I hadn't thought about Tania in a long time.

At one point, after Tom died, she dominated my thoughts almost as much as Tom did, although, to be fair, she made sure of that. If she wasn't banging on my door demanding answers or confronting me in the street when I dared to leave the house, she was calling me at all hours. It was relentless. This never-ending campaign to force the truth out of me.

Of course, once the truth was out there, or at least the news of what I had drunkenly confessed to Monica, the campaign stepped up a gear into something truly frightening. First, it started with a social media frenzy, constant accusatory posts on Facebook telling all of her three hundred so-called friends what a crazy, fucked-up bitch I was. How I was clearly insane. How I'd made up some ridiculous story about little grey men and how I should be institutionalised, if it wasn't for the fact a hospital would be too good for me and I deserved to suffer in a real prison.

Then there were the flyers. Hundreds and hundreds of them with my face, name and KILLER in large red font, plastered to every lamppost and street sign in a three-mile radius of my home. They were even left under the wipers of all the cars in the supermarket car park. I found some scattered by the wind, gathered along the kerbside down my street, rain-beaten and saturated until my face looked distorted and greyed-out.

I'd already been getting shit from Tom's friends – our friends – and anyone Tania was close to, but once the news went public, everything escalated. It was like my whole world – or whatever was left of it – blew up. Local kids left alien masks all over the front garden. A random stranger, someone I'd never met before, but who clearly knew me, spat in my face when I ventured out one day to get some milk, because I no longer had Monica to do those things for me. Despite walking by a packed-out bus stop at the time, no one offered to help. It was like I was suddenly this sub-human thing, not even worthy of a kind word or gesture. Look, then look away. That's just how it was then.

When I came home one day to find the house trashed inside and most of Tom's things gone, I knew I wasn't even safe in the home we'd adored. The home where I'd spent so long wrapped up in his arms, enjoying cosy Sunday morning lie-ins. The home where I'd watched him move around the kitchen like a tornado, wearing a British Bake-Off apron and creating some weird concoction that always tasted pretty good considering he'd never followed a recipe in his life. The home where we'd made love, laughed until we had tears running down our faces, watched movies together snuggled on the sofa, ate, slept and lived together.

Seven months after his death, a quick sale and much of the furniture sold because it wouldn't fit into the tiny one-bedroom flat I was renting, and that was it. Everything gone. Everything lost.

I was alone.

Sometimes, I think that's why I'd survived so long in the New World. I already knew how to live alone. To survive.

New World, new life.

Away from the campaign of hate, away from Tania, I could pick up the pieces of this broken world and start again, no rumours dogging my every step, no suspicion hanging over my head, no guilt weighing me down. When everyone learnt the truth about the Greys, I felt rightly vindicated in a weird way. I watched it all happening from my little one-bedroomed apartment, where the damp had bled down from the windowsills all the way to the carpet, where the cold tap in the bath always got stuck and barely forced out a trickle, where the old boiler was on its last legs. I watched as the TV stations and media outlets went crazy reporting about the monsters living among us, the ones that killed us and assumed our identities. I watched as the world waged war on itself. I watched and thought, fuck you all, I'm not crazy, I was right, I was right.

How was it that two years down the line from Tom's death, I was right back where I'd started? Keeping secrets and unable to tell those closest to me the truth, because deep down, I knew they would never understand?

The Grey was right. I'd already damaged the group's trust in me. When they'd avoided looking at me after I'd killed Rico, I had seen Monica's face in each of theirs, clear as day. I'd seen that same look she had given me and felt that same sense of seeing people you care for pulling away, stepping back out of reach. I couldn't bear the thought of any of them becoming out of reach, especially Jace.

The smirk on the Grey's face had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by a flush to his cheeks and a familiar frown that made it seem as if he was almost ashamed to have threatened me in such a way.

Standing up, he looked down at me, his hands fisting uselessly by his sides and, I noticed, was still scratching at the side of his finger with his thumb nail, an almost unconscious tic that made me wonder how comfortable he really was in this skin he wore.

'I don't want it to be like this,' he said. 'Really, I don't. I'm not a threat to your group, Evie and I'll prove it to you in time, but I will make things difficult for you if you don't agree to help me. I can do it right now. I can walk out there and persuade your friend Jace that maybe you're not the person he thought you were. I can persuade them all. Just a few seeds planted, that's all it will take. Trust is so hard to come by these days, don't you think?'

'Yes,' I replied, glaring at him. 'Yes, it is.'

He nodded, as if he was satisfied with my answer and had taken it for compliancy and he moved back to where he had been sat before, only this time, he bent down and picked up the boxes of painkillers.

'Here,' he said, throwing them down by my side. 'You should be due another dose. You were out for a few hours. I'd hate for you to be in pain.'

Retrieving my gun from the floor, he held it against his thigh and shot me a glance, his eyes softening.

'It might not seem like it now, but we'll find a way to make this work for both of us, you'll see.'

'Does that mean you're going to give me back my gun?' I said.

The Grey raised the gun, holding the barrel in one hand and rubbing his thumb over the pistol grip where he held it in the other. He smiled.

'Well, as much as I hate to see you in pain, I doubt very much that you think the same about me, so if you don't mind, I think I'll hold onto this just for now.' He nodded to the pills. 'Take them and let's go see your friend.'

***

The Grey had left the door open, slightly ajar.

He'd said I'd been unconscious for hours after hitting my head. Hours away from Jace. Hours away from the group. Then why did I suddenly feel so scared to walk through that door?

The Greys were able to mask their thoughts and feelings so well, seamlessly fitting in to any situation like nothing was wrong. I wasn't sure I would be able to do the same. How was I going to pretend everything was okay? I could barely even stomach it myself but the thought of trying to convince Jace made my head pound harder.

Grabbing the pill boxes, I opened up the ibuprofen and paracetamol and swallowed some down with the water, leaning my head back against the wall and closing my eyes for a moment.

Taking a deep breath, I began to climb to my feet, groaning as my body resisted. The room swayed back and forth for a few seconds, so I stood still, holding onto the wall to steady myself. Once everything had stopped spinning – or, at least, stopped making me feel so sick as it rocked from side to side – I hobbled and shuffled towards the door, feeling like I'd aged thirty years in the time I'd been here.

Immediately outside the door, there was a wine cellar, with rows and rows of dusty bottles lining the shelves either side. At the end, there appeared to be a turning on the left and as, I edged out of the door, wincing as each step felt like another kick to my body, I could see candlelight flickering through the gaps between the shelves and hear hushed voices whispering on the other side.

I took a few steps forward and stopped.

On the right, there were two empty spaces, the thick grey dust disturbed, recently by the looks of things. Instantly, I was swamped with images of Lena and Tom, taking refuge in the storeroom, drinking wine from the bottles that had been stored here, forgetting all about the nightmares in the world above as they downed some vintage red. I wondered what they looked like together. Reaching out, I touched where the fingerprints were, brushing over them lightly, feeling my face heat with anger and something dark and feral niggling in the base of my stomach.

Stop it, Evie.

Taking a deep breath, I headed down the aisle and turned the corner at the end of the shelving, finding myself in a larger room where huge wooden crates were piled up on one side, and what looked like leather storage cases on the other.

Sitting propped up against one of the storage cases was Lena, her arm now dressed and bandaged up, like an Egyptian mummy. Across from her sat Jace, and, crouched close to her side, was the Grey, his face close to hers, his hand resting on her shoulder.

I froze as I entered the room, and they all looked in my direction. My guts knotted in turmoil.

This was it. My chance to tell the truth.

Let's see how well this goes for you, shall we?

A split-second of hesitation was all it took. A split-second where I was standing in front of that bus stop again. A split-second of feeling the man's globule of spit running down my cheek, as everyone just watched me. Just watched.

'Ah, decided to wake up then?' Jace said, jumping to his feet and crossing the short distance towards me, where he stopped abruptly and couldn't have looked more awkward if he'd tried.

I stared at him, confused only until I saw him shoot a sidelong glance at Tom.

Shit. He didn't want to seem too over-familiar in front of the man he thought was my husband.

Each piece of the Grey's plan was already falling into place. Jace believed the Grey was Tom and clearly nothing had happened during my hours of unconsciousness to persuade him otherwise. I was already on the backfoot and I could tell from the look in the Grey's eyes that he knew that too. There was a glimmer of the same smile I had seen in the storeroom. Oh, he was pretending it was something else, but I could see it. I could see him.

I turned back to Jace and let my own smile grow wide. Fake. I could feel it, stretching my cheek muscles wide like a mask. 'A girl needs her beauty sleep.'

Jace's eyes narrowed and he leaned down until our faces were almost level. 'Hmm,' he said, 'You need a few more hours, it didn't work, you're still ugly.'

I laughed then, a real laugh, one that made my chest ache because it instantly made me feel guilty. Guilty for lying to Jace. Guilty for never telling him when we first met, all about my dirty little secret. Why did I ever let it get this far?

'Cheers for that,' I said, glancing over at the Grey and Lena. Did they just give each other a look? Did something unspoken pass between them?

I still wasn't one hundred percent convinced Lena wasn't faking this whole thing and I had no idea what she knew or didn't know. They certainly seemed close, but maybe it wasn't about a shared bottle of wine, but something darker, something that only they could share, because it was something only Greys could understand.

And if she wasn't a Grey, did she know the truth about Tom? Or had she been taken in by his story too? Maybe she saw him as her hero – the one who'd saved her from Rico. Maybe it really was just about a shared bottle of wine and something else... something that made me think things I didn't want to think about and see things in my head I didn't want to see. They would have looked good together. She was older and blondes were never really Tom's type, but things were different now. He was different now.

'How are you doing?' Jace said, his eyes searching mine.

Yeah, great. Just standing in the same room as my husband's killer and our enemy and pretending everything's okay. Everything's just great.

'Sore,' I managed feebly, realising I'd probably spent way too long with my gaze lingering on Lena and the man meant to be my husband. 'Like I've been kicked around like a football.'

'Did you take some more painkillers?' Tom's voice drifted over. Gentle. A genuine tone to it, like I could close my eyes and be transported back over two years.

Take a breath, Evie. Smile.

'Y-yes,' I said, hoping my smile looked less fake than it felt. 'Although not the codeine.'

The Grey stood up but thankfully made no attempt to move closer. 'She hates codeine. Makes her throw up,' he said to Jace, who acknowledged it with an awkward nod.

The silence crept in, tense and palpable.

'Are you okay?' I said to Jace. This seemed somehow bigger than Jace feeling suddenly uncomfortable around Tom. There was a tightness around his mouth. Turbulence in his eyes.

'Yeah,' he replied, 'this is just all a bit... fucking insane, you know?'

Insane. Unbelievable. Yeah, I knew.

'It's not just insane,' Lena spoke up. 'It's awkward, yes? The boyfriend and the husband in the same room. What ever will you do, Evelyn?'

I whirled around, glaring at the injured Norwegian.

I might have always held a grudging respect for Lena, but there had never been any love lost between us, especially not since the day when I'd held a gun to her head. To be fair, they'd been the ones to attack us when we'd refused to evacuate the Quadrant, but it had been my threat towards her which had broken the deadlock between the groups and since then, I was sure she would have taken me out given half the chance.

'Fuck you, Lena. Jace isn't my boyfriend.' I smiled thinly, this one definitely feeling less fake than the last. 'How's your boyfriend? Oh yeah, I remember now. He's rotting in the National Gallery with his brains sprayed up the wall. How long had you known about Rico, by the way?'

Lena pursed her lips. 'I never knew about Rico.'

'Bullshit,' I snapped. 'How could you not know? All that time? How do we even know you're not one of them, like he was? Maybe you killed the whole group together.'

Jace shifted beside me, his glaze flitting from me to Lena.

He'd thought it too. Maybe he still did.

'This is ridiculous,' Lena said, using the storage case to climb to her feet and gesturing to her bandaged arm. 'Look at me, for goodness sake. You think I did this to myself?'

I shrugged. 'I don't know how you did that and don't really care. All I know is that you were living side by side every day with a Grey and you claim to have had no idea.'

'I didn't!' she insisted.

Tom stepped closer, moving in between myself and Lena. 'Throwing accusations at each other isn't going to help. Let's face it, any one of us could be a Grey, right? Any survivor could be a Grey. The only thing we can do is be vigilant. And not fight with each other. Isn't that how they defeated us in the first place?'

God, I wanted to scream. And then I wanted to hit him. Hurt him.

This wasn't right. None of this was right.

'Fair point,' Jace said, almost reluctantly and I turned sharply – probably too sharply, from the way Lena's eyes narrowed, her head tilting a little to the side.

'None of us really know, do we?' Jace went on. 'But this is what the Greys want. They want us divided. They don't want us to trust each other.'

'Wait,' I said to him. 'Did you go through some kind of group therapy when I was out of it? What is all this love, peace and harmony crap?

'Evie,' he said, his face crinkling with frustration. 'It's not like that at all. Listen, Lena and Tom have some information for us, something really big, something that could change everything.'

'W-what?' I said, swallowing hard as I tried to keep my composure and feeling like I was losing my grip on it with every passing second.

Information? Is this what the Grey had referred to when he said he could help us?

'Tom and Lena have the location of a facility right here inside the Black Zone,' Jace said. 'A place where they're harvesting survivors. If we plan it right, we can hit it, Evie, we can take it right from under their noses and hit them hard. This could be our chance to fight back.'

Jace had that gleam in his eyes. That adrenalin-fuelled one he usually got when he knew we were about to do something really dangerous. He loved a bit of risk, said it made him feel alive in a dead world. Hitting an enemy facility in their most concentrated area of the city was about as dangerous and as risky as it got. In fact, it was downright suicidal, and he had no idea that a Grey – maybe even two Greys – was behind the whole thing.

'Look, Jace,' I said, wondering how the Hell I was going to change his mind about this when Tom and Lena had had hours to work on him. 'It's not like I don't want to see us fight back, but you were right – this is big. Really big. We're just one group and not a particularly big group at that. How on Earth are we meant to hit a facility that's going to be heavily guarded?'

'That's Tom's point, Evie,' Lena said. 'We work together. We join with the other groups and we hit the place together.'

I shook my head, glaring at her. 'What's this we shit? There is no we, Lena. You made that pretty clear from the start.'

'Evie, listen...' Jace began, reaching for me, but I pulled away angrily.

'No, you listen,' I said, jabbing my finger at him. 'Have you really forgotten everything? Lena and her little alien friend, Rico, tried to wipe us out. Have you forgotten how it was for us when we first got here? We were just trying to find a way to survive, like every other human left on this planet. They didn't want us to do that. They didn't want us to survive, they didn't want us taking the scraps of London for ourselves. They wanted it all, Jace, and they would have killed every last one of us to make sure they could have it.'

Jace tugged on his bottom lip with his teeth. 'Of course, I haven't forgotten. And I'm not saying we should all start being best mates or anything, but come on, Evie, all her group are gone now. They're either dead or harvested or whatever the fuck it is the Greys want with us.'

'So what? Suddenly we're meant to give a shit? I don't care about them and I don't care about her. Why would we ever want one of them in our group? They lived with that monster day in and day out. Never mind the fact he was a Grey, are you honestly telling me that none of them knew about all the fucked-up things he was doing? If we knew, even before what he did to me, are you seriously suggesting they didn't?'

'For what it is worth, I am sorry for what he did,' Lena said.

I stepped towards her. My anger was ballooning outwards, I could feel it, like some monstrous thing under my skin desperate to escape. And all the while, the Grey just stood and watched, his panicked gaze boring into me, willing me to stop.

'For what it's worth?' I said. 'It's worth nothing. If you knew, Lena, if you knew about any of the disgusting, abhorrent things he was doing, and you didn't put a bullet in his skull, then as far as I'm concerned, you were complicit. You should have killed him yourself. That would have been the first thing Taj would have done.'

'I didn't know, I swear it,' she said, brushing her long blonde fringe back from her forehead and looking completely unfazed by my accusations. In fact, she looked unfazed by any of this. 'There were rumours, sure. But nothing worse than anything else we had heard. It's a different world now, Evie. Yes, it's cruel and evil and hard, but there is nothing we can do about that. We just adapt. You cannot tell me that you have not had to do terrible things to adapt? We all have.'

I saw flashes then of the first one. Barely more than a teenager, but desperate enough to kill me for the tins of food I'd scavenged from the twenty-four-hour petrol station close to my apartment. There'd been a struggle, a fight. He'd hit me. The first time I'd ever been punched in the face by a man in my whole life and my return blow had been with a knife. I'd left him by the large refuse bins out back, bleeding out onto the ground among the overflowing rubbish and the rats that had learned quickly not to be scared of humans anymore.

'Yeah, we all have, that's right,' I said. 'But I don't remember ever fucking the corpse of anyone I've killed, and I certainly don't remember ever holding anyone down on the stage of the Shaftsbury Theatre and shoving my hand between their legs.'

The Grey bristled, a noticeable stiffness in his body as his face twisted darkly.

'Evie,' Jace said, trying again to calm me. 'Look, it's done with now. Okay? Rico is dead and whoever got to him before you did, definitely showed him the error of his ways and he suffered, yeah? He must have really bloody suffered and I'm glad he did.'

I didn't want to look at the Grey now and see Tom staring back at me.

He hurt you, so I hurt him.

I looked back at Jace, wishing I could just tell him and have us both walk away from this and from them. But I knew it wouldn't end like that. Nothing ever ended the way I wanted it to.

'I know he's dead, but we owe her nothing,' I insisted. 'Why should we just help her now because she's on her own?'

'But I am not on my own, am I?' Lena said and I turned in time to see her move closer to Tom's side, raising her brow as she smiled at me.

The anger hit, swift and hard and with a violence that I just couldn't stop.

I flew at her with a roar of such ferocity, that even she looked alarmed as she saw me coming right at her and she stumbled backwards into the storage case, the sight of her pained face as she fell on her injured arm doing nothing to halt my attack. I landed on top of her and raised my fist, only to feel hands grab at me and pull me back, my feet kicking out viciously as I was hauled away from her.

'Evie, for fuck's sake, stop,' Jace was saying. 'You're going to get us all killed. Stop!'

Still I kicked out and struggled, desperate to get back to her and pound her face in.

Such was the power of my rage, that at first I didn't even realise who had been the one to pull me away, or who was the one still holding onto me from behind, pulling me down to the floor with him and talking urgently and persistently, close to my ear.

'Eve, babe, calm down... please, it's okay. It's going to be okay, I promise, babe... Eve.'

Eve.

No one called me Eve.

No one had ever called me Eve, except him. Except Tom.

I was laying on the floor. I was laying on him. My husband's killer was holding me, his legs practically wrapped around me to stop me from moving.

His mouth at my ear.

His breath upon my skin.

Calling me what Tom used to call me.

I froze. My body reacting the only way it could.

'Get off me,' I said. 'Let me go right now, or I swear I'll scream and bring down half the Black Zone on our heads. And don't ever fucking call me Eve again.'

He let me go instantly, and I scrambled up and away from him. Away from them all.

Backing up until I hit the wall, I crumbled under the weight of their stares. I couldn't bear it. Couldn't bear the way it made my legs want to give way beneath me. My face burned with humiliation and shame.

Please, look away. Just like the strangers at the bus stop did. Please stop looking at me.

But they didn't look away. Jace just continued to stare at me stunned, clearly speechless, a horrified look on his face, the same one Monica had given me. Lena, who was still laying where I had attacked her, had paled considerably, but I saw something else there, something that looked horribly like suspicion.

The worst of them all, however, was the Grey, who stood alone in the middle of the room, his chest heaving in and out, his face – Tom's face – so drenched in pain and hurt and fear that it made my chest tighten to see it.

I closed my eyes to it all. It was futile, I knew that even as I did it, but I couldn't bear it anymore. I couldn't bear to look at him and feel so utterly broken and so utterly ashamed of causing that pain on Tom's face.

When the noise came – that awful, heart-stopping click-click-clicking noise that we all dreaded to hear – I instantly thought it was him and that my rejection of him in front of Jace and Lena had finally driven him to reveal what he really was underneath that skin he had stolen.

But the noise was too muffled, still audible and unmistakable, but it wasn't coming from Tom and it wasn't coming from within this room.

I opened my eyes, my head turning in the direction of the door, the same direction in which they were now all looking.

Click-click-click.

A Grey was out there. 

The Greys had found our hiding place and it was all my fault.