* * *

The door opened without warning. Sarah had been distracted playing mind games with the tiles on the floor; she hadn’t noticed someone was even outside until the doorknob turned.

Robyn poked her head in and took a deep breath as if to steady herself. “Hey, can I come in?”

“I thought you were hiding from me.”

“I kinda was… Sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

Robyn laughed. “Am I okay? Me?”

“It’s not your fault, Robyn. Of course it’s not.”

Robyn shook her head as if she disagreed, but she said nothing aloud.

“You know, I’m going crazy in here. You could’ve at least brought me a TV, a deck of cards, a book. Something, anything.”

“I went to the house a couple of days ago,” Robyn cut in when Sarah stopped to take a breath. “I brought back some of our photo albums.”

Sarah froze. She’d barely registered the words photo albums. She was thinking about the house. About what that house meant.

Home.

But was it a home if it was just a house? An empty house with a broken door and blood needing to be wiped from the floor…

Would anyone have done that?

Her mind recoiled from the thought of how the blood had gotten there as her eyes started tearing up.

She cast the memory shakily from her mind by forcing herself to latch onto what Robyn had been saying.

Photo albums…

Photos of people laughing, of trips and holidays and everyday things. Mom cooking, Dad making the hole that was never patched in Robyn’s wall.

Robyn was watching her expectantly.

She wiped at her eyes, trying not to blink.

Just things, albums, photos. But most of her photos wouldn’t be in those albums.

“My laptop, my phone. All my photos, my files. Everything is there.”

Sarah closed her eyes. It was hard to focus on the things. The files weren’t important—they were mostly assignments for classes she couldn’t care less about—but the photos were different. They were all that was left of the life they had.

“Do you want me to bring the albums over?” Robyn asked.

Sarah nodded, subdued.

“Okay, I’ll go get them.”

Robyn had barely opened the door when an alarm sounded.

For a moment, Sarah thought there was an alarm rigged to her door, but that was a little too ridiculous. The next thought, that it signaled something greater, was confirmed by Robyn’s reaction. Her sister shot her a startled glance before running off.

* * *

Robyn remembered to make sure the door was locked behind her. This was not a good time to have Sarah wandering around the place—not that any time would be.

In the distance, the alarm continued. Its rhythm signaled a medical emergency. That usually meant that a team had come in with severe injuries and the medical staff and whatever personnel were on call to help needed to be prepared.

Curiosity more than anything made her head towards comm. As was customary, she ran to the stairs instead of the elevator because she was not on call. As far as she knew, the only team they had outside at the moment was Griffon’s. The urgency of the alarm meant they’d come back, and someone was dying.

As she reached the last flight of stairs, she almost knocked over a dazed Scorpion.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Robyn stopped short of bumping into her. Instinctively, relief flooded her. She could scratch at least one name off the injured list. “What happened?”

“They saw us coming somehow,” Scorpion said, upset. “Bear’s not doing so good. Pegasus…” She sighed. “It’s a good thing that moron’s not easy to kill.”

Scorpion hovered where she was, as if she’d forgotten where she’d been going.

“Did we get the rest of the shipment?” Robyn asked. They’d been tracking down canisters of poisonous gas that had been stolen from a research lab.

“Looks like it. Including the ones they decided to test drive. But better that they use it on us than anybody else, right?”

Without waiting for an answer, Scorpion moved past her. Robyn noticed she had a makeshift bandage on her right leg, but she wasn’t limping too bad. Must not have been serious. She’d still have to keep off it for a couple of days. That meant they’d be short at least three operatives for the next day or two.

If the mission to track down the cell that attacked the Owens’ household got okayed within the next few hours as expected, she might be allowed to fill in.

In the distance, the alarm stopped.

Robyn closed her eyes. She never liked that silence.

When the alarm was still sounding, there was still hope, still possibility. Someone was dying, but they weren’t dead. Not yet.

When the sound stopped, it meant an emergency summoning was no longer necessary, either because all the doctors had arrived or because there was no one left to save.

* * *

Sarah was trying to finish reading a paragraph from the book in front of her, but she was getting stuck on the same sentence. She’d read it about twenty times by now, but she still didn’t know what she was reading. Shouldn’t have come as a surprise since she couldn’t even remember which book it was. At this point, she was staring at the page and not doing much else.

“Are you pretending to study so you won’t help me with the laundry?” Mom asked, passing her on the way to the bedroom.

Sarah blinked at her, following what had happened with a sort of delay. “No.”

Her gaze fell back on the book. She didn’t think she had a book to read. Why had she been wishing someone brought her a book?

She blinked at the page, not bothering to read it. Like an idiot, she picked it up and leafed through it with the strangest feeling that the book shouldn’t be there.

Was it because she didn’t have her things? Everything she had was back home.

Wait! Her eyes darted about the living room.

She was home. How could she be home?

But it was her living room and the front door—had they fixed the door?

Sarah jumped to her feet. Her chair lost balance, crashing onto the floor.

She was having trouble breathing.

This was wrong.

It was a dream. She had to wake up.

But it looked like home. It felt like home.

It couldn’t be, could it?

There’d been a room, a white sterile room with little more than a bed where she’d been trapped, and empty corridors that led to an elevator that led…

She sucked in a breath. She still felt trapped, still felt the need to escape.

“Sarah? Are you alright?”

Mom!

Sarah whirled towards the voice. Mom looked startled at first, then concerned as she came closer.

Sarah took an instinctive step back, wiping at her eyes to get rid of the tears. She wanted to wake up, and she desperately wished she didn’t have to. She didn’t want to have all this taken away.

“Sarah, honey, what’s wrong?”

Unable to answer, Sarah shook her head over and over again. Salt from her tears spread along her tongue. Dreams shouldn’t feel this real, should they?

She latched onto her mother and cried. It had been a dream, just a dream.

There was no locked room, no blood on the wall.

This was real.

This was real…

* * *

Sarah’s eyes snapped open, finding only darkness.

Had she fallen asleep? She didn’t even remember going to bed. Did she pass out?

She reached out for the light switch. If she were in her own bed, it should be on the right. From Robyn’s bed, it would be to her left. But there wasn’t even a wall on either side of the bed.

Frantic, she found the wall behind the headrest. She felt around the wall until she finally came to the switch.

The light blinded her for a second.

When she could open her eyes, the air was knocked out of her as if she’d been punched.

The white walls, the locked room…

No! This was wrong, this was so wrong!

It couldn’t be real.

This was only a dream.

She had to wake up. That’s all she had to do to go back to the place where her mother was holding her. The lingering sensation of an embrace was still there if she tried.

Warmth, and the smell of laundry detergent.

But with each breath, it was getting lost in the haze like everything else.

Sarah clasped a hand over her mouth. There was blood on the wall.

Ignoring the pain when she moved, she ran to the bathroom to wash her face. The image in the mirror was even more frightening.

She screamed at the image, but her own bloody face screamed back. The sound of running water overtook the silence, but was no more comforting.

Sarah went for the outer door, but it was locked.

Of course it was. She was sobbing now.

Robyn…

She was sure her sister would be in this place, in this nightmare.

Sarah pounded on the door, screaming Robyn’s name regardless of whether anyone outside could hear her. She pressed random numbers on the panel by the door when she couldn’t think of a code.

A piercing pain shot through her brain and she squeezed her eyes shut. Numbers flashed through her head. Something with seven?

Sarah turned her attention to the intercom instead. She tried all the buttons and, when that didn’t work, she started hitting it with the palm of her hand.

“Hey, Sarah? Stop that, please,” a man’s voice came through.

She didn’t recognize the voice, but she stopped. “I wanna talk to Robyn. Where’s my sister?”

“Robyn had to go out, remember?” the voice said slowly, as if he were talking to a child—or maybe a crazy person. “She said she told you about it earlier today. Don’t you remember?”

She swallowed back another sob. The haze was clearing. Yes, she remembered.

Robyn had left and she had died…

Mom was dead. So was Dad.

And there was blood on the wall. She turned to look at it with an involuntary whimper.

Whose blood was it? She couldn’t remember.