Page 232 of Immune

His voice grows hoarse as he finally answers, “The door broken. Blood in the hall. The bathroom…”

I stop breathing.

He stops talking.

The bathroom seems to sit between us. White tile. Rope. Snapping teeth. My mother’s face turned wrong in a way grief couldn’t even explain. My knife shaking so hard that I almost dropped it twice.

Maine’s eyes shine again.

“I thought you were dead,” he rasps. “There was so much blood.”

“It wasn’t mine,” I tell him bluntly.

“I know that now.”

“You didn’t know that then.”

“No.”

“You saw the bathroom and left?” I ask, and he flinches.

I want to be glad for it, but I’m not.

“I searched the house,” he tells me. “The neighbors’ house. The back alley. The school shelter. I found your knife mark on the kitchen doorframe.”

My stomach twists violently, because I forgot about that. A little slash low in the wood. A sign to myself that I had checked the room and cleared it. A stupid little system built out of panic and a blade far too big for my hand.

“You knew I was alive.”

“I knew you might be,” he says.

“That’s a convenient little difference,” I mutter, and his breath catches.

I pull my hand away, and it actually hurts. Good. Maybe the pain will do something useful for once.

Maine lets me take it back without chasing it, and that almost makes it worse.

“I found one of Dad’s private notebooks hidden under the loose floorboard in his office,” he explains, and my eyes snap up.

“What?”

“I didn’t know what half of it meant. Not back then. But I knew enough to recognize your name,” he tells me.

A cool chill crawls over my skin. “My name?”

“Not all of it. Initials. Date of birth. Blood type. Scent response notes. Omega stabilization schedules.”

My pulse trips over itself.

Dad’s kitchen table charts.

Mom rubbing his shoulders.

Maine stealing pens.

My drawing monsters in the margins until Dad laughed and said they had very good clinical instincts.

That memory suddenly curdles like spoiled milk and I ask, “He was studying me?”