I'd fallen asleep at some point during the car ride.

I didn't know when, or even how I could've with the anxiety that was coursing through my veins. But I had.

And I'd woken up in a cell.

The walls were a dark gray and made of stone. There were no lights in the cell, and the only light that allowed me to actually see my surroundings came from light fixtures in the hallways outside of the bars of the cell. Bars being thick metal poles that sprung from the floor to the cell's ceiling. It felt extremely old fashioned and I wondered if it was because they just really didn't care about their prisoners and decided that it was no use spending extra money on making the cells more likable.

Beyond the bars I could make out other barred areas, other cells. I couldn't tell if anyone actually was in any of them, but I couldn't hear anything else so I guessed not. Inside my own cell the only furniture was two identical beds, one on either side of the windowless room. They were both made of metal and had cheap mattresses on top with nothing else. No pillows or blankets. I could already tell that they wouldn't be too comfortable to sleep in.

I leaned back against the stone wall, feeling coldness spread through my shirt and onto my back. I was still wearing my clothes from before, and they looked dirtier than ever. Nothing moved outside the cell and the only thing moving from within it was my heart beating and my chest pulsing up and down in time with it.

Then I heard footsteps coming down the hallway. Slaps of sneakers hitting against hard floor. I stood up quickly, more alert than I was before. It had to be an inspector coming to take me away. I considered trying to make a weapon out of the few things that were in my room, but realized that there was nothing that I could use. Both the beds were bolted into the ground and the frames didn't have anything that I could pull off, unless I was able to break metal which I wasn't.

Throwing a mattress at the inspector probably wouldn't do anything either, and only would make me lose the mattress that I'd have to use to sleep in. I could always take the other mattress, but then there was another problem: I doubted the mattress would actually harm the inspector. It was a mattress, after all, and the purpose of a mattress was to be soft enough to sleep on.

I couldn't even use anything I had on me to my advantage since it was just pants and a shirt, nothing that was any sharper than the mattress would be.

And then the footsteps stopped in front of my cell and I heard tiny beeping noises of buttons being pressed. I looked up and saw a brown haired inspector typing something into a keypad and then opening the door.

He walked towards me robotically and grabbed both my hands. He pulled them behind my back before I could even fight back and then what felt like a zip tie was tightened around my two wrists. He grabbed my upper arm and began pulling me towards the opening in the cell. I went along, not having any other real choice. What could I do? My hands were zip tied together and I couldn't just run away.

I was taken down identical gray hallways until the man stopped in front of a gray painted metal doorway with a random assortment of letters and numbers on it. He took out a key card and swiped it next to a keypad on the side of the door, then pressed in a couple numbers that I couldn't see because his hand was covering the entire keypad.

The door clicked as it unlocked, and the inspector pulled it open. He walked inside, still pulling me along.

The room was completely white in contrast to the dark gray cell I'd been in. It reminded me only slightly of the cell I'd been kept in earlier when they'd first imprisoned me. The difference was that this room was a much brighter white and...

...someone was standing in the middle.

I blinked a couple times, thinking that I was hallucinating it and I was actually in the room completely alone.

Because what I was seeing...it just couldn't be real. The face in the middle of the room attached to a body wearing a tight fitting dress and high heels, unlike I'd ever seen her before, was too shocking to understand how. How?

Because it was Pepper standing in the middle of the room, facing me with a smile and her hands behind her back.

Her blue eyes sparkled underneath the white fluorescent lights in the ceiling. She was wearing black heels and looked nothing like the Pepper I had started to know well. I was used to her in her blue skinny jeans and white long sleeved shirt, not in a black dress and staring at me like she'd just won an important game.

The only aspect of her appearance that seemed out of place was the fact that she was chewing gum, and even from across the room I could smell the peppermint, just like the first day that I'd met her.

"Hi, Nova," she said, still smiling her successful smile. She was with them. She had betrayed everyone and now I knew why the distraction never came. Because she'd been working with them and had stopped it.

I didn't respond to her, just glared at her, feeling a stab of betrayal in my stomach. She'd just given us up like we were nothing. Because we were nothing to her. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in this position.

"I can understand why you probably don't want to respond. And I doubt you even want to have this conversation with me at all. But I wanted to talk to you specifically, because I felt that you at least deserved an explanation," she spoke. "Since you know, I can almost thank you for getting me here. After all, if you'd never abandoned me in the room with the laptop, the inspectors never would've found me and told me everything, then offered that I helped them."

I still refused to acknowledge her voice and reply even with the surprising new discovery. I didn't have anything to say and the only things that could come to mind were insults and anger. They rose to the back of my throat, but it felt better to just act like she wasn't talking at all. To not give in and do what she wanted me to do. If I were to start yelling at her, it'd only make her feel more victorious because my yelling wouldn't do anything, and I'd still be stuck in the same position as I had been before I started talking.

"I guess I can really say this all began two years ago. I was younger, obviously, and I was living with my parents. My dad had been diagnosed with cancer just the year before. We'd been paying a lot for his treatment, but it was hard. And then shockingly, we got the news. From the TV of course, that day when they'd finally stated it, that they'd found the cure for cancer. They never mentioned how much it would cost when they'd announced it, but my mom and I had figured we'd pay anything because we knew my dad didn't have that much time left."

I remembered that day, too, nearly exactly two years ago and how everyone had called it a miracle. There'd been celebrations, thousands of success stories, and happy faces even though crime was still on the rise.

"We'd decided to keep the money at home. In a vault in our basement locked by a password and everything because we were too afraid to take the risk of putting it all in a bank seeing as the crime issue was getting worse and we couldn't afford to lose it. It was the day before my mom and I were planning on taking him to treatment. We were lying in our beds, asleep, not doing anything to attract attention."

Without really meaning to I'd become engaged in her story, wondering what would happen next. I cursed myself for actually paying attention, but her story and her words had their grip on me and I couldn't escape, just like how I couldn't escape the zip ties preventing me from moving my arms.

"Then we heard a noise, at least I did. My mom had been upstairs in her room and I'd been the one who was closer to the hallway that led downstairs. It was the sound of our front door creaking open – somehow the person had managed to get a key or pick the lock. And only then had I remembered that earlier in the day when I was checking all the money and recounting to make sure we had enough, I'd forgotten to close the door all the way because I'd stopped midway through doing it to get the door for someone. Dread had filled me as I heard footsteps down our hall, then further down into the basement. By now, my mom and I were standing in the hall, too scared to go down the stairs, but too worried to just sit in our beds and do nothing."

Pepper was staring off into space now, consumed by her own memories and not seeing reality anymore.

"We both knew what they'd come for. The money."

She paused and swallowed, her face looking pained and reminding me of how she'd looked when she'd mentioned how my name had been highlighted in blue. It was funny how fast everything had changed, how she'd only been acting when she'd told me that. To her, our entire friendship was a joke.

"I heard the footsteps running back up the stairs only a couple minutes later, and then back down the hall. I wanted to run out and scream at the person to leave us alone, to drop the money...but I couldn't because of fear. I was only able to force myself to move to the top of the stairs, just so I could get a glimpse of the person who had stolen all the money, we later found out. It's kind of funny, I doubt think that person ever realized that I did see their face, that I had been able to tell who they were even in the darkened house and even from the small slice of visibility I was given with my angle at the top of the stairs."

She'd started to walk towards me, extremely slowly, punctuating random words with the click of her heels against the floor and closing the distance between us until she stopped a foot away from me.

"The next day, we had no money and couldn't afford the treatment. My father died seven days later. I knew deep down whose fault that was. You could say it was cancer's or the doctor's fault for making it too expensive, but no...no it was the person who stole the money's fault. It was all because of them that my father was killed," she said the last sentence quietly, her voice softer than a whisper, yet still filled with so much anger. Her eyes burned with it, screaming vengeance.

"And you wanna know the best part of the whole story?" she asked with a sarcastic laugh. "You wanna know what just put the icing on the cake for me?"

I waited for her to continue.

"That they'd known all along. Even when I went to the police and told them, they'd known. But they hadn't helped. They just told me to wait and they'd get to my issue as soon as they finished all these other crimes they were trying to deal with, as if my father's death wasn't important enough. And then they forgot, and refused to talk to me when I tried getting them to help. They told me I was delirious, that me simply seeing a face wasn't enough for them, not enough evidence and it was pointless to even try. They didn't even try. And do you want to know the hilarious truth behind everything? Every last thing that has happened in all these years of suffering, of death and crime and stealing?"

Her face was only inches from mine, and I could hear the anger radiating from her body, as she spoke.

"They know. They've always known and always will. They know because they're watching, they're watching through cameras you never see and always listening to. There's no escape from them, no way out. So why don't they just arrest everyone who has ever committed a crime? They have more than enough evidence?" she whispered in my ear, not speaking louder than was necessary. She was talking like she wanted me to come to the conclusion myself, but I didn't want to play along with any of her games, or anything she was saying.

For some reason though, I believed her words. I believed it. I believed every last thing she was saying, but my mind was still so jumbled and confused that I couldn't fathom figuring out the truth.

"Because...," she said in my ear, and I heard her suck in her breath, before releasing it with the few words she'd been meaning to say the entire time. "...they want money. The Animus had been created long before its actual release, but they knew if they let crime escalate to a fever pitch it would make everyone see the necessity in having one. And everyone would buy them and the money would go straight to the government, the same people who worked with Mr. Hillsburg, the real inventor. And then once they'd started using the Animus, all this evidence would magically appear out of nowhere, and crime would reduce. Tada, the Animus works perfectly only leading more and more people to buy it."

She backed away giving me a tortured smile and looking like she wanted to laugh again. Like the entire situation was so insanely terrible that there was nothing to do but laugh at it. "Oh, now you get it don't you? They already know what you did, honey. They just want a confession," she whispered sweetly.

"Why...if the government is doing this to everyone and is the reason behind the crime...why are you working with them?" I finally asked, the question plaguing me with confusion.

"Revenge," she said simply, shaking her head as to emphasize the word. "Revenge for myself, on the person who really caused my father's death. On the thief." She was smiling a terrible smile now, one that made it seem like she knew something and wasn't telling me. Like she was keeping an acidic secret that she was just waiting to throw at me like a grenade.

I saw that she wasn't just going to give it up without me prompting her. So I did.

"Who was the thief?" I asked, my body completely still as if moving a muscle would add so much noise that I wouldn't be able to hear her. I watched her lips form words, the actually sound seeming to come a moment too late.

"Kain," she snarled. "It was Kain."