Embers & Ice

Chapter Nine

Hunter was escorted directly from the laboratory to the bathroom upstairs. She desperately needed a shower and actually started looking forward to it, until she was taken through an iron door into a long room with tiled floors, slimy mold and a single bench running down the center. Along the walls were shower heads with taps spaced at intervals above grime-stained mirrors. There were drains everywhere and soap scrubs hanging from chains for washing. Hunter presumed the water – like the rest of the juvenile prison – would be cold.

When she turned back to the two Men in White who were guarding the door, they shoved a dirty towel, fresh jumpsuit and shoes into her arms.

“This is the bathroom?”

One of them tried to hold back a smile. The other just rolled his eyes. “Does this look like a five star hotel, Princess?”

She shut her mouth instantly. They chuckled and stepped aside as someone else squeezed between them as they shut the door.

“You get used to it,” said the girl with the brown hair Hunter knew as Jet’s girlfriend. Having forgotten her name, she merely gawked by the doorway.

“I’m Mikayla, by the way.” She was already unzipping her jumpsuit.

Hunter avoided looking at the naked girl as she shoved her dirty clothes down and turned on a shower head.

“Where are you from?” asked Mikayla.

“New York,” she replied, adjusting the icy temperature and shivering beside the flow. She kept imagining she was standing on a damp forest floor, green moss getting stuck between her toes. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

“I knew you were a New Yorker. My mom lives there with my stepdad.”

Hunter slipped under the chilly flow and gasped. Only her skin was cool; the inside of her body burned with raging fire. The water stopped her feeling so dizzy.

After her consultation with Dr. Wolfe, Hunter was lightheaded and an air of fear still swept through her bones. But the rest of the session wasn’t as bad as she expected. He took at least three pints of blood and went over her body with a strange torch device that scanned her skin. What he was looking for, she had no idea. He worked in silence. She tried not to let her head be smothered with fears and thoughts of Joshua lying on the same bed.

“Is that your natural hair color?”

Hunter stared across the room at Mikayla as she scrubbed her legs with the moldy stick. Her initial impression of the girl was bitchy-cheerleader-with-a-dick-boyfriend. Those were the girls she despised. But maybe she’d rushed into it. Mikayla was obviously making an effort to get to know her.

“Yeah. It comes with the powers,” Hunter replied.

“Right. Your fire.”

Hunter pushed her wet hair out of her eyes and swallowed disgusting sewer water when her mouth dropped open. She remembered the way Jet hinted at her power that morning before she broke his nose. Was there some kind of announcement at breakfast before I arrived? “How’d you know?”

“Comes with my powers,” she smirked. “I absorb other people’s abilities and render them powerless, so I can sense what people do. They don’t have bracelets like that for me. My power isn’t that much of a threat.”

“It’s still a power.”

Mikayla snorted. “Well until I figure out how to steal people’s powers and use them myself, it’s pretty much pointless.”

Hunter looked away from the girl and pretended to scrub dirt from the bottom of her feet. The look of desire in her eyes like a thirst for power reminded her of Joshua’s psycho moment in the warehouse. Hunter already knew that some abilities have the power to really mess with people’s heads, and Mikayla was becoming one of those victims. What would happen if she could someday take other powers?