Overdose

36. The Executioner

It was almost the big day, again. Lazarus wanted to make sure that everything was going well at The Academy before he brought more people there. Xander had no idea, or if he did, he didn't let it show.

I had been spending more and more time in the Containment Unit. Rem still didn't tell them that they were alive, and hiding it from them made me feel guilty. However, I wasn't going to steal Rem's chance to explain it themselves.

My main reason for going down there wasn't Heath and Marina. It was Nathaniel. He still wasn't opening up fully to me, but he wasn't as cold as he was before. I seemed to be breaking down the wall around him that he had built, but everytime I came back down he seemed to have rebuilt it.

We seemed to agree on one thing. Xander had ruined both of our lives. Once he realized that I was not helping Xander, or idolized him, he was a lot more willing to talk to me. I had tried to ask him what exactly Xander did to him before he got locked up, but Nathaniel never wanted to speak about his life before he was put in Containment. Heath and Marina seemed to honor this, and wouldn't tell me anything either.

The day before we left, I was talking to Lazarus alone. I had expressed that I was thinking about Yvonne and the others. He told me that they got home safe, which was a relief. But I knew something was up. If Xander had killed my father when I escaped, I was sure he had done something to their parents. I had no way of talking to them, though, so at that time I was in the dark.

"Do you think that Xander will come after Nathaniel and I?" It was something that was on my mind. Would Xander kill my mother?

"If you are so concerned, you could still come to The Academy. It would be much safer there." Lazarus suggested for the tenth time. I don't know why he was so adamant about me going to some school, especially if it was only supposed to be for Prodigials, but he wasn't letting up on it.

"I want to go home and see my family. What's left of it, at least."

"I understand that. What I don't understand is why Nathaniel wants to go with you." Lazarus leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands on his desk. "I would have thought he'd want to be with his friends."

"Maybe he doesn't want to be around anything that reminds him of The Facility." I shrugged. It was strange to me too, but I didn't know Nathaniel enough at the time to know what his motives were.

And I still blame him for most of the things that went down.

"That sounds like fair reason."

"What are you going to do about Xander?"

"What do you mean?"

"He's pretty much ruined about everything that you've worked hard for. I mean, he turned your entire Facility into some kind of three story torture chamber."

Lazarus looked down, tight-lipped. "He's done too much that there is simply nothing I could do that would provide any kind of justice to the people he's hurt."

"There is something you could do. Help everyone that's still in here. Not just the Prodigials. I know they're your main focus right now, but it's unfair to everyone else that would still be in here."

"There's not much I could do-"

"There is so much you could do. You could start by taking back what's yours. You could take Xander's power from him and then, I don't know like, exile him or something? You could torture him the same way he tortured us."

Lazarus shook his head. "Torturing him would make us just as bad as he is. Would you like to fall to his level?"

"Letting him continue this tyranny would be falling to his level." I stood up and walked to the door. "I really hope you don't leave all these innocent people behind."