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.