The music was loud and overbearing. The buffet was decent… but within the first hour most of the food was already gone. The drinks were sweet and non-alcoholic, except for that one huge bowl of punch, which had most likely been tampered with by some student who had sneaked a bottle of vodka in.
But Nya wasn’t paying attention to all of that.
She was leaning against the wall in a dark corner of the hall staring down at her half-empty glass of the deep red, spiked punch, with bits of lychee and strawberry swirling around.
She had managed to escape the crowd, even Jack and Ash, who were probably drunk dancing somewhere, after what she considered a ‘normal’ amount of socializing.
All of this pretence of leading a human life was tiring.
Of course, it was better than being treated like a rat in a lab. But it still felt out of place. As if she was trying to live a life that wasn’t hers, but a life that had been decided for her instead. It wasn’t too bad, but to this day she had never felt like she truly belonged here.
This year was their last at secondary school. She had gone through the motions like everyone else: she had applied to a few universities and was attending the career lectures and fairs in the vicinity.
But she wasn’t like everyone else.
The reincarnation of Chaos. A Mastermind. Why had she been chosen to inherit these powers? She would never know.
This had been going on since the beginning of time. Every time a Mastermind died, their power would be reborn into someone else. While a child born with Masterminds as parents had a higher chance of inheriting powers, there was no guarantee of it. No direct lineage, neither blood lines nor inheritance could influence the ‘body’ that Mastermind powers would pick as their next host.
Nya had never known her biological parents but she knew that they had been human. They had died as soon as she was born and she had long made peace with the fact that this had most likely been her doing.
Chaos was said to be invincible and fearsome… and yet, even after undergoing training at the penthouse for the past eight years, she could barely control her powers. Once she would unleash them, they would take a mind of their own somehow…
It scared her.
She didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Don’t worry about it, I don’t die that easily. This was what Ash would always tell her every time she would injure him during training. He would wipe his blood off his clothes and wipe her tears away from her cheeks.
There was always blood… so much blood…
Never hers.
Except that one time, when she had that silly accident…
———
That day, they had to cut their camping trip short.
“How did this even happen?”
“Ash and she were playing hide and seek. She climbed a tree but lost her balance and fell, head first.”
“And you couldn’t have done anything to stop it?”
“I’m sorry, Dany, it’s not like I can use telekinesis like you.”
“I thought Writers could write ten times faster than the average human being. That would have been fast enough to have softened the impact…if you had been watching them closely.”
A sigh.
“Listen, they’re twelve. It’s not like I had my eyes on them 24/7. They’re old enough to roam around by themselves.”
Nya had awoken to the sound of their voices. Her head hurt and it seemed like something tight was wrapped around it.. But it was too tight… It hurt…
Something was dripping down her temple. She touched the side of her head. Her fingers came back all red.
Blood.
Heila’s voice came up again.
“But it’s going to be fine, it’s not like a hit to the head can kill her. It’s not like she’s human so she’ll be back on her feet soon.”
“Heila, you know she’s the Mastermind of Chaos, right?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“No, that means that her body is engineered to be chaotic, disordered… but not healing. She may be one of the most powerful Masterminds, but her body doesn’t know how to repair itself. It only knows how to destroy.”
“Wait, that means…”
“Which means that it’ll take her much longer that the average Mastermind to recover from this.” Dany paused. “She’s not you, Heila.”
Nya’s ears started ringing. She wanted to cry out but her throat was dry.
Water… she needed water…
Dany was still talking.
“Maybe it would have been better if she had died.”
She felt her throat tighten.
Air…
She couldn’t breathe.
“Dany! How dare you even say that!”
“Would it have been the most effective way to stop the apocalypse?”
Someone suddenly held her hand.
“Nya? You awake? Nya? Can you hear me? Nya!”
It was Ash’s voice… That new boy who had moved in with them a few months ago. Heila had told her that he also had powers… and that his parents had kicked him out of the house because of that…
“I’m three months older than you. It means I’m your big brother as from now. So you have to listen to what I say.”
Ash had said it with so much pride… as if he had won a competition only he had devised in his mind.
Big brother…
It felt nice, for once, to feel like she had a family.
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