An Imposter Among Us

9: The Price of Innocence

Astrid (3rd-person POV)

For once, Astrid's first thought about the killer wasn't that it was Jericho. As the orange-suited killer leapt over Stella's body, a scalpel raised, Astrid was suddenly sure it was someone else.

Astrid dove to the side, ramming her shoulder into the wall—the wall with the body storage units—but fortunately not stabbed. The killer quickly recovered, and she tried to see through the narrow gap in the masked helmet before they made their next move. They drove their foot into her kneecap and tried to plunge the scalpel into her heart. She steeled herself against the wave of pain at her leg and caught their hand with both of hers. The two of them pushed against each other, arms shaking, labored breaths silenced. Despite Astrid's efforts, the tip of the blade was pushing itself closer, and closer. Her arm muscles throbbed, ready to give up, but she would not let them.

A small screen on the killer's forearm lit up, and a moving dot appeared. They took Astrid by the shoulders and threw her to the side. Her head clanged on the metal bar of a hospital bed, and with another eruption of pain at her brow her vision blurred. A blob of orange ran to a corner of the room, bent down, and pulled something out of the floor.

A vent. They were trying to escape.

Astrid leaned against the wall behind her, stood up, and pushed herself away from it, careening to the killer, hoping to tackle them or something. In response the killer grabbed something red from a glowing box, set it on the floor between them, and then used her own momentum against her, leaving her to run into their elbow and turning to flip her over their stomach. She landed directly on the red bag, and it burst underneath her. The unmistakable smell of blood quickly invaded her, and the warm stuff spread out from her belly, soaking her front and the floor around her. The killer rolled her over, walked past to do something to Stella, then leapt back over and grabbed the vent cover before sliding into the hole and disappearing.

Someone ran into the room, sucked in a breath. Astrid used every bit of strength she had to turn herself back over and sit up.

"It was you. The whole time. I knew it."

Jericho. Jericho.

"W-wait! No!" Her desperation to not die overpowered her jelly-like legs, and she sprung up and chased after him, miraculously catching up before they crossed the doorway into the cafeteria. She threw her weight on him, and they both fell to the hard ground.

"Get off me!" Jericho wriggled himself out from underneath her, but she caught his ankle before he could stand.

"It's not what it...looks like," Astrid said. "Please. I can prove it."

She had no idea how, but there had to be something. And if the one person who had been suspicious of her the whole time couldn't deny her innocence, then she would be safe from death by absolute zero.

Jericho scoffed. "You actually expect me to trust you like that?"

"Please," she said, hating herself for being so vulnerable. "I'm not the killer. I was framed." Without meaning to, tears flooded her eyes. "I don't want to be ejected. I don't want to die. Please do this for me. You could save me. Please."

Jericho was silent, unmoving. Astrid didn't dare look up at his face. Considering he could have wrenched himself free and have smashed that emergency button by now, Astrid took that as a good sign.

"Fine," he said. "But you better vouch for me."

He took Astrid's arms and hauled her up. She almost protested—after all, she had been set on him being the killer from the moment she saw Maeng—but he wasn't. It would be impossible for him to disappear into the vents only to appear in his own suit not even fifteen seconds later. Plus, he was probably that moving dot on the killer's device.

Not to mention she had a new suspect. She was still putting the pieces together, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense.

"H-Here we are." Jericho grimaced at the bloody scene and set Astrid on the nearest bed. He made a point of picking up a pair of surgical scissors and keeping his distance, both from her and from Stella. Astrid looked down and immediately flinched away.

"So what exactly happened?" Jericho asked.

Astrid told him everything, from the message to the scene she beheld to the attack, her heart racing at the all-too-recent memory, to the getaway. Jericho took it all in, then looked at the spot where Astrid had been flipped over. The broken bag was gone.

"An elaborate story," he said, spinning the loop of the scissors on his finger. Astrid knew then she needed more proof than that.

"I...I can test the blood on me!" she exclaimed. "If it doesn't match Stella's, will you believe me then?"

Jericho's lips were drawn into a thin, pessimistic line. She could see the gears turning in his head, tossing around all the possibilities as to why there was an explosion of blood not even close to Stella's body, which neither of them could bear to look at. If Astrid had been the killer, she sure took an unnecessary amount of time making up this story rather than escaping like the actual killer had.

Finally he sighed. "But couldn't the blood bag have belonged to Stella?"

"Let me see." Astrid made her way over—not gracefully—to the cooling box, next to the vent, where she kept the blood samples she had drawn from Stella and Jericho. She opened it and found that, to her relief, one of Jericho's pint bags was gone. "It should be yours." 

Astrid grimaced at the statement. Of course she planned to watch her own back on the Skeld, but never did she think that she would be wearing the blood of someone who had her life in his hands. It had all escalated way too quickly, despite how wary they all were from the beginning.

Quickly, she took out a cotton swab and wiped at her front. Then she hesitantly looked over at Stella, who was discovered to have a scalpel embedded in her side, and took a sample from there. She placed both samples into a small scanning machine on a table and, fingers trembling, set up the comparison test.

"Hurry up," Jericho said, "we need to handle Stella before someone walks in and thinks both of us were in on it."

Astrid stared at the buffering symbol until she had to keep herself from beating up the machine. Finally, it beeped twice, and displayed a negative result. She looked back at Jericho, who kept his gaze on the floor.

"You believe me now?"

Jericho looked up for a second to observe the red text (NO MATCH), then sighed. "Fine. But if you do anything else—"

Astrid, overcome with relief, stopped him with a hug.

"Thank you," she said, realizing that she didn't think this was something she would do in a million years. Jericho patted her back awkwardly, but didn't push away.

At least not until the doors to the medbay slid shut, locking them inside.

They both lunged for it, but it was far too late. Astrid went for the vent, but it had been locked up from the inside with a clamp, the handles unreachable through the grates.

"I told Captain Genesis," Jericho said, setting down his mini-tablet. Just as he did, it vibrated. "She says 'Wait, am chasing down killer'."

"No!" Astrid said, whipping around. "I mean, no, she's not."

"Why not?" Jericho asked, more confused and curious than accusatory.

"Because." Astrid sucked in a breath, everything falling into place faster than she could process it. "She is the killer."