Connor didn’t wake up feeling numb any more. He’d also lost the mysterious constant hunger, and his cravings for metal didn’t flare up as often. He figured the transformation, however it worked and whatever it meant, was pretty much finished. So he definitely wasn’t going to die, and now he was in Woodburn to see if Rod was right and they’d gotten their powers from Danny’s girlfriend Priya.
Priya’s house wasn’t as nice as most of the homes in Greenlake, but even from the outside Connor could tell that the inside would be comfortable and probably smelled good. Houses flanked it to either side, each separated by a stretch of grassy yard, and brown woods pushed up behind it.
He could do this. What was ‘this’? Something. Something he could do. He rang the doorbell.
After a moment, a girl’s voice came through the door. “Go away.”
That must be the puffy-haired sister. “I’m here to see Priya.”
“I know.” Her muffled voice sounded annoyed. “And I said go away.”
“Does she know I’m here?”
The sister didn’t answer. Connor looked through one of the narrow windows to either side of the door, thinking maybe he’d see Priya that way. The sister was there in an instant, filling the window. He didn’t remember her seeming so… creepy. The two times Connor had met her before, he’d thought she was quiet and kinda cute, if not nearly as attractive as Priya. Now she looked almost threatening in a light-weight way, like a horror movie scarecrow. Even though her eyes weren’t actually twitching, it seemed like they were going to start twitching at any moment.
“Priya’s meditating,” she said. “She can’t see you right now.”
“She is not meditating.” He craned his head back and shouted, “Priya! Priya!”
“You’re going to be sorry when you keep her from reaching enlightenment.”
Should he kick in the door? Should he charge past the sister?
“I’m up here!”
Priya stood on the roof. Connor held his arms up to her. “Look at my hands!” he called up. “Do you see?”
“I see.” She hesitated before shouting again. “Come up.”
So Connor kicked his sandals off and planted his hands on the wall and climbed up the side of the house. He was a super-mutant, and he could move in three dimensions. It was awesome. He pulled himself over the side of the roof and stood up beside Priya.
“How did you know about me?” she asked.
“You grabbed Rod. He says you were really strong. He says you nicked him, and we think maybe he caught it from you like a zombie virus. But, you know, cooler.”
“Rod? Rod has superpowers? That’s scary.”
“What do you think it is?”
She shrugged. She had kind of a sexy shrug. “I don’t know. Cosmic rays. Voodoo. Mass hallucination. Come on.” She led him over the peak of the roof to a shallow-sloping section overlooking the woods. There was a pillow there, a bag of apples, a box of crackers, a laptop. “I don’t like being inside with Kess in there,” she explained.
“Don’t your parents think it’s weird?”
“They’re gone. My mom’s sister in Colorado is having a baby, and she’s on bedrest because something’s complicated with the pregnancy, so Mom went out to help. And my grandma, Dad’s mom, lives out there and she’s really really really old and probably going to die soon, like this month soon, so he decided to fly out with Mom and be with Grandma. They both took off their whole year’s worth of vacation time—we’re probably not going to get a family trip this year.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I can’t imagine going on a road trip with Kess, being in a car with her.”
“What’s up with her? Your sister, I mean. I saw her through the window. She seemed… different.”
“She’s one of them.” Priya frowned, frustrated, maybe, at the words coming out of her own mouth. “What I mean is, I think there’s some other people who got powers too, different ones. And somehow the powers make us feel like—like enemies, or something.”
“Yeah,” said Connor, realizing she was right. “Danny’s one of them too.”
“I know. I saw him.” She sighed. “A few weeks ago I had a sister and a boyfriend. Now I’ve lost them. I can’t even like them any more—my body won’t let me. I don’t understand.”
“Are they strong too?”
“No. They shoot lightning out of their hands. At least Kess does.”
Connor shuddered. “You think Rod’s scary? Rod can’t electrocute you. That’s scary.”
“Lots of things are scary, Connor.”
It was hard to hear her sounding so sad, because they were strong now and that was awesome and she should realize it. He remembered the week he’d spent thinking there was something wrong with him, and how Rod had found him and brought him into the woods and showed him how powerful they were.
He looked over at the house next door. There was a maybe twenty-foot gap between the roofs of the two houses. “I bet I could make that jump,” he said. “I bet you could, too.”
She followed his line of sight. “How far can you jump now?” she asked.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I don’t know. I’ve climbed walls and I’ve thrown things and lifted things and punched and kicked things, but I haven’t jumped.”
“We should go down to the ground and experiment.”
“Why go down?” He backed up to get a running start.
“Connor…” Priya sounded worried, but that just meant she’d be even more impressed when he made it, when he made it, when he—
He ran and launched himself into the air. Empty space opened beneath him and gravity pulled at his stomach. He landed on the other roof, stumbling just a little as his feet adjusted to the slope. He bet it still looked pretty cool. He turned and waved for Priya to join him.
She hesitated for just a moment, and then she ran and jumped. She soared and landed on the roof several feet past Connor.
“You went farther than I did,” he said. “I think you went higher too.”
“I’m lighter,” she said. “That must be it. We both got stronger, but you’re still heavy.”
“So it must have been even more fun for you than for me. Right? Let’s keep going.” He ran again and jumped again to the next house, and this time Priya didn’t hesitate. This time she was right beside him. She landed ahead of him with her feet perfectly adjusted to the roof’s angle, and the moment she hit she was running again. A moment later she jumped to the next roof. She was running faster now, covering each roof in only a few steps. Each step was a leap. She looked like a gazelle or a lion or some other fast, pretty animal.
She glanced back at him and laughed. He’d done it. He’d shown how cool this was. Now he wanted to catch up to her, to get close enough to hear the details of her laugh. He pushed himself faster until he was barreling along with terrifying roller-coaster momentum. Once, twice, he almost didn’t push off before the edge of a roof.
Priya reached the last house in the row. She turned, and given how fast she was moving it was bizarre how sharply she changed directions. Connor tried to do the same, but he was too massive. He stumbled at an angle and plummeted off the side of the roof.
There was a brief, zooming mid-air moment, and then he plowed shoulder-first into the ground.
There was pain, and a terrible crunch.
###
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###
Priya ran across the rooftops of her street, springing from house to house, and for the first time she loved her body’s strange new properties. She was light and fast, and her muscles did exactly what she wanted them to. To someone watching from the ground, she must have looked spectacular.
From behind her, she heard Connor shout. She turned just in time to see him hurtle to the ground.
Oh no.
She sprang to the edge of the roof and jumped down to land on the ground beside him. And even as panicked and worried for Connor as she was, she couldn’t help noticing how beautifully she landed, how smooth and Catwoman-like.
Connor groaned. Oh no. His arm was wrong—bent at an angle that made Priya sick to her stomach. Oh no. She squeezed her eyes shut and deep-breathed for just a moment before pulling out her phone.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t call yet. It’s going numb. Is that normal?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never broken anything.”
He sat up, wincing. “Straighten it out.”
“What?”
“Take it and push it back to where it should be. Straighten it out.”
She almost laughed. “Are you crazy? The paramedic will do that.” Even as she said it, though, Priya realized she didn’t want to call a paramedic. No outsiders, something inside her said. This is our business.
“No no no no no,” said Connor. (Did he have that same strange intuition?) “I think you can do it. I believe you can do it. Just do it.”
So she took his arm in both hands and forced herself to keep her eyes open and pushed the bone into place. His arm was a straight line again.
“That didn’t hurt,” he said. He reached over with his other hand and cupped the injured stretch of arm. “I mean, it hurt, but not as bad as you’d think. A lot less then when I hit the ground. It’s all gone numb and tingly now. I think it’s the superpowers. I think they’re doing something in there.”
He was alright. Good. But it was stupid that he got hurt in the first place. Just stupid.
“It was your idea to go running on the roofs,” she snapped.
And suddenly he looked more confused and offended than in pain. “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
He was right. Crap. She raised her hands in surrender. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I do that sometimes. I’m terrified that things are my fault, even when they can’t be, even when they’re nobody’s, and so I push them on to other people. It’s all because I want to make things better and so I have to believe I have the power to make things better, but that also means I have the power to make things worse and that freaks me out.”
“That was very, um, self-aware?”
Priya looked at him closely to make sure he wasn’t still in horrific pain and hiding it to be stoic and manly. He didn’t seem to be. “I think it’s important to understand what your mind is doing. That’s the only way we’re going to get better.”
“Better at what?”
“Just better.”
Connor looked at her, looked into her eyes, and for a moment his excessively non-threatening, best-friend-y face changed. She wasn’t sure how it changed, just that it did.
But then he looked down at his arm again. “The numbness is going away.” He raised his damaged arm and waved it back and forth in the air, and then he put his hand on the ground and leaned his weight on the arm, and then he laughed. “It’s better. Totally better. I mean, it’s sore, but it’s definitely not broken. I’m Wolverine.”
Priya felt herself smiling. “I was thinking earlier that I’m Catwoman.”
“We’re Wolverine-Catwoman-Spiderman. That’s pretty cool, right?”
She helped him to his feet.
###
TEXT MESSAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN KSENYA CARPENTER AND ELIAS KAPLAN:
Ksenya: I just don’t get it. Why would you even have a website if it doesn’t say what the company does? It’s just empty slogans and pretty smiling people in business suits. I bet those people don’t even work there! That website is a lie. A LIE.
Elias: You said that yesterday.
Ksenya: You don’t have to tell me when I said things yesterday.
Ksenya: So did you figure out where the website’s coming from?
Elias: I looked up the ip. It comes from just across the state border.
Ksenya: That close to us?
Elias: Yeah. It’s actually mostly trees and horse farms in that area, one real town called Johnston. I looked up the satellite images of Johnston. They’re low resolution, but there’s a big building that looks like a factory or maybe an office park. So I found it on street-view. There’s the link. See the sign?
Ksenya: That was very thorough and impressive. You are a good junior detective and I’m sure you’ll make senior detective soon.
Ksenya: “Holifeld Company. Exploration. Impossible. Wonder. Since 1975.” That’s a different set of random stupid words than the website. We still don’t know what they do.
Elias: No. But the local paper has a website, with older issues archived. They’re all scanned images, so you can’t search them, but I looked at the ones for 1975, and I found this.
Ksenya: Wow. I was joking earlier, but that really is very clever and detective-y of you. What did you find?
Elias: I sent you the link.
Elias: I assume you went quiet because you’re reading it and not because you spontaneously combusted.
Elias: …
Elias: So what do you think?
Ksenya: Wow. *That’s* interesting.