Sophie was now beside her Atmá, supporting him with an arm around his shoulders as he slumped back, still sitting on the ground. He looked exhausted.
“He’s a Materialist,” Jayden answered from the door. “These days, a Materialist would be lucky to have mastered one single component or fabric, but Jack has a small amount of power over all of them. Alice, the Japanese woman if you remember, is a mason; she has the power to manipulate anything with a component of stone, and she can create stone out of nothing at all. I’ll admit, the Materialist powers are the most visually impressive.”
“Hardly!” Sophie objected, still stroking Jack’s shoulders. “The Elementalists have the most visually impressive powers. Imagine someone calling on a storm with a flick of their fingers!”
“That hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years,” Jack said quietly, a laugh hidden in his soft words. “All of the originals were just as impressive as each other: the original Materialist could have spun a castle out of pure gold in a matter of hours; the original Elementalist could have drowned an entire city in a fit of rage; the original Seer would have foreseen the fit of rage and prevented it; the Reader would have read the intentions of the Seer and intervened to let the fit go right on ahead as planned; and the Dead Man… well he probably orchestrated it all.”
Sophia scoffed, moving to sit on the bed that the other two had vacated. “Sounds about right. The ability to see everything makes for a tender-hearted person, always cautious of future suffering; while the ability to know everything makes for a mischief-maker, always trying to control the future. And as for the others, well… possession lends itself to greed, and power is an insatiable beast that will demand to be free of its tether sooner or later.”
“Did you just call me a tethered beast?” Jack asked, standing and turning on the Brazilian beauty.
“Only if you’ll growl at me,” Sophia quipped with a wink.
“Later,” he promised, pointing a finger at her.
On the other side of the room, Jayden rolled his eyes. I almost laughed, but there was a lingering yearning that wouldn’t allow the joy to surface. I wondered how Jayden felt; he was an Atmá without a pair, without even the need for a pair. It was… strangely devastating. I shook my head quickly, walking to the wardrobe and pulling it open, hunting through the clothes that Cabe had left behind for a pair of sweats and a shirt.
“Why did you come as well?” I asked Jayden, since the wardrobe was close to where he was standing.
He shrugged. “I was curious. Why did he put a bomb on you? That doesn’t seem like him.”
“He loves bombs.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t want you dead.”
“He took a picture. It looked like Cabe was about to kiss me.”
“Did Cabe kiss you?” He launched off the door, grabbing my biceps and narrowing his eyes on my face.
“Whoa dude, leave the poor girl alone,” Sophie interjected, pulling me gently out of Jayden’s grasp. “She’s been through enough today. Save your interrogation for next week, we all think it’s best if we give her a bit of space before calling her back to the Komnata. She needs to be eased into this, and she needs time to adjust to being… well… anywhere near Weston, to be frank.”
“Thank you,” I muttered quietly to Sophie, escaping Jayden’s scrutiny to disappear into the bathroom.
I pushed the door closed and splashed my face a few times, trying to clear my mind before I pulled off the towel and stepped into Cabe’s clothes. When I emerged from the bathroom again, Jack and his pair were gone, leaving only Jayden standing by the door.
“Sorry,” he said, managing to look like he meant it. “I’ll see you next week. In the meantime, the Klovoda has assigned two people to be on your person at all times. They don’t want to chance anything like this happening again. They’ll be waiting for you by the car tomorrow morning. Text me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay. Jayden?”
“Hm?”
I sat down on the same chair again, pulling my legs up and winding my arms around myself. Jayden was potentially the only member of the Klovoda who I could talk to about my pairs, and he was certainly more involved in my pairing to them than anyone else. Maybe he could answer a question that had been on my mind ever since Cabe and Noah had walked into my life.
“Before the Komnata incident last year with Silas, I used to have this weird reaction to the others: to Miro, Cabe and Noah. It was like… I don’t know… a kind of scratchy feeling that irritated me when they touched me. It only ever disappeared when I was straining.”
“And it never happened with Silas?” he asked, abandoning his post by the door to walk closer. I don’t think he even realised that he was doing it, he just seemed to be genuinely interested in what I had to say.