It was the first time in days that I could recall getting some real sleep.

It may have just been the exhaustion, the final breach of my physical limit. There was, of course, no gene modification that could bypass the need for sleep completely – or if there was, they hadn't tried to force it into my DNA. I must've drifted off without realising, because the only point at which it occurred to me I wasn't conscious was when the noise had already pulled me from the haze.

At first, I wondered where it was coming from. It seemed I'd been so deep in slumber that I failed to even recognise my own phone. It lay under my pillow, vibrating with such furious insistency that it seemed to drill right through my skull. Bleary-eyed, I fumbled for the device, blinking several times in confusion when the name flashed onscreen.

"Orla?"

"Astrid!" The word came out in a single rushed exhale, one she'd clearly been hanging onto for a long time.

"What time is it?" I mumbled, slowly rising into a sitting position and squinting at the time illuminated on my bedside table. "What's wrong?"

"I need to talk to you."

"Okay," I said slowly, wondering if I was missing something. "I'm here."

"I can't do it over the phone. I need to talk to you."

"Why? Is something wrong?"

"I don't know, but I can't take the chance if somebody's listening to this conversation," she said. I wished I was imagining the note of panic in her tone, that it was a construct of my half-asleep brain, but something told me it was all too real. "Bugs are everywhere. None of us would have any idea."

"Okay, okay." It seemed like I had to make at least some attempt to calm her, even if perhaps there was no reason to be. "Where do you want me to meet you?"

"I'm outside your gate," she said. "You just need to come and let me in."

***

Five minutes later, I'd pulled on a jacket and boots over my pyjamas, and I was hurrying up the gravel driveway – wishing my footsteps wouldn't sound quite so loud. Nova had always made sneaking out so easy, never once waking Mum or Dad, but only upon trying for myself did I realise exactly how many obstacles she'd had to deal with on a nightly basis. Boots were all wrong for silent footsteps, and even on the opposite side of the house my parents' room seemed far too close for comfort. It was clearly an art that my older sister had once mastered.

Orla came into view the same time the gate did: a dark-haired figure, bundled into layers of a coat, whose silhouette was sliced into pieces by the iron bars. I expected her to smile on my approach, but the real expression I encountered turned out to be just a visual projection of the voice on the phone.

"Are you okay?" I asked, reaching for the keypad at the side of the gate and entering my parents' usual security code. It worked, and I stepped back as the gates began to move apart.

"Not really." She moved inside once the gap was big enough. "It couldn't wait."

"Do you want to come inside?"

A definite hesitation. Then, "Will we be overheard?"

"I mean..." I glanced back at the house, the centrepiece of what people had once called the Oxford Estate. Every window sat darkened, but of course with the introduction of new voices there was no guarantee they'd stay that way. "My parents are asleep. But I know somewhere quieter."

"Okay, sure," she breathed. "Lead the way."

Gravel crunched underfoot as we headed back toward the house, a painful silence settling in the space that both of us refused to fill with words. I'd left the door unlocked, and we slipped inside, letting the door close as slowly as possible so the noise wouldn't echo through the marbled front hall. Then, we made for the stairs, and Orla's footsteps followed the path forged by my own all the way to Nova's room.

The roof was silent – like always. It would've been strange to hear anything other than deafening quiet as I pulled myself onto the tile, slotting the window back into place so our voices wouldn't travel. It was odd, really – how I remained none the wiser about anything Orla had to say, and yet had all her paranoia about prying ears, like it rubbed off on me by pure association.

"What did you mean?" I said first, when a snippet of our previous conversation came wandering back. "Bugs are everywhere? Is the government listening?"

For a second, she was quiet, and I wondered briefly if she'd come all this way for the words to catch in her throat. "I don't know," she said eventually. "I just know they've tightened national security since the bombings, and it's not exactly out of the question. As far as they're concerned, they probably think the mayor's daughter might have something interesting to say."

"Well," I said slowly, "it kind of sounds like you do."

"I don't know. It's not that I've come to some earth-shattering revelation, or anything like that. It's more like... I've put the pieces together, and something's wrong."

"What something?"

"Remember that day after the rally?" she said, glancing over. "What you said about my sick day, on the thirtieth?"

"Yeah..."

"It's been retracted. I have to go to school."

Suddenly, I felt my mouth go dry. "What?"

"Yeah," she breathed, and though she tried to hold her facial expression, I could see the fear seeping into every line. "Mum told me yesterday."

"Did she say why?"

"There's some kind of... ceremony. I don't know, Drew-Vaughn's been mentioning it in morning assemblies, but I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention. I thought I'd be missing anyway. And then yesterday, Mum comes home from the office with the news that it's mandatory, and every student has to be there."

"What kind of ceremony?"

"Some kind of prize-giving, I think. Awards for outstanding achievement, contributions to the school community, that kind of thing. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was just Drew-Vaughn's narcissism, but now... I'm not so sure."

The pace of my heart was pounding now – any longer and I was sure it would burst out of my chest. Each word out of Orla's mouth seemed to up the pressure one tiny notch, but I was no longer confident my ribcage could take it. This wasn't a coincidence. What Jace and I had uncovered over at City Hall meant something, and this only strengthened the panicked dread that had been building inside me for days. We may have been left with endless doubts, but one thing was for sure: something bad was going to happen at the academy on that day.

"What did your mum say? When she told you, what were her words?"

"She said the order had come from work. Someone in City Hall said the plans had been finalised, and all concerns had been... ironed out."

"What?" I breathed, more to myself than anything. "What does that mean?"

"The government don't know about me," Orla said. I watched panic flash across her dark eyes, the momentary lapse somehow enough to eat into the image that usually remained so cool and composed. It was remarkable how the situation managed to shift a perspective. "They don't know I'm modified, and they don't know the city mayor went through this under their noses. They assume they're the innocent ones. But it means all the while they assure her I'm safe... it could be exactly the opposite."

"Safe from what? What the hell are they planning?"

Orla looked down, and I realised only once I couldn't see her face that staring into darkness was much worse. "They said it would only affect those who have something to hide. It's something... biological."

My stomach lurched. "What, like a virus? Are they trying to cull us?"

"I don't know." She sounded like she was on the verge of tears, desperately clawing them back so she could hold herself together. "I don't know, Astrid. All I can tell you is that there's something planned, I think we're all in danger..."

"Then drop out," I told her, the order coming out more forcefully than I intended. "Drop out, Orla! It's not worth your life!"

When she looked at me, her eyes were glazed with tears, a shine so intense I could almost see the moonlight bouncing off. "That saves me," she said, "but what about everybody else?"

I knew she was right. As much as I wanted the answer to be simple, a single action and consequence, the web we were tangled in was much too complex. Saving Orla would be a case of privilege, one stemmed from her mother's authority. What about the kids who weren't lucky enough to have government connections? The kids whose parents had no such warning that they would soon be caught in the centre of biological warfare?

"We have to do something," I said, realising once the words were out of my mouth that they were exactly what I'd said to Jace. "We have to try to stop this."

"But how?" Orla had asked the question, but it wasn't like we needed to hear the words aloud. They'd been ricocheting off the inside of our skulls from the moment the conversation had started.

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"Well," Orla said, and the sudden force in her tone had me looking up, "we've got no hope of knowing if you refuse to tell me everything."

"What?"

"You know more than you're letting on," she continued, and it was the sudden change in demeanour that started the rapid pounding of my heart. "The day after the rally, you knew this. You knew there was something planned for the thirtieth – hell, you were the one that planted the idea in my head in the first place. So, tell me what you know, or I don't know how you think we're going to get anywhere."

I was taken aback by her insistence – and yet this was the Orla I was used to. Fiery, determined and willing to bend things any way they'd give to get her way. Probably a maternal influence, since the mayor of New London was also famous for taking no shit. Perhaps this was the natural transition from hopelessness: a realisation that if things were going to get done, you had to do them yourself. If you thought about it, that was kind of the mind-set that had led to Kristopher Holland's genetic engineering success in the first place.

"I don't—"

"No," she cut in, before I could get any further. "I know what you're going to do. You're going to give me excuses, and do whatever you can to keep me in the dark. But I'm not having it, Astrid. It's not up to you to handle the world alone. I'm part of this as much as you are – and I deserve to know."

Frozen like a deer in headlights, all I could do was stare. I could hear the truth in what she was saying, even if it was hard to stomach. Orla was modified too. I wasn't the only victim in this whole mess, and like I'd realised up on the rooftop, neither was Nova. But after wrapping myself up in it all for so long, cocooning myself in trauma like I was the only one that had a right to it, letting anyone else in felt weird.

"Astrid," she said again, as her unwavering stare seemed to burrow its way into me. "Tell me what happened."

The words rolled over and over on my tongue, drawn back again each time they felt ready to emerge. Once it happened, there was no going back. Orla would be looped into this whole mess, and the responsibility of anything that happened thereafter would rest on my shoulders. What if this was the straw that broke my back?

"I met someone," I said eventually, because in the moment, those three words were all I could muster.

Despite being perched on the edge of the roof tile, Orla still managed to look like she was on the edge of her seat. "Who?"

"You probably won't believe me."

Her expression told me off for stalling, even though she hadn't said the words aloud. "Try me."

Here it was: the point of no return. Just his name seemed to leave a taste in my mouth, even if that was totally illogical, and probably a sign I was in way over my head. Orla continued staring at me, clearly hoping if she kept it up for long enough she could drag out the answer she was looking for.

I braced myself for impact. "Jace Snowdon."

Orla paused. I waited for the disbelief, the panic, the uncertainty to cross her face. But it didn't. "You know Jace?"

Instead, it seemed I was the one in for a surprise. There was an unmistakable familiarity cloaked over her inflection, and I didn't need to clarify to know what she was getting at. "Wait... you know Jace?"

"Of course I do," she said, like this had been obvious all along. Like I was supposed to know something she'd never mentioned in all the years we'd known each other. "Our parents work in government, and they like to drag us along to events. It's not like we've never crossed paths."

I was struggling to wrap my head around it, though her explanation was perfectly logical. The link between the two was hardly tenuous, and yet I'd failed to connect the dots all this time. With everything else going on, it was easy to forget how life had been before – how it had felt to walk through the doors of the academy every day, sit between Orla and Verity in Modern Humanity class, come home to study relentlessly for university entrance exams. Easy to forget that Jace might've encountered other people before me.

"You know him," I repeated, because I couldn't seem to manage anything else.

"Look, we're not best friends," Orla said. "I don't call him up every night for a catch-up, nor do we go out for dinner on Friday nights. He's a familiar face in a room full of boring government people, but beyond that... not a lot else."

"So you've not spoken to him?"

"No," she said, "not in months. But now you're making me think I should."

"It's not that."

"Then what is it?"

I stopped. This was clearly the time to give her an answer, and even I'd figured I owed her that much. I couldn't keep everyone in the dark forever, like Jace and I were the only ones deserving of our own self-absorbed spotlight. Like a warped dream, buried deep inside me, that we'd be the heroes to save the world. But what was I even supposed to say?

"I met him at the launch party," I said, because without much other direction, I figured it was best to start at the beginning. "A couple of months ago. When everything about Eva Kelly came out, and BioNeutral started all their shit..."

"Okay." She seemed to sense I was struggling to find my words, not willing to run the risk of me stopping. "Go on."

"My dad was there on his company's special invitation, and apparently it'd look suspicious if we didn't all go with him. So I did, but I was getting sick of it all, and I went out some back exit to get some air."

"And so did Jace," Orla finished for me.

"Yeah." I shot her a strange look. "How'd you know?"

She shrugged. "Sounds like him. To be found waiting on the sidelines when his dad gets too much."

"Right," I said slowly, wondering if it was right to be unnerved at how accurate this sounded. "He does that often?"

"Not often..." Was she trying to backtrack, or had my question just come out sounding too accusatory? "It's happened a few times – or at least when I've noticed. Still, guess you can't blame him, when you've got a dad that intense."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess so."

"So fast forward," she continued. "That was the launch party, but a lot of stuff's happened since then."

"We made a... deal." The word took several seconds to come out, and I spent all of them considering whether this was even the right way to describe it. The agreement Jace and I had come to was nothing ordinary. I was hardly sure it made sense to me, let alone an outsider. "We're both looking for something. I need to know what happened to my sister, and I think... maybe he can help me."

At this point, Orla was quiet, and I guessed maybe it was the mention of Nova that had snatched the words from her mouth. She knew of her existence, of course – we'd been friends around the time my sister had stopped getting out of the car with me at the school gates, and I was known to spend more than a few lunch breaks crying in the toilets. There were never too many questions asked; there never were at the academy. When people got dragged out of class in suspicious circumstances, or stopped showing up altogether, nobody stopped to think too hard. We continued to go about our daily business, like we were supposed to.

Eventually, she spoke. "You think he's going to help you?"

I scanned her face, searching for any trace of deeper meaning that I might be able to find without asking. "What do you mean?"

"Well..." She paused, and I wondered if she was sifting through the same towering pile of reasons not to trust Jace Snowdon. They'd bothered me at first, but were surprisingly easy to forget. "He's not really on our side, is he? With his dad... he's one of them."

"It's more than that," I said, the words coming out with slightly more conviction than in my head. "He's looking for something too. And I know his dad's Max Snowdon, and is probably the one planning to kill us all off... but it's not him."

"Okay." Perhaps it was my cynicism, but she didn't seem willing to take my word for it. "I mean, it sounds like you know him better than I do, so maybe you're right. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still be careful."

"I am being careful."

Orla smiled, and I wished I could overlook the slight force behind it. "That's all I ask," she said. "So does he have a bright idea? What's your next move?"

I knew the question had been coming, and it was hardly a surprise. Still, that didn't mean I could hold my best friend's gaze as she waited for the answer – an answer I wanted nothing more than to be able to give. Standing up for Jace was that much harder without the tangible evidence he was setting us on the right track, and yet I found myself doing it anyway. I looked out across the street, every window of my neighbours' houses plunged into darkness, lit only by the sporadic bursts of street lights.

"There's not one yet," I said, "but we're going to do something. We don't have a choice."

"Right." She paused. "Whatever you decide, Astrid... whatever he decides. You don't have to go through with it. You're your own person, and you shouldn't forget that. Whatever happens – Jace Snowdon doesn't have you bound by handcuffs."

It wasn't what I'd been expecting to hear, and yet the words seemed to resonate with me anyway. Was I imagining it, or were there undertones of warning too? I couldn't quite work it out.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

"And keep me in the loop," she continued. "We're all in this, you know? It's not a battle you have to fight alone. I'm in the middle of this too."

"Of course." I nodded, and when Orla reached over to clasp my hand in a tight squeeze, the simple gesture seemed to solidify the new union. "Whatever happens... we're all in it together."

She smiled, like she'd finally got what she wanted from me. But in the echo of night silence, all I could think about was the huge expanse of open space stretching out before me, and how I had no hope of gaining a sense of direction.    

-------------------------

Hi, everyone! Working hard to get these chapters out as fast as I can, because I'm really eager to push through with this story. To the author it kind of feels like my plot is falling apart, so I hope that's not coming across to the readers (though it doesn't seem to be!).

I'm back at university now for my final term of my final year (slightly terrifying), but I'm working on an independent research project and hoping that means flexible hours with time to write in between! If that's the case, chapters look like they're on your way...

How's everyone's 2017 going so far? I can't believe this story is a year old already!

- Leigh