Two months.
It should have been long enough for the world to feel less raw, but grief doesn't keep appointments. Time slid by in uneasy increments: drills, tests, measurements, the dull tick of the band at my wrist. Some things changed. I learned—slowly but surely—how to shape the green light. I could form it into a sphere again, smaller now, denser, aimed like the barrel of a gun. I learned to make it a controlled blast instead of an indiscriminate inferno. It was a crude improvement, but in that place, "crude improvement" sounded dangerously like progress.
Katara had taught me to fight without powers. For the past month she shoved me through hours of technique—stance, balance, counters, how to fall without breaking. I picked it up faster than she expected, my body learning to obey where my head screamed no. Friends didn't come with training. The scientists, the guards, the employees—most of them kept their distance, eyes sliding away when I entered a room, as if fear could pass through skin. Only my small circle—the team—spoke to me without flinching: David's measured instructions, Mike's crude jokes, Medusa's cold, appraising remarks, Katara's taut watchfulness. They were a family that fit me like armor. A dangerous family.
Night had folded over the base when the summons came. The hall where we'd first met—long, low, lit by sickly tubes—filled again with the shadowed silhouettes of the group. I took my place at the same chair, Medusa to my left and Katara to my right, the room smelling faintly of metal and old coffee. The same table, the same faces, and beneath it all a steady compilation of the last two months: the numbers, the tests, the way they'd cataloged my life into charts.
Katara stood and spoke first. Her voice was flat, practiced. "We have a mission," she said. "David and I have been planning it for a week. Lena will join."
Something inside me lurched—an unexpected, foolish spike of hope. Outside. The world beyond the base. The idea made my chest flutter like a trapped bird. For a breath I tasted freedom: the hum of city air, the messy noise of people, another sky. Even for a second it warmed my pulse.
David cut into my small flutter of joy with calm efficiency. "You won't get away," he said, not unkindly, and the words landed like a door slamming. He tapped the band on my wrist. "This monitor tracks you. It will tell us where you are, and it will let us know if you try to run. Consider your freedom conditional."
I forced myself to nod. He treated it as logistics; I felt the noose.
They explained the plan: intelligence-gathering at the Hero Association headquarters in Milan—City of Sunrise. The words clustered in my brain: Milan, Sunrise, hero headquarters. They told me it was foreign, far from where I'd been born. The trip was already one more proof that I'd been transported into someone else's country, someone else's fate.
They divided the team into two units. Katara, Medusa, and Mike would hack, infiltrate and extract information—surgical, silent. David and I would be the decoy.
My skin cooled.
"Decoy?" I asked, my voice small and brittle. I didn't like the idea of setting off to lure anyone; decoy sounded like a role with other people's bodies hanging on the margins.
Katara's eyes were steady, unblinking. "You create a diversion. Draw attention. Cause controlled destruction to pull the heroes away from the data node. That gives us time to extract." Her words were measured—clinical. It sounded simple when she said it, as if she were describing a storm they'd studied in a lab and planned around down to the barometer.
My throat went dry. "You mean—" I couldn't finish.
Mike smirked the way he did when he wanted to be clever. "It's theater, Lena. A show to get the heroes' attention. You're the star." He said it like a compliment.
My heart hit a thousand beats a minute. I thought of their faces—my friends, my parents, the strangers who slept in the city. I imagined windows, children, bus stops, a hundred small lives woven into a pattern that my fist could tear. My hands trembled so hard the band around my wrist hummed.
"No," I said. The word left me in a small, broken sound. "I won't be your decoy. I won't… I can't hurt innocent people."
They didn't laugh. Silence pressed for a breath, then shifted like tectonic plates.
Mike's grin didn't waver. David's face was unreadable; even he seemed to find amusement. Medusa clicked her nails calmly, like a metronome. Then Katara leaned forward. Her voice dropped until it was almost inaudible, but each syllable pressed like a weight against the air.
"If you refuse," she said, looking straight at me, "your parents will die."
The sentence dropped between us like iron. For a moment I couldn't breathe. The world narrowed to the shape of that sentence and the sound of my heart. I laughed then—no humor in it—because of how impossible it sounded. My parents were thousands of miles away. How could they—?
Katara's face didn't change. She produced proof like a coin from a sleeve: a photograph, blurred but clear enough to break me. My parents' faces, older, eyes creased in a way that made me ache. "We have means," she said. "We have reached. We can hurt what you love."
My world went thin at the edges. The table wavered. I forced my hands steady in my lap. "You—won't—" I started, voice splitting, but nothing I could say pushed back her certainty.
David's tone dropped to something flat and efficient. "This mission is high-value. If we don't get that info, a lot of our operations will be compromised. If you're not willing to do this—for the organization—you'll be removed. Permanently." His eyes were clinical; he didn't gloat. He simply stated the possible outcome.
Medusa's nails tapped again. "You choose. Help us—or your family dies." She said it was like choosing a tea flavor. The room smelled suddenly of copper and breath.
I had no answer. A cold, viscous panic spread through me, equal parts fury and frozen terror. My chest felt too small, as if someone had tightened a band around it and were slowly turning the screw.
How could they reach my parents? How could they touch people so far away? They were in a different country, in a life I barely got to visit on holidays—safe at least by distance. But Katara's eyes told me otherwise: methods, networks, favors called in months earlier; a reach stretching farther than I'd dared imagine. Means. Power. Interitus did not ask for proof. They wielded fear like a key.
If I refused, death for them. If I complied, death for strangers. The choice carved out two avenues of blood.
I felt every part of me cracking into fractions. One part—small and furious—wanted to bring the table down, to shatter the monitors and bite at anyone who tried to hurt me. Another part—old and quiet—kept the images of my family's faces in a locked box, refusing to let them go.
"You can't do this," I whispered. It wasn't an argument. It was a plea to the air.
Katara sat back. She watched me as if studying how the surface of something shifts when pressure is applied. "We already did," she said softly. "We made a choice the second you survived Maya Forest. We took you because we need what you are. You are not the only one who lost something. You are the only one with the option left."
Hot tears slipped down my face, cold and useless. I felt small and ferocious and utterly, impossibly alone.
For the first time since they'd taken me, I understood the arithmetic they'd reduced my life to: value vs. cost. The numbers weren't written on the table. They were carved into the shape of the room, the tone of the voices, the band humming on my wrist.
I had two choices that were both wrong.
I had to choose anyway.
Their eyes drilled into me, waiting for an answer. My throat tightened, my chest rising and falling like I'd just run for miles. I glared at them—at Katara most of all—with every ounce of rage I had left.
Katara's lips curved, slow and deliberate, into that infuriating smile. "That look tells me everything," she said, her tone soft but sharpened like a blade. "You'll accept the mission. Whether you realize it or not."
Her certainty made my stomach twist. I snapped my gaze away, refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing me break. Behind her, Mike let out a laugh that echoed across the room, loud and mocking, while David remained stone-faced.
"Good," David said flatly, as if my silence sealed the deal. He spread a map across the table and began outlining routes and contingencies. His voice was calm, methodical—like he was describing the weather. "You and I will act as a diversion. We'll draw the Heroes' eyes and keep them occupied, while Katara, Mike, and Medusa infiltrate the Association's headquarters. If we execute this correctly, they won't suspect the true objective until it's too late."
Every word drilled into me like nails. Diversion. Occupied. Fight. Innocent lives are reduced to pawns in their strategy. My fists trembled under the table, nails digging into my skin to keep me from screaming.
By the time the meeting ended, the air was thick with plans and threats disguised as orders. One by one they filtered out—Katara leading with her usual composed arrogance, Mike still grinning like he'd just heard the best joke of his life, and David carrying his maps in cold silence.
Only Medusa and I remained. She leaned back in her chair, silent, her strange, serpent-like eyes studying me and her snakes in her hair looking at me. For once she didn't tease, didn't smirk, didn't ask a thousand questions. She just sat there, tapping her nails against the wood, while I stared at the polished surface of the table.
Neither of us spoke. The silence was heavier than any threat Katara had thrown at me.
The silence pressed down on the room like a heavy fog. I sat frozen in my chair, staring at the polished wood of the table as though its grain might hold an escape I couldn't see. Medusa remained across from me, calm as stone, her fingers laced together on her lap. Minutes stretched, dragging out the pounding of my heart, until finally, she broke the stillness.
"Lena," she said, her voice low but cutting. "You have to listen to Katara. If you don't, something worse than your parents' death will happen."
My head snapped up, my throat tightening. She didn't mean my birth parents. No—she meant them. The only people who had ever taken me in after the ashes of my real family. The only ones who had given me warmth, even when I thought I didn't deserve it. My new parents. My last fragile piece of home.
Medusa rose from her chair with the grace of someone who had rehearsed this moment. She moved toward the door, her back straight, her steps quiet against the floor. Just before leaving, she paused, half-turned, and delivered her final words like a blade drawn across skin.
"Endure it. This is your life now. One more thing, Lena—don't trust anyone except us. Not the scientists, not the guards, and never the government. Remember that."
Then she was gone, leaving only the faint echo of her boots in the hallway.
The door shut, and the weight I had been holding back finally broke me. My chest heaved as a sob tore free, and I buried my face in my trembling hands. They had found them. They had found the only people I had left, the ones who called me daughter when no one else would. My mind replayed their smiles, their voices, their arms around me in a home that felt real for once. Now that fragile happiness was nothing but a noose around my neck, tightened by Interitus' hands.
Hot tears blurred my vision as the truth cut into me. They weren't just forcing me into a mission. They were molding me into their weapon, reshaping me with threats and chains until there was nothing left of the girl my parents had loved.
"I can't do this," I whispered into the empty room, my voice breaking. But the walls didn't care. The silence swallowed me whole, leaving me with nothing but despair and the hollow knowledge that I was trapped.
My sobs echoed off the walls, sharp and ugly, but I couldn't stop them. Every tear that fell seemed to burn my skin, each one a reminder of how powerless I really was. I thought I had lost everything when my real parents died. I thought nothing could hurt worse than that. But now… now I realized pain could be dug deeper, like a blade twisted into an old wound.
They had them. My adoptive parents. The people who had tried to give me a normal life when all I carried was trauma. They were the ones who stayed up late when I woke from nightmares, who forced me to eat when I wanted to starve, who told me I wasn't broken even though I felt like I was. And now their lives dangled from a string I couldn't control, held hostage by the very people who claimed to be my "team."
I pressed my fists to my temples, trying to block out the spiral of thoughts clawing at me. How did they even find them? How long have they been watching? My stomach churned with nausea, bile rising at the thought of Katara's smirk when she had threatened them.
Anger flared, bright and desperate, but it collapsed under the weight of fear. No matter how hard I clenched my fists, I knew the truth: I couldn't fight them. Not now. Not when a single act of defiance could mean the death of the only family I had left.
The room felt too small, suffocating. I slid down from the chair onto the cold floor, curling my knees to my chest. My body trembled, not just from crying but from exhaustion—the kind of exhaustion that sinks into your bones, heavier than sleep could ever fix.
In the darkness of that room, I whispered to myself the only promise I could make:
"I'll endure it. For them."
But the words tasted like poison. Because deep inside, I knew what "endure" really meant. Every day with Interitus, they chipped away at me, piece by piece. If I kept enduring, one day there wouldn't be anything left of Lena at all. Just their weapon. Just their monster.
And that thought was almost worse than dying.