Apollo rushed out the door, moving silently past Kit and Phoenix as he headed towards Echo. She was sitting on the grass in the distance, her back to all of them as four mangled corpses lay scattered around her. 

"Echo?" Apollo neared her like he would a wild animal. Slowing his pace and extending his hands, he tried to not make any sudden moves. The grass beneath his feet crunched, provoking Echo who whipped her whole body around to face him. 

Ghostly white eyes studied him curiously from below. 

"Echo, it's Apollo. Are you okay?" He stretched out each word, trying to make them as easy as possible to understand. She just tilted her head to the side in response. Apollo felt perplexed on the spot as Echo stood up with a lethal grace he had never seen before.

She stalked towards him, her nostrils flaring as she took a whiff of the air they were sharing. 

When Apollo spoke again, he tried to sound more authoritative. "Echo."

Echo could hear Apollo, the silent warning in the way he spoke her name. The way he smelt, he was worried about her, but he was also cautious. The shift in both his tone and his scent made her stop her prowl. Something deep inside her flickered, like a fire that was starting to lose oxygen. 

All of a sudden she couldn't breathe. 

Apollo caught Echo as her eyes returned to their original colour and her body went limp. 

~~~~~~

"Phoenix, I'm telling you, her eyes... they were white. Completely white." Apollo cupped his hands around the hot cup of coffee, lifting it up to his lips and then deciding he wasn't thirsty. Phoenix shifted in his seat, resting his elbows on the wooden table and wiping his forehead as he thought about what Apollo was saying. 

"When you found her, those monsters were hunting her." Apollo nodded absentmindedly. "They were able to follow her scent. Crawlers don't work together, never have." Phoenix focused on a painting on the wall behind Apollo. He could still hear in his head the lapping of waves on that serene beach, the four hour car journey it had taken his family to reach. His sister had been so in awe of the landscape that she spent that glorious summer day painting its likeness. She had given him the picture for his 21st birthday. 

"Phoenix?" Apollo watched his friend stare at the painting, something he always did when he was thinking about the crawlers. 

"Yes, sorry. There is something wrong with her. We saw the signs... I should have made her leave." Phoenix shook his head. 

Apollo stared at Phoenix with anger raging in his black eyes.

"You don't mean that. She just saved us from a crawler attack that would have killed us all." 

"I know, Apollo. But you can't - you can't expect me to just let her stay here and risk the safety of all of us. Something - or someone - is after her. If we continue to protect her, we'll be dragged into it too."

Apollo gave Phoenix a wry smile. "I don't think we'd be the ones protecting her." 

Phoenix's grim features relaxed slightly as he smiled at his oldest friend, their brotherly bond extending towards one another as they thought about what they were going to do next. 

"Okay," Phoenix broke the comfortable silence, "she stays. But we are going to find out everything we can. If she so much as lies to us about her age, she's gone." 

Apollo would never let his friend notice, but a part of him was relieved Phoenix had let Echo stay. There was something about that girl. He wasn't finished getting to know her, or being amazed by her. 

Leaning back in his chair, Apollo thought about their next moves. Echo was in her room, fast asleep, He'd had Dante check her over, but there wasn't a scratch on her skin. Kit and Fletch were busy fixing the broken fence panel, so that left Apollo and Phoenix to sort out Echo. 

"Can you tell her to get changed and come down here. I want to get to the bottom of this... situation now." Phoenix was rightly uncomfortable with having someone like Echo under his roof. Under their roof. 

"Yeah, sure." Apollo set down the hardly drunken cup of coffee and made his way to Echo's room. On the way, he started to wonder what her life had been like before he and Kit had hit her. 

Women, for reasons unknown to them, had virtually diappeared after the crawler population rapidly increased. It only took a few months until they outnumbered the humans, devouring the majority of the animal kingdom by the first year. 

It was true, not seeing any women in five years had been a considerable disadvantage in living in the apocolypse. Fletch had spent a few weeks driving around, trying to find any other survivors, women or men. The search came up empty, of course. The only things he found were the crawlers. 

Apollo knocked twice on Echo's door, waiting for a response that didn't come. The door was unlocked, so he made his way in. 

"Echo! What are you doing?" 

Echo was half way out of her window as she looked behind her at Apollo. He had his arms in the air, looking at her with annoyance. His dark blonde hair fell over his eyes slightly as he waited for her to step back into the room. 

Without replying, Echo let go of the wall and dropped soundlessly out the window.