--XIV--

The dirt and dust on the rooftop didn't move when my feet connected with it.

I looked around me. I saw all of Vicinity Two from here; nothing obscured the dispiriting view, and nothing obscured the starlight.

Except maybe the darkness of my own memories.

My shoes and legs didn't need to absorb any impact, as always. I landed on what they used to call the Century Spire Tower: 60 floors of devoid, vacant, and bare; 60 floors of cold, dark, abandoned, and empty. Just like me, I guessed.

With my hands in Caleb's jacket pockets, I very slowly moved to the edge of the rooftop. I looked down... down, down. I looked at the outlines of sidewalks and avenues, trees and ivy and weeds, the growing things that took over half of the crumbled asphalt.

I looked at my left hand, where there were still marks from where the experiment conductors reconstructed bone and blood vessels.

"Do you hear me?" I said, seemingly to the sky, without any thinking.

I somnolently made my way to the part of the rooftop where I stood at eleven years old; I stood where, if you fell, you'd hit the pavement, the concrete of an empty parking lot. And probably splatter, like a bug hitting a windshield.

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Squish.

I kicked a pebble off the top, and I could only follow it with my eyes for a second before it was no longer visible to the eye.

It was the final day, the third month of Experiment Nightingale, the experiment that took the lives of kids that had gifts they could have used to better this world. People that could have bettered this place we live in, a place that often feels so full of darkness, a place so sick with pain.

I remember deciding it was too full of darkness and too sick with pain. I could take pain from people; no one could take this pain from me.

I was eleven and I didn't fall; I jumped. Only somehow I went way too far past the entire parking space, past roads and trees and broken bicycle wheels and fire hydrants. And when I landed I remained alive; there were no new injuries, not even a scratch. That was the day I lost my mind- or should I say, I lost whatever it was I still had left after years of abuse and after Experiment Nightingale.

I had nightmares before Nightingale; I had more after Nightingale.

I didn't hit the earth; the earth came to me, it took me gently in its arms like it cared to not hurt me.

Too late.

On that day I curled up, alone, on a sidewalk, and cried until I thought I would die and it was over. I woke up in Malcolm's house.

I told myself experiments were nothing new, thousands and thousands and thousands of people have been killed by these very experiments; it was nothing new, I had to move on.

It didn't help.

What I've learned is we don't choose what happens to us or what doesn't; we choose who we are, when they do happen to us. We can choose to be kind when the worst has happened, we can choose to heal others rather than to hurt. What goes around comes around. It's all that matters.