Page 76 of Captured Immune

“Tell us,” Carlos says, grinning.

Ruby shakes her head with a chuckle. “Hell no.”

“Helga?” Pixie asks.

“Ew!”

“Olga?”

“No.”

“Gertrude,” I say because that name just sounds funny.

“Definitely not.”

“Bertha?”

“Okay, stop.” Ruby rolls her eyes. “It’s Agatha, after my great-grandmother.”

Pixie spits out a laugh. “Agatha? No fucking way.”

A baseball-size fireball appears in Ruby’s palm, and she holds it close to Pixie’s face. “If you ever call me that, I’ll burn you alive.”

Pixie throws her arms up in surrender, still laughing. “Noted.”

“What’s your real name?” Carlos asks Dash.

“Henry,” Dash says simply. “But everyone’s called me Dash since I was toddler.”

“And you, Katie?”

“My name is actually Katie,” she says. “Not short for Katherine either. It’s just Katie.”

“I take back what I said about you, girl,” Pixie says, keeping a steady pace at my side. “I called you weak earlier, but apparently, you’re not. That timid voice and submissive personality fooled me good.”

Katie lets out an adorable chuckle. “Where’s my Oscar?”

“That’s one hell of a mind power too,” I say, ignoring the burning ache in my arms. I don’t know how much longer I can carry Arella like this. “Now I know why you were so confident you could overpower me when I tried to leave.”

“I only said that to scare you. I can’t blowpeopleup—just things.”

“I see. I guess if you could blow people up, you probably wouldn’t exist.”

Even before Zordinaries went into hiding, the zovernment controlled what powers remained in our genetic existence. Whenever a gift is classified as too dangerous or deadly, the zovernment puts it on the Extinction List. Then anyone with that power is sterilized to prevent others from being born with that gift.

There used to be people who could control minds, swap minds, and some even had a death touch. Now that those people haven’t reproduced for almost thirty generations, those powers don’t exist anymore.

“Deadly people slip through the cracks all the time,” Ruby says. “Especially if they’re a child of a Superior. My sister is living proof of that.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

Ruby twists around and walks backward as she raises a brow at me. “Think about it. Once our powers come in around the age of one, our parents are required to register our gifts with the zovernment, right?”

“Right?” I say like a question because I don’t know where she’s going with this.

“My sister’s body power is one that skipped a few generations in our line, so there isn’t a record of this gift being in our genetics. She can make your blood literally boil until it kills you from the inside out. Do you really think my parents were going to register her as a blood-boiling killer? That’s instant extermination, my dude.”

“What? I thought the zovernment just sterilizes those babies.”

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