10

Dear Melissa,

Get back to the airport. Anna is coming back. I sent her, so she could collect you, so that you could come back. But I have to stay and hunt down Riley. The blast must've hurt him more than we thought it did, because he isn't covering his tracks properly. I already have a lead.

Did you do the smart thing? I know what your power can do, so I can only assume that when we left, you did something important. Hopefully you found something out about what the hell happened. Maybe you found some fragments. Just be careful if you decide to head back to that place. There could still be stragglers.

I do have to ask: are you okay with this? I mean, you haven't said you have anything against it, but I know that you are the sort of person that wouldn't tell me any of your problems. Or maybe I'm the sort of person that people struggle to talk to. I'll try and work on that.

Anyway, try and find yourself some clues. Something that tells us where else Riley may have gone. Because while Pierce is a dick, he is smart. If he's told Riley he's going to Australia, chances are that he isn't in Australia. If I can figure that out, so can Riley. He'll have other flights booked, other countries where Pierce is likely to have gone.

See you soon,

Shannon

Signed 16/05/2018

Truly unbelievable. If Shannon did manage to kill Riley without dying herself, then Melissa was going to kill her. After everything that had happened, she still sent a thirteen-year-old girl on a plane by herself without any protection. She drummed her fingers on the table beside her, waiting impatiently for her daughter to come through the doors.

"Ahem. Anyone waiting for news from flight AL2256 from Australia..." No. Surely not. "The plane will be arriving in five minutes." Melissa sank back down into her seat. She didn't even know that she had stood up.

"Hello Mother." Melissa looked at Anna sharply.

"What... I swear they only just said the plane was arriving in five minutes."

"You must have fallen asleep. You've had a pretty rough couple of days."

"Hey, so have you, don't forget."

"No, I haven't." Melissa looked at her daughter quizzically but recoiled when her body transformed into Shannon's. Shannon reached behind her back, and pulled out a dagger, and drove it straight towards Melissa's heart...

She woke up with a jolt. Straightening, she looked around her to see if anyone noticed anything weird about her. Apparently not. A faint drone buzzed in her ears, informing her of the plane's descent.

A rush of people came bursting through the doors, men and women hugging their respective families. "Hi Mum."

"Hey Anna." Melissa pulled her daughter into a tight hug.

"What was that for?"

"No reason." She stood there for a while anyway, enjoying the feel of Anna clamped to the lower three quarters of her body.

"So, what are we doing today?"

"Don't think you get off that easily. What were you thinking? Why would you go by yourself onto a plane, a very high plane, when very dangerous people are after us?"

"Shannon said it would be alright." She actually looked apologetic.

"And you let her stay in Australia, while you came here by yourself?"

"Yeah, because telling her to come along was going to work."

Anna had a point. "Okay. Fair enough. Where do you think we should go?"

"Well, you obviously got the email that Shannon sent you. We need to find out if Riley purchased any other tickets to any other countries. And to do that, we need to retrace his steps."

"Starting..."

"You know where we're starting."

"I already went back there. Other than a blood spill and some scorch marks, there isn't anything there." She wasn't quite ready to confide in her daughter about the encounter with the so-called 'straggler' that Shannon had told her about.

"We aren't going back there to investigate. We're going back there to find where he went after that."

"And maybe find out where he's going to go after Australia."

"Exactly."

They walked together in companionable silence. The recent events hadn't exactly pushed them apart, but they hadn't really bonded, either. Also, it was the first time that either of them had been anywhere other than Britain. They were amazed by the differences in culture and the buildings that surrounded them, which were... different, but still with the same air about them. Melissa felt comfortable and confident walking around these streets, despite her distaste for the city.

"Shannon has a theory."

"Shannon has a set of balls, to send you by yourself."

Anna began to ask, but just gave up. "Um, yeah, sure. Anyway, the thing with the pink hair? She thinks it's a new power. Think what you will about her, she knows her stuff when it comes to this."

"That is definitely true. So, a new power? What is it, something to do with changing your appearance?"

"Yeah, she said shapeshifter. Figura Mutante was the Latin. The last time those fragments exploded, everyone got all of these powers. This time, I'm thinking..."

"That there are more powers because of the fragments exploding. Yeah, that makes sense," said Melissa, nodding her head. "So, why haven't any of us displayed any powers?"

"Not a clue." Anna looked down at the ground.

"Why are you so unhappy? We've got new powers! That's so cool!" Melissa was genuinely beaming at the possibility. Anna smiled faintly at her mother, before moving her eyes back to the ground.

"Because we weren't the only ones there. We might have gotten new powers, but there was someone else there. Riley. And I don't want to think about him having another attacking option added to his arsenal."

The news hit Melissa like a bombshell. She swayed a bit in her step, and Anna held her up, until Melissa regained her composure. Sure, she hadn't seen Riley in action, but the stories were more than enough. He literally couldn't be stopped. And him with a new power, one that would make him even more dangerous? Melissa swallowed the bile rising in her throat, and walked with a new, brisk pace.

They reached the compound within five minutes. There weren't any clues to where Riley could have gone afterwards, but it suddenly occurred to Anna that perhaps that wasn't the only entrance. And she was correct.

A back door stood behind the building, almost invisible to the outside world. No one could get in, but someone who was possibly living inside the place would certainly know about it. Melissa walked over and pulled on the handle. Nothing. It must have been locked after everyone had left.

She didn't really know what they were looking for. It wasn't as if they were going to find tracks in the dirt or broken branches to scour. And even if there was anything of the sort, Riley was far too clever to let those tracks be left there. "Well, the only way to find him is to think like him."

"But how do we do that? He's insane. It's impossible to know what he is thinking at any time. He's too unpredictable."

"Yeah, but think about what had just happened. At least twenty of his colleagues and friends have just died, he finds us, and instantly assumes that we're onto him. That would be the logical conclusion. So, he is distraught. He's upset. Some of those people would have been his friends."

"Maybe not. I mean, he's killed hundreds without feeling any remorse whatsoever. Why would he start being compassionate now?"

"I don't know." They sat in the grass outside for a few minutes, trying to imagine what could possibly have been going on in his head. "Maybe... I mean, those people that he killed, did he have any emotional connection to them whatsoever?"

"Probably not."

"So, we can presume that he was close to one of the people in there. Or, as close to people as he can get."

"Maybe," said Anna, sounding thoughtful. "It's either that, or the people who died were of great importance to him tactically. Maybe they had powers that he considered useful for things that even he couldn't do himself."

"Right. But either way, he's not happy. He can't feel compassion for others. But he can feel sorry for himself. He wouldn't be mourning those people's deaths; he'd be grieving the loss of his own assets."

"We went to an alley to cry it out after-- you know." Anna paused, tears nearly coming back to her eyes as she remembered her brief, but strong friendship with the man. "Maybe he did the same."

"Okay then. Let's go for a walk."

The grass that they were standing on went down into a valley. They walked down to the street below, which was crowded with people standing outside of shops and apartments, clearly with nothing better to do than smoke their lungs away on cigarettes and pot.

It wasn't a good place to be in, but it looked like the sort of place that Riley would definitely go to blend in, or to hide among the crowd, especially if he wanted to be alone. Maybe there were people around him. But there would always be somewhere to hide, somewhere to go to have a sulk.

"Hey, Mum. Look, over there. An internet cafe." Anna gestured to the other side of the road. "He had to have booked the tickets somewhere. And he wouldn't have known he was going to get the tickets until after the pieces exploded. He comes here, and sees the cafe, and gets his tickets, right?"

They walked inside. The interior wasn't much better than the rest of the town. It looked dusty and dingy, and the people who were on the computers in there probably weren't engaging in innocent activities. "So, now what?"

"Usually, this would be a lot more difficult. It is kind of hard to figure out what sort of plane he caught, or how to log into the website. However, these computers keep a recording of who has logged on and what they've done when they've been in use. And they're sometimes all linked, which would mean that I wouldn't need to access the same computers as him to figure out what he had done."

They sat down at the nearest computer and turned it on. The computer sounded as if it hadn't been used in decades, but the processors eventually started to work. Then it flashed again, and the screen turned entirely black. Except for...

"Is that a Pikachu?" Melissa whispered in shock.

Anna grumbled in annoyance. "Yes. And it's also a virus."

"A dancing Pikachu on the screen is a virus?"

"Yes. The Pokémon virus was almost an epidemic throughout 2006 where it hopped onto a computer, and distracted people with a Pikachu while it secretly stole all of the user's information, like security details and bank numbers." Anna sounded like she was reciting a book verbatim, which was probably true, considering her memory abilities.

"Well, why is it on here?"

"What do you mean? It's a virus. It doesn't select its victims to a specific standard."

"Yeah, but you said 2006. Surely it's gone by now, as in this specific virus isn't a thing anymore. Also, why would it hop onto an internet cafe computer. This computer could have heaps of people using it per day, which means that there wouldn't be any specific details to take."

"That's true," said Anna thoughtfully. "Unless..."

"Riley." Melissa finished for her. "Riley was on here. Maybe he decided to have a bit of fun. That means this was the computer he used. Can you get rid of it?"

"Yeah, I read about how to get rid of it somewhere. Hang on a second, it usually takes a bit to grab older memories. Okay..." Melissa watched in wonder as her daughter closed her eyes, and her eyeballs rolled around underneath her eyelids, seeing things that Melissa probably didn't even remember.

"Yep, got it. This shouldn't take too long." Melissa couldn't understand what Anna was typing in the computer, but whatever it was, it worked. Pikachu disappeared from the screen, and it flashed back on.

"Well, that was bizarre. Now what?"

"I see what Riley was accessing on here. It looks like he went to the same website where we got our tickets. It should tell us the login that he used... yep, got it."

The website itself proved to be almost as tricky to navigate as the virus was, but they pulled up his flight data. They gaped at the enormity of their task.

"Anna? Did he actually..."

"Yes. He did."

They looked on the screen, at the two hundred and fifty tickets that were displayed on the monitor.

"Riley is going to every country on the planet."

* * * *

Riley sprinted through the crowd, pushing and shoving his way, trying to reach the man responsible for all of his problems. He laid a hand on the man's shoulder.

"Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew." Riley shook his head and walked away. He only had two days until he was going to leave again. He made sure that he wasn't going to have as much time to look through Australia as he was the other countries, as it was very unlikely that Pierce would have given the actual country that he was residing in away. But he still needed to check.

And he had seen the look on Shannon's face. He wasn't normally the one to back away from a fight; he was the hunter, not the hunted. But something in Shannon's face scared him, and he didn't fancy fighting her anyway. Anyone else, he would've jumped at the opportunity. But not with Shannon.

A light glowed in his pocket. Maybe he was thinking too much about what happened. He unzipped the pocket of his jeans and put his hand around the fragments. He didn't want everyone to die. Just a select few. So he hadn't tried using the pieces again, for fear of his own life, and for someone else's.

He needed to get back to his apartment. He jumped the steps, using his power to help himself along a little bit. He keyed open the door.

A figure sat on his bed. "Honestly, what is it with people breaking into my places. Please go away, I need to pack."

Shannon moved out of the light. Riley took hold of her with his mind and stopped her moving any closer. He felt around for the gun held behind her back.

"Did you really think that you would be able to kill me like this?" He watched her struggle for a while, before continuing. "No. You didn't. So, what were you doing here, Shannon?"

She looked at the ground. "Come on. You didn't come here to talk, that's for sure. You're more a woman of action. So why did you come here?"

Shannon exploded. "Because you killed all of those people, right in front of us! Because your fucking goons killed Andrew, and because you didn't care about their deaths! There wasn't any sorrow in your eyes. And now you're going to kill me, right here in your own flat, because you're a fucking lunatic."

"That's not true. Well, the lunatic part is true, yes, but..." He was unnaturally calm, which only angered Shannon more. "Some of them were... I liked them, okay. I didn't want them to die. How on earth did you expect me to predict something like that happening. It was your bloody scientist, Pierce. He told me it would be okay. And then forty people died."

Shannon looked lost for a moment. Then she straightened up. "You can't kill him."

"I can, and I will. But I don't want to kill you. Please don't come after me again, Shannon." His face showed truth, and he seemed to be almost begging her.

He walked out quickly, before he could say or do anything he might regret.