Supernova

Chapter Ninety - Twisted Sister

Thank fuck Hawks had the sense or the sheer dumb luck to make it at midnight.

I could get out of the dorm building easily and silently enough using low density and slipping out the window, down the fire escape, through the woods that the building backed onto, and over the wall just like I did in the mornings. It's not like I slept in my bracelet, so nothing would seem off about that either. I kept it in the box, in a drawer at night, so I settled on it being a safe bet that it didn't pick up on the sounds of my breathing and tossing and turning for that to seem weird either. I didn't really know where the hell the address was, but Kiri had thought ahead about that and drawn me a map.

All of that was just the easy part.

The harder part was convincing Melanie to help me. The hardest part would just be facing her. Seeing her. Knowing we shared all this blood and all this history and facing the painful truth of the different places we'd ended up in within the same city after four years of not having any contact with each other.

On one hand, she was my sister, and we'd once been so close, and relationships don't change that much that quickly, do they? On the other, she was a waste now, a commoner villain, and I was a queen, a hero, or trying to be anyways, and even though I felt like I understood how we'd both gotten here, there was a lot of disconnect on those titles alone. Maybe things change a lot faster and a lot more drastically than I thought.

I dreaded seeing her just as much as I missed her.

The map led me through the busiest part of town, brought me into the outskirts and spat me back out of them, and ended off in an area that could only really be described as abandoned. I could see signs that the street was once brimming with life. Chipped murals were plastered on sides of buildings. Deflated soccer balls and dirty child sized shoes were kicked into the corners. There was a pool, half full of green water, leaves, and dead spiders closed off by a fence topped with rusty barbed wire and sealed with a matching rusted lock.

It was eerie. Like people had left in a hurry.

The building that was marked with an X on my map sat at the end of a dead end street that was once filled with business and ambition and was now just filled with broken dreams and shards of glass. I rolled up a few minutes to midnight, hoping to be quick and efficient, in and out. I tucked the map into the front of my shirt, not wanting to be seen with it, finding it embarrassing for one reason or another, but regretted it just as fast, because I suddenly didn't know what to do with my hands. This was not a common problem for me, especially when they were silent. But somehow I seemed starkly aware of them as I approached the door, halfway blocked from the sign above it falling down. I wondered briefly if I should knock, but I thought, of course not, that would be ridiculous. This was wasteland. We skipped the pleasantries here. I grabbed the door handle, pressed the latch, and pushed. To both my relief and surprise, it swung open with minimal creak and minimal effort.

The building was modest. There was a little light coming in from the moonlight pouring through the front window, but even with my vision overcompensating as it did, I couldn't make out anything other than darkness along the back wall, and had no idea how far back it might actually be. All I knew is that my feet were planted in a thick layer of dust, and from what I could smell, it seemed to be all over everything else.

Did Melanie live here?

I wondered if I was in the right place. I mean, I figured I was. I'd followed the map perfectly. But it was so creepy and quiet and empty that it felt deeply wrong. I then started to wonder if I'd been set up, if Kiri too had betrayed me, and I was about to get ambushed again. My mouth started to open, to say hello or Melanie or something, but then I heard the distinct sound of sole on floor. My instincts took over and whipped me around towards it before I even had to think.