‘It’ll happen.” I smiled and took a sip of soda. “You just have to find the right guy.”
“Okay.” She waved her hand dismissively as she turned the car’s engine over and put it in gear. “Enough of this mushy stuff. Let’s talk about the heavy stuff.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Is having a penis really all it’s cracked up to be?”
I snorted, spraying cola all over the dashboard as I clutched my side, laughing.
11
WITH MY ARBITER SHIFTS falling from evening until morning, I found myself struggling to keep pace with the upkeep of housekeeping chores. As I thought back on it, though, I realized Jake had kept to an irregular schedule for most of our marriage, and he had kept up with all the demands of being both an arbiter and a homemaker without my ever being the wiser. And those had included the diaper years.
For his part, Jake seemed to be thriving at work, though I couldn’t help but notice he hung onto every word whenever I would talk about my arbiter shifts. The way his eyes would gloss over with both fondness and sorrow whenever I talked about discovering a new facet of my power or working with a different arbiter told me enough. And, to be honest, I couldn’t blame him for feeling that way.
Despite how hard the work was—no matter how physically, mentally, and emotionally draining it was—I felt something unlike anything I had ever experienced before on those rare moments when I was able to save a life, or even just brighten someone else’s day. In those moments, I felt a fulfillment from my work I had never been able to even fathom when I was a desk jockey. Sometimes, I even allowed myself to think about those fantasies I had of being an arbiter as a child, if only for one moment at a time. Invariably, those warm memories would curdle if I thought on them for too long. Fantasies were fine for idle moments, but reality was what mattered. And, the reality was that, in the moment that had mattered the most, there hadn’t been anyone to save my parents. Still, there were moments I even allowed myself to wonder if, maybe...
“Do you miss it?” I asked Jake one evening.
“What?” He spared me a glance from the Jane Austin novel he was reading.
“I mean...” I fidgeted with the bedspread in my lap in an attempt at screwing up my courage again. “Do you miss being an arbiter?”
“Hmm?” He set a sheet of paper into his novel and set it aside. “I guess I haven’t really thought about it.”
“What do you mean? How can you not think about it?”
He shrugged. “Do you miss your work?”
“Not really. I mean, there are a lot of things I miss, like not being able to stand up and pee at the same time, or going out in public without having everyone eye me like a piece of meat, or being tall enough to reach the top shelf at the grocery store—”
“You can reach the top shelf,” he interrupted.
“No. I’m only five-foot-two now. Don’t even get me started on this. By the way, why is it that every useful pot or pan in our kitchen is on the top shelf?”
“Because you used to cook?”
“Oh, right...” I blinked. “Anyways, I guess what I mean is I miss being a man.”
“I miss being a woman.” His voice was just above a whisper. “But... the things I miss feel so petty. I miss being able to make myself look pretty and getting people’s attention just by entering the room. And, I dunno. People are just so much meaner to men. They just take for granted that we have feelings too. Does that make sense?”
“It does.” I nodded. “I’ve definitely noticed that people treat me differently.”
“It sounds to me like you miss being a man, but you don’t really miss having a job?” He watched me as I nodded, then smiled. “Makes sense. You’re worried that, because you don’t miss your job, but you’re liking being an arbiter, maybe I hate my job, and miss being an arbiter?”
“I never said I like being an arbiter.”
“But you do, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” I frowned. “I mean, it’s hard work, but it also makes such a huge difference in so many people’s lives.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So, you do miss being an arbiter.” I grimaced. “I knew it.”
He shook his head. “I don’t miss being an arbiter.”
“What? How do you not miss it?”
“I guess I never really saw it the way you do. I mean, I was able to lift a school bus well before I was old enough to go to kindergarten. I knew by the time I was in elementary school that I was probably going to end up being an arbiter. And then, if I had any doubts, when I was fifteen... I mean, I guess I knew, even then, that I was more powerful than most arbiters that had trained with their powers for years. It seemed like I would be throwing away a huge gift not to be an arbiter with the power I had. And, don’t get me wrong—saving lives, being a hero, even being on lunchboxes—it’s all amazing. I get why you like it. But I never really wanted it. I just... ended up winning a cosmic lottery where the prize didn’t matter that much to me. What I wanted, more than anything else, was what I found with you. And I still have that.”
“Wow.” I took a moment to work through his words. “I... guess I never thought about it like that, but it really makes a lot of sense.”
“I do miss not having my powers sometimes.” He sighed and wrapped an arm around me, then kissed me on the forehead. “But being able to watch and help you use them is almost as good. And you make a really, really good arbiter.”
I leaned against him and sighed. My heartbeat sped up, no doubt because I decided, in that moment, to say what had really been gnawing at me. “Sometimes, in those moments when I’m able to save someone, I think about my parents.”
I tried not to notice how he went stiff at my confession. I knew this would bother him. But I had already broached the subject. Better to just finish my thought, even if I could already see it would end badly. I tried to ignore the voice in the back of my head begging me not to say anything more. This was close—far too close—to the last conversation I had ever had with her, so many years before. Some irrational part of me was terrified Jake would somehow react the same way she had. But, I reminded myself, Jake was an adult, not a teenager. Amazing how, every time I thought about that girl from my past, my mindset seemed to revert back to when I was a teenager myself. Jake would understand. And, even if he didn’t, I could share this with him anyway.
“Sometimes I think about how, maybe, all this work is making it up to them. Pretty stupid, huh? I mean, it’s not like it’s my fault, or like they would ever blame me, or... I dunno.”
“Amber.” His voice was hoarse. “There’s nothing stupid about what you just said. I think your parents would be proud of who you’ve become.”
I managed a light smile as I twisted around to look up at him, and a warm glow swept over my face. Before I could even think to stop myself, I was talking again. “You know the weirdest thing? The other day, I was thinking about it. If, somehow, we had met a few years before we did, maybe you would have been there, the night they... well. Maybe you would have been able to save them.”
My heart stopped at seeing a frown tug at the corners of his lips, his eyes settling on a far corner of the room. Stupid! Of everything I could have said, why had I said that? That wasn’t close to what I had told her. They were almost the exact words. It had been enough to send her away forever. What if Jake reacted in the same way?
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I stammered, my face already red before I opened my mouth.
“I’m not upset.” He gave me a small, distracted smile. “Truth is, I’ve thought about that. A lot. In fact, for a very, very long time, it was the only thing I could think about.”
Something in my gut lurched as he turned back to me and I spotted tears on his cheeks. Fear gripped me deep in my chest as I struggled to backpedal. “It’s okay. Really, it is. It was kind of a dumb thought.”
“No, it’s not. I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered. A second later, he pul
led me closer and wrapped me in a bone-breaking hug. “You shouldn’t have lost your parents the way you did. If I could have...”
“I know.” I found myself whispering too, and, despite myself, as we pulled apart, I had to wipe away a few tears of my own. I laughed as I looked back at him. “Okay. Enough of that. Tonight’s my night off, right? I want to have some fun.”
He laughed and tilted his head to the side. “What are you talking about?”
I took a moment to run my hands over his arms, my gaze moving between his lips and his eyes. “Well, we’ve been kind of... timid... for the past few months.”
“It’s been less than two months since we swapped bodies!” He laughed, then frowned and shifted uncomfortably as he recognized something in the look I gave him. “Amber, what are you doing? You can’t just go from super serious to light and playful in two seconds like that. It...”
I leaned over and whispered into his ear, then smiled as I felt him shiver at my words. I straightened back up and flashed him a devious grin. It seemed that, despite what he had said, his body had no problem shifting gears on a dime, based on how his breathing hitched as he looked back at me. I pushed him onto his back and rested my arms on his chest, and any resistance he might have had a second before was gone as I leaned up and gave him a kiss.
“Ugh.” I grit my teeth a minute later, pulling my lips away from his at the shrill beep of my pager from a few feet away. “Seriously? Now?”
“You can’t schedule crises.” He smiled, though to say he sounded disappointed would be an understatement.
With a growl, I swiped my pager off my bedside table and looked at the number that had called.
“That’s an out of state number.” He frowned as he studied my pager from over my shoulder.
“Yeah.” I tilted my head to the side and fished around the bedside table for my phone. “I wonder what area code two-oh-two is?”
As I dialed the number and held my phone up to my ear, I glanced at him, only to see his eyes go wide with recognition. Before I had the chance to ask him what was wrong, though, the call connected.
“Is this Amber Grayson?” The gruff voice on the other end of the line sounded breathless.
“Yes?” I looked at Jake and tried to hide the uncertainty that was starting to creep into my voice. Anyone calling my pager should have been using my alias, not my actual name. Unless...
“This is Deputy Administrator Jeb Morris, from NASA. Have you by chance been watching the news?”
Two hours later, I found myself being strapped into a spacesuit within a hypobaric chamber in the cargo hold of a military jet that was flying almost ten miles above Cleveland, Ohio. As Morris had explained it, a satellite launched by some rogue techie in Eastern Europe had collided with the International Space Station, which had critically damaged the life support systems onboard and left multiple leaks in the capsules. With only hours of emergency oxygen left on the station, there wasn’t enough time for NASA to launch a rescue mission. What was worse, both Soyuz capsules had been damaged by the impact, which left the crew without a safe way to get back to earth. As I understood it, the crew had all donned spacesuits, but that still left them stranded in space with a contracting window of time left to live.
I left the house within minutes of Morris’ call, only taking enough time to suit up in my arbiter gear and hug my family goodbye before jetting off into the sky. Even given the direness of the situation, Nicole struggled to contain her giddiness at seeing me in my Gravita suit.
It took me less than twenty minutes to fly from Chicago to Cleveland, but by the time I set down outside the NASA center, I was roasting in my suit from the heat of air friction at travelling well past the sound barrier.
The plan was for me to use my power to lift a capsule up to space and rendezvous with the Space Station on its nearest pass, which worked out to be three hours from the time Morris had called me. I was briefed on the specifics of the mission as I flew to the research center, but as I slowly gathered together the details of what I would be doing, I realized just how crazy of a gamble the mission was. By some stroke of luck, they had a functional spacesuit at the site I was going to, which would be a necessity for this mission. With only hours to extricate the crew, there wasn’t even enough time for NASA to get me to a sealable capsule to take into space with me. Instead, they were having me go up in what had once been a working Apollo Command Module, or, that was what I kept telling myself. I tried to ignore the fact it had been a museum piece for the past forty years.
To make things more complicated, I couldn’t just don the spacesuit and fly up into space. The spacesuit NASA had supplied me with was designed to work at a much lower pressure than the pressure at sea level, and while it probably would have been fine for me to wear it at that pressure, as soon as I was in space and under the lower pressure of the spacesuit, the nitrogen in my blood would boil out into my body and probably kill me.
To solve that problem, the moment I had arrived at the NASA research center, I had been shuffled into a hypobaric chamber filled with pure oxygen to help draw out the nitrogen dissolved in my blood. The pre-breathing treatment took about two and a half hours, and while I waited for my body to acclimatize to a lowered pressure of only oxygen, I watched through the window of the pressure chamber as support staff loaded both my hypobaric capsule and the antiquated Apollo Command Module into the back of a military jet.
The second problem was that, after donning my spacesuit, it would need to stay at the lowered air pressure, meaning I couldn’t then begin my journey at sea level. The pressure difference between the outside and inside of my suit would cave it in, which would also kill me.
Fortunately, at forty-five thousand feet, the ambient air pressure was close enough to the pressure inside my suit that I could start my journey there. Unfortunately, that meant I was going to have to be launched, along with the Command Module, out of a military jet flying at forty-five thousand feet.
I nodded in response to the woman in the hypobaric chamber with me, who was helping me don the many layers of my spacesuit. She was, as I learned, an actual astronaut who had gone into space no less than three times. Listening carefully as she explained each part of my spacesuit, as well as the practical advice about what I would have to do to get up to the Space Station, I asked myself, for the thousandth time since my pager had gone off that evening, what I had gotten myself into.
Finally, after latching on my helmet, she worked through a checklist with me, double checking all the systems of my suit. After that was complete, she gave me a thumbs up.
I still had to wait an additional hour in my suit to evaporate out all the nitrogen in my blood, so I used the time to review in my head, one more time, the details of my mission. I tried as best I could to move around the cramped hypobaric chamber as I waited, but I found it difficult to move in a suit that weighed twice as much as I did. Finally, the astronaut in the chamber with me waved me over.
“Alright.” Her voice crackled through the radio in my ear, and she toggled a few switches on the front of my suit before continuing. “Your suit’s running on its own oxygen supply now, meaning you’ll have seven hours of oxygen to work with. The crew on the Space Station, though, only have around an hour and a half of oxygen left. By the time you get up to them in a half hour, they’re going to be running close to fumes.”
She toggled another few switches on my suit. The cargo hold of the C-17 we were in had been depressurized to the ambient pressure outside the jet, which, at our altitude, was a hair less than the pressure of my spacesuit. A moment later, she affixed an oxygen mask of her own over her face and made one final adjustment to the switches on the front of my suit. With a faint smile, she cracked open the hatch to our chamber and the two of us clambered out.
I lumbered over to the ancient Command Module, which had been placed near the back hatch of the cargo hold. After stepping into the cone-shaped pod, I turned around to look at the astronaut, who had busied herself with a control
panel at the front of the plane. After another moment’s hesitation, I moved to the inside of the Module, where I found just enough space to squeeze into one of the seats and strap myself in. I didn’t want to think about how cramped it would be in there once there were four more people in spacesuits joining me.
I looked out of the exterior hatch to see the astronaut watching me. She gave a thumbs-up, which I returned after taking in a deep breath.
I heard the roar of the wind, even through my spacesuit, as the back hatch to the plane opened. Everything around me took on a purple hue as I opened myself up to my grav-sense and oriented myself to the mass and lines trailing away from the Command Module. With a quick snap of effort, I generated a field around the module and lifted it up and out of the back of the plane.
A flood of disorientation hit me as the pod entered the jet stream and turbulence behind the jet. A moment later, after the pod stopped spinning uncontrollably and began falling toward the earth, I once again created a field around the craft and directed it upwards as fast as I dared.
I kept my eyes trained on the GPS monitor strapped to the wrist of my spacesuit, careful to make sure I wasn’t climbing too quickly. While the Command Module I was in had been designed to reenter the atmosphere at well over the speeds I planned on travelling, it had been equipped with ablative heat shielding that was now long gone. Not wanting to press my luck, I didn’t dare travel faster than the sound barrier until I was well clear of the atmosphere, past sixty-five miles of altitude.
As the craft climbed ever higher, I spared a glance out of the hatch to my left, but all I saw was a desolate, foreboding black horizon stretched out beneath me. From what I had understood, the cargo jet had flown me almost due north to bring me closer to the rendezvous point with the Space Station, which would be somewhere over Hudson Bay in northern Canada, if all went according to plan.
I leveled off after ten minutes of continuous ascent, seeing that I was at the same altitude as the station. I took a steadying breath, already feeling the stabbing pain behind my eyes that I had learned to associate with over-using my powers. It seemed the extended use of my power, both to fly to Cleveland and then to get up to altitude, combined with the fatigue of not sleeping in over thirty hours, had been enough to put me over the edge. Still, I maintained the field over the module to keep it suspended, motionless, two hundred and fifty miles above the earth.
Prime Identity Page 14
