Selah woke up on the morning of her surgery with a knot in her stomach. She laid on her back in bed and stared up at the ceiling of the lab, trying to quell the waves of anxiety that were rising up in her.

It's not like the facility, she tried to remind herself. You're safe here. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and took a deep breath before sitting up.

"Good, you're awake," Nurse Collins said, walking in. "Agent Danvers asked me to remind you that your operation is set to begin in an hour."

"Okay," Selah murmured.

"You can't have anything to eat or drink beforehand, but do you need anything?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Alright." Collins left, and Selah got dressed, worrying the inside of her lip. She knew that Kara would be arriving soon, so she went into the atrium to wait for the hero.

"Selah Undisclosed Surname," Brainy's voice came from behind a computer, and his head popped out a moment later, smiling at her. "Good morning,"

"Hi," she replied. "And my last name is Lerrol. How's your morning going?"

"Average," he replied, raising one eyebrow. "I have been running facial recognition on the woman whom you refer to as 'Nova' but I have not found any matches as of yet. Even with my best restoration work, our photo of her is quite low quality, and that seems to be making the search more difficult."

"Could I send you a mental image of what she looked like?" Selah suggested, an idea coming to her. "Would you be able to run it through the system if it's just in your mind?"

"Certainly," he replied. "I am a techno-organic life form, so technically, I am a part of our computer systems." The girl closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, conjuring up images of Nova, as well as the faces of all the doctors, security guards, and other staff members that she could remember. She felt the images solidify in her head, and then she reached out with her mind, finding Brainy's consciousness- a whitish blue orb hovering over the Coluan's head. She shut her eyes and gritted her teeth, sending the images over one by one with some effort.

"I have received your transmissions," he said once the last one was sent. Selah opened her eyes to see all of the pictures beamed up onto the screens on the wall.

"Good," she said, cracking the knuckles on one of her hands.

"I sense that was difficult for you."

"I don't send things out very often. I guess that I'm just a bit out of practice.

"Well, it seems to have been successful." He gestured to the screens behind them. "These are all the agents from the lab?"

"Yeah," Selah replied, looking up at them. There were fifteen to twenty of them staring down at her, and she swallowed back the memories that rose up in her. "Those two on the top, the blond man and the woman with dark hair, they were two of the Directors, Director Alpha and Beta. There was a third one too, but I never met him. And then the next eight were all doctors, and the rest were security guards or nurses or general staff members."

"I will run these images through the system," Brainy declared. "You are not entirely unhelpful, Selah Lerrol."

"Um. Thanks?" the girl replied. She turned to see Alex leaning against the far wall, watching the interaction with a small smile.

"I'm glad to see that you're opening up a little bit more," she said.

"I thought that I might be able to help," she explained, feeling awkward all of a sudden. The knot returned to her stomach as Kara soared in through the balcony and landed a few feet away. "I want them to face justice."

"They will," the agent replied firmly. She looked over to her sister and then back at Selah. "Are you ready?"

"I guess." Kara threw her arm around the girl's shoulders as they followed Alex into the med bay, and down the hallway to a surgical suite.

"Welcome," Alex said, ushering the girl into the sterile looking room. She picked up a hospital gown off of the counter and handed it to Selah. "You can change into this in the bathroom across the hall. You're not wearing any jewelry, right?"

"Where would I have gotten jewelry from?" she asked, giving her an unimpressed look, and she threw her hands up. "I don't know, I just always have to ask."

Selah left the room and entered the bathroom that Alex directed her to, letting out a long breath as the door swung shut behind her. She turned to the mirror and looked at her face, scared and pale.

"You're okay," she muttered to herself, unzipping her sweatshirt and beginning to get changed. "This is going to be okay." Once she had pulled on the hospital gown, she took another look at herself in the mirror and swallowed hard. She had pretty much exclusively worn hospital gowns at the lab, and it wasn't a comfortable sight to see herself in the blue and white fabric again.

She pulled the door open and left the bathroom, returning to the surgical suite to find Kara alone.

"Alex went to get changed into her scrubs and to brief her team on the procedure," she explained. "She told me to tell you that you can just hang out here until she gets back, and then they'll switch on the red sun lamps once everything is set."

"Okay," she replied, chewing on one of her fingernails.

"Are you doing alright?" Kara asked.

"I'm fine."

"Love, you're shaking." She didn't reply, turning her head away from the hero and swallowing back tears. Kara pulled her into a tight hug, focusing on calming thoughts as she felt the girl trembling in her arms. Eventually, Selah pulled away, rubbing at her eyes as she went to sit on the surgical table.

"Sorry," she murmured.

"You don't have anything to apologize for," she replied, going to sit next to the girl and wrapping an arm around her. "It's perfectly understandable for you to be scared right now."

"I know." For a while, the only sound was the distant noise of conversations in the atrium, and a quiet buzz from the machines. "Did you know that my fingers can regenerate themselves?" she said suddenly.

"What?" Kara asked, turning to look at her again.

"Yeah. Super weird alien power, right? If you cut off my finger, it will grow back." The girl chewed on her lip for a moment, not looking at the hero. "Not my hand or my arm, though."

"Did they cut off your fingers?"

"Whenever I didn't listen, or I resisted." Selah's voice was even and low. "The first time they did it, they cut off my pinky because I attacked a guard. I don't think that they knew they it was going to grow back, they seemed as surprised as I was. Then they cut off the rest of my fingers to see if they would grow back too. And they did. It took a few weeks, but they did. They tried cutting my hands off next, to see if those could regenerate, but they didn't. The stumps just healed off, so eventually they reattached them." She cleared her throat. "They used to joke that if I didn't obey, they would cut off my hands and reattach them backwards, or they'd swap my hands with my feet."

"That's barbaric," Kara said, her voice incredulous as frustration and anger welled up in her.

"That was pretty tame compared to some of the other stuff that they did, Kara." She cleared her throat again. "I'd take losing a finger over brain surgery any day."

"I'm so sorry, love." Alex re-entered the room wearing blue scrubs and a lab coat, and Selah straightened up, not looking at either of them.

"How are we doing in here?" she asked.

"Fine," the girl replied, playing with the hem of her hospital gown.

"I'm going to turn on the sun lamps now. You'll need to be under them for probably an hour before we can operate." Selah nodded, and read the plan from the woman's thoughts: Put her under the red lamps, knock her out, saw through her skull, remove the port, replace her skull, sew it all up, and put her under yellow sun lamps until she woke up again. It seemed simple enough, and Alex appeared to have the skill set required to pull it off, but the girl still felt incredibly anxious.

"Okay," she said. "I'm ready." The agent nodded and began to set up the lamps as Kara stood up and pulled up a stool to sit next to the girl. Selah laid on her back on the table as Alex positioned the lamps over top of her- carefully oriented so that Kara could sit next to her without also being hit by the light- and she switched them on, bathing her in a red glow. The hero took her hand and squeezed it, trying her best to reassure her.

"Okay, well. You're all set now," Alex said. "Kara and I will stay here with you until we're ready to start."

"Okay," Selah replied hoarsely. The three were silent for a little while, before Kara spoke.

"Do you want to play twenty questions?" she asked. The girl barked out a short laugh.

"I'm about to have brain surgery and you want to play twenty questions?" she asked.

"Technically it's not a brain surgery, it's a breaching of the skull. The brain shouldn't be involved at all," Alex interjected, not looking up from her laptop.

"Why not?" Kara asked. "We have an hour to kill. Besides, twenty questions is my go-to game for long car rides. Alex and I used to play it for hours as kids when we would go visit her grandparents in Washington."

"Kara, I can read minds, remember?"

"Right," the hero conceded. "Well then you can come up with the subjects and I can guess."

"Fine," Selah said, biting back a smile. "I've got my subject."

"Is it a person?"

"No."

"Is it a place?"

"No.

They played nine rounds over the next fifty minutes. Kara didn't get any of them in time, often wasting several guesses too early on, (Is it sticky buns? Is it Alex's shoes? Is it a saxophone?)

"Is it 'NSync's self-titled album 'NSync?" she guessed half heartedly, using up her last guess of the tenth round.

"I told you already, it's not directly related to 'NSync as a band," Selah said.

"Well, it's not a person, place, animal, or idea, it's not food related, it's from the early 2000's, it's related to Justin Timberlake but not the rest of the band, and it's something that physically exists. What else could it be?"

"Literally thousands of things. You're so bad at this game."

"How dare you," Kara sputtered, feigning offense. "What was it?"

"Britney Spears' jean dress from the 2001 American Music Awards," the girl replied with a smirk.

"How am I supposed to have guessed that?"

"I sent a telepathic message to Brainy asking for a short list of things that are important to you, and he responded with: Hope and justice, Ice cream, Chinese takeout, Family, and Iconic fashion choices from the early 2000's." She shrugged. "That one seemed like the easiest topic."

"That's cheating!" Kara protested.

"Yeah, well I'm about to have a skull breaching surgery, so you can't be mad at me."

"Do you still have your powers?" Alex asked.

"I still have my telepathy, but it's getting patchy. That's usually the last one to go." She blinked her eyes a few times. "My heat vision is gone. I don't think that I have any of the others anymore."

"I'd guess that we need another five to ten minutes before we can operate, then," she said.

"How are you feeling?" Kara asked. Selah shrugged, looking down at her hands.

"I'm not sure," she replied. "A little bit scared."

"I bet we could still fit in one more round of twenty questions."

"Not to be dramatic but I think I'd rather die in the middle of a skull breaching surgery."

"That's not going to happen on my watch," Alex stated.

"Fine," the hero said with a pout. "I spy? Two truths and a lie?"

"Can't we just sit in a relaxing silence?"

"I know that a relaxing silence will allow you to start getting anxious about all of the skull breaching that's about to happen. I'm trying to keep your mind off of it."

"I know," the girl replied. "I'm just feeling a little overwhelmed right now."

"Okay." Kara pulled her stool in as close to the bed as she could without touching the light, and she took the girl's hand in her own and squeezed it, more gently this time. Selah took a few deep breaths as the hero began to lightly trace patterns on the back of her hand, humming quietly. She was still quite nervous, but she wasn't as scared as she had thought that she was going to be. She'd never admit it to Kara, but the games and jokes and little distractions had helped a lot.

She laid there on her back, staring up into the red light and felt her telepathy slip away and her body becoming more and more vulnerable until all of her powers were gone. The only sounds were Alex's erratic typing on her laptop and Kara's soft humming.

You're going to be okay, she reminded herself.

"Okay," Alex said finally, shutting her laptop. "Are your powers fully gone now?" Selah nodded. "Good. I'm going to try to set up an IV then, alright?" She moved to the operating table and shut off the sun lamps, moving them out of the way. Then she pulled on a pair of gloves and picked up a needle, looking at the girl for a second.

"I'm okay," she insisted, her throat dry. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the sharp pain as Alex inserted the needle in her arm and prepped the IV tubing. Instead she focused on Kara still holding her other hand.

"Well," the agent said, straightening up. "We're all set to go now. I'm going to get my team in here in a second, but I thought that you might prefer to go unconscious with just us in here."

"Yes please."

"Okay. I'm going to start the anesthesia now."

"Okay." Alex opened a drip for the bag attached to the IV and started the pump, and Selah felt something cold beginning to run into her arm. She stiffened up, and panic rose up in her.

"Hey," the hero said, cupping the girl's cheek in her hand. "Look at me, love. You're okay." The girl's scared eyes met Kara's and she began gently running her hand over her short hair. "Right at me. You're okay."

Selah's eyes fluttered shut, and the last thing that she saw before losing consciousness was the glyph on Kara's chest.

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