Ensnare

4 - Take Me For A Drink First

ALINA

Peter wouldn't stop pacing, it was like the kid couldn't sit still.

"I was only out of the room for a moment." He was saying. "Less than three minutes, tops, I didn't even sense her in there, I should have been able to tell, I shouldn't have left her alone." He looked at me. "Will she be okay?"

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Be patient with him. He's scared. He's worried. He's been through a lot and lost people before.

"She'll be fine." I grunted. So much for patience. I'd done what I could for her, but now she needed rest. I could heal her with my powers as much as I wanted but there was nothing like time for the human body. Time, supposedly, not only healed all emotional wounds but physical ones too. Aditi was the expert on feelings, but I knew about medicine, and I could safely say rest truly did do wonders. The human body was an incredible thing.

I didn't know a lot about medicine by choice, I never wanted to be a doctor and I still didn't, but my powers over the human body forced me to become a de facto healer. Really, at heart, I was a physicist and engineer like my dad and uncle. But my dad was dead now, I couldn't ask him for advice on car parts or the stars. I hadn't wanted to think it, but sometimes it came into my mind. Maybe if I'd had my powers before she had died, I'd have been able to save my mom. Take away her cancer.

It was shitty not having parents. Peter and I had that in common. But I had Tony, and Peter had May.

Along with being able to heal people was what I called medical vision, which had now become shortened to med-vis for some reason. Tony had coined it, of course. I could do this thing where if I concentrated hard enough my eyes would roll back in my head, with only the whites showing, but somehow I could still see. Only not... normally. I saw the inner workings of people. I couldn't actually see bodies though. Just the skeletons, the muscle groups, the antibodies, the veins, the organs. I had been practicing and now I could focus in on just one element. It had looked creepy at first, but I'd quickly gotten used to it.

The Ascendency had tested me by breaking the fingers of other inmates and forcing me to fix them. If they hurt them too much and I couldn't fix them... Let's just say most of us were very much replaceable. They had begun experiments, at first, on anyone they had thought suitable. Then they realised children and young adults took to the experiments better. Then they realised girls were best.

They were trying to give us powers. Enhanced capabilities. They wanted to perfect the results before they gave themselves powers. We were the guinea pigs. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Some of us didn't survive the first. Often if you survived the first you wouldn't survive the second.

But apparently I was special because I'd absorbed two different forms of power. Medical powers, and also powers over light and dark. I could turn a room pitch black. I could throw balls of light. When I'd been forced to fight a brainwashed Roara I'd found I could conjure weapons of darkness but it wasn't always easy to do.

Loki had been there throughout my 'treatment'. I'd always thought he was working with the Ascendency. Turns out he wasn't. He'd been there to throw them off Roara's scent - she'd been the reason the Ascendency had been created in the first place, a few centuries ago. She'd used her powers to defend herself and the man she'd used them on had been searching for a way to gain those powers himself. When he died he'd passed the mission on.

Loki taken pity on me. Sat outside my cage and told me stories. Stole me food I wasn't supposed to have. Essentially he made sure they didn't break my spirit the way they had broken my body.

And while Loki Laufeyson was a lying piece of shit, and a murderer, and a complete pig, he was also a reason I was still alive. He was my friend, of sorts. And now...