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Max beat your high score on Assassin Quest. Hurry up and get out of there. He’s way better than me.
Guess where I’m sleeping? In your bed. Smells like you. And candy. Do you eat candy in bed?
Hero training announced 42 new enrollments. You inspired that. Even if you’re not a Hero, you’re one to the kids who signed up.
Max called you my girlfriend. I didn’t say anything but I didn’t deny it. Just thought you should know.
The last card feels heavy in my hand, as if each time I read the words it gains a pound of emotional weight. A knock on my door catches me off guard and I fake a yawn as I stretch my arm back and shove the cards inside my pillowcase.
Nurse Martha gives me a warm smile as she checks her wrist MOD; the creases in her eyes making her look like a loving great grandmother instead of Central’s super strict head nurse. She’s delivered just about every Super child born in the last century, myself included. When she isn’t in Central, she spends time in the human hospitals training their staff and using her healing powers in the NICU.
“You know what time it is,” she says, taking her usual place on the right side of my bed.
I shift my body to the left. “I don’t want to.”
She takes my arm anyway, lifting it off the pillow and forcing my wrist to bend up and down, bending my elbow inward and back out again. “You whine about it now, but one day you will realize how lucky you are. The luckiest Super in the world, I reckon. No one has escaped the depowering machine.”
“I didn’t escape. I was still partially depowered.” I suck in a deep breath and let it out in a huff. My right arm is the last thing I want to talk about. I don’t even look at it if I can help it. I haven’t seen the wounds. Every day when Nurse Martha cleans them I stare at the ceiling and clench my teeth as I bare the stinging scent of rubbing alcohol. But I don’t look down.
My arm is dead now. Powerless.
“Press against me,” she says in her soothing physical-rehabilitation voice. She pushes down on my arm and I’m supposed to pull up, negating her pressure. We do it every day. Every day I hate it.
“Now make a fist.” I do as she asks, and my fingers must close into each other because she says, “Excellent. You’re doing so great.” But I don’t feel like I’m doing great. My hand doesn’t feel like it’s making a fist. It feels dead. Numb. Like I’ve fallen asleep lying on my arm and lost all circulation so much that I’ll never get it back. The power that courses through my veins no longer courses through my right arm.
Now it’s just flesh and blood and muscles and bone. Now it’s worthless.
“You’ll get used to living with a depowered limb, Maci.” A gentle tug tells me she’s removing the yards of gauze wrapped around my arm. The alcohol scent will come soon, followed by stinging and then relief as another gauze replaces the old one. “You still have most of your power. You can still work. I know you feel like your life is over, but it isn’t.”
She says this kind of crap every day. I’ve done a good job of ignoring her and counting the dots in the ceiling tiles, but today I can’t hold back. I can’t pretend that everything is fine when it’s not.
“Why are you doing this?” My voice is raspy from a lack of using it. She stops pressing against my fingers. Her head tilts to the side and I can tell she’s deciding whether to answer me seriously or in a lighthearted way. “Why are you rehabilitating me?” I ask. “Why are you acting like I can go on from this and live a normal life?”
The creases deepen around her eyes. “I have worked here for over three hundred years. You may think you’re a lost cause, but I’ve seen far worse patients than you. Of course I’ve seen my share of injured Heroes, but it’s the twins who will break your heart.” Her eyes stare past me as her lips press together and she shakes her head.
Her hand squeezes mine and I actually register the feeling in my worthless hand. Pressure and a gentle sweep of her thumb across my palm. The feeling is similar to what it normally feels like only—it’s different. It’s lifeless. The tingling feeling of power pulsing through my skin is gone. My arm is still here, still a part of me, but it is forever changed.
A sigh escapes my lips. If she isn’t afraid to touch it then I shouldn’t be afraid to look at it. Nurse Martha watches me, probably guessing what I’m about to do. With clenched teeth, my left hand grabs a fistful of the bed sheet as I slowly drag my eyes across my body, reluctantly focusing on my depowered arm.
Bile churns in my stomach. Now I know why so much rubbing alcohol is needed. My arm looks like pale flesh that was raked over a bed of nails. My fingers have bloody nail beds that used to have nails with unkempt cuticles. My wrist is a mass of torn flesh, some of it seeming to barely hang on. I stretch open my fingers and watch my skin break apart, fresh blood leaking out until I relax the muscles and the skin presses back together. I’m so used to the pain I hardly feel it anymore.
Nurse Martha dips a strip of gauze into a clear solution. “The depowering process is much more humane than what they used to do, you know.”
I give her an incredulous look. “What could possibly be worse than this?”
She peers down her nose at me. “You could lose your life.”
I think of Dad, stuck in a room in the medical ward as well, his life forever ruined. I’m not sure how I can go on without my arm. How can he live without power in his entire body? “I think death would be better,” I say under my breath.
“Depowering only robs you of your power. It does not take away your body or your mind. Some of the earlier Supers weren’t so lucky.”
The next few moments are silent as she rewraps my arm and injects more pain suppressants into my IV on top of my shoulder. Then she surprises me by pulling out the needle and placing a hot pink sticky plastic strip on top of the spot where the needle had been.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“It’s a Band-Aid. Your skin won’t heal instantly anymore. Not on the depowered arm. Can’t have any more blood escaping from that tiny hole.” She smiles. I don’t find any of that funny.
When she’s finished, she rises from the side of the bed and reads something on her wrist MOD. “They’re allowing you to go home today,” she says with a smile. “My work here is done. I’ll send you home with plenty of bandages and you can tend to your arm for the next week or so.”
