The Girl Who Couldn't Kill

Chapter 13-A Quiet Contemplation

That night, Rory was drained of energy from head to toe, but somehow no matter how many times her eyes flutter shut, her consciousness will not bring her away. Her mind was mixed with complicated thoughts overlapping every time she started to drift off; she would feel like falling into a dark hole. She clung onto her sheets for the third time before she climbed out to get a drink of cold water.

As she sat on a highchair in her petite island kitchen, she allowed her thoughts to wash over like sculpted waves. As Autumn's soft snore bounced off the walls, she realized that she hadn't had a vision since philosophy class. Surprisingly, she'd thought her visions and nightmares would ignite after the encounter with a new death. But she felt calmer than she had all week.

She wondered if it was Ajax's doing.

Could he somehow be the cure for her nightmares and twisted fantasies?

Or maybe it was that she exploded her biggest secret to the two people she'd trust the most. She didn't know, but at least she felt a bit more confident about mastering her own plan to track down Chrome.

When Ajax and Autumn convinced Rory to drop her desire of meeting with Chrome, she decided to not contact him.

But she lied.

She needed clarity for her own sake and that means putting herself in danger. The last thing she wanted was for her friends to get hurt so she decided to go solo in this quest. Besides, their investigation was a dead end, the clues that were given just kept going straight to more unknown factors and questions.

Chrome had their ways, and they weren't making this game easy for these teenagers. Despite his tricks, the teenagers were closer to finding out the truth than they thought. They just walked in the wrong direction.

She planned to meet up with Chrome and record their conversation through her phone. The phone would be tucked in her baggy cargo pants and for extra safety measures, she decided to bring her mini-sized digital camera she had used as a child on vacation; it had worked pretty well, capturing all the best views under high pixels. She was also going to prepare a knife, a rope, and homemade pepper spray. She was ready to discover the person behind the killing and their ideology. She was interested to understand the psychology behind the killer's twisted mindset.

It fascinated her more than anything.

She wondered what it would feel like to blindly perish the murderer from behind. It was justice and revenge, not for Connor, but for herself and her friends. This situation had dragged out for far too long and her friends, including herself, were starting to fall behind in class.

Rory's solo plan was going to work and she was not allowing herself to get killed by an average school killer.

Connor was killed for a reason but Adam seemed like a fluke. Maybe Chrome had ingested some sort of poison into his food or potentially released toxic gas in the washroom. Either way, it wasn't accidental, the school was trying to cover it up but Rory believed that Chrome was trying to silence Adam. After all, Adam was the most prized person for intel, he was the one who delivered the message that started it all. The massage was the cue for the murderer to take action that night, which means there was an accomplice.

Someone who killed Adam was definitely either a student, staff, or intruder. There was no other suspect. It was simple, it was an extra class day, and some students either had an extra credit class or club activity, or they went home. It is the most chaotic time of the week, perfect for a murderer to plot their target; everyone would be too busy focusing on their activities to notice an outlier in the crowd.

Rory was almost sure that it was a student's doing. She had inspected the note cards earlier and realized the craftiness of the whole facade. The lace ribbons and elegant kraft paper were likely from a local stationary store, and the grammar of the messages was informal and bland, like a teenager that despised their life and wanted to disrupt a school full of nepotism babies.

Nevertheless, she was going to catch the killer, that was for sure.

Rory believed it may have been Adam himself and that he was lying straight to Autumn and Noel's face, but she didn't have evidence. But it would be stupid to kill a valuable accomplice, even with threats, the killer will always be able to win an argument due to their higher control of the situation. Her goal was to find a contact that was close to Adam and investigate them before her encounter with Chrome, then she would have enough evidence and experience to defeat Chrome.

As time went by, the contemplation started to give her a migraine. So she decided to go back to sleep.

If this keeps going, her visions will be reimbursed into her skull, and she did not want that happening in the middle of the night.

Her questions weren't going to be answered until she goes face to face with Chrome.

She lay on her soft cushioned bed sheets until the sound of silence enveloped her whole, leaving her in a comfortable lull with the night.