I sucked in my breath and forced the heaving sensation back down my throat. "I think I'm going to throw up."

  At the moment, I stood near one of the doctor's checkup tables with my fingers gripping the cold metal. My stomach rumbled, and the sensation of bile crawled up my throat.

  After grabbing a nearby trash can, Deryn placed it under my head. "That bad, huh?"

  "Awful." I reached for the bottle of water near me.

  "Wait a little bit before you drink." She plucked the bottle out of reach. "It'll make it worse."

  "How do you know that?" I asked. Then I had to clamp my hand over my mouth.

   Deryn's nose crinkled, but her feet stayed where they were.  "Personal experience."

  After a long while, the sensation and nausea faded into a dull headache. No longer feeling the need to spill my lunch, I released my grip on the table and took a few deep breaths.

  "Feel better?" Deryn asked.

  I rubbed my temple. "Yes, thank you."

  "I'll go tell the docs you're done with your crisis. I'll be back soon."

  Never in my three weeks of needle prodding did I ever feel the need to regurgitate my lunch. Sure, the medicine and pills tasted like baking soda and dirt sometimes, but that . . . was something special.

  Thankfully, my wave of nausea had kick started my nanobyte's recovering system, so my paranoia faded away with the sick feeling. The past three days were awful. Ryder and Saorise kept alternating times when they had nightmares or decided they were too scared to go to the stupid bathroom down the hall.

  Every creak in the house sounded like some psycho trying to break in, and every little sound screamed, "Hello there, I'm a crazy."

  My headache probably came from exhaustion instead of the vile potion the doctors stuck in me.

  All of that fear washed away with my sudden urge to show my lunch half-digested. There was nothing like the feeling of throwing up for an hour to kick start my nanobytes, which were ever so helpful the past few nights.

  "I'm back," Deryn said. "And I've brought friends."

  Two doctors followed behind her carrying the trays for more stupid shots with stupid needles.

  "More?" I groaned in my head.

  "Yes, we need to draw more blood," one of the doctors said.

  This time, the process took three tries to find a vein. Three times, the needle moved around in my left arm before it found a vessel, but at least it wasn't five.

  "You're almost done," the doctor said. He put a band-aid on the holes then stuck another needle in my shoulder. "This should prevent any lingering nausea."

  "Please come back in about an hour," his partner said. "We will be doing mechanical testing then, so don't use up too much energy."

  With that, the two swished away in their white lab coats with their trays and my vial of blood.

  Deryn climbed onto the metal table. "You know, they were impressed with your time. No one's recovered that fast before."

  "What?"

  Her face made a grimace. "They made you sick on purpose," Deryn said, "to test how fast your body would recover."

  "That's messed up," I said. An annoyed breath escaped from my lungs while I tried to think of some positive thing to say. "Well, now I know I recover faster than most humans from wanting to hurl."

  "Even faster than me. Thought they wouldn't try it on you though," Deryn said. Her eyes flitted away and landed on something else in the room.

  "Don't you have some duties or assignments or something?" I asked after a period of silence.

  "I have a break until around four because of the throwing up thing," she replied. "Bad for your health, apparently. Actually, if you aren't doing anything, I can spar with you so you get some more practice in."

  My ears perked up at her suggestion. Mr. Alan was training me, but a little practice wouldn't hurt . . . except for the fact I wasn't supposed to do anything with my electricity for the next hour. Then there were the aches popping up everywhere.

  Then there was the fact that she was a girl, and hitting a girl didn't sit well with me; though she could probably beat me up.

  I sighed. "That sounds great, but the docs said--"

  "Not with electricity. Just plain out fighting," she said. The corners of her mouth lifted up into a challenging smile. "Unless you don't feel up to it."

   Despite the protests of my mildly queasy stomach, my headache, and my morals; I returned her smile with my own challenge. "You're on."

.-.-.-.-.-.-.

  Plain-out fighting had somehow turned into fencing with swords. For the tenth time, our blades crossed as Deryn instructed me in different moves. 

  "Hold your sword properly."

  "No, don't cross your legs like that, you'll lose your balance."

  "Put more weight in that strike next time."

  After a grunt, I swung the weapon forward to block her strike. "It'd be easier to shock my opponent unconscious." 

  "Not if they're electrically resistant. You know, like you."

   We separated and back away from each other. With our dulled swords held out in front of us, our eyes gauged each other's next moves. 

  Deryn held the tip up at me. "From you, the shock would do a lot of damage, but against someone like the Lieutenant, you wouldn't be able to knock them out fast enough. Plus, they could block it with their own."

  I thought it worked well on the psychos who broke into my house. Granted, they didn't shoot very much at me, but that tactic worked.

  With a sour taste in my mouth, I muttered, "Still worked." 

  Deryn frowned before disarming me again. "Just because something worked once, doesn't mean it will work again. Take guns for example. At first, it seemed like the nanobytes weren't a good matchup--"

  I cut her off. "Until people figured out they could blast bullets from the air. I know, I've done it before." The first time it happened was a fluke. The psychos had fired right after I surged, so their bullets got caught in the arcs. 

  "Oh?" After returning my blade to me, Deryn raised an eyebrow in disbelief. "I thought you weren't old enough for the Academy."

  Before I answered her, a thought came to my mind. They fire bullets at students? It was enough to make my face scrunch up in confusion without responding.

  "They don't fire real bullets." Deryn stepped forward and flicked my forehead. "Paintballs. Stuff that won't kill people if they happen to miss. But that doesn't explain--"

  "Where do you think?" I stepped back and turned away from her. 

   It wasn't exactly a secret about what had happened, especially if she was working under Mr. Alan. News traveled fast about violent occurrences and the survivors, which did not include my mother or father.

  If I had gone back to help them, maybe they would've lived.

 "Oh." Deryn's words froze after she realized what I was talking about. "They fired at you."

  "Yeah."

  "You really shot down--"

  I turned around to face her. "Yes. Yes, I did. Real bullets too. Not paintballs or whatever--" my hands gestured to her "--you do at your school. Then the same psychos decided they needed to break in again if you don't remember." 

  The sword dropped from my hand as I stepped closer. 

  The words spilled out before I could stop them. "Now Saorise and Ryder can't even stay asleep because of the psychos. They wake up and ask if the  'the bad people' are coming after--" I took in a deep breath as my voice grew louder "--and asking when 'Mommy and Daddy' are coming back."

  Deryn looked away from me, down at the ground, before glancing back up again. Her slight movement backward after I raised my voice was enough to make me quiet back down.

  "Then in the morning, it's all a bad dream to them." My breathing staggered with the words, but I still had enough composure to stop my rant or the nanobytes did their magic again. "So yes. I have shot down real bullets before."

   After a moment of silence, she stepped forward. "Chael . . . I'm so sorry."

   "It's fine." The emptiness in my gut grew when I realized I just yelled at a girl for no reason.  "I'm sorry I yelled at you. That was uncalled for." 

  We stood there for a moment and waited in the suffocating silence. The worry that had melted away seeped back into my consciousness, but the panic didn't set in.

  It was like something added to a checklist: do my homework, train with Mr. Alan, worry about the invader, worry about the freaks from a few weeks ago. Then came the emptiness from the tiny robots in my body.

  Like now. 

  Deryn nudged away the silence with a quiet voice. "You have more tests soon. Want me to walk you up?"

  "Sure," I mumbled.

  The blanket of quiet covered our walk up to the sixth floor. The only sounds that exchanged between us were the thumping of her boots and the lighter taps of my shoes. I greeted the people we passed by, including Mr. Alan. On the stairwell between the sixth and fifth floor, Deryn spoke up again.

  "Hey, um, do you wanna hear a joke?" she asked.

  Not really. I shrugged and let her continue anyway.

  "Two peanuts walked down the road. One was assaulted."

  I blinked twice and tried to make sense of what she said. "How do you assault a peanut?" I opened the door to the sixth floor.

  Deryn stared at me a for a few seconds before answering. "Ah, it's a joke. Like a salted peanut."

  "Sorry, what?"

  "A salted peanut. A peanut with salt. It's a pun."

  Assaulted. . . a salted. "Oh, I get it." I laughed slightly.

  Deryn rolled her eyes and returned my laugh tentatively. "Thanks."

  The rest of our trip was quiet, but for some reason, it no longer loomed over us like a heavy blanket. More like a light sheet. 

  We parted ways at Ms. Raxyn's office with the promise of meeting up later. Upon entering her room, the first words out of the doctor's mouth were, "I must apologize for earlier this morning."

  She was referring to Ryder's crying and screaming incident that Deryn told me about.

  "That won't happen again, right?" I asked and rolled up my sleeve. I sat down in the seat in front of her desk and laid my arm on the armrest.

  It seemed like a natural reaction. Ryder tended to get scared easily, and he shared my aversion to needles. But the way Deryn described it. . .

  "I will try everything to prevent it. He displayed adverse reactions to my psychological exam." Ms. Raxyn took a needle from a tray lying on her desk.

  "He seemed pretty freaked out," I mumbled. My eyes closed before I could see the needle press through my skin. After a moment, a drawing sensation pricked my arm and signaled the removal of the stupid thing.

  "It will not happen again," Ms. Raxyn replied. Before I could protest further, she said, "The equipment is set up in the Sparring Room One. My assistants will administer today's tests."

  I nodded and headed down to the fourth floor.

  The equipment was in the room. Machines laid against the walls and hummed with power. A few metal rods rested on the floor, along with a few swords and other long, metal objects. The transmitting bracelets went around my wrists and ankles.

  The weird thing was no one else was there with me. For a long time, I sat against the wall in the silence of my thoughts. The only break from the quiet was the slight pitter-patter of feet outside, but even that stopped after a minute. Tired of waiting for the doctors, I poked my head out into the hallway, which was just as empty.

  Usually, there were at least one or two people walking around. Mr. Alan broke the still picture of the hallway, returning to normal, by bursting in and sprinting to me. "There you are," he said.

  "I've been here for awhile," I said.  "Where are all the doctors?"

  "Lock down." The Lieutenant pulled me down the corridor. "From the fourth floor and up."

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

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