Reflection

XXX

Foster looked at the little team that he had created. The three teenagers that would save the world so many times over.

Liam O'Connor. Maddy Carter. Sal Vikram.

They would have been amazing if they had been allowed to live on in their normal lives, but they had been cut short. Like a feather in the wind, they had flown freely, unless you were Maddy who was scared in be in an aeroplane, restricted slightly, but still free, before being dragged back down to earth. They had been taken, by him no less, to be tied down, to basically be experimented on, if you were Liam, and to struggle through life with nobody to help them.

Foster admired them. They had been plucked from the jaws of death, and placed in an equally dangerous sort of place. They were teetering on the edge of a braking cliff, and one day they would fall. And fall badly. Whether into love, or danger or death, he didn't know, but he knew that they would fall. It was inevitable.

They should have died, much like Foster should have died. He'd been like Liam. Stuck at sea, about to drown. That made them similar enough for the comparison that he'd told Maddy. 'Because he's me.'

The phrase haunted him. It haunted him every Monday, when Maddy visited him. It haunted him as she left, and as he ate the hotdog in the sun as he'd wished to. It would haunt him for always, he was sure. Because of that phrase, it now felt as though he were abandoning hi-them. But that was no worse than what had happened to him. At least he had stayed to help them for a while instead of going straight off.

But every time his thoughts drifted around to the last little team he had created - because he knew he wasn't going to make another one – he couldn't stop that little thought wriggling into his subconscious mind.

They should have died.