I hated feeling weak, but it was quickly becoming a familiar feeling. All of the others I trained with were either faster or stronger, sometimes both. At the end, I lost every fight.

“You need to stop now,” Mr. Baek said. “Before you end up a patient again.”

I walked to the side of the gymnasium and took a seat on the bleachers. Lina joined me in a few minutes. Her fight had ended in a tie, and she dropped a bottle of water into my hand as she took her seat.

“Everyone’s first day is like this,” she assured me. “It’ll get so much better after”

“After what?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said, taking a sip of water.

I only saw that I’d be needing an ice pack in the evening. I wanted to nurse my wounds and go back to my bed. This is what I wanted for more than a month, and now that I was in the gym, I was losing miserably.

“I just wanted to prove myself,” I said. I wanted to show that I was at least a shade of my former self, able to fight and win. I’d been so formidable I had even won the last battle of my life, even if I had lost my life in the process. Now, in this new young body, somehow I wasn’t half as good as before. The wooden swords felt natural in my hands and the movements were right, but it was like I was in a haze while the others lived in clarity. My movements were sluggish and awkward compared to their graceful lethality.

“And you did,” Lina said. “Some of us gave up in the first fight. Some in the second. It’s like adolescence all over again, trying to grow and fit into our new bodies and strengths.”

“These are some severe growing pains then.”

She smirked. “You proved that you will keep fighting to the end. Once you get used to the training, they’ll see that you’ll keeping fighting until your enemies meet their end.”

Enemies was a strange word. I didn’t think I had any enemies. The people who we would have to kill were just targets, jobs. I nodded anyway. Dennis stood at the center of the gymnasium, his dark hair held back with a navy blue headband. He wielded a long staff and stood against Louis, who carried a pair of two short wooden swords.

Their fight was more of a dance. Neither made contact with the other, swerving or leaping out of reach by inches. At the end both emerged unharmed and exhausted. Dennis wiped the sweat off his forehead with a towel and sat on the floor cross-legged.

“It gets better,” he said.

I nodded. But things always got worse before they got better. I knew that much from experience. Dr. Rossi walked into the gymnasium. She was out of place among all the people wearing clothing for training, in her neat blue office dress and lab coat.

“Ravi,” she called out.

“I think you’ve done enough for today,” Dr. Rossi said. “We’re going to be starting you on a new drug regimen.”

“On a new drug regimen?”

“Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” Dennis asked.

Dr. Rossi gave him a tight smile. “It’s more comfortable to refer to it this way. Follow me, Ravi.”

She walked through a side door of the gymnasium and through countless hallways until I was no longer familiar with the surroundings. I’d explored the institute in my spare time, mapped it out in my head from habit, but this part of the building was new. There were no replicas of modern art hung on the walls, no occasional seating for patients to rest. There were few employees, and no other patients.

Everything was bare and characterless. The walls and floor were of smooth concrete. There were no windows or skylights. It could’ve been my imagination, but it felt like we were deeper in the earth than before.

Lead-lined, I thought. Wherever we were headed was a sanctum, or a vault. The sound of our footsteps carried far, and there was nothing else there but silence. There was a chill in the air, a wind that blew past us that originated from something unnatural.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“A classified area,” Dr. Rossi answered.

It was a maze of identical pathways. While Dr. Rossi walked purposefully and without pause, I was lost in a few minutes. Finally, we reached a dead-end.

Black metal double doors extended from the floor to the ceiling. Two guards stood on either side of the door. They moved to open the door when we neared it. It took the unlocking of three different locks.

A glass door beyond the metal doors lit up with a holographic image of a security guard.

“Jennifer Rossi,” Dr. Rossi said.

The doors slid apart and we walked into a large circular cavern. A skylight twenty feet above showed a glimpse of the noon sky. The room was empty except for a bed. A curtain hung across a doorway, and looking in, I saw it was a tiny bathroom.

“You’ll be staying here for the next day or two,” she said. “Take a seat.”

From the pocket of her lab coat, she took out a filled syringe, an alcohol wipe, and a cotton pad. The liquid inside the syringe was violet and viscous, a drop of it hanging from the tip of the syringe’s needle.

“Your arm,” she said. “Make a fist.”

She tapped the front of my elbow until the vein there grew darker and more prominent.

“This will hurt just a bit,” she said.

It hurt a lot more than a bit.