Free Capture by Melissa Darnell

one of the new internment camps along with her family.
    And people who were still free, but might not be for long. Like Tarah.
    The bell rang, and I had to fight the urge to run to my AP English class, eager to get my mind on something else for awhile. Something that wouldn't make my stomach roll and my gut knot up.
    But then Ms. Brown announced our newest assignment, the movie Schindler's List , and I realized just how long a week it was going to be.
    Because the movie was too graphic to be shown at school, Ms. Brown had us watch it at home that night on the school's On Demand website, then write a five hundred word essay summarizing how Oskar Schindler grew from a selfish, opportunistic entrepreneur into a selfless savior of a thousand persecuted Jews.
    Mom tried to make me come down for dinner halfway through the movie. But no way could I eat. Every Jew hiding under a bed or inside a piano from the Nazis, every prisoner forced to work in their labor camps, every woman who was shoved into the gas chambers to be turned into dust and ashes, could have been Tarah being sent to her death.
    Why hadn't she told Damon and me about her growing abilities? We were her best friends for years. Did she think we couldn't keep a secret, or that we'd be too afraid of her to want to still be friends? Was that why she stopped hanging out with us and started hanging out with her new friends instead, because they knew what she could do and helped her hide it?
    If so, she wasn't nearly as smart as I thought. How many times had Damon and I pretended to be knights saving our Queen Tarah’s life? She had to have known that wasn't only kids' games, that we really would have done anything to help her if she had only asked us to.
    Instead, she had entrusted her secrets to people like that hotheaded Gary and Aimee, people who thought it was cool to make videos of themselves standing up to the government and showing off on the internet. They couldn't even keep their own secrets, much less someone else's. As soon as some FBI agent brought them in for questioning, they'd throw Tarah under the bus in a heartbeat just to save themselves.
    Damon and I would have died to save her if necessary.
    Now Damon was gone, and Tarah hadn't said more than a hundred words to me in years, and she could be thrown into one of those internment camps at any moment...
    I took a deep breath, then realized I'd been too lost in thought and missed half an hour of the movie. Time for a break to refocus. Now more than ever I had to stay calm and keep it together.
    I paused the video, grabbed the basketball off my bedside table, then flopped back on my bed and set the ball to spinning on my fingertips, one finger at a time. After a couple of minutes, watching the brownish orange blur helped clear my head.
    I was probably worrying for nothing. Tarah had been smart enough to keep her Clann side a secret this long. If not for the openly rebellious crowd she hung out with and her slinging clearly anarchist views in World History class, I never would have guessed her for the Clann type. Maybe I could talk to her in between classes, get her to see that hanging out with her current group of friends was too dangerous for her. Unlike my dad, Tarah's parents must have never warned her that our friends in high school were like team mates in a four year long game of basketball. We didn't have to like our friends, but we did have to choose them carefully and make sure they didn't bring us down or trip us up.
    Right now, Tarah's choice of friends was an added danger she couldn't afford. It was only a matter of time before her opinions and their loose lips got all of them into trouble.
    Tarah had always been stubborn and opinionated, but surely she'd listen to a former friend and change up her game plan.
    Especially if it meant keeping her butt out of an internment camp. Or worse.
     

CHAPTER 4
    Saturday, December 12th
    6:14 am
    T he nightmare that night hit me hard and fast. It was nothing I