Yurui The Cursed One

"Crap, crap, crap…"

I'm going to be late. 

The thought pounded through my head as I tore across Miracle City with my school bag slamming against my hip and my lungs burning raw. 

The sidewalks here were insultingly perfect: no cracks, no litter, no puddles of mystery liquid waiting to ruin your shoes. The city must have sent out workers at night to scrub the streets clean before morning.

The only miracle in this place is that they let slum trash like us into their schools. 

By law, every underage citizen of Razia was entitled to an education. The slum didn't have a single functioning school left, so kids like me got bused into Miracle City and dropped into buildings meant for rich kids. The government called that equality. I had a few opinions about that of my own.

"Stupid fucking law," I mutter under my breath as I get closer to the gates. "Dragging me into this hellhole."

I slowed near the front gates, chest heaving. The courtyard was empty, and relief flared through me. Maybe everyone was already inside. Maybe if I kept my head down—

The school building loomed ahead, painted entirely white and enormous in size, its tall windows glaring in the morning light. I slipped through the doors and into a corridor that smelled faintly of bleach and polished wood. Even empty, the place managed to make me feel unwelcome. If I walked into class late, Miss Maevis would stop mid-lesson, turn with that soft expression of hers, and smile.

Yurui. Nice of you to join us.

The whole class would stare. Someone would laugh. Maevis would say something sweet and measured and sharp enough to flay me open in front of everyone without ever sounding unkind. 

And then there were the girls. 

Sophia and her little orbit had been making my life miserable since my first day here. Maybe it was poverty. Rich kids can smell it on you somehow. In your shoes. In your uniform. In the split-second hesitation before you touch something expensive.

The bell shrieked through the corridor just as I neared the classroom.

"Fuck."

I started moving faster, trying to get clear of the hall before one of them spotted me. A hand caught my shoulder and yanked me backward. I twisted around.

Sophia stood there smiling like the hallway belonged to her. Behind her, the others spread into a loose half-circle, already amused. Then Yashiro smirked. Not wide, not dramatic- just the slightest lift at one corner of her mouth, cold and deliberate. My stomach dropped. I knew that look.

Yashiro stepped closer. "Yurui. Sit," she said, looking me straight in the eyes.

My knees hit the floor before my mind could catch up. Like a well-trained dog, I sat down on the ground. Pain cracked up my legs. My school bag slipped off my shoulder and smacked against the polished hallway tiles. For one stunned second, I just knelt there, palms half-open at my sides, staring at my own reflection in the white floor while laughter crackled around me, sharp as glass.

In this world, miracles could be bought. Sadly, I could never afford one.

Sophia laughed the loudest. She always did. Loud enough to make sure everyone nearby knew she was having a wonderful time, but with one manicured hand raised halfway to her mouth so she could still pretend she was being nice about it.

"Oh my God," she said. "She actually did it."

Beside her, Sophie doubled over with a snort. The two of them looked so annoyingly alike that, at a glance, people sometimes assumed they were sisters. Same glossy blonde hair, same easy prettiness, same smug mouths. Even today, they'd matched on purpose: white blouses with those ridiculous printed stars over the chest, only Sophia's was pink and Sophie's some sickly yellow-green, as if rich girls could now be bought in coordinated sets.

Kamila had her phone angled low against her skirt, not even trying very hard to hide that she was recording. She looked bored already. That was her usual contribution to cruelty: the air of a girl doing everyone a favor by showing up at all. Beautiful in that expensive, low-effort way that made you want to slap the universe for being so predictable. Dark hair. Flawless skin. The kind of face that turned heads without trying.

Yashiro didn't laugh. That would have made her seem childish. Ordinary. She just stood there in the middle of the hallway, immaculate as ever, one hand resting loosely at her side. She was wearing a green pinafore dress over a white shirt and carrying a dark lunchbox by one handle. Knowing her, I wouldn't be surprised if it contained aborted fetuses. Her expression was calm, with that faint edge of bored satisfaction that made her look like she'd paid for a service and gotten exactly what she wanted.

Which, in a way, she had. Her family had bought her a blessing two years ago. There'd been some party afterward: white flowers, champagne towers, a smiling Miracle Inc. representative wearing one of those sterile gold lapel pins they all wore. The kind of event that turned a miracle into a status symbol and a child's future into a receipt.

Yashiro's Blessing lived in her voice. Not mind control. Nothing so vulgar. Miracle Inc. loved euphemisms. They called it suggestive authority, linguistic resonance, directive alignment. Fancy phrases for the same ugly fact: if Yashiro told people to do certain things, their bodies obeyed. She tells you to sit, and you will. Just like that.

I tried to stand.

Nothing happened.

Not because I couldn't feel my legs. I could. That was the worst part. I felt everything, my knees against the cold tile, my pulse in my throat, the heat climbing into my face, the small tremor in my hands. My body was still mine in every way that mattered except the only one that counted.

Sophia stepped closer and nudged the strap of my bag with the pointed toe of her shoe. "You know," she said thoughtfully, "I really thought you'd make more of an effort to resist."

The girls laughed again. I kept my eyes on the floor. There are humiliations you survive better if you don't look directly at the people enjoying them.

The bell rang overhead, sharp and metallic. For one stupid, hopeful second, I thought that might save me. And it kind of did, at least for a moment. The morning had just begun, and I had no idea what the rest of the day had in store for me.

Yashiro tilted her head. "Stand."

My body surged upright so fast my vision swam. More laughter. Sophia clapped once, delighted. I snatched up my bag before anyone could kick it away and slung it over my shoulder hard enough to jar my teeth. My face was burning. I could feel my pulse hammering beneath my skin, frantic enough to feel like it might tear its way out.

"Go on," Yashiro said, as if dismissing a servant. "Class is starting."

I pushed past them without a word, my ears ringing all the way down the corridor.

The school hallways were so clean they looked surreal. Marble walls, gold-plated window frames, and floors that reflected the overhead lights. Even the air smelled scrubbed. No scuffs. No gum under sills. No graffiti. No mold. No pipes screaming inside the walls. Sometimes I thought the place looked uninhabited, it was that polished.

I reached the classroom door soon after the second bell sounded.

Just perfect.

Now I was late.

When I stepped inside, thirty heads turned. Miss Maevis stood at the front of the room with one hand resting against her desk, her posture as graceful and composed as ever. Cream blouse. Ash-gray skirt. A mass of wild white curls framed her face and spilled around her shoulders, somehow untamed and immaculate at once. She had a face built for trust. Soft eyes, soft mouth, the kind of calm beauty that made people lower their voices around her without even knowing why. Parents loved her. Administrators loved her. People who had only ever seen her in public loved her.

But I knew what she was like up close, in private.

“Yurui,” she said, smiling. “Nice of you to join us.”

A few people laughed under their breath.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“Of course.” Her tone stayed warm. That was the trick with Maevis. She could humiliate you in front of a room full of people and still sound gracious doing it. “Take your seat.”

I slid into my chair in the back row and kept my head down.

The other four came in after me and dropped into their seats as if they had all the time in the world. Of course, nobody said a word about them being late. That kind of scrutiny was a luxury reserved for girls like me. Miss Maevis didn’t spare them so much as a glance.

Sophia sat two rows over by the windows, Sophie beside her. Kamila took a seat ahead, already checking something on her phone under the desk with the polished discretion of someone who had never once been punished for anything important. Yashiro sat farther toward the front, composed and still, her white hair falling perfectly straight between her shoulders.

She was Miss Maevis’s younger sister, because apparently my life had been designed by someone whose sense of humor bordered on sadism. My bully and my homeroom teacher- sisters. What could possibly go wrong?

The resemblance between them was close enough to be unsettling. Same white hair. Same pale, beautiful face. Same fine, controlled features that made people trust them too quickly. But Maevis wore softness better. Her hair fell in careful white curls, her smiles were warm, her expressions softened just enough to hide the harder edges underneath. The only real differences between them were height and hair. Maevis was at least a couple of feet taller than Yashiro. Yashiro’s hair was perfectly straight, flat as pressed silk, and she made no effort to soften anything. Maevis disguised the family cruelty. Yashiro wore it plain.

Evil clearly breeds true in that family.

Today’s class is about state reconstruction policy. Miss Maevis wrote the heading on the board in clean, elegant letters and began speaking in that measured classroom voice of hers, calm, confident, and impossible to interrupt.

“After the integration period,” she said, “Razia emerged as the leading model of miracle-driven modernization. Can anyone tell me why?”

Three hands went up immediately. Of course they did. The children in this school had been raised on the myth of progress the same way children in the slum were raised on mildew and caution. Their parents worked in Miracle City law, Miracle City finance, Miracle City biotech, and Miracle City administration. They had dinner-table discussions about sovereign zoning, miracle licensing, and international competitive growth. Half of them probably came out of the womb with opinions on market stabilization.

Miss Maevis nodded to one of the boys in the front.

“Because Miracle Inc. made blessings scalable,” he said, crisp and confident. “So productivity increased, high-risk labor became safer, emergency response improved, and wealth expanded across every sector.”

“Very good.”

I copied the words without really seeing them, resting my head on my hand as I stared out the window and blindly scribbled in my notebook.

Outside the classroom windows, Miracle City glittered in broad daylight. White towers in the distance. Rail lines tracing silver arcs across the skyline. Trees planted in exact intervals along the avenue, their leaves too glossy to seem real. Nothing here looked neglected. Nothing looked accidental. This city had been designed by people who believed ugliness was a kind of moral failure.

Twenty years ago, Miracle Inc. had done the impossible and turned blessings into a product. Before that, a blessing was supposed to belong to fate. You were born with the possibility, or you weren’t. It either awakened before your eighteenth birthday or it never would. Nobody fully understood them. Priests called them divine. Scholars called them aberrant. Governments called them a regulatory nightmare.

Then Miracle Inc. appeared out of nowhere and announced that miracles could be mass-produced. At first, the world laughed. Then people decades past the blessing age started growing claws. Middle-aged women sprouted hawk wings from their backs and took to the sky above traffic. Elderly men hardened their skin like stone. Grandmothers split bricks with their bare hands. Overnight, fate became something you could purchase. Now, even miracles had become a commodity.

There were two main kinds of blessings.

Physical ones changed the body—animal traits, transformed limbs, sharpened senses, strength that bordered on monstrous.

Mental blessings altered the rules around you instead: telekinesis, gravity control, force fields, spatial distortion, mind-reading, etc. Invisible little miracles that needed no claws to bring ordinary people to their knees.

The rich wore power the way they wore perfume, watches, or tailored shoes. Some bought wings. Some bought strength. Some bought healing. Some bought sharper senses, quicker reflexes, teeth that could crack bone, and skin that shrugged off blades. And some, apparently, bought the right to tell poor girls to kneel in hallways.

A vibration against my thigh made me flinch.

My phone.

I went still, but no one else seemed to notice. Keeping it hidden beneath the desk, I carefully slid it halfway out of my pocket.

A message waited in the class group chat. No sender name, only a forwarded clip. The thumbnail was enough.

Me on my knees.

From that angle, my body looked pathetic- small and rigid, trapped in that hideous, obedient posture as though kneeling came naturally to me. There was no caption. There didn’t need to be.

I swallowed, but the tightness in my throat remained.

“Yurui.”

I looked up too fast. Miss Maevis was watching me from the front of the class, her expression unchanged.

“Since you seem occupied,” she said gently, “perhaps you’d like to explain the relationship between miracle privatization and regional inequality.”

A few students smiled. My cheeks burned so hot they hurt.

“I…” My voice caught. “I don’t know.”

Miss Maevis let the silence stretch just a second too long, then gave me one of those understanding smiles that made me feel as if my skin were being peeled back in strips.

“Then perhaps,” she said, “you’ll read more carefully tonight.”

Soft. Mild. Perfectly reasonable. Cruel as a blade sliding in under the ribs.

“Yes, Miss.”

“Good.” She turned back to the board. “Now, as I was saying—”

The rest of the class passed in a blur of not hearing a word and barely breathing. When the bell rang, everyone began packing at once, chairs scraping, voices lifting, phones reappearing. I shoved my books into my bag and stood up fast, hoping to get out before Sophia and the others could trap me again.

“Yurui,” Miss Maevis said.

The room went very quiet inside my head.

“Would you come see me for a moment?”

Of course.

My classmates filed out around me. Sophia passed my desk with the others, and though she didn’t say anything, I caught the flicker of amusement on her face. Sophie glanced over too, that same bright little cruelty already warming behind her eyes. Kamila barely looked up from her phone. Yashiro didn’t look at me at all.

That was somehow worse.

When the door shut behind the last student, Maevis sat on the edge of her desk and folded her hands.

“Come here.”

I obeyed. Unlike Yashiro, she didn’t need a purchased miracle to make me do what she wanted. I stopped a few feet away, and Maevis studied me with those soft, dark eyes of hers. Up close, their softness offered no comfort. It only made the cold beneath them more obvious.

“You’ve been struggling again,” she said.

Not are you all right? Not what happened in the hall. Just that mild, disappointed tone, as though I were failing to maintain something she had every right to expect from me.

“I’m fine.”

“I see.”

She let the silence hang. She was very good at silences. Most people fill empty space instinctively. Maevis knew that. She built traps out of pauses.

Finally, she said, “I’ve also heard concerns from other students.”

My mouth went dry. “Concerns.”

“Yes.” A sad little smile. “You do understand, I hope, that children from difficult environments sometimes develop… confrontational habits. Defensive ones. It can create friction.”

For a second, I honestly couldn’t speak. Children from difficult environments. As if I were mold she had to politely pretend not to smell.

“I didn’t start anything,” I said.

Maevis’s expression didn’t change, but something in the room did. Something subtle. A temperature drop. A tightening in the atmosphere.

“Nobody said you did.”

No, of course not. That would have been too direct. She rose from the desk and walked to the window, looking out over the city as if she needed the view to steady her patience.

“This school has made accommodations,” she said quietly. “For students from your district. Transportation, uniforms, meal access, and scholarship supplements. A great many resources are invested so that students like you may have opportunities you would not otherwise possess.”

Students like you. There it was.

I stared at the floor and said nothing. Maevis turned back toward me.

“All I ask,” she said, “is that you do not repay that generosity by becoming a source of disruption.”

The word generosity landed harder than the rest. Not rights. Not law. Not a public obligation. Generosity. As if every step I took in this building had been granted to me as an act of mercy.

“I’m not a disruption,” I said.

It came out too flat to sound brave. Maevis smiled.

“No?” she asked softly. “Then I’m sure I won’t hear your name again today.”

It wasn’t a threat in any formal sense. Nothing you could quote back to anyone. Nothing anyone would punish. It still made my stomach twist.

“You may go.”

I picked up my bag and left without another word.

The corridors were almost empty, with everyone else either still shut inside their classrooms or hanging about somewhere outside. By now, the only bus that ran from the academy back to the slum would be already gone.

Great.

It only came once during school hours. I could hardly blame them for not running it more often when I was probably the only student who ever used it. For the most part, probable the only reason the buss even made a stop here on main city-slum route was out of pure formality.

As I headed down the stairwell, my phone buzzed again. Then again. Then again. I did not have to look to know why.

At the ground floor, I pushed through the side doors instead of the main entrance. Fewer people. Less chance of being seen. The service path behind the school ran along a white stone wall toward the bus lot and delivery bay, clean even here. The bins were tucked into a recessed alcove behind sleek metal paneling so the city could pretend garbage itself was a design choice.

I almost made it to the corner.

“Yurui.”

I stopped.

Sophia was leaning against the wall ahead with her arms folded. Sophie and Kamila stood on either side of her. Sophie had matched herself to Sophia again: same blouse, same stupid star logo, same short skirt, only hers was that jaundiced green instead of pink. Together, they looked like some rich-girl double act designed in a lab to test how much of one personality the world could stand.

Kamila was already half inside her phone. Dark hair shining even in the gray afternoon light, posture lazy with the kind of confidence only money can make effortless. She didn’t look excited. She never did. If Sophia and Sophie treated cruelty like a hobby, Kamila treated it like a nuisance.

Yashiro stood a little apart from them near the garbage bay, expression unreadable. For one second, panic hit me hard, and I considered turning and running. I looked around. Four against one, with nowhere to run. Not great odds.

Sophia pushed off the wall.

“You left so fast after class,” she said. “We thought maybe you were upset.”

I said nothing. She smiled wider.

“That’s rude.”

“Move,” I shot back, irritated but trying my best not to show it.

Sophie laughed. “She thinks she gets to give instructions.”

“I said move.”

Sophia’s smile vanished. There it was, same as always. That tiny moment when girls like her remembered they weren’t just entertaining themselves. They were defending a natural order. People like me weren’t supposed to push back. Not even verbally.

Behind her, Yashiro watched me with mild interest. My skin went cold. Sophia took a step closer until I could smell her perfume, expensive and floral and nauseatingly clean.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked. “Nobody’s ever taught you what you are.”

I barked out a laugh before I could stop myself. Maybe I was just too tired. Maybe Maevis had scraped me hollow enough that there was nothing left in me except spite.

“What am I?” I said. “Go on. This should be enlightening.”

Sophie made a delighted little noise. Sophia’s face hardened. Yashiro spoke before Sophia could say anything else.

“Bag,” she said.

My fingers opened. The school bag slipped from my shoulder and dropped to the pavement. The girls smiled. I looked at it on the ground and felt something hot and poisonous bloom in my chest.

Yashiro nodded toward the alcove with the containers and trash. “Bring it.”

My body bent before I could stop it. I grabbed the strap, lifted the bag, and carried it toward the recessed metal doors beside the service wall. The smell hit before I reached them. Rotting food. Chemicals. Sour milk. Wet cardboard. Old grease. All of it muted beneath the expensive filtration systems of the city, but still there if you got close enough. Still garbage, no matter how polished the container.

Sophia laughed softly behind me, already understanding where this was going. Of course she did.

At the alcove, one of the doors stood open. Inside were stacked black bags, sealed bins, and beyond them the old compactor bay: a recessed drop with a deep industrial container lined with fresh plastic waiting below. Everything in Miracle City had a luxury version.

Even trash.

My pulse started hammering.

No. No, no, no.

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