Final Truth

Chapter 61: I Always Win

Julia reacts immediately to this, her face scrunching up into something of absolute horror as she begins to make a sort of choking sound, almost as if she were breathing in water.

"What...what did you do?!" I demand, rushing away from Henley to go to Julia.

"You told me to tell everyone in here to stand down; that includes the nurses that work to keep Julia's vitals going during these tests. I'm afraid she can't breathe," she says with a matter of indifference.

"Tell them to resume keeping her alive!" Cade practically shouts into her ear, and Henley goes to regard her people once more with an air of annoyance.

"You heard him," she says, and the nurses thankfully return to their jobs.

Julia seems to move as if she were drowning, lying on her back and making strange motions with her arms and legs as if she clawing through torrential currents before I hear her breathe in a gulp of air, so loud that I can almost physically feel the oxygen entering her lungs again.

I rush over to the one control panel that has a screen attached to it, and it's almost like watching a horror film: I see Julia treading water, her surroundings so dark that she looks around frantically for something, anything to let her know that she's not blind. Then I hear her cry out, both on the screen and in real life, and she's disappearing beneath the water again as something drags her down.

I look back at Julia in that little glass cage, face screwed up in pain as she grasps at her ankle, trying to pry whatever has her off.

"Take her out of the test!" I demand, turning my attention to Henley with absolute hatred while wondering when it will be enough, when will she have hurt enough people to be satisfied and finally stop.

"She'll die if I do that," she responds tersely. "Once you're in the test, you're stuck until it's finished. I'm afraid the only thing I can do is this..."

And as I whirl around to face Henley again, not missing the hints of violent implications at her words, everything seems to happen in slow motion.

A guard draws his gun and shoots Cade in the arm, but due to his power and reflexes, his skin hardens and the bullet bounces off of him, lodged in the ceiling now. However, it did distract Cade long enough for Henley to scramble away from him, and I watch as she draws a knife from her back pocket and slices the chain connecting the handcuffs together, severing their connection and allowing her power to become free again, for if you break handcuffs like those, their power becomes useless.

The ordeal must've taken less than three seconds before my friends and I are all forced to our knees and dragged together in a little huddle, groaning against her power and trying uselessly to break free.

The same guard who shot at Cade comes up to lock the door to the lab, and we're truly trapped now.

More than that, we played right into her hands. She expected us to come after Julia, she'd planned all of this. Allowing herself to be caught, telling her people how this was going to go, figuring this entire situation would follow exactly according to plan. And sure enough, it did.

I've never felt more foolish.

She looks down at us now with a mocking smile, her hold so tight on us that my knees begin to shake in pain from being forced to the ground.

"Oh don't look so disappointed; you had to see this coming, had to know that I always win in the end. Julia can attest to that when she gets out of the test, but for now, why don't you just watch her struggle? We'll wait for her to fail, and then I'll kill you all," Henley muses, eyes almost glazing over in relief before something else crosses her mind. "Oh! And don't expect Cassia or Susan to come to your aid; if I've played my cards right, they should be dead now as well."

"What?!" Cade shouts, a strangled sort of cry accompanying his fury.

Henley glares at him and physically forces his head down so that he may only look at the floor.

"You heard me; I had this planned, don't you see? I figured you all would come for a rescue mission, and I had Peter, wasting away and utterly useless. I figured he might be able to do me one last favor, so instead of continuing to starve him until he died, I saved his life at the last moment, started replenishing him with nutrients and getting him strong enough to where he could be reconditioned. Once he reached that point, I warped his mind again and made him a monster, made him my monster. I knew at least one of you would go after him, and for me, that was incentive enough. He'll try to kill anyone on sight, and you sent in the two of you least equipped to fight. It all worked out better than I could've hoped."

Cade is positively shaking beside me, but it's got nothing to do with Henley's power; it's rage, and I know so because I feel that some emotion leaking inside of me and pointed toward Henley, toward myself.

I brought them here. This is my fault.

And so, all I am left to do now is quietly mourn for my friends, a sinking feeling of grief settling permanently in my chest before I lift my eyes to look at Julia, watching her helplessly thrash around while crying out.

No, we won't be going home. This is it.