sophie.

Chapter 17

APRIL 2ND, 1963

I woke up the next morning at the crack of dawn, but didn't feel any motivation to sit up, to do anything. I kept focusing back on that one moment, when I found Sawyer in the forest and Bones whipped his head back, mechanical and quick and unreal. And during the night, my dreams became not only this but a fleshed-out saga of a nightmare. Of him chasing me through the forest, crawling through the trees effortlessly above me. There was no end to the forest, and he never actually reached down and tore me to pieces, but never once did the panic cease. Endless, the dream had been; my body wracked with impatience and wishfulness for an end. And when my body couldn't stand the pain anymore, I'd woken up, and didn't go back to sleep. Right then, as Adrien started to shift in the sheets beside me, I didn't feel any better.

"Sophie?" he asked, his voice tired but resonating with sublime joy. I just watched the window, silently wishing for him to think I was sleeping. But there must've been a noticeable difference in the way I breathed, because he peered over my body and saw that my eyes were open. In my fit of sloth, I didn't even have the sense to shut my eyelids to prevent the morning talk. His airy tone became slightly concerned as he saw my unwavering stare, and I think he was about to pull a strand of hair out of my face, a familiar gesture that I usually liked, but I was a thousand miles away. So his hand fell to his side, and trying not to intrude, he softly kissed me on the arm and left the bed, then the room. I heard him as his footsteps padded down the hardwood stairs.

I honestly don't know how I managed to hold my trauma in for so long the day before. I guess I was so concerned for Sawyer's state of mind, I wasn't able to register the state of my own until he left. After about twenty minutes of laying on the bed, Adrien came back into the room and told me in a soft voice that I needed to come to the study. It was a room downstairs, next to the master bedroom. Robert's private office. I nodded and got up, and he took my hand as if I needed help being lead downstairs. I didn't do anything to stop this, because it was nice to feel the warmth radiate through his hands.

When we got the room, he put me in a chair that sat on the opposite side of Robert's main desk, where Robert was lounging. It was almost funny to see Valentine in his natural habitat, with quality blue pajamas and a cigarette in his mouth. Robert must've been in his mid-forties, but there was an air about the guy that made him confidently exude youth. At the moment, it looked like he was trying to act older than he was, but really, he was forty-four. This was totally appropriate for him. When he started to speak, his tone was cautious, but conciliatory. Informal, but also careful.

"The information that I'm giving you, Sophie, can never be mentioned outside of these walls. This notebook," he said, and held the it up, "is one of many that Brady Warren had written in his years of temporal studies. It's a history book." He handed the item in question to me and told me to read on the fourth page, said that there was a succinct summary of the book.

3716: The Inciting Year of the Disease

Polonius Bern and a series of nine other scientists, all of whom lead the world in biochemical and biological warfare studies, initiated the endeavor to create a virus that would easily and exclusively infect the human population. After eight years of hard study and putting together the piecess of this virus, the cult of scientists released it onto themselves. The cult soon went public in telling the world that they were the ones who invented the disease. Riots broke out at their exposition, and not a week after the virus was released, the scientists were murdered and/or executed because of their crime. But the virus was not contained. Passed through skin-to-skin contact, it spread quite easily.

Unlike how the worldwide population perceived it to be, the virus was not in any way related to the concept of "zombies." The virus did not impair movement, and the subjects were not dead. But on the other hand, it did, in fact, spur a devolution of the person's sanity and cultivate an appropriated sense of bloodlust. The infected did not simply "desire for living human flesh," but rather, for any flesh of which they came across. In this way was the disease not fatal, but essentially just a maker of murderers across the globe.