And you fight back.
You destroy everything that man built
to earn your place.
Because in this new world, there’s only room forgirls with rebel souls.
Epilogue
They’re all gone.
Annalise looks around at the various instruments and equipment in Dr. Groger’s lab. There was no one left at Innovations Academy when she arrived tonight, but the smell of smoke is acrid down here, as if bodies had been burned up in the kiln. Leandra is nothing if not thorough.
“What the hell happened?” Quentin asks, wandering around the room. He stops to stare at the garden of girl parts, putting his hand over his stomach like he might get sick.
“Looks like a whole lot of murder,” Annalise replies. She glances over at Quentin. “You doing okay?”
“Naw,” he says.
Annalise smiles and turns back toward the lab. She strolls over to the desk, looking for any last bits of information. There’s no hint to where the girls have gone, or Mr. Petrov for that matter.His residence was empty, packed up rather than left abandoned like the others.
He got out.
Two days ago, Annalise called Quentin shortly after leaving the girls. He was surprised, to say the least. But he picked her up from the bus station with a backpack full of supplies, including a lighter.
Annalise likes Quentin. He knows how to get things done.
Quentin reaches out a shaky finger, ready to press on a doughy piece of smooth flesh sitting in a dish.
“Wait, don’t touch that!” Annalise calls, making him jump. He turns back to her, wide-eyed. She smiles. “Just kidding,” she says. Quentin curses and hikes his backpack up on his shoulders.
When Annalise and Quentin arrived at the academy an hour ago, all the girls and professors were gone. And to her disappointment, Anton’s office had been cleared out completely. The files were missing, as if they had never existed at all. It would have been hard to prove the truth to Quentin if there wasn’t still an array of body parts in the basement.
“Why’d they do this?” he asks quietly, swinging his backpack off his shoulder to open it. “Why make … you?” He looks at her, and when Annalise turns to him, he motions to her scar. “Why go through the trouble if they just want to destroy you?”
She swallows hard. She’s gotten used to deflecting when her feelings get hurt, but now, in this lab, it seems silly to try.
“Why do people hunt big game?” she asks. “Hunt animalsthey have no intention of eating? It’s because the entertainment is in their destruction.”
Quentin furrows his brow, looking disturbed.
“And we were game,” she adds.
The room is eerily quiet, and Annalise continues to go through the drawers, the metal scraping and then slamming as she opens and closes them. Quentin takes a container of lighter fluid, squirts it around the room and especially on the equipment. He pauses.
“You gotta be like that lion,” he tells Annalise, as if he just thought of something. Annalise looks over at him.
“What lion?” she asks.
“The one that ate the hunter. The dude had a big gun, thought he was so bad with it. Lion came up behind and tore him apart. Be the lion, girl.”
Annalise smiles. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll give that a try.”
Quentin laughs. “You should,” he adds.
Annalise opens the last drawer, seeing nothing, but just before she closes it, a piece of paper sticks out from where it was jammed underneath. Curious, she works it out.
But as she reads it, her breath catches. Annalise quickly folds the paper and puts it in her pocket.
