The Rebellious Host | ✓

Jamie

Melanie and I exchange a look. We both remember the times that Laina almost died.

"What?" Jared leans forward, closer to his sister.

She grins at me. "Don't wanna tell? Okay then, I will." she gives her brother a look. "First time, I fell off my bike not wearing a helmet and cracked my head open. Second time, I got hit by a car. And then I got hit by a car again. And then some idiots at school-"

"Okay, they get it." Melanie cuts me off. "We do not need to go into that one."

Laina shrugs. "They found me half-dead and almost drowning in my own blood in an empty trash can. Of course, the lot of them didn't exactly get away unscathed."

"Didn't exactly?" I roll my eyes. "The one girl had to get stitches because you knocked her into a brick wall and almost caved in her skull." Ian snorts.

Laina looks around then, just noticing something that the rest of us don't know. Her eyes widen. "Wait- where is she?"

"Who?" Melanie asks.

"The girl that was with me- what happened to her?"

Jared raises an eyebrow at his sister, and walks over to Ian and Kyle and says something. Wanda comes over and bends down so that she's eye level with Laina- not very difficult for her- and looks her in the eye. "There was no one with you when we found you, Laina."

Laina shakes her head. "There was another girl- I swear!"

Wanda, unlike anyone else who might try to reason with Laina, doesn't get irritated. "What did she look like?"

"Umm...it's hard to remember..." Laina thinks for a moment. "She had light skin- quite a bit lighter than mine. I remember that she had light blonde, straight-ish hair. And her eyes were...green?" Uncle Jeb shakes his head as if to say 'never saw her'. "Not like a dark green. Like a lighter green. Some people might describe it as celery green?"

"Can you remember anything else?"

Laina nods. "She was a Soul, but she was like me. Rebellious, the Seekers called us. She was about my height, and we were about the same weight. I never learned her name. Just the Soul's. But anyway, our birthdays are the exact same. Down to the last minute. And she looked kinda like those two." She motions towards Ian and Kyle, who look up at her, confused. They obviously weren't listening.

"Anything else?" I ask.

She nods. "She was from...." she trails off, thinking. "I think...maybe Arizona? Or was it Amarillo, Texas? I can't remember."

Wanda looks up at Ian and Kyle. "Where are you two from?" she asks.

Kyle looks confused, so it's Ian who answers. "We're originally from South Dakota, but we moved to Arizona when I was fourteen."

Laina nods. "She said that she was young when they moved. Just a baby, according to April Dawn."

"April Dawn?" Melanie asks at the same time as I say, "Who is that?"

Laina rolls her eyes. "Well, it's obviously  the Soul. She was like Autumn, one life on Origin, the other on the Planet of the Flowers. They wanted to go to the See Weeds when they were done with us."

"You only knew the name of her Soul?" I ask.

Laina looks at me and nods. "Oddly enough, yes. They both refused to go by our names. I'm glad. I wouldn't want it tainted." She says the word venomously, then looks at Sunny and Wanda. "No offense, Wanderer and Sunlight Passing Through the Ice."

Sunny cocks her head to the side. "How do you know my name?"

"Autumn Skies had recognized you. Somehow." Then her face scrunches up a little, telling me that she's thinking. "I remember something. April Dawn, she said something about the girl's last name. It was something that sounded sorta Irish. O-something. I don't know. And her initials- that was all that we could share when we got control before we stabbed ourselves- were ABO."

Ian lets out a long breath. "Was the last name O'Shea, by any chance?"

Laina thinks for a minute and shrugs. "No idea. Maybe. I'm not sure." She shrugs. "Sounds familiar. You're Ian, right? And the guy next to you is your older brother, Kyle?"

"How did you know that?" I ask.

She shrugs. "April Dawn mentioned them. Mentioned a bunch of human resisters. Sounded like a fairytale to me."

Something in her pocket buzzes, like a walkie-talkie. She pulls it out, a plain black thing. A voice crackles through the static. "Autumn, are you there?"