“Hmm?” I sensed him turn to watch me, even as I kept my eyes on the dirt pit.
“It’s just... I thought everything had been turned on its head before, but now? Jake, I feel weird even thinking about kissing you. But we’re married. We’re supposed to do way more than just that. How are we going to make this work?”
“We’ll figure this all out. We have time. I’m not going anywhere. Are you?”
“Of course not.” I scowled. “But I’m not the one that’s been saddled with a teenager.”
He sounded irritated. “Babe. We’ve been over this. You’re not a teenager. You’re still a thirty-nine-year-old. You’re just... in a different body now. This isn’t even the first time something like this has happened to us. I thought you would know that by now.”
I winced as I finally looked back at him, uncertain I wanted to ask the question that had been churning in my head for the past day. “Do you think... could you... ever be intimate with me again? Even though I’m literally your teenage self?”
In response, he leaned over and gave me a kiss. My face burned, despite the frigid night pressing in around us, as our lips parted over a minute later.
“Damn,” I whispered.
“What’s wrong?” He looked at me anxiously.
“I forgot what it’s like to be young.”
I grabbed him around the neck and pushed him onto his back as I kissed him again.
I had meant what I said when I told Jake I wasn’t going home until I had a better grasp of my powers. It took a five-minute conversation with arbiter housing for them to set me up with a place to stay until I was ready to come home. That left me with the unenviable position of having to check in at a seedy local motel, but all things considered, it was something I could live with. The way the cleric leered at me as I got my room key made me wish I had worn something more than just a tee shirt and jeans when I left the house, but that couldn’t be helped for the moment.
The next morning, after sleeping for an obscene eight hours, I set out to find some clothes that would fit me that also weren’t my daughter’s. As it was, the clothes on my back were the best I could find from a five-minute raid of Sam’s dresser. I pulled Jake’s oversized jacket over the Jurassic Park logo emblazoned across my chest as I walked across the courtyard to my car. I tried to ignore the way the two men smoking by their car watched me as I passed, though they didn’t seem content to leave it there.
“Hey girl!” One of the men whistled after me. “Nice tits!”
Memories of my first encounter with Greg, coupled with the dozens of other times I had been harassed since becoming a woman, flashed through my mind. It was just too much. I was tired of feeling dirty, like a piece of meat, just for the sin of existing. It certainly didn’t help that I found myself wondering, if either of my daughters were with me, if they would be harassed the same as me.
“What’s that?” I stopped abruptly and spun around to face the two of them.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” the same man asked as his eyes roved over my body.
“Hey, man.” The other man elbowed his friend and looked away from me as I strode up to them. “Leave her alone. She’s just a kid.”
“She can leave if she wants.” The man shrugged and turned back to me. “You wanna come with me, girl?”
“You’re joking, right?” I demanded. “What makes you think I’d even want to talk to a wrinkly turd like you, anyway?”
“Hey!” The man frowned, even as his friend held a hand up to his mouth to hide his laughter. “Why’d ya have to be like that?”
I grit my teeth as he grabbed my butt.
“Get your hand off my ass,” I growled. “Before you end up in the hospital.”
“But you’ve got such a tight ass.” He leaned forward. “Why don’t you—”
His next words were cut short as he was thrown back onto the hood of the car he had been leaning against. He slammed into the windshield from the negative gravity I had shoved against him, and the windshield cracked into an intricate spider’s web around him as he crumpled into a heap.
“My car!” The other man threw his hands up, shock on his face. He shrank away as I turned to him.
“Sorry about that.” I dug through my back pocket to pull out my wallet and fished out a hundred-dollar bill. “Will this cover the windshield?”
He nodded, his eyes never leaving me as I gave him the money and walked away.
It took less time than I thought it would to find clothes. Part of that, I was sure, was because I had been conditioned through years of experience with Jake and the girls that there was a long, drawn out process to finding women’s clothes. They had seemed to turn the whole thing into more of a ritual than anything else, actually. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find the whole thing much easier than expected, with one notable exception. It took much longer than I cared to admit to screw up my courage enough to go in and get measured for a few pairs of bras that would fit me. From the look of things, it would be at least another year of growth before I was back to my old size again.
Sighing as I left the lingerie store with a full bag in hand, I set out for the DPS downtown to get my documentation updated. I hadn’t been pulled over for driving yet, and while I looked old enough that I doubted I would be pulled over, if I ever found myself in that position, I wouldn’t be able to explain why my picture and birthdate were over twenty years older than I looked. Of course, I could probably then show the officer my arbiter credentials, which would be more than enough to get them off my case, but that wasn’t the point. It would be best for me to just update both my registration and driver’s license at the same time, and I could do both at the DPS.
Since I had never been in the Department of Prime Services before, I had no idea what to expect as I walked into the run-down lobby.
“Are you here to register your abilities?” The woman behind the counter smiled as our eyes met. “Or make a claim?”
“Er, neither.” I ran a finger across my forehead to tuck the stray hairs hanging in my eyes behind my ear. “I... uh, need to update my ID’s.”
I held out my registration card by way of explanation, and her eyes went wide as she recognized the photo on my ID. Even if she hadn’t, she would recognize my power class from the crimson holographic background of my card. From there, it wouldn’t take much of a leap to infer who I was.
“Are you...” She paused and studied me as she handed back my registration, then leaned forward and nearly whispered, “Gravita?”
“Yeah.” I shifted feet as she kept watching me. “I had a bit of a weird run-in with a rogue a few days ago.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.” The woman waved a hand as she leaned back and chuckled, then pointed to the elevator behind her. “Fourth floor. They should be able to get you everything you need.”
Unlike every experience I had gone through so far with the arbiter program, I found the DPS to be just as slow and inefficient as I had come to expect any government-run organization to be. In all, it took a little over two hours to make it through the line to get my registration and driver’s license straightened out, but I didn’t mind all that much. The familiarity of having to fill out obscure and overly redundant legal documents, combined with the tediousness of having to wait hours before being seen by anyone, was oddly comforting in a way I hadn’t expected.
After what had happened that morning at the motel, I wasn’t going back there. Thankfully, it only took a five-minute call with housing for them to come up with an alternative place to stay that better suited my plans in any case.
That was how I found myself eight hours later pulling off a small country road and onto a narrow dirt road that cut a mile-long path through the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The sun had set hours before, and light snow drifted down from the sky overhead, obscuring any light from the nearly full moon high above as I drove. I found a little log cabin at the end of the road where I would be staying for the next few days. It was
technically property of the US forestry service, but apparently the arbiter program was on good enough terms with the other branches of government that they could pull in these sorts of favors when needed.
I heard wolves howling through the darkened trees around me as I pulled the small suitcase I had packed from the house hours before out of the trunk and trundled up the snow-laden path between the cabin and the end of the dirt road. There was a combination box by the front of the cabin that I used to get the key to the front door, and after fumbling for a minute in the cold, I let myself into the cabin before shutting and locking the door behind me.
I was so far out in the woods that the cabin didn’t have electricity. Instead, there was a diesel generator out back that I would perhaps fire up the following evening to give me light to see by, but for the time being, the kerosene lanterns I found in the main room would serve my needs just as well.
I sighed as I set a tea pot on the stove to boil, thinking I would have a cup of tea to brace myself while I waited for the furnace to warm the cabin. I rubbed my forehead as I settled into a chair at the table and I cast back over the events of the day. Since being injected by that serum, I had used my powers twice, both times when I was angry. The second time had been intentional, but I had felt something absolutely different about my powers from both of those experiences. The second time in particular, I had known I didn’t have my powers calibrated, so I had been very careful to only give as small of a nudge as I could muster. What was more, I had used negative curvature, which as a rule was always harder to tap into and never as strong as positive curvature.
My powers, though, had been effortless to access. I hadn’t meant to send the man flying, but it had happened the instant I had reached out to use them. There was no way I could use my powers again around anyone else until I got a grip on them.
“But that’s why I’m here,” I told myself as I got up from hearing the pot come to a boil.
I settled into bed a few minutes later with a cup of Earl Grey tea on my bed stand. I knew I had a long few days ahead of me, but for just a few minutes, I allowed myself the luxury of curling up in bed with a favorite book in hand while the wolves outside filled the night with their mournful song.
The next morning, I stood in a clearing a few hundred feet from the cabin with a hand out and my eyes closed as I concentrated on sensing the mass around me as far as I possibly could. Within the span of seconds, my mind was nearly overloaded as I took in everything for miles and miles around. There were the obvious things I could identify without a second thought, like the steady movement of the nearest car winding along a road three miles away behind me, or the gentle circulation of the sluggish water trapped under the thick ice of the lake a mile or so to my right. Then there were the not-so-obvious things, like the almost non-existent motion from some creature hibernating in its burrow a few feet into the frozen earth no more than a thousand feet to my left. From its mass alone, I wondered if it weren’t a badger. I smiled at the thought, given the state I was currently in.
I could even feel the individual particles of air thrumming with their chaotic energy as they moved all around me. I felt them pulsating as they etched trillions upon trillions of paths through the trees to catch pockets of powder off the pine needles every so often to send light flurries of snow cascading to the ground. If I concentrated, I could even pick apart the composition of the molecules in the air, discerning between nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases.
Before, everything with mass had felt purple. Now, mass took on a completely different depth and dimension. It was like suddenly being able to see after a lifetime of being blind. It was still distinctly purple, but the experience transcended so much more than just one mere sense and color now. Water, air, dirt, metal—they all shimmered and hummed at such different shades and tones, each clear enough that I could pick them apart and touch them individually without a second thought. They filled my nose with a distinct smell as I focused on each one in turn. That sort of acuity was far beyond the limits of what I could even imagine just a week before. It was intoxicating.
Testing the limits of my control, I focused on the mass-signature coming from the snow and ignored everything else. I grasped the lines of spacetime from as much of the snow within my senses that I could and pulled them all up into the air. I opened my eyes to see all the snow within eyesight falling up from the ground and off the trees, swirling toward a center point a few thousand feet in the air above me. As I focused on that growing clump of snow, I pulled myself into the air as well, the better to see my work. As I floated up above the tree line, I was shocked to discover I was pulling up the snow from miles around. I probed my grav-sense and realized the car I had sensed miles away was stopping. For a wild moment, I worried I was somehow pulling the car to a stop, but that couldn’t be right. I knew I was only pulling snow. The truth dawned on me as the car abruptly sped up a moment later. The spectacle I was putting on had apparently frightened the driver into slowing down for a moment.
With a sheepish smile, I turned my attention back to the cloud of snow swirling above me and held my hands out as the frigid air above the trees whipped at the exposed skin of my face and neck. I had brought a winter jacket with me, but had left it in the cabin. I needed to hurry before the cold really got to me.
The cloud collapsed inward as I snapped the spacetime around it into a gravity well deep in the center of the mile-wide disk of swirling snow. In the span of seconds, the snow compacted into a perfectly smooth sphere of ice five hundred feet across. I grit my teeth and narrowed the field of compressed spacetime while also cranking up the strength of the field.
The ice cracked under the pressure, shimmering as it compressed more and more. For an ephemeral second, the ice melted into a bubble of water, which rippled into a sphere of ice a second later under the intense pressure. Still, it wasn’t enough. I had to go farther.
I pushed the gravity well up higher, even as I lowered myself back down below the level of the trees. Some predilection warned me to move the sphere of ice even further away as the ice shimmered from the pressure it was under. I shut my eyes and looked away as I sensed the ice about to buckle.
An intense wave of heat washed over me as the five-hundred-foot bubble of ice imploded into a sphere a fraction of its original size. I was shocked, though, as I sensed that the orb of matter could still be compressed more.
I opened my eyes and glanced upwards only for a fraction of a second to see the pinprick of brilliant light hanging more than half a mile above me in the air. I wondered for a brief second if I should try to compress the sphere further, but from the intense heat that washed over me even while it was thousands of feet away, combined with the enormous pressure the matter was already under, I decided against it. I had already seen more than enough to know my powers were well beyond what I could manage before, and I hadn’t even scraped the surface of the well of power I had within me. As it was, I knew that, if I weren’t focused on holding in the enormous energy rippling away from the matter, the entire countryside would have been sterilized from the radiation coming off the sphere of collapsed matter. My mind swam as I focused on the amount of energy that was straining to be released from it. I didn’t have a very good sense of how energy felt to my grav-sense yet, but I had enough of one to know this was orders of magnitude more energy than I had ever handled before.
Over the next half hour, I worked to slowly ease off the gravity compressing the water, all too aware I had effectively just created a nuclear-reactive core of degenerate matter. Without an insane amount of pressure to keep the matter compressed, I would have a miniature nova on my hands. Finally, after the last fraction of the ice core exploded out into another cloud of vapor, I wiped the sweat off my forehead as my head was slammed by a debilitating headache from the extended overuse of my powers. It was fine to know I could produce curvature near the limit of what the fabric of spacetime could sustain, but that wasn’t what I had come out to the cabin
to train for. I had to know I was still able to control my powers when only working with fractions of the earth’s gravity, which I knew from experience would be most of what I would use in the field anyway. I could take an Excedrin for the headache. The knowledge gained, on the other hand, was well worth it.
By my second night in the cabin, I figured out why I seemed to have so much trouble toning down my powers. Sometime around two in the morning, I woke with a start, an uneasy feeling in my stomach. While I fumbled in the dark to relight the kerosene lantern on my bedside table, I thought I heard something moving in the darkness around me. I tried reaching out to my grav-sense, but then realized I was already using it. What I had taken to be sound was the movement of something heavy about a hundred feet from the cabin. As I flared the lantern, I sensed the thing, whatever it was, wander away.
Before, there had always been a division between me and my powers, a barrier I had to breach to reach them. Now, my powers were inseparable from my conscious mind. And, given my grav-sense had woken me from a dead sleep, it seemed to extend beyond my conscious mind as well.
While that revelation left me with many more questions than it answered, it did help me the next day to call only the energy I needed to warp the spacetime around me. Using my grav-sense before had always turned my eyes purple, but now that didn’t seem to be the case, for which I was grateful. Since I couldn’t turn my sense off anymore, I would have been left with permanently glowing eyes, a dead-giveaway that I was prime.
Later that day, after a few more hours of training, I felt confident enough with my micro-control that I decided I was ready to go home. I still wanted to get more practice in, but I had learned what I needed to know, that my powers were still within my control. I could be safe around my family. With that in mind, I packed my suitcase while I made myself some lunch. I wanted to practice more in the afternoon, but assuming the weather held, I would leave for home before the sun set.
“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” I called, my eyes trained on the pine needles I balanced on their tips in the palm of my hand.
Prime Identity Page 20
