Jade 8 - Exams

By Babs Yerunkle

70: Second and third thoughts

“Jade, for Pete’s sake, when are you going to go to sleep?”

The smaller girl tossed in her bed once more, twisting her nightgown tighter.  She lay still for a moment, then exhaled in a loud huff.  “It’s almost the end of the semester.  It’s been almost half a year!  That’s, like, forever!  Have I done anything?  Have I gotten any closer to what I really want?  What am I doing here?”

Billie pulled her own pillow over her head, trying to drown out the talk.

“Am I just fooling myself?”

With an exasperated sigh, Billie sat up.  “Okay, that’s enough.  This whole thing is just stupid!  I mean, what were you doing a year ago at this time?  Look how far you’ve come since then!”

Jade sat up in the dark as well.  The lights were off, but Billie’s night vision was excellent.

“Last year?  I was living at home, with Dad.”  The young girl shuddered.  “I sure don’t miss him.  It was my last year of junior high.  I was wearing boys’ clothes, of course, and acting like a boy.  Trying to be one.”  She sighed again.  “There was this girl, Ashleigh, and she was so pretty.  She had hazel eyes, and she was just starting to try makeup.  She wasn’t very good yet.  I wanted to tell her.  But she always had the prettiest dresses.  I was so jealous.  I didn’t understand it, at the time.  I thought I was finally starting puberty.  I used to help her with the ribbon she always wore in her hair.  But she started hanging out with this guy named Mark.  I wasn’t jealous of either of them, but I was kind of sad that she wasn’t around to talk to.”

She was quiet for a moment, and Billie waited.

“I was starting to get good in Aikido.  I told Dad about Ashleigh and Mark.  He usually didn’t care, he just ignored me.  But this time he said I needed to beat up Mark, to prove to Ashleigh that I was willing to fight for her, and that I was a real man.  I thought it was stupid.  Aikido wasn’t about beating people up, or proving that you were tough.  But Dad didn’t get that part.  He just kept insisting, louder and louder.  Every night it was, ‘Have you given that asshole what’s coming to him?’ and I was always, ‘I couldn’t find him today,’ or even ‘He ran away from me.’  Of course, I never even went near Mark, or Ashleigh either, for that matter.  And after a week, Dad finally blew his top.  ‘If you were even halfway decent as a man,’ he yelled, ‘that bastard wouldn’t be able to get away from you!  This is how you do it!’”

Billie waited for a minute, but the smaller girl seemed to have stopped.  A shiver traveled down Billie’s back, probably from the cold air in the room.  Finally, she asked, “He hit you?”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Jade admitted quietly.  “I didn’t need a cast, or X-rays or anything.  And it’s not like it would even matter, these days.  Thanks to you, I’ve got these great healing powers.  If that happened nowadays, it would be no big deal.  I’ve taken hits that hard in training.  I’ve taken hits harder than those, since I told Ito-sensei about my regeneration and asked him to increase my challenges.  I must have broken something in class three or four times.”

“Five times,” Billie corrected.  “At least, five that were obvious.  I don’t know how many times you’ve gotten a cracked rib in the last couple of weeks.”  She was surprised that she’d kept a better count than Jade had.

Jade shrugged in the dark.  “Like I said, not a big deal.  Even the bad breaks are usually fine within a half hour.  And using Jann-sensei, I don’t even need a splint.”  She lay back down and pulled the covers over her shoulders.  “I almost wish I could go back to my old Aikido class.  If they wouldn’t freak out over me being a girl.  After a couple of months of sparring against exemplars and energizers and stuff, I could whip everyone in class, I’ll bet.  I know I’m hitting a ton harder, and I’m about a zillion times faster at dodging, and better at blocking.  And it’s not because I’ve gotten any bigger or stronger.  Toni-sempai’s training really helps.  Chou’s too.”

Things were quiet for a moment, and Billie lay back down.

“If I had my gun and equipment and stuff, I could take all of ‘em together.  Dad, too.”

“So… great,” Billie said, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice.  She had a test tomorrow morning!  The oddity of it struck her, and she looked around the dark room.  There were Jade’s books and pencils, doing homework.  Over by the closet, the laundry was gathering itself for the after-dark wash cycle.  Billie hadn’t done her own laundry since September.  Up near the ceiling, a two-inch high pixie was practicing what looked like whip work with a piece of thin string.  And Jinn had gone down to visit Sara a half hour ago.

Wait a minute.  That’s four of them.  And Jade’s still awake?

“How many charges do you have going right now?”

“Four.”

“Why aren’t you unconscious?”

“I’ve been getting better.  But I don’t think I could get out of bed right now.  I sure couldn’t stand up.”

“So why don’t you cast number five, and go to sleep?”

Jade tossed in her bed again.  “What if it’s too much?  What if I lose so much energy that my heart stops, and I just die?  I know, I know, I’m supposed to be a regenerator now, and that solves all sort of problems, but what if it doesn’t?  What if I get hurt so bad that I can’t heal?  What if it stays broken forever?”

Billie puzzled over this for a minute before she realized, “Okay.  You aren’t talking about going to sleep, are you?  What’s going on?”

Jade was still for a moment, then, very quietly, she said, “Winter finals.  Combat finals.  The matches are supposed to be completely random!  I could be going up against anyone!”

“Aw, don’t worry about it.  Most of ‘em are pussies.  I mean – no offense those of us who have… uh, never mind.”

Jade continued as if she hadn’t heard.  “What if Jinn has to fight an avatar?  What if he won’t let me go this time?  And the other classes have some really mean guys.  Have you seen Buster?  He just likes to hurt people!  And Behemoth?  What am I supposed to do against him?  And there’s others that are even worse!”

“You know what Ito-sensei said.  You don’t have to win the match.  You just have to make the best showing you can.  You know he’s going to adjust things if someone like you ends up fighting Buster.  It’ll probably be worth an ‘A’ to last more than two or three passes.  Besides,” Billie clenched her fist, cracking her knuckles one-handed.  “Some of them…  Counterpoint might be interesting.  I wouldn’t mind facing him.  And you spar with me sometimes, so by extension…”

“As if,” Jade said, dismissively.  “Of course you could take Counterpoint.  You’re … Tennyo.  You’re…  You could take any of them.  Well, so long as you weren’t bothered by the collateral damage.”

Billie snickered.  “Yeah, more windows to pay for.  I’d kinda thought I had it made moneywise when they started to pay me for the energy I was saving them, but then I find out it’s mostly going to fund repairs!”

“And don’t even pretend that we’re equal when we spar.  But it would be different if you hurt me.  I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’d never hurt you, Jade.”

“It would be okay if you did.  Even by accident.  But some of those guys are scary!”

“I can be scary too, Jade.  Tell you what.  If anyone gets too rough, you can tell them that they’ll hear from me.”

“No Oneesan!  You’d get expelled!  Then I’d have to leave, too, to be with you!”

Billie snorted.  “Then it’ll be just the two of us, on the road together.  Maybe we can take up the wild life of a space pirate or something.”

Jade was silent for a moment before asking, “You promise, Oneesan?”

“Sure, Jade.”  Billie smiled to herself at how seriously Jade seemed to take some of these wild conversations they had.  “Now go to sleep!”

“Yes Mistress Pirate, dread stalker of the st…”

Billie waited for the final giggle, but instead she was greeted by a soft snore.

By the time everyone was seated for breakfast, Jade had a whole new set of aggravations.

“Ooo!  I ought to kill that man!”  In a rare burst of anger, she furiously crumpled up her letter and looked around.  “Pyrokinetic… where’s a pyrokinetic?  Why isn’t there ever a pyrokinetic when you want one?”

“I could blast it,” Billie politely offered, “except that I promised not to do any energy blasts inside glass buildings.”

Nikki arrived with her tray, tucking a strand of flaming red hair behind a pointed ear.  “Did someone say something about a pyro?”

“Jade wants one.  Bad letter.”

Nikki raised the delicate brows over her arrestingly large eyes.  “Bad news?”

“Let me summarize,” Jade said, through gritted teeth.  “Babe.  Welcome to dumpsville.  Population: you.”

The other girls gasped.  “Thuban?”

Jade’s expression immediately turned to cheerful anticipation.  “Huh?  Where?”

“No, I mean, Thuban dumped you?” Nikki clarified.

“He did?!”  For a moment, Jade had a look of horror, then she figured it out.  “Oh… the letter!  No, this is from that butt-head who was being my doctor.  Dr. Traekham.  Hmph.  Dr. Butt-head is more like it!  One or two tries, and then he blows!  ‘Too tough for me, I’m outta here.’  Thanks a lot, Doc!”

Nikki finished arranging her dining silver with the air of a queen, eating at the high table.  “Did he say why?”

Still fuming, Jade smoothed out the crumpled letter.  “How’d he put it?  Right, here it is.  Let’s see… ‘exhausted the limits of conventional therapy’… ‘I am an ordinary General Practitioner’…  But those aren’t the real reasons.  Here it is.  ‘As new evidence has appeared indicating that you are a shapeshifter, rather than an exemplar, it seems likely that any remaining difficulties are psychological, rather than physical.’

“Psychological?”  Jade suddenly held her gun in her hand, and she waved it around menacingly.  “I’ll show you psychological, you quack!”

Her tirade was interrupted by a small ball of paper that dropped from the ceiling and landed directly on the table in front of her.

Toni looked around.  “Well, that was different.”

Jade unfolded the paper.  As she did so, a single red rose seemed to come into existence.  She immediately looked up and searched around the cafeteria for Thuban.  She found him about a quarter of the way around the large dome.  He met her gaze and nodded.

“What’s it say?” Billie demanded.

Jade smoothed the note and read it to herself, before sharing with the other girls.  “ ‘Are you available for Saturday?  Not a date, but definitely worth your while.  T.’ ”

The girls speculated about this while Jade thought.  She reached into her backpack and pulled out paper and pen… and surreptitiously pulled out something else.  She was getting pretty good at this sort of sleight-of-hand.  It was easy when you could simply charge up the backpack or purse and have the items in question fly themselves into the palm of your hand.

She wrote out a quick reply, while asking Nikki, “I hate to impose, but since his delivery was so flamboyant, do you think maybe you could conjure up one of your new pixies?”

Nikki thought for a moment, then nodded.  “I suppose.  I’m not so sure about sending an innocent little pixie flittering around our cafeteria, but I guess if things work out they’ll be public knowledge soon enough.  Might as well give them some experience with the big-people world, hmmm?”

Jade nodded and handed the folded paper across to Nikki.  For her part, Nikki accepted the folded page, placed it on the table in front of her, then held her closed fist in front of her while she began to gesture with the other hand.  A lavender glow formed around her gesturing hand, and sparkles seemed to condense in the air around her fist.  Rays of light suddenly speared inward, coalescing in a pinpoint of light somewhere within Nikki’s clenched fist.  At the same time, there was the sound of tiny chimes tinkling.

Nikki opened her fingers slowly, like a rosebud coming into bloom.

Standing there in her palm was a two-inch high vision of Nikki Reilly.  Except this version had dragonfly wings that sprouted from her back, and her voice (she was humming to herself) was in the highest soprano range and seemed to be accompanied by a faint wind-chime effect whenever she made a sound.  The pixie was fussing with a towel around her flame-red hair, and she had another diminutive towel wrapped around her body.  Sensing some change, her eyes opened.

“Oh!  It never fails!  Step into the shower for just one minute—!  Hold on!”  Again, the wind chime effect accompanied her voice.

There was a brief puff of white smoke, and when that vanished the little pixie was dressed in a red dress, red slippers, and was wearing a red Santa hat.

“Ready, my Queen!”  She bowed, there in the palm of Nikki’s hand.

Attempting to stop the smile that was creeping onto her lips, Nikki said, “I want you to carry this letter to Thuban.”

“Who?”

“The scaly fellow at that table over there.”

“Gotcha!  Should I wait for a reply?”

“Please.”

Grabbing one corner of the letter, the tiny pixie zoomed up toward the ceiling, then shot toward Thuban’s table.

“Wow!  Did you finally gain control of your hobgoblins?” Jamie asked.  “You must have done something big, ‘cause I can normally feel your hobgoblins, and I didn’t get much at all from that one.”

“Particular impressive,” Sara decided, “since your magic was so quiet.  I barely felt anything beyond the light-show illusion.”

Nikki just smiled back at the demon, her sometimes rival.

“Unless…” Sara continued to muse “…of course!  Let’s see, the anti-eavesdropping spell is on, so people can see us, but they can’t hear us.  So, nobody turn to look at her.  That was you, Jade, wasn’t it?”

Jamie almost turned to look, before stopping.  “That was Jinn?  No wonder.  You’re getting pretty good at the shapeshifting.”

“Thanks,” Jade said, blushing.  “Nikki and I have been practicing the last couple of days, but you weren’t around.”

“Wait a minute,” Hank said, leaning forward.  “If that’s Jinn, she’s still just as strong as ever, right?”

“I assume so,” Nikki replied, since the question was directed at her.  “Can you even make a weaker version of Jinn?”

Jade shook her head.  “Nope.  The pixie should be strong enough to move or lift 300 pounds.”

“Which is probably no big deal when she’s human sized,” Hank continued, “but when she’s pixie-sized, it’s like she’s got super-strength.  It’s the classic problem that most bricks have to deal with.  Her tiny hands can exert 300 pounds of force, but it’s too much pressure over too small an area.  She can’t use her full strength.”

“Oh, that.”  Jade waved her hand dismissively.  “When I’m a pixie, I don’t usually use my hands, it only looks like it.”

“Come again?” Nikki asked, thoroughly confused.

“Well, I can manipulate various objects, right?  I found this thread in one of the devisor labs.  Carbon nanotubes, spun together into thread.  You need a special diamond blade to cut it, and—” she looked up to notice that most of her audience was starting to look bored.  “Well, anyway, it’s very thin and semi-transparent, so it’s hard to see.  When I’m a pixie, I have six feet of the stuff coiled up inside me.  When I want to grab something, I just shoot the thread out through my palms and wrap it around whatever I’m grabbing.  So it’s actually me-as-a-thread doing the work, with a pixie body hanging on for the ride.”

Nikki boggled at that.  “My pixies are super-strong?”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d say that.  Three hundred pounds isn’t that much by Whateley standards.”

“It is for a two-inch pixie!”

Jade shrugged.  “Okay then.  They’re super-strong.  I’m still trying to figure out what all I can do with the wire technique.  I know I can spin it out into a flat disk for blocking hits.  It doesn’t make a very good punch, since it’s only as fast as I can fly.  Which is pretty fast when I’m that light, but not as fast as a real punch.”

Toni chortled.  “I can just see it as Nikki, also known as super-fairy, goes to stop her first bank robbery.”  She waved her hands in the air as she described the scene.  “Nikki stays back, casting her strange magic.  As the bank robbers appear, she gestures, shouting, ‘Pixie Patrol!  Pursue and Punish with Pugilistic Power!’  And while the elf queen sits back, her hoard of insect-size minions grab the robbers, giving them flips, socks to the jaw, and carrying them off to the paddy wagon!  What a triumph to see on the evening news, except for the fact that the pixies are too small to show up on camera.”

“ ‘Pugilistic Power’?”  Nikki frowned at her roommate.  “Sounds like someone’s aching for a little magic right now!”

Toni gave a sheepish grin, but didn’t look like she regretted it.

Thuban watched in bemusement as the two-inch high pixie came flying in, carrying a letter that was easily twice her size.  He casually held out a hand to accept the note, then flipped it open and to it one-handed:

‘Are you going to be there?  And, Demona’s not going to be there, is she?  –J.’

“Demona?  Why on earth would Demona be there?”

Using the same paper, he penned a reply: ‘No Demona.  I’ll be there for most of it.  –T.’

The pixie had settled down to the table, where she waited, tapping her foot.  Thuban, however, handed the note to the normal-looking boy next to him.

“Ricochet, if you would.”

The boy wadded the message into a small ball, then threw it hard into the glass dome above them.  The pixie immediately took off after the message, but it caromed off one support strut, was deflected by a pane of glass, and finally dropped down to the Kimba table, landing directly in front of Jade.

This time, when the pixie flew back with the reply, she had to dodge through a maze of anti-pixie fire.  High-speed paperclips, subsonic spitwads, small lightning bolts, and the occasional laser discharge forced her to dodge and weave like mad during her return flight to Thuban.  While he read the note, she collapsed onto the table, puffing to get her breath back.

Thuban read Jade’s comments: ‘What time? –J.’  and took out a small note card to write, ‘Let’s say, 10 AM to probably about 4 PM.  –T.’

When he handed the card to the pixie, he said, “I tried to make it a bit sssmaller, in consideration of your burden.”

She glared up at him.  “I don’t suppose you two could just sit at the same table and talk, like normal people?”

“Ah, but the exchange of notesss, particularly through a go-between, hasss sssuch a hallowed hissstory.  Now, off you go!”

The pixie took a tight hold of the card, crouched down, then sprung into the air, flying her fastest and highest as she dodged the ever-increasing hail of missiles and beams.  This time, small food items, particularly beans and peas, had been added to the suppressive fire.  Still, she made it through with herself and her message intact.  She practically collapsed in front of Jade and handed over the message.

A moment later, she was winging her way back.  This time, she shot up to hover right at the ceiling, dodging between the white metal struts that supported the geodesic panes of glass.  The extra height gave her more time to spot the incoming missiles and legumes.  It also increased the distance, which decreased the enemy’s aim.  Over Thuban’s table, she dive-bombed straight down, bringing the card to his hand.

“Are you (huff) just about done here?  (wheeze)  I don’t know if I can take (gasp) much more of this!”

Thuban unfolded the card: ‘Pick me up at Poe! –J.’  and penned his final message, ‘I’m looking forward to it.  –T.’

By now the cafeteria staff had come out waving the traditional array of ladles and rolling pins (save for the chef, who was allowed to wield a massive cleaver).

“What’s the matter with you little punks?  You never seen a little fairy carrying mail before?  You!  Don’t you dare throw that!  Yes, I’m talking to you!”

The brave little pixie dodged and weaved, but eventually, given the density of the barrage, something was bound to connect.  In this case, it was a laser beam.  It was low power, relatively speaking, but a person who is only two inches tall cannot stand the damage that would be a minor wound for a person five feet tall.  The valiant pixie gave a piercing cry of despair, then tumbled toward the ground, completely helpless, barely clinging to her precious message.

The savage audience, stunned by the event, held their fire and their collective breaths as she spiraled toward the floor, and what seemed to be certain death.  Then, seconds before she struck the cafeteria tile, the pixie looked up again.

“PSYCHE!”

With a new burst of speed, she dodged and weaved under tables and between legs until she finally arrived at her destination.

She hovered for a moment above the Kimba table, grandstanding.  “Neither foe nor pain nor boom of light stays pixie couriers from the swift completion of their disjointed rounds!”

The future elf queen scowled, as she was struck once again with punishing damage (and more importantly, caught without a comeback).  “That’s it!  Home you go!”  Nikki grabbed the pixie in her cupped hands.  With a flash of light and a small explosion of sparkles, the tiny creature was gone.

Sara looked around the table with a blasé expression.  “So… anyone else want to die of embarrassment right about now?”

Toni just lay down on the table and covered her head with her arms.

Jade grinned, missing the exchange entirely.  “I gotta date!”

“I have mentioned several times before,” Ito-sensei told the assembled class, “that we will begin holding the semester exams next week.  Today’s class will be preparation for the exam.  I will answer any questions you have, then we’ll do some non-contact work.  While you attempt to put some final polish on your form, Tolman Sensei and I will circulate for anyone who needs some last-minute pointers.”

Another freshman raised her hand.  “Sensei?  I heard a rumor that we might be facing people from other classes.”

Ito-sensei nodded.  “The combat exams are one-on-one, pooling everyone from the freshman and sophomore classes.  That is: all martial arts classes, regular P.E., everything.  Students are paired up completely at random.  You need not win to pass, but you must make an ‘acceptable’ showing, as judged by the assembled instructors.”

Many hands had already shot into the air.

“You mean, the kids that didn’t take martial arts might be facing off against one of us?”

Ito nodded.  “Well put.  Whateley is intended, among other things, to help you survive if you find yourself fleeing from a lynch mob, or caught between two street gangs, or merely at the wrong place at the wrong time.  You may walk away from the training we offer, but twice each year you will need to demonstrate that you can survive such perils.  That’s why the pairings are random.”

“But… that’s not fair!  I could end up fighting someone like Lancer!  What am I supposed to do?”

“You are expected to do your best, and to survive.  The tests will consist of a mission and an objective.  It’s possible that you could accomplish the objective through means other than direct confrontation.  Last spring’s objective was to rescue an unconscious victim, a dummy, from a piranha-filled lake.  There may be ways to achieve your goal without combat, but they require either the right powers, or the most extremely clever plan.”

There were more questions, and the freshmen slowly came to the sinking feeling that they were being set up for a fall.  The sophomores were mostly smirking, except for those whose powers were useless in combat.

“Sir?  Isn’t this really, really biased against us freshmen?  I mean, we’ve never been through this before.  The sophomores have gone through these tests twice already, most of ‘em.  A couple of other people have mentioned how unfair it is.  Well, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but could you actually answer the question this time?  Because it sure sounds like you have it in for us.”

Ito sensei clasped his hands behind his back.  “Unfair?  Most definitely.  ‘Have it in for you?’  No.  Quite the opposite.”  He paused for a second, as if choosing his words.  “Never forget that you are a mutant!  Because I assure you, your enemies will not forget.  Has anyone forgotten Halloween?”  The group sobered at that reminder.  “Unlike Halloween, most mobs are made up of over-emotional and under-trained fools.  Some people have even described freshmen that way, though I would never stoop so low.  And think: these sophomores, who as you so cleverly pointed out have had much more training and two previous tests, these sophomores are largely looking forward to the test.  And that is the purpose of all of this.  You freshmen, imagine next year when you are the sophomores.  Imagine four years from now, when you are the seniors.  I hope you will have learned much by then.  I hope that when the emotional and foolish mob comes for you, you smile like these sophomores are doing.  Because then you will have the training, and the experience, and the confidence to demonstrate to them the folly of their ways.  It is for this reason that we deliberately make things tough, and unfair, and press you to rise to the challenge.”

He looked around and, seeing that there were no more questions, he said, “As a final incentive, those who pass the test will be eligible for next semester’s Team Tactics class.  We have a new instructor this year – a former Navy SEAL who has spent many, many years in covert operations, before having what some call an ‘origin event’ late in life.

“I think you will all have much to learn there.  Ambushes – both making them and surviving them, taking captives and hostages, keeping them secure, rescuing them.  You will learn to assault fortified positions, to fight against a team of experienced foes, and how to create a truly effective team of your own.”  His smile was truly nefarious.  “But only if you qualify on the upcoming tests.”

71: Unveiling

Saturday, December 9, 9:47 AM

Saturday morning, Thuban was waiting in the entry of Poe Cottage.  This time the car was not a limousine, but a sensible gray sedan.  Jade didn’t know much about cars, so she couldn’t see how heavily the Mercedes had been reworked.  From the outside, it looked like any other high-end car that might be on the road, aside from the tinted windows in the rear.  And the inside … that was something else entirely.

She’d expected the rear compartment to be cozy, and had looked forward to sitting close to Thuban.  Perhaps she’d hold his hand.

Instead, the door opened and she stepped through a black curtain.  Beyond the curtain was an airlock.  An honest-to-god airlock!  It was seven feet high, and five foot square.  Plainly, it was larger than the car they had just entered.  At her back was a curtain and a car door with a tinted window.  Ahead of her was a vault-like door.  Thuban pushed her forward gently, as he came in and closed the door behind himself.  It slammed with a solid sound that made her certain that the door was some sort of reinforced armor.

“What the heck?”

“Shhh.  Wait until we are inside.”  There was a mild lurch as the car began to move.  The dragon-man pressed his open hand against a plate on the far wall.  A hatch slid open, and he stepped through it.  Jade followed him, marveling at what lay before her.

The inner chamber was huge.  It was perhaps forty feet across to the far side.  That was almost the width of Poe Cottage!  The ceiling towered above them, twenty feet up.  Although the center of the vast space was open, it became narrower and narrower at the top, like the interior of an A-frame.  But it was clear that it wasn’t the roofline crowding in, the two upper floors simply overhung the space, with open balconies looking over the central shaft.  At this level the main floor was a little over twenty feet wide.  The “front” of the room (judging by where the front of the car had been) was dominated by a gigantic flat display screen, flanked on both sides by rows of smaller screens.  Currently the screen was displaying a pastoral scene that looked like the mountains of ancient China.  Jade recognized the conical straw hats of the peasant workers in the foreground, as well as the limestone mountains that seemed to be unique to southern China.

Two rows of chairs and couches made a semi-circle around the giant screen.  There was a kitchenette, bathrooms, a set of bookshelves and a small library farther down.  And against the far wall was another airlock, right next to—

“It that an elevator?”  She couldn’t believe it.

“The next floor up is the medical wing.  Sometimes, patients can’t climb the stairs on their own.”

“You have an elevator to take you between the three floors?”  It was hard to keep her eyes from bugging out.

Thuban paused to give an uncomfortable cough.  “Five floors, actually.  The armory is downstairs, and the very top floor holds the mechanicals – electronics, communications gear, and the like.   And that section there on the far side holds the vehicle bay.”

“The—”  Jade had to start over to recover from the screech in her voice.  “Vehicle bay?”

“An APC, another limousine, a few motorcycles, and a couple of jetpacks (in case things get really bad).  Quite modest, really.”

She gulped.  “I… see.  Uh, who’d you have to sell your soul to, when you went to borrow this?”

“Oh, it’s mine.  I may have to sell it soon, and I wanted to show off to you before I lost it forever.”

Jade blinked at that, completely out of her depth.  She hadn’t known what to expect from today’s events, and Thuban had only said that he wanted to “surprise her.”  So, with that in mind, she’d begged Phase for an outfit to borrow.  Ayla was only three inches taller than her, so Jade could often wear the other girl’s outfits (not that she’d had reason to, until now).  And Ayla was rich enough that she had more outfits than she could wear.  This particular ensemble featured a simple sky-blue silk blouse, with a collared dark blue overshirt that was half-shirt and half-jacket.  An elegantly simple black leather miniskirt and dark hose left her looking feminine (since her figure up top certainly wasn’t that interesting).  Topped off with black suede ankle boots, a matching leather purse, and a beret, and the girls had pronounced her looking more like a sophisticated fourteen or fifteen, than her physical age of about eleven.

She’d triple-charged Jinn, which should leave her sister going strong at Whateley and let Jade stay out for six hours.  Jade could still call up Jann-sensei, but that would leave her so weak that she’d be pretty useless.

Which meant that she was oh-so-casually dressed to the hilt, with a mysterious dragon-boy boyfriend, looking at his impossible mansion-on-wheels and not having the slightest idea what to do.  Oh, and she was pretty much on her own.

“Should I go back for Jinn?  We won’t need her along, will we?”

“No, I don’t think we will,” Thuban purred, placing his hand gently on Jade’s back.  “Why?  Is she going to be, er, rejoining you soon?”

She turned and found herself held in the circle of his arms.  She looked up, way up, since he was more than a foot taller than she was.  As he lowered his long head to look at her, she stared into his alien-looking eyes and decided that it was time to trust him.

“I gave her a triple charge,” she admitted.  “She’ll be going strong for six hours.  Unless something weird happens, I won’t be, you know, seeing her before then.”

“Triple charge?  That’s new.  And I thought she was good for an hour and a half.”

“I’ve gotten better.”

“Does it bother you to be so…vulnerable?”

She wrapped her arms around him.  “I guess it matters who you’re vulnerable with.  It’s hard to explain, but I kinda want to make myself vulnerable sometimes.  With you.  That’s why I told you about my real time limit, and the whole triple-charge thing.  I usually try to hide all those details.  You know, deceive the enemy?”

“And you’ve decided that I’m not your enemy?”

“I sure hope not,” she admitted, with more fear than she wanted to reveal.

His encircling arms crushed her tight for a moment.

“I know very well about withholding secrets and deceiving those around you,” Thuban rumbled in his deep voice.  “I have a very hard time trusting.  Very few people even know what my powers are.  That’s part of why I brought you here – to show you.”

“Your powers?”  She was puzzled.  “You’re an exemplar.  An exemplar four, right?”

“Yes,” he agreed “but that’s a minor issue.  I am primarily a warper – one of the strongest ever identified.”

She frowned.  “Billie’s a warper…”

“Not the same thing at all.  She modifies gravity and acceleration.  I suspect that her powers relate to the curvature of space.  I modify space itself – specifically size and volume.”

She got it.  “So you either shrink or grow things.”

He nodded.  “Either.  Both.  Unlike many warpers, I’m not limited to my own body or equipment close to me.  I can make the effect last for hours, or with considerable expense and effort I can make the effect permanent, like in this car.”

“So… you could go Godzilla, like JimmyT, or Sizemax.”

“I can reach twice her maximum height, but the effect works much differently for me.  There is an ‘interface layer’ which makes my size useless for combat.  At least, useless for direct combat.”

Jade boggled.  “You do know that when she really tries, she can reach something like thirty feet tall?”

“Thirty-six feet, actually.”

She tried to wrap her mind around this new development.  “Are you saying that you can make other things ten times bigger?”

“A little more.  Ten times bigger, or ten times smaller.  And I can walk away.  The effect persists for several hours.”

“No wonder you keep it secret!  Wow.”

“And now I’m trusting you.  This is a very personal secret.  I’m asking you not to tell your friends, or slip and let them know, or to even confirm their guesses.”

“Oh, definitely!  I promise.”  She huffed.  “Of course, Jinn will know.”

“And she’ll be bound by the same promise, won’t she?”

“Yeah.”

They stood like that for a moment, then Thuban gave her a final squeeze and walked toward the kitchenette.  “Can I get you something while we drive?  A coke?  Milkshake?”

“Yeah, sure.”  She slowly walked after him, looking around at the huge building.  “So this is all inside the limo?”

Thuban ran a blender for a moment.  “Yes.  It has a permanent twelve-times reduction on the exterior surface.  That gives us about 1700 times the volume, when you work it out.”

“Handy,” she commented dryly, accepting the shake.  “Hey, that’s how you squeezed the gargoyle in the cigarette pack, isn’t it?”

He nodded.  “Exactly.”

“How about weight?”

“That adjusts proportionately with volume.”

“Wow, must be handy.  You could have enough pockets to carry anything you wanted.”

“You begin to see why this is most useful when kept secret.  I typically carry at least a motorcycle with me, as well as a plethora of tools and items.  It’s one of my secret faults.  I’m a bit of a packrat.”

She gestured around.  “If it’s not too personal, how much does something like all of this cost?  I mean, I knew you were rich, but… wow.”

“This little place?  Not a dime.”  Seeing her look of disbelief, he continued.  “I have, through various hidden channels, created a few of these chambers for people with the money to pay for them.  Lord Paramount, the United States CIA, the Queen of England.  For Lord Paramount, this car and chamber were my payment.  Of course, I had to handle the size adjustment myself, but he created the rest.”

“You trusted him with that?  How could you be sure he wouldn’t put bugs or bombs or who-knows-what inside?”

“Yes, that was a risk.  But he promised that he wouldn’t.  Unlike the CIA, or even the Queen, I trust Paramount’s word.  He may have his faults, but he’s always been fanatic about his personal honor.”

“Oh.”  She was suddenly overwhelmed with the company she was keeping, even if it was only second-hand.

After a moment, Thuban asked, “What are you thinking?  Is it so bad to deal with Lord Paramount?”

“Huh?  Oh, it’s not that.  It’s just … wow.  Suddenly I’m in, how do I say it?  I’m just a freshman.  I’m just a kid.  Even after something like Halloween, it’s hard to imagine…  I mean, this is really the big leagues, isn’t it?”

“Does it bother you to deal with the rich and powerful?”

“Madonna is rich and powerful.  Lord Paramount… he’s in another class entirely.  The Queen of England?  Heck, the entire CIA?  I don’t even know where to begin!”

Thuban folded his arms inside the wide sleeves of his Chinese robe.  “Would it be easier to deal with if you were also rich and powerful?”

“Me?” she snorted.  “Get real!  I have problems buying a spare set of underwear.  And sure, I’m a mutant.  That makes me powerful enough to stop bank robbers – some of them – or maybe to stop someone from holding up a Quickie-mart.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he cautioned.  “If you wanted to go into espionage, I’ll bet you could name your own salary.  Particularly if you can keep your ‘sister’ going for six hours.”

“Well…”

“But I’m talking about a more legitimate approach.  Something that will benefit the entire world, and make you, me, and many other people richer than the wealthiest software baron.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Indulge me for a little while longer, and I’ll show you.”

Lily was helping them out by running the control booth.  The underground “Arena ’77” was ugly and functional – exactly what you’d expect for a site that was used for pit fights these days.  The walls had all the functional utility of shrapnel-scarred concrete.  Powerful lights speared down from the distant corners of the room, illuminating every inch of the fifty-by-fifty foot combat stage.  Ancient but serviceable force-field generators created a full cube around the stage.  The fields only activated as matter approached within three feet, so sound and air were normally unrestricted.

Finally, the oversized stage was ringed with boxing-ring ropes, though no one expected those ropes to actually impede the combatants.  The ropes served mainly as boundary markers.

Lily looked left, to where Bunny waited.  The blonde girl nodded, saying, “As far as I can tell, the camera feeds are all deactivated.”

“I guess it’s not such a big deal,” Lily decided.  “All this will be public when they take their finals.  Filming them now would only be useful for giving pointers to their opponents.  Or maybe for the point spread, on the betting.”

Bunny shrugged.  “Like I’m a combat expert.  I’m shooting for a grade of ‘survival’ myself.”

Lily turned and activated one panel, snapping on switches in succession.  Below, the fields snapped into place briefly, sparking blue-white before fading to invisibility.

“Fields active,” she called down through the microphone.  “Get ready and I’ll start the countdown.”

Arena ’77 received little use these days except for training and the most savage fights.  It had none of the modern niceties – no holography generators, no terrain or obstacle systems, and no padded seats for the audience.  It came from an earlier era, when the fight was everything and that fight consisted of two opponents pounding on each other until one of them dropped.  On the up side, it was easy to reserve time on it.

“Get set!  Here comes the count!”

Lily started their own monitor cameras.  They wanted a post-fight analysis for all of these trials, though they planned to destroy the disks once they were done.  She snapped a final switch, and a simple clock lit up – no different from the scoreboard in a thousand high-school gyms.

Jinn prepared herself.  She couldn’t see the LED clock, but she could hear the clicks.  She thought that if she could stand up to Hank, she’d have a chance at almost any opponent they threw at her.  If she could stand up to Hank.  That was the issue.

Instead of her normal equipment, she was using previous discards, rejects, and the like.  She even had a small armored sphere in her chest to hold a clothes change for afterward.  Her physical body wouldn’t be back on campus until that afternoon, and she had other things to do today.  Hopefully, the sphere would be strong enough to survive the fight.  Everything outside she could afford to lose.

Another beep of the countdown clock.  Unconsciously, she crouched, ready to take to the air at the ‘go’ signal.  On the far side of the ring, Hank did the same.

Another beep.  She let the tattered cloak flare up, blowing in a non-existent wind.  Chains appeared, crossing over her chest bandolier-style.  Tatters of fabric began to rise along her cloak and clothes.  A fog began to form in the air around her, as small clouds of white mist billowed at her feet.  Across the ring Hank just cracked his knuckles and grinned.

They’d chosen each other for sparing partners because this way they could both go full strength.  Hank could destroy her, but he knew he wouldn’t be hurting her.  She could unleash everything she had against him, and she’d be lucky if she managed to raise a bruise.

The starting buzz was a harsh sound.  She immediately launched in the air; Hank did the same.  They met twenty feet up, over the center of the ring.  Jinn had her arms out, cruciform, spinning like a propeller.  The momentum would give her the power she’d need if she had any hope of cracking Hank’s protective layer.  In each hand, she held a railroad spike, point forward.

Hank shot forward, stopped, and slid back just out of range.

He’s gotten better at controlling his flight, she realized.  She shot forward.  At the same time, she pulled in her chains.  Just like an ice skater pulling in her arms, her body began to spin faster to conserve angular momentum.  Coordinated with the forward lunge, it had a chance to catch Hank by surprise.

Instead, he slid back a few feet, flipping over backward and counterattacking with a blindingly leg sweep.  His leg met her spinning arm at the elbow, and she screamed as her right arm was ripped away.  The black skeletal metal, along with the spike it had held, flew like a bullet to the far side of the stage.  The pieces passed over the rope boundary, then sparked against the force field that snapped into visibility.

Unbalanced, she spun to a stop, hovering in the air to look at her opponent.

“First blood,” he said, gesturing toward her missing limb.  “And it looks like I’ve disarmed you.”

Jinn growled and looked to her right side.  The free-floating dust that defined her ‘skin’ flowed like water, and a moment later her arm was restored.  “I’m not so easy to hurt.”

“But there’s no metal, no mass inside.  Without that you can’t hit hard enough to hurt a normal person, much less me.”

“Try me!”  Her cloak swirled around her like it had a mind of its own, and the air began to fog.

“You asked for it!”

With a whoosh of displaced air, Lancer shot forward, leading with his fist.  Jinn’s cloak swept aside like a matador’s cape, and she grabbed his back as he passed, trying to ride him.  She raised the spike that remained in her left fist, to impale him vampire-style, but Lancer flipped and kicked, sending her up to smash against the field that roofed the ring.

“She’s doing better than I expected,” Bunny said.  “I don’t usually think of Jinn as being that tough.”

Lily nodded.  “Hank’s super strength, invulnerability, and flight make a great combination,” she admitted.  “But he needs to be more aggressive.  He needs to fight more opponents like this – where his strength and invulnerability don’t let him instantly win.”  She grimaced.  “The problem is endemic to high-end bricks.  The decent ones, at least.  They spend so much time learning to be careful of a fragile world that it’s hard for them to let go of those inhibitions and fight at full strength.  See?  He should have followed up that smash right there, but he’s hanging back to make sure she’s okay.”

He’s too good, Jinn realized.  She was willing to sacrifice her training gear for this exercise, but she didn’t want to lose her regular outfit.  She was using a backup “locker” that carried her gear for the rest of the day.  If she lost that, if she lost her “grip” on her after-practice equipment, she wouldn’t be able to animate a body until Jade returned that afternoon.  The inside of the locker was sprayed with cushioning foam, and the locker itself was a titanium-steel sphere the size of a water balloon.  She held that in place inside her ribs, about where a living person’s heart would be.  Even so, Lancer’s latest slam had thrown her against the force field hard enough to put a small crack in the titanium-steel sphere.

Time to start fighting smarter, she decided.  She pushed off from the force field and taunted Hank.

“It’s not like you can hurt me.  You can go ahead and use some strength, if you want.”

She’d been hoping that he’d get a little hot under the collar, and maybe get sloppy.

Instead, he smiled.  “Okay, let’s say I fall for your bait.  What are you hoping for, a headlong rush?  Here it comes!”

In a matter of moments he’d adopted a classic “Superman” pose, leading with his fist as he flew toward her, spearing forward as fast as a car speeding down the highway.

Jinn metaphorically gulped as she backed toward the force field barrier.  Meanwhile, she quickly rearranged herself.  She looked frozen from Hank’s perspective, but she was anything but.  Her “bones” and material components were being shifted back and down, forming a tight gray-wrapped bundle at her feet and hidden behind her cloak.  Her chalk-white body appeared unaltered, but that’s all it was – appearance.

Hank rushed toward her, flipping at the last second.  His feet swung forward, smashing through her chest with the force of a bulldozer.  A bulldozer that was doing nearly fifty miles an hour.  His arms snapped out to each side, ready to clothesline her if she tried a dodge to the left or right.

Instead, her gambit worked.  Hank seemed to be taken by surprise as he passed harmlessly through the insubstantial chalk outline of her body to smash into the force field wall.  Lightning crackled over the wall, but Hank took the impact on his feet, and sprang back toward her.  He was fast enough to grab a handful of her cloak and rip it away from her.  She was forced to let it go.

“And thus, I remove your best weapon!”

“My cloak?”

“It hides your movements.  And I know about the reinforcing wires sewn into the very-deliberate tatters.”

“Damn!”  She still had her outfit and chains, but he was right about the cloak.  Quickly, she rearranged her bones and equipment back in place inside her body.

“In fact,” Lancer continued, “I think it’s time to end this.  There’s nothing you can do to hurt me.  And while you seem pretty invulnerable, I know your weakness.”

She backed away in mid-air.  “Yeah?  What’s that?”

His face was grim.  “The best way to defeat you is to simply close in and rip you to pieces, bit by bit.  You can’t hurt me, and once I throw any piece of you more than six feet away, you have to let go of it.  Soon there won’t be anything left.”

She backed away faster.  Okay, this is bad.  I figured he’d take me down eventually, but there’s got to be something I can do to him!

He reached forward to grab the thin fabric of her top.  “You weren’t expecting chivalry were you?  Fear of touching the poor girl there?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but instead of sound, she breathed out a cone of liquid nitrogen, straight into his face.

“Wha—?”

Hank released her top to wipe his face.  With his other hand he swung hard, connecting to her jaw.  The blow was hard enough to snap her skull free and send it ricocheting off the far wall.  Without thought, Jinn reformed her head outlined in white chalk, but there was nothing inside.

Hank was wiping furiously at his face and waving his hands.  Jinn took the opportunity to go to pieces.  It was hard to tell, but she figured they should now be inside a thick cloud.  She couldn’t perceive it herself, but Hank should be nearly blind in the billowing white fog.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

She made her voice issue from slightly ahead of him, while most of her pieces floated around behind him.  In particular, she needed to arrange a certain high-tension cable.  With scarcely a thought, one end tied itself into a slip-knot.  Hank was thrashing, but she managed to slip the knot around his left ankle.  She carefully tightened it, but deliberately held it away from his skin so he wouldn’t feel it yet.

Meanwhile, Hank finished wiping his face.  “It didn’t hurt.  I felt a moment of cold, but that’s all.  What did you do?”

“Liquid nitrogen.  The temperature plunged, and the water in the air condensed into a cloud.  Which is why you can’t see a thing.”

“We’ll see…” he responded, ominously.

A second cable was now in place around his other foot.  She had a small crank assembly that would amplify the mechanical advantage.  Hank was fifteen to twenty times stronger than she was, but with the right equipment she could still beat him.

Hank reached into his left and right pockets and pulled out two flimsy lengths of paper, rolled up.  He flicked out each hand and the paper unrolled, forming a cut-out shape like a sword.

“You’re going to hit me with a paper sword?”

“Not exactly.  Have you seen me in class, beating on the other bricks with that baseball bat?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You ever wonder why the bat didn’t break?”

She couldn’t help herself.  “If it did, you’d just throw the pieces at them.  And I know you’re not the type to throw brick-bats.”

“Ouch.  You’ve finally wounded me.  But to explain how I’m going to get rid of this fog, you should know that the bat doesn’t break for the same reason my clothes are protected.  Because my personal force field extends to cover my personal items.  That is, so long as I’m in contact with them.”

Jinn waited in ambush, poised for the moment when he reached a hand up over his shoulder.  “You have a length restriction?”

“Yeah.  The effect is pretty common for us ‘range zero’ TK types.  My maximum length is about three and a half feet.  So, baseball bat okay, broomstick not okay.”

“So… those paper swords are protected by your nearly-impervious personal force field?”

“Yup.”

“But how do you keep them stiff?  The force field doesn’t affect stuff on the inside.”

He gave a weak smile.  “It does a little.  I’m slightly protected against acceleration and vibration.  It’s a matter of training.”

He flicked the swords around in a quick martial display.  It wasn’t as impressive as anything Chou or Toni might have done, but then, Chou and Toni didn’t have razor-thin invincible swords, either.

“That makes for a pretty nasty paper cut.”

“Yeah,” Hank agreed.  “Even better, another aspect of the training was to focus my field to an edge.  A sharp edge.  I can’t do it just anywhere, it has to be ‘psychologically appropriate.’  My instructor has learned how to do a real ‘knife hand,’ but I’m nowhere close to being able to do that.”

As he spoke and gestured, he’d raised a hand up to shoulder height, but not quite into the proper position.  Jinn clamped down on her frustration and tried to keep him talking.

“That’ll be nasty.”

“Yeah, that’s why I haven’t shown it off in class yet.  But it turns out that ‘edge of a sword’ is a place that’s psychologically appropriate.”

“So in your pockets you carry around two swords that are paper-thin, stiff, unbreakable, and razor sharp.”

“Well put.”

That meant that even if she did manage to hog-tie him, he could cut the cable.  Could she get both hands at once?

“And as for the fog…”

Hank thrust his arms out to each side, holding the two swords even farther out.  Then, he began to spin, faster and faster, twirling like a top.

This was an ancient trick to Jinn.  She’d been doing the high-speed spin for months, practically since she’d arrived at Whateley.  She could even keep a part of herself spinning (the two cables on Hank’s ankles) while moving the rest of her to one side, slightly under his feet.  She was fine so long as she kept all of her pieces within a six-foot diameter cloud, but she didn’t want to get too close to the spinning blade of death.

Now Hank twisted the two blades slightly, so that they began acting like propeller blades.  Jinn almost missed that, but she noticed the debris on the floor being blown to the edge of the ring.

“Uh… you can see me now, can’t you?”

Hank smiled and gave a flick to each of his ‘swords.’  They curled up and he stowed them back in his pockets.  Before she could react, he dropped down to her height, reached forward and grabbed her remaining arm bone.

“One…” he said, yanking the bone out of her ‘grasp’ and hurling it to the floor below.

“That stings, you know.”

“Hmmm,” he decided.  “That’s not the usual reaction I get when I rip someone’s arm off.”

“You rip a lot of arms off?”

“Well, I try not to.  Only when it’s really necessary.  Like now.  Why?  You think you can stop me?”

This was probably her last chance.  She literally went to pieces, flowing in every direction around him.  Rib bones went one way, leg bones another, clothes a third way and a cloud of chalk went in every direction.  She briefly considered trying to blind him with a chalk cloud, but he’d blow that away the same way he’d handled the fog.

She coalesced again touching his back.  “You can’t reach me if I stay behind you!”

“Ha!  I’m more flexible than you think!”  He reached both hands over his shoulders.

This was exactly what she’d been hoping for.  Quick as thought, pre-prepared slip knots closed around his wrists and tightened.  Each wrist was tied to the opposite ankle.  Before he could react, she threaded the free end of the cable through her gear device and spun it.

“Damn!” he swore.  “When did you get so strong?”

“Mechanical advantage,” she explained.  “I’m getting just over six thousand pounds of pull, but I’m cranking like mad.”

She worked faster than she spoke.  By the time her sentence was done, Hank had been trussed up tight, arms crossed up over his shoulders and legs stretched backward.

“I can still fly, you know.”

She unlimbered another length of cable.  “I think I can handle that.”

Hank strained.  “Admittedly, this is an awkward position, but my strength doesn’t come from muscles.  If I can touch it, I can apply my full power.  It doesn’t matter if it’s physically awkward.”

The cables hummed from the tension they were suddenly under.

“Those cables are rated up to twenty thousand pounds of tension,” she informed him.  “That’s double your strength.”

Hank’s eyes gleamed.  “Tension?  How do they handle compression?  Remember, if I can touch it, I can apply my full power.”

Taking his thumb and finger, he began to squeeze the cable that bound him.

“Oh, one other thing,” he mentioned.  “Remember that edge I can create at psychologically appropriate locations?  Well, I don’t have a lot of call to use my fingernails, but it turns out I can make them really sharp.”

He flexed for a moment, letting the cabled go the tiniest bit slack, then simply pinched it in half with his thumb and finger.  To Jinn’s eye, the cable looked like it had been sliced with a knife.

“Uh oh.”

Hank pinched through the other cable.  After moving his arms and legs to limber them up, he reached across and pinched through the loops around his wrists and ankles.  The fragments of high-tension cable fell to the floor of the ring.

“I think that’s enough playing around,” Lancer decided.  “This might be my only chance to use my buzzsaw move, and I want to try it out.”  He flicked out his paper swords once more and began to twirl.

Jinn decided that it was a good thing that she couldn’t feel pain.

72: Blinded me with science

“Bio-regenetics?” Jade said, reading the sign above the unassuming office complex deep inside Berlin’s industrial district.  “What’s that?”

Thuban had not bothered shifting into his human form before stepping from the car, which was odd on the face of it.  He never appeared outside in Berlin in his normal form.  Also odd was his demeanor.  She didn’t have any special senses at the moment, but Stephen seemed to have gone abruptly cold, or perhaps harshly professional, as they left the amazing car.  First she’d stepped out of the mobile mansion to see that it looked like she was just stepping out of a car.  Now she was having to deal with Stephen, who had been so warm and trusting before, to find that he’d suddenly turned hard and callous.  She wasn’t sure what to think.

Thuban nodded toward the sign as they entered the building.  “It’s a new biotechnology firm.  The chamber of commerce thinks that it might help fund the rebirth of the city, as it moves from the old forestry-based industries of the nineteenth century, into the cutting edge industries of the twenty-first century.  The top scientist at Bio-regenetics is a Dr. Igor Gellmar, Whateley class of ’83.”

“I wish I had access to his MID right now,” she muttered.

“Exemplar-1, devisor & gadgeteer-3, specializing in biochemistry.”

She nodded.  “Makes sense, I guess.  If Berlin has a natural resource other than trees, it’s access to the country’s best supply of mutants.”

“This way.”

Inside, the place was a chaotic mess of construction in progress.  She could see where offices and a reception lobby were being constructed in front.  More small offices were being constructed in back.  And in the center – she wasn’t sure what was going on there.  It was two stories tall, whatever it was, and had hoses, water, gas, and electric lines, as well as giant parabolic reflectors, all in construction, and all seemingly focused on a raised circular platform in the center of the laboratory.  Technicians hurried about the platform, connecting equipment and checking machinery.  Standing in the center, with his arms folded, an older man in a lab coat surveyed the work critically, occasionally barking an instruction or correction at the team.

As the man turned to them, Jade wished for her typical rider.  She could summon up Jann-sensei, but her spirit-self would need to use TK to hold her upright.  The exhaustion would make it tough to stand and impossible to walk.  So for now, she didn’t have her regular rider, and couldn’t read the man’s emotions at all.  That was a shame, because the frigid demeanor he gave off was more than a little intimidating.  The man had narrow eyes hidden behind hard, oval glasses.  He had an unruly shock of black hair, and a tightly trimmed black beard that came to a point, at his chin.  There was no mustache, just a beard that outlined an already-sharp jaw line.  He wore a tight black turtleneck with matching slacks, and had a white lab coat that fit loosely over that.  And the impression he gave was that of an absolute ruler surveying his domain.

“Who are you?  This area is forbidden—”as he turned toward them, he recognized Thuban’s distinctive form.  “Ah, Stephen.  Superb.  Is this the… girl?”

Jade felt a spike of apprehension at the reference.  Did he know her secret?  Was it her imagination, or had his eyes widened slightly as he caught sight of her?

“Miss Sinclair?”  Unfolding his arms, the man reached out to shake hands, while placing his other hand possessively on her shoulder.  “It is pleasure to have you here at last.  Come.  The main facilities are incomplete, but examination room four is finished.  It’s in the back.  Follow me.”

Looking apprehensively over to Thuban, she allowed herself to be led into the back.

“Thuban?”  She wanted to call him ‘Stephen,’ too, but it seemed to public here for the intimacy of his first name.  “What’s going on?”

“Something of a surprise,” was all he said.

After they had all trooped inside the examination, the doctor pulled a small curtain open, indicating a changing room.  He tossed Jade a hospital gown.  “Now, undress in there.  We begin immediately!”

Her eyes flashed from Thuban to the insane doctor.  What a time to be down to her desperation charge!  She was half considering powering up Jann, despite what it would cost her!  “Uh…”

“Hurry up!  I don’t have time to waste!  You know what this is about!  We haven’t got all day.  Oh, if you’re concerned about my medical credentials,” he said the word with a slight sneer, “I assure you that I’m fully certified.”  He gestured toward a set of medical diplomas on the wall.  “There!  See?  I’m a real doctor.  Now strip!”

“Actually, Doctor,” Thuban said, letting some hiss creep into his voice, “I haven’t told her anything about this yet.”

“What?  Well why the hell not?  We’re wasting time!”

“I was hoping to surprise her.”

Jade stood there, clutching the hospital gown, with her knees unaccountable slammed together, feeling more than a little vulnerable.  “Surprise?” she croaked.

“It’s another attempt to solve your … situation,” Thuban explained.

“Oh!”  That changed everything.  She thought that maybe it also explained Stephen’s awkwardness, since he didn’t seem to cope well when dealing with the unfortunate truth about her physical condition.  But the closest she’d ever gotten to achieving her dream had been Stephen’s last attempt – the BIT-slicer.

With a more positive attitude, she ducked behind the curtain, and had switched into the hospital gown in no time.  “But… Stephen, I don’t want you to see me like this.”  She only belatedly realized that she had used his true name, but given the situation he was hardly being exposed as much as she was.

“You think it will matter to me?”

“It might.  I’m worried it might.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone with the doctor,” he said firmly.

“Then you can sit on the other side of the screen,” she decided.  “And you have to promise not to peek.”

“But… that’s… don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do,” she said, gaily.  “That’s why I want you to promise.”

Thuban fumed for a moment, then traded places with her.  “I promise not to peek,” he said gruffly.

She kissed the side of his mouth as they passed.  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Despite her lingering fatigue, she practically floated up to the examination table

“I hope you have a high pain threshold,” the doctor said, as he turned to his cabinet..

“It’s pretty good.”  As the doctor approached carrying some strange cutting device, Jade tried to imagine a worse question he might have asked.  She failed.  Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t going to make his reputation on having a good bedside manner.  “Could you tell me what’s going on?  …Please?”

“I’ll try to make it brief.”  He took her left arm, and sprayed something upon it, numbing it.  “I need to take several blood samples.  Then I’m going to excise a small patch of skin on your inner arm, a two centimeter square.  I’ll be replacing that with a series of four different grafts – two female skin grafts, one male, and one foreign.  Next, I’ll be making small incisions in your inner arm and inserting a variety of items and chemicals.  Since you’re a regenerator, I expect you will build up an immunity to the anesthetic fairly quickly, so I’ll need to work fast.”

He was working on the skin at the inner side of her bicep, but it was numb and she couldn’t feel much of what he was doing.  Occasionally, he would mutter comments such as “excellent” or “odd.”  He grabbed odd instruments, and she felt the vibration of strange things happening on her arm.

“That should do for that arm.  Now on the same area of your right arm, I’ll test a sequence of other techniques.”

Again he sprayed, and the arm went mostly numb, but she could feel him working.  She bit her lip, as it became more painful.

“I’ve read the reports on your previous medical adventures,” the disapproval in his voice was clear “and I understand where a rank novice might think you’d run out of possibilities.  The truth is that we are only limited by our imagination and daring.”  The doctor’s voice rang with conviction as he said this.  “I will approach the situation from an engineering point of view.  We need to test, to find out whether your body will absorb or reject implanted substances and tissues, how it deals with your flesh folding back on itself, and how it deals with foreign biological invaders, both human and otherwise.  My understanding is that, in addition to your regenerative abilities, your body also has a tendency to spontaneously ‘revert’ to its base state.  There are numerous possible explanations and we need to narrow down that situation, as well as mapping the outlines and extent of the reversion process.  For example, your hair length doesn’t revert, does it?  Nor do your memories.  All could form crucial clues.”

By the time he was done, Jade sat up and looked at her arms.  Both of them felt physically raw.  Looking for the first time, she gasped.

Her left arm had been tattooed in a checkerboard pattern, and there were cuts and lumps, where small beads seemed to have been inserted under the skin.  Another patch was where her skin had been cut away, with new skin laid over the bare spot.

Her right arm was even stranger.  Again there was a tattooed grid.  A ring was clipped through her skin, like any other body piercing.  In another location, a small tube had been stuck in, like a tiny straw.  A pinch of skin had been pulled out and the fold sewn over.  That pinched when she stretched her arm.

“Uh, I have a combat test next week.  I’ll need this stuff out for that.”

“No problem,” the doctor muttered absently.  “Now, I’ll need a blood draw, and we’ll want to get a baseline scan in the tomography systems.”

She resolved to cope with a long, extremely uncomfortable morning.

Occasionally, the cafeteria staff went above and beyond the call of duty.  They were top nutritional experts and professional chefs, every one.  Given the wide variety of dietary requirements, they pushed the envelope of conventional cuisine on a daily basis.  Occasionally, they liked to just settle back and show off.  They knew that the upcoming week would be stressful.  Even though there were two weeks until the break, half the school had combat finals during the upcoming week.  And the break itself would be stressful, particularly for many of the freshmen who would be returning home to deal with former friends and family.  Whateley had a tolerance for the unusual that was easy to depend upon.  The return home would be traumatic for some, especially freshmen.

For all of these reasons, the cafeteria staff had decided to show off a bit for Saturday’s dinner.  They had taken delivery of some 2000 cuts of filet mignon.

It helps to understand exactly what’s implied by this.  Filet mignon is the softest, tenderest, (and many believe) most flavorful meat on the animal.  It comes from the tenderloin, a narrow strips alongside the spine in what would be the “small of the back” on a person.  In cattle, these small muscles receive little stress or exercise and remain tender and succulent.  But the area is tiny, and the meat that the Whateley staff had just ordered consumed the entire tenderloin production of nearly 300 cattle.

The narrow tenderloin strips were sliced into four ounce sections, “medallions”, and then further enhanced with a delicately marinade, a blend of spices, and a wrap of bacon.  Finally, they were grilled over an open wood flame to bring out the peak flavor.  These small steaks were then made available in either rare, medium, or well-done portions.

Fresh grilled vegetables, Kaiser rolls, and assorted garnishes were also provides.

The cafeteria opened, the staff watched, hoping for some appreciation from the student body for the effort and expense.  And the first bricks came stampeding in, with a hunger that is difficult to accurately describe.

“Hey, look!” the leader of the slavering pack shouted.  “Bacon burgers!  All right, I’ll take ten to start with.  Where’s the mayo?  You got, like, chips or fries to go with these things?”

The staff, many of whom had left lucrative positions in five-star restaurants, quietly consoled each other.  The tears would be shed in private.  After all, one did not show weakness in the face of the enemy.

“Wow,” Hank said.  “From what some of the guys said, I thought these were just burgers or something.  But they’re actually little mini-steaks!”

“They’re called filet mignon,” Ayla said, acerbically.  She took a delicate bite.  “Not a bad job, either.  You’d pay forty to fifty bucks for a cut like this in a good restaurant.”  She looked critically at Hank’s plate.  “Of course, if you’re going to order them eight at a time, the cost runs up pretty quick.”

He shrugged.  “I worked up an appetite sparring full out against Jinn.  Hey, look, bite-size!”  With that, he managed to stuff an entire ‘mini-steak’ into his mouth and, with some difficulty, chew.

“That’s just disgusting,” Jamie said.

Toni nodded.  “You notice that he did it before Lily got to the table?”

Nikki was looking at Ayla.  “You pay fifty bucks for filet mignon?  Where?  I’ve seen it for twenty, sometimes even less.”

“Not at the best restaurants.”

“Oh, right.  Forgot about the whole Goodkind thing.  Money wasn’t a big concern of yours, was it?”

Toni turned to Jade.  “You were sparring with Hank?  Uh, how’d it go?”

“Not me, Jinn,” the smallest girl insisted.  “It went okay, I guess.  She lasted a couple of minutes against him and actually managed to slow him down once or twice.  But… it turned out he was just goofing around.”

Jade reached over and dropped a small black rod of metal in front of Toni.  It was a little thicker than a pencil, and about half as long.  The two ends were cut at angles, not square, but the cuts were clean and almost mirror-smooth.

“What’s this?” Toni asked, turning it over carefully.

“You know those metallic bones that Jinn has?  That’s from her arm.”

Toni looked at Hank with a bit more respect.  “You sly dog!  You’ve been holding back on us.”

He grinned sheepishly.  “Hopefully, it will be just as much of a surprise to my opponent during the test.  But it was nice to be able to really cut loose.”

“So to speak,” Jade muttered.

Lily set her tray down next to Hank’s, and reached forward to touch the glowing crystal hanging from the condiment rack.  “Did I miss anything?”

“Naw,” Jamie said.  “Just discussions of the price of meat, and Hank’s obscure reference to new combat techniques.”

“The price of meat?”  Lily looked toward Hank, who was stacking filet mignon medallions on a Kaiser roll, making a super-expensive triple-layer burger.  “Oh, got it.  Eat civilized, Hank.  Just because you are a brick doesn’t mean you have to act like one.”

He pointed across the table.  “Why are you bothering me?  Tennyo’s worse!”

Billie had concluded that she couldn’t fit two steaks in her mouth at once.  The attempt itself was bad enough.  Backing out of the untenable position was even worse.  To distract the table from the disgusting pieces of half-eaten meat that she placed back on her plate, she quickly turned to Jade.

“So, uh, how’d the big date go?”  At least, that’s what they thought she was saying.

Jade chewed delicately on her steak.  “Well, it turned out to be not quite a date.  He found me a new doctor.”

“Sure,” Toni quipped.  “That’s romantic.”

Nikki smacked her roommate with the back of her hand.  “Be nice!”

“Well, really, what kind of guy picks up a girl on a date and takes her to the doctor?  Unless he’s got some freaky-weird medical condition we ought to know about?”

“I’m the one with the weird medical condition,” Jade said, quietly.

“So… uh… how’d it go?” Billie asked delicately.

“Well, Thuban had a really big success once before.”  Her voice wasn’t wistful, just factual.  “So I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I don’t know about the new doctor, but his ideas certainly sound good.  And Traekham didn’t do much for me.  It’s probably just as well that he dumped me.”

By this point, everyone was burning with curiosity.  Ayla finally gave in and asked the big question.  “So, if it’s not too personal, what’s his plan?”

Jade pulled up the long, loose sleeves and displayed the inside of her arms.  Toni and Nikki coughed; Hank actually started to choke and Lily began to pound him on the back.

“He calls it the ‘engineering approach’ – finding out what sort of techniques will and won’t work with my body.”

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Ayla wondered.

“Not really.  Does an earring hurt?”

“A belly-button ring is probably a better example,” Nikki offered.  “And I was kinda freaked the first time I saw one of those.”

“What has he done to you?”  Toni leaned in for a better look.

“Well, there piercings, implants, grafts, tattoos…  Over here he’s kind of playing with the skin.”

“Ah!” Nikki said in comprehension.  “Implants.  Yeah, I get it.  That’s not a bad idea.  If you can’t get everything you want in one fell swoop, at least you can get most of the way there and be a bit happier about your life.”

“Hmmm, implants.”  Toni considered this.  “You wouldn’t be restricted to ‘natural’ developments.  You wouldn’t be tempted to – how to put it – go a little crazy, or anything, would you?”

Jade finally grinned a little.  “After the problems at Faction Three?  No thanks.  I’ve done my time as the biggest girl on campus, thank you very much.  No, Jinn has the proportions I’m supposed to have.  If I can end up something like that, I’ll be happy.”

“Good,” Lily said firmly.  “It’s nice knowing a few other girls who aren’t…”  She trailed off as she tried to figure out how to word things politely.

“Stacked like Hollywood supermodels?” Toni offered.  “Top heavy?  Looking like success advertisements for a silicon infomercial?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Sara arrived with a closed box.

Billie peaked into the box and commented, “More rats?  I’m surprised that health regulations allow those into a food-prep area.”

Sara stuck her arm into the box up to her elbow.  “I’d be surprised if the health inspectors had ever been to Whateley.  But the rats aren’t as bad as you make them sound.  The staff knows I won’t let them escape, and it’s not like I can catch anything from them.  Now that they’re live-trapping their vermin, they have to have some way to get rid of them.  This is just simple efficiency.”

“The words sound fine,” Lily commented, “but do I detect a bitter tone?  I know that I’d be pissed if the bricks were getting filet mignon, while they served me a box of mangy rats.”

Sara shrugged.  “Actually, rats are fairly interesting, particularly the ‘wild’ ones like these.  Though you do raise an interesting point.”

“She does?” Nikki wondered.

“Just that the cooks work so hard preparing the main meal.  For me, they throw some vermin in a box.  What would a proper chef be doing to prepare my meal to the same standards?  There must be something.  Maybe I’ll have to ask Daddy.”

Nikki glared at Lily.  “Thank you sooo much.  I’ll probably have nightmares tonight.”

Billie turned back toward Jade, to continue with the earlier discussion.  “So your new doctor is actually in Berlin?  Is that okay with the school?”

Jade answered around the meat she was chewing.  “Yeah, Stephen got it all cleared.  Some sort of special deal between Whateley and the private company where this guy works.”

“Ooo!  She called him Stephen!” Toni coo’ed.

“Who?”  Sara wasn’t quite up to speed.

“Thuban,” Toni whispered.

“Oh!”

Billie was still worried.  “But your arms – that’s got to hurt.  Are you going to be doing much more like that?”

Showing her arms to Sara, Jade admitted, “I got the impression I’d be doing a lot more like this.  He wants to get a lot of readings on my regeneration.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” her roommate decided.

“If you want to complain, you’re in luck,” Jade said.  “Both Thuban and the doc want to talk about it.  Are you free tonight?  They want to have a meeting with you and me and a couple of the other people involved in this.”

“ ‘Involved?’  I don’t know about that.”  Billie scowled.  “I mean, I’m worried about you, but isn’t this really between you and your doctor?”

Jade shrugged.  “Just come to the meeting.  Thuban said you needed to be there.”

“I guess.”

“For all that I’m a brick,” Hank said, “I can’t imagine having that done to my arms.  Doesn’t it hurt like hell?”

“The truth comes out!” Lily said.  “I can see the headlines: ‘Big, tough brick afraid of pain!  Passes out during ear piercing!’ ”

“The whole point of my force field is to stop damage before it penetrates my skin!  Besides, look at her arms!  That’s more than a little ear piercing.”

Jade held out her arms again.  “It wasn’t so bad.  There was this spray-on stuff that made everything cool and numb.”

Sara narrowed her eyes slightly.  “But if you’re a regenerator, I’m guessing you adapt to poisons and anesthetics pretty fast.”

“Well… it was starting to wear off toward the end.  But if I need to, I’ve been learning some self-hypnosis techniques.”

Sara looked more concerned upon hearing that.  “Hypnosis, even self-hypnosis, is crude.  It might be okay for the occasional crisis, but I wouldn’t rely on it.”

“Really?”  This was the first Jade had heard about anything like that.  “What’s wrong with it?”

Sara stroked her white chin, thinking of how to explain it.  “Hypnosis is… it’s like one part of the mind grabbing the switchboard and just jumbling the plugs up.  That’s not quite it, but it’s the best I can come up with on the spur of the moment.  All the energy is still flowing, but it’s been diverted who-knows-where.  All that pain is still flowing into your brain, but now it’s bottled up and hidden somewhere random.  A couple of times is okay, but if you do it too much you’re just begging for decades and decades of therapy.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Meditation.  It takes longer to learn, but is a much better way to cope with pain.  It’s good for other things, too – psychic shielding, martial arts, personal development.”

“’s true,” Toni agreed.  “I’ve only scratched the surface with meditation, but I can watch people, like Ito-sensei, who are experts.  It really smoothes the ki flows.  Builds ki, too.”

“So I should ask Ito-sensei?”

“Doesn’t Chou meditate?” Nikki asked.

“She needs to meditate,” Lily decided “after the way she took Sharisha apart.  It’s not that I can’t sympathize, but wow.”

Toni nodded.  “She’s just started the meditation, but she’s already pretty good.  I mean, you can see it in her ki.  You want to know who’s killer, though?  Chou’s new teacher – Rebecca.  That woman lights up when she meditates.  I mean, there’s like a physical glow around her.  Man, if I had half the ki she does, I swear, I could take out Champion!”

“So,” Sara concluded, “that’s three good suggestions for meditation teachers.  If you’re going to be coping with pain or stress very much, I think you should get on it as soon as possible.  Hypnosis may seem to work, but it’s really just meddling, in the most random and uncontrolled way.  Meditation, though, not only helps with the main problem, but it helps clean the whole system.”

“Great analogy,” Nikki chided.  “You been watching advertisements much?”

“Watch it, elf queen.  I eat your kind for lunch.”

Nikki licked her lips, slowly and sensually.  “Mmm mmm.  Filet of Old One.  Sooo satisfying.  I’ll take the tenderloin.”

“Don’t ask for it, if you can’t finish it.”

“Oh, I can be full and finished while you’re left gasping at the start.”

“Care to put your honey where your mouth is?”

“Uh… guys?” Lily interrupted.  “Honestly, you two!  I can never quite tell whether you’re making out or getting ready to call down Armageddon.”

“There’s a difference?” Sara asked, apparently sincere.

Lily just glared at her.  “You lover must be either very dangerous, or very confused.”

“Hmmm,” Sara mused, apparently serious.  “Now that you mention it, most of them are both.”

73: If I were a rich man

After dinner, Jade summoned up a fresh copy of Jinn to head back to Poe with the crew, while she and Billie broke off so they could attend Thuban’s discussion in The Underground.

“So what’s this meeting about?” Billie asked.  “Weren’t you with Thuban most of the day?  How come he wants to see us tonight?”

“I’m not sure,” Jade admitted.  “But we went to a new medical facility in town.  I mean, brand-new.  They’re still doing construction.  Oh, and the doctor’s an alumnus.  Whateley ’83.  He was a bio-devisor guy.”

They took the elevator down to the underground.  On the way, they met another group, a trio of devisors that Jade knew well – the porcupine-haired Raphael Eagan, the large form of Knick-knack (who was walking with a pronounced limp), and the girl prodigy and part-time Spy Kid, Kew.

Jade felt an immediate burst of hope.  “Was there a breakthrough with the BIT-slicer?  Are we ready for another try?”

Knick-knack shook his head, sending his long locks flying.  “No.  I’m as puzzled by this as you are.”

Together, the mystified group of five headed to the locked room that had been reconditioned and set aside for the Faction Three meetings.  Thuban met them outside and ushered them in, then locked the door behind himself.

“What’s this about?” Knick-knack demanded.  “I have projects to work on…”

Thuban gave a smile of genuine pleasure.  “Give me one hour, Jean-Paul.  If you regret the time afterward, I’ll try to compensate you.”  He gestured for them to precede him into the room.

Ahead of them, Jade saw that the meeting room had been reconfigured.  The lights were down.  Instead of the normal lighting, a large circular table had been placed in the exact center of the room, with a ring of spotlights focused down on it.  Waiting at the table were Thuban’s roommate, and the doctor she’d met in Berlin.

Eagan was the first to recognize the man.  He actually gasped in astonishment.  “Is that—?”

The doctor stepped forward to shake his hand.  “Dr. Igor Gellmar, at your service.”

Knick-knack’s attitude immediately changed.  “What an unexpected pleasure!”

“Yeah, so?” Jade asked, looking at Billie.

Billie cuffed her on the back of the head.  “You idiot!  Don’t you know anything?  This is the guy that cured the common cold!”

“Oh, him!”  She wondered why a major scientific celebrity had been examining her.

“I didn’t cure the cold,” Dr. Gellmar corrected.  “My formula Sneezix merely eliminates all major symptoms of nasopharyngitis.  Of course, that was before we had the so-called ‘mutant flu.’ ”

“Same diff,” Kew said, taking a seat.

“Pleasant as this meeting is,” Knick-knack interjected, “what brings you here?  And why talk to us?  None of us specialize in biology.”

Tennyo made a quiet cough, but didn’t say anything so everyone ignored her.

Gellmar steepled his fingers.  “I am here because of an offer that I recently received.”  His eyes flicked toward Thuban briefly.  “If successful, it will definitely, positively, absolutely clinch the Nobel Prize for me.  Mutant or not.  And for the rest of you… well, if we succeed, you’ll all be richer than rich.”

That brought the entire group to absolute silence and complete attention.  Gellmar took advantage of the moment to pick a small remote control off the table.  He clicked it on, and the large movie screen at the front of the room flashed to life.  On it was a film of the BIT-slicer, as it spun two figures through a corona of crackling blue energy.

“A few weeks ago, you all took part in a small experiment.  Ultimately, you did not achieve your main goal.  What you did achieve was something that will be far more important, in the eyes of society.  You achieved an accident.  A magnificent, unplanned, unanticipated accident.”

“But…” Jade said it quietly. “it didn’t work.  I went back to normal.”  There were nods around the table.

“No you didn’t!”  Gellmar’s voice rang out like a gong.  “You weren’t exactly the same, were you?”

“She regenerates now,” Billie realized.  “Which is cool, but … I don’t get it.  There are enough other regenerators out there.  Heck, I regenerate.”

“So you do,” Gellmar agreed.  “And classifying you as a simple regenerator is an absurdity of the highest order.”

Tennyo blushed and quieted.  Dr. Gellmar nodded and turned back to some equipment on a table.  He played with the control for a moment, and the magnified image of a cell nucleus appeared, showing the chromosomes lined up in neat order like a row of little X’s, ready for division.

“This, Miss Wilson, is an ordinary cell.  I’ll return to it later.”

He clicked the control.  What appeared next was different enough that it took a moment to recognize that this, too, was a cell.  But the main body of the cell was different somehow.  And the chromosomes were lined up, but instead of being X’s they looked more like O’s.

“This is one of your cells, Miss Wilson.  At least, as of six weeks ago.  I’m told that they have altered further since then.  You will notice additional organelles in the cell body.  And the chromosomes – I use that term for want of a better one – are still recognizable, although they are assuming a ring shape.  The scientists who have been working with you are puzzled by this, but they note that the cellular repair mechanisms are amazingly advanced.  What a human would consider ‘hard radiation’ hardly bothers your cells.  But perhaps that has become something of a necessary survival trait for you, considering that many of the cells actually seem to hold bits of antimatter – inside the cells themselves.  Neither the biologists nor the physicists understand that one.  Some of them have concluded that you have the worst case of GSD on campus, but it’s entirely on the cellular level.”

Billie blinked in astonishment at the picture, but said nothing.

“In any case, interesting as the cells are, they don’t have much to teach us.  Or rather, they’d have an amazing amount to teach us, if the science wasn’t a million years beyond us.  At the moment, your investigators aren’t even sure what questions to ask.  You are what we in the business call ‘an enigma.’ ”

Everyone except for Jade and Thuban give Billie a very cautious look.  Thuban had heard the data before, and refrained, while Jade just took it as more proof of her oneesan’s superiority.

“Given the essentially alien nature of Miss Wilson’s biology, only a fool would attempt to imprint such a pattern over a relatively normal human – or mutant.”  The other devisors shifted uncomfortably.  “However, and here’s the first part of the miracle, it worked.  How and why are still mysteries, but it worked.”

“Only temporarily,” Jade said in disgust.

“Yes.  You suffered a spontaneous, mysterious, inexplicable reversion.”

“Not entirely inexplicable,” Knick-knack pointed out.  “We’ve seen the same thing with other shifters.”

“Yes, yes.”  Gellmar waved aside the argument.  “And in the middle of the reversion, Miss Sinclair was wise enough to collect cell samples of the reversion in progress, and pass them on to Mr. Lee and his roommate.”  He glanced over at Thuban.

“So that’s where your amateur surgery ended up,” Billie whispered.

“I was trying to make a point,” Jade quietly replied.

Gellmar continued.  “The … er … tissue samples showed an amazing sequence of changes occurring at the genetic level.”  He clicked the control again.  The first cells showed DNA strands curled into shapes like the letter “C”, obviously in partial mimicry of the cells taken from Miss Wilson.  As the sequence of images progressed, the cells showed changes bringing them closer and closer to a normal appearance.

“This is even more interesting if we do a full genetic map,” Dr. Gellmar said, “and compare it against Miss Sinclair’s current genetic map.”

Eagan choked at that.  “A full genetic map?  The cost!  The expense!  The time!”

“Nothing, compared to what we stand to gain!  Now look.  Here is a map of the most ‘advanced’ cell.  Let me highlight changes as we sample different cells in the preserved tissue sample.”

A strange pattern appeared on the screen, something like a bar code.  Jade assumed that it had some meaning to biologists or geneticists, but to her it was nothing more than a complicated pattern.  As the doctor clicked his control, portions of the map were highlighted in color and changed.  She was watching mutation occur before her eyes, as her genetic code reverted back to normal.  It was a bit sad, as she was reminded again of how happy she’d been being truly female.

Tennyo muttered, “Wow! I wish I had access to this kind of equipment.”  Jade’s quick glance in her direction showed Tennyo with a rapt look of attention at what was being shown.

“And here is the final change, as the X chromosome reverts spontaneously to a Y.”

“Very interesting, I’m sure,” Knick-knack agreed.  “I’m sure those maps took quite a bit of funding.  I’m skeptical that they’re Nobel Prize material though, not in their present state.  The do present some interesting insights into how the BIT-slicer works, and how complete its changes can be—”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Gellmar interrupted.

“Get what?”

“It took all my prestige and influence to pry even one cell of Miss Wilson away from your science staff here at the academy.  Fortunately, I have prestige to burn.  And fortunately, it is routine to collect samples from all the students shortly after admission.  I was also able to obtain such a sample from Miss Sinclair.”  He clicked the control and a new bar code pattern appeared on the screen.  “The ‘normal’ cell I showed earlier.  Obtaining this was made even easier since her current doctor has dropped her case as ‘hopeless.’ ”  He paused to chuckle to himself.  “I am now her doctor of record.  Whateley Academy happily handed me the single most valuable cell samples on the entire planet.”

Staring at the bar code image, Knick-knacks eyes suddenly opened wide in realization.

“He gets it.  Do the rest of you?”

Kew shook her head.  “Biology isn’t my strong suit.  Tell us.”

Gellmar clicked the control.  “Miss Sinclair’s genetic map, as of today.”  He clicked again.  “Her genetic map, as of September, when she entered school.”  He clicked a third time.  “The difference between the two.”

The bar code now showed several areas highlighted in green.  Another click brought in annotations, pointing to particular areas of the bar code pattern.  The labels made little sense to Jade, being phrases such as “telomerase re-initialization” and “stem cell reversion.”

“But now she regenerates!” Eagan shouted out.

“Exactly!  What we have here is an exact map of the genetic changes needed to activate human regeneration!  And not just any regeneration – we’re talking regen-five, capable of repairing spinal cord injuries, regrowing lost limbs, even renewing damaged brain structures!  And for the first time in history, we have an exact genetic blueprint on how to do it!”

Thuban allowed the realization to wash over the audience.  There was total silence for several seconds, as the group digested the implications.  Thuban pulled out his own controller and clicked the picture forward.  Now the large screen showed the exterior of the medical building in Berlin, with the logo out front reading “Bio-regenetics.”

“Recognizing the opportunity,” the lizard-man said, in far too calm a voice, “I immediately began to liquidate the majority of my personal assets, and moved on to call in family markers.  Bio-regenetics is a Delaware corporation, with the trademark currently in process for international ownership.  Since all of you have had a place in the accident that eventually lead to this happy discovery, it seemed appropriate to deal you in for shares.  Of the initial one million shares that constitute total ownership of the company, the five of you will receive two point five percent, or twenty five thousand shares each.  My roommate will receive one-half percent, for crucial observations he made, and Dr. Gellmar will receive ten percent in exchange for his work during the coming forty-eight months.  Whateley regulations require one percent interest in any corporation founded by students, but in return we gain a variety of benefits including relaxed class schedules in regard to corporate activities, access to some facilities and equipment, and certain consultations.  For my part in sponsoring and funding the BIT-slicer as well as funding the creation of Bio-regenetics to the tune of 73 million dollars, my family and I will receive 40 percent ownership.  This leaves 36 percent or 360,000 shares available for raising further capital.  I would suggest that further work in advancing the project, such as your continued volunteering as a test subject, Jade, would be rewarded with additional stock grants.  Assistance in creating medical instrumentation,” he focused his eyes on the devisors “would naturally result in similar payments of unallocated stock, provided that patent rights to those devices are granted to the corporation.”

Thuban folded his hands and looked around the table.  “I intend to keep this venture quiet for as long as humanly possible.  Based on the current working capital, you have all just become modestly rich.  With capitol of 73 million implying a share price of $73 per share, that would make your individual grants theoretically worth a bit over one point eight million.  On paper at least, since the money is actually needed for R&D.  I’m going to request that none of us actually sells any stock until it becomes absolutely necessary.  And remember, if you can wait, if we can make this work, the implications are immense.”  He stared at Dr. Gellmar.  “A Nobel Prize, assuredly.”  He stared at Billie.  “A better understanding of your own genetics and biology,” turning to Jade, “and insights and perhaps a genuine cure for some of us.”  Lastly he faced the three devisors.  “And more bloody loot than you’ve ever dreamed of in your entire life.”

Jade and Billie were both more than a little loopy as they meandered back to Poe.  By herself, Jade might have felt some concern, late at night on a dark campus where she’d been attacked more than once by enemies determined to kill her.  But with Jamie the SpySpeck running high surveillance and Billie at her side, she felt no concern at all.

“Rich,” Billie kept repeating over and over.  “Unbelievably rich.”

“Yeah, but not for years,” Jade pointed out.  “Who knows how long it will take to turn it into something useful.  I sure don’t.  I wonder if Thuban expects us to add money to the thing?  ‘Cause if so, we’d be even poorer, while we waited for it to pay off.”

“Didn’t you hear the man?  He put in 73 million dollars!  All the money you and I could earn together wouldn’t come anywhere near that.”  Billie looked up in realization.  “Oh oh.”

“What?”

“Well, imagine the time when this goes public, but before the cash rolls in.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, we won’t be able to buy armored cars or castles or whatever.  Not yet.  But we will be rich on paper.  That makes us a pair of giant targets.”

Jade thought a bit.  “Might be worse than that.  The source of this breakthrough is, face it, you and me.  So if there are any competitors out there…”

Billie winced.  “We’re their only shortcut to getting a jump on the technology.”  She groaned.  “Great.  As if being kidnapped wasn’t bad enough, we’ll have to worry about being kidnapped for use in evil medical experiments.”

“But if they can make it work, think what it could mean!”

Billie flung out her arms and spun, lifting a few feet off the ground.  “No kidding!  They mentioned missing limbs, spinal cord injuries, and brain damage.  And that’s probably just scratching the surface!”

Jade snickered.  “We’ll do so much good that we’ll make Adam Ironknife look like a black-hearted scoundrel!”

Billie laughed.  “Yeah, I can see it.  Hey Adam!  I helped invent—”

“Don’t say it out loud!”

“Oh yeah.  ‘Hey Adam!  I helped invent –you know—!  What the heck have you done lately?’  That’d get him!”

In the middle of the night, Billie rolled over.  As always, one of the Jade-lings was working on homework.

“An island,” Billie muttered.

The pencil picked up from the page and pointed at her, as if in inquiry.

“Buy my own island.  Really nice one, too.”  And Billie fell back asleep.

74: Big guns and other weapons

Sunday morning was Billie’s day to sleep in.  So it was more than a little irritating to wake up at any time earlier than noon.  In this case, the wake-up call came in the form of the super-villain-esque chortling that was quietly coming from her roommate’s closed mouth.

Billie levered herself wearily up on one elbow and peered around muzzily, finally focusing on the diminutive girl sitting at her desk, manipulating something on the laptop, and periodically chortling.

“What’s so funny?”

Jade looked up, and Billie could tell right off that there was trouble ahead.  The manic gleam in the smaller girl’s eye, the slight ‘I’m not nervous’ twitch, the strained smile.  Unless she could head it off, it was going to be one of those days.

“Funny?  No, nothing’s funny.  Go back to sleep!”

“Too late for that.  What are you looking at?”

“Nothing!”

“Let me see!”

Billie hadn’t actually gotten up, but she had glided forward out of bed.  Jade seemed reluctant to show her the screen, but finally gave in and turned the comput