ouran4eva – I'm sorry! I got swept up with school (a writer's favorite excuse, if you ask me.) I'm going to attempt to write ahead, so wait times aren't too long. I'll try, but I can't promise! I'm like super easily distracted.

Soul Mates are Forever – Eek! I'll hurry! (:

GigglingFangirl – Yes, watermelons. And fruit-flavored milk? Are you sure it's not soured? Haha!

xandra7x13t3 – Oh, you're computer's fine if you have this story on your alerts list; when you reviewed, I had updated by adding the second chapter. Thank you so much for that review, it actually helped give me the motivation to start out this chapter (and several others, if I do say so myself.) Your review and your support in reading this story and others are greatly appreciated!

cupcakemania22 – Thank you so much!

3: Proof

Simon wasn't lying about my ID. They requested it the moment we found a seat in the fast food joint a few blocks away from Gran's house. The entire walk had taken, at most, fifteen minutes, and it had been the most awkward fifteen minutes of my life. I led the way, but I stayed tense the entire time, feverishly taking in my surroundings, waiting for them to jump me. But they didn't. We walked in, sat down, and Simon asked for my ID.

Flustered, I didn't hesitate to pull it from my wallet and hand it over. The picture itself was hideous. Gran had taken me early one Saturday morning, and you could tell. My hair was frizzy, the ponytail lumpy, and my eyes had that half-asleep glazed look. They'd taken the picture too early and my smile looked forced. Gran said that it wasn't that bad, but she was required to say that.

"Emma A. Halstead," Simon read aloud. I wondered if he was going to ask what the A stood for. If he did, I wasn't going to tell him.

We'd gotten a table with six seats; I sat at one end with Tori one seat away. Chloe was sandwiched in between Derek and Simon on the other side. If I were her, I'd be scared out of my mind. But she looked perfectly content. I wondered if she was brave or just stupid.

I leaned across the table and snatched my ID from Simon's hands. His fingers were spotted with color, like he'd been using markers recently. I remembered that he'd been the one with the pencil in his pocket at the diner. Maybe I was right about him being an artist. "You have your proof," I snapped, tucking the plastic card back into my wallet. "So what do you want?"

Even I was aware of the bravado in my voice. I was scared to death. What did these four ominous teenagers want with me? I'd been so careful. I'd been so sure that nobody knew about my deepest secret.

Simon glanced over his shoulder as he leaned in closer. I gripped the soda between my hands, the outside cold to the touch. We'd had to buy something so we wouldn't get kicked out. Derek had gotten a full meal, and Chloe had gotten a few chicken nuggets. Tori stirred a milkshake. Simon had gotten a drink, and when I didn't pipe up with an order, he'd gotten me one, too. I hadn't done much more than hold it and stare down the straw.

Simon cleared his throat. "Well, we know some stuff that you probably want to know. About you, I mean. About your parents and your past," he clarified, stumbling over his words. Clearly, he was nervous, though he was trying to hide it. His eyes never really met mine. Instead, they stared down at his drink as he picked at his discarded straw wrapper.

Hope ballooned in my chest. I'd thought that they might know something about me. There were so many things about my history that I didn't know the answer to, things that I'd thought I'd put behind me but obviously hadn't. Just as quickly as it had come, though, the hope dimmed. How could I know that they were trustworthy? Where did they get their information? They were my age. How could they know about things that had happened to me when I was a baby when they had been the same?

I tried to flatten out my features. I didn't want to seem overeager. I wasn't going to be gullible. "What kind of stuff?" My voice even sounded sufficiently suspicious, and I was proud of myself.

Tori looked up from her milkshake with narrowed eyes. She and I didn't get along, and I knew that we'd be hard-pressed to find any symbolism of friendship. Her look alone made me wish that Nichole and Ali were here to back me up. "Tell us, Emma," she said, stressing my name in a snotty way that reminded me of Rebecca, "what kind of crazy powers have you uncovered?"

"P-p-powers," I echoed, struggling to swallow. How did she know about that? "What do you mean powers?" I asked. The lie was quick on my tongue, prepared. Somehow, unconsciously, I knew that their information had something to do with that secret part of me that I'd worked so hard to keep hidden. They were dark and mysterious, and since I was so paranoid, I'd pegged them as the type of people that would hide a secret similar to mine.

Maybe they could mentally move things, too. Maybe I wasn't alone.

"What do you mean powers?" Tori mocked, making her voice horribly high-pitched. I did not sound like that at all. "Don't lie to us. We came all the way out here to help you, and you have the audacity to pretend like we're crazy?"

"I didn't –" I began, but I was cut off.

"Tori, shut up." Simon hissed. He glanced over his shoulder, to the few patrons that were seated in the restaurant. Their tables were far away from ours, and they wouldn't be able to hear us unless they had some sort of supersonic hearing. "Our point is that we have documents that you might like to see. It might help to explain some things."

Simon held out his hand, and Chloe dug through her backpack, pulling out a thick stack of papers. They were wrinkled and folded over, and I could see that some of the ink had gotten splotchy from water stains. Whatever they had on those papers must've been important. They'd looked at them repeatedly, and they hadn't found the time to print out another set. These were probably their only ones. Somehow, those pieces of paper told them how to find me.

The hope dwindled into panic. If they'd found me, four teenagers that barely looked old enough to drive, then who else could be out there? It was obvious by the way they all kept their eyes on them that those pages were important.

Maybe they'd stolen them.

And if that was true, who had compiled discriminating evidence against me, anyway?

"Don't get them wet," Simon warned as he handed them towards me. I stared down at them. I had a feeling that whatever information they had would change my life. Their group had changed me already – I'd lied to Jared, and rendezvoused with complete strangers. They knew my name, knew where I lived. Whatever they had, it was cataclysmic. And I didn't know if I wanted in.

Tori was about the snatch them out of Simon's hands and shove them in my face when he lowered them to the table in front of me. "I know it's confusing, and you're probably debating whether or not all of this is worth it. But I promise you, you'll want to know. If you walk away now, you'll regret it."

Derek stared at his brother, his face stern. Only his eyes betrayed his shock in Simon's monologue. Clearly, the blonde boy in front of me wasn't often spot on about reading people. Or maybe it was just super-powered freaks that he was good at understanding.

I swallowed hard. Simon was right. I didn't want to know, but I desperately needed to know. Wiping my clammy hands on my thighs, I reached for the pages and carefully unfolded them. A lot of it was gibberish to me, scientific talk that I'd never heard outside of biology class, and sometimes not even then. But I caught the words genetic a few times, and I wasn't so dumb that I didn't know what that meant.

Flipping to the next page, I saw other words: Genesis II. I remembered from my old days at Sunday school that Genesis was a book in the Bible, but I didn't think there was a Genesis II. In fact, that sounded really, really wrong. And the page wasn't filled with passages, but with more scientific jargon. And, at the very end of the list: names.

My own name stuck out at me. Emma Adelynn Halstead. Apparently, I hadn't needed to tell Simon what my A stood for, because he already knew. My stomach tightened as I looked over the names. Simon's was there, and so were Chloe's and Derek's. Just like I thought, Simon and Derek shared different last names – Bae and Souza, respectively. There wasn't a Tori, but there was a Victoria. Great, as if she needed to sound any more like a snooty queen.

But that wasn't the only thing. There were other names of course, ones of people that I'd never met and they'd never spoke of. My eyes settled on one of the last ones – Elizabeth Delany: Terminated. My mind immediately thought up the worst things. Terminated in all of the science fiction movies meant that they'd been killed, gotten rid of.

My life wasn't a science fiction. At least, I didn't think so. But I couldn't think of any other meaning for terminated.

"What's this?" I demanded, my voice louder and shakier than I intended. I'd also meant for my finger to be resting on my name, but instead it underlined Elizabeth's. My hand shook, too, which was utterly horrifying. They'd succeeded in scaring me, and I promised myself that they wouldn't. I looked up at them and blurted out my deepest hope: "Is this a joke? Did Jared set you up for this?"

"It's not a setup." Tori said, her voice exasperated. I wondered how well she'd fared to finding out that she was on a list that included the names of dead people. Murdered people.

"What are we on the list for?" I asked.

"God, you really are dense, aren't you?" Tori snapped. I could feel the anger rising in my chest, turning my neck and face bright red. Gran always said that I had a quick temper, and then she would add that it was something that came from my mother. But she wouldn't even say the word "father" around me, or any of its forms. "You need us."

My fingers tightened into a clenched fist. I wanted, more than anything, to throw my drink onto her. I wanted to show her that she didn't get to just march into my life and start bossing me around. She might've been named after a queen, but she was probably as far from royalty as you could get.

Before I did something I would regret, I pushed away from the table. "Wait, Emma," Simon said. Chloe was up and out of her chair before any of the others. I could hear Derek and Tori arguing as I stepped out of the restaurant. The sidewalk had a warm glow, but it didn't stretch very far. Before long I was back in the shadows, walking away from them.

They had to be crazy. That was the only thing I could think of. They could've typed that up themselves, picked out random names from newspapers. I was there with the entire team when we got our picture taken and our names in the paper for last year's playoffs. They didn't know anything about me. That's what I kept telling myself as I stomped away.

"Hey!" Simon yelled out after me. I recognized his voice right away. The four of them were so different in personality that their voices were as different as opposite colors. "Emma! Wait up!" I could hear their footsteps following me as I turned down the next street, which housed some of the older apartments. They had a stone wall along the far side of their property, but it was short enough that I could climb it if I wanted to. And I would, if it meant getting away from them. I might even talk Gran into getting that alarm system she kept thinking about.

The street was dark and quiet, seeing as there wasn't much down the road. I ducked behind one of the apartment garages and traipsed down to the stone wall. It was only a few feet taller than I was, and was built in such a way that there were ruts deep enough to be foot and handholds. I wedged the end of my sneaker onto one of them and gripped the wall with my fingertips, using pretty much all of my soccer training to haul myself up over the wall and to the other side.

I nearly twisted one of my ankles when I hit the ground on the other side. It was a steep hill with a handful of ancient trees and a small creek that only ever held water when it rained a lot. I swerved through the trees and jumped over the dry creek, coming to the side of one of old roads that were hardly used anymore. Down the way, though, the street ran into one of the main roads, and from there it wouldn't take me long to double back. I'd be back to Gran's before curfew.

I did just that, and when I got back to the house, everything looked the same as it had been when I left it. I could see the TV playing from one of the front windows; Gran had probably fallen asleep waiting up for me. I brushed my hand through my hair, hoping that I didn't look like I'd been slipping around the back roads trying to hide from crazy teens.

I dug my keys out of my pocket and stepped up to the porch. I was just about to unlock the door, too, when I heard footsteps on the sidewalk behind me. I nearly dropped my key as I whirled around. Sure enough, they'd showed up outside my house. I should've known that they wouldn't just leave me alone because I ran away. I'd hoped that they were crazy enough that they'd forget about me and where I lived.

"What are you guys doing here?" I hissed. I couldn't yell at them like I wanted to, because then Gran would hear and she probably wouldn't be happy to find a bunch of random teens on her doorstep so close to curfew.

"We just wanted to make sure you got home okay." Chloe's voice came from the darkness. I couldn't really see her all that well in the shadows, but I knew which shape she was. She could only be the shortest one, standing right next to the tallest one.

"I'm fine. Get lost," I said. I knew it was rude when I said it, but I wanted them to leave me alone, and if I had to be mean to get the point across, then I would be.

"You can't just run away from your problems." That was Tori. Just hearing her voice made me furious. I turned around to shoot off something else, completely unaware of the fact that Gran's potted plants that sat on the front porch were starting to shake until one of them hit me in the leg. I hadn't lost my temper since that day I discovered my abilities, but I remembered how the plates rattled in the cabinets like we were having an earthquake.

My anger turned to panic in an instant. I'd worked for years to learn how to control my abilities as best as I could. I would do anything to keep them a secret. And if I couldn't calm down, I would show them to the four people I was currently most scared of. They had known my name, and they knew where I lived, and Tori had talked about powers like she knew exactly what I was hiding….

My heart hammered in my chest and the potted plants continued to shake so violently I was scared that they were going to fly off the porch and crack over their skulls. People died that way, and I wasn't a killer. I sucked in a deep breath and the plants slowed from an all-out shake to a slight quiver.

"I knew it." Tori said. "You're a freak, just like us."

"Us?" I echoed. "What do you mean, us?"

Okay, so this is a super short chapter. Sorry about that, but I've been busy with a lot of stuff lately, and writing my fanfics have kind of fallen to the backburner (if you haven't noticed already.) I'm honestly not sure how long this will be, but it's not going to be a bunch of chapters, so hopefully I'll be able to write them sooner rather than later.

Thanks for reading, and leave me a review! Peace (: