"It's...it's going to alright." Yes. Yes, it was going to be alright. Alice was stiff; her voice sounded like stones falling out of her mouth. Raidon... But it was going to be alright. Eventually. It was going to be alright. There's a life ahead of you. Things to draw, things to write. No ...

And you wait. You wait, and it's cold, and you wait for Alice to say something. Because she's going to speak, and anger can only make you brave for so long. Go on. Take your best shot. "You loved him." And that was hurt that Mizore wasn't expecting. "You started trying to save him, bu...

"Because he was the only one I could save." Now that she'd broken through, now that she'd decided, somehow, that she wasn't going to give a damn about this irrelevant thing--what people thought of her relationship with Naoko Raidon, whether it made her a terrible hypocrite--it was much eas...

Alice turned her head fully, resting one arm across her knees and bracing the other against her forehead. "Just because he knew it was wrong doesn't make him any less a monster. Sparing you doesn't change anything either. He was still a murderer." Monster. "So, you found him, talked t...

And Mizore was forgotten, as Alice curled up, trembled, white-knuckled, pale. As Alice cried. See what you've done, Raidon? See what you've done? Screaming at him in her mind was not going to help. She put a hand on Alice's back, tentatively. She had never been good at giving comfort. "Why were...

"So." Hands on her knees. Sweating. Memories. "I was in a house. With--with Naoko Raidon." But this was not the time to think about her pain, about his, this was the time to think about Alice's pain. "She came in--Victoria came in, and he was on the top of the stairs, and sh...

Shiver. Shiver. Shiver. Shiver. Ring the doorbell. You can do it, Mizore. Alice Blake There was something she had to do. "I...I'm h-happy to see you again, Alice." Vic coughed and even managed to ignore the pain, because Alice was back. "I'm sorry I left you before. I-I'm sorry I ran ...

Words are not my usual medium. I tried to make art of you, Raidon, I really did. I found the footage, not just the parts they showed, but all of it, on the internet (including the parts where they lied about our deaths). I'll admit, because you're dead and because I can, that I watched all of it. T...

I care. There was pain in her chest, close to her heart. She realized, numbly, that she'd been shot, that if she looked down at where her hand had pressed the wound, she'd be bleeding now. Her hand would be wet. Blood really had the same texture as water--it wasn't sticky, when there was this much ...

Shot in the shoulder. Ow. She fell backward. Sword-boy--Julian Avery--slashed him in the face. Well, that neatly solved the problem of him shooting her. She was--less okay with dying, now that she had a reason to live. Feeling was coming back into her mind, stinging, like fingers warmed after the co...

(Alice Boucher continued from Vitriol ) Alice Boucher shot him in the back. It wasn't hard. He was just...standing there. She didn't even need to use the machine gun. Just the handgun, Brock's gun. He was using a sword. Pressing his sword against another boy's sword. A real honest-to-God swordfight....

Ever since I settled on it, it's kept me going. That made sense, somehow. Didn't you always have a purpose here? No. There was the first three days. The first three days, you were scared out of your mind. And trying to learn to use your weapon, which you promptly never used again. The cat o' nine t...

It wasn't Aston's style to worry about the possibilities. Alice did, though. Dead bodies here, wrapped in sheets. This had been the tail-end of something horrific. She had never buried Sarah, never wrapped her, and she realized, with a dull ache in her psyche, that it bothered her. Multiple murderer...

I'm not going down there. Unless Quincy Jones is on that boat, I have no reason to be there. There's no point, don't you see? This place gives me some sort of purpose. That made two of them. You could look at Alice, look at her now, and she would be nothing. And in some ways she was. She was a vess...

And then there was prom. Liz had never wanted to go to prom. Prom was everything she was scared of; pressed-bodies sweat, body odor and the smell of lip gloss. And trying to talk to people, make conversation, to stutter and redden and try to fit in a dress, a dress to cover up her hideous shriveled ...