It takes nearly a full day for Ion to get back home. 

It is dark when she gets home. Except for her that is.

She takes a deep breath and braces before she enters.

"Isabella! Where were you?"

A spike of anxiety. Ion feels the energy insider her begin to flare. Brighter than before. She can feel something inside her. A power yearning to be let out.

Oh no. That is... not good.

Ion closes her eyes, taking a few deep breaths.

Her Mom takes a few steps back

"What... What happened?"

Ion's glow returns to it's regular level.

"Oh? I uh.... wanted some fresh air. So I went on a walk?"

It didn't sound plausible even to herself. Her mom clearly didn't buy it.

"You have been gone for an entire day! Your father and I have been worried sick!"

Okay, need an opening to end this conversation. Time to go on the offensive

"No. You have been worried sick. Dad doesn't give a shit about me since I started to glow!"

Her mom takes a step back. Ion feels the start of regret but pushes forward.

"Nobody gives a shit! I'm alone in my room, treated like a freak by the people who are supposed to love me."

Ion can see her mom starting to hurt. She'll be disorient for the next few seconds. Enough time to escape.

Ion marches into her room and shuts the door

Ion is stripped of her clothes, and her possessions.

The guards say things. They aim guns at her.

She goes where she is pointed to.

She can feel the energy inside her still.

She could kill everyone around her. 

Her light flares with that thought, and an effort of will forces herself to calm down . Back to the regular glow.

These jobs... They broke me. They made everything worse.


They shover her roughly into a cell.

There is not light. Just thick concrete walls. 

Ion waits until she is alone. Then screams. 

The light around her flash. The energy within her swells then explodes out . She can feel bits of her skin and hair turning into pure energy when she explodes. 

I'm not human any more. I'm a shell around a walking bomb.

Ion keeps screaming when her throat reforms. 

Then she cries.

Then she explodes again. 

Then she keeps screaming, and crying, until her body and mind can't handle it anymore, and she passes out into a deep sleep.



When she wakes she begins to slowly carve lines in the wall. 33 lines, for 33 people killed.

This cell is similar.

It takes Ion a week before she finishes replicating the 33 marks on her old prison cell. 

In the first cell, the last few marks had been made by Ion's glowing blood on the wall. 

After a few days that had faded, and left a discolored patch, where the wall had degraded some.

So, in this cell, Ion licks a thumb, and experiments. After a few days, she can see the degradation.

Then it is a slow process. Gathering enough spit to coat her thumb, drawing a mark, then checking that it made enough of a mark.

The rest of the time is practice. She needs to control her glow. It's the only way she will be able to... she can't be normal any more.. but maybe sometimes she'll feel normal.

----- Two weeks in

Ion's cell door opens.

The guards wear what could be accurately described as bomb suits. 

"Okay Isabella. You've been approved to have 30 minutes at the phone. Your calls will be monitored. "

Ion considers not calling anyone.

If she doesn't do anything, she won't have to fight. She won't have to hope. To see the disappointment in her parents eyes.

She thinks back to the monsters.

To the 33.

She needs to find a way to make this right.

Maybe the government can use her for something. Maybe the government has like. Some X-men type deal for supernatural people with hard to control powers.


Fuck.

I need to start somewhere.

She calls for help

Ion moves her hands holding them in front of the screen, so her teacher can see.

"Good. But a little too much rotation." The woman on the screen corrects Ion.

A flash of anger. Then depression.

Ion's light flickers bright, then dims. 

Her hand moves. She can feel the comprehending happening. She is learning quickly. Way too quickly.

Proof that whatever change made her a bomb was changing her in other ways. She was learning faster.  Healing a little faster soon. Back to 100% after a month. 

Fucking lucky that I am. I'd go even more insane if I couldn't talk to anyone 

It was two weeks, and still the only way Ion could speak was with her hands. It ... wasn't a bad way to speak. It was... fun to learn actually. 

But she missed her voice. 

She had given up so much already. Almost everything she was. She didn't want to lose that too.

Ion practices her ASL. 

It is.... harder. Her finger being gone give her... an accent. She needs to relearn. But. All she has in her is her thoughts.

Feeling her power. Feeling the energy and the molecules in her body. The combustion of energy. Her matter and energy.

Her hand twitches. 

She looks down. 

There is a nub where before there was no part of her finger. 

She blinks. 

How...? The Painting! The painting that Alex...

Ion glows brightly as her cheeks flush.

Oh! Oh... They... They are ... Fixing the painting. 

There is a warning beep from the automated system in the corner of the room.

Ion stops breathing. The light starts to dim. Slowly. Under her control.

Breathing is nice. Ion likes it. But it is by far the more pleasant way of suppressing the glow.... Being back in that day. Dimming her emotions. Wallowing in the depression that keeps herself, and her light dimmed. 

Ion waits in her room for the lights to go out. 

Well. Most of the lights. Even when she closed her eyes, she was never really in darkness anymore.

She can feel something different. Her body changing. A thickening of some parts of her. The bubbling changing. Moving along her body.

Before it was a pot she could keep a lid on. In one spot. Now...

She could feel the energy under her skin, moving through her body with each heart beat... except she didn't really need a heart beat did she? She didn't need to breath, or eat, all of her energy could be provided by this... thing inside her.

This thing she is.

She looks down at a hand. There is a crackle of energy. She can feel it in her feet also. She quickly gets off her bed, before with a whoosh small explosions send her flying across the room, barely catching herself before she hits the wall.

"Okay. Fuck. Well.... Hopefully I can learn to make that useful."

Ion sits. 

She has some books she can read. She can practice her signing in the mirror. Sometimes there will be guards close enough that she can talk to them. 

I need to get out of here.

Ion looks over at the tally on the wall. 

No. I need to stay here. I'm being foolish. What am I doing. I haven't even been here a year, and I'm already plotting. 

Ion slaps herself in the face.

"You're weak Isabella. Weak. You deserve this, so just.... Stay in your place."

Not everyone thinks you deserve this.

Ion frowns. 

They don't know me. If they did... 

The screams echo in her mind. She looks over at the tallies on the wall.

"You made a mistake. You didn't mean to."

A shadow of Alex's voice. 

She looks over at the other list of tallies. The people she saved. It was still too few. 

I want out.

Ion paces. 

She had finished her books for the month. Twice now. An unfortunate side effect of however her brain was changing was that things were faster for her mind now. 

She considered re reading them again, or reading the books from last month... but it was all crisp enough in her mind that she could go through what happened page by page without holding the book. 

She was lonely. She was agitated. 

This is my punishment. I deserve this.

Her eyes drift over to the 31 marks on the wall. 

Fuck I'm bored. 

Ion drops to the ground and starts doing push ups. 

It doesn't stop her brain. So she keeps pushing until it does, forcing her body to move and work until it chases the thoughts away. 

Pushups. Then squats. Then jumping jacks. 

Then repeat. 

Her muscles are sore, but they heal.

They aren't real muscles anyway. 

Ion can feel at the edge of her awareness, her mind determining constructing the material needed to rebuild her shell. She could probably label them if she wanted.

She smirked.

"35 liters of water, 20 kilograms of carbon, 4 liters of ammonia, 1.5 kilograms of lime, 800 grams of phosphorus, 250 grams of salt, 100 grams of niter (saltpeter), 80 grams of sulfur, 7.5 grams of fluorine, 5 grams of iron, 3 grams of silicon"

Her dad used to hate when she would watch anime. 

She started the cycle again, the energy inside her slowly being drained, making new atoms and stringing the compounds together into new muscles and flesh. 

"Is she out?"

Ion rolls her eyes.

"No. I told you. Gas won't take me out."

The Anesthetist sighs. 

"We'll have to go with local anesthetic then." 

Ion rolled her eyes and waited. It was an arduous process to check her physiology. Most imaging tools didn't work on her. But once they learned that she could regenerate...

The knife slides down her chest, cutting a narrow slit. The arm doing the cutting was covered in the equipment used for bomb squads. Every inch of flesh that parted let out a burst of energy pushing out from her. They had tried this before when she was asleep, and it still had the same effect, so the checkups stopped scheduling around her sleep schedule. 

"Fuck!" 

The surgeon flails back. His arm... both his arms are swelling up, growths beginning to cover them. 

A nurse hits the emergency button, as the room evacuates.

Ion looks down at the slit in her stomach slowly closing.

"Well.... That's new."