The Altered.

Chapter X.

Miles felt like his airway was constricting. He couldn't breathe he couldn't see he couldn't stand.

He crumpled to his knees, a noise escaping him that was something between a sob and a whine.

It wasn't Eira, it wasn't Lia. It was somebody so much more important.

"Miles," Aaron warned, voice cracking. He too had noticed that the body wasn't Lia's or his sister's, but it was still a corpse - and the second they'd seen today.

Miles ignored Aaron, scrambling towards the fallen form. "Harvey," he said, and now he realised that he was crying. He didn't care. He grabbed his dead friend's arm and then reached for his face, shaking Harvey desperately like he might wake up.

"He's dead," said Aaron, appearing behind Miles to kneel by his side.

"Fuck off!" Miles snarled, using one hand to shove Aaron away and the other to pull Harvey's cooling body towards him. Blood smeared the ground as the body dragged, seeping from a fatal wound in the boy's stomach.

"He's my age," gasped Miles. "Our age. He's so - he's so -" young. Miles didn't know what he was trying to say. Aaron had decided to keep his distance, watching from a few feet away with round, terrified eyes as Miles pulled Harvey into his embrace, forgetting to care about the blood that was leaking onto him. "Fuck, Aaron." Miles looked at Aaron exasperatedly, vision fuzzy with tears. "Why is he dead? He can't be -"

Miles' speech was broken by a sob, and he didn't continue. Tightening his grip on Harvey's lifeless form, Miles tried desperately to think of something that could wake Harvey up.

But Harvey wasn't going to wake up.

"Miles -"

"Don't!" Miles spat before Aaron could finish.

Aaron fell silent.

Miles had seen death before. In movies and in books and even in his family. Grandparents. Not fifteen-year-olds.

But now, clutching Harvey's still form close to his chest, Miles felt so raw so torn so bleak.

Death had never felt this close before.

How was it possible for a person to exist one moment, and to not the next?

Miles held Harvey's body so close to his that he didn't even feel Harvey's blood seeping into his shirt. He rested his cheek against Harvey's tousled hair, a single tear slid down the bridge of his nose as he scrunched his eyes shut tight.

"What happened?"

That wasn't Aaron's voice. Miles' head snapped up and his grip protectively tightened on Harvey's dead body. Aaron jumped.

Lia was standing nearby, Eira by her side. And there was somebody new with them, too: a boy that looked hardly twelve years old. The boy was covered in grazes.

Aaron answered when he realised that Miles wasn't going to. "Miles found his friend, um..." he tipped his head in the direction of Miles, who was still clutching Harvey and frowning at the people who had just shown up at the scene. If he wasn't holding one of his closest friends, dead, in his arms, he might have been more relieved that Lia and Eira had shown up and more interested in who they'd brought along with them.

At first, Eira and Lia and the boy looked absolutely horrified, but some kind of understanding glinted in Lia's eyes for hardly a send before she and Eira shared a troubled glance.

Picking up on the fact that there was something else going on that didn't involve Miles' dead friend, Aaron asked warily, "What is it?"

The younger boy who was by Lia's side narrowed his eyes and shrank back. "They're here," he whispered.