Greenhaus Part 1: A Storm Brews by Bryan Reckelhoff

exacting a small measure of revenge for the betrayal by killing those who perpetrated the double cross.
    She was exhausted, not only from lack of sle ep, physical exertion, and the normal malnutrition of her kind, but also from the emotional gamut she had run through that day. She wanted to go back to that place, where things were… better, and lock eyes with Stranger Friend, but deep down, she knew that would never happen again. They would never meet through the glass or anywhere else for that matter. She would forever long for him and the spell his eyes cast upon her. One brown eye, one blue, it was a gaze she would never forget.
    This brought the rage r ushing back, and became part of a growing list of things that could trigger it. She tried to shut her eyes and get some much needed rest. Hoping that when she did, she would see him in her dreams and the compassionate look in his eyes would remove her anger as he had done earlier in the day. But, when she drifted off to sleep, all she saw was a toppled city of glass and mangled steel. Burning. And her dreams were not filled with desire or wasted chasing some Stranger Friend through the glass; they were spent figuring out a way to achieve that destructive end. Even if her conscious state had started to break and soften, her subconscious would remain hardened and forever loyal to the mission of the Masked.

CHAPTER 9 (Jacob Niles)
     
     
    Everywhere Jacob looked , blood. Splattered on the walls and pooled on the floor beneath Jasper’s chair, which was also covered. Jacob had a bad feeling that something had gone terribly wrong, but given the evidence he now had, doubted it was an accident. Jasper’s empty chair, normally white and shiny like the rest of the seats in the transfusion chamber of decon, was now a deep red. So fresh it’s probably still warm. Jacob wanted to reach out and touch it, just to check, but given what Jasper had told him earlier in the day, he thought it wiser to remain still and keep calm. The pool of the dark liquid gathered beneath the chair and began to trickle away toward the drain, the story behind how it got there likely to go forever untold.
    Jacob was sure Jasper was already dead. Stunn ed from shock, he could not even begin to figure the who or the why yet. Was it coincidence that it happened on the same day they talked about so much? Not a chance. From suspicions about Harvard’s death, to waste, corruption, conspiracies involving departments any of these topics could have gotten them in trouble if heard by the wrong set of ears. But we were alone.
    And Jacob couldn ’t shake that fact. Nothing about this whole situation was more puzzling. Nobody else, except the glassmen, were near enough to hear them and only then if they were shouting. Even in their relative close proximity, the glassys were too far away to hear their conversations over the auditory clutter of the annex worksite, especially in Jasper’s hushed tones . None of this made any sense, so Jacob decided to play it cool when Medical arrived with his clean blood.
    He watched a group from Medical clean up the blood, which Jacob presumed to be Jasper ’s. Jacob did not wait for the elephant in the room to squash him, instead he attacked it. “Crazy old man Jasper, looks like he lost a lot of blood,” Jacob observed to the random Medic assigned to attend to him that day.
    “ Yeah, they said he removed his needle and stuck himself four times in the neck before he could be subdued,” said the Med Tech. “He was screaming some incoherent nonsense about not wanting to live anymore, saying, ‘It will all be better if I’m dead.’”
    Jacob knew this was a crock of crap, Jasper seemed more alive than ever today, like all the talking was an elixir that cured some hidden terminal disease. Jacob could not tell whether this particular Medic was lying or simply relaying the information he was given, but either way, all were to be held in the same suspicion in Jacob’s eyes. The