Willow was restless the entire trip back to her hotel. She opened and closed her laptop, watched strangers get on and off the bus, tried to read, failed, checked the status of applications to colleges she hadn't heard from, checked the status of the data decryption, tried to eat a granola bar, felt nauseous—
The bus came to a screeching halt at her stop. She jumped up and rushed to the exit, ignoring annoyed looks from other passengers as she shoved past them.
Willow fumbled to get her laptop out of her bag as she entered her hotel room. The door clicked shut behind her. She let the bag drop to the floor, opened the laptop, and set it on the bed. The decryption process was ninety-six percent complete.
She collapsed onto the bed next to her laptop and stared blankly up at the ceiling.
The morning before Tyche Point had been destroyed, when she'd sat outside the school with Adam...he'd called it the last good day. Maybe it was.
The Scorpion building was always so cold. Not in temperature, Willow could handle that. But it was quiet and tense and unwelcoming. She couldn't deny that she often found herself wishing she was sitting in the sun. Sitting with someone who didn't hate her.
And that morning had been perfect. They'd made it past the early chill of spring, but it wasn't yet scorching the moment the sun touched the sky. And the coffee from that shop in town was so much better than what they made at Scorpion's base. Considering how much other equipment Scorpion stole, Willow figured they could at least get their hands on some decent coffee makers.
Maybe Scorpion was lonelier, too. No one there liked each other. At least people at Tyche Point had been friendly. Polite, at the very least.
Willow's laptop beeped, announcing that the decryption program was done running. She sat up and pulled it onto her lap. SCI's outgoing messages took a few moments to load, and it took Willow another few to locate the date they'd spiked in volume.
The surge of outgoing messages was frantic. One after the other had been sent in rapid succession, all short, all spelling out a warning. Willow's eyes widened.
Error with the containment chamber.
Possible sabotage.
Sample storage broken into.
It's tracking something.
Something had escaped SCI. Willow's eyes darted back and forth, picking out bits and pieces of text and barely processing any of it.
Apex-3.
She pulled up the other files she'd grabbed from the local server and opened a search bar. "Apex," she muttered as she typed the word.
The images that popped up in the results were...terrifying. Photos, x-rays, MRIs. It took Willow longer than it should have to go through the reports they were connected to. She kept reading the same sentence over and over, struggling to take in the information.
Crash in Canada.
Three bodies.
Still alive, critical condition. Tranquilized.
Brought back to the lab.
SCI couldn't be sure where the...creatures came from. The vessel they'd arrived in was too damaged to learn anything of interest. And the physiological descriptions, the genetic information, the photos, none of it matched with anything in any databases. Nothing from Earth. Nothing in the sparse amount of information they had on other planets.
Recorded history had no shortage of heroes and villains claiming to be from other worlds. There were even stories of attempted attacks on Earth, though none had ever been confirmed to be true. It seemed that the Star System Alliance, which Earth's most prominent governments had supposedly been brought into decades ago, eventually felt forced to admit their existence.
But Earth's interaction with whatever the hell was out there was next to nothing. Rumors of alien landings still created a lot of buzz. Just like they had at Tyche Point.
Willow forced herself to return to the reports. To pick out facts that might help her figure out what had gone down at the SCI facility.
Apex was a tracker. An alarmingly good one. Its abilities far surpassed those of any animal from Earth. But it could track one thing and one thing only: genetic material. DNA.
Samples labeled "Tyche Point Subjects" had been taken from SCI's storage. Blood samples. Frowning, Willow opened the file for those samples. When would SCI have been able to obtain altered blood?
The file had an answer: Delta Labs. Willow's eyes widened. SCI had gone back in after the building collapsed and scraped up whatever blood they could find. Not only that, but they'd used salvaged security footage and information from the genetic sequences to make guesses at who the blood belonged to.
SCI only had a few samples with viable DNA, and their guesses at who the samples belonged to were redacted here. The notes indicated that the names had only been left on the physical sample vials. And in files on a server so high security that Willow suspected it would take her weeks to get in.
Willow went back to the reports on Apex. She wouldn't put it past SCI to utilize something so dangerous to hunt down the altered, but they hadn't done this. They didn't think the thing was ready. It was too unpredictable.
Someone had let it out of cryo. Someone had stolen a blood sample. It seemed this mystery person had given Apex a target. And if so, whoever the blood came from was completely screwed.
Willow closed the laptop. What were the chances it was her blood? She couldn't recall getting injured during the battle in the chamber. A small scratch wouldn't have left behind enough blood for SCI to find.
The blood could have belonged to one of Scorpion's other altered, though. If so, that creature could show up at their headquarters any day.
Okay, it had scared SCI. It was strong. Fast. But an army could handle it. There was no reason to panic over this. Willow took a deep breath.
Her phone buzzed, making her jump. It was a text from the Director. Are you still ready to be picked up at six?
She needed to respond. All she had to say was yes. Three letters. Her hand tightened around the phone as she stood up and stormed into the bathroom. Willow stared at herself in the mirror, at her wild eyes and shaking hands. She set her phone on the counter. Wrapped her hands around the edge. Leaned forward.
It wasn't the thought of that monster on the loose that made typing out her response to the Director seem impossible. Now that she'd been outside of Scorpion's headquarters for a day, she was fully grasping what she'd gotten herself into.
The girl in the mirror had run from her home. From her family. From everyone.
Her phone lit up again. An email, this time. USC.
Willow was shaking even harder now as she grabbed the phone and fumbled to unlock it. The email loaded. She could hardly believe her eyes.
She was off the waitlist.
She'd been accepted.
Based on the other acceptance—and rejection—letters she'd gotten so far, this was probably going to be it. USC.
Willow had desperately wanted to leave California, but she'd also known she wasn't going to get in everywhere. USC had already been a reach. MIT was a longshot. Not that she was underqualified, per se. The cold, hard truth was that there were plenty of other equally qualified applicants, and philanthropy had never been Willow's strong suit.
Plus, most of her more impressive accomplishments were...technically illegal. Not exactly suitable for a college application.
She couldn't be too picky about location, if she really wanted to be the best. Better than her father. Better than everyone else in the tech club. Oh, she would have loved to tell Kate and the other tech club members in person that she got into USC—
Willow looked up and shot herself a glare. She had to stop thinking about them. But it was hard not to.
"Come on," she muttered to herself. "You've got the best damn internship in the country." Best paying. Best tech. Sure, she couldn't put the true nature of the job on resumes, but the Director had mentioned a front corporation that she could use to cover her time at Scorpion.
Willow's phone buzzed with another text notification.
From Adam.
Damn it, Willow had forgotten he still had her number. She really needed to change it at some point—for a multitude of reasons—but that would have to wait. She unlocked the phone and read Adam's text.
You can change your mind any time.
Willow's grip tightened. She was a heartbeat away from throwing the phone. She sucked in a deep breath and resisted the impulse.
Sometimes she could see it, in her mind's eye. What might have been if she went with the Fortuna Guard. No, she'd spent most of her time around them brimming with annoyance. She didn't actually miss the time they'd spend training at the abandoned mini golf place. She just...thought she did, sometimes, when comparing it to the isolation she felt at Scorpion.
Her time with Scorpion wasn't going to last much longer. She was going to get out. She was going to get better.
Yet, she kept thinking about it. About the Fortuna. About high school. About everyone and everything.
What if Tyche Point hadn't fallen apart? What if Adam had been dumb enough to ask her to the spring dance? Willow nearly laughed out loud at the thought. God, her? Going to a dance? Stupid. She'd hate every moment. Maybe. Would she? Adam made her laugh, sometimes. Maybe, if she were willing to try, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
Or, she'd hate every second she spent with him. She hadn't had enough time to quite figure out how she'd really felt about Adam. At first, she'd just felt bad for him. He'd asked an annoying number of questions about her life. But she'd felt some relief in answering them.
Willow shook her head. She had no idea what had made him take an interest in her, but it wouldn't last. She wasn't the kind of person that made people want to stick around.