A Fractured Light (Beautiful Dark)

entry memorized:
     
Guardians haunt these woods, watching us. I know they know. It’s only a matter of time.
We have to act quickly. There are too many of them. We need more recruits.
     
    So maybe Devin was wrong. Maybe my visions were something else entirely. A result of my mental and physical exertion lately: skiing, controlling the elements, being with Asher. Or maybe, practicing to fight the Order’s mental manipulation was taking a toll on my mind, as it had done to Gideon’s.
    But I didn’t want to face the thing I knew deep down, which was that these visions had been going on much longer than I’d known Gideon. They’d started right around the time I’d met Asher and Devin. My seventeenth birthday, when everything strange began happening to me in the first place.
     
    Asher wouldn’t leave my side that week. We practiced sometimes at night, after Aunt Jo had gone to bed. When we were too tired to continue, he’d follow me upstairs in the dark, holding my hand to guide him, and we’d curl up in my bed and sleep. “You need to rest,” Asher whispered to me in the darkness. “You need to be strong.”
    On Wednesday night, we followed our routine, and both of us were sleeping when I woke with a start. If my visions were glimpses into the future, then finding the shoe box in Aunt Jo’s closet was going to happen at some point. She was in there, sleeping now, but in the vision, the room was empty, and the last light of day peeked through the curtains.
    Not tonight , I thought. Tomorrow night. Before Aunt Jo gets home from work.
    There was something in that box I needed. Something that was going to help me. I let Asher curl himself around me. What if it’s something that has to do with my
parents? I wondered. What if it’s one more thing that will bring me closer to my mom?
    I fell asleep not knowing the answers.
     
    The next day was the day before the race, and practice after school was tense. Rather than racing freestyle, we ran drills. Coach watched Ellie and me with close attention, his ever-present stopwatch starting and stopping with an obnoxious little beep. Once or twice, Ellie and I glanced at each other and tried not to laugh. Maybe things weren’t going to end up so bad between us after all.
    On the last drill, Ellie and I went head to head.
    “Step it up, girls,” Coach said. “Captain’s on the line here.”
    “Like we could forget,” Ellie muttered under her breath. He blew his whistle, and we took off, weaving between a series of slaloms that were set up for the drill. We started off smiling at each other tentatively, but the more we got into it, the fiercer the competition became. At first, I was winning, making my turns with much more precision, feeling out the snow and the bumps in the ground beneath me. Then Ellie picked up speed, pulling ahead. I leaned in, focusing every ounce of my being. I couldn’t let her beat me. Suddenly my anger at her raged.
    Who did she think she was? She had flirted with Asher when she had clearly seen something brewing between the two of us, even if it hadn’t been official. And when she didn’t win that round, she decided to hook up with Ian. And now she wanted to be captain.
    Aunt Jo was right. People hate things that they think are a threat to them. And Ellie somehow found me threatening. It wasn’t that she particularly cared about Asher, or Ian, or even making captain of the ski team. It was just about beating me . But what had I ever done to her? How had I threatened her in any way? Annoyance and frustration burned through me.
    For the briefest of moments, I forgot to focus.
    I seemed to feel the rumble of the mountain before anyone else, and so I had a few seconds to try to stop whatever was about to happen from happening. But I was still too late. I may have prevented a full-on avalanche, but a large chunk of ice dislodged from a rock face and came rolling down the mountain. It gathered more and more snow the faster it rolled.
    “Skye!” Coach called. “Look out!”
    I swerved to my right, but I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. The icy snowball clipped the side of my ski, sending me careening backward. I tried to grab on to something to steady myself, but I couldn’t find a hold. Panicking, I felt myself falling, rolling head over foot down the mountain. I dug my nails and heels into the snow to gain traction and felt myself slowing.
    “Skye!” Ellie called from far below. “Are you okay?”
    “Skye?” Coach