Deserted Highways

The Guilty Bend First

fuck, Jace, why would you do something like this? Didn't you know what would happen?"

"I- Sarah, I had too. I knew you'd come, I knew Kaelie would come for me, and you would never let her go in alone. I had to come. He swore- Jordan swore if I didn't, if I tried to tell you guys and bring you with me, he'd slit my mother's throat, and then he'd kill Kaelie too, just for good measure," Jace said, guilt burning in his throat and stinging at his eyes.

"He took her anyways, Jace. He took her anyways, and she just went, to save us, to save all of us, again. Don't you get it? How easy it would be for her to die, if it meant you would live? She's fucking in love with you, she'd have done whatever it took to keep us all alive, to keep you alive, if you'd just fucking told her," Sarah said, and her voice was angry and she pulled her self to Michael, pulling him into her chest and carding her fingers through her hair.

"Look what they did to him, to my Michael," she said, and Jace could hear the tears coating her throat in her voice.

"But- I don't understand. How did- what are you guys doing here now, before me, I don't understand what happened,"Jace said and he'd never felt so confused, so disoriented.

Michael tried to laugh, and Sarah clung tighter to him, not looking Jace in the eye and Jace felt the trembling start in his hands. When Lilith started to speak, Jace almost didn't want to look at her right away, he didn't know what he'd see, didn't know if he'd want to. "Kaelie figured it out. JayBird- it was a helicopter, the name of the helicopter that Jordan took your mother onto. She knew- she always seems to know, she's always been the coldest of us, in some ways, the most calculating, shrewd. She knew it was a trap. She knew that when we went it, someone was going to get hurt. She knew we had to, of course we did, but that Jordan had set this all up to get her here. She didn't care, she was ready to do it, ready to find a way to get your mother out and make it out of Jordan's clutches, escape.

"But, she tried to tell you, I could see in her face how badly she wanted to see your eyes lighten up when she told you we could do it, we could save your mom, that we'd figured it out, and when she found out you'd gone, something in her cracked. She was angry, barely controlling her rage, she barely waited long enough to locate the exact airfield, she didn't plan, didn't think- she just got us back, Jace, she just got you back, and then you were gone and she was lost," Lilith said, her voice hard and pained.

"So, yeah, we got here first, and she stormed in here looking for you, and Jordan was ready. He was waiting. I don't even think he was surprised that she showed up before you did. He knew Kaelie, he knows her so well, it's unnerving because she seems to get him, understand his processes so easily, and she barely knows him. It's like they're the same and when he came out, he brought your mother out with him. He was going to kill her, if Kaelie didn't lay down her weapons, he had a gun to her head, and Kaelie- she just cocked her head, like she saw something we hadn't, like she understood something we didn't, and she stopped."

Jace stared at Lilith, finally look at her for the first time, bruises littering her arms and shadowing her jaw and her black hair was tangled around her face. "Stopped?" he asked after a moment, trying to reconcile the image in his mind of Kaelie just- giving up.

"She set her stuff down. She turned to me and she told me to try to get out, to leave her behind, to make sure Jordan gave you and your mother back to us, and get the hell out of the way, to hide, and then she set her stuff down and she told Jordan she'd come to him if he let you two go, she didn't know you weren't here yet, and he said he would."

"But he didn't," Jace said slowly.

"No, of course he didn't," Lilith spat. "He lied, and the second she got close he stuck her with something, and she went down like a sack of rocks and the minute she was out, he sent them for us," Lilith said.

"Hunters?" he asked and she nodded.

"Hunters. Too many, Jace way too many, I've never seen that many before, not in one place, I have no idea where they came from, how he had so many. They came for us and we fought, we fought like hell but there weren't enough of us and eventually, we just- fell. We ended up in here and Kaelie- she's gone. I don't know where she is," Lilith said, and her voice was soft and strained.

"How long have you been in here?" Jace asked.

"Not long. An hour or two," Sarah said. "We weren't too far ahead of you, Jace."

"Okay. Okay. What do we do now? How do we get out?" he said, rubbing his face and settling against the wall with the rest of them.

"Jace, I- I don't know if we can. We don't have anything, no weapons, Michael is no condition to fight, we don't know if there are more Hunters and how many. We have no idea where Kaelie is and what Jordan's done to her. I think- I don't know what we can do," Sarah said, defeated, her voice hollow, empty.

"So, what, you want to just give it up? Let Jordan kill us all? Kill Kaelie? Do you know what he plans to do?" Jace said, anger lighting his veins and warming him. "You think Kaelie would want us to do that? She'd laugh in your face if she were here right now. Jordan- he doesn't just plan to make more Hunters- he literally plans to eradicate us, every last normal human, build a new race from the ground up, he plans to destroy this world and make a new one, and somehow, he wants Kaelie to be there to see it, maybe he plans to make her help run it, I don't know."

"What do you want us to do, exactly, Jace?" Michael said with a cough. "How do you plan on getting out of this room?"

"We will figure it out, we always do. We can't count on Kaelie saving us this time, we need to save her. What would she do?" Jace asked, more to himself than to them.

Jordan stood in a sterile room, staring at Kaelie as she lay on a cold steel operating table, straps binding her at her wrists and ankles, more across her hips and chest. She was still unconscious, the result of the heavy sedative flowing in her veins, and Jordan admired his handiwork. She'd be awake soon, and he stepped towards her, running his finger over a line of stitches just under her hairline.

When Jordan first created the Illusion, his goal was always to help others, to eradicate diseases, genetic enhancements to keep people healthy and happy and the more he worked, the more he watched humanity rip itself apart. The idea of creating the perfect human had not been a new one to him, but the possibilities it opened up- those were unfathomed, steeped in opportunity and possibility.

He handed his power to Serna Rose early, a young and ambitious redhead- knew she'd be the one to pull in the funding, pull in the people he would need to create this superior breed of people. When she stepped in, he made sure no one really knew who he was, who he really was. He wanted to remain in the shadows, out of view until it was right. But Serna, she got too power hungry, she lost sight of the goals, she wanted revenge and she wanted to control everyone by fear, and she needed to die.

Jordan looked down at Kaelie's face, her mismatched eyes still closed, her skin clear and unlined, the curve of her lips. Kaelie was perfection, nearly. His early designs for the Hunters had some flaws, but Kaelie- she was exactly what he'd needed from Hunters. He needed to recreate her, hundreds of her, thousands, but first, he needed to figure out how to retain her unparalleled strength, her wit, her speed, her intelligence, all of it, and shut off her empathy, her loyalty to doing what was right, to helping, her humanity.

Jordan first saw Britta when he went to Paris as "an aide" at Serna's orders- she'd had no idea where her orders truly came from. Serna was trying to create new Hunters, following plans Jordan had left for her to find. Britta was beautiful, the kind of soft and gentle and good that Jordan wished he'd been, the kind of person he wanted to see replace everyone else in the world. She didn't know he'd been watching her, long before he'd picked her to be à Hunter's mother. She was one of the things he'd truly loved, and he'd nearly destroyed the Illusion and every Hunter when he'd found that Serna had had her killed, Ben and Jace had gotten her killed. 

He didn't. He punished Ben, because he'd deserved it, wanted to punish Jace, but he needed to remember the bigger picture- the image of the world him and Britta had always dreamed of, had spent hours in her cell in Paris talking about. He wanted to give it to her. He figured it out, after a while, the connections he needed to