Kara jerked awake, gasping for air as she scrambled to her feet. Her heart was racing as she tried her best to remind herself that it was just a dream, that she was safe, but the cold metal walls weren't a very welcoming sight. She hadn't realized that she had fallen asleep- she had been trying her best to stay awake until Selah returned. But after so many sleepless nights, even she needed rest. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the cell, she desperately tried to make out the shape of the girl somewhere, sleeping on the floor underneath Kara's cape perhaps, but she already knew that Selah was still gone.

This had been one of the longest stretches yet, Kara would estimate that it had been well over a full day. Sometimes they would take the girl for only a few hours, but she was usually gone for at least five or six. There had only been one other time when she had been gone for this long. When she had finally returned, she didn't say anything about what had happened, but she cried in Kara's arms for a very long time. They hadn't allowed her to heal completely, and Kara could see a long thin cut that had barely begun to close up, starting at the base of the girl's neck and disappearing down the collar of her shirt.

Selah never said much about exactly what happened in the lab, and she got very fidgety and anxious whenever Kara asked. She had kept pushing once, asking again what had happened, but the girl became completely mute, and she didn't speak for hours afterwards. Sometimes she would disclose small things, like if they had done surgery or not, and where they had operated, but aside from those small pieces of information, Kara had no idea what was really going on in the lab. She had tried bargaining with the security guards, hoping to get some information, or to get them to take her instead of Selah, but the guard had only smirked, his face smug.

"Your abilities don't fit Director Beta's needs," he had said. Kara had considered zapping him with her heat vision right then and there, but she ultimately decided that it wouldn't be productive, and opted for a regular glare instead.

She had never felt so powerless before. Even though she had her powers, they were no good to her here. She couldn't do anything to stop what was happening to Selah. Praying to Rao wasn't helping much, if she ever so much as sneezed too hard around the guards, they all whipped out their power draining devices, and she had no way to contact her sister or J'onn or anyone else who could provide backup. Kara would often allow herself to cry when Selah was not in the cell, but right now she felt too frustrated for tears, too angry.

Even though she knew that it was useless, she punched the wall as hard as she could. Pain momentarily sprung up in her hand, but it disappeared just as quickly, and the wall was as unmoved as ever. She hit it twice more and kicked it for good measure, before leaning against it with her back flat against the metal, sliding tiredly down onto the floor.

"J'onn," she whispered. "I know that you probably can't hear me. But if by some chance you're getting this, please come soon."

.

Kara abruptly awoke, choking on the air for the second time that night. As her brain adjusted to no longer being asleep, she stood up, closed her eyes tightly, and took a few long, deep breaths.

"Are you okay?" She whirled around to see Selah sitting against the wall, sporting a bruised face and bloody lip.

"When did you get back?" she demanded, avoiding the question as she ran a hand through her tangled hair, beginning to pace back and forth at the front of the cell.

"About an hour ago."

"You should have woken me up."

"I'm sorry. I know that you haven't been sleeping very well, and I didn't want to disrupt you." For a few moments, the only sound was Kara's footsteps, gradually getting faster and more agitated. "Kara?" She didn't reply, but glanced over at the girl. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay. You were just mumbling a lot in your sleep, and you seem upset-"

"I said that I didn't want to talk about it, Selah." Kara interrupted.

"Okay. I'm sorry." They were quiet again for a while, until the hero sighed, walking back over to the wall and sitting down next to the girl.

"What did they do to you?" she asked, placing a hand under Selah's chin and looking at her bruised face.

"No surgery this time. They were testing out some new weapons," she answered, looking down at her cuffed hands. "My powers haven't come back yet from it."

"This isn't okay," Kara said, exhaling angrily. "None of this is okay! We have to get out of here." The silence returned, as they both felt their inescapable reality looming over them.

"I'm sorry that you're stuck here with me," Selah said eventually, still not looking up. "They should have only taken me. You don't belong in here."

"We're going to get out," she insisted, practically on instinct.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"There was a word in Kryptonian that you kept muttering in your sleep. It sounded like 'dare-ow-ged'. What does it mean?"

"Dhehraoghehd," Kara corrected, her forehead creasing. "Couldn't you read it off of me?"

"My powers are gone, remember?"

"Right." She turned to look at Selah, her eyes stormy. "It means death."

"Oh."

"We're going to get out of here," she repeated fiercely. All the girl could do was nod in agreement.

.

"Ehwor, ehworazh, ehworu?" Selah said tentatively.

"Yes!" Kara exclaimed. "How are you getting so good at this?"

"You talk in your sleep a lot." The hero gently shoved her shoulder, and she grinned.

"Okay, smarty pants, how would you say that in Kryptonian?"

"Um. Well, the sentence structure is verb subject object, so... Ehwor fis i zhind rraop rriv."

"Nicely done."

"How do you say 'paternal first cousin once removed' in Kryptonian?" Selah asked, smirking.

"Fyrehb," Kara replied. "It's for any older relative on your father's side."

"What an obscure word."

"We actually used it all the time, it was a really common phrase on Krypton."

"Really?" Selah asked, surprised.

"No, you're right. It is pretty obscure." She paused for a moment, thinking as she smiled at the girl.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just thinking."

"About what?"

"I always thought that I was going to teach Kal-El how to speak Kryptonian one day. I guess that I never realized how much I wanted to teach it to someone else until now."

"I thought that you taught Alex."

"She only knows a few words and phrases. She's not very good with languages, and she also got really frustrated with the pronunciations. Winn knows some too, but he learned it on his own."

"Did Kal-El learn in the fortress?" Kara nodded.

"You know, you're about the age that he would have been if my pod hadn't gotten stuck." She frowned, thinking. " Or... You're the age he would have been when I was my age? No, like if I arrived on Earth when I was supposed to, and he arrived with me at the same time, and he was still a baby, and I was still twelve years older than him-"

"I know what you're getting at," Selah said, laughing. "You and I have roughly the same distance in age that you and my father had on Krypton."

"That's so weird," Kara muttered. "But yeah. You're a little bit older than he would have been, I think. He would be almost eighteen, and you're nineteen."

"Twenty," Selah corrected quietly. "Today's my birthday. November 22nd. There was a calendar hanging up in Beta's office."

"Oh."

"It's not a huge deal, you know," the girl stammered, her hands twisting themselves together. "My mother never really celebrated my birthday. My aunt would get me cake sometimes, but only if she wasn't too busy at work, and we never had any money to spare for gifts or anything, so I'm pretty used to having low-key birthdays."

"This goes a little beyond low-key."

"Yeah." Selah's face was hard to read as she stared at the bars of the cell. "I remember sitting in my other cell, and wondering if I'd ever actually make it out of my teens."

"We'll just have to throw an even bigger party once you turn twenty-one, once we're out of here. That way we can make up for this year," Kara said. "Plus, twenty-one, you know what that means," she elbowed the girl, who rolled her eyes.

"Would normal alcohol even do anything to me?" she asked.

"Nope. We'll have to go to the alien bar downtown." Selah laughed quietly. "We are going to get out of here," she reminded. The girl didn't reply, instead, looking at the hero for a long time.

"Who's Astra?" she asked abruptly, looking away as she spoke.

"What?" Kara asked.

"Sorry. You just dream a lot about her. She was in your nightmare last night, wasn't she?" The hero nodded slowly.

"She was my aunt. She died. It happened soon after I became Supergirl." Selah winced as the wave of emotion washed over her.

"Sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean to pry. I was just curious."

"It's okay. She named me, you know. After the ancient Kryptonian goddess of beauty."

"How fitting."

"She was a good person. She had her flaws, but I know that she loved me."

"My aunt named me too." Selah replied. "My mother didn't want much to do with me when I was first born, but she kept insisting that I should be named after her mother."

"What was her mother's name?" The girl glanced over at Kara, smiling wryly.

"Sarralanindara," she said.

"Oof."

"Yeah. My aunt chose the Andromedan word 'selah' instead. She said that Sarralanindara sounded too alien."

"Valid. What does Selah mean?"

"It doesn't translate perfectly. It's a verb, and it means to pause and reflect. My aunt always translated it as 'to take a breath'."

"That's beautiful," Kara said. "Did you know that El means 'sun' or 'sunlight' in Kryptonian?"

"House of Sunlight?"

"Yup. And Kal means child."

"My full Kryptonian name would be Selah Kal-El if I had one, right? My last name would be my father's first name?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, so your full Kryptonian name means 'beautiful sunlight' and mine would mean 'take a breath, sun-child?" Selah demanded, crossing her arms.

"It's a good name."

"They should have named me Sarralanindara," Selah muttered.

"Hey," Kara said, elbowing the girl. "Chin up, sun-child."

"You're the worst."

.

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

"What happened?" she couldn't stop herself from asking, as the door finally swung open. The girl looked injured and battered, and her feet were clearly shaky. She was stumbling unsteadily behind the guard; he was practically dragging her along by her arm 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 as he opened the cell door.

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

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

"I can't see."

"What do you mean?"

"They injected something into my eyes. I don't know what it was, but 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 her for any major injuries. Her ribs weren't broken, but from the way that she winced each time she breathed in, she would guess that they were badly bruised. She also had a long gash that cut across her forehead, and her hair was sticky with blood.

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

"I think that I killed him." Kara sat up, leaning back so that she could see Selah's face, but her 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," she 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 that he was thinking. They did it to test how strong my powers are, I think. They put the stuff in my eyes to make sure that I couldn't see anything, and then they would show him a card with numbers on it, and I had to find what he was seeing from in his thoughts so that I could 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 license plate numbers from his first car, or the name of his third grade teacher." She rubbed at her eyes, which were still shut. "He was so scared of me, Kara. He could feel me inside of his mind, and he was absolutely 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 did a surgery where they put a chip right here," she touched the base of her neck with a shaky hand. "I thought that maybe it was a tracking device or something, but-" she paused again. "When I went into his mind, Beta was in there with me."

"What?"

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

"Does she have all of your psychic powers? 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 that it was too much for him, because he started blacking out a little bit. His mind got really loud and scary. I'd never put myself into anyone's mind like this before today, but my aunt always said that if you do it, it's really important to be gentle and to not to go in too deep, because you can cause a lot of damage, and it'll hurt the host."

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

"She could feel how scared he was, and all of the blackouts were getting longer, and it was so loud. But she kept digging, like she was in there, looking for something. I tried to tell her to stop, and I tried to say that she was hurting him, but she wouldn't listen to me, and I couldn't leave, she was holding me in there with her. Eventually," she swallowed, her voice breaking. "Everything went black, 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, I don't even think that he was breathing anymore, and-" she stopped abruptly, shutting her eyes again.

"That was not your fault, Selah. You didn't do any of those things to him, Beta did."

"I was a part of it. And she wouldn't have been able to do it without me, she wouldn't have been able to hurt him like that. And what happens if she gets stronger? What if she gets to a point where she doesn't need me as a bridge anymore? What happens if she can put herself into the mind of anyone that she wants to, 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 her shoulders were still full of tension. "There's something else that's wrong, isn't there?"

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

"Maybe she somehow made your telepathy stronger, and she managed to weaponize it."

"No. There wasn't anything else in there besides me and her, I could tell. The things that she made me do, that's what-" stopping herself, Selah rubbed a hand over her face. "Those are things that 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. But she changed too, once the powers started coming in. My aunt always said that the powers changed her. 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 here 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 that he takes me out of the cell. I'm like, ninety percent sure that there's a psychic shield that blocks the doorway, and the button is what disables it. Beta said that she has them all over the building, and if I go through one of them, it will detect my powers and paralyze me."

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

"There's more shields than 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 then they'll torture us."

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

"Yeah, well 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 have to 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 all of them off, or I have to have my powers blown out."

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

"Whenever they walk me over to the lab, the guard disables a shield that's a few feet away from the door. But when they take me out again, 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."

"Yeah, but then we'd still need to find a way out of this potentially underground maze that's completely lined with lead and has guards constantly patrolling it."

"The guard might know the layout, you could maybe somehow read it off of him."

"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 hallway's door swung open, and a guard wordlessly pushed two bowls of broth through the flap on the cell 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 that I didn't mean it like that."

"I know." She set the bowl down on the floor. "I'm pretty sure that Beta can send me her 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, and she won't need me to be 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 that they'll just send us back home and thank us for all the help?"

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

"A week? Two, maybe?"

"So we have a week to escape."

"Maybe two."

.

.

.