Feared

Forty-Eight: Returning

"Hardly," he replied. "I just want to remind you that the stakes are high. We mightn't come out of this Charlotte".

She stared at him. "We always knew that was a risk and I've dealt with crowds bigger than this before... they can't have numbers larger than the Exhibition games on the island and I trapped all of them with my alteration, or have you forgotten?"

"How could I forget?" he sighed. "That was the signal greatest victory in the Exhibitions... but we had time to prepare for that. We had Elmhirst. We had his fear, and Charlotte you know as well as I do that his fear was so strong it allowed you to do that. This is the real world. How do we know if we'll have that in there? This won't be easy".

"I'm counting on that," she growled. She moved towards the door, but he caught her wrist and held her still.

"Promise me Charlotte... you'll use your head in there. You won't..." He fought to find the right words. "You will be smart about this".

She gazed at him and smiled sadly. "Ethan, I have a job to do. I don't plan on doing it half-assed. If they are going to kill me, they are going to find it damn hard".

"Good," he said. "I just... needed to make sure". He released her wrist and she walked past him to the hallway beyond. She didn't care if he came, but a part of her knew he would. She focused her sights ahead, feeling the presence of the others like anxious ghosts around her, but she didn't look to them. She couldn't. They had seen him break her.

Nancy and Ervin were nowhere to be seen as she descended the stairs and pushed open the door. The cloud of anxiety grew behind her, as more of her friends joined her. Even as fragile as she was now, they still trusted her enough to follow her. She walked from the house into the darkness of the night, still not looking back to the others, not wanting to know who had put their faith in her now. Now that she was a shell of what they had supported before. Would she be willing to put her hopes on somebody so beaten down? Did they think she was on some suicide mission? Ethan seemed to. But it was a realistic question. She had thought the same of him. Were both of them now just looking to cause the opposition as much pain as they could and hope by the end of it... what? Was there an end to it? She inhaled deeply, pushing her worries away. She needed to stay focused, empty. Part of her hoped they were all there, but she couldn't, wouldn't check. She couldn't chance meeting his green eyes.

Gritting her teeth, she forced all thoughts of James from her mind. She focused instead on the feel of the dewy grass beneath her boots and the moonlit darkness as she climbed up the hill behind the farmhouse. The moon was a silver half dangling above the eastern horizon, bathing their path in light. Trees began to appear with the ascent, growing thicker with each passing minute. Animals scratched in among the roots, but fell silent as she passed. She was aware of her friends' footsteps, of waves of unease, of nervousness, but she focused on what was before her. There was a break in the trees as she reached the crest of the hill between the two valleys. From where they had come the lights of the farmhouse twinkled like stars, but below in the other valley only darkness held sway.

"You said it was here?" Charlotte breathed to Ethan as he moved beside her.

"It – it is," he said, pointing to the blackness. "It's just... there".

"Looks like nobody's home," Ian said, his voice a comforting relief for Charlotte. She had a sudden urge to take his hand, to squeeze his fingers to be sure he really was there with her, but she quashed any thoughts of such needy and childish behaviour. She was a daughter of Kingston Academy, a robot, a monster.

"Seems that way, doesn't it," Charlotte whispered, stepping down the hill towards the house lost in the shroud of night. Darkness was a weak excuse to halt their attack now. Or at least she wasn't going back to the farmhouse. The thought of Nicholls' house was positively homely in comparison to the heartache and tension cooped up among the old walls on the farm.