile back through the trees, two stories of weathered clapboard with green shutters and a stone foundation. The director kept the trunks of leftover camper things in the front room. Her uncle had walked her through it once and shown her which floorboards creaked. She went inside and shut the heavy door behind her. She dragged a farm table into the middle of the room and emptied her pockets onto it. The drawing of the four-ring spiral. The charm rat, runes faint now under the dim window light. A book of trail superstitions her uncle had given her at twelve. She laid her wrist flat next to the drawing and compared. One ring on her. Four on the boy. She had hours, maybe less, before the second ring set. She opened the book and worked through it line by line. Marks are passed by name. A name spoken inside completes one stage; a name answered begins another. She had not answered him. She had only stood there. That was something. The book said a forming mark could be broken if the link was severed before the second ring. The method it gave required a token of weight, given freely, worn against the skin. She thought of the trunks in the next room. She found it in the third trunk, under a pile of name tags from a summer ten years before hers. A heavy gold ring set with a red stone, left behind by some camper's mother and never claimed. The weight of it surprised her. She slid it onto her finger above the marked wrist and pressed her palm flat over the ring on her skin. The cold under her thumb rose to meet the stone. The rat's runes flared once, bright, then dimmed. The ring on her wrist faded from black to pink to nothing. Her hand shook. One ring gone. She sat on the farmhouse floor and breathed. Then she remembered the boy, alone in the cabin with four rings and her name in his mouth, and she understood the ring had bought her hours, not him. She pulled her sleeve down over the gold band and stood up.