The van arrives at the local security center and the agents move me into a cold lobby with bright, sterile lights reflecting on the walls and panels. Workers pass without a second glance while I wait. How nice it must be to have full immunity.

Wilson brings me another bottle of water, but now I've worked up a cold sweat, and the bottle dangles lifelessly from my fingers as I stare at the desk on the other side of the room.

An hour passes, and Wilson pats my shoulder. "The shuttle will be here any moment. Time to go." I stumble behind her to the lawn. A shiny, sleek black speck descends from the rich blue sky. My hair flies against the wind from the roaring rotors that whip the grass at my feet. I shiver, wide-eyed. I've seen shuttles pass overhead, but only on occasion.

The hatch opens, mechanics hissing as the metal platform lowers until it thumps softly on the ground. A new agent steps out from the back of the rear bay. He's tall and slender with light brown skin, but I can't see much else of him with his suit.

"The Community is safe," Wilson says with smile as she steps away from me. "Good luck."

I give a small nod, about all I can muster.

"This way." The new agent-Agent Agarwal-ushers me on board the back of the shuttle and motions to a table beside the interior door. Like the others, his accent is a little bit different from what I'm used to. These agents have come from all over the Community. According to the doctor, they're taking me outside the Community to the treatment facility.

Where am I going to end up?

"You'll spend the trip here," Agent Agarwal continues. "Others will be accompanying you later in the journey. There's a bathroom to your left, and you can get water from the sink. There should be paper cups beside the mirror." He leads me past several unmarked crates to the bathroom, but that's really the only thing to show.

My stomach rumbles... and for the first time since the injection, I don't feel like I'm going to lose the pudding I ate earlier. "Is there going to be an evening meal?"

He nods curtly. "We will bring you food, as well as a sleeping bag."

I blink, surprised. "We don't get bunks?"

Agarwal places his hands behind his back. "This was something of an unplanned trip. Normally there would be more options, but since we have to keep you quarantined, this will have to do."

I frown. "Why keep me quarantined from the other agents but not you? Aren't they already immune? Are you going to be okay?"

He sighs, his shoulders slouching, but he seems to understand where I'm coming from. "It's not so much the plague we need to worry about as it is the delusions you might have. The infected have been known to get... rambunctious. Inside the Community, an incident is fairly easy to handle. Plenty of security guards with the proper measures to subdue someone if necessary. Don't get me wrong, those of us on the shuttle can handle you, too, but it's all about safety. Something goes wrong in the air, that could be a lot more devastating than if something goes wrong on the ground."

My stomach twists in a knot. So much for the idea of successfully eating dinner. The idea that we... that I could get violent... that I could cause harm to the Community...

I might not do well in school, but I don't want my friends to get hurt, or my family.

I lower my eyes and rub the back of my neck. Though the day is surprisingly cool for August, which has flooded the back of the shuttle with fresh air, I'm pretty sure that air should be humid. Instead my skin feels like it wants to crack from sunburn. I withdraw my fingers and knot them together to keep from fidgeting.

"Thanks for explaining that."

"Of course. I know this is a trying time for you. It's hard for anyone who has to go in for treatment. Now, why don't you have a seat?" He tips his hand to his forehead and starts to leave. "I'll let the pilot know you're situated."

"How long does it take?" I ask suddenly. "How long before I can come back and see my family again?"

Agarwal pauses, slowly turning on his heel to face me. He chews at the edge of his lip as if there's something he doesn't want to say. "I don't know. I don't mean to scare you-the Community is safe, after all-but most of the students I've seen taken away haven't come back. They're still at the treatment facility."

A cold spike shoots through my spine. He hasn't seen anyone come back?

How long does it take? They do have a cure right? I'm going to go there and get treatment and then I'll come home to my family, all better. No way am I going to spend the rest of my life locked away in a hospital room, having delusions of discussing the interoperability of maritime telecommunications with an imaginary version of my professor.

I stare after the agent as he leaves me alone in the bay and the door squeezes shut, hiding away the last views of the security center. Surely it doesn't take that long to treat the plague.

Not when it's been contained...

But contained doesn't mean cured, does it?

If it did, I wouldn't be here.

~

The shuttle flies for the rest of the evening, with one stop near dusk to pick up three other students who also failed the scan. The agents restrict the new patients to the cargo bay, same as me. I'm too sick- dehydrated mostly-to do much talking, so I stick to myself in a seat at the table. One of the other students plops himself next to me while I still have my head down. I peek between my arms. He's got a kind of sharp, pointy jaw with a rounded chin and a thin-lipped smile, and short, curly brown hair cut in classic Community style.

"Hey... you feeling all right?" he asks, his accent somewhere from the European Community.

I raise my head enough to shoot him a glare. "What does it look like?"

"The injection?" He brushes aside a strand of hair that's close to getting into his eye. "Didn't feel good for me, either."

"Couldn't tell it," I mutter, lowering my face back in my arms. He's far too enthusiastic to be talking to me right now.

He leans forward. "I've had time to acclimate. We've been traveling for most of the day. This was our layover."

"Good for you."

"I'm Luuk." He sticks out his hand. "You?"

"Not feeling well enough to answer," I mutter, and drown any further attempts of communication from the guy. If he really wants to talk, he can chat with the other students who came with him. Surely they've had as much time to acclimate to the injection as he did.

~

One of the agents brings us sleeping bags once night arrives. I take mine with welcome, but Luuk is quiet the entire time the agents are here. It's only after I roll out my bag and try to tuck myself inside for much needed sleep-comfortable sleep-that he sidles up to me again and sits cross-legged in front of my face. I shoot him a glare. "Go away."

"What are you in for?" He keeps his voice hushed.

"Theophrenia, like the rest of you."

"No, I mean, what did you see before they caught you?" Luuk props his chin on his knuckles, his head tilted inquisitively to the side. I'm guessing he doesn't have my particular strain of "feel like a dried up washrag on its third cycle too many in the dryer."

"Caught me?" I mumble. "I turned myself in after I saw my teacher's face floating above my water cup."

His eyes widen and a tiny grin quirks on his lips. "Just an image, or did the water actually flow upright and move?"

"Did the..." I stare at him. How could he possibly have guessed that so accurately? "It doesn't matter." I roll onto my side, my back to the jerk who's interrupting my sleep.

"It could matter a lot," Luuk says softly. There's something in the way he speaks that's more sincere than I expect, but I hunch my shoulders and pull the bag over my head. I still need rest.

"How long were you off the pill?"

I groan. Is he trying to get me in trouble? I flip back over and narrow my eyes at him. "I don't know what it's like in your side of the Community, but that's not something you ask."

"I stopped taking mine when the resistance warned me I might have powers," he continues, still watching me. "My brother did, and he failed the scan. They said I might fail the scan, too, since I have more than one sibling. E-Leadership always leaves one, you know. They don't want to completely remove the genetics that give us powers. They need our powers for their army, and if they took all of us at once, they'd run out of soldiers."

I cough into my hand. Community... wow. This guy has really lost it. Like... he's well into the "delusions of grandeur" bit. It's a good thing he's on this shuttle, for all that he's an annoyance.

"You have theophrenia," I remind him, and then pull the bag over my head to muffle his voice. But despite the cold of the shuttle, the bag is hot and stuffy, especially given the injection's recent side effects.

I grimace. I'm going to need air again soon.

"I know it's hard to believe," Luuk continues, apparently not caring that I'm trying to sleep. "But if the water reshaped itself into something you were picturing, you might be a water elemental."

Water elemental? I take a deep breath, trying not to pay attention to the stuffy heat of the bag. Luuk has an imagination, that's for sure, but unless he's planning on going into engineering or the sciences, he doesn't need an imagination.

He needs treatment.

"If you were, you would have control over water," he adds. "You could sense moisture in the air... maybe even sense people. It would explain why you've been so thirsty after the injection. Adominogen blocks our powers, but our bodies become so reliant on them that when those powers are blocked, we get sick-"

I wrangle the bag off me in a massive heap around my lap. "Shut up!" I snap. "I'm hot, thirsty, and exhausted. I don't need your conspiracy theories or what you think is going to happen because you're delusional. You're here for the same reason we all are. We're infected. Now leave me alone so I can get sleep."

His shoulders sag. "They're going to kill us," he says softly, so low that I barely hear him. "Not directly. But they're going to turn us into beasts." He pushes himself from the metal grate of the floor and brushes dust off his knees. "If you decide you don't want that, come talk to me. We might have a chance to escape while we're still in the air."

With that crazy addition, he walks away to bother some other student, a girl with pale, freckled skin and curly red hair.

I shake my head. Is he what I would have been like if I hadn't gone to the health clinic when I did? I know the infected get delusional, but are they all like this?

I sigh and rearrange my bag, laying on top of it so I can still feel the cool air.

I can't wait for the side effects of the injection to finally wear off-because all of this is an obnoxious side effect, not because I'm sick without my "powers."

* * *

Thanks again for reading! :-D

Come back next Monday for chapter seven, where things start going wrong...

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