The Forsaken

agreement.
    “Stop it!” Ms. Baines snaps. She glances over at the docent sheepishly, like our class is embarrassing her. Then she turns back to us. “The island will take care of Unanchored Souls like this boy.” Her voice rises in pitch. “The island knows what to do with savage teenagers who don’t fit in!”
    On-screen, the boy continues to talk and gesture fiercely. His hands dash and twirl, drawing complex figures in the air. I realize he’s trying to use sign language to communicate his message, but I still can’t understand.
    It’s then that another figure emerges from a cluster of trees behind the boy.
    This second figure is huge and menacing—a good head taller than the first one—and he’s wearing a long black robe. I can’t see his face clearly.
    “Whoa. They’re gonna fight!” Jonas and his friends begin yammering. My heart starts beating faster.
    “We can dim the screen,” the docent says, no doubt trying to protect our tender eyes. But Ms. Baines interrupts him.
    “Don’t. It’s important that they see this.”
    I watch as the dark figure edges closer, head down, slowly moving up behind his intended victim. The blue-eyed boy is still looking at the camera, oblivious.
    “I can’t take it!” a girl cries. But she keeps watching, and so do I, the breath stuck in my throat. I’m surprised the boy hasn’t heard anything yet, like the crackling of twigs underfoot. But the dark figure is moving forward with methodical precision, like he’s done this many times before.
    Now he’s twenty paces away from the boy.
    Now fifteen.
    Now ten.
    Now five.
    At the very last second, the boy’s eyes widen, and he spins sideways. Melissa and her friends scream. The attacker lunges forward, his mouth twisted into a toothy snarl. I now see that his face is painted bloodred, with black lines rimming his eyes and lips.
    The blue-eyed boy raises an arm, and surprisingly, I catch a flash of something sharp and silver hidden in his palm. It looks like a knife. Almost like he was expecting the attack and was just biding his time.
    Then the image pops and slips into a dizzying array of electronic glitches. Everyone gasps. The screen cuts to black.
    The docent looks truly alive for the first time. My classmates start babbling:
    “Dude, what happened?”
    “We want to see!”
    “Bring it back up!”
    “We lose the satellite feed sometimes,” the docent explains, entering a code on a touch-screen pad. “Not often, but it happens.”
    Our class is getting noisier, and Ms. Baines shushes everyone. Our earpieces are practically blasting classical music now. A moment later the screen flares to life again.
    But the blue-eyed boy and the dark figure are both gone. It’s just the trees, the grassy plain, the buildings, and that strange stone staircase, sitting there in a lifeless tableau.
    Goose bumps run up and down my arms. The boy might be dead, unless he did indeed have a knife. Around me everyone is speculating about what might have happened.
    The boy definitely didn’t look like he belonged on the island to me, but supposedly no one can tell from appearances. An Unanchored Soul is invisible to the eye. Antisocial tendencies cut across skin color, gender, looks, and everything else. Which is why the GPPT is so important.
    At least I have nothing to worry about, I think. Of the millions of kids who take the test every year, only one thousandth of 1 percent fail and get sent to the island. And I’ve never done a single thing that suggests I’m a burgeoning psychopath. In fact, I’m pretty much the opposite of an Unanchored Soul. I get good grades, I keep my head down, and I look forward to the future.
    While life as an orphan in the UNA might not be perfect, it could be a whole lot worse. So I know that the GPPT will show I pose no threat to anyone—let alone society itself.
    Our class moves on to make way for another. Yet something about the blue-eyed boy on the video screen continues to linger in my mind and unsettle me just a tiny bit. What was he trying to tell us so desperately? And why did he look completely sane if he’s supposed to be an Unanchored Soul? For an instant, I wonder if it’s possible he got sent there by some fluke accident.
    Then I put the thought right out of my mind. There’d have to be some kind of terrible mistake during the GPPT for such a thing to happen. And that would be inconceivable, because Minister Harka’s government—as it so often reminds us—never makes