With a bolt of shock, Day dropped the man and darted backwards, her heart suddenly pounding fast and hard as she heard the man.. the man who wasn't her father, who couldn't be her father, grunt and then moan. A spark flew out of his half-finished leg, and his eyes, his red eyes, were closed. 

"No," she thought to herself, and felt herself start to shake, felt the warmth of Josh's torn body press against her skin. She looked at the stranger, because he had to be a stranger, curls of blond hair, the hair her father had had, pressed against his cheek, a tinge of blue in the red eyes, like the blue of her father. 

"Day," Josh spoke quietly in her ear. "Is that your father?"

"NO!" Day protested, and glanced at the man, the man. "Yes, but no, not really. NO, he cannot be. My father's dead!" 

"Do you have a sister? Is your real name Daybreak?"

"Yes, yes, but it can't be him!" Day moaned and clutched her fists, glaring at Josh, who was being calm and sensible. Memories were flooding her, of him staggering home drunk after work, punching her mother when she became pregnant with Sarah. Telling Day to leave her sister in the fire, dying in the fire. The burning beam falling on his body. His scream as he was burned alive. She ran towards the man, gripped his cheeks harshly and raised up his head to look at her. His eyes blinked, once, twice. 

"But you're dead!" Day shouted. "You were burned alive in the fire that killed Mama!" 

"That's what they said," He grunted and his eyes flickered over her face, looking at her for the first time. An unbelievable expression of joy passed through his red eyes and the words that left his lips were full of recognition. "Day?" He whispered, a smooth hand... free of any burns, of any scars from the fire years ago, reaching out to her. Day watched it, mesmerized. Yes, it was caked with gray soil and small spots of newly opened scratches were traced on the skin, but it was unblemished of long, twisted burns that could crack open the skin, disintegrate it. The man's eyes flickered to his torn hand, and pulled it away, pressing against the ground to rise, face her. "Is it really you?" The red was temporarily gone from his eyes, as the virus battled for control inside of him. Day kneeled beside him, took up his stained hand, clutched it desperately. 

"Daddy?" She whispered at last, feeling tears well in her eyes. Suddenly, she was a little girl again, except everything was turned backwards. Instead of her father, powerful and menacing, yelling drunken slurs, strong, she was the one holding his hand as he battled for control of his own body. She felt his body soften, the slightest. 

"Is Mary..." he gazed at her desperately, fearfully, suddenly. 

"Mama didn't make it out of the fire," Day felt her voice hush, as if she could take away the weight those words held if she lowered her voice. The moan, the terrible, agony stricken moan, made the tears she had been holding spill over onto her cheeks, drip from her chin. She licked her lips, then, and salt tasted on her tongue. 

"I-" the man hiccuped, "I was so-" he looked away briefly and when he was there again, his eyes were red. "I never got to apologize. I never got to say goodbye. My fault, my fault." He was shaking his head. "Leave me, please." When his eyes rounded, Day realized he was seeing the horrors from the fire, all those years ago, watching as a flaming column collapsed onto his body, burning him, maybe. Or her sister...

"Sarah's still alive." Day interrupted his thoughts, peering hopefully into his anguished face. "She made it out, and I saved her. Well, sort of. Actually, I held her in my arms as the firemen got us out." She puffed out her chest proudly, feeling an odd, almost forgotten kind of hope stir deep inside of her. 

"Sarah?" He glanced up at her blankly, his eyes dull for a moment, before he gathered back his senses and jerked into reality. "Sarah?" He snarled it this time, surged from the ground and for a moment looked like the father Day had always cowered from in her youth. His hands whipped through the air, searching for a target, as his face twisted in anger. An inhuman-like noise erupted from his throat as his fist collided with the side of Day's cheek, and red filled her vision. 

"Day!" Josh's shout rang through the dark clearing as her wrist watch tumbled from her hand, clattering to the slimy soil and shining into an unknown section of the forest. Reeling, she fell onto her back, pressing her hands to her mouth to silence her cries of pain and rocking back and forth quietly as she internally screamed. She felt two warm bodies close around her, and she struggled to keep her eyes open, see the haze of red that surrounded everything to focus on Josh's wide, open, and concerned face as he leaned forward and touched her cheek delicately. Day bit against her fist to silence herself again, and felt the force of her teeth leave dents in her knuckles. 

"She'll be fine." Her father snapped. "She's overreacting. I've hit her worse than this before, and she survived. Got a thick head." The snarl that had built up in his chest hadn't gone away, and his eyes were now a hard red the color of scarlet. The virus, it was taking over. 

"Not like this, sir." Josh responded warily. "Your punch collided with several delicate bones in her cheek. If broken, this takes a while to heal, if at all." 

"You schooling me on anatomy, kid?" Her father glared at him, and his hands, unclenched, bunched together again. Josh looked away nervously, but as Day's hazy vision started to clear, she saw he was trembling. "I can tell they're not broken. If not, girl would be screaming now. Wouldn't be able to restrain herself." With a sudden shake of his head, the red in his eyes faded slightly. "Oh, no. Day- I can't lose you too. The virus!" 

Day struggled to sit up, because the tender bones in her cheek felt crushed. However, they didn't feel broken, and as she brushed a hand over then tentatively, her fingers came away with something red and sticky. Blood. "Please, Dad, just tell me..." She hated being the weak one, the one everyone crowded around anxiously, peering at her with anxious eyes as if she were some museum display. "Tell me, what happened after the fire?" 

"When the flaming wood fell on me, it appeared to you as if it fell on me! However, it actually fell on my leg, trapping it beneath and burning it away. That was pure agony." He paused to shudder. "To this day, I'm not sure how I survived the first few minutes before I passed out. I guess they saw an opportunity to take me away for whatever reason, but they told you I was dead and carted me away. The next time I woke up, I was chained to a wall in a jail cell, and starving. Where my leg used to be had been sewn together so I didn't feel pain, just the phantom of where it used to be. For years after that, they experimented on me, knowing I couldn't escape." Her father paused to breath, his grimy blond hair falling over his eyes. With a trembling hand, he brushed it away. "On the day they were finished with me, they started to build a prosthetic leg on me, so it would work perfectly, when the Sunless attacked and passed on the virus to me. So here I am, changing into a monster on what should've been the happiest day in years." With a sigh, his shoulders sagged and another sob escaped his lips. Day was rendered speechless at what her father had gone through, and all she could do was scoot towards him and drape an arm over his shoulder, feeling rage at whoever had done this.

"One more question," Day whispered quietly. "Who are they?" 

"I don't know," her father breathed. "While I was in there, I never saw a sign, or a logo, anything to show what they might be. Everything was white, white, white, black, white. The only colors in the facility." As his words brushed against her ear, everything seemed to darken. 

Because rage poured through his eyes, which were once again the color of blood. "