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When Beta finally awoke, the first thing he saw was the mountains, but they were distant and moving fast. His stomach churned as the recent events came back to him.

Beta raised his head and looked around himself. They were in another car, he couldn’t depict what kind. He was never much for cars. Hershey was next to him in the backseat, looking tense and pale like he had witnessed something he shouldn’t have. Beta looked down and saw Min’s car seat strapped in between them; Min was fast asleep. They were on a lone road as the mountains engulfed them.

“Welcome back to consciousness,” Matrix said from the passenger seat. He looked at Beta through the rearview mirror. That’s when Beta saw who was driving, his teal nails clutching the wheel.

Elias.

Elias didn’t even bother to glance at Beta as he kept his wings tucked behind his back and drove along.

There were many things he wanted to say to him, but one specific question came to mind first: “What is wrong with you?”

“Is anybody cold?” Elias asked, completely ignoring Beta’s comment. His voice was light and sweet, but also simple and civilized.

“I trusted you.”

“What about hot? Anyone hot?”

“You killed them.”

“Oh really? I didn’t notice.” Elias rolled his two mismatched eyes.

“You slaughtered them.”

“You do realize that they just get sent back to Plato, right? And that they would’ve had to kill themselves to get back anyway?” Matrix fidgeted in his seat as Elias spoke. Beta so badly wanted to insult him further, but he choked on the fact that he was completely right. They weren’t truly dead…

But they did suffer, Beta concluded, letting his eyes drift back down.

Elias saw this and went on. “Not sure about Syncs, though. In that department, I might have killed a lot of people. But, we all did so…”

Matrix sighed as he stared in the distance. “Stop saying we, there is no we.” He spoke bitterly. Elias just blinked and ignored him.

All of a sudden, a figure popped up from the trunk of the car, screaming. Hershey and Beta whipped their heads around in shock. “Ah!” Beta announced. “I was wondering where you’d gone.”

“What’s happening?” Ah asked, looking flustered. “How did I get here?”

“Questions we all want answers to,” Matrix announced. “Along with why the hell this ass finally decided to show up.”

“I was waiting for Beta to wake up to explain,” Elias responded, acknowledging Matrix’s presence.

“Wait, you’re Elias?” Ah asked. Elias just nodded. She let out a quick laugh. “Wow,” she whispered. “You’re…actually exactly what I pictured you’d be. The Cider was very descriptive.” Ah leaned down and held up a sword, examining it.

“Uhm…Well I don’t know who you are so—”

“Are going to explain or not?” Matrix said sharply, cutting him off.

Elias took a deep breath before he started. Hershey sat quietly, watching the window and waiting for words to be had. “Okay,” Elias began.

Beta, Matrix, and Ah tuned in. “When I was still, ya know, living, I lived with my dad, my mom, and my sister. We weren’t poor, given we weren’t rich either, but we had a good life for the most part. Then things…sort of got bad when my dad started ‘looking’ at me differently. He started noticing things that he didn’t want to, like the way I never willingly invited any boys to my birthday parties, or the way I would get into my sister’s nail polish and clothes when she wasn’t home, or the way I couldn’t get over my best friend, Gus, from middle school moving away. He clearly didn’t like the way things were going for me. So, he got into the internet, and found this helpful little website called ’How to ‘straighten’ out your child: 10 steps to heteronormativity.’ Spoiler Alert: Steps 1 through 8 involved beating the shit out of your kid every time they did something ‘gay,’ which evidently, I did a lot. My sister didn’t know it, and my mom didn’t stop it. Sometimes I think she wanted to but…didn’t know how. Nevertheless, she died of AIDS not long after.

“Then my sister drowned herself because of it. She suffered from depression, so as bad as it sounds, it was expected. After that I was just…stuck with him. I think the empty rooms gave him more space to beat me so good for him. All through school, it was like my only chance to escape but…I was just so scared that every person I met would just be a photo copy of my dad that I never…talked to anyone. That is until I met Jack.”

Matrix turned his head in curiosity. “I first met him in middle school, but we ended up going to the same high school together too. He and I were always around each other, and it was nice to have someone on my side, just my side, for once. The lonely discussions I had in my head turned into full blown arguments when he was around me. It was mainly him saying how perfect I was and that I wasn’t alone anymore. He was quite the guy’s guy. He wanted to get my dad arrested and I was always the one telling him it didn’t matter. Nothing about my life before Jack really mattered in my opinion.

“After high school and onto college, we moved in together as far away as I could get from my hometown. When I turned 22, I went back home to visit my old friends, not that I had many…and my dad saw me from across the street, still living in the same old house. Jack was with me that day.” Elias gripped the steering wheel tighter. “My dad…was furious when I left home with Jack. He told me he had failed raising me, that he had tried so hard to ‘give me’ the normal life I deserved…and that he couldn’t do it. He said he was sorry that I was going to live out the rest of my life with such a terrible burden…and that he wanted to do better the next time. He hoped the scars would one day remind me of who I really was. I didn’t really say anything back…because there’s really nothing I could say that wouldn’t end in ‘screw you.’

“The night Jack and I were going to head back home, we were walking through my old neighborhood, talking about wallpapers…and I left him to go to the corner store.” Elias snickered, thinking back to the situation. “I mean a corner store of all things. I came back and found Jack…dead on the ground. Blood was running down his chest from the bullet hole…and his eyes were still wide open, as if he were still waiting for me to come back from the corner store. By then I knew…I just knew it was my dad. I mean at that point, everything, and I mean everything, just seemed pointless. I just wasn’t…strong enough to handle it by myself.” Elias took a deep breath. “So I said goodbye to him and I ran. In hindsight, it was a stupid idea, but then again in hindsight I was different than I am now. But I just wanted to feel something, anything…and at the same time feel nothing. So, I went back to that same corner store, bought a lighter and some gasoline, and lit myself on fire. I guess my family line is known for being overdramatic in their deaths. Yet, I felt absolutely nothing as I burned…nothing.”

Even though it seemed like Hershey’s head was in the clouds, he was tuning in as well. It was evident in the tear that strolled down his face.

Elias took a big breath. “Anyway, and then I was in Plato, in their hoarding quarters for new arrivals. I was a Cider, so you could assume I was a wimpy, scrawny little winged shapeshifter and you would be right. But then I was rejoiced with my mother, sister…and Jack. I was honestly the happiest version of myself…or I was until I figured out how separate we had become. Not only were Jack and I two different species—me a Cider and him a Tenti—with different attitudes, but when I was up there…I just lost any real love I had for him…and I never knew why. Jack was willing…but I just couldn’t do it. So, we felt nothing with each other and drifted. All the lack of love, increase of emotion, categorizing, change…it was killing me all over again.

“So, I tried to get back to Earth, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought considering no one had really tried before. But, on the way I ran into my sister. She tried to stop me, thinking that I was abandoning her somehow. I tried to tell her that they were lying to us, that something was wrong but she wouldn’t believe me. So, I had to leave her behind.”

Elias swallowed the bile in his throat. “You wouldn’t get it…leaving behind someone that you love, someone that you could’ve brought with you if you had just tried harder. But…she wouldn’t listen to me, she wouldn’t even go near me. Even if I had brought her I don’t think I would’ve ever trusted her to understand. My mom wouldn’t have understood either, they just couldn’t get it. There was no one left for me there. No one ever talked about me again in Plato once I left, they were forced into silence.

“So I lived my life hiding from humans, afraid of their judgement, until I learned that being on Earth made me stronger. So eventually I was able to shapeshift into different humans and not just animals. A year later, I learned about the Syncs, and they learned about me. They found me and strapped me to a chair in a dark room for months on end. I thought they would just kill me…but they didn’t. Every day they would come to the room with a needle, injecting gallons of blood into me over the time I was there. What they were, who they were, it was in my veins. It didn’t take long to realize that it was their blood. It was torture the way my body was changing and fighting against itself. They were trying to make a super soldier out of me, someone with combined abilities. Trust me when I say, it worked. Hints the eye.” Elias gestured to his left eye; the black around the white was symbolic.

“Anyway, I learned a few things while being in there. First, Syncs don’t eat a lot of normal food, need that much sleep, or apparently bathe all that often. At one point, they would come back older, but some would look the same. After a while, I realized that Syncs age about the same as us. But instead of living until 80, they’re actually living until 160, maybe longer if they’re lucky. Also, I heard your name pop up frequently, Beta. They kept talking about ‘this guy named Beta one of the low graded Syncs killed’. It wasn’t happy chatter, they were mainly just freaked out about what would happen. I also figured out that they were planning something big, and I’ve been building on that for a while.

“It wasn’t long before I was strong enough to break out. But once I was out, I knew something was wrong with me. I had the Cider part of me that was meticulous and careful and then the Sync part of me that was dangerous and erratic, not to mention hungry for things other than human food if you catch my drift. I ended up slaughtering a whole bunch of Syncs in there, and maybe a few humans, I wasn’t sure. Everything was fuzzy when I got out. Somehow, I ended up in New Hampshire and killed my dad…which was oddly satisfying as it was messy. Eventually I found a place to camp out, and then I contacted you, Beta, in that little brain of yours. The only reason I knew who you were was because of those tattoos, but I’ve also been closer than that. The bird after the spaceship crashed, the killer whale, the woolly mammoth who crushed your car—”

“All that was you?!” Beta exclaimed.

“Well not just me, I got help from the elephants in the zoo, obviously.” Elias said. “I also messed with your car. That was a fun ride, eh? Then, of course, you cut me out so I just tracked you and I knew they were setting up a trap so I came to save your asses and now here we are.” Elias glanced at the three boys, one by one.

Beta and Matrix said nothing, but Hershey looked away from the window and spoke up. “I’m sorry about Jack and your sister.”

Elias stared straight forward and shrugged. “I don’t really care anymore…emotions seem pointless to me. I just do what needs to be done and that’s it.”

It was quiet for a few minutes until Matrix finally spoke. “So where are we going?”

“You didn’t ask him that before you got in the car with him?” Beta said incredulously.

Matrix didn’t answer. Elias spoke instead. “We’re going to see Willow Baines, the person you were supposed to see before—”

“—you sent us around the country like idiots. Mm, yes, what an angel you are,” Matrix commented, tone bitter. Elias looked at him for a brief second, befuddled by the nickname, but eventually turned back to the road.

And nothing else was said. They stayed quiet, not wanting to risk conversation. Everything was settled now; they wished to leave it as it was.