Silver: The Lost Royal

16 | Shiny Silver Ropes

SWEARS and sweat had been her companions for days on end. She couldn't even tell how many days or how long it had been since she and Zack went down that road that faithful evening.

When Gema said they were going to be training, she had envisioned it would start with light warm-ups to get her in shape, and they started with that. She just didn't expect them to progress as fast as they did.

One day she was running laps in The Vast, the next, she was dodging blasts and learning stances.

She always thought swords were medieval objects because what use were they in the modern day of pistols and rifles? But Jamie was insistent on not just learning swords, but everything there was to learn. He claimed The Red Guard he knew were already skilled in long and short-distance fights. If they were going to be their potential enemies, then she had to be better than them in every way.

He wanted her to remaster her astral projection, a power granted specifically to her by the Silver gem. He wanted her to learn spells, teleportation, and even how to communicate with his counterparts through the mind network they had.

His wants and needs were endless, and Karyn wasn't sure she could keep up.

She fell to her knees in rapid breaths and raised her hand to signal a stop, hoping Jamie would get the non-verbal message she conveyed.

There was no clock or way of knowing the time except by the watch on Jamie's wrist. She told herself that Jamie would soon leave to prepare for school and that was what she was using to push herself further until she couldn't anymore.

When they started, they would start training from 4:30 a.m. and on till 8 a.m. when Jamie would leave. She would then drag herself to freshen up and catch some sleep before heading down for breakfast. Which was usually whatever one of them had whipped up that morning.

Jamie would give her spells to memorize when he wasn't around and would grill her on them for hours in the evening, only leaving her to fall asleep between sheets of spells and wake to the same routine.

She'd been managing with it and gaining some strength, but for the past few days, Jamie had been around all day, which meant more physical training.

She moved her eyes to the bottle some distance away and, as Jamie taught, reached out to it, willing to find its core before gaining control over it, which she used to pull the object towards her. Despite her success at the act she'd been trying to master, she was too weak to even celebrate the small win.

"I didn't say we could take a break," Jamie's voice grated on her ears and pounded on her head as she rushed the water down.

"Aren't you going to school anymore?" she asked as she moved to sit on the cool floor. Jamie cherished his environment cold, and she had no choice but to adapt to it.

"For now. I'm sick."

Her eyes widened as she took him in because how could he be sick and still have so much energy to train her? Then he coughed—a fictitious one—and she raised an eyebrow.

"Or at least that's what Gema and Marcela are going to say if anyone asks," he said before he moved various steps back. They were in the middle of a lesson on stances before she fell after he had whipped her leg from beneath her without warning. "Now get up. We need to continue."

"Continue! Do you want me dead?!" she shrieked with as much force as she could, yet it sounded like a dying croak.

"Don't be dramatic," he dismissed with a bored look as he turned back to her.

"Is there a deadline that we are working towards or do you want me to die of exhaustion?"

In the next moment, she wondered if she said something wrong as Jamie stormed toward her with a furious look replacing the bored one he sported earlier. When he got closer, she had to look up at him, which made him appear all the more menacing.