Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  “You’re right. Because all my friends’ moms shave their beards each morning. You can’t say that’s not messed up.”

  “It kind of is. But, so what?”

  “So what?”

  “Yeah. So what? Guess what? Everyone has a life that’s kind of messed up. Don’t you realize some of the kids at your school would want nothing more than to just have parents to come home to each day?”

  “Oh, lucky me. I get a dad who wears a bra and panties and flies around Chicago in a cape.”

  “You think I can wear anything under that outfit?” I tilted my head to the side.

  “Eww, dad!” He laughed despite himself, then squeezed his eyes shut as he got out of the car. “That’s so gross! Why would you tell me that?”

  “Oh, grow up.” I laughed too as I walked around the car. “But, Alan.” I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him around to face me. “Seriously. Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, but it’s not worth it. Trust me.” I paused for a second, unsure if I should say what was on my mind. I let out a breath and decided to just say it. “I know what it’s like to lose your parents. That’s not what happened here.”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked down at the ground. “You’re right. I know you and mom didn’t do this on purpose, and you’re just trying to figure all of this out. I’m sorry I’ve been so dumb about it.”

  “It’s okay.” I gave him a sideways hug, then had to fight against the urge to ruffle his hair.

  He slung his backpack over his shoulders as he twisted around me and led the way into the house. “Do you want to go throw some hoops before dinner?”

  “What? You think that now you’re as tall as your old man you can beat him?”

  “Well, there’s that.” He grinned. “Plus, you’re not really a man anymore.”

  “Okay.” I ran my fingers through my hair to pull it into a ponytail. “You want to talk smack? You’re on. Just be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Be ready to lose to a girl.”

  I glanced back at him and grinned at the uncertain look that flitted across his face.

  Somewhere between us starting to play and dinner being ready, Sam and Nicole joined us in the backyard to watch us play and cheer us on. It would have been a closer game if Alan were a few years further into puberty. Had that been the case, even with my conditioning, I doubt I could have held my ground against him. As it was, though, he was outmatched. Still, despite his chagrin, especially at losing in front of his sisters, he laughed at my antics right along with his sisters.

  Finally, Jake came out to let us know that dinner was ready, and I noticed that, for all his bluster, Alan was still smiling as he came into the house. As I wiped the sweat off my forehead and came inside, I felt, for the first time since finding myself in my wife’s body, like my family was back to the way it should be.

  10

  WITHIN A WEEK, THE weather had taken a sharp turn toward winter. At around the time of our first snowfall of the season, my shifts with Kiara swapped over to a different time, leaving us with the task of patrolling Chicago in the evenings and into the early morning hours. As primes were first and foremost human, there was less activity for us to watch out for during these new shifts, but because there were fewer arbiters out as well, it meant we saw an overall uptick in the number of times we were called in to deal with problems.

  “Flames, do you copy?” The radio in our central console crackled to life one night near the end of our shift. Kiara grabbed the microphone on the radio, recognizing her radio handle.

  “I read you,” she answered. “What’ve we got?”

  “We have a ten-seventy at an apartment complex near your location.” The voice on the other end of the radio was interrupted by a burst of static as it continued. “—Suspect was seen fleeing the scene, and other units are in pursuit. We need you and G’s at the scene, though, until emergency responders arrive. ETA is four minutes.”

  “On our way. Out.” She gunned the engine as she clipped the microphone back onto the console, then glanced my way. “Would you mind making sure we keep traction?”

  “Sure.” I nodded and watched out the windshield at the snow that was swirling down from the darkened sky. I tried to force my tone to stay casual. “Ten-seventy’s a fire, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She slid around the next corner.

  With a flicker of concentration, I prodded the car out of the fishtail it was slipping into. I ignored the heavy weight that had settled in my stomach at her confirmation. Ahead, I could just make out the column of sludgy smoke framed an inky black against the permanent sickly orange glow of the Chicago night sky. We rounded another corner and the mid rise apartment building came into view on the right. My throat went dry as I stared up at the smoke pouring out of the top floors of the building. Of all the emergencies we could have been called in for, why did it have to be a fire?

  I hopped out of the car as soon as we came to a stop outside the building. My helmet came equipped with a night filter, which almost always led to me wearing it while we were on duty during these hours, as it let me see almost as if it were day.

  “I’ll work on the lower levels.” Her voice was slightly muffled as she worked to affix an oxygen mask over her face.

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to try and douse the flames?”

  I kept my eyes trained on the six-story building as I waited for her answer. The night vision filter in my visor only served to make the tongues of fire licking out of the second-story windows and up the brick façade of the mid rise that much more blinding as they lit up the night around us. I blinked and flexed my fingers, suddenly aware of how clammy they were under my gloves.

  “I could,” she said. “But I’m much better at speeding up molecules than slowing them down. I think I’d be better off searching for people. The heat shouldn’t really get to me, in any case.”

  “Alright.” I nodded quickly in an attempt to hide the tremor in my movement. I could hold it together through this. I had to. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of people depending on us. On me. “I’ll start at the top, then.”

  “I’ll ping you if I need help getting anyone out.” She tapped the throat microphone built into her suit before giving me a thumbs up. “Good luck.”

  As she disappeared into the building in a shutter of motion, I lifted myself off the ground and flew up to the top floor of the building. The insulation in my suit was top-notch, and I was holding myself over fifty feet from the flames, but the heat that washed over me as I rose through the air was almost overpowering. But flames couldn’t affect me in my suit—not right away. I shoved my fear aside and focused instead on the clumps of people hanging out of their apartment windows and waving their arms to try and draw my attention. I took in a steading breath, praying no one would notice the tremor in my hands as I held them up and lifted the people I could see out of their windows, then dropped them to the ground in a field of lessened gravity. Some of them flailed around for a second as they were caught in my field that left them drifting through the air, but most of them understood what I was doing. As I dropped more and more people to the ground, I noticed people starting to poke their heads out of the windows beneath the top floor as well.

  Struck by a thought, I held up a hand and extended a field of lowered gravity to the entire front of the building.

  “It’s safe for all of you!” I shouted to be heard over the roar of the fire that was steadily growing louder. “If you get to the window, just jump!”

  One woman about half-way down the building, holding two of her children in her arms, was the first to jump out into the air. I could see the terror in her eyes, but from the steady stream of blackened smoke pouring out her window, I guessed she didn’t have much of a choice. The second she cleared the building, she was caught in my field of gravity, which left her drifting to the ground like a feather.

  The others were quick to follow. W
ithin a minute, over a hundred people were huddled on the icy sidewalk in front of the apartment. When it looked like the last of the people had made it to the ground, I grit my teeth and slipped into the top floor through one of the open windows before I could have the chance to think through the fact I was willingly going into a burning building. Through all of it, I was careful to still maintain the field of altered gravity over the front of the building in case any stray survivors attempted to escape through the windows while I searched around inside.

  I made my way through the living room I found myself in and, with a push of gravity, forced the door to the apartment open to reveal the hallway beyond. What greeted me was a furnace of heat.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and wrapped my cape around my exposed arms while I took an involuntary step backward. I was grateful, not for the first time, that Jake had insisted I keep the cape as part of my uniform. In the early days of the arbiter program, capes had been a staple of almost every uniform, but they had become more of a novelty and hinderance in recent years than anything essential, which made sense. It was hard to manage martial fighting with a sheet on your back, after all. For those arbiters capable of flight, though, it still seemed an unwritten rule that their uniforms include capes, and it seemed Jake wasn’t willing to part from that tradition. At the moment, I couldn’t complain. My cape was made from a heavily insulated material which offered me some temporary relief from the extreme heat. The smoke in the hall was oppressive, and the heat was worse, but I forced myself forward anyway. It didn’t matter that my mouth was completely dry and my heart was somewhere half-way up my throat. I knew, intellectually, that I didn’t have anything to fear from the smoke or heat. There were sophisticated filters built into my helmet, and if those didn’t do the trick, a backup system would automatically feed me an emergency supply of oxygen that would last half an hour. And my suit was practically fireproof. Somehow, though, repeating back to myself that list of facts wasn’t enough to calm the terror gripping me deep in my chest. Still, I went on.

  It was slow work, but as I willed myself forward and made my way around the hallway, I was rewarded with the discovery of a few people who were either still huddled in their apartments, too afraid to attempt the descent out their windows, or some who had passed out from the smoke. Forcing myself to stay calm and knowing I only had minutes left, I worked through the group of stragglers and paired them up to send them out through the window. Without time to coax the more frightened ones into jumping, I simply nudged them through the window with my power. They could forgive me later.

  “Top floor is clear.” I jetted out of the building and into the night. My voice was shaking, but I didn’t care, by then, if Kiara picked up on that or not.

  “Good.” Her voice came back clear despite the roar of the fire from the building. “That trick you pulled with the windows was a godsend. I’ve been able to clear out the bottom four floors already. I’m working through the fifth now.”

  “I’ll come help—”

  Her feed went dead as an explosion tore through the night, shattering half of the windows of the apartment complex. As glass showered the ground, I twisted around to see a fireball twist its way up the side of the building, centered on the fourth floor. My heart stopped.

  Acting even before I had time to think, I shot through the air, tucking my arms in to my body just in time to clear the window as I barreled into the building on the fifth floor.

  “Cherub!” It was all I could do to call Kiara by her alias as I dropped onto the floor, which I could see was already starting to char from the flames licking up from below. “Are you okay?”

  I sprinted out into the hall, my heart thrumming painfully in my ears as the seconds ticked by. Shouting or not, she should have heard me through her radio. I tried not to think about what her silence could mean.

  The wood cracked and swayed underfoot as I sprinted through the hall, but I didn’t have time to think about that. I slammed each door open as I passed, pausing only seconds at each apartment to search for any survivors from the blast. My panic at being immersed, almost completely, into the heart of the inferno threatened more and more to overcome me with every passing second, but I just grit my teeth and sprinted on. I could barely breathe as I skirted past a section of the hallway where the fire was eating away the wall, the raw flames curling away the wallpaper to expose the sheetrock beneath. My terror was paralyzing, but as I watched the angry flames creep further along the corridor, I found myself somehow gripped by an even deeper fear than my deep-seated phobia of fire. Kiara still hadn’t answered me. She couldn’t be... She had to be... I wouldn’t let this happen.

  As if to test my newfound resolve, I found, in one of the rooms nearest to the blast, the charred remains of someone who hadn’t managed to escape the fire in time. My stomach heaved and the taste of bile filled my mouth as I stared, transfixed, at the smoldering body. Unbidden, my mind cast back on the images I had seen, two and a half decades before, that morning I had woken up in the hospital. The pictures of my home, ravaged by a fireball of death, and my parents...

  Numbness seeped through my body, despite the blistering heat all around me, as I stumbled through the remaining wreckage. At one of the final apartments, I found the door ajar before I came to it.

  Slipping inside, I found Kiara lying sprawled face-down on the floor. There were two children lying on either side of her. None of them were moving.

  “No.” My mind slammed to a stop as I tried to process what I was seeing. It couldn’t... She couldn’t...

  With a concussive blast of energy, I tore open the wall of the apartment to expose the room to the outside. An instant later, the ceiling threatened to collapse as one of the supporting walls caved in.

  With a flicker of effort, I pushed the ceiling back into place before gently lifting her and the two children off the ground and pulling them out into the night air.

  By the time we were back on the ground, the flames had engulfed the entire building. My eyes filled with tears as a woman screamed and ran forward as I set the two children gently on the ground. At some point the paramedics had arrived, as they swept forward immediately to set the two children onto stretchers and fit oxygen masks over their faces. Through my clouded vision, I could just make out their chests moving up and down. They were alive.

  I turned my attention to Kiara, who lay on the snow-filled sidewalk a foot away. I dropped onto the ground next to her, taking only a second to rip my helmet off before I pulled her head into my lap. I dipped my ear down near to her face and strained to hear her breathe. Her lips were blue, far too blue.

  “Don’t do this to me,” I whispered, a tear tracing its way down my cheek as I watched her chest for any sign of motion.

  My heart skipped a beat as she gasped and took in a greedy gulp of air before starting to cough.

  I leaned back as she opened her eyes, then wiped my nose with the back of my hand. I finally became aware of the crowd that had gathered around the two of us. Ordinarily, I would have been embarrassed to be caught crying in front of perfect strangers, but as I met the somber and grateful gazes of those around me, many whose eyes were filled with tears of their own, it was hard to feel embarrassed.

  The apartment was obliterated by the fire. I later learned that, of the more than hundred residents, only four lives had been lost that night. I knew, even before getting home that morning, that those lives were going to stay with me forever. I arrived home just in time to see Jake and the children off to work and school, and it was all I could do to keep myself from crying as I gave them all hugs. No matter what I tried, I kept reliving again and again that frantic search through the hellish apartment building. I don’t know if he recognized my expression or just the ash that was ground into my hair, but Jake seemed to know enough to just hold me a second longer as we hugged goodbye that morning.

  Kiara was good as new by the next evening for our shift. With the steady collection of injuries I acquired on the job, I had ye
t to encounter an injury the arbiter medics couldn’t heal within minutes, so her quick recovery didn’t surprise me. By unspoken consent, we avoided discussing her near brush with death, a task made much harder by the fact the next few days were quieter than usual. Somehow, in our search for other subjects to talk about, we settled on a topic I hadn’t really thought about before.

  “Come on!” She threw a crumpled-up food wrapper at me. “You can’t hold out on this, you’ve got the inside scoop! All I want to know is, why can’t I seem to find a guy who’s marriage material?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” I spoke through a mouthful of cheeseburger, then shrugged. “I’ve never dated a guy.”

  “You go on dates with Jake, don’t you?” She dug through the fast food bag on the seat between us and pulled out a bag of fries.

  “Does he really count, though, you know, since he’s technically a woman?”

  “Fine.” She snorted. “How do I end up with someone like Jake, then?”

  “You mean, someone like me?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “If you want to get weird about it, sure.”

  “I dunno.” I stared out the windshield as I collected my thoughts. “This is going to sound dumb, but when I met Amber, she was... nice. Beautiful. I’m not even ashamed to admit that’s what caught my attention at first.

  “But then I got to know her. I don’t know exactly how it all happened, but everything just sort of clicked together. Have you ever dated someone where you could kinda feel, at every step, you were just butting heads?”

  “That’s every guy I date.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Exactly. It wasn’t like that with Amber. We just had so much in common that, when we started spending more of our time together, our lives sort of meshed together without us meaning them to. As I got to know Amber, I stopped thinking about ‘ifs.’ Instead, I started thinking about ‘whens.’”

  “Wow.” She sighed. “I want that so bad.”