They’re all gone.
Annalise looks around at the various instruments and equipment in Dr. Groger’s lab. There was no one left at Innovations Academy when she arrived tonight, but the smell of smoke is acrid down here, as if bodies had been burned up in the kiln. Leandra is nothing if not thorough.
“What the hell happened?” Quentin asks, wandering around the room. He stops to stare at the garden of girl parts, putting his hand over his stomach like he might get sick.
“Looks like a whole lot of murder,” Annalise replies. She glances over at Quentin. “You doing okay?”
“Naw,” he says.
Annalise smiles and turns back toward the lab. She strolls over to the desk, looking for any last bits of information. There’s no hint to where the girls have gone, or Mr. Petrov for that matter. His residence was empty, packed up rather than left abandoned like the others.
He got out.
Two days ago, Annalise called Quentin shortly after leaving the girls. He was surprised, to say the least. But he picked her up from the bus station with a backpack full of supplies, including a lighter.
Annalise likes Quentin. He knows how to get things done.
Quentin reaches out a shaky finger, ready to press on a doughy piece of smooth flesh sitting in a dish.
“Wait, don’t touch that!” Annalise calls, making him jump. He turns back to her, wide-eyed. She smiles. “Just kidding,” she says. Quentin curses and hikes his backpack up on his shoulders.
When Annalise and Quentin arrived at the academy an hour ago, all the girls and professors were gone. And to her disappointment, Anton’s office had been cleared out completely. The files were missing, as if they had never existed at all. It would have been hard to prove the truth to Quentin if there wasn’t still an array of body parts in the basement.
“Why’d they do this?” he asks quietly, swinging his backpack off his shoulder to open it. “Why make … you?” He looks at her, and when Annalise turns to him, he motions to her scar. “Why go through the trouble if they just want to destroy you?”
She swallows hard. She’s gotten used to deflecting when her feelings get hurt, but now, in this lab, it seems silly to try.
“Why do people hunt big game?” she asks. “Hunt animals they have no intention of eating? It’s because the entertainment is in their destruction.”
Quentin furrows his brow, looking disturbed.
“And we were game,” she adds.
The room is eerily quiet, and Annalise continues to go through the drawers, the metal scraping and then slamming as she opens and closes them. Quentin takes a container of lighter fluid, squirts it around the room and especially on the equipment. He pauses.
“You gotta be like that lion,” he tells Annalise, as if he just thought of something. Annalise looks over at him.
“What lion?” she asks.
“The one that ate the hunter. The dude had a big gun, thought he was so bad with it. Lion came up behind and tore him apart. Be the lion, girl.”
Annalise smiles. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll give that a try.”
Quentin laughs. “You should,” he adds.
Annalise opens the last drawer, seeing nothing, but just before she closes it, a piece of paper sticks out from where it was jammed underneath. Curious, she works it out.
But as she reads it, her breath catches. Annalise quickly folds the paper and puts it in her pocket.
“We need to call Mena,” she says, walking over to where Quentin is putting the fluid back in his backpack.
“Everything okay?” he asks, worried.
She nods, a smile breaking over her face. “Yes,” she says. “I found a bill of sale.”
“A what now?” Quentin asks.
“It means that Valentine’s alive,” Annalise explains.
“Who’s Valentine?”
“Our friend. The doctor lied—he didn’t destroy her. Not really. He sold her program to an investor. She’s alive, just … in a different body.”
Quentin seems uncomfortable with the idea of Valentine getting a different body, but he holds out the lighter to Annalise just the same.
“I assume you want the honors,” he says.
“Thank you,” Annalise replies gratefully.
Quentin grabs his backpack and heads for the door, but Annalise takes a moment to look around one last time. She’ll never see this place again, but more importantly, neither will any other girl.
She crinkles her nose, the smell of lighter fluid thick in the air, and then she flicks on the flame. She tosses the lighter far away, and it ignites immediately in a flash of bright orange. The fire will spread fast through the old building, so Annalise starts at a brisk jog.
When she gets outside, she takes a gulp of night air. She sees the headlights of Quentin’s car waiting at the gate.
When she’s close, Quentin gets out of the driver’s seat, clutching the door and watches the building. Annalise walks to the passenger side and does the same.
Dark smoke billows from the chimney of Innovations Academy, thick and black. There is an orange glow from the basement windows. She hears crackling, and a window shatters as the first flames lick out.
Quentin gets behind the wheel and tells her to come on. Annalise climbs into the passenger seat and looks at Quentin.
“But I want to watch it burn,” she says. “I want assurances that the academy is officially destroyed.”
Quentin looks sideways at her, studying her, before nodding. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, all right.”
She sighs and leans to rest her head on his shoulder. Exhausted. A bit sad. But in her pocket is an address, and that makes her smile as flames become visible behind the windows of one of the main-floor rooms.
This part of their lives is finally over. And soon, they’ll have Valentine back.
Annalise and Quentin watch until the bars fall from the windows and the top floor crashes down. They watch until Innovations Academy is gone altogether. It’s gone except for its girls.