Ravela turned in the bed. She was sweating buckets. She had kicked off the blanket, but the feverish heat she felt didn’t pass.
While her breath wasn’t condensing in the air anymore, she had failed to work off all the energy she had taken in, and sleep hadn’t claimed her all night. Instead, she lay on her bed rolling restlessly, standing up every other hour and taking another bottle out of the mini-fridge.
It was too late to fall asleep now, but at the same time, too early to be awake and active.
She once again got up to drink something cold and refreshing. Opening the mini-fridge, she realized she had taken the last bottle hours ago. Ravela groaned in frustration and considered drinking the water from the tap. Her mind hallucinated a fuzzy blue soda with ice before her to dissuade her from the idea.
Ravela put on some clothes before she went out to go to the gas station down the road. The early morning road was already busy but not quite buzzing with activity yet.
The sidewalk’s concrete slabs were level and neatly connected to each other. The clean connection and good craftsmanship soothed her agitated state a bit. As she walked, Ravela looked around for some Swaddy tailing her on foot.
She found that they once again were absent and relaxed even more. Her mood became somewhat more upbeat as she approached the gas station. Inside was already a line of customers, primarily truckers, who had topped off their work vehicles before going for a long ride out of town.
From the moment she got in line, Ravela shifted her weight from one leg to another. Her restlessness bothered the men entering the queue behind her more than those in front of her. The man directly behind her in line started clearing his throat in an attempt to get her attention. Ravela, however, didn’t notice the irritation she caused. All her thought dwelled on quenching her thirst.
She looked at the clock on the wall, just a little after six o’clock. The queue moved slowly, and Ravela watched the half-asleep man behind the register with absolute focus.
The door was flung open behind her, and she could hear the glass panel crack. Ravela twitched and turned toward the noise. Three men with guns had entered the gas station.
“Everybody! HANDS UP, THIS IS A ROBBERY!”
Their faces were masked but still showed enough visible skin to know that they weren’t Swaddy.
All the people in line had turned toward the yelling men waving their shotguns around.
Ravela took a deep breath. “Just great,” She growled as the three criminals took over the shop.
When she thought this situation couldn’t be any more annoying, tires screaked outside as two police cruisers pulled in with their sirens blaring.
Her temples started to throb. Just when she wanted to take things slow, something ridiculous happened, putting her into another situation.
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Laena had left the siblings to themselves after they had woken up Safora.
She had been wandering the hospital all day, looking for Beth Nams. Her walk with Markus had been part of her attempt to find her. But either Beth never arrived in the hospital, or she had failed to find her.
It wasn’t like she had much experience with the hospital, but the fact that talking to multiple nurses over the entire day and night had yielded no tangible results was frustrating. Something was going on, and she wanted to know where Beth and Troy went. Not for the first, she thought of asking Ramiel for help, but given his adamant refusal to insert himself into this situation the last time she asked, there was little hope for getting a different response.
Walking into random hospital rooms wasn’t an option, but Laena thought that walking around the whole hospital, she might get a whiff of the obnoxious flower smell Beth had been spreading.
After deciding that, she wandered the hospital for another hour without finding a trace of the girl she was searching for.
Frustrated, she gave up and returned to Markus’ hospital room to say her goodbyes.
Outside the door, she could hear the dim laughter of the siblings. She was glad that Safora relaxed a bit. After knocking on the door, Laena walked in.
Markus sat crosslegged on the hospital bed. He removed the hospital gown but hadn’t put on a shirt. Laena looked at his naked upper body for a moment before she spoke. “So, I will be going back to the dorm. Now that Markus seems to be okay, I think I more than deserve to sleep in a bed instead of on a bench. Say hi to your parents from me, you two.”
Safora made a pouty face and tried to dissuade her from leaving. “You could stay, you know. You’re family too.”
Laena managed a smile, but she knew it didn’t reach her eyes. A mantle of melancholy inevitably fell over her when Safora called her part of the family. ‘Family, huh?’ She only had Ma Stone and the very vague memories of her parents.
“I…thank you, Safora. I really need to sleep in a proper bed, though.” Laena turned, and she could feel her expression change. Her mouth became pursed, and dark clouds loomed over her thoughts as she wandered toward the exit.
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Memories of a bright sunny day returned. Her little hand was clinging to the index finger of her crying grandmother, confused and scared. The two tombstones, the coffins lowered into the ground, and the incomprehensibility of never seeing her mother or father again.
“Family.” She whispered the word. ‘What a way to end the day.’ Moments earlier, she felt fine; now, her mouth was filled with a thick, bitter taste.
As she neared the exit, an alarm went off in one of the rooms, and the two nurses at the front desk flew out of their chairs and down the hall toward the beeping noise. A book caught Laena’s eye, and she felt stupid for not checking the admitted patient list sooner.
Then she scolded herself because never once during the day the front desk had been unguarded. Laena looked over her shoulder and down the hall. She was alone. This was her chance. Her mind fled her prior dark paths and hurdled head over heels back to a more engaging, less depressing topic.
Vaulting over the counter, she pulled down the book the nurses had left in the open to check yesterday’s admittances. She sat down under the table to not be spotted by passing doctors and started flipping pages for Beth’s name.
‘Come on, where are you, Beth? You have to be here somewhere.’ Laena thought and mumbled along with her train of thought. “Gotta be here somewhere, don’t you?”
Her eyes skimmed over the names, only stopping for the right starting letter. She was surprised at how many patients were admitted in one day but kept turning page after page, undeterred.
Her finger went down one page, stopping abruptly. Laena had found her. “You’re here.” She peaked out from under the nurses' workstation. The coast was clear, and Laena returned the book to where she had found it.
Jumping back over the counter, she walked out of the hospital, trying to think of the room where Beth might be kept. ‘They probably hadn’t put her in the intensive care wing. So where did they put you?’
Laena left the hospital. She wanted to know where they put the kids that changed. Laena just wanted to ensure they were okay and treated right.
Outside, the thought that all the horror movies she watched with Safora might have made her a conspiracy nut crossed her mind. The teenager shot that concern in the wind. There were conspiracy theories, and then there were things that Laena knew were happening. And if there was one thing she knew, it was that people could gain superpowers because she was one of them. The sirens of an approaching ambulance could be heard, taking her out of her thoughts for a moment.
She began pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the hospital. Laena’s mind ran wild with the possible places where she could look for Beth in the hospital and how to go about this without getting arrested for breaking into cordoned wings of the hospital.
The curiosity was killing her, and she wanted to know how Beth was treated.
The sirens blared louder, and two ambulances and a bunch of police cruisers drove to the hospital. The cruisers stopped beside her right at the curb. At the same time, the two ambulances came to a halt right at the hospital's entrance.
Laena watched as patients were hurriedly rolled inside. One man had a lot of blood on him, two officers rushed along with the stretcher, and the two paramedics were stressed about him until they were relieved at the door. The other man was escorted by two paramedics, who looked calm compared to the two she had observed before, and by a single officer who looked extremely worried about the officer on the stretcher. The patient on the stretcher looked a bit annoyed by the whole ordeal.
Laena made all these observations thanks to the scene playing slowly before her. While it gave her time to take in everything, it annoyed her nonetheless. Her thoughts came to a screeching halt, and before her inner eyes, she returned to a hallway she had passed through only an hour ago. There was a room where a police officer was standing guard in front of. The door looked more like the door of a walk-in freezer than that of a normal hospital room. In a moment of clarity, she had finally found Beth’s room,
The police cruisers popped open, and other concerned officers flooded the sidewalk. Among the faces, she spotted one face she wasn’t expecting to see here at all. Unwittingly calling out to the person. “Ramiel?”
Ramiel, in his recruits shirt, looked oddly out of place among the officers. The officers closest to her turned just as the man she called did. The rest of the officers huddled around the man who had escorted his colleague on the stretcher.
The eyes met, and Laena felt offended when the man made a face like he had one of the worst days, and she was somehow adding to it.
‘What are you making that face for?’ Laena thought just when she realized she would pull him into her obsession with Beth. ‘Oh my god, that’s why he was making that face! I am trouble. I am just as bad as Safora.’
Her brief moment of self-reflection passed quickly as she approached Ramiel, fully intending to make him lend her a hand.
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Ravela stood on the sidewalk, still stunned by the entire chain of events, when someone called her name.
Turning around, wondering who among the twenty-odd officers populating the sidewalk knew her by name, Ravela locked eyes with a teenager. Her eyes almost rolled back into her skull, and she groaned. ‘Can this day get any more off track?!’
Looking up at the sky, she contemplated the odds while the girl approached her. There was no way this wasn’t going to be trouble for her. The day just hadn’t developed that way so far.
They met where Ravela had stood. She wasn’t in the mood for teenager shenanigan, and the fact that Laena stood outside a hospital in the early morning hours made her think back to their conversation about Troy Han.
Laena inhaled to speak, and Ravela’s hand wandered to the bridge of her nose as she closed her eyes. ‘Alright, let’s hear the damage.’
“You know you could, at least, pretend you’re happy to see me.” Laena started with a complaint.
Ravela, who never got her cold soft drink and was still boiling on the inside, sighed and replied. “I could. But then I’d be lying to you. Now, what are you doing this early outside the hospital? And if you say you’re trying to find Troy Han, I might just walk away like I don’t know you. So, go ahead and tell me what you want to tell me.”
The girl looked caught, but she recovered. “It’s not really about Troy.”
Ravela raised an eyebrow at that, prompting Laena to continue.
“So, uhm, Markus collapsed during school and got admitted to the hospital.” She said.
Ravela shifted her weight from one foot to the other at this news, worried.
Laena began talking faster. “He is okay now. Nothing like Troy happened with him. He just overworked himself in school, but another girl got admitted to the hospital, and she changed.”
Ravela’s eyes narrowed as she looked over her shoulder at the bunched-up police officers. “How would you know that she changed and is here?”
“You see, okay, hear me out before you say anything,” Laena prepared her for a bombshell, and Ravela felt her temples throbbing.
Her mouth felt dryer with each passing second, but she waited for the rest of the girl’s explanation.
“I kinda ran into Beth Nam today on her way to school. She filled an entire hallway with the smell of flowers to the point I had a sneezing fit. Later, I met her outside, and she was dragging a cloud behind her. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened when I came to our shared class later that day, and she wasn’t there anymore, and the school was buzzing about the weird flower smell that wouldn’t clear out entirely.”
“That doesn’t explain how you would know she is here,” Ravela stated.
“Because I wasn’t done. I was just catching my breath.” Laena said, huffing.
Ravela felt unbalanced, and everything happening today didn’t help her to remain calm. “Fine, sorry. Keep going.”
“So, I may have checked out the admittance book at the front desk when it was left unsupervised while I was leaving. Before you get mad, I was planning to leave for school, but I just had to know when the nurses ran from the front desk.” Laena said while looking at Ravela with big sad eyes, all concerned.
Ravela closed her eyes, taking a long deep breath. She had a soft spot for these teenagers and knew she’d regret hearing Laena out. “Very clever, but certainly not legal. Can we come to the part where you ask me to help satiate your obsession?”
Laena’s eyes flickered over to the crowd of police officers behind Ravela. She heard the footsteps of multiple people approaching.
“There he is! Ey, Rookie, come, meet the others. They want to shake your hand!” A familiar voice called out to her.
Ravela looked over her shoulder and quickly back to Laena, saying quietly, “Let’s meet here in the afternoon. 4 pm, then we can talk things through.”
Then she turned and allowed her new friends to escort her to the crowd of waiting officers. Ravela saw that most of the frowns and grim looks from before had turned into calmer, relieved expressions.