Claimed by Alpha and Omega: Trash Luna

6: The Golden Mark

MIA POV

Lila was on her feet before I'd even fully processed the words. "She already demonstrated it. In class. In front of the whole instructor."

"I wasn't talking to you."

Lila's eyes narrowed to something dangerous. "She doesn't need to prove anything to you."

The girl smiled, slow and sharp. "Then maybe she should leave the academy. Save everyone the trouble of watching her fail twice a day."

The cafeteria went strangely quiet, that particular quiet that happens right before something ugly. I looked around and found every table turned toward us, forks paused halfway to mouths, conversations dying mid-sentence. My chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.

The girl leaned down toward me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something sharp and expensive. "Unless Trash Luna is finally going to prove us wrong?"

My heart pounded so hard I could feel it in my throat. I looked down at my own hands, and for some reason the memory surfaced again, the golden glow, the strange warmth, that odd sensation like my ability had been trying to tell me something all day and I just hadn't been listening properly.

Slowly, I raised my hand. The girl's smile widened, victorious already. "That's better."

I concentrated as hard as I could.

Nothing happened.

Her smile stretched wider still. "See? Nothing. Just like I said."

Laughter erupted around the table, spreading outward to the tables nearby. My face burned hot enough that I was sure everyone could see it. Lila's hand landed on my shoulder, steadying, but I shook my head at her before she could step in again, this was mine to finish, whatever finish even meant here.

I tried again. Still nothing.

Then, a tiny golden spark flickered between my fingers, faint as a dying ember.

Everyone stopped laughing at once.

The light flickered. Once. Twice.

Then, suddenly —

CRACK!

A sharp, blinding pain shot through my palm, so sudden I nearly cried out despite myself. I gasped silently, the sound catching somewhere in my throat where it always got stuck, and the golden light vanished as fast as it had appeared.

I stared down at my hand, breathing hard.

A thin golden mark now ran across my palm, curling in a shape I didn't recognize, a pattern that hadn't been there ten seconds ago. It hadn't come from a cut, hadn't come from anything I'd done on purpose.

And somehow, impossibly, it was moving. Shifting slowly along my skin like something alive and patient, tracing a path across my palm on its own schedule.

The girl who'd started all of this took a step back, her mocking expression finally slipping into something closer to unease. "What is that?"

I didn't answer, couldn't, even if I'd wanted to, but Lila crouched down beside me immediately, gripping my wrist gently to look closer at the mark, her earlier fury replaced by something sharper and more focused.

"Mia," she said quietly, no teasing left in her voice at all now. "Does it hurt?"

I nodded, once, honestly, because pretending otherwise had never worked on her anyway.

"Does it feel like your ability? Or something else?"

I hesitated. That was the question, wasn't it, the one I didn't have a real answer to. I'd spent the entire day being told exactly what my ability was: weak, support-only, functional at best, a healer's ability that would never do anything more than knit shut small cuts on wooden dummies. That was the story everyone had already written for me before I'd even finished my first lesson.

But this, the crack of pain, the golden mark tracing itself into my skin like it had somewhere specific to go, this didn't feel like functional. This felt like something else entirely, something that had been sitting quietly underneath the surface of me, waiting for the exact wrong moment to wake up.

A few students had started murmuring now, phones raised, the mockery from a minute ago curdling into something closer to nervous fascination. The girl who'd demanded the demonstration hadn't moved, still staring at my hand like it might do something worse if she looked away.

"Give her space," Lila said sharply, rising to her feet and turning on the gathering crowd with a look that dared anyone to argue. "All of you. Now."

Nobody moved right away, and for a second I thought this was going to turn into exactly the kind of fight Lila loved throwing herself into, but then one of the instructors appeared at the edge of the cafeteria, drawn by the noise, and the crowd scattered fast enough to suggest they'd rather not explain themselves.

The instructor crossed the room and knelt in front of me, all business, taking my hand without asking permission first and turning it toward the light. His expression, usually flat and unreadable, shifted into something I hadn't seen from him all day.

Concern.

"How long has this been happening?" he asked.

I shook my head, “never before today”, and pointed toward the training field outside, then mimed the healing gesture I'd used on the dummies, then finally pointed at the golden mark itself.

He studied it for a long moment, turning my palm gently one way and then the other, tracing the edge of the mark with his eyes without touching it directly. "This isn't a standard healing manifestation."

Lila's arms crossed tight over her chest. "Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning," he said slowly, choosing his words with obvious care, "that her ability may not be what any of us assumed it was."

The cafeteria had gone dead silent again, every ear straining to catch what he'd say next. I looked down at the mark on my palm, still faintly warm, still tracing its slow path across my skin like it had a destination in mind that I hadn't been told about yet.

“Support ability,” he'd told the whole class this morning. “Not designed for combat.”

I looked up at him now, waiting, my whole chest tight with something I didn't have a name for, not quite hope, not quite fear, but standing right in the space between them.

"What does that mean for me?" I wanted to ask, except of course I couldn't ask anything at all, and for the first time all day, I hated the silence in my throat more than I hated any of the whispers that had followed me across this field.

The instructor rose to his feet, still frowning down at my palm. "I'll need to report this to the headmaster."

"Report what?" Lila demanded. "You still haven't said what it is."

He hesitated, actually hesitated, this man who'd delivered every verdict today without a flicker of doubt, and that hesitation frightened me more than anything that had happened since the crack of pain in my hand.

"I'm not entirely certain yet," he admitted quietly. "But whatever this is, it isn't weak. And if I'm right about what I think I'm seeing, Miss Vale is about to become a very different kind of problem for this academy than the one everyone assumed she was."

Behind him, the golden mark on my palm pulsed once, faint and steady, like something underneath my skin had just been waiting its entire life to finally be noticed.