Jude

I break my promise as soon as I'm out of their sight. Instead of heading for the bathroom, I go straight to Taylor's room. It's one floor above and a little to the left—as long as Rani and Lana don't come looking, they'll never know.

When I get there, Taylor has already changed back into his clothes, and he's tying his shoes. He's unsurprised and undisturbed when I close the door behind me. If anything, it looks like he's egging me on.

"They said I'm good to go," he says tonelessly. "But they keep asking for identifying information. I'll have to escape before they come back."

"Good," I say tightly.

He keeps tying his shoe, but he's looking directly at me. When he's done, he sits up straight, never breaking eye contact. "Are Rani and Lana still here?"

"Yes."

"Did Rani explain why she did that?"

"You killed Jansen."

Something flashes across his face; at first I think it's anger that he's been made, but I quickly realize it's panic. "I did," he says quietly.

My hands clench. "And were you going to kill us?"

This makes him think. His eyes squeeze shut, and he stands, turning so that he's only facing me halfway. "I—"

"That's a yes or no question," I snap.

He looks at me. "Yes," he says quietly. "But then I changed my mind. And now, I—"

"Owe us an explanation? Yeah, you do." I go to leave, but I turn halfway through the door. "Give me a minute head start," I say stiffly. "I wasn't supposed to talk to you."

I slam the door behind me and go back downstairs, taking my place next to Rani. Neither of them ask where I was, so I take it as a sign that they believe I was in the bathroom, or that I got lost on my way there. Plausible, considering I've never been in this hospital before, and I hope to never be here again.

A few minutes later, Taylor walks right by us. We stand and follow, lagging several steps behind. I'm bursting with anger, betrayal, confusion, and about a million different emotions, and I'm sure that Rani and Lana and hell, even Taylor, are bursting too, but we do our best to give nothing away.

There's no way he knows where he's going, because he was barely lucid when he brought him here. As far as he knows, we're not even in Georgia anymore. And yet, his steps never falter. He does stop by his car—which we drove here—to pick up his jacket, but then, he keeps walking, and we keep following until we've found a clearing in a small thicket of trees, occupied only by a few squirrels that go running away when we arrive.

Taylor stands, alone, on one side, and the three of us are on the other. He looks annoyingly composed; I know for certain that I fractured one of his ribs when I gave him CPR, and I know that he feels it with every breath, and yet, I'd never say by looking at him that he almost drowned.

"Whatever Dr. Jansen told you about me," he says to Rani, "was a last-ditch effort to save his own skin and his grand plan."

Rani narrows her eyes, but she doesn't respond.

"He didn't find us the way that we are," Taylor continues. "He made us. After each of our accidents, he took our bodies from the hospital and used us like lab rats. It was science and cruel experimentation that gave us these powers, and when we woke up, he lied to us and convinced us it happened naturally, and that we could become heroes."

"Why?" Lana asks.

"Because he was a fucking maniac, that's why. He was intelligent and egotistical and he didn't give a shit about us because we were just injured kids who no longer had any direct family. He probably told himself he was doing us a favor."

Rani steps forward. Her face is hard, tone even harder. "I want to see it," she says. "Show me the lab where he made us."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I burned it." Taylor smiles, and it's terrifying. "It was underneath the Oregon house. I torched it and I torched Dr. Jansen, too, because he didn't deserve to live even a second longer."

"Then what proof do you have?"

Taylor takes out three folders from his jacket and slides them across the clearing instead of handing them to us. I don't know why he does it, if it's because he's afraid we'll try to kill him, or if he thinks we're afraid he'll try to kill us.

"Those are your files," he announces, "with all the details of every little thing he did."

Rani picks up the stack, separates them, and hands me and Lana our individual folders. I hesitate before opening it, and so do they, but we do it. The first page is my picture and the kind of info you'd find on a passport. Address, height, date of birth, those things. At the bottom are details of my accident.

And when I flip the page, everything goes to shit.

Bone saws. Acid. Deprivation chambers. Flatlining. My eyes go through the pages faster than I can process, but I can't slow down. There are dozens of detailed accounts of procedures and observations and things that I, never in a million years, imagined Dr. Jansen doing to me.

Lana clears her throat. "You could have made these yourself," she mumbles, but her heart isn't it.

Taylor just laughs, and it's Rani who responds. "This is Jansen's handwriting," she says softly. "I'm sure of it."

I close my folder. I've seen enough. Lana is the last to close hers, and after she's done, I ask the final question.

"Why were you going to kill us?"

Taylor doesn't look composed anymore. His voice is hoarse, and the pain of breathing is finally getting to him. "Because the world is safer without us," he says quietly. "We're not fit to be heroes."

"Why?" Rani demands. "You just assumed we'd be unstable psychopaths, like you?"

"Psychopath?" Taylor repeats. He laughs, twice, and it sounds like a choke each time. "Do...do you think I was always like this? Aren't you wondering how I found out the truth in the first place? I used to be like you! I was eager and happy to be alive and I was genuinely excited to become a team!"

He pauses to wince. "I was the first," he says. "When Jansen sent me out, there was no Elementals theory—I didn't even know we would be called that until I met Jude. He simply sent me to Michigan and told me to wait. I guess he wasn't sure yet if he would find more kids to steal and experiment on, so he couldn't feed me the lie just yet. I had no idea there would be more. When he found Rani, he told me he found someone who controlled water, and that he figured out there was some cosmic thing going on, that people with the powers of the classical elements were simply...appearing. That's when he decided on the future team. Then he told me he found a boy with the power of Earth, and a girl with the power of air, and I was genuinely, genuinely excited, like all of you were." He looks at each of us and swallows. "And that's when they started coming back."

A chill goes down my spine. "What came back?" Lana asks.

"The memories," Taylor says. "I started seeing these scenes, bits and pieces of things that I swear I never experienced. Remnant feelings of pain. Memories of the things he did—but I didn't know it at the time. I went to Oregon for answers, and he was nervous when I asked him about it. He said it was all a bad dream, but it felt wrong. I started poking around, and after burning down three locked doors and a vault, I found the lab and all his meticulously detailed reports. When I confronted him, he panicked and hid somewhere in the house."

"That's when he sent me the video," Rani says quietly. "And your addresses."

"It took me a few minutes to find him, and then I chased him to the lab and killed him." Taylor looks down at his hands. "This was a little over a week ago. It was too late to prevent anything—all three of you were already made and sent out to wait."

So I decided to kill us instead. Those words go unsaid.

"I was made the earliest," he continues, "that's why I'm the only one who remembers right now. But it's only a matter of time until your memories start coming back, and if you don't believe me now—" he laughs cruelly "—you will believe me then."

Rani's gripping her folder tightly. I hold mine by pinching a corner, letting it dangle. Lana is holding hers to her chest. I think we're fantasizing on how we're going to destroy them. I'm sure Taylor has already burned his to a crisp—along with his pager.

"I believe you," Rani says quietly, and for the first time, she meets Taylor's eyes with an expression that isn't pure hatred.

Lana nods, eyes glued to the ground. I nod, too. Whoever said the truth will set you free was never told something like this. I don't feel free. I feel like shit.

"But murder shouldn't have been your plan," Rani says tightly. "How could you do that to us? You were supposed to lead us--"

Taylor laughs. It's scratchy. "The only reason he chose me to lead was because I had the most time with our new reality, and he thought I'd be more well-adjusted. That was before he realized our memories would come back. So it wasn't about skill, or morality, or kindness, it was about time and the order we happened to be in. I'm no better than any of you -- if anything, I'm clearly fucking worse."

Rani grips her folder even tighter. I can see the gears turning in her head; had she killed Taylor like Jansen wanted, had we become a team, she would've been next on the roster to lead. What would she have done if it was her who got the memories with no predecessor to explain?

"Are you still planning to kill us?" she asks flatly.

Taylor shakes his head. "I don't care anymore. I'm tired."

"But do you still think we should die?"

He hesitates, but the answer is still, "Yes."

"You think we're monsters," Lana says quietly.

"We are!" he insists. " Those scars we all have running down our sternums? Those didn't happen during the embalming like he said, because we were never sent to the morticians in the first place, because the hospitals never even declared us dead! He stole us from the hospitals while we were alive and faked the entirety of our deaths. We got those scars when he cut us open down the middle because he wanted to inject chemicals directly into our hearts and see what happened. You can read all about that on page four, and that's not even the worst of it!" Taylor finally stops yelling, and he shakes his head, hand pressing against the fractured rib.

"Nothing good can come from what he did to us," he says quietly. "We're monsters. If you still think you can be a hero even after you know the truth, even after you feel the truth and the pain, then be my guest!" He spreads his arms. "But I'm out."

He shakes his head, takes a step back, and repeats, "I'm out."

We all stare at each other. No one says another word. Lana is the first to move. There are tears in her eyes, and when they start to fall, she begins shaking her head and turning. Then she's walking away, and she never turns around or glances over her shoulder. She simply leaves.

When I tear my eyes away from her, Taylor is gone, too. Before thinking it through, I go after him in the direction I think he went in, and soon I catch him heading for the parking lot.

"How were you going to do it?" I yell.

He turns to face me. "What?"

"You found me first," I say tightly, "you came to Washington with a plan. What was it, pushing me down a cliff? Stabbing me while I slept? Burning me alive? How were you going to fucking murder me?"

Taylor backs away. "I wasn't--I didn't, I didn't actually plan it out."

"All those hours you spent driving to find me, all those hours we spent road-tripping to find them, talking like we were friends, there's no way you didn't think of some ideas."

Taylor's backed up to the car now. For a moment I think he's going to scramble inside and run for it, but he just leans back against the door, arms crossed tightly over his abdomen, eyes shiny.

"I really didn't plan it through," he says quietly. "I didn't decide a method, but...it would've been quick. You wouldn't have seen it coming. I didn't want any of you to suffer."

"Wow!" I exclaim. "That's so gracious. Thank you for being so considerate."

Surprisingly, he laughs. "I'm stupid. I know. I'm sorry."

"I know you're sorry," I say. "I know you regret it. What I don't understand is why you didn't tell me the truth after you let me live. You had days with me. Why did you let me sit there and gush about how excited I was? Were you laughing at me?"

"No."

"Then why did we have to force it out of you? Why didn't you tell any of us earlier?"

"I was expecting you to be like me!" he cries. "Confused and angry. But the moment I met you, I realized you hadn't gotten your memories back. You were kind and you were genuinely excited to become heroes together, and I just—" He stares at the ground, taking a deep breath. "I couldn't bring myself to kill you or tell the truth. I thought I could delay it, I thought I would take all of us out together, but we didn't find Rani, and when we found Lana, she was the same as you. Sweet and excited."

An ambulance roars through the lot, and we wait for the sound to pass.

"I decided," Taylor says, "that if I didn't tell you the truth, if I convinced you that the memories were just nightmares and if I covered up Jansen's death, then maybe the Elementals would have a chance. You guys would never have to know. I swear, I really was going to try and make it work, but then Rani blew that plan out of the water. Literally."

That's it, I think. The last pressing question about what's happened. The past is closed, and now the future begins. We're done here. I know that no matter what I say, he's going to leave like Lana did. I should do the same, but I stick around in the silence as we both stare at the ground.

"I had no right to decide we were better of dead," he says finally. "I'm sorry."

"I know. I forgive you."

He looks up at me. "Really?"

"I won't pretend that you being the first to get your memories back didn't contribute to you going crazy. You're his victim as much as the rest of us."

Taylor stares at me like he can't quite believe it. "Thank you for saving my life."

I shrug. "You didn't deserve to go out like that. And, besides, we needed to get the truth out of you, and it'd be hard to interrogate a corpse."

He laughs again and then winces, taking another deep breath. "This is still goodbye."

"What will you do now?" It's out of my mouth before I think it through, and he seems surprised I asked.

"I'm going home," he says flatly. "And then I'm jumping off a cliff."

I raise an eyebrow. "Is that a joke?"

"I don't know yet." He takes something out of his pocket and holds it out; the keys to our motel room, the one in Lana's building. My stuff is still there—so is some of his, but he clearly doesn't want to go back for it. "Goodbye, Jude."

I take the keys, and he gets into the car. He doesn't look at me as he drives off, and I don't wait to see it turn into the main road. I turn around and head back for the clearing. There's nothing left for me there since I have my folder with me, but a small part of me wants to make sure it's empty.

It isn't.

Rani is still here, and she's startled when I come through the trees. She was obviously expecting a moment to herself, and I turn to go, but she speaks.

"Lana didn't come back," she says. "I didn't expect her to, but...yeah. She's gone."

I nod.

"Taylor?"

"He went home," I say.

Rani nods. Her folder is still in her hands, but it's sopping wet and flimsy, the ink smudged and unreadable. Her pager is on the ground; the screen is shattered, and it's leaking water. "Well," she says awkwardly.

"Well," I repeat, shifting my weight from foot to foot. "I guess..."

"This is goodbye?" she suggests.

My heart feels a little pang of sadness. Or is this a memory of Dr. Jansen forcibly injecting drugs into it? I don't think so, it's not my time yet, but soon I won't be able to tell the difference.

"Goodbye, Rani," I say, going backwards.

"Goodbye Jude," she responds softly.

And this is it. The Elementals, meant to change the world, separate into sadness and despair over the truth of their origin. I walk away, deceptively steady. Once again I'm leaving behind friends, except this time, unlike all the times I moved, there's no promise to keep in touch. This feels worse somehow; the empty promises at least gave me a day or two's worth of hope.

All I feel now is numb.