I was fast.

I was very, very fast.

If I'd run this fast back in my last athletics competition, I definitely wouldn't have had to suffer fucking Chloe Beckett's boasting as I stood on the silver podium. I'd have left her in the dust too.

He was already on the ground when I leapt out the bushes, the creature poised above him and without a second thought cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted to claim its attention as I skidded onto the road. I ducked, lifting a fistful of pebbles from the carpark and throwing them at the creature.

It turned. I could see it trying to home in on my heartbeat and the sound of my breath.

It had taken half a step towards me when the gunshot rang out.

I gasped and sighed simultaneously, recoiling away from the noise, as my hands clenched into fists and my eyes snapped shut.

I heard the creature bounding away behind me and footsteps closed in towards me, but they stopped as out of the shrubbery– calling my name– stumbled Nick.

'Anna! Jesus Christ! What do you think you're doing!'

I tried to calm myself and steady my breathing whilst the tremors of trauma crept up my body, so thinking of an appropriate response was out of the question, instead I convinced myself I was fine and the pain in my stomach was all in my head.

I looked back to see Stephen standing a few feet away, smoking gun still clutched in his hand. Concern bled through his expression but he didn't say anything and he didn't try to get any closer.

Nick's hands touched down on my shoulders. 'Anna,' he repeated– out of breath– 'what the hell?'

I didn't care enough to answer.

'Look, Anna, look! I might be your boyfriend but I'm also in charge around here, you can't– Anna, listen.' He shook my shoulders gently trying to bring my gaze to his. 'Listen to me! This thing will kill you if you give it even half a chance.'

I angrily circled my arms, brushing him off me. 'You think I don't know that!' I returned. I don't know why he thought he could talk to me like that. I don't know what right he thought he had but I wasn't a child. I wasn't some helpless woman who needed a knight in shining armour. 'If that thing kills Connor, I'll let it!'

I barely had a chance to register the look of sadness that crossed over his features before I took a big step back away from him, and ran to Connor.

'Here,' I said, offering him a hand up. I helped pull him up onto his feet before I leant him back against the bonnet of the truck. 'Did it hurt you?' I asked softly.

He shook his head. 'No.'

'You sure?' The level of adrenaline rushing through him would be high enough to mask any pain.

He nodded. 'Thanks.'

'Yeah yeah,' I said.

He tried to catch his breath. 'You just saved my life.'

'Hmm,' I agreed, 'yeah, does that mean I'm in the lead now?' Wincing, he bent over to prop himself up with his hand on his knees, and I rested my hand on the back of his head. 'You scared the shit out of me.'

'Sorry,' he replied.

At the sound of footsteps crunching over the pebbled carpark, I glanced back. Nick was walking towards us, hands on his hips, but still not in the mood to have him talk down to me again I retreated, cutting across Connor to walk back to the road.

'Anna...' Nick said frustratedly.

I ignored him and kept walking.

He hadn't got far– only 10 meters or so up the road from the signpost for the car park, and I called his name as I jogged to catch up with him. 'Stephen!'

Upon hearing my voice he stopped in the middle of the road and turned.

I felt tiny standing opposite him, and in some effort to contradict it, I put my hands on my hips to try and convince myself I had more power than I actually did. He didn't say anything, he just stared down at me and waited for me to start. And I should have thought about what I actually wanted to say to him before I'd bothered calling his attention, but I hadn't. So I took a few deep breaths, still struggling to regulate a respiratory pattern and chewed the inside of my cheek. 'I think we need to have a little chat,' I said in a small voice, 'don't you?'

It looked like he was expecting it. Without rolling his eyes– which I suspect he wanted to– he turned and started walking again. I fell into step beside him.

'Stephen,' I said, 'what's going on with you?'

Again, he was just silent.

'... you came all this way down here, before, on your own. You put yourself at serious risk just to warn me when you could have picked up the phone,' I said calmly. But he just kept walking and didn't speak. I reached out to grab his forearm. 'Stephen–'

'What?' he said, as he stopped suddenly and turned to face me, 'so you're allowed to be reckless and do whatever you like to save people but no one else is, huh?'

'It's different.'

'How?' he shrugged. 'How is it different? Do you think you're just so much better than everyone else, you think you're not going to get hurt because you're you? You're just as fallible–'

'I don't think I'm better than anyone,' I interrupted, offended, and suddenly afraid that's what people thought of me. I had a reason, obviously, there was a method behind my mad actions that I hadn't expected to ever need to explicate, but sighing I figured I'd better. 'I shouldn't be here. I should be dead, Stephen,' I said, 'I should be six feet deep right now but by some miracle I'm not ...' I paused, not sure if I should continue but he didn't speak so I did. 'I really don't care about myself, but...'

He swallowed. '... how did he die?' he asked. I cocked my head. 'Will,' he clarified and dropped his gaze for a second to the ground before he brought it tentatively back up to me. 'How did it happen?'

Still a bit of a touchy subject. Acknowledging it for the first time since that god-awful moment in the hospital didn't diminish the tension, instead it seemed to increase it.

I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I could respond. 'He was shot.' I saw his realisation in his widening eyes. 'By my father right after he killed my mum, then I found them and he shot me. And now I have this... I don't know, saviour complex–'

'That's not a saviour complex, Anna,' he interrupted to explain, 'that's survivors' guilt. You feel like you owe it to them to make up for it somehow. But you don't,' he said.

'I can't lose anyone else,' I shrugged, 'even if that means losing myself.'

He shook his head, 'yeah, but you're not the one who would miss you when you're gone. How could you say that when you know how that feels...'

'I know you mean well but you can't tell me what I should do with my own life.'

'I know,' he mirrored with a sad smile, 'and you can't tell me what I should do with mine.'

I cocked my head again. He misunderstood me. 'I'm not questioning what you did,' I said. 'I am so grateful. I'm questioning why you did it.'

He just stared at me like I knew he knew he didn't want to say it. 'The truth...' he started, then he paused for a second to take a breath. 'Whenever I look at you I get this pit in my stomach, not just because of what I said about him– Will– but everything. Now you're with Cutter and you two are great together but... to me it feels like I wanted to protect you too much. I didn't want you to have to look out for yourself. I didn't trust you–' But again he winced and slowly corrected himself. 'I didn't want to have to trust you when I knew already that I could trust myself. You made me see that being a part of something like this, this project, doesn't mean relying on yourself to do everything.'

'Stephen, we hated each other,' I tried to console, matching his somewhat chaotic energy, 'we can barely spend two minutes together even now without arguing.'

'We aren't arguing,' he insisted. I widened my eyes in amusement of the irony. 'And I never hated you. Even if you couldn't call us friends, I don't hate you. I couldn't.' His attention turned, along with his head back up the road and following the distraction I saw Nick standing just at the edge of the carpark watching us.

When he saw us looking at him his gaze dropped to his shoes.

I sighed. 'I should...'

'Yeah,' he agreed. Then just as I went to take a step back towards Nick and Connor, Stephen caught my arm. 'What was she like...' he asked, 'your mum.'

No one had really asked me that before. My mum was still young when she'd had me– only 25– She'd ended up raising us all pretty much on her own. She was always busy but we never knew it because she always made time for us. And she was always there when we needed her. The thought of her made me smile. 'She... just wanted to help people.'

I watched him nod with realisation. 'She was a doctor too?' he deduced. I kept smiling weakly in confirmation and he continued 'and that's why you hate the name so much.'

'She always seemed so much more deserving of it, you know.'

'That's ridiculous,' he said.

'Yeah,' I replied, even though I didn't agree in the slightest. She was always so strong and her strength was something I just didn't possess, and I wasn't ready. 'But that's how I feel.'

We all congregated back outside the zoo entrance about half an hour later, where Ryan and his men had all unloaded the black-ops dogs from the vehicles that had come from the home office.

I'd collected my backpack and brought Connor with me on the trip through the zoo. It made me feel a little bit better having him with me where I could keep an eye on him.

He still had the oscilloscope in his hands and every so often it would break up the conversation with an odd bleep. But there was no sign of the creature returning.

I still hadn't spoken to Cutter by the time the search party embarked from the zoo and out across the fields again.

Connor and I stayed at the back of the group.

It wasn't long until the dogs led us through to an external structure, a collection of old and slightly hazardous looking buildings only a mile or two from the back of the reptilian sanctuary.

'What do they keep in here then?' Cutter's voice came back to us from somewhere in the middle of the group.

'Well, it's animal crate storage,' Stephen replied but he sounded secretly just as unsure about it.

'Great place for a lair,' noted Helen.

'You know what would be better?' Connor asked without even looking up from the oscilloscope.

'A volcano?' I suggested.

'Whoa! Careful; your nerd is showing.'

'Oh shut up,' I returned, 'what were you gonna say?'

'The greenhouse,' he suggested, attention non-despondent from the device in his hands as he pointed to the structure poking out from behind one of the buildings.

'You're right,' I said, 'regulated temperatures...'

'Clear visual of any incoming predators...'

Ryan looked to me–for some reason– for confirmation and I gave him a nod. His men started searching through the structures for any signs of the entrance.

'It must only be accessible through one of these other buildings,' I said, looking up over the roofs to try and better locate it. I was too short to see anything.

'This way,' Ryan said.

Suddenly Connor's arm came out to stop me, oscilloscope jabbing into my ribs as he held it out for me to see. 'They're close,' he said.

I looked down at the dogs. 'Nothing...' I said. And it was strange because they should have been doing something but there was no reaction at all.

'Maybe I was wrong...' Connor said.

I shook my head. 'No. No you weren't. This thing says it should be right on top of us. So why aren't the dogs fussing?'

I tapped the screen a few times for some reason – then realised I probably looked just like Nana trying to work out how to use a microwave for the first time and quickly stopped again.

I had to surrender in the end and shrug.

We finally followed Ryan. Connor and I were last into the building. I tried to meander through the soldiers without paying them or their weapons any attention but my efforts were futile; I happened to be just the wrong height, so wherever I turned the soldiers' guns were either right in my eyeline. I found myself staring down the barrels and fisted my hands tightly around the dangling straps of my backpack.

'Cutter! You're gonna want to see this!' I followed the sound of Stephen's voice, joining Cutter and Connor as they too made their way to the gap between some old crates at the rear of the room.

'My god!' Cutter noted as we stared down at the litter in the boxes before us.

'Are those...'

'It's given birth.'

Connor huffed. 'Awh, cute.' Then we shared another look and I spared a thought for how completely insane we probably looked from an outside view. He cooed and leant in.

I quickly reached out and put a hand against his chest. 'Maybe... don't? Unless you want your face clawed off.'

Stephen slipped past me, a hand just ghosting my shoulder as he squeezed between me and the crates stacked up behind. I took a step forward to give him more space.

'There's bodies back here,' he called back a moment later.

And that was my cue. I joined him in the chamber annexed to the building and crouched down, pulling back the tarp covering a partial corpse.

The leg had been pulled clean off. The skin was shredded around the acetabulofemoral joint, the femur bone itself was in perfect condition but beside it was a pile of intestines. They were completely dry and clear like sausage skins, and above that was a section of chest, skin torn down the middle, ribs cracked back to expose the chest cavity with all its organs still fleshy and wet inside, among which flies were buzzing and maggots hatching up out the tissue.

Stephen gipped.

'Oh,' I noted, 'you alright?'

He put a hand over his mouth as he winced. 'That's repulsive.'

'Hmm,' I agreed, even though I hadn't moved my gaze from it and hadn't shown any of my own disgust in my expression. 'It looks like it's storing them to feed the young.'

I barely heard the beeping; I was too distracted pulling the wrinkled tarp back over the bodies, so that at least for now the others were safe from the sight of the rotting flesh. It wasn't until Connor shouted and the panels on the roof overhead started to rattle that I sprang back onto my feet.

I turned my head up, expecting to hear another sound, a clanging of roof titles as the creature bounded a trail across them but it became suddenly unnervingly silent.

'Where the hell is it?' the captain growled.

Then, before I could blink a stack of crates beside us came cascading down. I jumped back, as one of the soldiers screamed and came crashing down on top of the jagged boxes, face torn to ribbons, and a three-pronged gash across the entirety of his chest. He wasn't far out of reach. Though I suspected he was already dead, I quickly hurdled the closest fallen crate and stopped in front of him. Then I reached out to search for his pulse.

Gunfire rang out and instinctively I ducked, my heart rate shot up until I could feel the pounding through every inch of my body, and unsure whether or not it was his pulse or my own I could feel, I had to pull my hands back from the soldier's neck.

Every inch of my body throbbed dully, the sound reverberating through the echoey room until it felt like it was inside my head. I couldn't catch my breath. I slammed my hands down over my ears and tucked my chin into my chest, gasping.

Something grabbed my arm but I'd shut my eyes and I couldn't see who, or what it was. A moment later, the shooting ceased. I heard another stack of crates tumbling down before another sort of temporary silence settled. But I could still feel it. I could feel the flames inside me blossoming out from the wound from where the bullet had torn so easily through my organs, and I became glad of the pounding sensation in my extremities because at least it was a distraction.

'Anna?'

I screwed my eyes up tighter. But the darker it was there the clearer the image of Will became. I could see his lifeless blue eyes staring right into me as a pool of his blood slowly started to swallow him against the mahogany floor.

My eyes snapped open. 'Anna,' Stephen repeated, squeezing my arm harder.

My gaze darted back to the fallen crates barricading us into the room. We'd have to climb over them to get out. I immediately tried to get up but pain crippled through my insides and I collapsed back with a groan. Stephen peered down at me in concern. I fought the whimper; I wasn't going to let it out and it died in my chest. 'It's all in your head,' I told myself. I took a breath. 'It's all in your head. It's all in your head. It's all in your head.'

This time when I moved there was nothing but a dull ache. I ignored the alarm in Stephen's expression as I quickly pushed myself up onto my feet and jumped up onto the first crate to climb across a second then dropped down on the other side.

'Connor!' I sighed in relief as he clambered out from under a table.

There was something in the way he stared back at me that quickly quashed any relief I could have felt. 'Cutter...' he said, as if by way of explanation. My eyes widened, and looking round for him I missed the way Connor started shaking his head. 'No... he's not... he took one of the young–'

Before he could explain I heard another gunshot. This time, the distress escaped me as a devasted gasp, the same noise I'd made when I saw Will's dead body on the floor. I tried to fight the panic flaring up through me.

I heard the sound, like rain, as glass came pouring down from the greenhouse roof.

There was a second gunshot and I jumped, closing my eyes and trying to force myself into serenity. Then there came a third, a fourth, a fifth. I lost count after that. I tried to pretend I couldn't hear it. I tried to keep my face as still and unresponsive as possible but I could feel my forehead furrow as my eyes started to water. I could feel myself trembling, my whole body shaking from head to toe.

When the shattering finally stopped I willed myself to open my eyes to quickly push away any of the trauma that was slowly wrapping its dark tentacles around me, but it was all a moment too soon. No sooner had the building come back into a focus did a final gunshot resound through the complex and I jumped in fright again and inhaled sharply. My eyes snapped shut.

'You okay?'

I looked up from the interesting patch of dirt on the rug on our hallway floor, to his face. I hadn't even noticed he was there.

And it occurred to me that I had no idea how long he'd been there, or how long I'd been seeing Wills' face as a repeat pattern in the grain of the floorboards.

'Hmm?' It took much longer than it should have done to process his question and that was probably another bad omen in itself because I didn't know what he was talking about. And even if I had my brain was too empty to conjure a response until I remembered. 'Oh... yeah.'

I lifted my chin from my hand and, moving my elbow from my knee, revealed an angry red patch of flesh where it had been resting. Guess I had been here a while.

My bottom was numb from sitting on the stairs for so long, the bare floorboards pressing into my flesh in a way that should have been painful, but just wasn't.

Nick frowned, uncrossing his arms from across his chest and holding out a hot-water bottle to me.

I cocked my head.

'I called an old psychiatrist friend,' he said. 'He told me that you were probably re-experiencing the pain of gunshot. He said its best to replace that sensation with another physical one. Said heat would be good.'

He was right. It probably was a good idea to deal with the trauma whenever it presented itself rather than let the PTSD run rampant. It was just... I had always been good at distracting myself, switching off whatever was inconvenient, and I knew it wasn't healthy but it was the only way I could cope with it. I smiled weakly at him, took the hot-water bottle, and laid it across my stomach.

'Thanks.'

He leant against the doorframe and smiled.' 'Is she still in the bathroom?'

Again, it occurred to me that I must have been here a lot longer than I felt I had. I nodded.

'She's got this mad plan,' he continued, 'you know, to find the future anomaly. She's even managed to convince Lester to go through with it, somehow.'

Helen always managed to get her way. It wasn't all that surprising. I felt the familiar nervous sort of queasiness in my stomach. The bad feeling. The something that didn't sit right with me.

'I'll tell you the details tomorrow,' he said. When I still didn't say anything, he called my name and I lifted my head to meet his eye. 'You look exhausted, really. And you seem... you know...' he paused like he didn't know how exactly to tell me. He sounded reserved. Almost afraid. The longer I looked at him the worse it got. 'Distant.'

I couldn't get out of that moment. I couldn't stop seeing my dead fiancé on the floor in front of me.

And I didn't want to tell him that. Because I didn't want him to think that it meant there was a part of me that didn't want to be with him because of it. Truthfully, I never thought I'd fall in love again but that never meant I couldn't.

I had to swallow before I could speak. 'I'm sorry I'm like this.' I wasn't well. I knew that. But I didn't want to take it easy because then I'd just have too much time to myself with my dangerous thoughts. 'I...' One gunshot and I'm back there. Any that come after just make that image in my head clearer and brighter until I can smell the air of that house.

I sighed again.

The lock on the bathroom door finally clicked and the door creaked open to reveal Helen wearing nothing but a big t-shirt and her socks. She stepped out onto the landing. Nick retreated back, trying to distance himself but she already had him in her sights. She pressed herself against the wall and looked up at him. I got up from the bottom step and walked into the bathroom, giving Nick just enough time to call my name before the door shut behind me.

I stood over the sink, gripping the bowl in both hands, head hanging as I tried to calm myself down. Tears started to prick my eyes and quickly I threw my head back eager to stop them. 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,' I hissed to myself.

I forced myself to face myself. To see them. To see what I looked like right now and confront it.

I looked into the mirror.

I didn't really understand my reflection. Sometimes I looked nice, most of the time I just thought I looked sort of ugly, but Stephen called me beautiful that once and ever since then I had wondered just what I looked like through the eyes of other people.

I had dark circles now. My hair was tied back and I could see all the blemishes on my skin.

I certainly didn't feel beautiful.

'We never discussed sleeping arrangements,' I heard Helen say.

I cast my eyes over the back of the door and imagined her holding her body against his.

'We have a spare room,' Nick said.

'So, are you going to join me there?'

I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket and as I pulled it out Connor's name flashed up on caller I.D But I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say. I barely had the energy to speak. I let it go to voicemail.

Outside the door, I heard Nick's footsteps as he walked away.