Aaliyah sat at their requisite table, idly chewing on a piece of perfectly toasted bread, scrunching her face in thought. The rest of her team were surrounding her, chatting about their training and what they were trying to work on in their quest to beat the members of the other team.

Ajax had been the one to find himself as most competitive with the other team, his power having increased magnificently as soon as he’d implemented one, amazingly simple thing. Actually using his axe. The rest of the team hadn’t even bothered to be happy for the man when he’d told them why he was doing so much better. It wasn’t as if Ajax was stupid, just restrictive and cautious when it actually came to drawing from that power that the axe could give him.

Walter had been faring better as he got acclimated to the amorphous blob that was Julia, though he still found it extraordinarily difficult to resist his mind’s natural inclination to try and subvert the sound that Julia used to throw him off. He had explained it like the brain had to figure out a new equation ever time that Julia changed to delay, so it was almost nauseating to experience. Once he’d been able to ignore the changes in sound and rely entirely off of eyesight, he fared a little better until she started to subvert that as well. Amorphous blob bending the mind with just what she was capable of in movement.

Mirah, however, was most surprising to Aaliyah. She wasn’t even close to being able to fight hand to hand with the massively tall Nigerian woman, of which Aaliyah had found only a few public records on and an old social media account that she had to manually translate. But Mirah’s performance against the other girl was impressive, even if there was a distinct lack in the usage of her pseudo telekinetic abilities. She was able to dodge blows before they were thrown, and that same principle even applied to the girl who could move as fast as damn lightning, enough to terrify Aaliyah on occasion with a flash of movement out of the corner of her own eye.

Aaliyah was doing fine, but it was all simply learning to fight against a foe who was just as strong, and far more skilled than herself. It was, however, increasing her interest in just what her other emotions might do for her, if she could reproduce them in combat so easily. For her to switch powersets to give herself a strategic advantage against her opponent, then she’d be the next ‘swiss army knife’ Linked, something that was extremely valuable and highly sought after.

But Aaliyah could care less about that right now, even with how she’d been pummelled into the ground by Jamie’s clawed hands and scaled body not twenty minutes earlier. Right now, her mind was awhirl with the information she’d gained the night before, something that had even stopped her from sleeping with the swirling thoughts.

It wasn’t a grand revelation or anything so astounding, but enough to make her hate the world just a little more.

“Aaliyah.” Ajax’s voice was the one to cut through the hubbub of her mind, pulling her back to the present with a soft, but firm tone, “Something is bothering you.”

She looked up to the man, almost a half-foot taller than her, and she was already six foot tall, dwarfing the majority of men and women even in Australia. Even as he sat, he looked so much bigger than he was even then. Next to June he looked short, but it also made his already impressive muscles even more prominent. As he idly pulled his long hair back into a bun, focusing on her completely, letting the rest of the group do the same, she could swear that she saw concern in his powerful features and dark eyebrows.

‘Hah, concern for little old me.’ She thought sarcastically before running a hand through her own blonde locks, pulling them over her shoulder and leaning back in the chair as she felt the centre of attention shift towards here properly.

“I had a visitor last night.” She began, trying her best to say the world flatly and without the sarcastic or mockingly theatrical edge she fell into so easily when she wasn’t playing a character. Just good old, broken Aaliyah.

“Baxter’s team?” Walter said, catching on instantly, almost surprising the rest of the group with just how snappy his response had been. The fairly slim Vietnamese boy tried not to shy away from the looks, instead choosing to elucidate the others to how he’d picked out the answer so fight.

“I’ve been chatting with Rich a lot recently, trying to get a good idea of, uh,” he waved his hand around the place, “all of what we’ve been missing. Apparently you’re not really expected to interact with the other trainees for a few months at least, not until combat training starts, so we’re behind big time—”

“And?” Mirah said, stopping the boy from falling down a rabbit hole with a sharp tug on the reins, though Walt just jolted as if the train he was riding clicked back onto the rails. Mirah was good at that.

“And,” he said slowly, “Slip has a bit of a reputation of doing that sort of thing. That’s what they call the kid in the golden hoodie, anyways.” The others nodded their heads slowly, following along with Walter’s pedestrian explanation, though Aaliyah snorted.

“Five points for the quick deduction, two for guessing right on who wanted the information, but that’s all you’re getting.” Walt turned back, less annoyed by the random scoring he’d received, and more interested in what he’d gotten ‘wrong’. Aaliyah shrugged nonchalantly and continued on, “Guy Baker showed up on my doorstep last night.”

Something that only confused them more.

“Uh, Guy is the one that Mirah fought, right? The one that could change his skin into what he stood on, I think.” Walter questioned hesitantly, and Aaliyah confirmed, turning her own questioning gaze towards Mirah.

“He was indeed.” She said mysteriously, “And according to you, Mirah, he also wasn’t a predator.”

She wasn’t doing so much as threatening her team member. Aaliyah found it difficult to do that to someone that sometimes felt so out of this world, almost alien. But it was a question, or even a challenge, to what the girl had felt between her and that man that could have possibly made her think that he wasn’t a predator of some sort.

“He is not.” Mirah intoned quietly after a long moment of thought, prompting the two boys at the table to covertly look around the cafeteria to see if they could find the boy’s pudgy form, one they’d never really taken any particular interest in, not over someone far more… intimidating than Baxter or his muscled Asian bodyguard.

“You say that,” Aaliyah said as she snatched up a packet of sugar from the middle of the table, ripping it open and pouring it into her now lukewarm drink, “but when he talked to me last night, I could swear he was about to kill someone.” The intensity between the two girls was almost palpable, though there was one in the group that had shown that he sometimes had difficulties reading atmospheres.

“Yeah right, how would you know wha–” Walter said, snorting amusedly before he found the rest of the team’s eyes focused in in him. Walt grimace heavily, cringing at his own knee-jerk response, beating himself over the head mentally for the stupid idea his brain had spawned.

“When I saw him,” Mirah said, ignoring Walter’s blunder, “I knew that he wasn’t here because he wanted to be.” The explanation was simple, and getting more out of Mirah was difficult; with her sometimes limited vocabulary, and terrible communication skills. Sometimes it was just easier to take the words at face value.

“And maybe you’re right.” Aaliyah shrugged heavily, “But he showed up to talk on behalf of Slip last night, and if you’d told me that he was a genuine RO member, I wouldn’t have even questioned it.”

“Anyway,” Ajax interjected hastily, choosing to push the conversation away from a potential argument, “that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what you found out, and what you gave them.”

Ajax, surprisingly, had been the one to realise that it was a deal, and that Aaliyah would have had to give up information on her own team to get some on others. The other two had it click for them next, with Walter’s eyes going wide with a horrified betrayal.

“You sold us out?” He hissed harshly, the look of disgust on his face almost offensive if Aaliyah knew that she wouldn’t feel just as violated had he done it to her.

“Yes, I sold some of our information for their own information.” The others at the table, even Ajax and Mirah, have her a hard look, unsure and slightly hurt. Aaliyah forced a harsh sigh from her throat scratching her fingers through her hair and letting it fall into its natural middle part. “Look, I know that sounds bad—”

“Really bad.” Walter said, voice strained with some anger, and she glared at him for interrupting, only continuing after Walter twisted his lip in distaste for a moment and restraining himself.

“But it was necessary. Our information isn’t valuable, not as much as theirs is, and theirs is far more valuable to us than you seem to think.”

“It’s not valuable to you!” Walter hissed, his voice cracking with the effort of restraining the yell he so desperately wanted to let loose. “You’re giving Righteous Order information about me, and I have parents who have to work with them!”

Aaliyah clenched her jaw angrily, even if she could see his point. Well, she could more than see his point. She knew his point back to front, and she also knew what was really happening.

Walt began to stand from his seat at the table, ready to storm off and go burn off some energy, quite literally. You’d have thought that it’d be Ajax to stop him, to try and keep the team together and talk through the situation with a level head, and Aaliyah was sure he would have, if she hadn’t called out to him first.

“Walt!” She said insistently, loud enough that it turned a few heads in their direction, before they rolled their eyes at what they’d have probably believed was just another fight between a new team. Walter turned back towards her, his face a mask of pure anger and betrayal that she felt painfully pierce into her chest.

‘Goddamn it, Aaliyah. You’re losing your touch.’ She reprimanded herself as she swallowed against the pang of sadness that washed over her at the boy’s rage fuelled look, an expression that she’d been on the receiving end of too many times to count. A look that she thought that she’d completely numbed herself too. A look that somehow managed to cut past any defence she had and slice through the muscled walls of her heart.

“Walt, you want to sit down.” She commanded, her voice almost defensively angry before tapering off at the end as she flicked her eyes away from the man, looking to her hands at the table, “… please.”

The words were almost painful to say, and the grey colour that floated to the surface of her skin only made her more uncomfortable with the eyes of the group on her. She remembered the grey dots, the ones that had once allowed Mirah to remember Aaliyah’s own memories, and she hated that it was appearing now, of all places. She tried to push it down, but even as Walter glared at her heatedly, taking the few steps back to the table and sitting back down heavily.

“What, then?” He said, crossing his arms in a surprisingly intimidating fashion for the boy that she could have sworn was just an excitable puppy made human. She sighed, her breath filled with pure exasperation, her hand roughly rubbing against the skin of her forehead.

“I’m so sorry Walt.” Aaliyah began, and everyone at the table froze at her tone. It was true, genuine sadness, something that was so stark when coming from Aaliyah’s mouth that even Aaliyah was a little surprised that she felt as deeply sad as she did. She’d thought that she’d lost that part of herself, her ability to express any real, genuine emotions past a select handful. Certainly not any that made her vulnerable.

She struggled to make eye contact with the man, her body covered in goosebumps from the wave of adrenalin as she realised that she was being vulnerable in front of the team, in a public place. But despite the bravado she tried to summon, she couldn’t stop her expression from shaking.

“They already know about your parents, Walt. They always did.” She placed her white knuckled grip against her brow, obscuring her face from view as she kneaded the thin skin with a painful amount of force.

“Who do you think is helping Baxter push forwards our training?”

Aaliyah watched on in with a terrible dread in her stomach as Walter’s face went from angrier that he had likely ever been, to that heart wrenching look of horror on his face, his mouth falling agape as the light in his eyes dulled slightly as reality set in. A blanket of real danger, genuine danger, fell over the group as they slowly came to understand just terrifying their lives were going to be.

Aaliyah, however, was the one who could walk in the swamps of the darkness, sullying herself so that the others could remain clean, even if she returned with information that destroyed their hearts ever so slightly. Aaliyah let her jaw clench and her eyes close as she faced her own secret fear, realising that she had no choice but to tell them just why she could brave the darkness.

“I think…” Aaliyah said, the first to break the horrid stillness, her mouth trembling as she clenched her heart and forced it to steel itself against her vulnerability. She stood up straight, finding the warm orange of willpower on her skin, washing over her and the rest of the group as their minds focused and pulled themselves into a desperate intensity.

“I think it’s time we talked. About us, about our histories, our Awakenings.” She trailed off for a second, looking from Mirah to Ajax, then finally letting her eyes rest on Walter’s distraught expression.

“About me.” She finalized, letting the warm amber cover her skin even more completely, even glowing slightly as she resolved herself to the words she’d shied away from for years, the terrible name that had haunted her, and would haunt her, for the rest of her life.

“My name… is Aaliyah Flinn.” She said finally, her words burning with a quivering shame, “And I was the Monarch.”