In the park. With my mom.
It was the summer between grades seven and eight, the summer I got serious about training. I’d always been a jock, but mostly to distinguish myself from my sisters. Between the four of them, they were good at so many things, they hadn’t left much I could make my own. None of them cared about sports, though, so I latched onto that.
I played hockey and soccer and softball like a lot of kids do: nothing special, but having fun. When I started going through puberty, my sisters teased me that I’d soon give up on dirt and sweat. The four of them were boy crazy (it runs in the family) and as women of the world, they predicted that any day now, I’d trade my team uniforms for tight tops and Daisy Dukes.
Mom assured me it didn’t have to be either/or. She wasn’t a jock herself—she was fifty pounds overweight, and couldn’t give up cigarettes—but she supported me, even when I decided to spend the summer in a rabid exercise program. I did everything I could to prove to my sisters they were wrong. I woke up at 6:00 A.M. to go swimming at the pool, then an hour lifting weights, and biking, jogging, all that. Plus every little league sport they’d let me sign up for.
In other words, I went overboard. Typical Jools, right? No such thing as too much.
But Mom supported me. Which was how we ended up in a park beside the North Saskatchewan River on a sunny afternoon: me running a half-K jogging loop while Mom sat on a bench, reading Chatelaine and timing my circuits with a stopwatch. By the end of the summer, I wanted to run the eight-K in under half an hour.
I ran hard and fast, less than two minutes a lap, which is pretty darn good for a twelve-year-old. The first time I passed my mom and saw that she’d slumped on the bench instead of sitting straight up, I was mad that she’d fallen asleep. She was supposed to be timing me!
I felt the same anger when I relived it years later. As those alien sparks ignited memories in my brain, I was two separate people: twenty-one-year-old Jools in a Waterloo lab, and twelve-year-old Jools in that Edmonton park. I felt my young irritation and my present-day horror. I shouted to myself, Stop! Don’t keep going! Go check on her!
I didn’t. Twelve-year-old me didn’t stop till I finished my laps. Then I ran to my mother and started to grump that she’d fallen asleep on the job.
She wouldn’t wake up.
I still did nothing useful. First, I wasted time nudging her shoulder, harder and harder. Then I panicked, feeling helpless and dumb cuz I didn’t know CPR. Couldn’t remember how they did it on TV. Finally, finally, I ran to look for help … but somehow I got the desperate idea that I couldn’t just scream my head off, I had to pick exactly the right person. If only I chose correctly and found a doctor, everything would still turn out okay. That wasted even more time, until a guy walking his dog asked, “Are you all right?” and I fell apart.
For a long time afterward, people kept telling me nothing would have made a difference. “She died instantly, Jools. You couldn’t have helped her.”
But what else would they say? It’s what they had to tell me.
To this day, I don’t know if it’s true. No one in our family does. Whatever the truth, would any doctor say, “Of course, the girl could have saved her mother. She was just too stupid and self-centered.”
Anyway, that’s what happened when I was twelve. And that’s what I relived when the sparks got inside of me. I lived through the moment I ran past my mom and saw that she’d slipped sideways. That she’d dropped her magazine. That her position was far too awkward for anyone to be able to sleep. I felt annoyed that she wasn’t paying attention to me; as I started my next loop around the trail, I ran even faster because I was pissed off.
But inside Younger Me, Older Me screamed, “Stop, stop!”
Suddenly, the two of us split. My older self broke out of my younger body, separating and drifting upward to a bird’s-eye view. I saw myself running. I saw my mom lying so limply it brought me to tears—how clueless I was to think she had fallen asleep. I floated above the world, screaming and crying …
Then my mother was floating with me.
Not like a ghost from the movies. Neither of us was visible. I was disembodied, a viewpoint looking down on the scene; Mom was even less, just a presence. But she radiated disapproval, all the blame and loathing I’ve aimed at myself ever since.
A good daughter would have seen the truth immediately. A smart daughter would have called for help and started CPR. It was the middle of the afternoon; plenty of people were within earshot. Maybe one was a doctor or a nurse. Maybe somebody had a cell phone; they weren’t so common back then, but somebody probably had one. An ambulance could have arrived within minutes, instead of the forever it took.
My mother was so disappointed with me. I was twelve years old, not five. You could forgive a little kid, but I was old enough to use my pitiful excuse for a brain.
I floated above my mother’s corpse and felt her soul accuse me.
It nearly killed me. I truly think I might have died with those sparks inside my head. When people get superpowers, often a crowd of folks are exposed to the same conditions—the same radiation, or chemicals, or cosmic forces. Some people survive and become super; the others die.
But as I floated … as I felt the blame squeeze crushingly around me … something within me said, No, you aren’t my mom.
My mother was good and she loved me. The last thing she’d do would be to shame me. The entity judging me couldn’t be my mom. It was some goddamned horror pretending to be her, and I silently screamed in outrage, Fuck off, fuck off, you leave her alone!
Something snapped. I woke up. My eyes, nose, and throat were burning. I was still surrounded by those little colored sparks trying to get inside me … but now they couldn’t.
As if I was armored against them. Immunized. Saved.
Eventually, my friends and I closed the portal and got the hell out of that lab. But that stuff was only aftermath. I became a Spark the moment I said no to whatever it was. To all the whatevers that wanted me to curl up and die.
And that’s the story I tell Vernon. I fuck up a lot; there’s stuff I can’t put into words. I don’t even know how much I say out loud. A ton of it sticks in my mouth.
But Vernon gets it. By the time I finish, he’s holding my hands and nodding, over and over. I don’t know what he went through himself, but he’s on the same wavelength.
“Thanks, Jools,” he says, very softly. He takes a deep breath. “So now, I guess it’s my turn.” He inhales again. “Okay, I can do this. I can tell you.”
But he doesn’t. Because Ninja Jane leaps down from a tree and claps her hands three times loudly.
* * *
THE CLAPS ARE SURPRISINGLY sharp, given that Jane wears gloves. I start to ask, “What do—” but she makes a chopping gesture. I’ll interpret that as Shut up!
Jane stares hard at Vernon. She thrusts her finger at a trail leading who knows where.
Vernon gives me an apologetic look. He says, “I guess—”
Jane makes her chopping gesture, and jabs her finger at the trail again.
I say, “Jane apparently wants you for something.”
“No,” Vernon replies, “it’s Marian. Jane is just the messenger.”
Jane claps her hands even more loudly and points to the trail.
“I’d better go,” Vernon says. “Jane doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“All right,” I say, “let’s go.”
I step toward the trail, but Jane blocks my way. She’s shorter than me and maybe thirty pounds lighter, but she’s intimidating, like a black-pajamaed time bomb. With most Sparks, that would only be her Halo getting under my skin, but with Jane, there’s nothing artificial about it. Her eyes drill into mine without blinking, dark brown eyes surrounded by greasepaint and the black of her ninja mask.
I stare back and don’t blink, either. Hockey instincts: don’t let other girls scare you. If I had any booze in my bloodstream, I might even escalate. I wouldn’t outright head butt her
but I’d send the message, Don’t mess with me, sis.
But really, what would fighting Jane get me? Bruises and bupkes. I’m just annoyed she interrupted before Vernon could tell his story.
I want to know what he went through when he got superpowers. Did he have to face some mental ordeal? Reliving a horrible thing from deep in his past?
I want to know.
Even more, I want to know what K, Miranda, and Shar went through the night we got powered up. But then I’d have to tell them my own story, and I don’t know if I could stand it. Telling a stranger is one thing, especially when my mind will soon get erased so I won’t have to live with the memory. But confessing to my friends? When I know it’ll make them think badly of me? Nuh-uh.
I don’t do emotional spillage. It clashes with my brand.
Maybe I should start a fight with Jane. That’d get my mind off my mother. A fight would get me out of my head, maybe better than sex or alcohol. And hey, I outfought Robin Hood. Why couldn’t I beat Ninja Jane, too?
Yeah, no. I’m just being stupid.
Robin’s powers are charisma and shooting strange arrows. He’s never been known as a hand-to-hand guy. Jane, however, is one of the top ten scrappers in the world. I don’t know where I rank in the list of Spark brawlers, but it probably has three digits. Or more.
And Jane’s too crazy to hold herself back. She might not kill me outright, but she’d happily gash me bloody with her scary whispery knives. I doubt if Jane understands the concept of sparring for fun or practice. It’s always a fight to the finish for her, preferably damaging opponents so badly she’ll never have to fight them again.
Fuck that. I step back.
Consider it a sign of budding maturity.
Or sobriety. Frightening, inexplicable sobriety.
I turn to Vernon. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“Jane won’t hurt me,” Vernon says. “She just wants to take me to Marian.”
“Got any ideas for what I should do to amuse myself?” I ask.
Vernon laughs. “Stay out of trouble.”
I think, Yeah, that’s going to happen, as Ninja Jane hustles him off.
13
Migration
LEFT ALONE IN SHERWOOD Forest, I have three choices.
Choice one: Go back to Robin Hood’s house. Where that gadget in the kitchen will cheerfully make me food and drink. Especially drink. Except I don’t want to find out that I still can’t face the prospect of alcohol. Also, I’m not hungry at all, even though it’s been hours since I ate anything. Wouldn’t be surprising if Marian’s medi-tank topped up my blood sugar; I won’t need to eat for a while.
Choice two: Wander through the forest till I find something of interest. The paths in these woods aren’t game trails; I still haven’t seen any animals. So let’s assume human beings made these pathways to connect between places like the lab and Robin Hood’s house. The members of Robin’s gang must have living space somewhere in the forest. And who knows what else I might find? A mead hall. I’ll bet there’s a mead hall. Cuz duh. But a mead hall could be just as traumatic for me as the dispenser in Robin’s kitchen. What if I can’t drink anymore?
Which leaves choice three: Marian’s lab. I can find where it is, no problem—I remember the way. And it’s full of interesting gadgets, including the medi-tank.
I really should learn how the tank works. Partly so I can build one for my friends if they get injured, partly to figure out what the hell the fucking tank did to me.
Why can’t I stand the thought of booze? And what else has changed inside me? Like for instance, why did I decide to whack Robin with a quarterstaff instead of straddling his mighty manhood?
Wasn’t that weird? It was weird. What was I thinking?
So I head for the lab. It only takes a minute to get there. And when I poke my head inside, nobody’s home … at least not in the room closest to the door. The building itself is large enough to hold multiple labs, and now that my brain isn’t mucked up from time in the medi-tank or freezing to death after a cold shower, I can see that the lab in front of me has doors leading left, right, and center. It makes me wonder what else the building holds … but as soon as the question crosses my mind, ideas flood in. The rooms that I would build if I were Marian.
Research lab. (I’m looking at it.)
Manufacturing facility. (She seems to have an unending supply of battle-bots. Means she needs a place to build them.)
Storage area. (Because once you have robots, you need to put them someplace.)
Power plant. (It must take gigawatts of energy to run this place, and an outlaw can’t plug into a public power grid. Marian must have built her own generating station. Nuclear maybe, or fusion. Or something beyond all conventional science, and likely dangerous as hell. A super-Fukushima waiting to rumble.)
A Mad Genius needs all that stuff. And that’s only for starters. After that, it’s time to get creative.
The possibilities start my juices flowing. Notions and plans leap spontaneously out of nowhere.
I can tell when WikiJools feeds me data. I feel downloads arrive from some exterior source, maybe literally from Wikipedia and similar sites on the triple dub. But other info just seems like it’s always been inside of me. I don’t have to access how to fight or do parkour; it’s as natural as walking. It doesn’t feel like something external putting thoughts into my head. It’s completely me.
Except I never had Mad Genius ideas until I got powers. My brilliant insights leaned more toward “It’s time to go to the pub” and “I’m horny as hell, let’s fix that.” Not a dozen new ways to break the laws of physics.
But now my brain is filled with Cape Tech designs. And I’m staring at a lab that can make the designs a reality.
I wander, taking inventory as I pass tables covered with cruft. In a mundane lab like the one where I tried to analyze Diamond’s bazooka, most gizmos look like sealed boxes with computers attached. Cape Tech is more photogenic. At the very least, there are flashing lights, and gauges with big red zones labeled DANGER. But you also see shit that is just plain weird: a helmet with deely bobbers controlling a 3-D printer, or a four-keyboard pipe organ with mummified hamster heads for stops. I’m tempted to pick a gadget at random and take it apart to see how it works … but after mature consideration (ha ha), I head for the medi-tank.
* * *
THE TANK IS THE same place I last saw it, in that curtained-off alcove. From a nearby workbench, I grab some tools—a funky little oscilloscope with attachment clips shaped like actual alligator heads, and a solid copper rod that seems to read my mind as it sprouts anything from screwdriver tips to perfectly sized wrench sockets. I set to work examining what makes the medi-tank tick.
Time passes while I have fun. Unlike with Diamond’s bazooka, I have no trouble understanding the tank. Maybe I just have better equipment. The lab on campus was perfectly adequate for analyzing mundane devices but bush league for the needs of Cape Tech. And maybe when Diamond designed his gun, he deliberately made it confusing to figure out. Or maybe, since Diamond is nuts, his inventions are too deranged for me to grasp, whereas Marian is more on my mental wavelength.
One way or another, I catch on quickly. The tank works by infusing human cells with extra chromosomes that contain genes from various reptiles—the kind of reptiles that can grow back parts of their body if something gets bitten off. The new chromosomes also have genes to inhibit scarring, which is the main impediment to regrowth of tissues. A scar is an impenetrable barrier: it permanently seals off blood vessels, nerves, and so on. Scars provide an evolutionary advantage because they quickly cap off a wound, thereby preventing infection and further damage. But they also prevent regeneration. They’re immovable blockages to growth.
So Marian’s medi-tank suppresses the scarification process, while expediting restoration through gene therapy, hormones, and other bio tricks. It makes me smile—Marian had to get the requisite genes from quick-healing animal species. But me, I’ve g
ot something better. I could use my own Spark tissues. Since I regenerate much faster than any natural creature, a Jools-based medi-tank could patch people up in record time.
Even better, a Joolsian tank would minimize the need for post-repair cleanup. Marian’s tank has to remove the reptile chromosomes after the healing is finished. That takes a lot of effort, and it’s fiddly work because you have to be careful not to reopen wounds.
But my tank will use my own DNA. That’s human already (except for the Sparkness). There’ll still be some cleanup to make the regrown cells compatible with the host—wouldn’t want my lovely new tissues to be rejected by their owner’s immune system—but that’s easier than dealing with completely foreign stuff like reptile genes.
Oh, wait, that raises another problem. Spark immune systems tend to be more ornery than vanilla human ones. Some Sparks fight off germs so thoroughly, they’d reject the reptile chromosomes too fast for the process to work. Sparks have other abilities, too: mutations that might clash with the added DNA, or armor that’s simply too tough to get through. Take Wrecking Ball, for instance—the tank could immerse her in a million weird-shit chemicals, but none of it would soak through her cast-iron skin. So how …
…
Whoa.
Sneaky. And scary as hell.
Before the tank does anything else, it turns off superpowers. Shuts ’em down completely. So Wrecking Ball would revert to flesh and blood. And someone like me …
Crap. This fucking machine could have killed me. The very first thing it did was turn off my power of regeneration. If it had just left me on my own … well, okay, I might have died, but otherwise I would have healed from my wounds in minutes.
This stupid medi-tank made me human. That’s why I needed a full hour to recover. And why I might have died if the tank hadn’t come through and put me back together.
So note to self: when I make my own version of a medi-tank, leave out the stuff that turns powers off.
Except what about Zircon? Zirc is made of rock. I’m not sure, but Zirc might not have internal organs, just rock all the way through. If Zirc gets hurt, my medi-tank will have to turn zir back to flesh and blood before the machine can inject its restorative DNA.
They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded Page 23
