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T ime drags by slowly as my body and mind starts to wake. A soft swaying drags me from the edges of sleep, and my eyes finally blink open. I try to move, but my body doesn’t want to cooperate, every part of it aching and heavy.

“I’m sorry,” a familiar voice whispers, and I push my body to sit up, panting when I finally manage to sit up straight to find I’m in a car.

Lush green forests pass by the window as my body starts to grow heavy again.

I try to think back to the last thing I remember, and the war games and the attack flashes across my mind, making my heart race.

My mates. The Shadows. The terrigons.

I glance around trying to figure out how I got here when my gaze lands on the front seat where a man sits behind the wheel. He glances over his shoulder quickly, and my eyes widen in shock.

“Professor Graves?” I ask.

His expression grows sad and fills with nothing but guilt. “I’m sorry. I should have never taken you to the academy, Sena.”

I frown. “You never…” Wait. He took me to the academy?

“What… What are you talking about? Where am I?” I try the handle on the door, but it’s locked. Not that I’d want to dive out of a moving vehicle. But I need to get out of here and away from him.

“You’re safe,” he promises but I don’t believe him. How can I?

“How did I get here? Where are my mates?” I ask while trying to come up with a plan or at least figure out where I am.

“I’m the one who found you. In the burning building,” he says softly, and I freeze. He can’t mean what I think he means.

The burning building… “It was you? You’re the Variant that switched my body?” I ask.

“No,” he shakes his head giving me a sad look over his shoulder. “I switched it back .”

Every part of me freezes turning to ice. Switched… it… back…

The words don’t process in my brain immediately. It takes a minute before I realize what he’s just said. But when he realizes I’m not saying anything, he continues.

“ This is your real body, Sena. You were switched as a child. We needed to hide you and keep you safe. So no one could find you and figure out what you are.”

A sliver of awareness slides through the shock, needing to know what he means. “What am I?”

He glances back at me with an expression full of reverence and awe. “Our last hope.”