Pearl

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Perfectly Normal

The group in bullet-proof armor closed in on Lyly and Randal, and Lyly moved.

She shoved O'Lane with a light tap to the chest and he stumbled back several steps, instinctively looking down to watch his footing and swinging an arm out to catch himself. He had been caught totally by surprise, felt defenseless as he registered the sounds of conflict around him – the hard thumps of bodies hitting the ground, the short grunts of air getting knocked out of someone's chest. 

The dry cracks of bones breaking.

No – he thought desperately as he stumbled – no one should have to die for this.

Yet, in the time it took for O'Lane to regain his footing, it had grown quiet in the garage.

He looked up, barely seconds after Lyly's shove, and saw her standing, legs wide, over a pile of armored bodies. 

"Why?"

Her voice was quiet and husky as she looked back at him over her shoulder. 

He stood frozen, hairs rising all over his body as he looked at her, wondered about the strange trick of the light that formed a pink halo around her eyes and silhouette of her face.  

With a dry swallow, he took a quick visual sweep across the carnage.

There was no blood. That was the first thing he noticed. His heart thumped quickly in his chest when he realized it, as he felt faint hope that someone, anyone, may have survived the encounter. But all he had to do was look at the angles of the bodies in the pile to know how false his hope was.

A body didn't need to bleed to die.

"Why?" she asked again, insistent as she turned fully to face him. He struggled to drag his eyes from the bodies behind her, looked at her more properly.

Her hands were clenched tightly at her side, her brows furrowed in an expression he had never seen from her before. And her hair was stretched out in a wide circle around her head, the pink tips almost glowing in the underground lighting.

She closed the distance between them in a few large strides – steps that, he realized, she had slowed down deliberately so that he could see them. With her forearm she pressed against his chest, smashing him back into the side of the SUV behind him. His ribs creaked in painful protest, and felt the car behind him tilt on its axles to adjust for the strength in the small body that had him pinned.

He met her eyes, responding to the furious question he found there with confusion.

"I heard you," she said, keeping eye contact despite the height difference. "You knew them."

"Lyly," he wheezed around the pressure and pain in his chest, "you have to understand, this—"

He was cut off by the sudden and intense sensation of an itch in his brain. Her gaze never wavered from his, she never touched him aside from the forearm pressing him against the side of the vehicle, but somehow he knew that she was there, inside his mind, as his memories of the last few days surfaced without his bidding.

He watched like a passenger as she dove through his mind, following the echoing path of the really bad idea like a bloodhound. It wasn't so much that he remembered these experiences as he relived them, felt again what he felt in the moment as she watched with absolute attention what had happened in the meeting room that day.

It was like being torn inside out as all his thoughts and emotions were laid bare under the flickering orange lights of the garage. He saw in his memories the face of the man who ordered this field test, and knew that she saw it too.