Contestant 6 - Mara Ellison

Mara Ellison was making a house out of light for children who no longer had one.

Not a full house. She had learned years ago that too much detail could turn comfort sour. Children who had lost homes did not want perfect replicas. They wanted warm comfort, even humor. Anything to forget the wave of inhuman Alters that swept through their town.

So Mara kept it simple. A warm kitchen with yellow light in the windows. A table set for four. A kettle on the stove that gave off no heat, only the soft suggestion of steam. Curtains breathing inward as if a summer breeze had found them. Nothing too specific. Nothing anyone could mistake for the exact place they’d been taken from.

Just the shape of home. The little girl on the shelter cot watched the illusion with solemn, swollen eyes.

“Where is the cat? A proper house should have a cat,” said the boy beside her, no older than seven. His left sleeve hung empty where the emergency medics had pinned it out of the way.

Mara crouched between the cots and put a hand dramatically to her heart. “A devastating critique. You’re right, we want a proper house,” With a lazy wave of her fingers and flex of her will, a fuzzy orange kitten stumbled out of a cabinet nosing around for his bowl.

The boy nodded, satisfied. “There,” he said. “Better.”

“Much better,” Mara agreed. Around them, the emergency shelter hummed with exhausted life. Cots lined every wall of the converted school gymnasium. Relief workers moved in tired circuits with blankets, food trays, and paper cups of reconstituted broth. Somewhere near the entrance, a baby cried with the dry, angry rhythm of being overtired. Someone had tuned an old television above the supply station to the evening news but turned the volume low enough that all the smiling anchors were trapped behind silent captions about infrastructure losses and evacuation routes.

Another Alter strike two districts east, another apartment fire, another block evacuated. Another week in which the city held together by refusing to admit how close its fingers were to slipping. Mara lifted the house-illusion a little higher and the scene followed the kitten as it stalked after a clever gray mouse into a small den.

The little girl looked up at her. “Do you have kids?” she asked.

It was the sort of question children asked without understanding boudaries. Honesty had sharp edges sometimes. Mara smiled anyway. “No,” she said gently.

“Would you want some?” The girl never took her eyes from the mouse hunt as the kitten began climbing the curtains.

Across the shelter, one of the medics looked over at the sound of the question and then, embarrassed, looked away again. Mara adjusted the illusion so the kitten tumbled from the curtain onto a window sill.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “I think I would.” The little girl considered that with the grave seriousness children reserved for matters adults spent years failing to resolve.

“You’d be good at it,” the comment was an off-hand compliment like holding a door for a stranger.

Mara laughed softly before she could stop herself. “That’s kind of you.”

The boy with the pinned sleeve said, “My mom says heroes don’t have time for kids.” There it was. Another one. Mara kept her smile in place because she was good at that part too. Good at giving children things that did not burden them with adult bitterness.

“Some heroes do,” she said.

“Do you?” The boy was relentless without realizing it. Mara’s eyes flicked, just for a second, to the far end of the gymnasium.

A volunteer in an orange relief vest was kneeling by a folding table, helping two young sisters decorate donated paper lanterns with little star stickers. Behind the volunteer stood an ordinary man in a warehouse uniform with a toddler balanced on one hip, his free hand rubbing absently at the small of his wife’s back while she bent over the craft table laughing at something one of the girls had said.

Just a family, a tired one, a worried one, probably a strained one. But whole. The sight made Mara feel hollow. Her spine stiffened a bit. She had made her choice and it was better this way. “No,” Mara said quietly to the boy. “Not yet.”

The boy nodded as if that settled it. Maybe for him it did.

Her wrist comm buzzed once. “Need you at intake triage in three. Bringing in a bad group.”

That was Dr. Perla in emergency receiving, which meant the city had just found another busload of frightened civilians and wanted Mara to help manage the overflow. She rose smoothly, letting the illusion-house soften at the edges and the watercolor kitten to finally catch the clever little mouse.

“You two stay out of trouble,” she said, tapping the boy’s nose.

“That’s not fair,” the boy protested. “There’s nothing to do here except trouble.”

Mara lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Then commit only small, manageable crimes until I get back.”

The little girl smiled for the first time. There it was again—that painful, lovely tug in Mara’s chest when she made someone feel safer. She lived for that feeling more than she ought to. It was the best part of being a heroine.

She turned to go and nearly collided with Tomas Reed from logistics, carrying a crate of bottled water against one broad shoulder. Tomas was kind, unmarried, thirty-two, and had been trying for six months to decide whether his careful friendliness toward Mara counted as flirting. Tonight he was flushed from work, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark hair damp from rain.

“Mara,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Tragic,” she replied. “I was hoping to be flattened by municipal aid tonight. Really round out the evening.”

He smiled, because he always smiled at her like she was the first pleasant thing to happen in his shift. His eyes went past her toward the fading illusion. “You’re good at that,” he said. She knew he meant more than the power.

Mara shifted her weight and tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear. “The children needed distraction.”

“You make a lot of people feel like they can breathe again,” his sincerity was plain. “Thanks again for helping. Many heroines disappear after the fighting.”

“Tomas,” she said lightly, “if this is your attempt to romance me in the middle of a triage shelter, I need you to know the setting lacks ambition.”

He laughed, cheeks coloring. “I was aiming for warm and steadfast.”

“A dangerous aesthetic,” she started pulling away from the conversation. Not just because of the incoming casualties.

“Works on some people,” his gaze dipped, almost involuntarily, to her fading smile and back up. Harmless. Honest. A little hopeful.

Mara could have taken that hope in both hands and done something with it. Dinner, at least. Maybe more, if she were cruel enough or lonely enough or selfish enough to pretend she did not know how these stories ended for women in the midst of a war.

Duty call. Sudden deployment. Two months of silence while some border town burned. A man left alone in a kitchen built for more people than one. A child asking where Mommy went and getting only the heroic answer because the truthful one was too ugly.

She smiled with practiced softness and touched two fingers to his forearm through his rolled sleeve. The brief contact was friendly, not intimate, and that was all she would allow herself.

“Bring your steadfastness to triage,” she said. “I hear they need bottled water and handsome men with strong backs.”

His laugh followed her a few steps, warm and a little wounded and trying not to be. Mara kept walking. The school gym doors slid open ahead of her. Then the fluorescent lights above the corridor went white. Not bright. White.

Every sound in the shelter caught and flattened, like reality itself had suddenly gone breathless. The volunteers froze. The television screens at the far end of the gymnasium flashed into blank radiance. Mara’s fading illusion-house shattered into drifting motes of gold that simply vanished.

Her stomach dropped. This was not an Alter attack. Not a psychic pulse. Not anything she recognized from any known threat profile. The light hit her full in the eyes. The shelter vanished. Mara arrived elsewhere still half-turned toward the triage doors, one hand lifted as if to brace against impact that had never come.

Polished stone under her heels. Painted sky overhead. Some kind of marble hall, maybe a small palace or a really big hotel. Seven people stood inside it already. At the center, was a dark-haired woman in black. Her smile did not reach her eyes and her hands had the stillness of a predator.

To one side stood a young man in ordinary clothes, tense and increasingly haunted around the eyes. Nearby, Evelyn Cross held herself with a sort of reflexive poised control. A young red-haired girl bristled, gaze darting to every part of the room, but always returning to that strange woman in black.

Another younger brunette in purple looked nervously compressed around her own fear. A woman in gloves held her arms close to her body, not protectively exactly, but with the careful awareness of someone with a contagious disease. And closest to the windows stood a dark-haired woman in a black dress, composed and watchful, as if **** had interrupted her in the middle of watching an opera.

Mara’s first thought was absurd and immediate, “None of them look like they’ve eaten properly in hours.”

Then the woman in black smiled. “Contestant Six,” she said. “Mara Ellison.”

Gold script ignited across the wall.

CONTESTANT SIX: MARA ELLISON

AGE: 28

STATUS: ACTIVE

VICTORY POINTS: 0

Contestant. Mara looked at the word and felt, very distinctly, the world divide into before and after.

“For our audience,” the woman continued in a tone only slightly higher and her face a shade more relaxed, as if speaking into some invisible camera, “Miss Ellison is an advanced illusionist with strong control and morale applications, excellent emotional instincts, a chronic attraction to domestic stability she believes she does not deserve, and a highly developed tendency to confuse sacrifice with moral worth. Nurturing. Beautiful. Under committed to her own happiness. Occasionally envious of ordinary women in ways she finds shameful.”

The room went still. Mara’s face flushed all the way to her chest.

“Well,” said the dark-haired woman by the window—Katherine, according to the gold lettering above her. “Subtle.”

Claire’s expression shifted from anger to open sympathy. The gloved brunette looked as if she had just watched someone else’s private wound get opened in public. Evelyn Cross remained unreadable except for one tiny narrowing of the eyes that suggested she was filing the information away with care rather than malice.

Mara found her voice. “That is,” she said, very evenly, “an extraordinary way to greet someone.”

The woman in black inclined her head. “Verena Sable. Hostess and headmistress.”

Of course she was, Mara thought. She looked like the entry for head mistress in the dictionary. Mara looked at the windows, the room, the polished display, the impossible serenity arranged over everything like a curtain. “Am I dead?”

“No,” said the young man before Verena could answer. “that would be too simple.”

That startled a laugh out of Katherine. Claire almost smiled. Even Lizzy’s frightened face shifted for a second. Mara looked at the young man properly. He met her gaze briefly, without challenge. She had seen his look before, he looked like one of the thousand refugees she had helped. Even his clothes looked like the standard issue relief package gear. At first she placed him in the same category as the survivors she was helping only minutes ago. But then the glowing screen behind him said otherwise in letters too large to ignore.

MASTER: VAN

Mara blinked once, then twice. No, she thought. No, absolutely not.

Verena, predictably, stepped into the exact shape of that realization. “Master Van is the central male participant for this season of Harem Hotel: Genesis Response.”

Claire made a disgusted noise. Katherine pinched the bridge of her nose. Naomi looked away from the display. Lizzy’s attention flicked from Mara to Serena to Van almost involuntarily and then away just as quickly.

Mara felt something colder than panic settle under her ribs. Season? Participant? Master? Her world was on fire one district at a time, and somewhere in this marble prison, something had built a velvet-lined vocabulary for human trafficking.

“I need to go back,” she said, and heard at once that she sounded calmer than she felt. Years of field work did that. You learned to make your voice walk while your insides ran.

“Of course you do,” Verena said.

Mara’s laugh came out thin and sharp. “This has to be illegal.”

“Much of what governs this place would be, elsewhere,” if she was disturbed by the accusation, she didn’t show it. “You will find, Ms. Ellison, that the **** of mortal laws is of the least possible concern here.”

“Comforting,” she took one step back, then another, scanning the walls, the archway, the windows, the distance between herself and the others. Her power swirled behind her eyes, reactive and frightened, wanting shape.

She loosed her illusion and the room ran riot. Light and sound betrayed their normal course and obeyed her will. Three different Maras fled in three different directions. The light fixtures all began spinning throwing multicolored light in disco bright panels across the walls and floors. Noise amplified in intensity until a simple breath sounded like a pounding surf. In the midst of this chaos, an invisible Mara ran for an exit.

Verena looked at the room and every illusion collapsed. Not shattered or dispelled, simply denied. The Maras vanished, the spinning fields of color drained away. The noise stopped without so much as an echo. Mara fell to her knees near one of the windows, pain rebounding behind her eyes.

Verena’s smile did not change. “A beautiful instinct.”

Mara pressed two fingers to her temple. “You say that like praise.”

“It was,” she said simply but without warmth, like a shark in human form.

Katherine murmured, “I’m beginning to think that kind of praise is one of her more irritating weapons.”

Van, still watching Mara with a concern that seemed painfully un-curated, said, “Are you okay?”

The question touched something she did not have the energy to protect quickly enough. For one ridiculous second she wanted to say no. Not elegantly, not strategically. Just the plain child-word of it. No, I am not okay, I was in a shelter with displaced children and now I’m in a room where a stranger was reading my private life aloud before she tore my power into scraps without apparent strain.

Instead she smiled, because that was an old reflex and old reflexes arrived fastest under pressure. “I’ve certainly had better evenings.”

Katherine gave her a sidelong look that said she recognized a professional dodge when she heard one.

Across the room, Lizzy stepped closer by half a pace, still keeping her distance in the uncertain geometry they were all building around one another. “I tried my powers too, my whole arms still feels fuzzy,” she said.

The comment was so earnest and oddly timid that Mara almost laughed again. “Is that right?” She glared at Verena.

Lizzy folded her arms, suddenly defensive about having spoken up. “It was the same for Claire, I don’t know what Verena is doing to us, but none of us have shaken it.”

Verena’s lip finally twitched, “There is still much to do and while it may amuse some members of our audience to watch me spend time forcing each of you to listen, I prefer less direct methods”

Verena gestured grandly. Each of the girls stilled instantly.

The bell rang. Its notes sounded like the slamming of an iron door.

A seventh light ignited on the wall.

CONTESTANT INTAKE: SEVEN