I awoke about a week after our escape attempt to muted heavy breathing from Campbell’s cell to the left of my own. He was running through his usual morning regimen of exercises, stretching his muscles more than growing them, testing the limits of his powers within the limits of his power-proof cell.

We were all re-evaluating ourselves by that point. An enclosed space with limited outside interaction and walls that our powers can’t destroy will do that. Rachel could telepathically connect us into one big mental conversation (excluding Bruce’s jumbled gray matter) periodically, but physically we were still cut off.

They’d changed our DNA, altering our physiology and injecting new, manufactured sequences of their own. Before, when they’d shackled us all with different forms of a metal/plastic blend inhibitor, I hadn’t understood how they worked. It was only through possessing an orderly and flipping through his thoughts like a picture book that I noticed the inhibitors were made of a material that pharmaceutical companies were experimenting with that slowly seeped small doses of a drug into our bodies. The drug subdued the parts of our brains that allowed us to activate our powers, but they couldn’t remove our powers. And the orderly couldn’t pronounce the name of the drug, so that was all I was able to find out.

Now, in cells we couldn’t escape, if we got too rowdy they would gas the offender’s chamber and return us to normal.

So, with no hope of escape that we could think of (short of Campbell’s attempts to bulk up until he’d filled his cell with muscle and damn near suffocated himself, and Rachel and I brainwashing the orderlies into breaking their noses on the clear walls of our door-less cells before we’d be gassed into submission), we experimented with our powers, giving us something to concentrate on besides our captivity and Bruce.

Campbell worked out. I worked on extending the time limit of my ghost state and spent a lot of that time staring at a spoon to try and levitate it or bend it. Rachel, with our consent (most of the time), created hallucinations. At first only one person could see them, then she’d construct images that only one person could see at a time. After a couple of days she could almost support an individual image for each person all at once. I awoke a couple of times to ghoulish figures standing over me in the darkness or voices echoing within my cell. Even Sara started to work on some new tricks, using her aura reading abilities to track the movements of the orderlies and to alter her own aura to draw specific emotional reactions from them. And Bruce still lay there lifeless.

We never saw the doctors. We were almost starting to relax, to settle into a routine and accept our fate, at least for a time. And then Dr. Andretti walked through the door.