Shadow of a Doubt

ARK Memories

The girls seemed to understand Maria's desire to not talk about her past, because they never asked. Even after all the guys left.

The next day, Maria ran over to the guys' house to pick up Silver. Conveniently for everyone, the two houses were right behind each other on opposite sides of the forest, so not too far. There was even a trail between them with a nice fountain at the halfway mark.

Maria didn't knock on the door, and just texted Silver that she was outside. There was no way she wanted to risk Shadow opening the door.

She was admiring the Lilac bush when Silver came out.

"Morning, Maria."

"Morning, Silver."

"You got here fast. The text saying you were leaving the house, then the one saying you're here was delivered within a minute of each other."

"Yeah, well, I jogged it." She shrugged.

"You jogged a 2km trail in less than a minute?"

"Both your brothers can run up to the speed of sound. How much crazier is it to believe that I can run up to the speed of light?"

"Damn. I guess."

"If you want to piggyback, I can run us over to Tails' lickity split." Maria offered, adjusting the purse that hung across her chest.

"Really?"

"Why not? I want to get my endurance up so I can show up Sonic." She smirked.

"Now that, I'd pay to see." Silver chuckled. "You're serious?"

"As the grave. And I've been there."

"So dark humour is you're thing now?"

"Only with people who know my past. What's the point in dying if you can't joke about it." Maria smiled, enjoying the fun, openness.

"Fine, let's go."

Silver hopped onto Maria's back, arms around her shoulders and legs around her waist. The weight was nothing to her.

"Ready?"

"I guess."

"Then off we go."

With that, Maria ran them across town to Tails' place. It took less than a minute. They stopped on the lawn and Maria dropped Silver on his feet.

He tottered a bit, a little dizzy, "We're here all ready?"

"Yep."

"God. This is why I don't let Sonic and Shadow take me places." Silver muttered, a hand over his eyes.

Maria went straight up to the door and rang the bell. Tails answered as Silver joined her on the step.

"Come on in. I already plugged the hard drive into the computer downstairs."

"Thanks, Tails."

Once at the computer, Maria pulled out an SD card on a chain from her purse and stuck it in. She put the head phones on and began skimming through the documents. First she saved copies of her old personal documents, like her SIN, birth certificate, and the giant file that was her health records. During this, Tails and Silver chatted a bit about nothing in particular as they watched from over her shoulders.

Then Maria got to the good stuff. She pulled up the surveillance recording system and entered her name into the search bar. A map of the ARK's floor plan showed up with a calendar search bar at the top of the page. It had defaulted to a random day and there was path mapped out in red, weaving through the rooms.

"Wow! They were tracking your movements?" Silver leaned in closer.

"Yeah, the system tracked everyone's whereabouts. If you needed to find someone, you just entered their name in and the computer would tell you what room. It was pretty handy until you tried to play hide and seek." Maria replied.

She took out her phone and opened up the notes app. There she had written down the date she researched the night before. She entered it into the search bar. Once she hit enter, a new path replaced the other.

The path was a lot less complicated than the one before. It went from her room, to the cafeteria, to a room for a while, then made a bee line to another room where it stopped.

She clicked on the last location.

The screen changed to a video viewing platform. The video showed to be less than ten minutes long.

"What are we looking at, Maria? Why have you pulled this up?" Tails asked.

"Don't worry about it." Maria said, hitting the play button and turning up the volume in her headphones.

The video began playing. It showed a room of individual cryogenic-type escape pods. The door opened and they could see Shadow and human Maria run in.

"Is this...?" Silver trailed off.

"Oh my God..." Tails breathed.

Maria could hear everything. She watched and listened to herself tell Shadow to get into a pod as she got to the control panel. Once Shadow was in and it was locked and prepped, the door opened to soldier. They fired a couple rounds into the room, yelling something, before human Maria hit the emergency lockdown button, which closed and locked the door on him. Maria leaned heavily on the panel, finishing the launch set up as Shadow yelled. Once she finished, she fell to the floor. The wound in her chest pouring blood.

Maria tried her best not to get emotional watching. Shadow's screams were so helpless and panicked, it hurt to hear again.

Shadow's pod was ejected into space. After a couple seconds of quiet and just the laboured breathing, she heard what she was looking for.

Maria paused the video and backed it up to right after the pod ejected. She copied from that point until the end of the video and saved it to her card. Then she finagled around to delete that little bit of the video.

"Did you just delete the footage of your death?" Tails asked, confused.

"Sure. That's what I did." Maria exited out of the program, taking her SD card back.

Maria set the headphones down, and put the chain around her neck, slipping the card under her shirt.

"Thanks for letting me do that." Maria stood up. "I should go." She rubbed a tear from her eye. "You good to get home by yourself, Silver?"

"Yeah, thanks, Maria."

"See you guys later."

"See ya, Maria." Tails said.

Maria left the two boys there. They watched her leave before turning to each other.

"Should we check out why she deleted that?" Tails asked.

"Probably. I know she has no problem with her death, so it seems out of character for her not wanting the footage there."

"Exactly."

Tails recovered the video segment easily. He unplugged the headphones, turned up the volume, and hit play.

"I... I love you... Shadow the Hedgehog..."

The two looked at each other in shock.

"Do you think... she meant romantically?" Tails asked.

"Well if she meant it in a platonic way, why would she try to get rid of it?" Silver rubbed his face.

"No wonder she's not ready to come out to the group. Once Shadow knows who she is, she'll have to face up to her feelings."

"This complicates things a bit."