(TAYLOR’S DEMONIC ADVENTURE) CHAPTER THREE

In the years that followed, Taylor would sometimes try to recall the exact moment when consciousness returned to her in that too clean hospital room. She would search for something distinct, something she could isolate from the blur of aches and fear, but all she could ever truly remember was the slow, drifting sense of rising toward the surface after being submerged for too long. It felt as though she were emerging from deep water, heavy and disoriented, struggling to understand where she was and why everything hurt.

The ceiling above her came into view first, a wide square of fluorescent light that occasionally made buzzing sounds. For several seconds she simply stared at it, unable to understand why she was not looking at the stained tiles of the Winslow High bathroom. A cold, creeping dread began to settle in her chest even before she found the strength to turn her head.

Her father was seated beside her bed, elbows pressed into his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together that his knuckles had lost all color. His eyes were red and swollen, his jaw unshaven, and there were faint trails on his cheeks where tears had dried and left little salt marks behind. When he looked up and saw her eyes open, a sound escaped from him that she had never heard before in all her fifteen years, a low and broken mixture of relief and fear that made her stomach twist.

“Taylor… thank God.” His voice cracked as though he had been holding himself together by sheer will and that last thread had finally given way.

She tried to answer, but her throat was raw, and the words refused to form. Confusion swept through her as she tried to piece together what had happened, why she was here, and why her father looked as though he had been sitting vigil for far longer than a few hours. Her memories came in scattered fragments that slipped away whenever she tried to chase them, and for a brief moment she simply wanted to stop trying.

Then one memory stood out clearly: the image of a ruined bathroom, with its broken stall walls and fixtures scattered at her feet, and the lingering tang of a force she had no words for, but instinctively knew was terrible.

Her pulse quickened.

“Dad…?” Her voice sounded rough and unfamiliar to her own ears, as if it belonged to someone else entirely. “What… what happened?”

He hesitated. She saw it clearly, the way his shoulders tightened slightly, and the way his breath caught before he forced himself to speak. That was when fear truly took hold, because her dad rarely hesitated, and when he did, it was only when he was afraid of saying something that would hurt her.

“There was an accident at school,” he said quietly, each word seeming to weigh more than the last. “The… bathroom you were in collapsed. There was… damage. A lot of it.”

Taylor stared at him, waiting for him to say more, because the collapse she remembered. The aftermath, however, was a blank she could not fill.

He did not continue. He did not need to. The rest came later, though not from him, but from the doctors who kept circling her with hushed voices, from the administrators hovering anxiously outside her room, and finally from the PRT officers who arrived once the situation became impossible to frame as anything mundane.

The words “freak accident” were repeated so often that she eventually began to resent them. They were spoken in soft, placating tones that were meant to calm her, but every time she heard them she felt the opposite. She felt as though they were intentionally trying to shield her from something too large and awful to name.

The truth reached her anyway.

Three students had died. Three girls. Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, and Madison Clements.

The trio.

For a long, breathless moment after hearing the names, she simply sat in her hospital bed and stared at the PRT officer who had delivered the news. Her mind refused to accept it, refused to believe that the three girls who had tormented her—what felt like only hours earlier—were now gone. She had expected humiliation. She had expected pain, more whispers, more laughter, and more of the same routine she had endured for over a year. But this… this was something she had never imagined in even her darkest moments.

A strange hollowness spread through her chest, as though the air around her had thinned and she could no longer draw a full breath.

“How?” The question slipped out of her quietly, as though she was afraid that saying it too loudly would make the truth more real. “Why… why did I survive?”

The officers exchanged a look before one of them stepped closer. His expression remained carefully neutral, even gentle, but it did nothing to soften the enormity of the words he offered her.

“Miss Hebert… we believe you experienced a trigger event.”

She blinked at him, struggling to process the implications.

He continued, choosing each word with painstaking caution, as though he were handling something both fragile and dangerous. “From what we can determine, despite your lack of a developed corona pollentia or gemma, you manifested a parahuman ability under extreme emotional distress. The resulting release of energy was… powerful enough to destroy the bathroom stall you occupied… and everything within the immediate radius.”

Her breath caught sharply.

“Are you saying… I killed them?”

Another careful glance passed between the officers. This one lingered a moment too long, filled with uncertainty, and the sight of it made her stomach twist.

“We do not believe there was intent,” he said. “events can be catastrophic. People often lose awareness during them, and the powers… manifest in unpredictable ways. You were already unconscious by the time emergency personnel reached you, so it is possible that your survival may be due to your own power protecting you when it was activated, tiring you out.”

The explanation should have helped. It should have comforted her. But it didn't. 

Nothing could.

She remembered the oppressive pressure in the air as the darkness expanded outward, that awful moment when all sound disappeared, the way the world seemed to lurch and twist around her, and then the sudden, overwhelming collapse into nothing but destruction.

Her hands began to tremble. She looked down at them, at her own fingers resting on the blanket, and felt a wave of nausea rise in her throat.

Her father reached for her then, his touch gentle, but she barely felt it. The truth had begun to seep in, heavier and colder than anything she had ever experienced.

She was alive, and the trio was not.

It wasn't because she had escaped, but because something inside her, something she still did not understand, had killed them.

She did not have the vocabulary for the self-loathing that entered her at that realization. She could not imagine how to speak through the suffocating guilt pressing against her chest, making her feel as though she were drowning.

The PRT officers continued to speak, but she no longer heard them. Their voices faded into dull, distant noise, as though she were hearing them from underwater.

Taylor Hebert stared at her shaking hands again and understood, with a clarity more horrifying than anything she had ever known, the truth she could not escape.

She was a murderer, and nothing in the world felt more terrifying than that.