The Numbers on Our Arms

Chapter 34

Seraphina sat on her bed with her blinds drawn down and a book in her lap. It wasn't any of the books that her mother had assigned but a fiction one. Of course, it still had to be one she approved of because she wasn't away from home at the moment, so it was a classic. 'Prejudice and Pride'.

Maybe she should have thought a bit more about a romance book between two soulmates. On the other hand, this book had been sitting on her bookshelf since she was sixteen and this could prove that she didn't go through her rooms in such high detail to consider this. Or maybe they thought she was making up meeting her soulmate thing.

The only light in the room was the lamp on her bedside table next to her, casting a small circle of light on her bed, with possibly some small slivers of silver light pouring in from between the cracks in her blinds. Suddenly, an orange light engulfed the room and she glanced up to see the shape of a man illuminated in the orange light that lit the room. She slammed the book closed and placed it on the bedside table.

"Are you ready to go?" Kayden asked as he deactivated his ability and the light returned to what it had been before.

She nodded and walked over in her dark clothes and he took her hand. The orange light blinded her own vision and they ended up in the teleporting room of her sister's building.

She took in a deep breath of the now cool air of the room. "Did you seriously agree to do that?"

"What? And not bring you here?" he answered. "Or just end up waiting outside for hours when you can't get out. That wouldn't have happened otherwise.

She reached over and opened the door. She headed over to the lab room that Leilah usually worked in to find that Leilah stood in there in front of a set of lab tubes. As she placed the equipment back down onto the countertop, she turned back to her with a smile and took off the safety glasses.

"Do they actually let you practiced with your hair down?" Sera asked her.

"It's only temporary. I wasn't planning on experimenting for long."

Sera took a few more steps into the room. "What are you working on?"

"You know, this and that request," she replied. "But I'm still trying to get a permanent cure or at least one that can be administrated by a person by themselves."

"You don't have to do that for me," she said, glancing over to the machine on the other side of the room. "No one is testing me on my ability currently anyway."

"That will change – you'll be going to university in a year and sooner than that, you don't know about any new students next year (first years or otherwise). Even if you can easily defeat them, you need your ability to do that," she replied and then sighed. "And it's not even just that. You need to come here to get your ability fixed and in the between time, you have a risk of your ability stopping working. It's just better if someone recovering from the drug can use the machine and recover, or if that won't work, someone can take pills or injection to recover their ability. It's not fair that some like you has to go without their ability or be connected to this company forever."

"I think someone may have other issues if they are connected to this company," Seraphina said.

"What do you mean?"

"This company isn't exactly legal. Yes, it has a legal front, but I doubt the Authorities know that this is the place that distributed the drug that prevents someone from using their ability. Now, would this company want someone to leave it if they have that information?"

"You've got a point," she replied. "But the Authorities would only want this technology for themselves, not to get rid of it, and do you know how they would use it? They would target people who are against them. Anyone at risk of being a vigilante, particularly a powerful one, well now they don't have their ability to even start that. An alternative politician, suddenly no ability to earn respect with. A child with a criminal history, no chance to readjust to society as now they have no ability."