"How do you keep breaking in?" he asks curiously.
She smirks and then holds out her hand where her blood swirls through a gash she has made. "I use it to slide under your door and unlock it. Handy little gift."
"Ah," he says, seeming a little impressed.
“So I’ve gone over all the logs, but there isn’t anything of any real value,” she releases with sheer frustration.
He frowns, though I’m not sure if it’s because our conversation was interrupted, or if it’s because of her unhelpful information.
“There has to be something we’re missing. Aria wasn’t there, and they would have known that. So they came for something else, something they need,” he says, but it feels more as if he’s thinking aloud.
Simone scrolls through her phone while assessing each log, Mr. Mask stares tediously at the screen of the crumbled compound, and I sit uselessly on the couch. Then Simone’s eyes widen as she pales and goes stiff at once.
“What?” he prompts.
She looks up from her phone, her eyes flashing from me to him, and then her mouth slowly tries to bring out the words in a drawn out breath.
“Aria’s blood. It was there.”
He grips his head, and then he throws the remote across the room to shatter against the wall.
“Fuck!” he blares. “Why the hell was her blood there?”
“I was doing tests to see if I could find her gifts. You told her my father could use the blood to understand all the secret gifts hiding within Araya. I wanted to do the same for her.”
She looks back to me, and I’m sure I’m just as ashen as she is.
“It was so little. There’s barely enough to test - hell there was barely enough for Simone to work with, and that’s with her using her gift. She was cautious like that. They can’t do anything with that small amount of blood,” I murmur, but I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince them or myself. "Besides, I've bled out in numerous fights. If they wanted my blood, they could have taken it then."
"Not your blood," Simone says with a grimace.
"What do you mean?" I ask, feeling stupid.
The masked crusader answers instead of her though. "Your blood has to stay fresh. Once spilled, it's as worthless as a dead man's blood. Simone's gift is one of the few things that enables it to stay alive."
"And I'm just now hearing this because?"
"I don't know," Simone says, her eyes turning to the masked hero. "I only found out about it during my lab trials. How did you know?"
His lips tighten, secrets churning in his eyes.
"I know a lot more about her than you realize. Right now, we need to focus on retrieving her blood."
"Why would this person want it? It's obvious they're emergent related, otherwise they wouldn't have been seeking revenge on that facility. Why team up with the Scorpions they killed now? Why would they need my blood if it matches theirs?"
"Because all descendents of emergents have a different set of cells in their blood that is incomparable to anyone else's. They may need your blood to... hell, I don't know. I need answers," he grumbles.
He shakes his head, and then he grabs his bag before throwing all of his clothes into it.
“Where are you going?” I worry while standing up.
“To see if I can find out who did this. I don’t know what they can use such a small amount of blood for, but they were willing to do that in order to get to it,” he murmurs while pointing to the smoldering embers of Seminole displayed on the screen.
“What are you going to do? You can’t face whatever that thing was. You’ll be killed,” I panic, and I see a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“You worried?” he asks a little too cockily.
“Of course I’m worried. I’m going with you.”
