Deserted Highways

Flightless

a sniper on a rooftop and they- they-" Kaelie's voice cracked, her near death experience had made her appreciate her emotions and the often times extreme ways that they manifested.

"Ben died. They shot him, straight between the eyes when he paused for a moment to make sure it was really me. I got him killed. I don't- we got away. I brought Jace here, he said Michael and Lilith were gone, he said Sarah would be here. I told him to wait, I made him swear not to say anything until I came back," she said, meeting Sarah's gentle, reproachful eyes.

'I went to find Jordan. I didn't want to believe that- I didn't want to find my suspicions to be real, so I went to his apartment, I thought he would know what to do. He's gone, he disappeared, I found a note on the bed for me, saying that Ben deserved what he got. It- Jordan had been calling the hits. He'd been calling them the whole time, trying to get Jace murdered and now I don't know what to think, if he really was just some lowly Illusion grunt dissatisfied with the status quo, or if he's more, if he's a bigger part of this because I can't fathom how he had these sort of contacts and resources to pull this off."

Kaelie glanced at Michael. "After I explain this next part, I think you owe Sarah, and me, an explanation of just what the hell you were doing," she told him in a cool voice. He gave her a sharp, angry glare, and then it softened into resignation and he nodded at her to go on.

"I tore that place apart, looking for anything, some sort of explanation for why he would do something so horrible after saving my life, after making me believe we were going to work towards something better. I was trying to find where he went, or what he might do next and I found a note in his handwriting with an address for that old state hospital on the Boulevard, the one that they shut down a few years back. At the bottom, I recognized Michael's handwriting saying that he would be there. Jace had already told me that you two were gone. I got there as fast as I could, I beat Jordan there, I was so convinced he was using this as another trap to kill the both of you.

"And I found you. Both of you, alive, and safe and waiting at a table in that room, waiting for Jordan. What were you doing there? Were you working with him? For him? How did you even find him?" Kaelie asked, twisting bits of her hair around her fingers and stretching her leg out to pop her knee. She didn't know what to do, or where to look, she felt at home for the first time in weeks and somehow, still out of place, like she didn't belong here.

Lilith hung her head as Michael started talking. "We didn't find him. He found us. Kaelie, after you- after we thought you died, we went to get your body, Jace wouldn't let us leave without you. But Jordan got there first and he took you. We searched for days, for hours at a time, and we couldn't find anything. One night, Sarah, she just couldn't do it anymore and so Lilith and I went alone."

"Some guy came up to us," Lilith chimed in. "He said he knew you. Knew all of us, and I nearly killed him on the spot, it hurt too bad to hear your name. He told us that he was an ex-Illusion, someone who knew a little bit about a lot of things, and then he gave us the same crock of shit that he's been spoon feeding you about some plan that would take down the Illusion, where we could live in the normals and not have to worry about anyone trying to murder us. He just knew, about so many things and we were so desperate. Jace, Sarah, Ben, they had their ways of dealing, and this was ours. We needed to feel like we were doing something, like something would come out of your death, so it would mean something."

"Why couldn't you tell me?" Sarah asked, her voice a whisper, and Michael looked pained, lost.

"I- baby, you were so sad. You barely talked, you weren't eating, you weren't sleeping. I didn't know what to do, I thought if you knew, it would be too hard, too much. I'm sorry, baby, I'm so fucking sorry," Michael breathed.

"We found one more thing," Kaelie said, wincing as she broke into their moment. "We found a closet full of pictures. Of us, our time in the lab, when we were captured and tortured. Of someone else. Jordan was married."

"To who?" Jace asked, and Kaelie turned to him, trying to steady herself under his stormy gaze.

"Britta."

Silence fell and Kaelie didn't speak for a moment. "He what?"

"He was married. To Britta. Some of the photos- I think he stalked her long before the Illusion took her, and at this point, I'm willing to bet that he is the one who had her name pulled for the project. I think he convinced her while she was in that place, that he was the only one who could truly help. I think, in a way, he did love her. And then-"

Jace cut her off. "And then Ben and I got her killed."

Kaelie nodded and then shook her head rapidly. "No. You didn't get her killed. Not really. She was marked for death the second she walked out of that lab, whether they let her go or not. The Illusion killed her. But I think that Jordan believes it's your fault."

"So Ben was?" Lilith started.

"Revenge," Kaelie said softly. "Ben was revenge."

They shared looks, worry and anger and hurt etched into their faces and Kaelie spoke again. "I don't think it's over."

Chapter 11

Somewhere Amongst the Bones

It was silent for a while after Kaelie spoke. No one seemed to want to move, or maybe they couldn't, the weight of the new revelations, the weight of the empty space where Ben should be holding them to their spots. She stared down at her hands, twisting and untwisting her fingers in her lap and tearing at the cuticles of her skin. She flaked dried blood of her hands and watching it twirl to the carpet.

"I need to go shower. I need to get his blood off of me," she mumbled, and Jace almost started after her, but he didn't follow, and it seared her to her core.

She made it down the hall on wobbling legs, searching for a towel in the cubby by the door and turning the water to its highest setting. She sat on the toilet after she tugged her blood matted clothes away from her skin and waited for the room to fill with steam and hide her from her own view in the mirror. It was no use, her eyes penetrated the thing vapor easily, and she could still see the flecks of red on her face.

She stood after a while, climbing into the shower, and then she sank to the floor in the bathtub and let the water scald her skin red and she let out a heaving cry, the sob hitting her with the force to steal the air from her lungs. The water poured down the drain and she almost wanted all her memories to go with it, everything good and everything bad that she remembered about Ben gone, and maybe it wouldn't hurt like this.

She remembered the nights she spent finding his room and singing to him, until he slept and she could stay awake and think about the boy with the gray eyes and what kind of like her and her friends could have if they found a way out of this place. She remembered that sometimes she could hear Ben crying and whimpering through the walls of her room when Theo would come in and take from her body that to which he did not have a right. She remembered the steel of little Ben's arms around her body as he lifted her from her floor the night Theo left her to bleed dry and that he sang to her in the infirmary for days after word until they made her go back to her room and Theo came back again.

She stood, suddenly desperate to get clean, and her tears mixed with the water, and she scrubbed at her face until it burned, scrubbed her arms, and scrubbed her hands until the water swirled pink at her feet and the barely scabbed cuts from the window pulled open again and fresh blood dripped between her fingers and she kept washing her hands. She scrubbed at her scalp and she could feel the strands of hair ripping away, sliding down her body and down the drain and at some point the water went icy cold and she didn't move at all.

She shut the water off after a while and she stepped out, wiping the towel around her body and grabbing another to dry her tender scalp. She didn't look in the mirror. She padded down the hall and stopped in front of her old room and her hand rested tentatively on the door knob, like she wasn't sure she should even really open it.

Jace looked up as the door hand turned and Kaelie stepped in. She didn't seem to notice him at first, and he could see droplets of blood oozing from deep lacerations on her hand. Her skinned looked raw, red, and angry, and he wanted to soothe it away, but he didn't know what to do.

He cleared his throat when he saw her hands move to drop