Convergence - The Last Science #2.2 - Heroes and Villains

B2: Chapter 22 - In Her Image - I

  Her hand moved to her bag, about to open it and fish out the card.

  Natalie shook her head. No time. She got back up and started moving again. She couldn't risk being found. There wasn't any time to waste.

  She pulled out her phone while she kept moving. To her dismay, there still wasn't a single response from anyone on the website. Cinza and her people were totally silent. Hailey, too, but that didn't surprise her anymore. Hailey seemed so preoccupied with her own stuff lately. Probably didn't want to talk to a little kid anymore... Boris and Dan hadn't been online since they were on TV, but she'd heard they were okay. She missed Hector, but he barely ever showed up on the website. He wasn't the type to talk online.

  Even worse, she hadn't gotten anything new from her friends. Mitch, Tyler and Steven were presumably still keeping up the charade at Steven's place. Kelsey had texted her back, but since she was still trapped in the back of Steven's closet, she didn't have anything new for her. Mostly just confused reactions to the news, intermixed with complaints about some game she was playing while she was waiting around bored.

  The news... There's gonna be a book about us. About everything that happened.

  About me and my dad.

  Natalie knew how it was going to go. She was the daughter of the traitor. She'd be infamous for that, especially since she'd fought back. They were on opposite sides of the story. Not for the first time, she wondered what might have happened if she'd just told him about magic. Rachel hadn't outright told her not to, but she hadn't seemed okay with it either.

  Natalie hadn't really wanted to tell him either. Sometimes, her dad was weirdly strict on things. Like when they'd first moved to Rallsburg and he hadn't let her out of his sight, ever. She was a lot smaller back then, but it lasted for years. After he'd finally let her go do things on her own, she still had to check in constantly, and he wouldn't let her talk to anyone. It was months before she finally got caught talking to Hector, and her dad grounded her for a month for it.

  In the end, though, he'd relented and let her have the run of the town, and even the forest around it, just so long as she was home for meals and got all her homework done. So maybe he would have been okay with magic too. Maybe he wouldn't have talked to Omega instead. Maybe he wouldn't have... killed so many people.

  And maybe I wouldn't have killed anyone either. What does that make me?

  Their faces were still in her head. The furious crowd of people in Rallsburg. The guys in the abandoned warehouse in Seattle.

  I didn't want to. They made me do it.

  But she still did it. She killed them.

  Natalie got up and kept running. She leapt straight over the entire street, flinging herself high into the air with magic as cars whipped by underneath. A few passerbys gawked at her. Landing was a bit harder, and she stumbled as she touched down, but she kept running. Her hood didn't slip an inch from her head as she blitzed down the next street, and the one after that.

  A siren kicked up in the distance. For a brief panicked moment, Natalie thought it was coming for her—but it was getting quieter. Nothing related to her. Just another loud, inescapable part of the city she hated so much.

  Keep moving.

  She was alone again, but she wasn't going to fall into the same trap as last time. She knew where she was, and she still had all her things. Nothing like that would ever happen to her again.