by Chris Adrian
Five paralytics, two amputees, one serene vegetable, and a girl named Musette, twenty years old but with the physical, intellectual, and emotional repertoire of an eight-week-old; none of them could withstand Jemma, though their parents offered unexpected assaults on her. “What are you doing to my baby?” was the question that they asked as they sat up out of sleep, or as they clawed at Jemma, or threw syringes like darts, or tried to whack her with a spare IV pole. “Watch and see,” Jemma told them, striking them too with the green fire; to disconnect their voluntary musculature was as easy as flipping off a switch. They crumpled to the floor and watched with unblinking eyes as their children flew from bed in a Christmas-morning leap, or as bones grew in slender filligree from pale stumps, to bud and bloom in green fire that took the form and then the substance of muscle, ligament, and tendon, fat, fascia, and skin. Jemma’s mind performed new motions determined by the problem: the spinal lesions of the paralytics glowed in her head, galling and bitter and ugly; she smoothed her thumb just over the spot on their spines while doing something that made her feel as if her brain was sneezing, shoving violently at either end of the wrongness and holding every fiber of the bundle in her consciousness, counting them like the hairs of a head and commanding them to unite. Bone and flesh had to be encouraged, delicately at first, and then ecstatically, to venture into the air and fill up the felt, phantom image with a real thing. The vegetable required a shout, spoken silent on Jemma’s lips, but sounding louder than any word previously spoken inside the child’s head. She sat up with a start, folding violently from the hips, and her eyes flew open with her mouth. “I’m awake already,” she said sullenly. “Jeesh.”
Fixing Musette was a stranger task. She lay in her bed, gnawing on her fists and looking out the window at the moon, her gown rising up just below her breasts. Rivulets of drool ran down her wrists and arms to drip from her elbow. She made a constant noise, a low little moan interrupted every few moments by a cough or a giggle. Her mother was on the floor, her head at Jemma’s foot, an IV pole dropped at her side.
Jemma put her hands on Musette’s head, her fingers disappearing into a thick mass of greasy black curls. It was easy to make over her mushy brain, to burn it until it was perfect, but harder to restore the lost, neverborn personality. Jemma thought it would be, like everything so far, a matter of will; she only had to want it enough, to push hard enough, and it would grow inside of Musette like the ruined tissue of her cortex. So Jemma pushed hard; this patient burned brighter than any previous. Musette’s lungs, chronically wet and infected from aspirating her own saliva, dried up; her skin, blighted by acne, cleared; the greasy fountain in her scalp, which formerly put out such volume that she left stains wherever she lay her moaning, idiot head, slowed to a trickle, just enough to put a lustrous shine in her hair. Jemma kept pushing even when these things were done, because she still sensed only blankness inside. Musette’s snaggly, sharp teeth straightened and dulled, hairy moles leapt away from her skin like black ladybugs taking flight; still she was blank. It wasn’t until Jemma, hopping with frustration, accidentally stepped on the mother’s face that she realized what she must do to put the child right. As her foot touched flesh she understood how Musette must be filled. She slipped out of her clog and felt along the mother’s face with her bare foot, working her big toe into the lady’s mouth, then pushed her hands deeper into Musette’s now enviable curls. She could not put a name to what flowed into her toe, up her spine and over her shoulders, down her arms and hands into her fingers and into Musette, but she felt as if she were transplanting and transforming the desires and daydreams of the woman at her feet, every aspect of a lost child meticulously imagined during twenty years of caring for the body holding its place. What the mother had dreamed became real, or what the mother had guarded was returned to the girl who had lost it.
Jemma finally took her hands away and fell back against the window, repelled somehow by the enormity of what she’d just accomplished. She was suddenly very afraid of Musette, afraid of what she might do, this new thing. Maybe she would be angry that she’d been pulled from her blank heaven, placed in a punished world, and afflicted with the capacity to understand what she’d lost. Musette turned her eyes from the moon and sat up, patting her hair like someone whose first concern upon rising is the state of their coif. She yawned and put a hand on her belly, then looked up at Jemma. “I’d like a cheese sandwich, please,” she said.
“Can’t help you,” Jemma said, and hurried away, casting back a thought to release the mother as she passed through the door. She was not the least bit tired as she raced down to the eighth floor, feet striking green sparks from the stairs. She thought she should be exhausted, but she was exhilarated, running down the rainbow hall of the heme-onc ward, and there were all sorts of complicated issues, aspects of what she had done, what she was doing, and what would come before she finished, that should be crowding in her brain. She ought to just have a seat and consider things, but she could hardly be expected, right now, to do something so boring. Exhilaration drove her and excused her. She tore by the nurses’ station, ignoring their shouts. When she stopped outside Ethel Puffer’s door she noticed that one was pursuing her.
“Just what do you think—” Her shrieky little whisper was silenced when Jemma paralyzed her vocal cords. In a display of skill that developed as she exercised it, she took away control of the rest of the nurse’s muscles in a slow upward stroke, toes to scalp, so she did not collapse but folded slowly to the ground.
Jemma’s hands gave the only light in the deep dark of Ethel’s room. “I am here,” she said.
“Go away,” said Ethel.
“There’s something I have to do. Something wonderful.”
“You’ve got some shit on your hands. Kryptonite or something.”
“Or something,” said Jemma.
“I’ll call the nurse.” Ethel’s voice was coming from different places around the room, but Jemma could not hear her moving.
“She’s right outside the door. Where are you?” She could feel her, if she couldn’t see her. From across the room she could feel the hideous wrongness in her leg. Jemma let the green fire go out from her in a flare; it showed her Ethel crouched by the door, her hands thrown over her eyes. The fire reached out, caught her up, and drew her forward, hurrying reluctantly on her tiptoes, her diver’s back gracefully arching. They collided next to the bed, Jemma laughing, Ethel screaming as they burned together. Jemma ran her hands down the girl’s back and bottom and, leaning her chin over Ethel’s shoulder, fastened her hands on the sick and healthy thighs. She ran her mind around and around the tumor, burning it down a little with every pass, until it was gone, and juicy muscle grown in its place. Then she went looking for the mets, her perception racing on fire into Ethel’s lungs and brain, burning out every mote of wrong stuff. Jemma thought she heard the very last tumor cell cry out, Mercy! She showed it none.
The fire dimmed; they came unglued. Ethel fell to her knees, her face pressed against Jemma’s thigh. “Fucking bitch,” she said, before she timbered over to the left. Jemma caught her shoulder just in time to keep her from striking her head against the edge of a nightstand.
As Jemma reached for the door it opened and filled with an angry nurse. Jemma struck swiftly, pressing her thumb against the rounded end of the woman’s nose, turning her off. She dealt similarly with the two others clustered around their sister fallen in the hall. She stepped among the fallen bodies to get into Josh Swift’s room. He was asleep, but woke before she could touch him.
“You’re here!” he said, spastically uncovering himself. “I’ll be ready in a second.” He hunched over to stare at his limp penis, so small it was lost entirely under the bushy hair. “Come on, come on, come on!” he said to it. “She’s here!” But it would not rise. “Maybe you should touch it,” he said. She almost did. It almost seemed like the thing to do, to make a fine pincer of her thumb and forefinger and go questing for the grub in the alfalfa sprouts. She even
started to do it, Josh watching her hand drifting through space and saying to her, “Finally, finally,” and to his penis, “Come on, you stupid!” But her hand changed course just before she touched him, rushing up, centimeters from his skin, over his belly and chest, hand spreading from pincer into claw to fasten around his throat. She dragged him from his bed and held him up before her. He was four foot two without the platform heels he wore when not in bed. He looked up at her, lust abated by fear, eyes full of extra innocence from his extra chromosome, his mouth agape.
What she did to him was not gentle. Healed by science or healed by Jemma, it hurt to get better, but this felt like murder. It wasn’t like with Musette, where her fire wrote on something blank. Here she was burning away a whole person, someone who died a little more completely as each cell gave up its extra copy of chromosome twenty-one. Josh’s old face screamed and twisted up in last fear even as his new face smiled and shouted for joy. She lifted him, or he grew on legs lengthened by fire, until she had to stand on her own toes to keep her hand at his neck. Her fingers slipped away as his neck thickened, and her hand slipped down his chest as it broadened and rose, until her fist was pressed into the hollow of his sternum. The other Josh was flying up in green embers, each fiery piece asking Jemma a different question: Why couldn’t you love me… What’s wrong with me… Why couldn’t you just put it in your mouth, just for a second, would that have been so difficult… you hardly would have noticed it.
Head full of fire, he opened his mouth to the ceiling as the clot in his brain burned out. He took in a gasping breath, then leaned his head forward and expelled it as swirling flame from his nose. Then the fire was gone, and they stood together in the bright moonlight. Jemma, fist still on his chest, looked at his body, at the too-big hands and feet, the thin layer of sweat that made him look as if he was glowing, the new penis, still not terribly big but no longer anything anybody would laugh at, standing almost flush against his belly. As she watched it formed a tiny ball of goo that jumped immediately to the floor, falling plumb on a shining line to strike between their feet. Josh raised his hands to his face. “What did you do?” he asked her.
“Figure it out,” Jemma said, and she was off again. Magnolia’s room was right next door. She was asleep in the middle of her plush menagerie, her arms wrapped around a monkey half her own size, whose boneless arms and legs were twisted around her neck and head and chest. Jemma stood for a moment watching her sleep, watched in turn by a dozen pair of lustrous glass eyes. The animals seemed to be clustered around her defensively. Jemma suffered a brief vision of the soft little bodies springing at her, and tearing ineffectually at her flesh with felt teeth. She had to move aside a seal pup and a pony to uncover Magnolia’s hands.
Perhaps because Magnolia never woke, this one seemed like the gentlest yet. The fire played out subtly along her skin, and as Jemma went into her to make the change only her hair stirred, unfolding from its carefully sculpted style (tonight it sat upon her head in a shape like a giant molar) to wave in its full length first to the left and then to the right, as slow and graceful as kelp. Jemma conceived the fix as an argument. For a period of time that could be measured only by the languid ticking of Magnolia’s hair, Jemma instructed a stubborn stem cell in the marrow of Magnolia’s hip on the proper synthesis of hemoglobin. Like this, she told it, holding up in her mind the lovely molecule, pointers of green fire indicating the place where the cell was doing wrong, and how to do it right. It wanted to know why like that, and not like it had always been done. It wanted to know who Jemma thought she was, barging into the marrow in the middle of the night to demand that the sun rise in the west instead of the east. As if in defiance, it squeezed out some faulty molecule. You’re killing her, Jemma said furiously. Her who? the cell asked. Who is she, and who are you?
I am… Jemma said. I am… Who was she? Who was she, to do these things, to declare a new order to the sick body? It was not a question profitably to be pursued, here in the middle of things. She crushed its stubborn will, the smallest violence she would do that evening, commandeering the machines of its molecular industry and churning out perfect hemoglobin in a swelling tide. See? she asked it. Now do you see?
Yes, it said, and it proclaimed the secret to its neighbor. But with that information it passed along also a hint of feeling, the sullen residue of wounded pride. Jemma tried to burn it out, afraid it would turn sweet Magnolia into a sulker who’d eschew the taste of delight to feed on habitual resentment. But it resisted her. Before the hair had ticked twice the residue had spread everywhere and declared itself to the greater Magnolia, the sleeping child who seemed to open an eye to its clamoring, then shrug and turn her attention from it, so it sank down somewhere into her, and was hidden. Then Jemma was distracted by the rest of the fix, unweaving the fibrosis of the dead pieces of lungs; inflating the nubbin spleen; revitalizing the infarcted areas in her knees and hips.
Jemma opened her eyes and let go of Magnolia’s hands. The girl lay still asleep, looking no different except in her hair, which was wilting to her pillow, where it lay in a stiff corona around her sighing head. Jemma put the seal pup and the pony back in their places, frowning. There was a residue in her, too, a grime of worry that she had put something wrong in the girl even as she made her right. But the worry sank away into hiding, also, and did not keep her at Magnolia’s side, where she might have spent the whole night trying to root out the maybe-imaginary flaw, and it did not keep her from continuing on to the next room.
No tumor withstood her. She proceeded down one side of the hall and up the other, stamping out osteosarcomas and Wilms’ tumors and rhabdos and neuroblastomas, all the proud, selfish flesh quivering and dying under her hands. She imagined repentance for some, last-minute declarations by the tumor that it would be good and retire back into the fold of normal tissue. Others were defiant to the end, sucking greedily at her fire, trying to overcome her with appetite, but they burned and popped like brittle insects. She left behind a trail of exhausted, healthy children and temporarily incapacitated parents. She left them all in their rooms, and yet they stayed with her in a way that made it feel as if she were being pushed along at the head of a tumbling pile of children. So when she came to Juan Fraggle’s room, the last on the floor, she stood for a moment with her cheek pressed hard against the door, feeling a marvelous pressure on her neck and back and thighs. She pushed back and kicked the door open, making a gunslinger entrance because she was sure she’d have to take out his whole extended family before she could get to him, and wondering if she could get them all before somebody clubbed her with a bedpan. She leaped into the room, hands up and fingers pointed. The family was clustered around the bed, bodies three-deep in some places. Nobody tried to brain her. They all just looked at her calmly. “We know what you are doing,” the boy’s mother said, and they began to move aside, opening a short little corridor to the patient.
“Don’t hurt him!” one of the little cousins called out as Jemma rushed down the corridor, afraid probably because of the fierce, awful expression on Jemma’s face; she did not look like she was bringing something good. Juan shrank back in his bed as she came to him, colliding with the bed rail, throwing up her hands and bringing them down on his bony chest in a single note of applause. Fire flew up from the place she struck, as if splashed from a puddle. Someone, not Jemma and not Juan, screamed, but Jemma hardly heard. She made a pass over him, from head to toe, burning out the fungus hidden in little balls in his liver and brain, and pinching out the malevolent white-cell clones that sought to flee from her in his swiftly moving blood. Her fingers curled on his chest, clutching at the thin muscle and making bruises that vanished and were made anew, and vanished and were made anew. She sank into his bones, and burned them so hot he seemed lit from within. Now he did scream. The wicked clusters of cells perished in fire, leaving his marrow empty and barren, but she called new cells out of the barrenness, calling and calling to them with the purest desire she had ever felt—she’d wanted Ro
b and she’d wanted her very own handsome midshipman and she’d wanted her parents to be alive again and wanted Calvin back but she’d never wanted anything like she suddenly wanted this—until they came, bursting suddenly and violently into her perception like a load of sequins fired from a cannon. She puffed up his wasted flesh. His sunken chest rose under her bruising fingers like a miraculously restored soufflé, and his bald head sprouted hair that grew in a cloud into the most astounding afro she’d ever seen on any boy.
She slipped through gaps in the closing family, and left them huddled around the bed, Juan’s muffled cries fading as soon as she was beyond the door. People had gone ahead of her to the seventh floor, to proclaim for or against her coming. There was no hope now of sneaking. She was spotted as soon as she came out of the stairwell. A bulky nurse came lumbering down the hall at her. Jemma raised her hands, sure she’d be crushed by the abundant flesh when she turned her off. But the nurse stopped whole yards away and waved her forward, and said, “Hurry up, we’ve got one coding.” Jemma followed her, the nurse pumping her arms at her sides and huffing in good imitation of a locomotive. She looked over her shoulder at Jemma and called back, “What part of hurry up did you not understand?” Jemma tried to hurry, her gait unsettled by the churning fire in her, considering how even super powers could not protect you from being ordered around by nurses.
It was a bloody code. A liver-transplant kid Jemma recognized from in-and-out stays in the PICU lay on her bed, bleeding from her mouth and nose and eyes. Emma, on emergency loan from the unit, was doing chest compressions on her while another nurse bagged her through an ET tube. With every compression a little more blood would seep out. To Jemma it seemed so obviously not the way to save her life.
