Young Writers Society

A/N: I feel like this is a filler chapter, at least in the middle, so I apologize for that. I would have cut more, but I needed to meet LMS requirements, so. There's my excuse. Love you guys. <3

Emma/ Zenith

Emma emerged from the factory doors and immediately doubled over, choking on smoke. Her eyes watered, and her ears rang with the sounds of snapping wood, fire roaring, the popping of tile breaking. 

Rift collapsed to his knees as soon as they passed the threshold, grasping at his side. Blood shone from behind his fingers, gleaming in the dying sun.

Emma tried to speak but fell into a coughing fit. When she recovered, she rounded on Rift.

"Did you do this?"

He looked up. His mask was shifted off-center, smudged with dirt.

"No. I was trying to stop him."

"Really?"

He gave a hiss of pain and curled over, hugging his side. "The bastard shot me. Does that convince you?"

Emma swallowed the flare of panic and scanned her surroundings. A group of employees clustered together in the grassy courtyard outside the front doors, eyes wide with shock. Had they all gotten out?

She straightened, wincing at the new bruises forming on her legs from her falls.

"I have to make sure that everyone's safe," she said, pulling on her Zenith persona like a comfort blanket. It made her voice deeper.

Rift pushed himself up on one knee. "I'll help."

Zenith glanced at the employees watching and pushed a hand into his neck, like she was holding him down. She dropped her voice to a whisper. "You're bleeding, everyone thinks you set off a bomb, and the police are on their way, I'm sure. You need to get out of here."

Rift shook his head, struggling against her hold. "If I run, I'll look guilty."

Zenith shot him a withering glare. "Look guilty, then. I'm not going to let you bleed out or get arrested, not here."

He hesitated, opened his mouth to protest. She gave him a shake by the neck, and he gave a sharp inhale of pain.

"Please leave, Rift. You're in no state to be here."

In response, he fizzed out of her hold, and she fell forward at the sudden absence of a physical body. She caught herself just in time to see him reappear a few feet away, running with a limp towards the giant fence that lined the perimeter. Blood splattered on the concrete behind him.

---

Eli

"Oh god oh god oh god," Eli whispered. His head was pounding, and every step he took sent a streak of pain running up his torso. The bullet wound was just a graze, hardly anything, but dang, if it wasn't a bleeder.

When he'd found the man locking the doors, sweating like a stuck pig in the factory, his gut had immediately told him something was wrong. As soon as the man saw him, he had pulled out the gun. Eli had been too slow to activate his new teleportation device in time. The graze had slowed him down, but he'd managed to catch the man before anything could happen.

Then Zenith had arrived, and... well. Look how well that had gone.

Warehouses stretched out on either side of the empty industrial district road. He had been running between them, phasing through fences, but he was about ready to collapse. A break was required. He approached one building and pressed the button at the bottom of his palm, activating the invisibility and teleportation device. The device was working marvelously, courtesy of Seb.

Eli pushed through the wall. The device had to regain its energy after each episode, not unlike how his original power had worked, and he burst back into being inside the building only a few seconds later. An empty room stretched before him, gray and full of metal junk with unknown purpose.

Eli limped over to the cinderblock wall and collapsed. He yanked the clausterphobic mask from his face and leaned his head against the cold stone, the back of his neck slick with sweat. His withdrawal symptoms had been plaguing him all week, and he didn't know how long they would last. The familiar knife of a migraine dug into his temple. And on top of that, his dumb side wouldn't stop bleeding.

He pulled his phone out of the inner pocket of his suit and unlocked it. A message from Seb glowed on the screen, and he promptly opened the messages app.

Come back quick, read the text. I found something you'll want to see. Probably shouldn't send it here, but it has to do with the P.

It had been sent a little over an hour ago, near the beginning of his mission. Before this all went to hell.

"Shit," he whispered, the realization dawning on him.

He knocked his head into the wall, exhaustion seeping into his core. Of course. This was just Atlas all over again. The Program had found out that he knew, and he had to go. It was only logical. The fact that he had assumed that he could just get away with it, that he thought he could just stop taking the pills and continue as if all was well, was the entirely idiotic part of it.

The watch. Eli bit his cheek so hard he tasted copper. Was he honestly the dumbest human alive?

He flew to his feet and reached for his ankle, where the real Program watch now resided, since Seb's contraption had taken its place on Eli's wrist. He ripped the watch off and cracked it under his heel, grimacing at the sound of snapping glass.

The tracker would have been on until here. It might still be working. He needed to move. There was no time to call Seb to hear what he'd found, and besides, it might not have been safe to talk over the phone anyway.

Eli could have slept for days, could have fallen asleep on the spot, but there wasn't any time. He set his course back to Edgewood.

---

He avoided main roads, light, anything that signaled life that could give him away. He just needed to get to Seb and get out of here.

Maybe I'll move home. No, that might not be safe for his parents. Maybe he and Seb could just grab the car and go on a road trip for a while, find a sympathetic police station, expose the Program to the news. Something. Something that didn't end with him captured or dead or... bleeding out in downtown Bluford.

His thoughts cut back to Zenith, to those poor employees that he'd endangered by letting that man go. He hoped that they were all right, that Zenith had found them all, that the bomb had only been one and had been neutralized.

Gosh, this is a mess.

The campus started to pop up around him, a few academic buildings here and there, before the dorm section. By now, it was completely dark out, and the street lights had been turned on. Rosiello Hall was still alive and wild, of course. Music streamed from some of the open windows into the chill autumn air, and some young men hung out on the front steps with beers in hand.

It all looked normal. Good.

He went in the back door and ran up the stairs, praying that he wouldn't run into anyone. He faded out of view whenever he suspected someone, but the stairwell remained mercifully empty.

When he got to his floor, he immediately turned intangible and ran to his room before he could be spotted. He'd already phased through the wall when he realized that something was off. He couldn't see anything at first, but his gut twisted even before he popped back into being.

When his eyesight returned, it was all he could do to keep from crying out.

The room had been turned upside down, torn from corner to corner like a hurricane had ripped right through it. The desks were collapsed on their sides, and the mattresses ripped and slid halfway onto the floor. The closets had been rooted through, clothes strewn all over the carpet, his succulents were crushed, and there was ink from shattered pens leaking into the carpet. Even the walls had been damaged, huge gashes in the paint running from the back wall to the front.

Eli backed away from the carnage, eyes landing on the crushed computer by the window. Seb's prized possession. The center of his life.

"No," Eli gasped. The bomb, the text from Seb, and now this?

They've taken him. The truth speared him through the temple. No, no. Panic surged up like lava. Something crunched under his foot.

He looked down. A small Post-it note was crumpled into the stained carpet, and he bent down for it, grimacing at the jab of pain in his side.

The first line read, "Supers?" and below that was a list of names. It was all in Seb's handwriting.

Eli didn't know what it meant, but maybe it had to do with Seb's text about the Program. Maybe it would help him find him. He folded it and put it in his suit pocket.

He was about to scour the place for more clues, bile rising up in his throat at the hellish spectacle before him, when he heard the sirens. Red and blue lights flashed in the windows. Shouting.

Eli's eyelids fluttered closed, and he sagged into the bedframe. Exhaustion settled in his bones like concrete. There was blood running down his side. A headache roared in his ears. He was so, so tired. All of this was his fault.

Maybe it would just be better if he stopped running, and gave in.

"Don't let it happen again," Atlas' ghost sighed.

"I already did," Eli whispered, but he hauled himself upright reluctantly. The shouting had moved to the stairwell, echoing upward, accented by the thumping of feet.

He was out of time.

He scooped some clothes and shoved them in his bag, and managed to find some bandages from where his first aid kit lay cracked open on the floor. He was turning towards the window, the one that faced the parking lot, when the door burst open.

"Rift! Eli Wagner! Stay where you are!"

So they knew both of his names now. Should he be surprised?

"Hands up!"

Eli didn't even turn around as he pulled the mask back over his face and slung the backpack over his shoulder. His hands were sticky with slowly drying blood.

" 't wasn't me," he mumbled, suddenly woozy. Everything hurt. His head was full of cotton.

"Freeze!" the police screamed, but Eli couldn't hear them anymore.

He pushed the button on his wrist.

He passed out before he even registered that he had fallen out of the third-story window.

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