Deception | Alias Duology

Chapter Eleven: Well Needed Reminder

David once told me that I used to exclusively take cold showers. I can't imagine why, now, when I had unlimited hot water in End, but he said that I took cold ones because they made me feel awake, alert, alive.

But as I step out from the spacious shower (that is separate from the hot tub-sized bath), freezing water clinging to me like liquid glass and skin chilled nearly to freezer burn, I don't feel alive. I feel empty. Dull. Dead, like a dust-coated stainless steel tap in a long-since abandoned building.

I glance at the mirror and the person that stares back doesn't look much better. A smattering of freckles stands out from my pale brown skin and lighter brown curls hang limply around my forehead, all of which accentuate the shadows under eyes that are dark and haunted like an empty museum (back when museums were still physical locations).

Distantly, I reach up and trace the skin under my eyes. Back in END, they were sagging crescents of darkness, but here they are just simple shadows. Now that I am not on high-grade PowDown patches, my skin isn't so pale, the shadows not so deep, my energy and appetite returned. It's...a freedom, a relief to feel alive, like myself again, and at the same time, I want high-powered PowDown patches again.

If they are on, I am safe, the building is safe, everyone is safe from my powers. If they are on, people stop looking at me like I am an electricity bomb ready to explode at any moment—at least, not as much. If they are on, it means I don't have to fight for myself alone. Edison and David and everyone else are there to fill in where I can't, advocating for me and my cases, helping me take one step at a time to a future not locked in boxes.

If I have them on, I am in End, but my body suffers. But without them...I am here, trapped in a secret base somewhere far away, with only regular PowDown patches—too weak to stop anything but a small burst from me—and Deception. Wraith. The others lurking down here.

And I...I feel awake in a way I haven't in weeks.

The Parasite's powers—my powers—pulse at the base of my neck and whisper and wind around my bones as a patient storm, sliding against invisible barriers, crackling with energy. The subtle fog around my thoughts is clear, my mind on its feet, and my stomach rumbles on regular times. And blanking the tower...releasing the waiting winter storm and feeling its strength, its power, its hunger, I feel awake, alive, like everything before was a dream and this is reality.

My hands outstretched, fingers spread, and a thrill of release tingling through my body, rubble at my feet. Why is that the moment I feel most awake? Why isn't it when I am joking and laughing with David, or snuggling Skittles, or just hanging out with Edison with snacks and thoughts of the day?

I close my eyes, holding the image of the tower's rubble in my mind, bracing for the feeling of exhilaration to wash over me, a perfectly circular ball of ice lodged in my throat. But it doesn't come. As much as it is burned into my mind, I feel nothing but dullness. Ache. A growing pulse of prickly frost at the nape of my neck.

Dr. Egret says that the Parasite is both a gift and a curse, but right now, all I see is the curse, the burden, the doom it brings.

In a few years, maybe even less, it will grow too big, too greedy, and either starve me out of my own body or crowd me out. In the meantime, it gives me this accursed power that destroyed me, my life, my memories. This power that Deception hungers for, the power that made her kidnap me, the/this power that she wants to use as the pristine white scepter with which she will rule the world with.

This power with which I destroyed everything around me—buildings, people, relationships, myself—leaving nothing behind but a blank slate. A legacy of destruction. A life so ruined I will die before I even finish rebuilding the scaffolding.