F I N N

I guided the car we'd rented down the winding road, wishing I could sew both Arlo and Jaxon's mouths shut. They'd been bickering for almost as long as we'd been in the car.

Arlo leaned over the passenger side to glare at Jaxon. "Let me do it."

"No."

"Please?" I didn't think I'd ever heard Arlo say that in his entire life.

"No."

Arlo turned to me. "Finn, can you settle a disagreement between Jaxon and I?"

I kept my eyes on the road. "Isn't that what I'm here for?"

"Right," he said, not picking up on my sarcastic comment. "So answer me this, who do you think should get to detonate the bombs? Me or Jaxon?"

It was in that moment that I wished I'd picked a different group. I sighed. "Don't take this the wrong way, Arlo, but Jaxon is much less erratic and therefore, less prone to accidents."

"I'd prefer he did take it the wrong way," Jaxon suggested from behind me.

"He didn't say no," Arlo pointed out.

"Yes, he did."

"No, Finn always tries to please everyone, so he won't pick a side." My frown deepened. Was that really true?

"I'm on Jaxon's side," I told Arlo with a flat expression.

"I told you." I could hear the smile in Jaxon's words.

"Fine." Arlo crossed his arms. "I'll remember this when you two want anything from me."

Jaxon scoffed. "What would we want from you?"

"When you inevitably find yourself in a life-threatening predicament, then you'll need my help."

"Might I remind you that I needed to join this group because you were worried that you and Finn wouldn't be competent by yourselves?"

"I never said that," I pointed out.

"You didn't have to," Arlo retorted. "You're too honorable to willingly do something so destructive like this by yourself." I huffed out a sigh, wishing that this assault on my character—which happened to be much less morally gray then my teammates'—would stop soon.

"Don't make me sound so ostentatiously righteous," I protested. "I just have a more clear idea of what's right and wrong than the rest of you."

"Oh, I know the difference between right and wrong," Jaxon said, a smug undertone in his voice, "I just often choose to ignore my conscience."

"I don't have a conscience," Arlo stated proudly. Somehow, I didn't doubt that.

I parked the car next to the fence surrounding the Russian weapons factory, glad that the long and argument-filled ride was over. Jaxon unbuckled his seatbelt. "I'll go in first and make sure the area is clear."

Glancing over at the facility, I saw it standing in the middle of the area, a black mass below the dark, cloudy sky. Even from how far away we were parked, I noticed a few lights shone through the windows. "It looks like someone's home."

Jaxon shrugged, not worried in the slightest. "I'll just kill them. Stay here until I get back."

"You'll just kill them," I repeated in an incredulous whisper. Jaxon vanished from sight.

"Isn't it strange that we're probably the only two people on our team that haven't murdered anyone yet?" Arlo asked thoughtfully, looking out the window at the place Jaxon had vanished into. I scoffed at his usage of the word 'yet'.

"Everyone else has thoroughly corrupted you."

He grinned that crazy smile. "That's right. The only one here that has yet to become a criminal is you."

Shaking my head, I answered, "I won't become one. I want to keep the order, not further destroy it." No matter how great the darkness's pull was, I wouldn't succumb to it. I had promised myself that.

"Well, whether you want it to or not, things will eventually delve into chaos. And with the way these events are unfolding, it will probably be soon."

I turned to look at him. "What do you mean?"

He glanced at me with a flash of his gray eyes and shrugged, like he hadn't realized he'd said his thoughts aloud. "Even I can feel the strain in our team. For the most part, we're being civil because we have a common enemy in Imperium, but tensions are building. I don't know how long it will take before something worse happens."

I'd only seen him like this a few times: serious and pensive rather than mentally strange and loud. As I watched him talk, I realized that I quite liked him like this.

He went on. "We haven't even made a dent in Imperium's rise ever since we discovered their return. For now, they're just killing people one-by-one and making moves behind the scenes. But eventually, they'll grab power and become unstoppable."

Leaving a brief moment of silence after his statement, I asked, "Where is all of this coming from? It's not like you to be so...engaged."

Leaned against the headrest, he angled his head upward and closed his eyes. As his shoulders slumped, I worried that this might deeper than I'd originally thought. I had never seen him show any sign of defeat, even when he'd revealed his childhood imprisonment in a laboratory.

"I'm dying, Finn."

I blinked. "What?"

"Dying. My heart will stop, my brain will shut down, I'll stop breathing-"

"What are you talking about?" I asked, feeling as though every word took a gasping breath to get out. He had to be joking, this had to be his idea of some sick, twisted joke...

"I went to one of the ONNT doctors the other day because I've been sick for a long time. After running tests on me, they found out that one of the medications the lab was giving me is slowly killing my body." He sounded too calm, too robotic, like he was delivering the evening news and not his own death sentence.

"How long do you have?" The panic was working its way up from my chest, clamping around my throat.

"Six months, tops."

"No." I was shaking my head before I was even aware of it. "No, there has to be something that we can do, something that can save you."

"They said that they'd work on a cure for me. But I know it won't work. I've been feeling sick for almost as long as I've been out of the lab. I've been getting weaker with each passing day."

I simply stared at him. There was nothing that I could say or do.

"But it's okay," he said, a small smile emerging on his face even at a time like this, "At least I'll get out of fighting Imperium if I die before they start taking over."

"How could this happen to you?" My voice sounded so exhausted, so drained. I hardly noticed.

He sighed, sobering up again. "I don't know. I don't want to die, not now. But I think I can make peace with it."

"How? You just started really living and now you're about to have it snatched back from you."

"Everyone dies. Even me. But at least I get to live a little before it happens. At least I finally found people like me, no matter how criminal and murderous they are." He paused. "Honestly, I always hoped that I'd go out in battle from being blown up or something. But I suppose that dying from a chemical infiltrating my bloodstream is badass in its own way."

He stopped rambling and turned back to me. "I'm only telling you about this, at least for right now."

"Why?" I felt a strange urge to ask.

"Our team is close to imploding. Everyone is still hiding things, but another dark truth could rip us apart."

I supposed he was right. As he'd pointed out earlier, tensions were high with everything that had happened. Arlo's desire to not be the catalyst to something worse happening was understandable.

We both jumped when Jaxon, sprayed with blood, reappeared on my side and began rapping fervently on the window. I opened my door, not sure if I should be nervous for what he was going to tell us. Judging by the look on his face, I knew something was wrong.

"I took out the guards without a problem," he said, his breaths coming in short, panting gusts. "And I made it inside the factory, but it's all gone. The place is almost completely cleared out."

"What do you mean, 'cleared out'? You mean there's no one inside?"

"No, I mean that all the weaponry—all the Scorpions—are gone. The place is empty."

I got out of the car. "There has to be some sort of mistake. You must have gone into the wrong door or something."

"You can see it with your own eyes. They must have shipped out all their weapons early."

"They couldn't have seen us coming," I said as the three of us walked to the looming edifice. "Right?"

"I don't know," Jaxon admitted. "If the others destroyed the Prague and Romanian facilities already, it's probable that Imperium knew this one was next."

He led us to the door he'd come through, which had two guards' bodies splayed out in front of it. They were covered in blood, just like Jaxon, and their open eyes seemed to follow us as we passed. Wrinkling my nose, I stepped over a body and passed through the doorway.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the building was its size. The place was so large that I could barely make out the opposite side in the distance. If this was just one of Imperium's weapon factories, they must have had an arsenal bigger than any other organization, especially those that dared to cross them.

The second thing I noticed was that the place was indeed empty. The tables were cleared of blueprints and tools. Every piece of machinery that once was on all day building guns and Scorpions—and whatever else Imperium was hiding—was now off and unmoving. I'd only ever seen the blueprints for the Scorpions that Jaxon had warned us about, but I had a good enough idea of how they looked to be certain there were none here.

"They saw us coming." My voice was a whisper; I couldn't help but worry that someone else was in here with us.

"Shh." Arlo held out his hand to keep me from walking forward. "I hear...a beeping noise."

"What? Could it be one of the machines?"

"Or," Jaxon's tone was dark, panic lurking below the surface, "Is it the steady beeping of a bomb preparing to go off?"

"I think-"

I never heard the rest of Arlo's sentence. It was drowned out by the thunderous roar of a bomb exploding. I clapped my hands over my ears, barely aware of Jaxon and Arlo doing the same. The fire spread so quickly that we barely had time to move before we were fully engulfed in the first wave of smoke and flames. The shock knocked me back and I wasn't sure if I'd fallen or not.

As the fire and smoke around us became indistinguishable, I wasn't worried about myself. Both my body and clothes were fireproof: the flames only heated my skin like a warm bath. Arlo and Jaxon, however, would burn alive if I didn't do something to help them.

Between the flames and debris crashing down from the ceiling, it was nearly impossible to see. But I knew that Arlo was somewhere to my right, while Jaxon stood directly in front of me. Sweeping out my arms in wide gestures, I tried to grab onto either one of them. Finally, my right hand grasped onto Arlo. I could feel his body spasming as he coughed and I immediately panicked even more when I remembered that he was already sick. After shoving him out of the exit behind us, I went back to find Jaxon.

Pieces of the roof were caving in. A slab of concrete smashed to pieces less than a foot away from me. If Jaxon didn't burn alive, he was going to be crushed under the falling roof.

It smelled like the center of a nuclear bomb: fire, smoke, burning. Everything was burning.

I let out a sigh of relief when I found Jaxon. Wrapping a hand around his arm, I hauled him out of the collapsing building. Stumbling out of the doorway, I coughed and waved the smoke out of my face. Jaxon and Arlo did the same, bent over and retching from the smoke inhalation. They appeared to have no bad burns on their skin, though all of their clothes had burn holes and reeked of smoke.

"Are you okay?" I asked, but looked to Arlo first. They both nodded, needing to breathe the cool air for a few more moments before trying to speak.

"I think it's safe to say...that they knew we were coming," Arlo said between wheezing coughs.

"I told you. All their weaponry was gone." Jaxon said, sitting weakly down on the asphalt. "They already shipped it to the Imperium fortress."

I watched the roof cave in. Sparks flew as it crashed to the floor below. If we hadn't gotten out of there with those few seconds to spare, we would have been crushed with the impact of the roof. I ran my hands through my hair, grateful to be alive.