She didn't hang on to them just out of pity. No, honestly, she protested, even with herself. She really, truly believed there would be a cure. If the DNA could mutate one way, well, maybe the signal could be reversed. Maybe they could force the cells to mutate back to what they should be. Maybe they could just somehow wake the human souls back up within the infectees.

It wasn't any kind of jealousy, no matter what that boy had said. She just wanted to fix them. Fix them, fix the world, fix herself. Let everything go back to normal.

She wondered if it ever could.

What she was doing wasn't cruelty. She knew it wasn't because someday, there would be a cure, and she didn't care who said there wouldn't be. There had to be. No process is completely irreversible, right?

But sometimes, she pitied them so much she just wanted to kill them, set them free.