Chapter Twenty-Four ♰ 
A Trail of Blood

  𝕬 haemorrhaging blood-trail splayed right from Lover's Lake to Nadine Munson's trailer—two motherless daughters sat in the middle of it, existing as wretched, fawn-eyed mirrors of each other. They sat surrounded by the ink-blotched madness of Christine Sommers; scribbles, testimonies, bizarre spider diagrams, a poorly-drawn sketch of the lab's architecture. Right by Nadine's bony ankle, they had set up a dirty ashtray that was tarred with black ash and the charred stubs of joints and Marlboros alike. A half-drunk bottle of wine that was honestly too cheap to even be considered wine was in Sydney's trembling, overreactive hands, her sweat-beaded fingers wrapped around the neck of it.

  "—look at this one," she was saying, sticking a particularly visceral testament under Nadine's nose, "Meera Prasad—they bumped her full of psilocybin. She tried to tell the New Yorker that her daughter, erm...Kali, I think...could create, like, illusions or something. They thought she was mad, obviously. But—"

  "Well, that's what I don't really get about all of this. Eddie, me, neither of us have any kind of powers. I mean," Nadine smirked, droll and wolfish, "I can get cross-faded and not even puke, but that's not exactly creating illusions, is it? Or, what is that kid can do, the one the sheriff took in—tele...televan—"

  Sydney blinked at her, bemused. "Eleven is not a televangelist. She's telekinetic."

  "Same thing." Nadine lifted an indifferent shoulder and snatched the bottle from Sydney, taking a bitter swig, grimacing at the tacky taste. "God, you'd think that taking down a corrupt, government lab would mean we deserve better than Uncle Wayne's vino."

  "You'd think," mumbled Sydney dryly, returning to the files. 

  Groaning, Nadine flopped back onto the stained carpet, eagle-spread and exhausted. She let a toned arm drape over her abdomen, just where a slither of pale skin was exposed by the riding up of her tank-top. Then, entirely well-meaning and subtle, her head tilted, chin jutting out to scratch an itch against the bony hollow of her shoulder as her eyes raked over Sydney Sommers.

  It still was laughable, having her here. All twitchy and trembling, wired on cheap weed and cheaper wine, getting her pretty fingers smeared with ink. And she really was pretty. The kind of pretty that used to piss Nadine off, because she got to know her. She still remembered the first day they met—a daydream nestled away in the overgrown brambles and rusted metal of the junkyard that rots shamefully on Nadine's tongue now for being attracted to Sydney even then. When she was this forlorn girl of gaunt cheekbones and sallow skin and a desperation for whatever vice she could get her hands on. She's better now. Prettier, even. Nadine hoped Sydney didn't credit Steve for that better-ness. For the soft flush that exists again under the smooth graves of her swollen, bug-like eyes. It's rather unconscious, this thing Nadine had for Sydney. Not love. Not platonic. A third thing, that Nadine shall keep within her ribs.

  "C'mon, Nads," Sydney beseeched, rolling onto her stomach and reaching a hand out to squeeze Nadine's thigh encouragingly. "We gotta keep going."

  "But, I'm so bored," she bellyached, mouth all pouty and pillowed in a sigh. She lifted herself up, barely, leaning her weight back onto her forearms. "This is all so miserable. Do you want a pill?"

  "Is that really appropriate. Y'know, considering—"

  "Fuck appropriate." Nadine's lips quivered in a smirk. "Loosen up, Loch Nora."

  Sydney bristled. "I'm loose."

  "Prove it."

  "I think what we're doing right now is proof enough, thanks. Me coming here was, like, government-level treason. I mean, seriously, they could send me to Guantánamo Bay for this, Nadine—"

  A laugh rasped from her, and she reached out to knuckle Sydney's jaw mockingly. "Naw, and you're too pretty for Guantánamo Bay, aren't you?"

  "Yes, actually," Sydney said haughtily. "So, can we please—"

  "Sydney?"

  Sydney and Nadine both sat bolt upright, their heads snapping over to Sydney's bag that she had dumped at the doorway—where the crackled, scratchy feedback of her walkie-talkie was carrying some gravelled frequencies of her name.

  "Is your bag..." Nadine's frown deepened, "talking?"

  "It's a walkie-talkie." Sydney stood up, reaching for it. "Dumbass."

  "Oh, sure. Silly me. Because everyone walks around with walkie-talkies in their fucking bag—"

  "It's from the kids," she said defensively, yanking up the antenna. "Lucas? Is that you? What's—"

  "Sydney." Nancy. Her voice, soft, pitchy, thready with relief. "Thank God. We went by your place, but you weren't there. Or school. I'm so glad to—"

  Nadine, intrigued, knelt up now, hands folded politely in her lap as she tilted her head curiously at Sydney—doglike, almost, at her feet. Then, all mischief and half-snarl, she whispered, "Is this about Steve?"

  Sydney kicked her maliciously in the rib, narrowing a stern glare at her before holding down the button on the walkie-talkie and speaking into the microphone, "Nance, yeah. It's me. Hey, what's wrong? Who's we?"

  "Jonathan, and me." Sydney and Nadine exchanged a collusive glance. Nancy's voice was tinged with something achingly like guilt, but the urgency cut deeper as she plowed on, "Where are you? We need to talk to you—now!"

  "Oh, erm. Actually, Nance—" Desperately looking at Nadine for help, the other girl only raised an apathetic shoulder, still murmuring about her sore rib. Sydney massaged at a pang in her skull, and said, "I'm at Nadine's."

  A carrying pause.

  "Oh."

  "Yeah, erm. Long story."

  "Oh, well—"

  "But, you can come here," Sydney offered weakly.

  Nadine's eyes widened, reaching out smack Sydney's kneecap. "What the fuck, Sommers?"

  "Shut up!"

  "Really?" said Nancy on the other end, startled. "Okay, well, erm. But it's kind of about—you-know-what, so, it's a bit sensitive, Sid—"

  Sydney nibbled at the soft-bitten flesh of her bottom lip. "Nadine knows."

  "Nadine...knows?"

  "She knows."

  Nadine blinked at her, almost doleful.

  "Right. Right. Okay. That's—" Nancy breathed in deeply. "Fine. That's fine. We'll be there soon."

  "Great. Yeah, okay, I'll, erm, see you—" The static cut off with a dull, final crackle. Sydney grimaced, dropping the walkie back into her bag like a dead, limp thing. She returned to the unravelled mess of her mother's grey matter, ignoring Nadine's feral eyes. "So...Nancy Wheeler's coming."

  "You don't say?"

  The haemorrhaging blood-trail of Nadine's doorstep was soon filthied by more dirt. Nancy's pretty in a camel coat, dishevelled, wild-eyed, frantic as she spilled inside, clutching a spare walkie in one hand and a Walkman in the other. Jonathan hesitated on the doorstep longer, muttering some awkward, half-polite words of 'thanks' to Nadine as she gestured stoically for him to come. Soon enough, all four of them were cramped in the mess of the trailer's living room, cross-legged and jutting knees. A networked tangle of jittery limbs and eyes that would not meet, even as Nancy lay the Walkman in the middle of all the files and papers, pressing play with a brutal lack of pretence.

  "—Doesn't really matter..." Sydney recognised the voice immediately. It was jilted, sagacious, half-patronising, and belonged to Dr. Sam Owens at the lab. Sydney could still recite, even now, the drawling and supercilious monologue he gave them all last autumn about the importance of keeping the lab's secrets quiet. He had that same tone now, lordly and imperious, if only slightly dulled by the crepitating of feedback, "...the point is, mistakes have been made. And the men involved with those mistakes, the ones responsible for what happened to your brother and Miss Holland's death—they're gone."

  "Shit." Nadine stared at the Walkman as if it was a dead, rotting animal that Nancy Wheeler had dragged into the slaughterhouse of her trailer. "So, this is all real then? This isn't one big joke?"

  Sydney glared at her, affronted. "You still thought it was a joke? Why the fuck would I—"

  "You know what I mean, Sommers," she seethed, indignant and restless. She pressed herself up, barefoot on the fresh carpet of old paper. "This is—that makes it—"

  "Sorry." Nancy lifted her sweetened hands in surrender, unapologetically snide as she glanced at Sydney. "Why does she know everything, again?"

  "Erm." Sydney turned to Nadine, frowning. "Do you wanna tell them, or...?" The malevolent look she cut to her was telling enough. Sydney inhaled breathily. "Right. Well, Nadine's mom—Bonnie—she was like Eleven's. Part of Project MKUltra."

  Jonathan nodded, trifling through the papers. "And all of this?"

  "My mom's."

  Nancy softened. "Oh, Sydney."

  "It's whatever." Brittle, Sydney jutted her jaw at the Walkman. "So. You got a confession, huh?"

  "Yeah, uh." Nancy shared a quick glimpse with Jonathan. "We're going to Murray Bauman's. You know, the journalist Barb's parents hired?  We think he might be able to help us take the lab down—with this."

  "And that's...—" Sydney mumbled, clueless.

  "Plan A." Nancy's voice had a reporter's edge. Diplomatic and clipped. "Take the lab down. Expose everything. We bring the tape, your mom's files. Murray gets it out there—New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, whatever bites."

  "Optimistic," Nadine muttered.

  "No shit," sneered Sydney, harsher than intended.

  Jonathan was rifling through the stacks again, slower now. "Your mom—she got all of these?"

  A splintery throb in her chest, Sydney looked at him and nodded softly. His smile was weak, kind. The sort of tender twitch of his crooked mouth that he used to give her last springtime when she all sinews and marrow, skin grey with grief.

  "My dad and I found them a few months back. I—" Shame curdled in her throat like bile, and she swallowed it thickly. "I told him I didn't care. To drop it. I wanted to leave it all behind. Her behind." She felt unsightly and difficult to digest. She felt brutalised and like a weeping, kicked dog at the wound. Still, she gritted her teeth and bared them, eliciting a sour, hollow scoff. "But, clearly, I can't. So, yeah. My mom was investigating the lab. For months. Maybe longer. I think she knew they were watching her."

  Nancy's expression shuttered, a wretched, girlish kind of sympathy in those blues of hers—lilacs of pity for the ill-fated girl she might've hated, if things were different. If she wasn't so sullen and pitiful. "Sydney—"

  "She didn't die because the roads were slippy. She didn't die because I got wasted and needed picking up." Jagged and withering, Sydney's weak-kneed again in the white light of the mortician's, and her mother's this cut-up corpse on a silver table, surrounded by utensils and instruments of misery and blunt edges. Sydney should've sliced her open right there, took out all of her organs, made honest work out of carving her name into each one. "They killed her."

  Ravaged, Sydney looked down at the papers. Christine's handwriting laughed back at her in urgent, looping cursive. Names. Diagrams. A grainy polaroid of a girl with a shaved head and blood at her nose, curled by age at the corners. Christine exists in there. Parts of her, spliced and buried in jargon—the good parts; the ones she didn't spare for her daughter. She punished Sydney for hunger and belligerence, but cared enough about a world that wronged her to do this—to die for this. 

  Nancy blinked fast, like grief had sewn together her vocal cords. "Sydney, if this is too much, you don't have to—"

  "I do." Her voice splintered like a fractured bone. "Because if I don't, then my mom died screaming in a car that never should've broken on the way to pick me up from some shitty party. And I can't—I can't live with that. I tried."

  That tenderness still there, Jonathan reached out and gently touched her arm. His hand was rough and calloused and warm. Brotherly, almost.

  "We'll burn it all down, Sydney," he swore.

  Sydney blinked at him, lashes wet and bottom lip worried between her gnawing teeth. "Promise?"

  "Yeah." His blunt nails bit dully into the threadbare cableknit of Steve's jumper. "Promise."

  The Walkman whirred softly in the middle of them all, tape winding back like a lung deflating. In the little death of Nadine Munson's living room, it almost sounded like breathing. 

♰ 

  𝕾teve felt like a wounded, rejected dog, running back to its master with his tail tucked between his legs and his thumbs beaded with berry-blood from thorn pricks. He was so nervous that his palms left sweat-prints in the nimble shape of his fidgety fingers on the leather of his steering wheel. Dewy frost settled sensibly over the neat lawn of the Wheeler's house, a Reagan campaign sign crookedly sticking out of the patchy perennials. 

  "Shit. Shit." Steve kissed his forehead to the sweaty leather; it stuck tacky to his skin. He thought about his forehead against Sydney's instead—thought about her pretty fingers digging into his underjaw, her smiling into his mouth. Him, trembling like a bathing animal as her mouth travelled next to his cheekbone, murmuring something against the rose-bitten skin there about him shaking. He thought about Nancy, hiccoughing through slurs of swallowed resentment. Bullshitbullshitbullshit. "Motherfucker."

  He reached over his polished console and snatched up one of two bouquets—one rose, one tulips; the roses for Nancy, tulips for Nicks—and kicked himself out of his car like he was heading to the gallows. A sucker for punishment, as always, Steve figured he owed Nancy an apology. He didn't mean to fall for Sydney Sommers. He's pretty sure no one ever means to—not even Toby; who might call it, now, a conscious decision, to swallow up everything honeyed and good about her, call Sydney his. But, nah. Steve didn't mean it. Certainly, not to this degree. This consuming canine of want that's sunk its twin stingers into his jugular and won't let go. She's folded herself all prettily under his ribs like the shiniest bead on a rosary. Nestled, all doe-eyed and killing, somewhere between his heart and grape-lungs, and Steve didn't think he even wanted to remove this malignancy in him. He was quite content with letting it stay, letting it fester. Letting her nails scrape against the shivery nape of his neck, her lips tracing some sensitivity on the shell of his ear that he didn't even know he had until her teeth grazed it, her fingertips teasing the hollow slope of his clavicle, thumbing the silver of his chain. 

  Yeah.

  He can live with that.

  But not without apologising to Nancy. Not without explaining to her—Steve was a weak man. Boyish, almost. It wasn't on her. It wasn't even on Sydney. He's been trying to make himself smaller since he was a kid—the greedy toddler he was—but it didn't work. He knew he had a nasty habit for wanting what he couldn't have, for snatching toys from his little cousins, for being mouthy, spiteful, mauling in his absent pursuit for more, more, more. He didn't ever want Nancy to be hurt. He loved her, once. Loves her, still. Just, not in the way he was supposed to. Steve was weak. And shameless. And now a trail of girl-blood—Sydney's, Nancy's, his mother's (in a twisted way)—lingered in the doorstep of his future with Nicks like some unwanted party-guest, returning for a scarf they left on purpose. Holy blood, that he needed to make clean if he and Sydney ever had a shot at good.

  Burying the hatchet.

  Apologising.

  Being the wounded dog.

  Loving the hand that feeds and leaving half-mauled roses at Nancy Wheeler's feet as penance.

  "—Jesus Christ. Okay." Steve raked his trembling fingers through his hair. At least his hair felt good. Smooth, still awry from Sydney's own hands—Nicks. God, Nicks. This would be so much easier if she helped him write something down. If she was in his car. If she— "Okay," he said, scathing and nervous, "erm, Nancy, I'm sorry. For...—for everything. For—shit."

  "Steve."

  Startled, he looked over the parched grass. One of the kids was marching over to him with this determined look that unsettled something old and buried in his stomach. Henderson, was it? 

  "Uh," Steve blinked lamely, "yeah?"

  "Are those for Mr. or Mrs. Wheeler?" the kid, Henderson, asked dully, jabbing a finger at the roses.

  Steve stared at him dumbly. "What? No—"

  "Good." Dustin snatched them off him, inadvertently knocking Steve's keys to the grass at his feet, and trudged up to the BMW.

  "Hey! What the hell?" Steve grabbed his keys, watching the kid frogmarch up to his car. Mindless, Steve raised his arms to let them drop back down again fretfully. "Hey!"

  "Nancy's not in," the kid chewed out.

  "Where is she?" he demanded, feeling a bit pathetic having this kid bark at him and watch absently as he cranked open the passenger door of his beloved car.

  "It doesn't matter," Henderson drawled, blindly tossing the roses into the backseat. "We have bigger problems than your love life." Then, a beat. Dustin blinking drolly at the second bouquet—Sydney's tulips. "Speaking of. Why do you have two—"

  Steve traipsed back up the slope to the pavement, wagging a reproachful finger. "Hey, no. None of your business."

  Henderson grinned then, baring a gummy, shit-eating smile. "Are they for Sydney?"

  "What did I just say—"

  "Do you still have that bat?" he interjected blithely.

  Steve stammered. What was with this kid? "Bat? What bat?"

  "The one with the nails!"

  "Why?"

  "I'll explain it on the way," Henderson replied, nonchalantly slipping into the car and tenderly placing Sydney's tulips into the footwell between his tattered trainers.

  "Now?" said Steve, appalled.

  "Now! Let's go!" Dustin's eyes frantically followed Steve as he scrambled around the car, almost tripping over his own feet. As Steve fumbled to jam his keys into the ignition, Dustin narrowed his eyes at his shaky hands and spasming knee. "And," he said dryly, unimpressed, "pick up Toby on the way."

  Steve went motionless. "Toby. Toby? Like—"

  "Is that a problem, Steve?" challenged the kid.

  "Erm. No. No, it's not—well, actually—"

  "Blah, blah, blah! Toby. We need Toby."

  Steve tried not to let that sting, but Toby Stanfield was a special kind of boyish bruise that hurt whenever prodded. "Fine. Yeah. Fine, okay. Whatever. It's not like I helped kill that thing too or anything. But, sure. Let's get Toby," he muttered bitterly, slamming his foot on the gas.

  Henderson rolled his eyes, muttering something about the immaturity of love, and how little it was worth. Steve thought about Sydney again. He thought about her the whole time. 

♰ 

  The trailer had that solemn, mournful feeling that tangles in stigmata fumes of a church after communion. Sydney choked on it. (But, that very well could've been tears).

  "So," said Nancy breathily, glancing around, "Murray's."

  Sydney dragged a grudging palm over her cheekbone and let out something between a sigh and a scoff. "Yeah. Have fun nitpicking Cold War conspiracies and listening to him monologue about water fluoridation."

  "You're not coming?" Jonathan startled.

  "No," she mumbled forlornly, "I'm not."

  "What?" Nancy demanded. She glanced between Jonathan and Sydney, affronted. "Sid. What do you mean—"

  Sydney rapped her blunt fingernails against a manila folder near her anklebone—at a smearing of ink; scrawled coordinates. 45.1299° N, 85.6320° W. 

  "I'm going here." She met Nadine's eyes—blown pupils, mother's baby-blues. Dilation and grief and madness. "We're going here. 

  Nadine pursed her lips. "Not the most romantic first date, Sommers. Is it?"

  "That's northern woods—right off the Ridge," Jonathan muttered, kneeling closer to squint at the coordinates. "That's...—isn't that near where the Boy Scouts found the flayed deer, last month?"

  "Maybe. Most likely," said Sydney, fever-bright.

  "Your dad...Matt, he's not gonna like this, Sid." Jonathan shook his head, crestfallen almost. "Come with us. We'll go to Murray's. We'll take your mom's stuff—"

  But Sydney's sick of mothering and nurturing her grief better than Christine ever mothered her. She's sick of cradling it and taking care of it—feeding the mass all these ripe, pretty parts of her that she needs for more tender pursuits now. The woman's buried. The woman was rot. It's not about smearing her name on newspaper headlines, martyring the cruel. Sydney didn't want that. She didn't want justice, not really. She just wanted to rid her mouth of the taste of blood. 

  "No, it's fine. Honestly," she added hoarsely, giving him and Nancy both a face-splitting smile of agony and little reassurance. But she meant it.

  A strangled sound rasped from Nancy's throat as she toppled onto her knees, pressing her fingertips into Sydney's wrist like prayers. "You don't have to do this now," she said desperately. "Not when you're this...It's still raw, Sid. You could come with us, sleep on it. Talk it through on the way to Indiana—"

  "Nance. I've sleeping on it for months."

  Jonathan thumbed violently at his browbone. "Jesus, Sydney."

  "No. No, she's right," said Nadine, uncharacteristically astute and serious. "Time to stop wallowing and start—I don't know—hunting? Is that what you guys do?"

  The three of them unconsciously touched their scars. Triplet cicatrices. Sydney's heart ached longingly. Toby, somewhere, with the fourth scar—a similar pang in his own ribs. An awful kind of remorse twisted guiltily in her stomach as her calloused fingertip traced the jagged line on the insane of her palm.

  (Sydney missed her best friend. She missed Toby Stanfield in her bones).

  "I guess," said Nancy awkwardly, grimacing through a toothy smile. 

  Sydney abruptly got to her feet, sobered now, enough that she felt the dull throb in her jaw from gritting her teeth so hard against all her grief. A migraine teased at the sinews of her neck's nape, at the frayed stitches of her old head-wound. A premonition to a concussion, almost. The preordained injury of wading through all this shit again. Everything she thought she left behind last wintertime. At least Eleven was safe this time, she thought nihilistically. Lonely and childlike in Hopper's cabin—a softened collection of bird-bones and crooked teeth and gnarly nightmares—but safe. 

  At least Toby was at home. A silent vigil at his mother's bedside, maybe. The air smelling of cauterisation, steriliser, and that death-odour of hospitals. Sweetened by Imani's lavender perfume that twined around his heartache.

  And Steve. Thinking about him made her feel homesick. She felt dizzy with it

  "You call us," said Nancy urgently, standing too. Prayerful. Her fingers ghosted the tension in Sydney's shoulders like she might nurse it out with a pretty smile. "You've got the walkie. I've got Mike's."

  Sydney's smile was careworn. "Yeah. Okay, Nance."

  "I mean it, Sydney." Her words were heavy, meaningful. Unapologetically desperate. "Don't—" Nancy sunk her teeth meanly into her tongue, "Don't go somewhere dark and not come back."

  "Jesus, Nance." Sydney hesitated, not knowing what to say. "I won't. I promise."

  Sydney's best friend since she was a kid was always Toby. A boy. Oftentimes, Toby would miss the mark on how Sydney was feeling—a girl of rage and shaking fists and hunger. But she forgave him relentlessly, because he was a boy. Because she loved him. And he was well-meaning in his tenderness. Sydney sorely lacked female friendships until Nadine and Nancy—now, she felt bloated by understanding. It's like she's fluent in a language that was as embryonic and hereditary as grudge-holding. 

  She could translate Nancy through these frantic tongues of Be safe, and I promise, and their matching scars. So different to Sydney; singularly clever, bitten nails, early college applications. Found herself making excuses for her in a way she wouldn't be able to for even Toby. 

  "Erm. Anyways." Gauchely uncomfortable, Nadine let Sydney's car-keys dangle flimsily from her forefinger. "Shotgun? I mean that literally, too—like, does anyone have a gun?"

  Comically, Sydney and Jonathan both looked to Nancy.

  "Hopper confiscated it after—well, you know," Nancy muttered, blushing indignantly.

  Nadine visibly deflated. "Great."

  Suddenly, Jonathan was wrapping Sydney into a hasty, one-armed hug that almost a headlock—the kind of embrace that could easily be mistaken for a brotherly fight. Sydney's arms stayed limply at her sides like the broken wings of a flightless sparrow, but it was nice. The warmth of him eased into her as his lips pressed nervously to her temple.

  "Erm," he said, clumsily stepping back, almost slipping on the manila folders, "be safe, Sid."

  Sydney looked at him strangely, but saluted. "Yup. You too, Byers."

  "Alright, Loch Nora," Nadine said bracingly, snaking an arm around Sydney's shoulders. "Let's go dig up our moms. Kind of. Not really," she said sparingly, flashing her bloodshot eyes to Jonathan and Nancy. "I meant, like—"

  "Shut up, Nadine."

  "Right."

  The blood-trail smeared over the starved grass outside of the trailer, splitting in a forked tongue as Jonathan and Nancy returned to his beaten car and the others sidled up into Sydney's Jeep. 

  Christine's ouroboros would never be satiated. Not really. Sydney knew it, deep down—all of this; the hunting, the paper-cuts from trifling through papers, the killing-floor of it all ... It wouldn't make any of this better. It wouldn't make Chris rest easier. Or Sydney's nightmares any less ghoulish. A snake will keep eating its tail, Christine will keep eating Sydney, but Daughter shall stay hungry. That's how punishment works. That's how motherhood stays fed.

  But maybe, just maybe, in the dense woods of those coordinates, there'd be a sliver of something easier to swallow. Something to feed her. 

  Sydney Sommers was so sick of being starved.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

omg hey........im back. so that s5 sneak peak was barely enough but it got me FEDDDDD!!! i instantly opened up the draft to this chapter - which was 412 words long until yesterday morning. sydney sommers summer everyone!!!! my girl is back.

id really appreciate any comments/feedback. ik the writing is a bit weak rn but im getting back into the swing of it - writing itself, and also writing for sydney. ive written any entire dissertation since last writing for my girl. so, bare with me for a bit.

last night, i went through all of my old notes for this book. &. now, at chap twenty-four, we're getting into the thick of it finally. the real plot. nadine & sydney are about to unravel the invisible string (lol) of what i've been slowly sewing since literally the prelude. i welcome any and all theories of what they could possibly be - i also (shamelessly) encourage some rereads of old chapters. see if u can pick up on any little clues. (honestly, to get back into writing for this - i had to read some as well, to actually remember what was going on).

anyways. this is getting longwinded.

all my love, dani.