Kara could tell that Selah was coming long before she actually entered the hallway. The lead walls blocked her vision, but she could hear the girl's heart rate, erratic and frantic as it grew closer to the cell. She jumped to her feet and went to the corner of the cell that was closest to the doorway, her hands clutching the bars, praying that the girl was alright. Slowly, the footsteps and heartbeats grew louder and louder, and Kara shut her eyes, willing them to arrive.

"What happened?" she couldn't stop herself from asking once the door finally swung open. The girl looked injured and battered, and her feet were clearly shaky. She was stumbling unsteadily behind the guard, practically being dragged along by him as they approached the cell.

"Back away from the door," he snapped in a low voice, ignoring her question.

"What happened?" she asked again, obediently taking a few steps back. The closest thing to a reply that she received was a cold glare from him as he opened the cell door.

"Kara?" Selah asked as she was roughly pushed into the cell, and she fell to the floor, biting back a cry of pain. Her hands scrabbled across the ground, desperately searching for the hero.

"Hey," Kara said as she moved to the girl, barely noticing as the door was slammed shut once more, and the guard left. Selah reached out, her hands trembling. "I'm here, it's okay." She crawled into Kara's arms, and the hero held her as she wept. "What happened, Selah? Are you okay?" she demanded.

"I can't see."

"What do you mean?"

"They put something in my eyes. An injection. I can't see." Kara tipped the girl's chin up and saw that her eyes were clouded over with a white film.

"It's okay," she murmured. "You're going to be okay, I promise."

The cell was as dim as ever, but Kara did her best to scan Selah for injuries. Her ribs weren't broken, but from the way the girl winced each time she breathed in, she would guess that they were badly bruised. She also had a gash across her forehead that was scabbed over, and her hair was matted with blood.

"It's going to be alright," the hero whispered again. "Just breathe." She held the girl, listening to her heart until it finally began to beat at a pace that was more regular and slow.

"I think I killed him." Kara sat up a little bit, and leaned back so that she could see Selah's face, but the girl's blank eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

"Who?" she asked.

"I don't know who he was, or where he came from, I'd never seen him before. They made me go into his head," Selah said, pulling away from Kara and sitting up. Her voice was gravelly and low. "He didn't have a blocker on, so I could hear everything he was thinking. It was a test of my powers, I think. They put the stuff in my eyes to make sure I couldn't see, and then they would show him a card with numbers on it, and I had to read from his thoughts what he was seeing to tell them what the card said. Then they made me really go into his mind, and I had to find stuff like his daughter's birthday, or the name of his third grade teacher." She rubbed at her eyes, which were still shut. "He was so scared of me. He could feel me in his mind, and he was terrified." Her voice trailed off, and she didn't say anything for a few moments.

"What happened?" Kara gently asked for a third time.

"Last week, they put a chip right here," she touched the base of her neck with a shaky hand. "I thought it was maybe a tracker or something, but-" she paused again. "When I went into his mind, Beta was in there with me."

"What?"

"The chip psychically connects me to her somehow. If I go into someone's mind, I take her along."

"Can she read thoughts like you can too?"

"I don't think so. Not yet, at least," she cleared her throat. "Once she came into this guy's head, I think it was too much for him, because he started blacking out a little bit. I'd never really entered peoples' minds like this before, but my aunt always said how it's really important to be gentle and not to go too deep, because you can hurt the host."

"She went too deep?" Kara asked. Selah nodded slowly.

"She could feel how scared he was, and that the blackouts were getting longer. But she kept digging, like she was looking for something. I tried to tell her to stop, and that she was hurting him, but she wouldn't, and I couldn't leave, she was holding me there. Eventually," she swallowed, her voice breaking. "Everything went blank, and I sort of fell out of him. I woke up back in the room, and he was slumped over, and he didn't have any thoughts-" she stopped abruptly, shutting her eyes again.

"It wasn't your fault. You didn't do it to him, Beta did that."

"I was a part of it. She wouldn't have been able to do it without me, she wouldn't have been able to hurt him like that. And what about when she doesn't need me as a bridge anymore? What about when she can go into anyone that she wants, and she can kill them?"

"We'll stop her."

"How?" Selah turned to face the hero, her empty eyes filled with tears. "How are we ever going to stop any of this?"

"I don't know," Kara admitted. "But we'll figure it out." She put an arm around the girl, but Selah's shoulders were still full of tension. "There's something else, isn't there?"

"Beta shouldn't have been able to do what she did," she said slowly. "Using my powers, she shouldn't have been able to hurt him the way that she did."

"Maybe they've figured out how to weaponize your telepathy."

"No. There wasn't anything else besides me, I could tell. The things she did, that's what-" stopping herself, Selah rubbed a hand over her face. "That's what Empath Andromedans can do."

"Like your mother?"

"Like my mother," the girl nodded slowly. "You know, her powers began to manifest a week after her twentieth birthday."

"You are not her, Selah."

"Maybe not yet. She changed too, once the powers started coming in. She wasn't always the way that she is now." She turned to look at Kara with her wide, unseeing eyes. "What if I become like her?"

"Then we will figure it out," Kara replied, tucking a stray curl behind Selah's ear. "And I will be here for you, no matter what happens."

.

"Escape plan number 47," Kara said, pacing around the cell. "The next time a guard comes to get you, you can distract him and then I'll zap him with my heat vision and knock him unconscious. Then we can leave the cell-"

"I won't be able to get out of the door," Selah interrupted, trying her best to scratch her back with her cuffed hands. "The guard presses a button on his belt every time before he takes me out of the cell. I'm ninety percent sure that there's a psychic shield that blocks the doorway, and the button disables it. Beta said how they're all over the building, and if I go through them, they detect my powers and paralyze me."

"Okay," Kara restarted. "So I can go through the door after I knock him out, press the button on his belt, and then you can follow."

"There's more shields that just that one though. I know where a few of them are, but I'm positive that there's more that I don't know about. And he has a blocker so I can't read anything off of him to figure out where the rest of them are."

"Okay." The hero furrowed her brow, and began to pace a bit faster. "We get the cuffs off, and when he comes you can psychically disable his blocker, I'll ask him where they are, and he won't be able to avoid thinking about it. Like if I tell you not to think about pink elephants, you think about?"

"Pink elephants," Selah said flatly. "Except instead of pink elephants, we both get shot with power dampeners and tortured."

"I do have super speed, I could move faster than him."

"So how are we going to get the cuffs off?" The hero sighed and sat down on the floor next to Selah.

"Right."

"Can you get this spot for me?" the girl asked, gesturing vaguely to her back. Rolling her eyes, Kara scratched the girl's back, before flopping down to lie on the floor.

"So," she began. "To recap, in order to get out of the cell, we either need a key or we wait for the guard to open it."

"Getting out isn't the issue so much as avoiding the psychic detectors. We either need to know where every single one is, and how to shut them off, or I have to have my powers blown out."

"Would that work?" Kara asked, sitting up. Selah shrugged.

"Whenever they walk me to the lab and I have my powers, the guard disables a shield a few feet away from the door. But when they take me out and I don't have my powers, he doesn't disable it and nothing happens."

"So if your powers are gone, we can get past the shields."

"And then we'd just need to find a way out of this potentially underground maze that's completely lined with lead and has constant patrol."

"The guard might know the layout."

"I think you're also forgetting that I'm still completely blind, and if I don't have my powers then I can't see anything from your thoughts." Kara groaned and laid back down, pressing her cheek against the cold metal floor. The door swung open, and a guard wordlessly pushed two bowls of broth through the gap in the door, before exiting again.

"Dinner," the hero said dully, sitting up and handing the bowl that was slightly more full to Selah, looking glumly down at her own. "Do you know what I'd do for a potsticker right now?" She asked. "I'd kill a man."

"Too soon," the girl replied, taking a long sip of the soup.

"You know I didn't mean it like that."

"I know." She set the bowl down on the floor. "Beta can send me thoughts now. This morning I heard her voice, asking me how I slept."

"That's new and horrifying. What did you tell her?"

"I didn't say anything back, I was traumatized." Selah made a face as she drank more of the weak broth. "She's getting stronger."

"What does that mean?"

"She's going to be able to use the powers on her own soon, she won't need me as a bridge. I won't have any use to her anymore."

"And we both know that they're only keeping me here as leverage, to keep you compliant" Kara added." You'll do what they say because otherwise they'll kill me. So if they don't need you, they don't need me either."

"It's probably too much to hope they'll just send us home and thank us for all the help?"

"Probably. How long do you think it will be until she's ready to do it by herself?" Selah shrugged.

"A week? Two maybe?"

"So we have a week to escape."

"Maybe two."

.

.

.