END OF BOOK 1 RECAP: Astrid and Jace broke into the Darnell Facility during a public lecture. Inside, they found files marked with ominous red stamps, containing details of the kids who have been modified. When Jace finds his name there, he realises he's been modified all this time -- despite his dad being in charge of the anti-modification cause, BioNeutral. With footsteps in the hallway, Astrid's desperate to get out of there and avoid getting caught, but Jace's eyes change colour and he loses control. The door then opens, and Nova walks in -- but Jace recognises her as Eden, and they realise they've been searching for the same person all this time. Book 1 ends with Nova saying the following:

"Well, to say you two took the bait is an understatement. Now, I've come to get you out of here. There's no need to thank me yet. Just one condition: nobody asks any questions."

***

            At night, Jace screamed.

I wanted to believe it was a one-off, the product of an unsettling day and an unfortunate nightmare, but it seemed like more than that. It had happened earlier, though then I hadn't thought much of it. Being packed into a van for the bumpy journey north and escaping across the city border had been stressful enough, and even once the initial fear settled it was impossible to doze off for more than a few minutes at a time. It had been several hours into the journey when Jace first cried out, jerking away from the glass window to find faces staring back at him. I hadn't known how to react, but he made it easy – not letting his eyes close for the rest of the journey.

Now, though, it was worse.

Even some distance down the corridor, the noise of distress rang strong, powerful enough to pull me from restless sleep. It hurt more than my ears – seeming to drill through my skill, burrow under my skin, make every part of me ache. It was the sound of someone I'd grown to care deeply about, struggling to keep a hold on this new world.

Under Nova's orders, I wasn't supposed to leave my room, but I couldn't lie there and listen. No force in the world could've stopped my footsteps creeping to the door and down the hall. Triggered by my movement, a lightbulb flickered to life above my head, illuminating the gloomy corridor and guiding the way. If anybody else woke, they'd probably see the light creep beneath their doors – but for this I was willing to take the risk.

I didn't knock. Instead, I pushed the door open, letting light filter into Jace's room inch by inch. Lacking any mark of personalisation, it was pretty much identical to mine: a square box containing a bed and a storage unit for our few belongings. The bare minimum.

As the light reached the bed, I saw Jace. With his covers thrown off the bed and lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, I could see his body sprawled out on the mattress. He was wearing what he had been the day before, just stripped of a few layers to become a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The cries of distress grew louder, and he thrashed violently with each one, as if trying to shake off an attacker that wasn't there.

I couldn't watch any longer. As the door clicked shut, I hurried closer to his bed, reaching out to grab a flailing arm.

"Jace."

It wasn't loud enough, and within seconds his arm had jerked away.

"Jace." This time, I gripped his shoulders, shaking just hard enough to pull him from sleep. It worked; his eyes snapped open, and they locked with mine just as he scrambled into an upright position, startled.

"Sorry," I whispered, "I didn't mean to scare you."

His hand reached for the bedside unit, searching for his glasses. "What are you doing?"

"You were yelling," I said. "I wanted to check if you were okay."

For a moment, he didn't say anything, his eyes darting around the room as if trying to make sense of the surroundings. The room had been assigned to him just hours ago, and it looked like he was having trouble making the association. "It was just a nightmare," he said eventually, the words coming out in a single rushed breath. "I'm fine."

"You don't look fine." A sheen of sweat on his face was visible in the light from the window – misplaced on a cold night, especially in a room that struggled to keep hold of any heat.

"Well, I am."

The insistence was firm, setting a boundary not to be breached, but I wasn't going to give up so easily.

"You know," I said gently, "if you're struggling, you can tell me. It's been a rough couple of days. I'm not going to think any less of you."

Anybody who could endure what we had without wanting to break down a few times wasn't human. To say it been a whirlwind was accurate to some degree, but that also made it seem like some kind of fun adventure, which couldn't have been further from the truth. I could barely process the events between breaking into the Darnell Facility and this sudden new existence. Each mile we'd travelled from the capital had caused another piece of me to vanish, and I couldn't work out what I'd been left with.

The assurance was meant to make him feel better, but ended up having the opposite effect, which I realise when Jace's expression hardened. "I'm not struggling," he said, with force that made me want to shrink backward. "Besides, what does it matter if I was? It's not like my feeling are real, are they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, after the big news," he said, the sarcasm venomous, lashing right out at me. "Now I know I've got all these great big chunks of fake DNA. How am I supposed to tell what I'm actually feeling, and what some maniac with a syringe has made me feel?"

"That's not true. You can't engineer emotion." I thought I sounded convincing, but I didn't know for certain. Who could tell how far BioPlus' experiments had progressed since we'd been born? "Whatever you feel, it's still you. It's all you."

"Really? You want to bet on that?" His voice raised in volume, backed up by an anger that seemed to intensify by the minute. We were almost certainly being too loud, but in that moment, it seemed like nothing would calm Jace down. "How can I trust anything? My whole life has been a lie. Take my eyesight, for example. All these years, I've been convinced I needed glasses. They did the tests – or so they said. I've heard so many times that I'm blind without them – from my dad, mostly – that my eyes seemed to blur themselves. Only since finding out did I think about it. Why would you modify your kid to be as blind as a bat? For the first time, I took them off and really looked. Paid attention to what I hadn't before. And what do you know? I've got fucking perfect vision."

"Jace..."

"No," he said, cutting me off. "Don't tell me it's still me. It's not. Me has been a fucking lie, all this time."

He reached up and snatched his glasses off his nose. Without them, his face looked eerily different, like having his features unobscured and in such clear focus changed the whole picture. The transformation only took seconds.

For a moment, he turned the glasses over in his hands, inspecting them. My eyes followed them, casting a glance over the thick frames that had been unnecessary all this time. Then, his arm drew back, and only at the last minute did I realise what he was about to do.

The glasses hit the wall with surprising force, and the crack echoed across the room. The noise was no louder than our voices, but somehow seemed to carry a hundred times more impact. All I could do was stare back at Jace. The anger pulsed through him, burning like a fire in his eyes. It was remnant of what I'd seen before, hours ago now, in the lab where the game had seemed over. As he struggled to come to terms with his modification, he was also struggling to keep a hold on his emotion. It was the type of anger that words couldn't contain – and that made him potentially dangerous.

"Jace..." I said again, though I wasn't sure what words would follow.

"No." He snatched his arm away as the skin brushed mine. "Stop doing that! Stop trying to normalise everything. It's anything but normal. Things couldn't be more messed up right now, and anything you say isn't going to change cold hard fact..."

"I'm trying to help."

He looked at me, and even in the darkness, I could've sworn I saw his brown eyes morph into something else – only for a second, but it was there. "No one can help me."

I went to say something, to offer words that probably wouldn't do anything but would at least make me feel like I was trying. But a noise cut me off.

A door opening on creaky hinges, followed by a flood of yellow light that poured into the room.

In the doorway, Nova's silhouette stood threateningly, its arms folded.

With the sudden intrusion, we were exposed, left with nowhere to hide. Out in the open like deer caught in headlights. And I knew what she saw, what it looked like. Jace, upright on his bare mattress, face distressed and streaked with sweat. Me, perched at his bedside, in a hurry to offer a comforting shoulder. Like we were caught in some kind of tender moment, in which more had been felt than white-hot anger.

"You're not supposed to be in here." As she stepped into the light, I noticed she was looking straight at me, with a narrow-eyed stare so focused it seemed to slice through my skin. It was like Jace wasn't even there. "Do you realise you've woken the whole place? You know, people here might actually want some sleep."

My words were nowhere to be found; I just couldn't seem to get a grasp on them. "I'm sorry," I said eventually. "We were just..."

"You were just what?"

I glanced back at Jace, trying desperately to read his expression, but there wasn't an answer to be found there.

"Nothing."

"I think it's best that Jace gets some sleep," Nova said. "Don't you?"

In no universe was she asking my opinion. The order was thinly veiled, leaving me with no option but to stand from his bed and move away. Her eyes followed me as I did so. Even if I wanted to look back and say something, it would've been a stupid move.

I thought Nova might march me back to my room. So much had changed in this new environment, even in our first few hours outside New London, and it was completely disorienting. This was my sister, but so far she'd felt like a complete stranger. The Nova I remembered, of two years ago, seemed worlds away. Gone was the aura of eccentricity, the perpetual smile, the dazed look of a girl who always had her head in the clouds. This wasn't the girl who'd sneaked out of her bedroom each night in search of pointless adventure, who'd collected jewellery and wore as many pieces as she physically could, whose back-of-the-neck tattoo had been the ultimate act of rebellion. She'd changed.

She even looked different, with her once defining features now faded into the background. Her hair was plaited thickly into submission, hiding the true wildness of the red locks which had once bounced on her shoulders with every step. Freckles were one thing she couldn't hide, but even they seemed less prominent, faded after what looked like some time without sun.

My insides squirmed as she turned to me, Jace's door now shut somewhere behind us, and I drew an involuntary breath.

"I thought I made the rules clear," she said. A calm, collected statement – not the angry outburst I'd braced myself for.

"You did," I said. "I know them. But he was screaming, and I thought..."

"You thought what?"

"Thought I could help him." It was true, but as soon as the words left my mouth, the look on her face filled me with regret. "Look, he was going to wake everybody up regardless. I wanted to at least try."

Instead of saying anything, Nova just looked at me. It was more than uncomfortable to stare back, but I forced myself to hold my nerve. Even if she tried to pretend otherwise, she was still my sister, and never in my life had I been scared of her. My parents might have been terrified from the moment her eyes flickered orange, but I wasn't. They saw a monster, while I saw Nova. I just had to keep that in mind.

Two years had undoubtedly hardened her. I guessed it was a change of priority more than anything else, but I was still waiting for the full story. She couldn't bring us here, load us secretly into the back of a van and drive for miles without expecting to be asked for an explanation. From the moment we'd reached the ruins of Birmingham, I'd wanted answers. What was this place? How long had she been here? With how many others? One question could lead into another until they became an infinite string, but Nova's stony resolve had yet to weaken. There'd only been the assurance that it would all become clear later.

"I got you out of there, Astrid," she said, matter-of-factly, like the statement spoke for itself. "I brought you here. And if you want to stay, you have to play by the rules."

"I'm not trying to break any rules," I protested. "I was just trying to help. He's obviously struggling."

"We're all struggling," she said coldly. "If he wants help, he'll ask. Trying to chase after somebody who won't look back is a waste of everybody's time."

To this, I couldn't conjure up an answer. Her words held a sense of finality that wouldn't let me argue, as much as I wanted to tell her she was wrong. She had to be. How could you be so cold as to turn a blind eye to someone going through a hard time? It went against every human instinct, and I knew she never would've done that to me in the past.

We'd once been each other's support systems, in the absence of parents who came rushing to our aid. We were the type of people who could sense when anything was wrong before the other had said anything at all, through some special intuition that only existed between sisters. Her treating me like a stranger only served as another reminder that things were different here.

With no conversation left, Nova's expression gave a wordless instruction, and I had no choice but to return to my room. Being alone, however, didn't help in the slightest. The walls of the tiny box seemed to close in on me, and I could tell that this place – with its cold, bland sterility – would never feel like my own.

I climbed back onto my mattress and lay there in the dark. The thoughts churned through my head faster than I could keep up, and they seemed to weigh down my entire body. I could only hope that the nights would get easier. If they didn't, I would have to start looking for a way out.

The room had no clock, so I had no way of knowing what time it was. The only thing I could work out was that I'd be getting no sleep that night.

And lying there, miles away from everything I'd ever known, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly lonely.

----------------------

AHSHDIHDIHWDWH IT'S UP.

Chapter 1 of book 2, we are finally here! In case you haven't seen all my social media (if not, leigh_ansell on both Twitter and Instagram, so go follow), I am writing this book for NaNoWriMo! Five days in, and I have 11,000 words already -- I've really surprised myself because I thought it would be impossible to fit in writing alongside a full-time job. Turns out it's possible if you MAKE time, so I've been doing just that!

So, come the end of November, I will hopefully have 50,000 words written for this story! Which means a designated update day and regular chapters. The trade-off is a little bit of patience with me in November while I churn all those words out.

It's not to say there won't be ANY chapters in November (because I've just got this one out). It really depends on how far ahead I can get in my word count, and therefore how much spare time I can dedicate to editing. This is also made slightly harder by the fact chapter 2 is an absolute train wreck right now, but I guess I'll get to fixing it soon...

As always, let me know what you thought. I'm BEYOND excited for the sequel and there are some truly exciting revelations to come.

Until next time!

- Leigh