Seventeen year old Jay Sasaki lives in a world where corporations spend millions of dollars to exploit superpowered children and the media defines good and evil. Cursed with the ability to steal souls, Jay leads a double life as both a normal high s...
A few days later, Carmen asked me to come into her lab again. As soon as I lay down on the lab table and saw the fluorescent lights, I began to lose my grip on the present. "Jay, are you okay?" Carmen asked me as I tried to fight my memories of the Academy away.
"I'm fine," I said. Carmen said something disguised in scientific jargon to one of her assistants, and I couldn't fight my memories anymore. Even though a part of me knew that Carmen would never hurt me, the lab still reminded me far too much of the Academy's Research Floor, so that's where my mind went.
Almost a year after I arrived at the Academy, Harper and I were sitting on the grass in the courtyard, staring up at the clouds. "That one looks like a chicken," Harper noted as she sketched what she saw.
"Don't be silly," I said. "It looks more like Mickey Mouse than a chicken."
"No, it's definitely a chicken," Harper said.
"Do you even know what a chicken looks like?" I asked.
"I used to live on a farm in North Dakota," Harper said. "My family had chickens when I was little. I'm not sure you know what a chicken looks like."
"I've seen pigeons in real life before," I said. "That's close enough, right?"
Harper sighed and shook her head. "No, that's not close at all," she said.
All of a sudden, Harper and I both heard a loud noise. It sounded like a splash, and then a scream. "What was that?" I asked her.
"I don't know, but it sounded like it came from the Research Floor," Harper said. "We should go check it out."
Harper and I walked to the Research Floor, but it seemed that everyone else had the same idea that we did. Almost every student and teacher at the Academy rushed downstairs towards the Research Floor, and I was nearly trampled by some of the larger, more powerful older students. Harper transformed into a mouse and scurried ahead of the crowd, leaving me behind. As it was, I was one of the last students to find out what all of the fuss was about.
In a rarely used offshoot of the Research Floor, there were several large vats of the mutagenic chemical known as hydroglosseide that the Academy's scientists sometimes used in attempts to disable or modify our powers. The students crowded around one of those vats, while I stood on my tiptoes to get a better look.
When Harper transformed back into a human next to me, I asked, "What's going on?"
"It's hard to tell," she said. "Let's get closer to the front."
She grabbed my hand and shoved a few other kids out of the way until the two of us were at the front of the crowd. Harper then looked up and gasped. "It's Deven!" she exclaimed. "He must have fallen into the vat."
