“Hmm.” He scratched at his beard as he consulted my records. “So... you’re thirty-nine?”
“Yes.” I squirmed as he studied me over the rim of his glasses.
“That’s right.” He tapped the monitor with the tip of his pen and smiled. “You were that nanite serum case a few weeks ago, weren’t you? Fascinating study.”
My eyes flickered to the door as it cracked open. A nurse poked her head in and smiled as she handed a printout to the doctor. He glanced at me, an eyebrow raised, after looking over the paper and setting it aside.
“Do you know what’s wrong?” Kiara studied him critically as he wheeled a monitor over to my side.
“I think so.” He looked at me. “Can you lift your shirt?”
I nodded and pulled my shirt up as I glanced at Kiara. She smiled reassuringly at me, though her smile faltered as he clicked the monitor on and squeezed some clear gel onto what I recognized as an ultrasound transducer.
“From your records, it looks like you had your last IUD placed three years ago?”
“Sounds right?” I shuddered at the cold feel of the gel as he pressed the transducer into my stomach a few inches below my navel.
“Sounds right?” He raised an eyebrow again, not even sparing me a glance as he squinted at the monitor.
“Well, I wasn’t in this body three years ago.” I winced. “My wife and I ended up in each other’s bodies a little over two months ago. But I think three years is about right.”
“Did you really?” He looked at me that time, though I thought the shock on his face was a little much. “I must say, you have quite an interesting medical history.”
“I’ve told her she should write a book.” Kiara smiled pleasantly.
“Well.” He sighed and pulled the monitor around for my benefit. “I wish I could say differently, but I think your medical history is about to get even more interesting. It looks like, somehow, your IUD’s been removed.”
“How...?” I blinked and stared at the jumbled black-and-white image on the screen to try and make sense of it.
“I would guess...” He paused and squinted at the monitor, then adjusted a few settings on the ultrasound. “With all the radical changes to your body from that serum two weeks ago, your IUD was displaced and dispelled from your uterus. Whatever happened, though, it’s pretty clear it’s not there now.”
“But...” I stammered, looking between the doctor and the monitor. “That would have happened weeks ago. Why would I suddenly start feeling sick now?”
“When did your last period start?” He looked back at me, his pen poised over the papers in front of him.
“Umm... November nineteenth?” I glanced once again at Kiara, confused, as he scribbled something down. “I think I’m on something like a twenty-seven-day cycle though. I’m not supposed to start my next one until Saturday. Please don’t tell me all of this is just me PMSing.”
“It’s not.” He smiled in a reassuring way. His eyes were back on the monitor as he shifted the transducer slightly and pushed it harder into my belly. “Have you been sexually active in the past two weeks?”
“Er... yes,” I mumbled, not daring to look at Kiara as my face burned from embarrassment.
“Oh my...” She put a hand over her mouth, causing me to look at her. “She isn’t... She can’t be... Is she?”
“Blood test confirmed it.” He nodded and pointed to a small circle at the center of the screen. “Mrs. Grayson, you’re pregnant.”
I was mostly silent throughout dinner a few hours later, weighed down with the revelations of the day. I desperately wanted to speak with Jake alone, but for that, I had to get through what had become a daily exercise during dinner of Nicole drilling me about what I had done during the day as Gravita.
Jake pursed his lips later that night once the kids were in bed and we were both getting settled for the evening. “So, what really happened today, with that sting operation?”
Unexpected relief flooded over me as I met his gaze. He had picked it up, then, even from the scarce details Nicole had brought up during dinner. He knew something about the official account was off.
I felt a cathartic release at being able to finally tell someone everything that had happened between Evelyn and me. I saw the surprise and then guarded anger that burned in his eyes as I talked about her claim that the Syndicate had infiltrated the arbiter program, how I had doubted her claims, but then after seeing the aftermath of the bomb, had started to wonder if she were right.
“Did you tell them all this in the debrief?” He spoke just above a whisper, his eyes fixed on a spot on the floor.
“I just said she tried to coerce me into cutting her a deal, but I didn’t go into more detail than that.”
“Good. Don’t tell them.”
“What?” I watched as he stood up and paced around the room.
“For a while, Kiara and I wondered if there were someone in the program leaking to rogues. Over the past year, there just have been too many seemingly unimportant coincidences. I’m sure you’ve started to wonder yourself, haven’t you? How the Syndicate knew you were at the girls’ high school? How they knew you were going to be at that rally downtown?”
“You don’t think they’ve gotten through to the administrators, do you?”
“We can’t know for certain.” He frowned, but then just shook his head. “Though, personally, I don’t think so. Anyone making it to admin would be very hard to be persuaded to turn traitor. No, I think it’s much more likely an arbiter is the mole. With the access they have to information within the program, any one of them would be able to give the Syndicate the information they’ve been working with.”
“Then, I should have told admin.”
“No. I’m certain admin’s aware of the problem already. With everything from debrief sessions being available to arbiters to review, all you would have done is tip off the mole that you knew about them. At this point, any information we can keep from them is worth holding onto.”
I waited for him to continue, but as he sat back onto the bed without saying another word, I couldn’t help but ask the question that had been on the back of my mind for the past month. “What do you think the Syndicate is planning with me?”
“I think...” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “They want to use you to make an Einstein-Rosen bridge.”
“In English?”
“A wormhole. A portal through spacetime.”
“But...” I frowned. “There are primes that can already do that. One of the rogues in the lab could make portals. That’s how they got all the stuff out.”
“There are some primes that can make spatial tunnels, yes. But no one, that I’m aware of, has been able to make temporal tunnels.”
“Jake—”
“They can travel through space. They can’t travel through time.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?” I massaged my forehead. “Seriously. I’m starting to feel like I’m on an episode of Star Trek, or something. But now that you mention it, I was able to collapse the portal that the rogue made in the lab.”
“You did?” He rubbed his chin, deep in thought.
I nodded, and with a start, remembered what had come to me when I saw that rogue crafting those portals in the lab the month before. The girl from my past had been able to jump through space with no more than a thought. If she could jump through space, did that mean she could jump through time just as easily?
“You really think I could travel through time?”
“According to one theory of general relativity, yes.” He held up a finger. “But I wouldn’t recommend you try. Remember what I said about breaking the fabric of spacetime? Making a time bridge would involve basically doing that to the spacetime around you, with all the incredible energy that would go along with it. And that’s assuming the theory is right in the first place. It’s never been tested, so that’s a really big ‘if’. More than likely, you’d just end up annihilating yourself in a pocket of c
ollapsed spacetime.”
“But do you think it’s possible?”
He was silent for a long while. I started to think he wouldn’t answer as he stared down at his hands, but then he whispered, “I do.”
I took a deep breath as he once again lapsed into silence. I wouldn’t say it to him, but it made a lot of sense to me as well. From everything I knew so far, unlike virtually every other prime in the world, she had the exact same powerset I now had. It would only make sense, then, that I could jump through spacetime too. Not that it mattered at the moment. I took a deep breath. No use putting this off anymore.
“Well, that’s not the only news I have.”
“Oh?” He didn’t look up.
“Jake.” I put my hand on his arm, and he turned to me with a frown. “I’m pregnant.”
I had imagined, over and over in my head since the doctor’s visit, how he would react when I told him. I had anticipated the shock, disbelief, and fear that would flash across his face in quick succession in the first seconds after hearing there was a new life growing inside me. I already knew fear would be the strongest emotion. It had to be. Seeing that fear realized in his eyes, though, was so much worse than I thought it would be. After all, I couldn’t deny the fear digging at my own heart anymore when it was playing out so plainly before me.
“Are... are you sure?” His voice was steady, belying the way his lower lip trembled as he spoke. Not trusting myself to words, I only nodded, tears already filling my eyes.
A second later, I found myself being dragged across the bed as he reached over and pulled me into a hug. Unable to stop myself, I dissolved into tears as we held each other. “Are you as terrified as I am?”
“Probably,” he whispered.
“What are we going to do? What if—”
“No, we can’t think like that.” His voice broke. “Don’t work yourself up about this, Amber. This time is completely different. I mean, your body is, biologically, much younger now. There’s no reason to think—”
“I don’t think I can go through that again. It almost destroyed us last time. Do you remember?”
“Amber...”
“We can’t lose another baby, Jake.”
18
“SO, JAKE TOOK THE NEWS well?” Kiara glanced away from the traffic light we were sitting at. Evidently, she didn’t think she could convey her full skepticism through her voice alone, based on the look she gave me.
“Considering we’re having a baby in our late thirties, and the age gap between children is going to be fourteen years, I think so.”
“Do the kids know yet?”
“No.” I tapped the armrest on the door as the light changed green. “And to be honest, I’m not sure how to tell them. I thought my family dynamic was weird before.”
“You could always apply to be on sixteen and pregnant.”
I glared at her as the radio on the dash crackled to life.
“Flames, G’s, we have a level-four threat at the River North that’s turning ugly fast. We need you there. Now.”
Kiara grit her teeth and twisted the car through two lanes of traffic to pull it up to the curb. I ignored the chorus of angry car horns behind us as I fixed my helmet on and unbuckled my seat belt.
“It’ll take twenty minutes with this traffic to get there. You good to fly us there?”
“I was planning on it.” I nodded as I climbed out of the car. The few drivers who had been indignant enough at Kiara’s driving to slow down and shout as they passed seemed taken aback at the sight of the two us emerging from the car.
To her credit, Kiara didn’t scream out as I jerked the two of us into the air on a trajectory toward the Chicago River, a fact made more impressive by my knowledge of her fear of heights. As we flew, the dispatch officer relayed to us the details she had up to that point. It looked like what had started as a fight between rival gangs had devolved into an all-out war. What made the situation so much worse was that some of the gang members, it seemed, were primes—and powerful ones, at that. There were already a handful of arbiters on the scene, but with such powerful primes in play, it wasn’t safe to call in regular police forces to mop up the conflict until things were under better control. Kiara and I certainly weren’t the only arbiters en route, but from what we knew, we would likely be some of the first on the scene.
As we passed State Street, my attention was diverted to the scene of a fifty-foot fireball engulfing a crowd near the riverfront half a mile to the south. As I twisted around to watch, a thick bolt of green energy slammed into the cement at the center of another mass of people a few dozen feet from the fireball. The energy washed out from its point of impact in a wave of vapor that, within a second, had wrapped around everyone within ten feet. As it evaporated away only seconds later, I was horrified to see only smoking skeletal remains heaped on the ground.
“I’ll drop you off here.” I darted to the street below and lowered Kiara to the cement of the sidewalk.
“Alright.” She squinted up at me. “If you can take the flame-thrower, I’ll handle green-energy. Something tells me faster reflexes are going to be essential to ending that cleanly.”
I agreed, even as I rose back into the air and sped toward the fight still raging to the south. Below me, I saw a burgundy streak zoom along the sidewalk, easily outstripping my speed.
My eyes tracked another fireball that erupted on the middle of the State Street Bridge, and this time, I was close enough to see who had thrown it.
Extending a hand even as I continued to barrel forward, I gathered the lines of spacetime coming from the man—who at this distance was no more than a pinprick of mass—and pulled him down to the ground.
He flailed his arms weakly as he dropped onto his stomach, but thankfully, he seemed smart enough to not try creating another explosion to get himself free. As I closed the distance between us, I saw another rogue sprinting at full speed into a crowd of pedestrians running from the bridge. Before thinking through a fully-formed strategy, I held out my other hand and crafted a wave of spacetime that bowled into the crowd and knocked them all back, out of the way of the rogue. As the rogue lumbered past the bystanders that were now cowering on the ground, I gripped the spacetime around him and flung him up into the air on an arc back toward the bridge, then turned my attention back to the fire-throwing rogue.
I dropped lithely onto the ground next to him, even while keeping the strengthened gravity field around him to pin him down. As I looked down at him, I felt more than saw the green dissolving energy flashing toward me. With a gravity-assisted jump, I back-flipped out of the way and the energy arched instead through the air under me and slammed into the man’s prone form.
My eyes stayed trained on him, even as his body dissolved into acrid smoke. I had sensed a distortion of spacetime from the energy—a barely discernible trace of lilac lines that hummed from the energy. There wasn’t much to it, but it was enough that I had been able to dodge out of the way without seeing it. If it came to it, I could work with that. As I twisted around and studied the woman who had conjured the energy, I was grateful to see she was still watching me. Good—better for her to be focused on me than on hurting anyone else.
I saw surprise flash across her face as a flaming blade seemingly appeared out of nowhere under her armpit and sliced upward, cutting her arm off while also cauterizing the wound. As she screamed in agony and clutched the stump below her shoulder, Kiara slapped a power-nullifying band over her head and slammed her down to the ground in one practiced motion.
Before anything else could happen, I held both hands up and created a strengthened field of gravity around the street to either side of the bridge to pin down the gang members around me who were still in deadly combat with each other. The odds that any of the remaining thugs were prime—
I reeled as a fist slammed into the side of my helmet. Blinking away the sparks in my vision, I saw a burly man to my right who was already rearing back for another swing.
“G’s, a
re you here yet?” A voice came through crisp from the radio in my helmet as I ducked to the side to avoid the man’s next blow.
“What’s up?” I spoke through gritted teeth as I backed up from the barrage of punches the man aimed at me.
“We’ve neutralized the primes over here on Wabash Avenue,” the voice launched into an explanation, even as I kneed the man in his stomach at the first opening I had seen from his technique. My move didn’t do much—he only took a half-step back and smiled. “But the surrounding buildings have taken a beating. We might need you... Oh, shit!”
I twisted around, my fight with the man forgotten, as I heard screaming behind me. My eyes were drawn upward, where a few blocks away, the Trump Tower was swaying back and forth in the wind.
The man punched me hard in the kidneys while my back was turned. I arched my back out of reflex as a muffled cry escaped my lips. My suit did a good job dampening the blow, but he had still hit hard enough to knock the breath out of me.
He massaged his knuckles and laughed as I turned around to face him. I was still doubled over and clutching my side as he reared his fists back once again.
“What are you supposed to be?” He aimed a punch at my head that I just managed to dodge. “Some sort of discount Gravita?”
“Pretty much, actually.” I forced in a tortured breath through the pain and then forced myself to stand straight.
His eyes went to the galaxy insignia on my chest, and I saw shock flash across his face as realization set in. I had taken the liberty of updating the color scheme of my arbiter uniform when I had it resized for my younger self, which was undoubtedly why he hadn’t recognized me, but the design and aesthetic of my new suit was otherwise identical to my old one. Even without that, the insignia on my chest was Gravita’s symbol. No other arbiter in the US could wear it, and I doubted very much any rogue or vigilante would be stupid enough to try and steal it from me. It was a dead giveaway I was still Gravita. As he twisted around to run, I flexed the spacetime around him and sent him tumbling to the edge of the bridge, where he slammed into the barrier.
Prime Identity Page 22
