“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 Rob 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.