Sage nods.
They start running.
I watch them go—Sage with his pink hair streaming behind him, Jett a shadow at his heels—and something in my chest cracks.
Blaze is beside me, golden-brown eyes bright with something I don't want to name.
"We going or what?"
I don't want to go.
Don't want to get involved in whatever disaster Sage has created.
Don't want to care about some random Omega whose name I don't even know.
But Blaze is already running after them.
And I?—
Fuck it.
I groan and take off after my pack.
The rain returns as we run—light sprinkle at first, then heavier, soaking through my coat and plastering my hair to my forehead. We tear through Ruthless Academy's streets like menpossessed, dodging crowds, vaulting obstacles, following Sage's lead through a maze of buildings I don't recognize.
The residential sector.
The townhomes are reserved for Omegas who've earned the right to exist outside the dormitories.
The exclusive housing that can only be claimed through survival, through violence, through proving you're too dangerous to cage with the general population.
She lives here.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it.
She earned a place here. Through killing. Through surviving. Through being exactly the kind of monster this academy was designed to create.
We're halfway there when I notice the sky.
Grey clouds.
Normal.
But underneath them?—
Smoke.
Rising in a thick black column that shouldn't exist this time of evening, in this part of campus, unless something is very, very wrong.
"What the hell?" Blaze calls out, slowing slightly as he tracks the smoke to its source.
Sage doesn't slow down.
If anything, he runs faster.
"WHAT THE FUCK DOES SHE LOOK LIKE?" Blaze shouts.
"PINK HAIR LIKE MINE!" Sage calls back, his voice tight with panic. "DOUBLE SWORDS! MISMATCHED EYES!"
