REAPING INNOCENCE ◦ STILINSKI [3]

xi.

The teenagers and the teacher all got up, Stiles commenting that there was a map of the school in Coach Finstock's office that they could use to figure out where the other vault entrance would be. She noticed that Scott and Logan had neared closer to her body, hands outstretched as though they were waiting to catch her if she faltered or fainted again. But thankfully, she and all the others had made it successfully into the room, crowding around Coach's desk as Mister Yukimura pulled out the map. He stood in front of it, evaluating the large piece of blue paper.

"Okay," Stiles began, pointing toward a certain point on the map. "This is where the school sign is, so the vault's got to be right about here."

Mister Yukimura glanced down at the spot on the map that was being circled by Stiles' finger and nodded. "I suppose if Carter's right and there is a second entrance, it would probably be accessible from the basement."

"It's probably somewhere in this hallway. West corridor—" Stiles' sentence had been cut abruptly as the teenage boy staggered, falling onto the desk. Carter's heart lurched up into her throat as she snatched his arm and pulled him back up. He blinked rapidly, glancing around the room. "Whoa."

Stiles pulled back his jacket sleeve, noticing that he was now sporting the same rash as Carter, just a much smaller version. Like the one Sydney had. The couple gave each other weary glances. Mister Yukimura grabbed Stiles' wrist. "It's happening to you too. You're getting sick. You all are."

Everyone then simultaneously turned to Logan, who frowned at his friends. "I feel fine; no sweating, uncontrollable shifting—nothing."

"Well, we still don't know what you are," Scott announced, taking a step toward the older Dunbar, grabbing his shoulder. "For all we know you could be completely immune to whatever this is. We don't know yet."

"I don't feel sick, either," Kira said.

"I think it's affecting you differently, neurologically." He began to explain. "I found your test answers here in a pile with the others."

Scott and Logan, who had been closest to Kira, glanced down to see that the raven-haired girl had been filling in all of her answers outside in the margins between the columns of bubbles. That was when they realized that they needed to find the second entrance to the vault and they needed to find it fasts

The teenagers quickly found themselves sprinting down the stairs that led into the basement, all of them splitting off and searching at different parts of the hallway to try and see if anything peculiar stuck out to them. Malia suddenly began trying to see if any of the doors would open; Kira beginning to look through the racks while the others all searched a bit further down the hall. They were examining every nook and cranny of the basement.

Carter ended up moving past a rack of things that teachers could find things that weren't normally found in their classrooms; like overhead projectors and a few other things, she hadn't thought much about it until she turned and bumped chests with Stiles, who had been intently focused on the same thing as her. They locked eyes for a moment before the both of them leaned further to the rack.

"Hey, guys," Stiles called out the moment that his hand moved a box, revealing a triskelion. "Over here."

Everyone stopped their own individual searches to go and see what Stiles found, Carter taking a few steps back to allow the boys to push the rack away from the symbol engraved into the wall. Once the metal rack was moved, she was able to see that a large triskelion was marked across the entire length of the wall; from the floor to the ceiling. The brunette began to wonder how her family's vault could have been hidden for so long; she would've assumed that a janitor or a faculty member would have noticed it by now—the vault was older than the school, it had been here when they built the school over it.