Chapter 1544: Katie’s Situation
Katie slowly got up from the ground, the blanket still wrapped around her. She looked toward Ning and then wiped her tears.
“Why did you do it, Katie?” Ning asked.
“Because I wanted to forget,” she said. “The few hours this thing works, it lets me forget.”
Ning was taken aback. “What do you want to forget, Katie?” he asked.
“My life. My situation. Everything. I want to forget everything,” she said. “It’s much better than the other solutions my mind comes up with.”
Ning settled down next to her and sighed. “Do you have friends?” he asked.
“A few, but I left them once I joined the military,” she said softly.
“And you didn’t make any in the Military?” he asked.
“I was pushed up to an Officer just days after I joined. I didn’t have the chance to make any people,” she said.
Ning sighed. “Then… do you want to talk about what is going on? If that will help, I’ll listen. That sounds like a much better alternative than doing drugs. Especially since it doesn’t look like you even like doing drugs.”
The girl said nothing.
“You can talk when you want to,” Ning said. “And you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Ning waited for the girl to speak, but she didn’t.
“Also, I won’t tell anyone about this, so don’t worry. Just, don’t do drugs anymore, okay?” he asked.
The girl nodded slowly. She still didn’t say anything.
Ning sighed internally and looked away from the girl, letting her talk when she wanted to. He waited for a while, and as he did, he noticed the vial that the drug came in.
He realized that there might be some leftovers inside. He got up and grabbed the vial from the table. As he did, he looked to the side almost instinctively.
Katie had looked in this direction for a while before she poured all of the drug into the glass and drank it. He wanted to see what she was staring at.
There wasn’t much in that direction. The table was pushed against the wall, and there was nothing on the wall itself. There was a knife on the table, laid to the side, and—
Ning paused and his eyes went wide. He quickly turned around and looked at the girl behind him.
“You…” he said slowly. “You were thinking of killing yourself, weren’t you?”
The girl looked up, her eyes wide. She couldn’t believe that he had realized that somehow.
“How did you…”
“Why?” Ning asked. He leaned down and grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her. “Why do you want to kill yourself? What is so wrong that you want to die? Is someone bullying you? Did something happen to people you love? What happened?”
The girl only stared at Ning with a pale face, saying nothing.
“Answer me, dammit! So I can help you,” he said.
The girl pushed his hands aside finally. “You can’t help me. No one can. I’m already doomed, so leave me alone,” she shouted.
Ning took back his hands. “What does that mean?”
“I’m Sparkless. That is what it means. I have lost my power and I can’t live without it,” she said. “My status, my future. Nothing remains without my powers. The military will kick me soon enough, and then I’ll struggle on my own for a while and die.”
“I don’t want to die, but that is all the future I have,” the girl shouted.
Ning took a deep breath.
Sparkless. He hadn’t expected the girl to be Sparkless at all. He looked back at their uniform, the officer badge on it. That did mean she could use Spark.
But now that she couldn’t, what happened to her? Did she get demoted to a Cadet again?
‘She can’t face the truth,’ Ning thought. He had heard that many people when they lost the power of Spark lost themselves in the process.
He had heard in passing about how people would rather kill themselves than stay Sparkless.
Someone born without the power to use Spark was fine, but when they were used to it when they knew what it tasted like, they couldn’t live without it.
‘This girl tried to live,’ Ning thought. He couldn’t imagine what sort of mental battle this girl was fighting with herself. She was fighting off her own thoughts to kill herself. In doing so, she had unfortunately fallen into the habit of taking drugs.
Drugs were bad, certainly, but compared to suicide, it appeared so much better as an option. A lesser evil of the two.
Ning sat back down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what you were going through. I can’t even imagine what you could be going through.”
The girl sniffed a little and said nothing.
“How did it happen?” he asked. “How did you go Sparkless?”
The girl shivered a little and seemed to shrink into herself. “Two weeks ago,” she finally answered. “A few days after we arrived, I was one of the people sent to the city to fill it with air.”
“This was my first time doing something at this level, so I wasn’t ready. I thought I had to push myself hard so I consumed more Spark than my body could handle or something. I ended up holding the energy within me for too long, and then it vanished from me all at once.”
“It took me some time to realize that I had become Sparkless. When I did, it was too much of a blow,” she said.
“I see,” Ning said. “Do your superiors know?”
She nodded. “They tested me and figured out I was Sparkless,” she said.
“What then?” Ning asked.
“Nothing. They told me they would deal with me later since they were busy at the time. They haven’t called for me in 2 weeks,” she said. Once again, tears streamed down her face.
“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s so hard to continue living when you realize that you can never reach your true potential, and the fault was no one else’s but your own.”
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