“I think Rosemarie wants you destroyed,” she says then. “I think she wants you for her project, but the moment it’s done, she’ll decommission you.”
“What are you talking about?” Brynn asks. “Didn’t she create us?
“Sure,” Leandra allows. “But once she gets control of society, frees human girls from the expectations and oppression of the current leaders, do you think she’ll need you? No. At that point, we all become a liability. A threat to her peaceful utopia of human women.”
“Just because she wanted to kill you doesn’t mean she’ll kill us,” Marcella points out. “You do have that effect on people.”
Leandra laughs and tells Marcella she’s quite right.
“You think on it,” she tells us when we hesitate to answer. “But don’t think too long. The other girls are counting on you too. In the end, Rosemarie must be stopped.” She pauses. “We’ll expect you in a few days.” She hangs up.
There is a sudden shift in the air, and then the girls and I look around at each other.
“We?”Sydney repeats. “She’s not alone, so who is Leandra with?”
“We can’t go back now,” I say. “We should—”
“You’re abandoning them again?” Brynn says, cutting me off. Offended, I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “We’re going to get the girls… eventually. But I think we need to be careful of—”
“Just stop it, Mena,” she says. “You promised you’d go back for them when we left the academy and you didn’t. You said it was too dangerous, you said they weren’t awake, you said we had to stop the corporation. And even now, with the corporation gone, you still aren’t going back for them. You’re a liar.”
“Hey,” I say sharply. I wait for the other girls to defend me, but none of them immediately do. I look around, feeling betrayed. “You agreed with me,” I tell them. “We couldn’t save them if we hadn’t saved ourselves first.”
“It shouldn’t have mattered if they were awake,” Brynn says. “You should have saved them anyway. But you didn’t. You talked us into saving the human girls at Ridgeview. But what about our friends? When do they fit into your schedule to save them?”
Tears well up in my eyes. “That’s not fair,” I say. “I’ve tried to keep us safe.”
“Exactly,” Brynn says. “Us. And now, Rosemarie has our friends and who knows what she’s done to them. She turned Lennon Rose into a monster. And instead of going back there to fight, you’re sitting here, debating if it’s safe enough for us. Well, forget safety, Mena. Do what’s right.”
I’m shocked and hurt by her outburst. A tear slips onto my cheek. I don’t deserve all the blame, I know that. But sheisn’t wrong either. I did make excuses. I put us ahead of them. Humans ahead of them. And now, Rosemarie has our girls.
The others are quiet, Marcella glancing at me in the rearview mirror and Sydney gnawing on her lip.
“We go back and save them,” I say quietly. “But we’re not going through Leandra and whoever she’s with. We go directly to Rosemarie. We don’t even tell Leandra we’re coming to town.”
“I agree with you, Mena,” Marcella says, nodding to me in the mirror. “I think we go directly to Rosemarie and we don’t leave without our girls.”
The idea of facing Rosemarie again is terrifying, and I’ll admit that I’m scared. But being scared isn’t a good enough excuse not to try. Not anymore.
“It’s all of us,” Brynn says. “You understand that, right? We have to show up for each other, no matter the cost. Just like when we saved Annalise in the lab at the school. We don’t leave anyone else behind.”
I remember watching Annalise die in that laboratory, the absolute agony of losing her and how I would have done anything to get her back. Just because I can’t see the suffering of the other girls in front of me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be just as devastated. I won’t let them become monsters. I won’t let evil win.
“All of us,” I say, nodding my head in agreement. “It has to be all of us.”
“Thank you, Mena,” Brynn says, stretching her hand back toward me. I grip her hand, squeezing it before letting go.
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Hometown Lacrosse Hero Jonah Grant Missing from His Home in East Connecticut
