Nova was an incredibly busy person. Here, anything and everything wanted her attention at all hours of the day.

To some extent, I should've been used to it. Back home, she'd had the kind of extroverted personality people were drawn to, and therefore had more friends than she could keep track of. As a kid, this had meant a house packed out with friends every evening after school, and Mum cooking dinner for what felt like half the neighbourhood. In her teens, the social events were a little further afield, and she'd never let a lack of parental permission be a barrier to staying involved. As fast as she learnt to sneak out of her window, I learnt to cover for her.

After all, a party wasn't a party if Nova wasn't there.

Still, this place was a whole different league. There was no official hierarchy, and yet at the same time nobody could dispute that she was in charge. She couldn't walk from one place to another without somebody stopping to ask her a question. And I was the one with the most questions of anybody.

There was so much she still had to explain, so much I was still in the dark about. All I wanted was the chance to ask, but it was near on impossible to corner my sister. I tried, but she was always in a hurry to get somewhere – to see Erica because the generator was looking patchy again, to find out why someone hadn't done their job for the day, to go to bed because it'd been a really long day.

Being her sister counted for nothing. I was now just one of the group.

So when, a couple of days later, Nova pulled me aside and said she needed to talk, I jumped at the chance.

My first few days had been spent helping out other people, tagging along as they carried out their daily jobs. At the time, I was in the kitchen, behind the scenes with Erica as she prepared dinner. My involvement hadn't been an overwhelming success – I'd already burnt one batch of potato and filled the entire room with smoke – so to see Nova's head poke around the door came as more of a relief than I liked to admit.

With her head tilted to the side, her long braid hung low, pointing to the floor. "Astrid?" she called. "You got a minute?"

I was more than willing to give up one, but with an apron tied around my waist and my hands stuck into potato peeling, the decision probably wasn't down to me. I glanced at Erica.

The blue-haired girl shot a disbelieving look at Nova. "You're really leaving me to handle dinner alone?"

"Judging by the smoke earlier, I think that's in all of our best interests," she said. "It's okay. I'll adjust the schedule in future, make it even. Astrid, with me."

I couldn't get the apron off fast enough. Smiling apologetically at Erica, to which she rolled her eyes jokingly, I headed out of the door after my sister.

Not one to wait for anybody, she was already striding off ahead. I had to walk fast to catch up with her. "Where are we going?"

"My office."

"You've got an office?"

"If you can call it that," she said. "That's arguable, but it makes me sound important. It's a room for which I've got a key, at least."

"Still," I said, "sounds impressive."

It turned out to be several streets over, in a small building I hadn't yet noticed. I was still working out how to get my bearings, but the easiest thing to use for reference seemed to be the steeple of the church; above collapsing roofs and overgrown trees, it was generally pretty visible.

Inside, we made our way down a long, dark corridor filled with cobwebs and lined with at least a dozen doors. I followed Nova to the end, passing each one with just long enough to wonder what was inside. At the very end, she came to a halt, and I stood by as she dug a key from her pocket to unlock the door.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I couldn't help asking. "What is this place?"

The lock clicked, and with a push, the door swung open. "Honestly, I'm not sure. I've spent a lot of time investigating the city, and I wanted somewhere I could call my own. Some places look like they could collapse any moment, so obviously they're a no-go. This one seemed okay. The strangest thing was that this door still had its key in the lock – not to mention one that works. So I claimed it for my own. The only thing is I have no idea what's behind any of the others, and I can't get into them. It's a little creepy."

"A little?" I raised an eyebrow. "Try a lot."

The conviction in my voice made her laugh. As the sound echoed through the empty hallway, I realised it was the first time since being here that I'd heard it – and I'd missed it more than I knew.

Stepping inside the room, the musty smell hit me instantly; it clung to everything, as if determined not to give up its home for the last fifty years. There was hardly any furniture, just enough to stop the room from looking like a bare space. A huge mahogany desk, with two mismatching chairs either side – one leather, the other a less extravagant plastic – and an ancient-looking laptop sat atop the wood. I'd never seen anything so old-fashioned; it was big and bulky, nothing like the thin, flexible sheets we had nowadays that could fold up and fit in our pockets.

Nova saw me staring. "It doesn't work," she said. "I think the last of the battery went years ago, and I've yet to find a charger. Believe me, not knowing what's on it is killing me too."

"Nothing Erica can fix?"

"She's tried. No luck so far. I've stopped pinning my hopes on it."

I wasn't sure I could stand it, having the laptop right there on the desk, never being able to find out what it contained. A relic of life before the collapse, it probably held secrets none of us could imagine. I guessed Nova kept it there for the effect, to make the room look more like the office she wanted, but the unanswered question would've driven me mad.

She sunk down into the leather chair, leaving me to settle for the plastic.

Once I'd sat down, I looked at her, waiting.

"I need to talk to you," she said. "About what's going on here."

A flicker of hope ignited within me; this was the moment. She was finally going to give me some back story to this whole thing, and I could stop feeling so lost. After hope, there came relief.

"It's about time," I breathed. "You want to start with what happened back in the lab?"

Nova frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You know," I pressed. Only several days had passed since then; it couldn't have slipped her mind already. "Jace and I thought we were done for, and then you showed up. Next thing we know, we're being bundled into the back of a van, and suddenly we're here... with no explanation."

"It's a long story," she said dismissively. "And long stories waste time. That's not what I was going to talk to you about."

"Well, it's a bigger waste of time trying to figure out everything for myself," I pointed out. "Does it have to be such a big secret?"

"It's not a secret."

"Then why aren't you telling me anything?"

A moment of silence lapsed between us. Nova closed her eyes, her head leaning back as if she was losing patience. "I'm trying to run a smooth operation around here," she said. "If I've learnt anything in my life, it's that we have to focus on what's important."

"That's the problem," I told her. "I don't know what's important. Right now, I don't know anything."

She took a deep breath. The silence was so full of tension I thought she might order me to leave the office. I hadn't been trying to rile her up, but it seemed I'd done a pretty good job regardless.

"Fine," she said eventually. "What do you want to know?"

"You could start at the beginning," I suggested. "How you knew Jace and I would be in the lab at that moment, because it seems like a pretty huge coincidence to me. And why you decided to bring us out of New London in the first place. We were trying to stop something terrible happening. That's going to go ahead now, isn't it?"

"The day of the ceremony," Nova said, leaning back in her chair. "We already know about it."

"Wait. You know what they're planning?"

"We had an inkling. Our links with BioPlus are strong, and they're generally pretty good at figuring things out – things we probably shouldn't know. They've been prepared for longer than you think, and for a number of possibilities – a biological weapon being one of them. All the students at the academy have already been dosed up with Dysintax, just in case."

"So they're going to be okay? My friends, my classmates – they're all fine?"

Nova nodded. "It's been taken care of. Even if this big plan does go ahead, it's very likely nothing sinister will happen."

"So back home... Jace and I took all those risks for nothing."

"I mean, if you want to look at it that way," Nova said. "But you were trying to help, and that speaks louder than anything else. Plus, it means you ended up here. Which, you've got to trust me when I say, is the best place for you to be."

"How long have you been planning it?"

"A while," came her reply, and I had a feeling I wouldn't get anything more specific than that. "It's always been part of the plan to bring you here. We've just been waiting for the right moment."

"And what about Jace?" I asked. "Was he part of the plan, too?"

Nova paused, our gazes frozen above the desk. It seemed like she was trying to stare me out, but I held my nerve. A break in contact would only provide her with an excuse to skirt round the question, and this was one I definitely wanted to hear the answer to. She'd given away no hints of her feelings towards Jace. For all I knew, she could still be madly in love with him and simply good at hiding it – or she could've erased him from her mind completely. I wasn't sure which would be better.

"Not exactly," she said.

I went with a more explicit question. "Did you want him here?"

Nova sighed, reaching up to massage her temples as if my mere presence was giving her a headache. "The original plan was to get you here," she said. "My main priority was getting you away from Mum and Dad, because that house is far from safe. It should've been a nice easy job. But things happened faster than we anticipated, and you – rightly so – started to notice what didn't add up. And then your path crossed with Jace, and, well... things got a little more complicated."

"How so?"

"Well, he's a Snowdon, for a start. There are a lot of people in this country that'd like to see us dead, but his dad's top of the list. In any other situation, the family ties would make him impossible to trust – though of course you seemed to think otherwise. But in that lab, well... let's just say there was an unexpected revelation, and I decided to take a risk."

"Hold on," I said. "You said you were affiliated with BioPlus. They must have records. Surely you already knew Jace was modified?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Nova managed a humourless smile. "No, that came as a little surprise for us, too. Turns out Max Snowdon is capable of a bigger cover-up than we thought."

It was difficult to process so much new information at once; it felt like my brain had been well and truly overloaded already. The first part of the fog had started to clear, but the more I found out, the more other things didn't make sense. It was never-ending.

"Wait," I said. "You're saying all this like you've had a camera on Jace and I the whole time. How do you know so much about what we've been doing?"

Oddly enough, this was what made Nova smile. Without a word, she nodded towards my lap.

My gaze dropped, but all I could see was my hands folded there. I was about to ask her what she was staring so pointedly at when it occurred to me what was on my hand – and always had been.

"Your ring," I said.

The gold piece of jewellery, fashioned into the shape of an old Christian cross. The same ring that, once upon a time, Nova was never seen without. I'd lost count of the times I'd studied it closely, looking for some deeper meaning that might lead me to my sister. When the hours of thinking had come to nothing, I'd resigned myself to the belief being false hope. But perhaps that might not have been the case.

"What did you do to it?"

"I promise I didn't do it with the intention of spying on you," she said. "In fact, I didn't even plan on leaving it behind. The police caught me unexpectedly that night, and it must've fallen off in the struggle. I modified it to protect myself – or rather, a much more technically-minded friend did. Things started to get weird as soon as my side effects appeared. I'd get pulled aside at school to have government officers question me, except they'd twist my words in the hope of getting something else out. It was completely unfair. I thought if I had a recording device, I'd have evidence of how I was treated. What information I'd actually given, and what they'd invented. If they tried to take me away on some false accusation, I'd have evidence to defend myself. I guess it was naïve to think something so simple would work."

"I guess it did work," I said. "Just not in the way you expected."

The corner of her lip twitched into a small smile. "Yeah. It took a while for me to realise the potential, and even longer for us to hack the signal. Plus, I didn't even know if you'd found it, or if you'd be wearing it. I was counting on you being sentimental."

"It was the only thing I had left," I told her. "Sometimes it felt like the only proof you'd ever existed in the first place."

"You mean Mum and Dad weren't going to the ends of the earth to keep my memory alive?" Nova rolled her eyes. "Shocker."

"They were awful. It was like they wanted to pretend you were never there."

"Well, out of sight, out of mind." She folded her arms. The expression on her face gave away something more than she was saying, and I suspected there was deeper meaning to her words. "That seemed to be their motto all along."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't figure it out?"

"Figure what out?"

She paused. "Mum and Dad were the ones who turned me in."

A jolt went through my chest; I could almost feel my heart plummet to the pit of my stomach. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The words were too jarring, going against everything I'd believed for so long, a realisation that seemed to turn my world on its head.

No...

"What?" I breathed.

"You heard right," she said. "It was them."

"But... why?"

When Nova looked at me, her expression seemed almost sympathetic, like she pitied me finding this out for the first time. Though she'd had time to deal with it, something like this was a lot harder to hear without warning.

"I know for certain it was them," she said solemnly. "I found out later. But it makes sense. You saw how they reacted when the side effects appeared. They were absolutely terrified – I'm sure they didn't even see me as a person after that. I think part of it was guilt, knowing it was them who'd done this. They didn't feel safe living under the same roof as me, not when I could snap at any moment. A subtle tip-off to the right people, and before long... well, they didn't need to worry any longer."

My mouth hung open, waiting for words that wouldn't come. "That's... awful."

"It's why I wanted you out of there," she said. "I mean, aside from the danger of everything else. I thought if it ever started happening to you – the side effects – they might do the same thing. And if that happened, there was no guarantee you'd be able to escape the same way I did."

It physically hurt to think about. These were our parents, the people that should've been behind us for our entire lives, rallying support each step of the way. To think they were capable of something so evil and twisted was beyond imagination. Not to mention completely messed up in principle. If they hadn't chosen modification in the first place, side effects wouldn't have been a problem – and they never would have been faced with that choice.

"It did happen to me," I said quietly. Suddenly, the only image in my mind was the moment I'd seen red, and hadn't been able to stop myself from lashing out at my mother. "They could've turned me in, too."

"But you're here now," Nova said. "That's what matters. We succeeded in getting you out, and they can't do to you what they did to me. We learnt from experience."

Struggling to come to terms with the revelation, I couldn't stop thinking about it. My mind seemed unable – or unwilling – to process the fact that our parents were capable of betrayal. But I was going to have to get used to it.

"Anyway," Nova continued, in a way that made it obvious a change of subject was on the way, "that's not what I called you in for. There's something else."

"Okay." I could tell I sounded wary. "What is it?"

"Your medical results," she said, "from the other day."

"Okay," I repeated. Being fit and healthy for as long as I could remember, I wasn't expecting anything ominous, but Nova's expression ignited a spark of worry. That kind of face was never a good sign. "What is it?"

"No need to look so terrified," she said. "I'm not about to give you a terminal diagnosis. Your physiological results were all perfectly normal."

It permitted some relief, but there was obviously something else.

"It was the genetic sequence," she continued. "There was some kind of issue. I think we're going to need to run it again."

"What do you mean?"

Nova waved me off. "It's probably nothing. Thomas seems to think there was a contamination somewhere, or something went wrong with the sample. It's entirely possible. Sure, he's a scientist, but he's also human, and humans make mistakes. We just need to give it another go to get a proper result."

"Why do you say probably?" I asked. "Probably implies there's another possibility."

"Really, Astrid, I'm not trying to worry you. Thomas wasn't concerned. He thought the sequence was a little odd, but our equipment isn't perfect. We just need to give it another go."

She was doing her best to convince me, but even with statistical probability on my side, my stomach still squirmed uncomfortably. I wanted – needed – to know more. "What made it odd?"

Nova paused. It seemed like she was choosing her words carefully. "We found more than we were expecting," she said eventually. "That's all."

An evasive answer: one that only offered a fraction of what I wanted to know, but what I perhaps had to learn to be grateful for. Nova's need-to-know policy stretched further than I'd initially thought. I couldn't shake off the feeling that this meant something more, this odd result more than the product of sloppy scientific method, but I tried to stop myself from jumping to conclusions.

They would run it again, be more careful – and then we'd know for certain.

But know what, I wasn't sure.

"I have to run," Nova said, already rising from her chair. With the conversation over, at least by her standards, her brain was already racing ahead to the next matter, not one to waste a single moment. "There's somewhere I need to be. Can you see Thomas down at the lab this afternoon, get him to sequence you again?"

With her already on her feet, there was little opportunity to protest. "Yeah," I said instead. "Sure."

She gestured for me to head out first, so I did. Once over the threshold, I lingered, watching as she locked the door behind us. I didn't know why she bothered. There was really nothing of value in that space, at least not anything anyone here would think worth stealing, but it seemed important to her anyway.

So I didn't question it. It wasn't my place to.

In this community, it seemed both everything and nothing was shared, all at the same time.

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

Hi, guys! How was your Monday? Mine wasn't actually too terrible -- it's my last week at work before I get a whole 10 days off for Christmas, so good things are on their way!

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- Leigh