The Marked by Inara Scott Page B

bricks forty feet through car windows, but Cam moved twice as fast. When Thaddeus finally did come out swinging, Cam ducked swiftly to avoid a series of punches, then got in an uppercut before dancing out of reach.
    It took only those few seconds for the rest of the group to engage themselves in battle. Trevor faced off against a girl with long brown hair in a braid, her bandanna tied around her forehead. She crouched down, hands loosely guarding her face. He swung at her with a clenched fist, but she spun around him like a tiny cyclone, easily avoiding his punches, then bringing alternating feet under his chin with a staccato motion that sent him reeling. He paused for only a moment before coming back toward her with his hands flying.
    Kari sparred with a snarling girl dressed all in black, who seemed to dance as she fought. She reminded me of a ballerina, except that every leap ended with an openhanded strike to the face or jab with an elbow. Geneva and a boy who must have shared her talent for acrobatics turned somersaults in the air and swung at each other while they were ten feet off the ground. A moment later, they would land on the ground like cats, lightly springing on the balls of their feet before launching themselves back into the air.
    Barrett and his friends didn’t join the fight, despite the fact that there were five of them, and that Cam, Trevor, Kari, Sam, and Geneva were outnumbered two to one. The seniors ducked behind the car and watched. Lucas and Esteban had bemused expressions on their faces, while Tara kept shaking her head and wincing.
    But it was Barrett whose behavior I couldn’t understand.
    He stood beside the curb, lips pressed together tightly, hair pushed back, intently assessing the situation. For once, he wasn’t smiling or laughing. In fact, he wore an expression I’d never seen on him before. He crossed his arms over his chest, a mixture of frustration and anger written in his eyes. If I didn’t know him, I would have found him distinctly intimidating.
    Yet he didn’t do anything.
    For all his speed, Cam couldn’t hold out against Thaddeus’s fists forever, and he finally took a direct blow to the face. When he struck back with a blind punch, Thaddeus grabbed his arm and twisted him around, then landed three quick strikes in a row to Cam’s lower back. Cam grunted and fell back a few paces.
    I whipped around to face Barrett. “Do something!” I cried. “Help him!”
    “They created this,” Barrett said. “It’s their fight now.”
    “What?”
    “It was only a matter of time.” He shook his head, mouth tight, dark eyes flashing.
    I could hardly process what he was saying. Barrett was standing there watching Cam get beat up because he thought Cam and the others had picked this fight? No way. If your team was threatened, you helped. Even if the people in trouble weren’t Barrett’s friends, we had all taken an oath of loyalty to the Program. As far as I was concerned, this was an attack on the Program. I didn’t know why, or who the gang of bandanna-wearing thugs were, but they were after us.
    And they were winning.
    I stepped forward a few paces.
    “Don’t do it,” Barrett warned. “You’ll get hurt. Let the police handle it.”
    “But—”
    “What are you going to do? Let them use you as a punching bag? You honestly think that’s going to help?”
    I wanted to argue, but Barrett was right. I fought like a six-year-old girl. When I’d practiced on a bag in my self-defense class, I had been lucky to escape the bag’s knocking me over. If I took on someone who knew what the heck they were doing, I’d have been a bloody lump in a matter of minutes.
    “There are other ways to fight,” I said.
    I faced Thaddeus and deliberately tuned out the rest of the fighting. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I focused my mind in anticipation of figuring it out.
    “Stop, Dancia,” Barrett’s voice snapped over my shoulder. “You aren’t