For a long time after the explosion, the training room stayed silent except for the hum of cooling systems and the distant murmurs of people repairing what they could. I lay on my back in the dim light, the Napkin still clutched to my mouth, feeling as if the world had tilted and never righted itself again. The numbers—one-twenty, one-fifty—echoed through my head like verdicts. They sounded less like measurements and more like chains tightening around my ribs.
When I finally dragged myself back to my room, the desert sun hit the window low and red, painting the floor with a color that felt wrong. The bracelets on my wrist and the lingering ache in my limbs throbbed like reminders: they had assessed me, labeled me, and now they planned to forge me into something else.
They called it "training." They called it "management" and "containment" and "optimization." The words tasted clinical, like the voices that said them: David with his calm metrics, Mike with his dangerous grin, Medusa with her cold curiosity, and Katara—Katara with her steady, dangerous certainty. None of those words, none of those people, knew the real thing that ached inside me: the small, stubborn human who missed awful dinners and bad jokes and the smell of rain on the university steps. They did not know the way my little sister's laugh could still make the world feel less heavy for a single, impossible second.
I tried to sleep that night and failed. Instead I turned the words over in my head. You are valuable. You are a weapon. The sentences looped until they sounded like truths I couldn't deny. But even as their certainty settled in like dust, anger rose—at them, at the universe, at myself. I felt anger for surviving, for being useful to people who would weaponize me, and an even deeper, quieter anger for the helplessness that made me hide it.
Morning came without mercy. The guards brought breakfast on a tray with polite indifference. I pushed the plate away as if the act might make a difference, as if refusing their carefully measured food would change the fact that I was held here against my will. It did not.
They changed their approach after the blast. The scientists wanted protocols. The officers wanted assurances. Katara wanted control. I wanted my old life back so badly the ache in my throat was physical. At some point during some meeting I was not allowed to attend, they had made a list: thresholds to test, hours for controlled activation, containment plans if Lena's output spiked above one-fifty. On paper it looked tidy: variables, procedures, fail-safes. In reality it read like a countdown.
That was the worst part—the precision. They measured me in fractions and decimals turned into rules. The band around my wrist hummed faintly and transmitted telemetry to unseen servers. The same hand that had comforted my little sister through nightmares now held a device that tracked my heartbeats and decided whether I could keep breathing without incident.
I began to understand what they loved about me. They loved certainty. I existed, for them, as an unpredictable element that had become predictable: a function that could be pushed, calibrated, and reproduced. They admired that. They smiled at the discovery the way people smile when a new specimen clicks into place. Medusa nodded like a general pleased with new weaponry; Mike laughed the delighted laugh of someone who collects guns and wonders which one will sing the loudest. David's eyes glittered with data.
But admiration and affection were not the same. The more they praised my numbers, the more I felt smaller—an object presented at the center of a lab, polished, measured, and then placed into a cabinet.
When they let me out into the corridor that day, the security detail shadowed me with perfect efficiency. The guards' faces were blank, their hands on the holsters of weapons that I had no desire to think about. I kept my head down. I moved like someone trying to be invisible, but invisibility was a cruel joke in a place built to watch.
In the solitude of my room, I let myself think about the things I could not say aloud.
If they wanted to teach me, fine. Teach me how not to hurt anyone. Teach me how to carry the weight I'd been given without exploding. But their lessons felt like lessons in making me better at breaking. They were learning where my limits bent so they could push them further.
I pictured a classroom of mirrors with their faces on the other side: Katara smirking behind a whiteboard of strategies; Mike applauding a new prototype he'd conjured with a flick of wrist; David adjusting the material composition of a new containment alloy; Medusa studying my posture as if preparing choreography for a fight. Each one had a role, and I fitted into none except as "output."
That afternoon the guards escorted me to the throughput lab—David's domain. The hallway opened to a room that shone with engineered steel and humming consoles. A single platform stood in the center beneath a ring of sensors. The band on my wrist hummed warmer as we approached. David greeted me like a man meeting a new equation he was excited to solve: calm, clinical, precise. He did not smile. Smiles were inefficient.
"We need to establish baseline behaviors," he said. His voice was a metronome. "We'll trigger controlled activation, record telemetry, and create a feedback loop to dampen outputs past threshold. This is for your safety—and ours."
I watched his hands move over the controls, fingers tracing graphs that meant nothing to me and everything to them. The screens bloomed with lines and colors, my heartbeat flattened into a curve, my breath turned into numbers. David's face held the one expression I hadn't observed in any of them: earnest curiosity. He was not cruel, not exactly. He was a man addicted to understanding, and understanding sometimes looks like mercy in the wrong hands.
At the end of the session they walked me back to my room with polite efficiency. They left me with new terms to memorize—"attenuation," "feedback matrices," "activation thresholds"—and a pamphlet I could not pretend to understand. It was all so neat, so organized. I read the words until they meant nothing, until the edges of the paper blurred. They told me the tests were for control. They called it help.
That night I sat on the window ledge and watched the desert breathe under the moon. I placed both palms on my knees and thought back to the explosion, feeling again the weight of that green light as it formed between my hands. For a second—so brief it felt criminal—I remembered the comfort it had offered. The power had wrapped around me like a shawl, warm and ancient, and for a terrible second I had felt safe. Safe and monstrous at once.
A small part of me wanted to learn to use that safety. If I could shape it—if I could bend it to shield instead of shatter—maybe, maybe I could save someone else one day. Maybe I could make myself useful for a reason that didn't eat me whole.
But even that hope tasted like ash. The base would take any skill I learned and twist it into another tool. The cruel certainty of their eyes, the way the bracelet hummed whenever my pulse quickened—those things would never let me be free. They would catalog and calibrate and weaponize until I was nothing left but a perfected function.
Despair was not the only thing that lived in me now. There was also a small, raw ember of resistance—soft, tenacious, stubborn as a stone lodged in a throat. It had not the clarity of a plan. It had no allies and no map, only the stubborn, ridiculous human desire to not be used.
I pressed my palm to the glass and watched the heat of the desert fade into the night. The stars were cold pinpricks above, indifferent. I closed my eyes and whispered into the dark—no prayers, only a promise that sounded less like hope and more like a vow:
I will not be just a number.
I will not be only their weapon.
For now it was a promise that lived in me alone. It was small. It was shaky. But it was mine.