Page 54 of Captured Immune

Katie sat on the floor with me and rubbed a tender hand over my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t have it in me to explain. The only thing I had the strength for was to cry. Katie didn’t force me to speak. She simply circled her arms around me and hugged me tight. I let her because something about her made me feel at ease. Plus, I was willing to take any form of comfort.

We stayed like that until my sobbing subsided. I wasn’t sure how long it was.

Through hiccups, I asked, “What happens to you people when you die?”

She pressed her eyebrows together. “What do you mean?”

“Like what happens to your bodies?”

“Um, we just... die. Obviously, we lose our powers, and everything about our bodies become like Ordinaries. Well, except for Shifters. If they die in another form, whether it’s an animal, an object, or another person, they’ll stay that way.”

Shifters?Apparently, that wasn’t just a thing in books and movies. “Does anything special happen when a Zordi diesbeforethey’re born?”

At first, Katie’s face scrunched together, then her eyes went wide and she whispered, “Are you pregnant?”

“Was.” That single word almost made me burst into tears again.

Still hushed, she said, “Are you saying you were pregnant with... a Zordi?”

I nodded.

That mousey voice of hers disappeared as she continued whispering, “That can’t be. Our biological makeups are too different for fertilization to happen. The Ordinary egg isn’t strong enough to hold the nature of a Zordi sperm.”

I stared at the bathroom floor. “Maybe whatever makes me immune to your powers also makes me immune to all that.”

Katie thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Nope. It’s impossible. Your immunity has nothing to do with your reproductive organs. For you to have conceived a child with a Zordi, you’d have to be a Zordi with Zordi eggs in your ovaries. It’s impossible for you to be one of us because you don’t have any gifts. And if immunity was your gift, it would have been turned off by the perrizophine. Last night, your body was affected by only the sedative part of the perrizo, and you took to it faster than the average Zordi, which further confirms that you’re an Ordi. Also, our zense doesn’t activate around you.”

“Zense? What’s that?”

“It’s a little tingle we get in our chests whenever we’re within an arm’s length of each other.”

“Interesting.” By the look on Katie’s face, I could tell she was about to ask, so I beat her to it. “No, my chest doesn’t tingle around you guys.”

“Immuneanda Mind Reader. You really are something special.” She leaned in to me again, lowering her voice. “How are you so sure you were pregnant with a Zordi baby?”

“I’ve only slept with one man recently. And for the last few days, up until last night, I was sensing everyone’s emotions.”

Katie gasped, then lowered her voice so much, I could barely hear her. “Your baby was an Empath. You must have been at least seven or eight weeks along. That’s when our mind powers begin developing in the womb.”

That timing was right. “Mind powers?”

“All Zordis are born with three gifts. Our mind power is the most powerful because it begins developing the earliest. Our body and elemental powers are determined before birth, but those don’t develop until we’re about a year old. Then, it’s not until puberty when our powers become fully developed.”

It was nice to know that my baby couldn’t have thrown fireballs or made tornados inside my uterus.

Katie went back to whispering. “Does he know?”

I match her tone. “Does who know what?”

“The father. Trey.” She points at my stomach with her eyes. “Does he know?”

“Yeah, I told him.”

“He didn’t think the baby was his, did he?”

I shook my head as a single tear rolled down my cheek. “No, he didn’t.”

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