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Chapter 11

Quinn hurried out, regretting it as soon as she realised leaving early meant leaving alone. The total silence felt worse than any attack ever could have. If she could find any way of stopping whatever was happening, that was the most important thing. Even if she had to do it all by herself.

Holding the notes inside her pocket, she picked up her bag and hurried back to her house.

She laid notes out across her desk to re-read them, but there didn't seem to be any real information. Not unless she wanted more of the things running around. The other pages just seemed to be full of random equations and 'tested theories,' the majority of which made her stomach lurch.

The worst of it was that most of the 'willing participants' seemed to have been less than a year old when they'd changed. She supposed they hadn't been human long enough to remember much, but still, it changed things.

She thought about Adam again. Despite her best intentions, he still occupied a place in her mind. All she really wanted was to talk things through with him, and she hated herself for it, but knowing he'd been human once made everything much worse.

For a few fleeting seconds, that creature had been a living, breathing human being. If whoever had started the experiments had passed him over for any reason, maybe he really would have been the kind of person he'd spent so long pretending to be. Maybe he would have been stood with her right there and then, and they could have kept working through their problems together.

Noah and Avery had blood linking them, and hundreds of files telling them they had to stick with each other, but she didn’t have any siblings, and until now, she'd never felt the absence because she'd had Adam, and after a few years, he'd been indistinguishable. If either Noah or Avery found out the other had spent their entire lives lying to them, and a decade of looking out for one another had all gone to waste, would she consider it justified for them to struggle to get over it? She honestly wasn't sure anymore. They'd all spent their lives trying to prevent this exact scenario, and she'd literally made every single mistake in the books.

She wondered if that was why they had chosen her as a target. Because they could have predicted that losing him would be more inhibiting and more painful than losing an arm.

It felt like ropes were tightening around her lungs, not enough to stop her breathing, but enough to take any relief out of the motion. She couldn't bring herself to sit down. She wanted to call someone, anyone, just to hear thoughts that weren't her own. She needed to breathe.

At that moment, there was a knock at the door.

Cautiously, she went to open it and Jem pushed past her and dropped his bag on the floor. "Hey, where did you go?" He said. "I didn't see you leave."

He seemed normal, at least, but she still didn't close the door or let herself exhale. Instead she grabbed her notes and held them to her chest protectively. "I... Don't remember seeing you much until now. I thought you were mad about something that happened last night." She paused. "You do... You do remember what happened, right?"

"Am I supposed to?" He replied bemusedly. "I mean, you wanted to wait behind after training, right? You aren't seriously avoiding me for that, right? I know I forgot, but..."

"No, I mean..." She scratched the back of her neck awkwardly. "It's fine..."

"Good, because you look like shit. What's that?" He took a sheet out of the pile she was still holding and began reading the equations.