As she stopped to catch her breath, she looked back at the road behind her, the searing red dust that had burned her feet even through the thick-soled boots that she had stolen three towns back. The food was running out fast, though not as quickly as the water, and that was the girl’s main worry - she could live without eating for perhaps another day or so, but if she didn’t find something to drink within the next ten hours, she knew that she would be toast.

So Kim Yujin continued to trudge wearily along the abandoned and long-forgotten road that she had seen on her way to the hospital two weeks earlier, hoping desperately to find what she was searching for before death found her instead. She had already been traveling for five days straight, surviving only on a cumulative twelve hours of sleep, and she was starting to lose hope that she would ever find it.

She had heard the horror stories when she was little about people who developed strange powers being shunned from human society and being thrown to the compounds that hid in the deserts outside of the city borders; in the compounds, it was said, lived the mutants of the human race, the ones that weren’t wanted by anybody. They were always spoken about with so much contempt, yet Yujin always wondered how they felt, the ones who had been trapped outside the cities, away from their families and loved ones. What caused the powers to form, nobody knew. But it wasn’t proper to ponder such things, so eventually, she stopped talking and then thinking about the mutants altogether. 

Everybody in the city that Yujin had grown up in had exuded this air of being untouchable, as though nothing bad would ever happen to them. And nothing had, until the day of the accident, three weeks ago almost to the day, if Yujin’s calculations (more like estimated guesses based on how many sunsets she had seen on while she had been on the road) were correct.

She shook her head like a lion shaking off a fly and tried hard not to think about it, at least not for the time being. Not until she found the compound, anyway.

The thing about hours trekking through the wilderness was that everything started to look the same after a while - she was sure she had already passed that particularly jagged boulder at least twice and the horizon seemed to be swinging around on her every time she looked at it. She only knew to travel South because of the snatches of overheard gossip from the nurses outside her hospital room, and it wasn’t really much to go on if you considered the fact that she had been known to get lost around her own neighbourhood sometimes. 

By midday (Yujin guessed that it was midday, anyway, as the sun seemed to be hanging impossibly high in the endless blue of the sky above her), the last of the water was gone and the food had diminished to a handful of oats and dried fruit in the bottom of her ill-designed pack. She was getting desperate, panting as the sun bore down on her head, sweat beading at her hairline, weaving across the rubble-littered terrain as though she was drunk. It was with a ragged sigh that she finally admitted defeat and slumped to the ground, the world spinning around her, the land pitching a heaving beneath her. Damn it, was she that useless that she couldn’t even find the compound? She should’ve just stayed in the hospital if she wanted to die - at least there it would have been quick and relatively painless, unlike this. Her eyelids were too heavy to claw open once they drifted shut.

*

When she opened them again, the first thing she thought was thank God that the air was cooler in Hell than it was on earth. Then she adjusted to the darkness and saw the ghostly face hovering in front of her and opened to scream. 

“Shut it!” the face snarled, lip curling as he (he? Yujin assumed that the person in front of her was male from the rough voice) reached a calloused hand over to press over and nose. “If I wanted the whole lot of the stinking bastards to hear you, don’t you think I’d of paraded you into the eating hall at lunchtime rather than hauling your sorry arse down here away from them trigger-happy gits?”

Her eyes widened as she strained away from him. 

“There’s no use struggling, sweetheart,” he continued in a suddenly bored tone, pulling his hand from her face. “You did just pass out right at our front door, you know. We have security to uphold here.”

“Your front door?” she whispered, the words feeling unfamiliar in after not needing to use speech for a fortnight. Every syllable felt like it scraped its way up into , scalding her tongue. 

“Aye, we found you lying like you’d died right there in the sand. If it wasn’t for the fact that Sehun swore he felt a pulse, we’d of left you right there for the wolves to eat,” the man answered matter-of-factly. 

“Where am I?” Yujin pressed urgently, hands groping around in the suffocating darkness to find purchase on something, anything. 

He grinned suddenly, throwing his arms wide. “You’re in the compound, lady. Welcome!”

*

Kim Yujin only remembered snatches of her first night in the compound, and most of them involved being carted around bound to a wheelchair of some sort. The first interrogation wasn’t so bad as she didn’t really have the energy to answer any of the questions that were being flung at her, but it was when a tall male with a mop of dark hair, black Yujin presumed, dumped what looked like a bowl of lumpy stew and a hunk of home-baked bread on the table in front of her that things started to get complicated. When she only stared at it for a moment or two, he sighed and leaned forward onto his elbows, face in his hands.

“You’re meant to eat, you know,” he informed her in a soft tone. 

“I cant eat when my hands are tied to the chair,” she muttered under her breath, stomach growling and clawing for the food in front of her, no matter how unappetizing it looked.

“I can untie one hand and one hand only,” he warned her. “You have to be one of us to have survived so long out there, and you’re obviously untrained otherwise you wouldn’t have been found in such a compromising position, so you could be just as dangerous to yourself as you are to me.”

“I don’t even know how to attack,” Yujin told him sincerely. “I doubt you’d be in any danger.”

He gave her a dark look. “That’s exactly my point,” he commented, but took a long, wicked-looking blade from the sheath at his belt and approached her carefully. “Don’t move, I’m going to cut one of the ropes at your right wrist.”

She held her breath as the steel slid through the fibres like a hot knife through butter and exhaled when he returned to his seat on the opposite side of the table. Cautiously, she reached towards the spoon resting at the side of her dish and scooped some of the stew onto it. It looked edible enough, she mused as she bought it to eye level. And it did smell pretty good. So she proceeded to eat as though it was her first meal.

Her guard raised a dark eyebrow at her actions but she was too content to care. 

“Now that you’re done,” he announced when she had scraped every last scrap from the bowl with the bread. “You can start by telling me your name and why you’re here, aside from the obvious reason,”

She gulped. “You could tell me your name first. You know, make me feel more at ease.”

“You’re not meant to feel at ease,” another growled from the shadows of the doorway.

The first mad held a hand, throwing a glance at the guy behind him. “Kyuhyun, please. If she wants names, I can give her names. We need every little help we can get here.” He turned back to face her and shot her a sincere smile. “My name’s Donghae, and that grumpy one there is Kyuhyun. Your appearance caused him to miss his dinner, which is why he’s so grumpy, so ignore him-”

“And now it’s your turn,” the aforementioned grump called. “Your name?”

“Kim Yujin. My name is Kim Yujin.” the girl murmured. 

“Yujin,” Donghae smiled brightly. “And how old are you, Yujin-ssi?”

“I’m nearly twenty,” she answered, deciding that giving them what they wanted was the best course of action. 

“You are obviously here for our help and training, right, Yujin-ssi? How about telling us what power you have?”

Yujin heaved a shaky breath in, pushing away the not-so-distant memories of two weeks ago. “Fire, I think. I’m not sure exactly what happened... But fire.”

Donghae nodded slowly, more as though he was mulling over her words rather than agreeing with her.

“We’ll need Jonghyun down here for that one, then, Hae,” a lighter-haired tall male wider eyes spoke up from the back corner of the dank room. 

“Yes, that would be a good idea, Hyukjae,” Donghae mused, never taking his eyes off of the girl in front of him. “Ryeowook-ah, could you fetch him, please?”

One of the shorter males in the room nodded curtly and took off through the door and into the inky black corridor beyond. 

“Jonghyun will be able to assess your powers better than we could,” Donghae explained to Yujin kindly as he caught the vaguely terrified gleam of her eyes. “We need to know how strong you are, whether you know it yourself or not.”

She nodded, supposing that it was the wise thing to do for them - erring on the side of caution, she thought. She would do the same if she were in their position. 

“I’m not a threat to you,” she coughed out. “I just... Couldn’t stay in the city.”

The taller one slinked forward with the grace of a panther. Hyukjae, she remembered Donghae calling him. 

“What happened to you in the city?” he asked, not unkindly. When she failed to answer, eyes burning though she refused to cry in front of a roomfull of what seemed like trained soldiers, he sat on the edge of the wooden table. “Did your power make itself known? Did they take you to a facility, Yujin-ssi?”

“Yes,” she choked out finally. “I don’t know what happened. All I know is that I was angry at something my mother said and then here was... Fire everywhere. It hurt so, so much... And then I woke up in that hospital, chained... Chained down like some animal and-”

“It’s okay,” Donghae consoled and she wondered whether he really understood or was just trying to make her calm down in case the fire exploded out of her again. “We understand. I understand, Yujin.”

She took a deep, controlled breath and willed herself to force her thoughts away from the dangerous tornado of memories that were that morning. 

“Well, well well,” a short figure that seemed to be dressed in some sort of military uniform projected from the doorway, his voice both soft and loud at the same time. He stepped into the light and his platinum blond hair and wide eyes were the first things that caught her attention. “What have we here? Another fire, hmm?” he continued with a grin. 

“I don’t think you should be sounding too happy about it, sir,” Kyuhyun muttered from the doorway. “She seems more than a little unstable to me,”

“The more unstable the better for a fire user, I always say,” he retorted cheerfully as he strode closer to the desk in the centre of the room, black boots clicking against the cobblestone flooring. “If everyone could please vacate the premises, I will proceed to have a quick chat with our new guest,” he requested and though it wasn’t an outright order, Yujin noticed that all of them did as he said as though it had been.

“Don’t worry,” Donghae told her with an eye smile as he heaved himself out of his chair, taking the empty bowl and spoon with him. “Jonghyun is a pro.”

As soon as she was left alone with the ‘pro’, he sliced through the rope binding her left arm to her chair and took Donghae’s recently vacated seat.

“Hello there,” he greeted. “My name is Lieutenant Kim Jonghyun, leader of the fire department and I’ve been called down to see if I can pick up on exactly how strong your affinity with fire is,”

“Can you... Sense that or something?” Yujin whispered, genuinely curious despite herself, despite her surroundings.

Jonghyun, however, seemed amused. “In a way, I guess I can. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never used their power in a controlled way before, but you’ll understand what I mean one day. Now, what I want you to do is to close your eyes and imagine yourself back in the place where your fire first became apparent to you.”

Yujin found it hard to believe that the Lieutenant was going to be able to find out how strong her power was just by her remembering that awful morning, and closing her eyes on the room and the somewhat imposing man sat opposite her went against every instinct in her body. She did it anyway.

“I’m just going to hover around your temples,” Jonghyun’s voice floated through the strained darkness and Yujin bobbed her head in a tiny nod. Then she fought to recall what had happened that morning.

She had barely gotten into the memory when she felt the soldier move away from her and she opened her eyes, blinking in the dim light that came from the single dingy lightbulb swinging from the ceiling, thinking that there was no way in hell that he had gotten what he needed just from those brief seconds.

His face was pale and drawn, eyes wide with what seemed like disbelief and she stared at him until he finally spoke.

“Yujin-ssi,” he began. “Are you aware of the fact that you don’t only have the ability to control fire, but also, if I sensed it correctly, electricity?”

“What?” Her voice cracked on the word, her shaking her head uncomprehendingly. “One person can’t control two things at once-”

“Hybrids are quite rare, but they do exist,” Jonghyun corrected immediately. “Some of our best recruits and soldiers here are hybrids, actually. I think with a hell of a lot of training, you’d make a damn good soldier here,” he continued with a small smile. “You’d certainly bring some glory back to the fire department, anyway.”

Yujin thought about his words, thought hard; hybrids? She had never even heard of such people so much as existing, even in the stories. But maybe that was the point of stories told around campfires and in the dead of night - maybe they were based in fact, in truth, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were just there to encourage you or deter you or to scare you, but they certainly weren’t told to educate. Everything Yujin had heard had turned out to be a lie.

“So what’s going to happen to me now?” she questioned, almost scared to hear the answer.

“Well,” Jonghyun returned, face turning grim even as he tried to keep his tone light. “Obviously you can’t just join up straight away; there’s no way that we can know whether or not you’re genuine, after all. There will be some interrogation-”

“Interrogation?” Yujin repeated with dread.

“There’s not really a nice way to put it,” he responded by way of apology. “I’m sure you can appreciate why we have to do this. But as soon as Boa and Yunho sign you off, you’ll be out and into the compound properly.”

Interrogation. Such a bleak word. Yujin supposed that in her heart of hearts, she had known that something like this would happen, but she had chosen not to believe it when the people that she had met so far had been almost kind, startlingly so. 

“I’d tell you to get some sleep before it begins, but it seems like they’re ready to go,” Jonghyun continued sadly. He rose from the chair and patted a hand onto her shoulder softly. “Good luck, Kim Yujin. I’ll see you on the other side.”

AIGOO you guys don't know how damn angry I am at Lee Donghae for gETTING SO OUT OF CHARACTER THAT LITTLE . He was meant to be all 'listen here and listen good you little I'm here to interrogate you I'm scary' and he was like 'Lauren. Nope. I cannot do that, because I am an aCTUAL SWEETHEART HERE LET ME COMFORT HER AND SMILE AND BE ADORABLE!' Donghae why.

I hope you all liked the first chapter, anyway. We're going to get into some good stuff now :D Who would you guys like to see the most in the upcoming chapters? Drop me a comment and I'll see what I can do ^.^

-XenexianAG