The Octopus Effect

by Michael Reisman

  “What, your spying Narrator didn’t know something?” Sirabetta spat as she cradled the former Keeper’s head. “Alive,” she whispered. “She’s still alive.”

  “Of course she’s alive,” Simon said, sounding indignant.

  Sirabetta stood and clenched her hands into fists as she stared down the path at Simon. “You’re going to pay, Bloom,” she growled. “For standing in my way, for ruining my life, and for daring to harm my mother.”

  Simon pointed at his friends spread out on the ground, also unconscious, and his expression hardened. “If she helped you do that,” he snarled, “then she got justice. And that’s what you’ll get, too.”

  Even the Breeze stopped blowing as Sirabetta cracked her knuckles, and Simon rolled his neck and shoulders. As they both prepared to unleash powers beyond imagination.

  CHAPTER 44

  THE NIGHT THEY DROVE OLD DUNKERHOOK DOWN

  Sirabetta activated a blue tattoo on one arm, launching herself up into the air. At the same time, Simon soared upward with a twist of gravity.

  They maneuvered quickly but carefully, swooping and ducking under and around branches, and circling huge tree trunks. This hide-and-seek led them out into the clearing or, rather, high above it. Suddenly they faced each other across open air.

  “No more dancing, Simon,” Sirabetta snarled.

  Simon changed his gravitational pull so he could hover. He lashed out with a gravity arm, snatched Sirabetta, and whipped her at the nearest tree. With visible effort, she tore free of his grip and flew back to her place.

  “Did you forget?” she said. “Gravity—your favorite toy— doesn’t work on me. Here’s a new toy for you.” She fired a ball of star-stuff at him; it sizzled the air as it flew.

  Simon gasped. Like Owen, he was shocked that Sirabetta could now use more than one tattoo at a time. He didn’t hesitate, though; he’d gotten used to thinking on his feet (or, as now, in midair). And he didn’t need much thought to set his gravity arms in motion.

  Simon grabbed the searing ball in a coil of gravity. Stars, after all, were as subject to gravity as anything else in the universe. He whipped it around and slung it back at her. “No,” he yelled. “You keep it!”

  Sirabetta cursed under her breath and barely managed to send another star-ball at this one in time to destroy it. The backlash of force and flame staggered her in the air, knocking her backward.

  “Impressive, Bloom. Too bad you’re not so slick with space-time. Maybe your friends wouldn’t be lying in a pile in the dirt. It’s a pity they trusted you as a leader.”

  Simon gritted his teeth. He had made a mistake with space-time, yes, but he wasn’t going to allow guilt to wash over him, or self-doubt to distract him. Not this time—not ever again, if he could help it. It was courage and confidence—tempered with caution—that made a good leader. And whether he wanted to be or not, that’s what Simon was.

  Sirabetta fired off a series of six of the burning globes at Simon, but he used gravity arms to flick the first two star-balls aside, sending them deep into the woods. They blew apart a pair of distant treetops, setting them ablaze. He snagged the other four out of the air and sent them soaring back at Sirabetta. She bobbed and weaved to avoid them, singeing her leg on the fiery tail of one that came too close. They exploded beyond her, destroying several massive trees and igniting many others.

  Sirabetta looked at the devastation behind her and smirked. “Wrecking your beloved woods?” she said. “I can help.” She pointed to a yellow tattoo—her deforestation control—and, with a wink, activated it. Her formula cut through the bases of the trunks of the biggest trees around the clearing, eating away at the wood.

  The sight of Dunkerhook being torn apart wounded Simon, but rather than show it, he went for Sirabetta’s soft spot. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll hit your mommy?”

  “You don’t get to speak about her!” Sirabetta screamed. She set off air pressure explosions on the far sides of the trees, toppling them toward Simon. He narrowly avoided the enormous columns of dying wood. She hurled another barrage of star-balls at him, one after another in rapid succession. There were too many for him to grab and throw back without getting hit.

  But this was not the same Simon Bloom who had been confounded by how to fight the mammoths—at last he understood and accepted what he was capable of. He could shape gravity to his will with his extra arms . . . and gravity was the same stuff that could crush buildings and move planets.

  Simon quickly used his gravity-coils to grab large pieces of broken trees and swing them like gigantic baseball bats. “I. Am. Getting. Sick. Of. You. Lady!” he shouted, punctuating each word with another swing. Each impact between wood and star-ball resulted in a terrible, forest-shaking explosion and a shower of wooden shrapnel across the entire area.

  Sirabetta used her heat and deforestation tattoos to annihilate the shards that flew at her, while Simon spoke a gravity-reverse that flung the pieces away. Both fighters sustained small cuts and burns from the chunks of wood that slipped past their defenses or ricocheted off trees behind them.

  After several minutes, the clearing fell quiet. Sirabetta and Simon floated idly, squinting to see through the smoky air. Both panted; Sirabetta was feeling the strain from her heavy tattoo activity, and Simon was growing weary from his constant formula use. They looked around and saw considerably fewer trees in Dunkerhook Woods than there’d been before.

  “Is this what chess players call a stalemate?” Sirabetta asked.

  “I don’t know—never played chess,” Simon said, stone-faced and gruff-voiced.

  “Can I convince you to give up?” Sirabetta asked. “What if I promised to let you go? I only want the Book, Bloom.”

  “The Book stays with me. I won’t give in,” Simon said. “Not ever.”

  “So heroic,” she growled. “Or is it stubborn? Either way, you’re a fool.” She directed an air pressure burst at him, but Simon wrapped a gravitational field around the rapidly expanding air, compressing it back to the way it was.

  Sirabetta sighed, sweat pouring down her face. “Well, that didn’t work, did it?”

  Simon breathed heavily and smiled. “Nope. Tattoos still hurt to use, huh?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “You know, you can give up,” Simon said. “Surrender, have the tattoos taken off, stop trying to kill people, go for coun seling.”

  “Yeah, right!” she spat. “After what I suffered, all the unfair treatment I got, I deserve this victory! And when I’m done, it’ll be a better world for the Union and the Outsiders.”

  They bobbed silently on the air in the ruins of the forest, floating lower to the ground in their weariness. Both breathed deeply as the Breeze blew away the acrid smell of charred wood and ashed greenery. They drifted close enough to talk quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” Simon said, “but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I think you want power and you want revenge and you’re probably a little crazy.”

  Though Simon’s words were harsh, his tone was gentle; he wasn’t even mad at Sirabetta anymore. He felt bad for her, just from knowing only a sliver of what had happened in her past.

  “You’re probably right,” Sirabetta said. Her voice was calm, almost serene, perhaps finally moving past her rage. “But I’ve come too far to stop now.” She sighed. “I know you’re just a kid. Powerful, but a kid nonetheless. You don’t have the killer instinct. Even after all you’ve done to me, I wish it didn’t have to end like this. Truly.” She took a deep breath. “But it does.”

  Sirabetta chose another blue formula: activating it unleashed waves of fierce heat that reached Simon in a split second.

  Simon screamed as the air around him burst aflame and he was blasted by the heat. The Book fell through his disintegrating backpack and to the forest floor. Sirabetta saw this and her eyes lit up; she need only swoop down and grab it. But that moment of distraction proved disastrous.

  See, the heat she generated was caused
by a type of radiation: infrared light. And light could be affected by gravity, too. It took a lot of gravitation—much more than needed to lift a mammoth—but with the right inspiration, Simon had near-infinite gravitational control at his disposal.

  The agony he felt from the heat caused his body’s natural epinephrine to surge, giving him the same effect as from a boost of Targa’s formula. And Simon, desperate to undo this scorching attack, unleashed a mighty gravitational warp.

  It was focused on the burning air and radiating heat, extinguishing the fire that engulfed him and the woods around him. It also bent the waves of heat, twisting them along the intricate web of gravity and sending them raging back to their source. Back to Sirabetta.

  She had no way to defend herself against such an assault, and she screamed at the sizzling air as it surrounded her. She turned off her tattoo, cutting the source of the heat in time to save herself from all but a slight singeing, but Simon wasn’t done.

  His pain and anger pushed him to a level of gravitational force that he couldn’t control, and it all slammed into Sirabetta. The tattoo that let her resist previous attacks could not match this, and she was dragged down to the forest floor.

  Simon formed a gravity bubble around Sirabetta, drawing in dirt and stone and wood and air, and compressing it all ever more tightly until it risked crushing her.

  For a fraction of a second, even the light waves curved and distorted, blurring Sirabetta’s appearance, but then the strain burst Simon’s control. Consciousness fled him and he fell to the forest floor.

  He landed hard about ten feet from where Sirabetta lay, bruised and battered, amid a pile of forest wreckage. Neither combatant moved. In between them, its cover closed and sealed shut, sat undamaged the Teacher’s Edition of Physics.

  Long moments passed, and amid the ruins of Dunkerhook Woods, there was silence once again.

  CHAPTER 45

  TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

  Thanks to his octopus resilience, Simon stirred first. The fall had hurt, though, and the burns from Sirabetta’s attack were painful, too. His hair was partially burned off, and his skin was seared. He was not a pretty sight.

  Simon took a few deep breaths and then rasped the formula for space-time, aiming it at himself. It reversed his injuries, taking his molecules back in time several minutes until right before Sirabetta’s heat attack. His hair, clothing, and backpack reformed, too, as if they had never been burned. Thanks to the space-time warp, they hadn’t.

  It was a highly localized way of affecting time, though. He didn’t move in space; he remained there on the ground instead of reappearing back in midair. Also, the Book did not reappear in Simon’s backpack as it had been before; it stayed on the forest floor between Simon and Sirbetta. Apparently, the only space-time shifts that could affect the Book were its own.

  Simon was weary from his exertions, and he couldn’t use space-time to undo that—using space-time was a draining effort in itself. Plus, he still bore the sting of all the cuts and bruises he’d gotten during the bulk of the fight; he’d only reversed time up to the point of the heat attack. That had been tiring enough for him.

  Sirabetta groaned and stirred. She shifted some of the debris around her and coughed at the smoke she’d inhaled. She sat up and saw Simon, just ten feet away, staring at her. Then she saw the Book on the ground and gasped. She reached out for it with one hand—the hand that was tattooed with the multicolored mark of the Board of Administration. It was the most crucial of all her tattoos; it allowed her to force the Book to work for her.

  The tattoo worked best with physical contact; if she could get hold of the Book, she could do whatever she wished with it. But she was too weak to walk or even crawl, so she tugged at it with the tattoo’s limited influence.

  Simon was too tired to use gravity yet. He called to the Book, trying to use his Keeper-link to pull it back to him. The Book trembled, trapped between two summonings. At just five feet away, with the Book out of Simon’s possession, Sirabetta’s tattoo gave her just enough of a hold to cause another stalemate.

  Simon wracked his brain for what to do. He thought of space-time, the very same formula that had turned Sirabetta from a thirty-something into a thirteen-year-old. He could try reversing what he did last time, and restore Sirabetta to her true age; perhaps twenty years of growth would stretch out her new tattoos and make then unusable. But, then again, they might still work, and she’d have an adult’s physical strength, too.

  Better yet, if he made her much older—perhaps elderly—the tattoos would be unreadable on her wrinkled skin, and she would also be physically weaker. It was worth trying.

  Simon spoke the words for space-time, aiming it at Sirabetta while hoping he was using it properly.

  Maybe it was that—Simon not knowing how to control the formula in this way. Or perhaps it was Sirabetta’s and Simon’s split mastery over the Book that so distorted the effect. It probably had at least a little to do with the space-time connection between Simon and Sirabetta. And it certainly didn’t help that Simon was so tired. But whatever the cause, the effect was . . . dramatic.

  The sound of air ripping dominated that part of the forest. A dusty smell spread through the area, but that, like the air ripping, was part of the normal unpleasantness of space-time bending.

  A blue glow surrounded Sirabetta. “No!” she wailed. “Not again!” Her entire body rippled like water in the wind, and then she grew. She aged. From thirteen to thirty-three in seconds. There was a tearing sound, and she grabbed at her wet suit, desperate to keep it covering her now more womanly body.

  “I’m back,” Sirabetta shouted triumphantly. “No more acne! No more puberty! No more getting treated like a kid!” She looked down and grinned; though her tattoos had stretched a bit with her changed age, they were still intact.

  But then, as Simon gaped, her body rippled again and returned to thirteen. “NO!” she screamed. “This is not fair!” The wet suit, though torn or stretched in a few key places, was now the right size again. She clenched her fists. “You’ve done this to me for the last time!”

  She extended a hand toward him and looked down at a tattoo, but she froze, with lips pursed on the first syllable. Her skin was wavering again and, before her startled eyes, returned to age thirty-three once more. She clutched at the wet suit. “Oh, you have got to be kidding,” she rasped, her voice too spent to yell anymore.

  Simon gulped. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Like you don’t know,” she said. “Like this isn’t some sick joke of yours. I’ve had enough of you, Simon Bloom. I’ll fix this myself once I have the Book!” She pointed her hand at him and chose a different tattoo.

  Simon was too weak to use gravity, octopus-style or not, but he knew he had to stop her. He reacted with instincts he didn’t know he had—another octopus attribute—and spat something vile and viscous from his mouth.

  A puddle of jet-black fluid shot through the air at Sirabetta. She screamed hoarsely as the liquid struck her, coating her face and arm in octopus ink. “Ahhh! What is this?” she shrieked.

  Simon was too busy trying to get ink off of his tongue to answer; he felt like he’d gargled with water paint.

  Sirabetta swiped at the liquid clinging to her, then gave up and turned to her other arm. Simon prepared to let loose with another ink attack, but he paused. He didn’t understand what had happened: Sirabetta was surrounded by a blue glow and wasn’t moving. Not even blinking or breathing. Had he done something without realizing it?

  He was too puzzled and tired to think; he just waited numbly for something to happen. At the sound of laughter, he looked around; it was definitely not from Sirabetta.

  “It’s okay, you can relax,” a deep male voice said between chuckles. “I’m sorry, I should have done something sooner, but I had to see that again. It’s been a while since the first time, and I was too surprised to really appreciate it then. Want a breath mint?”

  Simon whirled his head around and stared
at the source of the voice: a young man in his twenties or late teens. And he looked so familiar.

  “You’re thinking I look familiar right now, aren’t you?” the young man asked. “And you’re wondering if you need to try and whip up one of your patented gravity-coils to take care of me. Don’t worry, I’m a friend. The best friend you’ll ever have.”

  “Who are you?” Simon asked, though on some level part of him knew. He thought he knew, but he couldn’t believe it was even possible.

  “It is possible, and it is true,” the young man said.

  “Are you reading my mind?” Simon asked.

  “Nah,” the young man answered. “I just remember what I was thinking; I remember it vividly, ’cause it was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen in twelve years of life. And considering I was Keeper of the Order of Physics then, that’s saying something.”

  “Um . . . what?” was the best Simon could think of to say.

  “Oh, man. I’m you. I’m Simon Bloom. Simon Bloom from the future, to be exact.”

  “Oh,” Simon said. “Thanks for clearing that up.” And then he passed out.

  CHAPTER 46

  DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER . . . ESPECIALLY IF IT’S YOU

  Simon was jarred awake by a strange, unpleasant buzzing. “What?” he shouted, sitting up with a jolt.

  “Sorry to wake you,” the young man said. “I don’t have much time. Don’t worry, you’ll have a chance to rest soon. Before things get really crazy.”

  “You—” Simon stammered. “You said you’re me!”

  The young man gave a gentle smile. “I am you. I know it’s hard to believe; trust me, I know exactly how you feel.” He frowned. “Though I could have sworn I was a little taller at that age. Hmmm. Maybe it’s time you laid off the soda and started drinking milk, huh?”

  Simon just stared. Then he remembered Sirabetta. “What about—?”

  The young man (for the sake of easier narrating, I’ll call him Future Simon) waved a hand casually. “Oh, don’t worry about her. She’s frozen in time now. It’s a complicated trick; it’ll take you a while to get the hang of it.”