Words cannot describe how much I passionately hate traveling by car.

Here you are, hurtling forward in a box made of metal, at a speed sufficient to flatten you into a pancake if you hit any of those other boxes made of metal, and you're all alone.� Even if there are other people in the car, you're strapped into your own little segment of hell, and you can't really look at them or touch them.� There's nowhere to dodge, nowhere you can run, and no access to the third dimension � in a car there's no up or down, just the road.� Honestly, you barely have access to the second dimension � being able to go to one side or the other is a luxury you have only if there isn't a jersey wall or a cutaway mountain on one side or the other of the road.� I can just barely tolerate being in a car if I'm the driver; at least then my heightened reaction time gives me a better-than-normal chance of avoiding being in an accident.� But being in a car driven by someone else invariably drives me up the wall.�

As horrific as it is to be a passenger with anyone but me driving, I have to say that letting Ciana Kim drive was a special hell.� The woman had no concept of speed limits.� I wouldn't have expected it, honestly; as the combat leader for the Peace Force she's actually quite careful, almost a control freak.� So why did she have to drive her car up I-95 like she was piloting an airplane or something?� (And not a commercial 747 jet, either; more like a stunt pilot in an airshow.)� I don't think she dropped below 70 mph anywhere but the toll plazas, and her car had EZ Pass so she was able to sail right through some of them at high speed as well. �I kept stepping on an imaginary brake, bracing myself against the seat and armrest, and desperately trying to tone down the adrenaline surging through my system before I did something I'd regret, like accidentally wake up the cat sleeping on my lap.� Angelkitty flying panicked around the inside of the car would not have helped matters.

Also, Ciana played music. Loudly. And her musical tastes were frozen in the 80's. Look, I was a teen in the 80's too. I'm as big a fan of the Go-Go's and Quarterflash as any other member of the first MTV generation, but unlike some people, I've actually listened to some music since then. And I haven't actually enjoyed early 80's Madonna since I was 14 � somehow, "Borderline" and "Like a Virgin" have lost a great part of their charm since I grew up, which apparently, at least in terms of her musical interests, Ciana never did.

Of course, Ciana also doesn't sing, so as soon as I started belting out "Gimme the prize!" when she played "Kurgan's Theme", she skipped to the next song. (At least she had mp3's, although she had burned them to a CD rather than the way the rest of the 21^st century did it, with an iPod or something. I had half expected Ciana to be still listening to mix tapes.) "What?" I asked her. "If you didn't like Queen, what did you put it on your CD for?"

"I wanted to listen to Freddie Mercury. Not you.� Though I might have guessed you'd sympathize with Kurgan."

"It's the Kurgan, not Kurgan. And I don't sympathize with him more than I do, say, Connor MacLeod; I just sympathize with both of them more than I do, say, Debbie Gibson."

She just grunted. And sped up. Honestly, if I hadn't been afraid that distracting her could lead to both of us ending up the lunchmeat in a metal sandwich, I would have sung some more. It distracted me from the fear of imminent death, at least.

By the time I got to the Peace Force headquarters in Manhattan, I wanted to kill something. Or someone. Sapphire was high on my list of people to kill, but I'd settle for whoever thought it was a good idea to send her alone to pick me up.

Mother Bear met me at the parking garage elevator.� "I didn't think you'd come," she said.�

"You were obviously wrong.� Where is she?"

"Fifth floor.� Dan Foster's with her."� She stepped into the elevator.� Ciana and I followed her.

"And he can't help her?"

"He says her condition's beyond his abilities."

"He can perform an abortion."

"She refuses to have an abortion.� I thought Sapphire would have made that clear to you."

"I did," Sapphire said.� "I was very clear on that fact."

"So?� If she's dying�"

"We will honor Dr. Sun's wishes," Mother Bear said, in that tone she always got when she was lecturing me as if I were still a child, "because we do not believe in simply performing medical treatments on people without their consent."

"So you believe in letting people die from preventable disorders instead.� Nice to know where your priorities are."�

"Ignore her, Ursula," Ciana said.� "She isn't capable of comprehending ethics."

I decided I was going to let that one go, mostly because we'd reached the fifth floor, and I thought I remembered where the medical ward on the fifth floor was.� Mother Bear was far too dignified to run after me in her human form, and Ciana was far too dignified period, so when I raced out of the elevator full tilt neither of them followed me particularly quickly.�

The medical ward on the fifth floor of the Tycho Building was actually two doors away from the elevator, so I didn't have far to run.� I pushed the double doors open and headed down the corridor.

"...stery's here, Suri,"� I heard.� "You're going to be fine."

The door to the room with the voices was partway open.� I elbowed it the rest of the way.� "Danny!� I had no idea you thought so highly of me."

Daniel Foster looked at me as if he'd just found me on his shoe.� "I think very highly of your powers and your control over them, Meg," he said politely, his tone utterly at odds with the look of disgust.� I didn't see the point, honestly; Suri could read his mind, so why pretend for her sake?

Dan was a tall, slender black man my age who wore his lab coat all the time to inform New York City cops that he was a doctor, not a drug dealer or a gangsta or whatever else stupid thing the cops have decided that all black guys are this week.� Given that in NYC, black men have been shot by the cops for having wallets or refusing to buy marijuana, this was probably a wise decision.� Personally I thought he'd be better off in spandex; superheroes get even more respect than doctors, and a distinctive spandex uniform would make him very easy to recognize.� But Dan had decided to quit the superhero business and become a doctor before I did; in fact his decision was one of the factors in mine.� Of course, he had an older sister who was also a doctor, of the research variety but a medical doctor nonetheless; it was an obvious career trajectory for a man with the power to heal.� His power was far less versatile than mine, in part because his power mitochondria simply had less output and in part because he's just not as vicious as I am, but it's also simply a different power.� I had to learn to heal; Dan didn't.� He simply does it. �Becoming a medical doctor improved his skill, certainly, but he hadn't needed any education to start healing people, as I had.� Like me, Dan hadn't aged in years; unlike me, he looked about 28 or so, and had looked about 28 since he was 18.�

We were rivals from my days with the Peace Force.� The similar powers with opposing attitudes about how to use them had been bad enough, but when I'd seduced his best friend and then acted insanely jealous whenever Jason had spent time with Dan instead of me, that had made it infinitely worse.� Truthfully, I'd been a bitch back then and his dislike of me was somewhat justifiable, so probably I shouldn't have been taunting Dan by calling him "Danny" � I only did that to annoy him.� On the other hand, I really didn't like dealing with the Peace Force.� Especially not after riding with Ciana for four hours.

He stood up, moving out of my way, and I was able to get a good look at Suri.

Suri � Suryabati Chandrasekhar, Doctor Sun in combat, because Suryabati means "sun" and because she's distantly related to a famous astronomer, and because when you see her in your head she looks like a giant glowing talking star.� Possibly the most powerful telepath in the world, certainly the most skilled.� She was 65 years old, but she looked, and biologically was, in her early 40's, because of me.� Because when I met her, she was an invalid slowly losing control of her body to multiple sclerosis, and as soon as I felt confident in my ability to heal instead of kill, she was the first person I healed of a chronic disease... and I went overboard with it, de-aging her to early 20's because I was a teenager at the time and being old seemed almost as great a horror as chronic illness.�

When I last saw her in the flesh, Suri had resumed her original habit of going into combat with the Peace Force, since telepathy is more powerful the closer the telepath is to the target.� She had looked healthy and strong � her skin smooth, brown and vibrant, her muscle tone excellent for her age, just the slightest taste of gray starting to lap at the edges of her rich black hair.� Now she had gone halfway gray, and her skin had a dull grayish tone to it as well, a combination of a lack of sunshine and ill health.� Black eyes that used to be able to bore into your brain without the use of her powers were now glassy with pain or drugs, I couldn't tell yet.� Probably both.� And she was obviously nine months pregnant with twins, except that according to what Sapphire had told me, she was not quite three months pregnant with a single baby.�

The hospital gown she wore was buttoned over her breasts and then left open over her stomach, and I could see why, because pale pinkish scars stood out like a web woven of thick, shiny dead earthworms all over her abdomen, standing out in shocking contrast to her brown skin.� I'd never seen stretch marks quite so bad.� As I approached closer I could see that the skin was actually dry and peeling all over her body, but worst on her abdomen.� It probably itched terribly; I could see scratch marks all over her arms, but perhaps her abdomen was too sore to be touched or perhaps she'd just had the willpower not to scratch it.� And aside from her swollen abdomen and breasts she was terribly, horribly thin, skin sagging loosely on her arms and her face.

She gestured at Dan, whispering, "You can go, Dan."� To my surprise, he actually went.� And then she smiled up at me, weakly.� "Meg.� I told them you would come."

"Well, obviously you know me better than they do.� I wonder if being a telepath has anything to do with that?"

"Oh, I don't think so," she said, her voice cracked and hoarse.� "Dana still despises you, and she's a telepath."

"Calling you and her both telepaths is like calling Bill Gates and a doctor who makes $200 K a year both rich."

She laughed, and then coughed.� "Can you see what you can do?� Dan doesn't think he can save the baby or me unless we kill the baby, and I won't do that."

"You should.� It's Primus' baby.� If we let men running around raping women and impregnating them, and we never abort the fetuses, then rape will continue to be an integral part of the human genome and we'll never get rid of it."

"Meg, men don't rape because they're genetically programmed to rape.� Men rape for the same reason you used to kill people.� Because they can.� You can't eliminate rape by killing the babies of rapists; you'd have to eliminate it by killing everyone who ever killed, taunted, or exhilarated in their defeat of another person, and I'm afraid the three people left on the planet wouldn't be a viable reproductive popu-"� Then she started coughing again.

I touched her arm.� I didn't want to know the full extent of the damage to her body, not yet, but I felt for her lungs. They were drowning in mucus and they were compressed to two-thirds of their usual size by the crushing size of her swollen uterus pressing up against her internal organs, which in turn pressed against her diaphragm.� I couldn't do anything about the compression until delivery, but I shut off her sinus mucus production, healed the irritation she'd already done to her lungs by coughing a lot, and grew her a set of absorptive stereocilia in her lungs to siphon the liquid out, break it down, and dump it back into her bloodstream.� Her lungs would take minutes to fully clear, so I shut down the nerves reporting to the brain and spinal column that she really needed to cough.�

She gritted her teeth and stiffened under my touch � simply using my power actively on people often causes them pain.� It's psychosomatic but no less real for that, and Suri was too exhausted to hack her own brain with her telepathy and convince herself the pain wasn't happening; if I hadn't detected high levels of painkiller in her system I simply wouldn't have done something this quickly in her weakened condition.

Her cells didn't want to respond to me.� They were dangerously low on fuel.� Even her power mitochondria were being taxed to their maximum.� Normally a Proxima with active power mitochondria doesn't need food or oxygen nearly as much as a normal human or a Proxima with normal mitochondria, because power mitochondria draw energy from some other source and convert it into the life force that powers the cells or the superpowers.� But Suri was so badly drained by the rapidity of her pregnancy that even the power mitochondria couldn't make up the difference.� She simply couldn't take in enough food and oxygen to feed the baby's need, and she'd been overtaxed this way for nearly three months.�

My power typically works with the patient's life force; I can't make cells divide if they haven't got enough available materials to make a second cell or enough fuel to power the reaction.� I could see why Daniel's power was coming up short; I'd need to feed Suri energy directly, using my own power to charge her cells, possibly giving her some of my raw material � my amino acids, my lipids, my carbs, the things my own flesh was made of or the things circulating in my bloodstream from my food � or she wouldn't survive this.

When I was done working with her lungs, I pulled my active power out of her, only remaining inside her passively to examine her.� She sighed, relaxing.� "Primus has the same control over his body I do," I argued � technically more; he's 2,000 years old and has learned to do things I can't begin to imagine how he pulls off, and his power mitochondria have a much higher output than mine, but I didn't need to put myself down to make my point.� "He could have raped you without impregnating you.� He wanted to father a child on you.� If you don't abort it, you're playing into his hands."

She sighed again.� "It's a living being, Meg."

"So's a rat, but I don't recall you balking at having Jase frying them when you didn't want to hire an exterminator and there was a colony in the basement."

"A rat doesn't think."

"Neither does a fetus.� If you think a fetus has more sophisticated brain development than a rat, I'll need to check your brain for evidence of dementia."

"How would you know?" she asked sharply, or as sharply as she could with the hoarseness in her voice.� "You can only see the structure of a brain.� You aren't a telepath.� How can you tell me who can think and who cannot?"

"Because a three-month-old fetus has less brain development than a jumbo shrimp, and I don't believe in the supernatural.� You can't think without a brain, Suri."� As we talked I was slowly turning off her internal pain and pressure sensors, slowly bringing up her endorphin levels.� I couldn't force my power into her quickly without hurting her, or being forced to make her numb or flooding her with opiates to avoid hurting her.� I didn't want her numb, high, or sexually aroused; I wanted to be able to use my power without her particularly noticing, though.

"The reason this child is killing me is that it is growing much faster than a fetus should.� It's somewhere in the third trimester.� Even if I supported aborting it to begin with, it's too late now."

"I didn't know you didn't support abortion."

She closed her eyes and straightened her head, so she'd be looking at the ceiling if her eyes were open.� It looked as if she was trying to fall asleep, except that she kept talking in a hoarse whisper.� "I do support the option of abortion.� In the abstract.� Meg, do you remember what I told you?� About mothers, and the price of life?"

Yes.� I remembered.� It had changed the way I thought about my own mother, who I'd pretty much hated most of my life, and had colored my treatment of women with children ever since.� "Your mother pays the price for you to live," I said softly.

She opened her eyes and looked at me again.� "Yes.� The Greeks had it wrong.� The payment is not to the ferryman when you die; dying is easy.� The payment is made by your mother, to make you live.� And if a woman cannot bear the price of converting unthinking tissue into a person with a soul, I should not gainsay her, nor should you, or anyone else.� Every woman must choose for herself whether she can pay the price.� But for me... I have spent my entire life fighting for the lives of the innocent, and paying a price for that choice.� I cannot choose not to pay the price.� Not and live with myself afterward."

"The price could be your life, Suri.� Do you owe anyone that?� Especially something that only exists because it's part of some plan of Caesar Primus'?"

"It's a child.� Not a thing.� It will become a human being if I choose to let it.� And I do choose, because it is my child as much as Primus'."

"If it's not a thing why do you keep calling it an it?"

"Because it doesn't know what gender it is, or the concept of gender at all, and no one who has seen the ultrasound will tell me.� Believe me, Meg, you are not the first to tell me I should have the child aborted.� I believe Dan thinks the baby will be more real to me if I know its gender.� He forgets I can read its mind.� Or could, when I wasn't so tired."

I did a quick check.� "It's a boy," I said.

Then she smiled.� "My mother will be pleased to hear that.� She only stopped nagging me about having a child a few years ago, and I know that if I had a child she would rather I had a son."

"Your mother's still alive?"

"I'm not so ancient, Meg.� My mother is only 87.� Yes, she's still alive."

"She's not going to be so thrilled that you had a baby boy if you die in the process."

"That's why I asked you to come."� She closed her eyes again.� This time I could feel that she really was starting to fall asleep, which was what I'd been working toward as we talked.� "I trust you to save me.� And my son."

"You're not going to change your mind about this, are you?� Do you know how much extra work you're making for me?� Not to mention, you have no idea why Primus wanted a child, except that it's probably not anything good?� I mean, not like I care; he rescued me from prison, or had his minions do it, and I used to even work with the asshole, but you'd think you would be more concerned about what his master plan might be."

Of course Suri didn't answer any of that.� She was asleep.

I let go of her arm and went to the door.� "Yo!� Peace Force!� I need help here, stat!"

Daniel Foster had actually been leaning against the wall right outside the door.� "What's her condition?"

"Delusional.� She thinks her baby can think.� Unfortunately now I can't do this the easy way and kill the damn thing, so I need you here, I need Jason if he still works here, I need someone who can steal me a cow�"

"A cow?"

"Or a deer.� Actually a deer would be better, they're smaller.� I need a lot of food.� I need someone who's gonna volunteer to be modified to nurse a baby, preferably a woman but if a man really wants I could fix him up�"

"What's wrong with baby formula?"

"Formulated for human babies.� This thing is growing three times faster than a human infant.� It needs a much higher concentration of food than you'll find in formula or regular breastmilk, but it still won't be any better able to digest solid food than human babies are.� In fact I need two or three volunteers to nurse the baby, because any one woman would be too depleted after a week or so of full-time nursing."

"I'll call everyone in."

"Good.� Prep me two operating theaters next to each other if you've got �em.� Or better yet a bed and a large table in the same theater, next to each other.� I'll do the full examination now that I've got her sedated."

While he was gathering his forces, I sat down again next to Suri, braced myself, and went inside to examine the fetus itself.

It was a double Proxima; child of two Proximas, it carried two of the all-important catalysine allele, not just one.� This usually resulted in power, or some power, or at least an unusual appearance, manifesting early.� In this case, it appeared that he was developing about twice as fast as a normal human baby, but consuming three or four times the resources.� He was 11 pounds, easily the size of a one or two-month-old born baby, but only as developed as a fetus in the beginning of the third trimester, about week 28 or so... viable, barely.� Except that in his case, because he was consuming so many resources, he wouldn't be viable outside the body at all.� There was no way he could digest the amount of food he needed to survive at his stage of development.� However, he was far too large to remain in Suri's body.�

He had stripped Suri's body of vital nutrients.� She was suffering from severe gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia (at that it was probably only not full-blown eclampsia because Dan was both a healer and a competent doctor), and probably great difficulty eating anything at all, which explained why there was a feeding tube inserted into her esophagus through a hole in her neck.� Her digestive system had largely shut down; Dan was pumping her full of amino acids, lipids, and simple or double sugars through her feeding tube so she wouldn't need to digest anything, and her body was still absorbing only about a third of it.� Her body was massively overproducing histamines as if she was actually allergic to the baby, resulting in rashes all over her body and a huge buildup of mucus in her sinuses and lungs, so even though she had nasal tubes feeding her pure oxygen her blood was about 20% underoxygenated.� If she survived this she'd suffer osteoporosis, cavities or even disintegrating teeth, and other problems from the baby stripping the calcium out of her body.

The baby himself was not getting all the calcium he needed; his bones were less calcinated than a 28-week-fetus should be.� Both he and Suri were short on sodium, potassium, iron and most vitamins, although he had more of what he needed than she did.� He would need a heightened feed of nutrition and some directed growth to ensure that his brain developed properly; the rest of his body would take care of itself as soon as the better nutrition was provided, but his brain was suffering from hypertrophy of the powers-control areas and some atrophy of other parts.� I couldn't tell what power he was going to have, but he would manifest it shortly after birth if someone didn't slow his catalysine production immediately after birth and reset his hypothalamus to restrict catalysine production until after puberty.� And by someone, I meant me, since no one else had that kind of ability; Dan could heal something that was injured or diseased but couldn't alter the normal functioning of a body that simply didn't function the way everyone else's body did.�

Well.� I had a plan.� I wasn't going to be sleeping for a week or two, but I had a pretty good idea what I would need to do to save the both of them.� I made sure Suri was still sleeping comfortably, with most of her pain-bearing internal nerves shut down, and then I left the room again.� The Peace Force was assembling out in the hallway.�

Of the people who'd been adults when I joined the Peace Force, my teachers and mentors, the only one left besides Suri herself was Mother Bear, aka Ursula Bear Woman � a 300-year-old Lakota woman whose supposed "real" name consisted of two different translations of her Lakota name, which, as nearly as I could tell, was actually something like Woman Who Turns Into A Bear.� Mother Bear was 6 foot 6 and over 300 pounds, most of it muscle, which made her impressively huge when she wasn't a bear.� (Proximas who shapeshift are very, very rarely able to randomly acquire or lose mass; Mother Bear's form as a black bear was also over 300 pounds, and a little shorter than her human form because bears are wider than humans.)� She looked to be in her 60s, not too different from when I'd met her 20 years ago, due to the odd fact that when she turned into a bear, it was always the same bear, a young bear female just coming into her prime, and when she turned back into a human, she was the same age she'd been before turning into a bear.� So by switching back and forth and spending long enough periods of time as a bear, she had aged about five times more slowly than a normal human.� Her hair was solid grey now, not the salt-and-pepper it had been when I met her twenty years ago, but aside from that she was the same stern middle-aged woman she'd been then.� (Although back then I'd seen her as an elderly woman, not a middle-aged one.� Amazing what twenty years do to your perspective.)

There were a lot fewer of the people I'd fought beside and attended powers and combat training classes with, too.� I recognized Jason Reynardo � Fahrenheit � of course; the first guy I'd willingly had sex with and the first (and last) person whose heart I'd broken.� Algernon Jacobs � Singularity � now looking much like a college professor rather than the skinny tall geek he'd been when I'd known him.� Dana Velasquez � Psion � Jason's aunt, although only four years older than him, who would probably never forgive me for what I did to Jason.� Mare (pronounced Ma-ray; Latin for ocean, as she had never tired of telling us) Forrester � Cyberna � wearing her power suit, I suppose just in case I went crazy and jumped someone.� Or maybe she was now surgically grafted to it.� I hadn't seen her out of it since I left the Peace Force.� I recognized Chris Sargent � Powerhouse � although he'd been a child when I left the Peace Force, because he was their super-strong fighter and I'd met him in combat several times.� Given that he'd been 11 when I left the Peace Force, I'd always felt weird about that.� Jeff Riordan � Ace � was still here, although his flying older sister and younger brother with the really weird power were not.� I thought the young black woman might be Alannah Foster, Dan's niece, but since she was 7 when I left and I hadn't met her in combat since, I couldn't be sure.� Likewise, the young white guy with the light brown hair and the really pale blue eyes was probably Raymond Montesquieu, whose power I couldn't even remember although I dimly recalled it manifesting before I quit.�

Rebecca Jansen was also there � the blonde immortal woman who'd been the team doctor before Dan had gotten his training.� That was helpful � I'd need multiple people who knew medicine to back me up.� This one was going to be hard.� And there were about six young people between the ages of 18 and 30 somewhere that I only knew by their code names; they hadn't been here when I had, so I only knew them from fighting the Peace Force.

"All right," I said.� "I need a large animal, preferably female but I can work with male, as soon as possible.� It needs to be alive, unconscious and in reasonably good health � I can work with broken limbs but not shotgun wounds.� A deer would be great.� I can also manage with a sheep or a cow.� Which one of you can get that?"

"I'll do it," Mother Bear said.� She looked at two of the newcomers, a wiry red-haired man who stood on the balls of his feet and a blue-skinned woman with chemically relaxed and bleached white-blonde hair.� "Bobcat, Zap, you're with me. We need to head upstate and catch a deer."

"All right, we'll start on route 9D," Zap, the woman, said, and took Bobcat and Mother Bear's hands.� All three of them disintegrated in what looked like a Star Trek transporter dissolve, and zoomed as balls of light down the corridor, possibly looking for a window.� I'd never seen Zap transport anyone through an object that visible light couldn't pass through.�

"Jason, go in there and keep Suri at 98.6.� She's too thin and weak to maintain her own body temperature."

He glared at me.� "Since when do I take your orders?"

Al sighed.� "Jason, just do it.� Doctor Sun trusts her to do the job she's here for, and neither Dan nor Dr. Jansen can save her, so we're really stuck with Meg."

Continuing to glare at me, Jason said, "Fine, but I'm only doing it because you asked me, not because of her."

"Didn't that go without saying?" I said.� "I mean, did you have to actually point that out?� It really makes you sound awfully insecure."

He just snarled at me and stalked off.�

"Dan, you go with him.� Keep Suri stable while we're waiting.� Rebecca�" I really shouldn't be calling a 400-year-old woman "Rebecca", but "Dr. Jansen" would have made me sound like a kid again � "prep me an operating theater with room for Suri and an unconscious deer."

"Will you need to shave the deer?"

"Probably not.� Whoever can get food, I want a big pile of it.� I want cannoli, rugelach, black and white cookies, cheesecake, Ben and Jerry's ice cream�"

"What flavor?" Algernon asked, and I realized he was actually writing a list.

"Um, New York Super Fudge Chunk would be best, but I'll take anything that has chocolate in it.� And I want Cheetos, and some really good spaghetti with meatballs � find a real Italian restaurant, not a tourist trap, that does take out�"

"I'll make your spaghetti," Rebecca Jansen said.�

I blinked.� Dr. Jansen was one of the few people besides Suri who had actually been nice to me when I had been here.� Now I felt bad about calling her Rebecca.� She'd traveled the world for 400 years and was an expert cook in dozens of different cuisines.� "Well, if you're cooking it, great.� I am going to need as much energy as possible for this operation, so I'm gonna have to start with as much sugar as I can eat without getting sick and then load up on the complex carbs and proteins."

"When are you actually going to get to work?" Ciana asked.

"When I have my food and my deer.� There's nothing I can do that Dan can't do until I've got what I need.� Oh, and someone needs to take care of my cats.� I may actually need to be doing this for a few weeks if I have to save this baby.� They'll need a room to play in with lots and lots of food � they eat real human food, not cat food crap.� Give them tuna fish and uncooked hamburger."

"Meg, your cat has wings," Ciana said.

"That's why she's so hungry all the time.� The other one throws electricity.� But you can give them a regular litterbox, they're fine with that."

"Electricity?"

"We'll make sure the cats are cared for," Algernon said tiredly.� "Alannah?� You want the cats?"

"Sure, I'll take care of them."

"Do you have superpowers that work well with flying cats?" I asked.

"You don't remember my power, Dr. Mystery?" Alannah asked me with a weird little smile.

"You were seven when I left.� Did you even have powers?"

"I can handle your cats.� Trust me."

"Powerhouse, Cyberna, you two go do the grocery shopping.� Here's the list.� I'll call you if she comes up with anything else," Algernon said.� They left.

"And I'm going to need three volunteers � preferably women, but I can work with men � who'll breastfeed the baby."

"Is there a problem with baby formula?" Ciana asked.

"Yes.� As I explained to Dan earlier, this baby is consuming three times the resources of a normal human infant.� Even if I slow him down, which I intend to try, he won't be able to digest solid food but he won't be able to consume enough formula to meet his needs.� So the people I modify will produce much more rich breastmilk than a normal lactating woman, about every twelve hours or so... but the baby needs to eat every four hours, so I need three volunteers.� I can come back and modify whoever back to normal once the baby's old enough to be weaned."

"If you don't modify us back to normal, what happens?" Alannah asked.

"Theoretically, you'd produce super-rich milk that normal human babies can't drink, and too infrequently for them to drink, so you wouldn't be able to breastfeed if you had kids of your own if I didn't modify you back.� In practice, it's possible that once you naturally stop lactating and then start again with your own pregnancy, you could spontaneously revert."

"Well, I'm not planning to have kids until I'm at least 30," she said, "so I'll volunteer."

"I'd just like to point out that I would be happy to volunteer, except that I'm a guy," Jeff said.

"I can work with a guy.� You won't even grow breasts.� Your nipples will lactate, that's all."

"I'm sorry, but �lactating' and �man' are two words that should never be put next to each other."

"I'll volunteer," Rebecca said.� "If, while you're at it, you can check and see if there's a good reason why I can't have children."

"I already know why you can't have children.� Your eggs all died 350 years ago or so. Most likely, I mean, I wasn't around to check you at the time, but that's my guess."

"Really?� When did you find that out?"

"Last time I touched you.� What was that, 20 years ago?� You have no eggs.� I assume it's because they all died."� Eggs are mostly made when a woman is a fetus; they do replenish over time, to a certain extent, but as the oocytes age they make fewer and fewer new eggs, and the ones they make are less and less viable. Rebecca's power to regenerate herself after she died wouldn't necessarily bring her eggs back.� Since she was an experienced doctor, I figured she could fill in the gaps.� "If you want new ones I can do it but it's going to cost you; I owe Suri and this is a life or death thing, but I don't normally do this work for free."

"I'll consider that.� In the meantime, fine, I'll volunteer to feed Suri's baby."

"Why won't Dr. Sun be able to do it herself?" one of the younger ones whose name I'd forgotten asked, an extremely tiny blue-haired boy.� Well, technically he was probably a man, but he was 5 foot zero if even that much and had a very youthful expression.

"She'll be recovering.� She won't have the resources for normal breastfeeding, let alone what this baby will need."� I looked around at the gathered superheroes.� "I need one more volunteer. Any takers?"

The various women looked at each other.� The men looked at them.� No one looked at me.� It was pretty obvious that breastfeeding was not high on the superhero priority list.

"What the hell," the man I thought was probably Raymond Montesquieu finally said.� "It's not as if I'll ever have an opportunity to experience something usually only women get to experience again, so why not?"

I blinked.� I'd mentioned that I could work with men because I didn't want to be sexist, but I hadn't actually expected any to take me up on it.� "Are you currently seeing anyone?"

"Is that any of your business?"

I shrugged.� "The side effects will be more unpleasant if you're sexually involved.� You may experience loss of libido or heightened libido, loss of muscle tone, weight gain, swellings in the chest area that look like small breasts, impotence, or mood swings, and you almost certainly will experience pain and sensitivity in the nipples and the area directly behind them.� If you have a partner, dealing with these effects could be more challenging.� But I personally don't care; I just want to make sure you know the risks."

"Any risk of cancer?"

"You haven't killed my dog lately, so I'd say no."� In one battle a younger member of the Peace Force, Energeon, now forcibly retired by me, had killed my puppy.� This was before I got the cats.� It was an accident � he fired a force beam at a wall, it collapsed, and the puppy got in the way.� I came very, very close to killing the guy, but restrained myself before Sapphire pulled me off him � instead I just gave him fibromyalgia and a nerve disorder that would cause him pain every time he tried to use his powers.� I hadn't actually given him cancer � if I'd wanted him dead I would have killed him then and there � but I did make sure his carelessness wouldn't kill any more puppies.� Or people.� And that he'd suffer pain for his mistake for the rest of his life.

"It doesn't sound like the side effects you describe are anything more than women go through after pregnancy."

"In most ways, it won't be as bad as what women go through after pregnancy, since they have to recover from labor and from having been pregnant.� But your body won't be used to the hormonal shift, and the psychological effects of feminizing a man can be pretty severe."

"I'm curious.� Go ahead and do it; I want to be able to tell my future wife that I know exactly how she feels."� He grinned.� "Of course I could have said that anyway, but I want to have personal experience."

"All right.� I only need three volunteers, so the rest of you are off the hook.� Dr. Jansen, I'll do you first so you can get to prepping the theater; then you, Alannah, since you're going to be taking care of my cats.� Raymond � you are Raymond, right?"

"I wondered if you recognized me.� Yes."

"You go last.� The rest of you, amscray.� Go do whatever it is you do.� Doctor, is there a room we can use for the breastfeeding modifications?"

"Yes, we have six private medical rooms and only one is occupied.� We can take any one of the others."

"Doctor, should I stay?� Just in case?"� Sapphire asked.

Alannah shook her head.� "If Mystery does something she shouldn't, I'll make sure you know."

The question had been addressed to Dr. Jansen; I was surprised that Alannah Foster was answering it.� I wondered what her power was.�

We went into one of the private rooms.� I did the work on Dr. Jansen first, because she was needed to prep the operating theater I'd be using.� Jansen may have never had kids herself, but she'd been a midwife and later a doctor for about 300 years or so, so I didn't feel a need to explain anything to her; I just numbed her internal nerves so I wouldn't hurt her, made the modifications, removed the numbing effect, and sent her on her way.� Alannah, however, was a kid, and I'd never used my power on her before.

"The way this usually works is, I numb the nerves that run from the inside of your body to your brain, because otherwise, they tend to pick up on the action of my powers and cause you psychosomatic pain.� You'll feel a little odd, a little disconnected from your body."

"I wonder why it causes pain?" Alannah asked.� "Daniel's power doesn't hurt when he uses it."

"Daniel's power can do a lot less," I said.� "And he might have the numbing effect built in.� Besides, he does make people itchy."

"Only when he's regrowing a lot of skin," Alannah said, almost defensively.

I took her hand.� Her powers-complex � the portion of her DNA that was activated by catalysine to grant her a superpower � contained something totally unrecognizable to me.� I wasn't even sure where the individual genes in the complex started and stopped, and that was very rare for me, after I'd been studying Proxima powers-complex genes for ten years.� "So, what's your power anyway?" I asked as I started the work on her breasts.

"You and every other supervillain on the planet would like to know that."

I sighed.� "Fine.� Be all mysterious about it.� I'm just curious because the genes are unusual."� I took a sample of her skin tissue and stashed it under my own skin as I worked; something this unique needed to be in my database even if I didn't know what it did, and maybe with access to my database I might be able to reverse engineer it and figure out what it did.

"Here's what's going to happen," I explained.� "In a couple of days, you'll start to make milk, or rather, colostrum; it's a thin, yellow substance that's usually made for newborns.� Your breasts will get sore and tender before then, and you may leak a bit.� The colostrum will leak more.� Then, probably in about five days or so, your breasts will swell up like they're made of rock and most likely hurt like hell.� That's when you'll be full of milk.� Unlike a situation where you have your own baby, you'll only fill up every twelve hours or so � normally with your own baby you'd fill up every four hours or so with a newborn.� The baby will still need to feed every four hours, it's just that the milk you'll be making will be so much richer and denser than normal human milk, you'll have to make it three times more slowly than normal human milk is made, or it would drain your resources very quickly."� I finished the modifications.� "Are you on any kind of diet?"

"No.� I try to eat healthy foods, but I don't do any kind of calorie restriction, if that's what you mean."

"Well, keep up the good work.� You'll get much hungrier.� Eat more, but keep it the same healthy foods you're eating now, since that's what you're used to.� If you don't take in more food, you'll burn about 500 calories a day, or approximately a pound a week, and you don't have the fat to lose."

"I don't have a problem with eating more."

"I'm glad to hear it.� A lot of people, particularly women, have very weird ideas about food."

"Can you do me a favor?"

I looked up at her face.� "That would depend on what.� And they aren't free."

"I just want you to answer a question about my genetics."

"About your powers?"

"No, about my relatives."

Well, that would be easy enough, but it was the principle of the thing.� "Yeah, I can do that.� But again, it's not free."

"I could tell you what my powers are."

"I thought they were top secret and every supervillain wants to know what they are."

She laughed.� "They're a secret, but so far, I've never had to use them against you, so I'm not sure I need to keep them a secret in your case.� You don't do team-ups with other villains to destroy us all, like some of them do."

"No, I buy things from the other guys or exchange favors, but I haven't worked with anyone since I left Primus."

"Well, then.� Since you were so interested, purely as a matter of interest in the genetics..."

"What do you need to know?"

"What's my actual relationship to Uncle Dan?"

Daniel Foster's older sister Cynthia was Alannah's mother.� Or so went the official story.� "Why do you think it's something other than what they told you?� And if you think it's different, why not ask them?"

"I was reading a paper on Proxima genetics.� It said that when the Proxima gene turns on, it's on.� And in a woman, it has to happen in her eggs before she's even born.� So a woman can't have a child who's a Proxima and another child who's not except that they're a latent who produces a child of their own who's a Proxima."

"It's not that it can't happen," I said, "but it would be very, very rare."� Latents were people whose genes converted in their sex cells to Proxima genes.� It wasn't well understood how this happened yet, although I'd done a lot of research on the matter myself and probably knew more than most other scientists.� Latents were somatically Sapiens � their own body's cells did not carry the Proxima gene � but their sex cells did.� In men, this transformation could happen in adult life, because the spermatogonia continued to produce new sperm throughout a man's entire life.� But a woman had most of the eggs she would ever have by the time she was born; the change from latent genes to Proxima genes happened in utero as her ovaries were developing and spawning eggs.� It was possible for the latency conversion to happen during this process so that some of her eggs still carried latency genes and others carried full-blown Proxima genes, and it was also possible that it would convert late in life and affect only her most recently generated eggs, but what was most likely was that the latent allele would either convert for all of them or it wouldn't, since all of a woman's eggs come from a very small number of oogonia.

So the result of this was that if a woman was a latent who had undergone sex cell conversion, half of her cells, statistically, would carry Proxima genes and the other half would carry the normal allele, the one that wasn't even latent.� Since the normal allele wasn't the latent allele, it wouldn't spontaneously undergo conversion in the next generation.� Her children would either be Proximas or normal Sapiens, not latent Sapiens.� So the odds that she would have a girl who was Sapiens who then had a child of her own who was Proxima... well, usually I'd expect to see that the Proxima genes had come from the father.� In fact the whole thing was often most easily explained by mother and daughter both having sex with Proxima or latent men.

"On the other hand, there's no guarantee that your powers actually come from your mother's genes, and the genetics makes perfect sense if you got them from your father instead," I told her.� "So there needs to be more to it than that."

"When I was a teenager my mother used to lecture me not to have sex, because getting pregnant could ruin my life.� I told her I'd be careful, and she said that that was what she said.� Then she wouldn't talk about it.� I figured maybe she'd had an abortion... until I realized Uncle Dan was born when Mom was 15.� But I don't want to ask her or Grandma, because if I'm wrong, that would be insulting, and if I'm right I don't want to embarrass her or make her think I think any less of her."

"If you don't want to embarrass her or make her think you think less of her, why would you need to know?"

"It's my genes.� It's my family.� I'm not ashamed of my mother if she had a kid when she was a teenager � hell, the fact that it didn't ruin her life and she went on to become a top researcher in Proxima genetics would make me proud of her.� But I just want to know."

"Well, you're right.� Dan's your half brother.� Totally different powers complex, but you two have the same power mitochondria � which you would anyway, since your mother has her mother's mitochondria � and the same Proxima gene."

"Huh.� I thought that might be, but... it's weird to hear it."

"I suppose the fact that you two have the same eyes and nose was a tip-off as well?"

"Not much.� We both look like my mother.� And my grandmother.� I mean, it's not like I thought I was adopted or something."

"Are you going to tell them you know?"

She shook her head.� "I'm good at keeping secrets."� Alannah looked at her hand in mine.� "You done?"

"Yes."� I let go.� "Do you have sensation back?"

"Hard to say... it's not like I normally feel my internal organs unless there's a problem with them.� Aren't you going to ask me my powers?"

"No, you're going to tell me.� Because that was our bargain."

She smiled.� "I can travel in time."

I stared at her.� "You can't be serious."

"It's absolutely true.� I send my consciousness back in time twenty minutes or less, and redo anything I did in that time that had a result I didn't like.� Once when I was a kid, someone broke into my house and tried to kill me � an anti-Proxima nutjob who didn't like my mother's research.� I could only jump back five minutes then, but I held him off for half an hour... which, for me, was something more like three or four hours.� He kept shooting me, and I kept redoing it, finding a way to do it differently so I wouldn't get shot."

I broke into a wide grin.� "You have saved games!"

Alannah laughed.� "Not exactly.� Wish I did; I could have gone back to a checkpoint from just before Dr. Sun was kidnapped, and prevented it from happening."

"I thought the only person who could travel in time was Morrow, and he has some weird future tech he does it with."

"Morrow doesn't travel in time anymore.� He gets data updates from the future, but he can't go back there.� The way time travel works is, sending data is much easier than sending matter; my power works by transmitting my consciousness, which is data, back to the brain I had twenty minutes ago.� And after I make the change, the new reality doesn't contain the same data.� I'm the only one who remembers the change.� If Morrow went back to the future he would probably create a causality paradox because most likely he's already prevented himself from being born."

"You've talked to him about it?"

"He's the only other time traveler I know, even if all he did was make one one-way trip."

"That's awesome.� I had no idea you had such a cool power."

She looked at me oddly.� "Are you deliberately trying to talk like you're still a teenager, or do you just always talk like that?"

"How would you prefer I talk?� �Fools of the Peace Force!� It is I, the incomparable Doctor Mystery, whose deadly lair awaits you!� Now tremble in terror as you face your DOOM!'� I mean... yes, I do say �awesome' and �cool' and things like that, and I can still kill you if I feel like it.� I don't have to sound like Ming the Merciless or something."

"I suppose.� It just makes you sound immature.� I've never fought you, since I don't really have a great combat power.� But the way the others talk about you, I thought you were some kind of badass."

I smiled.� It was not a nice smile.� "I am some kind of badass, Alannah dearest," I said cheerfully.� "I'm not going to raise boils all over your skin just to prove it, since you'll probably jump back in time and choose to not have this conversation.� But I can watch cartoons, sing along to mix tapes, have a puppy or a pair of kittycats, and I can still melt all the flesh off a man's bones for beating his baby to death with a video game controller.� I don't need to prove what a ruthless bitch of a supervillain I can be; everyone who needs to know has already seen me kill someone."

"You remind me of Shadow," she said.

And that was funny, because Shadow had gone into the heart of hell at Sonnebend to get me out, and even though the news about the attack on Suri had put her boss Primus on my "people I will kill someday if I ever manage to get powerful enough to do it" list, and even though she had once tried to kill me and I'd retaliated by paralyzing her and making all her hair fall out, she was still someone I'd be eternally grateful to.� If I had modeled a significant part of my adult persona after Shadow, I wouldn't be too surprised.� On the other hand, Shadow was significantly less hip to modern pop culture than I was.� I was pretty sure she'd never seen an episode of Pokemon.

"Why, thank you," I said, and stuck my head out the door.� "Raymond! You're next!"� I turned to Alannah.� "The cats like to play with chewy toys.� Don't get them mad. Angelkitty will pee in your hair."

"You have some very interesting pets, Doctor," she said, and left.

And then there was Raymond.

I gestured him to a seat.� The concept of modifying a man to lactate intrigued me from a scientific perspective.� Raymond had been a child when I'd last seen him, the little brother of Sharon Montesquieu, whose power was to influence people's intelligence.� Not much of a combat power, which was probably why she wasn't here today; I seemed to recall she'd become an advisor to the President.� I barely remembered Raymond; he'd been a very quiet child.� As a man, though, he interested me � most men would have had the same reaction that Jeff Riordan had had, that any remote aspect of female biology as applied to them was disgusting and unthinkable.� A man who was curious about what it was like to make milk � at least, curious enough to agree to do it -- was rather unusual.�

With the women, I'd simply made them internally numb, so they wouldn't sense my power.� But I preferred to do it a different way with men.� If I wasn't actively out to hurt a man, to demonstrate my power over him � a trick I often pulled with politicians and CEOs when they requested my services for themselves � I liked to demonstrate my power over them a different way.� Raymond was nondescript, not particularly attractive to me � brown hair, light blue eyes, pale skin, average height and weight, nothing special about his face.� If he had been attractive, I wouldn't have done it this way � I don't seduce men that I actually want using my powers; it's too much like rape.� But since I didn't actually want him, and therefore no seduction would be taking place, I saw no harm in it.� Let someone on the Peace Force remember exactly what I could do.

I flooded him with endorphins, the way I had Mindy Lightman.� Except with a child like her, I was always very careful to make sure any pleasure they felt from my touch was completely non-sexual.� When I used my powers on adult men, I went for the opposite effect.� Raymond gasped very slightly as my power worked inside him, his eyes dilating.� He hadn't sat down with the thought that he'd have to hide an erection, so when I looked at his lap I could plainly see his pants straining.� I smiled mockingly at him.� I was only touching his arm, just laying my hand on top of it, but through the connection I could feel hormones and neurotransmitters kicking into high gear, could feel the blood flow in his body shifting around as his vessels constricted, driving up blood pressure and forcing more of it into his penis.� I had to work with sex hormones and erogenous zones anyway to make a man capable of making milk; a diagnostic of the entire system before I modified it was a good idea.� Besides, I liked making men want me when I had no intention of reciprocating.� I didn't wear leather catsuits solely to get badass villain cred.

And then just as I started to do the actual work, to make the modifications on him, something in me shifted, and goddamn but he was gorgeous.� Absolutely nothing had changed about his objective appearance, but features I'd described to myself a minute ago as nondescript and not terribly attractive suddenly looked yummy enough to lick, and my interest in his erection went from amusement to need.� I lost my concentration completely and let go of him; I don't touch people when I feel like my powers are out of my control, and right now, I felt totally out of control.� The urge to throw myself at him � literally � to climb in his lap and rip his clothes off was overwhelming.

I wasn't stupid, though, however much my own hormones were suddenly clouding my thinking.� If I hadn't felt this overwhelming lust a moment ago, then someone had done it to me.� Probably Montesquieu himself.� In fact, he was grinning sardonically at me, an expression that just made me want to melt into a puddle of goo and drape said goo all over his body, preferably with no clothes between the goo and his skin.� I took a deep breath and looked into myself.� Yes, all of my own chemical substrates of lust were circulating like mad through my bloodstream and firing off in my brain.� No, there was nothing physical to explain why.� So he didn't have a power like mine, and he didn't have pheromones or other forms of chemical stimulant that could make me feel lust.� This was a telepathic ability of some form; he was working directly on my brain, at a level where my powers couldn't quite detect what was going on.

I shut everything down.� All nerves to erogenous zones, all internal sensors, all receptors for oxytocin, vasopressin, estrogen, testosterone, endorphin, and anything else I could think of that was involved in desire.� It was like the mother of all cold showers.� Even though I'd done it to myself and therefore knew it was coming, the sudden absence of sensation hit me like a ton of bricks.

"Not so pleasant to be on the other end, is it?" Montesquieu said.

"You do that to women a lot?" I asked.

"Only the ones who do it to me first.� I'm a lot more fond of making people trust and like me.� Or of making them get irrationally angry at their own comrades in arms."

"You control emotions."

"How did you guess?"� He folded his hands over his chest.� "I'm still willing to do this, but you don't gratitutiously screw with my head.� Or any other part of my body.� I have the distinct impression you didn't do that to Dr. Jansen or Alannah."

Embarrassed, I smiled.� "Fine, you got me."� I reached out for him again.� "I won't do that again.� Pinky swear."

He hesitated for a moment and then gave me his hand again.� "Do you do that to men a lot?"

"Only the ones I don't want to have sex with."� Interesting.� His power, genetically, was indistinguishable from his sister's.� But she had the ability to increase or decrease intelligence, whereas he could alter physical sensations, and if his boast was accurate, manipulate the more mental emotions as well.� I'd had a theory for some time that the genetics of superpowers wasn't the only thing that affected how they worked; personality and culture might have an impact as well, and this seemed to be proof.� Could Sharon and Raymond Montesquieu have divided control of reason and control of emotion so neatly between them if they didn't belong to a culture with a long history of considering those traits opposite?�

"That doesn't make any sense.� Why would you make men want you if you don't want them?"

I did the same thing to him I'd done to the women, shut down the internal nerves and started work on his chest without letting him feel it.� "Because if I do want them, and I make them want me, and then we have sex, I just raped them.� If I do want them, and I make them want me, and I don't want to be a rapist, I would have to deny myself something I want.� Men I actually want to sleep with should have freedom of choice to say yes or no."

"I had freedom of choice to say no a minute ago."

"Is that why you used your powers to make me want you?� Because you wanted to say no?"

"Absolutely.� I knew you'd realize what was going on and shut down my influence on you; I wanted you to know what it felt like, what you were doing to me.� In fact that's literally what I did.� What you got was exactly what you did to me, because I took how you made me feel and projected it on you."

"So if I'd stopped doing it to you, it would have stopped on its own.� What if I'd started tearing your clothes off?"

"Well, rumor has it that you hate rapists, so I suspected that wasn't going to happen, but if it did I'd have just made you feel apathetic and depressed and probably a bit worthless.� Then you probably would have stopped on your own."

I decided I never wanted to actually come up against this man in combat.� "Well, you're right.� I don't rape people."

"Did it ever occur to you that the part of rape that's violating isn't the actual sex per se, but the fact that someone is doing something to your body and mind for their own pleasure and it's outside your control?"

"I assure you I probably know a fuck of a lot more about what it's like to be raped than you do."

"But you just used your powers to make me desire you.� For no reason that I could see.� I hadn't threatened you, you didn't want me � what did you want?� Was it just a power trip?"

I really didn't like this conversation.� I'm a supervillain.� People don't call me on my bad behavior; they expect me to be bad.� I wondered if he was using his powers to make me feel guilty and embarrassed, but when I'm touching a Proxima I can feel if their powers are in use, if I check it, and his were quiescent.� "I already told you I won't do it again."

"To anyone?� Because what you just did may not have been rape, but it definitely qualifies as sexual harassment."

"Oh, come on.� You sound like the guys who cry sexual harassment because a woman shows up at work wearing hot pants and gives them a stiffie."

"You know, if she does that because there's nothing in her closet but hot pants, that's one thing, but if she does it knowing the men will want her and enjoying the power over them it gives her, that is sexual harassment.� And I wouldn't want to legislate that because, again, maybe it's all she's got in her closet.� Men would be going down a slippery slope assuming that whenever a woman is attractive it's because she wants to attract them.� But you quite deliberately used your powers to make me aroused.� For what?� To prove you could do it?� To make me feel uncomfortable so that you could feel more powerful?"

Um, yeah, that was kind of exactly why I had done it.� "My power hurts people unless I do something to avoid it.� I can make you numb, or I can make you hot for me.� Most men prefer the �hot' option."

"You didn't ask."

"I didn't know you'd make a federal case of it."

"No, you didn't know I could project it right back at you.� You didn't like that at all, did you?"

While I had been a prisoner at Sonnebend, my powers controlled by an induction implant in my brain that allowed me to use them only when my captors allowed, the guards had been in the habit of raping me frequently.� It hurt, and it was humiliating, and I remember thinking to myself, why was I putting up with this pain?� I could alter my own body to make the rapes physically pleasureable.� So I did � the next time I was required to use my powers, I took a few moments to change myself so that any physical contact with my genitals, however rough, would be arousing and pleasurable.� And the very next time I had my powers again, I undid it and made my entire body numb.� Because as utterly horrible as the pain of being raped had been, it had been much, much worse when the bastards I hated had been able to make me want it.� Even when it was something I'd done to myself.

No, I hadn't liked Raymond making me want him at all.� Which, I suppose, made his point for him, that he hadn't liked me doing it to him, either.

I let go of him without turning his internal nerves back on.� Eventually they'd come back on their own, but he'd be numb for hours, and probably end up with gas and constipation because his brain wouldn't be able to properly regulate his digestive system with the nerves shut down.� "You've made your point.� We're done here."

"Do you even think men are people, or are only women allowed to be angry that someone's been making them desire people they don't actually want?"

"Fine!� I already said I won't do it again, all right?� You know, when men do that kind of thing to women, it pretty much always is because they're going to rape them.� At least I never use my powers to make a man want me and then have sex with him!"

"I'm not sure that actually makes it any better at all.� Most men would probably prefer the coerced sex to the coerced blue balls.� And regardless, even if you don't rape them you're still invading their bodies and forcing sexual feelings on them they didn't ask for.� So you're not a rapist, you're just a molester."

Rage swelled.� "Call me that again and I will kill you."

"No, you won't," he said, and he was right, because I suddenly wasn't angry anymore, even though I wanted very much to be angry and defensive and I wanted to kill this bastard for accusing me of being like my father or the men at Sonnebend except I didn't want to kill him at all because I was feeling very calm and peaceful, but what he was saying hurt, it hurt terribly, and because I was too calm and peaceful to get angry or to cry I simply had to pretend I hadn't heard any of it.� Because I wouldn't be calm or peaceful if someone had accused me of being a rapist, so of course no one had.� I wondered what the weather was like outside and if they had my food yet because I was hungry.

And then Montesquieu wasn't in the room anymore and the rage was back all of a sudden, like a switch thrown in my head.� And I knew that was his doing, that he had used his powers to calm me long enough to get out of my way and escape me, and that infuriated me even more.� I threw the door open.� "Montesquieu!"

"You had something to say to Raymond?"� Ciana asked, forcefield up on full, standing just outside the doorway.

"I need to go check on Suri," I said, in a tone that at the time I thought sounded reasonable but in retrospect I'm fairly sure did nothing to hide how generally ticked off I was.�

So I went and checked on Suri, who was doing about as well as she'd been before, and then I checked on Dr. Jansen's progress in setting up my operating theater, which she had just about finished doing, and then I checked on Suri again, and then the operating theater again, and right about the time I was running out of ideas for ways I could kill time, my food arrived.

Eating for energy requires more forethought than you might think.� You have to actually digest the food and let it start circulating in your bloodstream before it turns into energy, and digestion is slowed down or turned off by stress and excitement.� So the first thing I had to do was calm down.� As much as it made me unhappy to do so � I dislike modifying my own brain to stop feeling the things I'm feeling, or to feel different things � I had to turn down the adrenaline and basically do to myself what Raymond Montesquieu had done to me twenty minutes ago, to calm myself.� And then I had to shut down my sympathetic nervous system as much as possible, so I ended up in a state of intense relaxation bordering on sleepiness where it would actually be very difficult for me to return quickly to alertness if the Peace Force decided to jump me, but then, I wouldn't have been there if I was seriously worried about that.� And then I had to stuff my face.

Food is yummy.� Sweet food is especially yummy.� But too many yummy things all at once really is overkill.� I ate and ate, drowsed for a bit while my stomach cleared out what I'd already filled it with, then kicked my appetite back on and ate some more.� It didn't make me queasy or overfull because I was using my powers to suppress such sensations, but it did start to bother me after a while that so much tasty food, so close together, just stopped being really tasty.� And then the sugar started hitting my bloodstream, which woke me up and made me hyper, except I needed to sit still and keep eating because I needed to have as much energy stored up as possible before I got to work.

I'd eaten about two-thirds of it and I just had to get up and move around.� No choice.� Well, no choice aside from expediting the conversion of some of it to fat, and if I did that it wouldn't be around as free energy when I needed it.� So I went for a walk.� I didn't think the Peace Force would let me out of the medical wing, but I also didn't think they would really object to my looking at their general medical setup.� I mean, if I wanted to, I could manufacture a plague to kill them all, no matter what kind of medical technology they had, so it wasn't as if keeping secrets about their medical equipment was going to save them.

But, predictably, I wasn't halfway down the corridor before Ciana was by my side.� "Do you have somewhere you need to go?"

"I'm bored and I need to walk off my meal, since you folks haven't seen fit to provide me with that deer yet.� What, are you afraid I'm going to spy on your medical wing and tsk tsk you for not having enough hand sanitizer lying around?� I'm a doctor.� You haven't got anything in any of these rooms I haven't seen before."

"Oh, you're a real doctor now?� With an actual degree?� Who works at hospitals and things like that?"

"I would have had the actual degree except for the minor problem of being kidnapped a month from graduation.� And yes, I work in hospitals.� Quite a bit."

"But they don't know who you are."

"The great thing about how overworked interns and residents are is, if you put them to sleep for 24 hours and go take their place on rotation, when they wake up and have no memory of having gone to work but everyone else remembers them being there, they assume the problem is they were so overtired they essentially slept through their rotation, on their feet and with their eyes open, and since that's not the kind of thing you want to admit to anyone, they don't exactly tell their supervisor about it."

"So you drive young doctors crazy by making them think they went to work asleep, when in fact you'd knocked them unconscious."

"I would be doing a great public service by knocking half the interns and residents in the United States right now unconscious, so they can't attempt to practice life-or-death medicine on 2 hours of sleep."

"I want you to come look at something."

I shrugged.� "All right."

The room we went to was plainly a morgue, though with a high-tech twist.� Someone, I was guessing either Rafe Wilcox or Lamont, had built the Peace Force stasis tubes, ten of them.� Ciana pulled out one of the tubes and pressed a button, which I was guessing released the stasis field inside.� She waited a few minutes and then lifted the lid.� A blast of extremely cold air hit me.� I looked at the corpse inside the tube.

I didn't recognize him.� He was a light-skinned black man, slightly overweight (usually a state Proximas have to actually work at, because power mitochondria don't do all the work of fueling our superpowers; some of the energy actually comes from our food, which means we burn off calories very quickly), of medium height, and I didn't recognize his face due to the unusually large hole in it.� I touched him, and jerked away.� He was still much too cold for me to make contact with.� Ciana closed the inner, clear lid and spun the inside tube, so I could see his back.� No identifying marks, and he'd been shot in the back of the head � the weapon had entered through a small wound, and then apparently expanded and come blasting out of the front of his head in so many places that it had torn his face to shreds.� She turned it again and lifted the inner lid again.� "You recognize him?"� she asked.

"Not with the missing face, no."

"It's Lifeliner.� Do you know anything about this?"

"Well, I know he was shot in the head... that's about it.� Do you want me to see if there's any evidence of his mental state before he died?"

"You can do that?"

"Sure.� With a head shot like this, if he didn't see it coming he wouldn't have had time to feel fear or anger.� So the amount of adrenaline in the blood stream should tell me whether he knew he was about to get shot, or not.� Depending on how quickly you got his body into stasis after he died."

"But you don't know anything about who killed him or why."

"Again, if there's DNA evidence I might be able to tell you who, but with a gunshot wound like that I doubt there's DNA; I could possibly tell you who the last person he had sex with was and how recently that was before he died, or who he touched last before he died, but that may not prove anything."� I touched him again.� He was still chilly, but not so cold I couldn't make contact.

"I meant, you hadn't heard anything."

"Supervillains don't actually congregate in bars and gloat to each other over who they killed today.� At least, if they do, they haven't sent me an invite.� Why would I know who killed Lifeliner?"

"When we were looking for him or Psychophage, The Eye told us you'd killed Psychophage.� Two years ago."

"I didn't know The Eye was still alive.� Let alone practicing.� Isn't she like a hundred or something?"

"She's in her 80's, and she still practices for her friends.� Doctor Sun's a friend.� Did you kill Psychophage?"

"I don't see why you think The Eye would lie to her friend's minions.� Yes, I did.� Two years ago, like the lady told you.� What does that have to do with Lifeliner?� They had similar powers, but one was a mercenary medic and one was a serial killer."

Lifeliner had been flash-frozen, not by the stasis procedure, which worked by manipulating time and actually didn't literally freeze anything (or so I was told; physics is not my field), but probably by Jason, sometime shortly after his death.� The chemicals in his body had crystallized, but that was good, because it meant they hadn't broken down for the most part.� It took me more time to unpack crystals than it would have to examine unfrozen tissue, but I was getting the distinct impression that he hadn't seen his death coming; there was no evidence of unusual amounts of adrenaline in his system.� Other signs, like muscle tension, would only have been present a short time after his death and certainly wouldn't have survived the flash freezing, but from what I could see he'd been taken totally by surprise.

"I thought there might be a connection.� Why did you kill Psychophage?"

"What part of �he was a serial killer' did you not understand?"

"He wasn't a serial killer.� He stole people's life energy, but I don't know of any cases where he killed them."

"I do.� And even if he didn't kill most of his victims, he raped a number of them.� He was perfectly capable of taking life energy from anyone, but he had a very strong preference for taking it from attractive women, and generally raping them while they were unconscious.� Trust me, the world's a better place without him."� Lifeliner's DNA was undamaged.� I gathered up some of his cells and stuck them in my arm, next to the little pocket of Alannah's cells that I'd stored.� Psychophage's DNA was already in my database at home, and I was interested in comparing the two.� "Whereas Lifeliner would give you more energy in exchange for money, or money in exchange for your life energy.� Life energy being something we all replenish as we live, it's not like people were selling him organs or their soul or something, so I never had an issue with it, and he did use his energy supplies to help sick people survive their illness long enough to overcome it, fairly frequently.� I never had a problem with him."�

The work I was going to do for Suri was probably going to keep me a week or two.� If I wanted these cells to live, or Alannah's, long enough to study them, I couldn't just keep them under my skin.� I pulled them through my body so they could sit in the fatty tissue of my breasts, where they didn't have to interfere with any of my muscles, and I triggered angiogenesis to feed them some blood � basically, made them into two tiny benign tumors.� Though Lifeliner himself was dead, his cells had been frozen and then placed in stasis quickly enough after his death that I could revive them and make them live.

"Someone did," Ciana said.� "We would have gone to him for help instead of you, except someone shot him less than a day before Jason and I found his apartment."

"Hm.� Well, that could have worked, but there's things the baby needs done for its long-term health that Daniel can't do, so you're better off with me anyway."� I focused my attention on the man's destroyed face.� He really had deserved better than this.� "Do you guys still need to do a forensic analysis on the bullet trajectory, or can I fix up his face?"

"You can do that?� He's dead."

"He's still made of organic tissue.� Most of it isn't even fully dead yet."

"Wait a minute."� Ciana grabbed my shoulder and swung me around to look at her.� "Are you telling me you can still work with his body in this condition?� Could you save him?"

I shook my head.� "I was just thinking of putting his face back together so his next of kin can recognize him, if he's got any.� I can't bring him back with essentially no brain."

"But you can still heal him?� Except he's still dead?� How can you heal someone that's dead?"

"Ciana, I work with dead material all the time.� What do you think wood is?� Or cotton?"

"It just seems... I know you can transmit your powers through wood, but healing a dead body seems... if you can do that, why can't you bring back the dead?"

"I can."� I shrugged.� "Best time I ever managed on resurrecting the dead was a baby who'd been shaken to death about three hours before I got to him.� It took me a few hours, but I got that baby back.� But it depends mostly on the brain � the more damage to the brain, the less I can do.� I essentially had to rebuild the baby's brain from scratch, which only worked because he was only about two months old and didn't have much of any information in his brain yet.� For adults, the best I've ever managed was a guy who drowned in ice water an hour and a half before I got to him, and the paramedics have actually done revivals from people in that state.� Normally I can do adults and older children within twenty minutes and babies within a hour or so.� But if the brain is destroyed, there's nothing I can do; I couldn't have saved Lifeliner even if I'd gotten to him ten seconds after he was shot.� I can just do cosmetic work."

"Don't.� Forensics might still need to study him."� She looked down at the body.� "So... if you impersonate doctors and go to hospitals... how did you manage to resurrect a baby without blowing your cover?"

"I didn't.� I blew my cover completely.� Took my Dr. Mystery scary Oscar statue form, told everyone I was a Proxima healer and I thought maybe I could save the baby, and busted my ass."� I looked up at her.� "And then I followed the parents back to their apartment, because that baby didn't shake himself, and he didn't get the other bruises and contusions on his body by magic either, and after I figured out it was the father I melted his face off and told the mother that if anything violent ever happened to that kid she'd be next."

Ciana made a disgusted face.� "Why do you do things like this?"

"Like melt baby killers' faces off so they won't take the opportunity to murder their son a second time?"

"No, I know why you do things like that.� Why do you go out of your way to tell people?� I had almost started to think you had a worthwhile bone in your body, and then you interrupt your story of heroically resurrecting a murdered child to tell me how you killed his father in a gruesome way.� I know you're a murderous sociopath, but why do you work so hard to make sure I can never forget it even for a few moments?"

"I'm not a murderous sociopath.� The people I kill deserve to die."

"Like the fraternity brothers you turned into werewolves?"

"I had evidence of three gang rapes committed by that frat before I kidnapped them.� It's not as if I was going to get informed consent for infecting people with a mutagenic virus, so I picked criminals who would never see any kind of justice.� I know you were falling all over yourselves about the poor, poor frat boy werewolves and how mean I was to them�"

"You mutated them against their will.� Half of them died.� And then you flipped out and destroyed Energeon's career, nearly killed him and gave him a debilitating disease, because he accidentally killed your dog."

"He shouldn't have been firing force beams at the walls in a room with a puppy!� That was just wrong.� Poor Min didn't have his superpowers fully manifested yet; he was just a puppy.� He couldn't defend himself from a wall caving in on him."

"You're the one who brought a puppy to your lab."

"My lab was a perfectly safe place until you broke in and trashed it!"

"Because you were killing human beings!� If they were rapists, they should have gone to jail � they didn't deserve to be infected with a mutagenic virus and die!"

I looked at her.� "Yes.� They did.� They raped women, they got away with it, they would have kept getting away with it and there was no chance they would ever have faced justice for what they did.� They might well have ruined those women's lives, and if some of them got over what those bastards did and managed to have happy lives afterward, it doesn't lessen the crime any.� If my technique had worked I'd have had a reliable way to quickly mutate large numbers of Sapiens into Proximas without having to extensively remap brain pathways, and that would have benefitted us all.� So if someone had to die for the possibility that the Proximas would be saved from Sapiens hatred, it damn well should be rapists who will never so much as be charged for their crimes... not innocent puppies."

She shook her head.� "How do you even know for certain they were guilty?� Or that they were all guilty?� Could there have been innocent men at that fraternity who weren't involved in the rapes?� Could any of those women have been lying to you?"

"No one can lie to me if I'm touching them, Ciana.� Not unless they're crazy and believe what they're saying, and I'd notice schizophrenia in someone I was touching.� And I had a positive ID on every man I kidnapped.� The two frat boys I couldn't link to any of the rapes, I left unconscious in their beds when I took the others."

"That doesn't make it better.� You may think you have some kind of moral high ground because you experiment on rapists and kill child murderers instead of indiscriminately killing people the way you did when you were a teenager.� But you're still a killer.� You can't do good by doing evil."

"You've never killed anyone?"

She winced.� "Never on purpose.� Accidents... can happen, when you're in combat trying to take down a killer.� But I've never deliberately taken a life."

"So if you found a guy who'd just murdered a baby, only there was no way to prove it because by saving the baby's life you yourself had erased the evidence, you would just cheerfully hand the baby back to him to be killed again?� Or at least beaten and abused?� Why is the innocent baby's life worth less than the killer's?"

"I didn't say I'd do that.� If I had been in that situation I'd probably have monitored the situation and come in with cops the moment he did anything to the child again."

"Well, you work with the Peace Force.� You have that as an option.� I don't."

Algernon stuck his head in the door.� "There you are.� They came back with your deer, Mystery."

Showtime!

I left Lifeliner's corpse with his face still ruined and ran for the operating theater Dr. Jansen had prepped for me.� The deer was bound and starting to wake up, thrashing its head and feet a little on the table they'd dumped it on.� I grabbed its thrashing head, said "Shh, shh," and shut it down, putting it deeply to sleep.� It had a concussion; presumably Mother Bear and Bobcat had bashed it in the head to get it here in the first place.� It really didn't matter because I was never going to allow it to wake up, but I healed the concussion anyway.� Then I shut off all of its internal nerve endings and generated some of the warmer fuzzier hormones and neurotransmitters in its brain.

It was a doe, and she'd had fawns before.� As I reconfigured her body so she could carry a human fetus, I pumped her full of the same hormones she'd have coursing through her if it was her own baby inside her.� I imagined that maybe she would dream of her fawns while she slept.

"Bring Suri in," I said to Dr. Jansen.

Daniel and Jason wheeled Suri's bed and equipment in.� Physically, she looked no different than when I'd last checked on her.� I waited until they had her on the surgical table, and put my hand on her forehead while Daniel and Dr. Jansen lowered themselves to acting as my nurses (doctors are generally not the biggest fans of doing nursing work like prepping patients for surgery, but the Peace Force actually didn't employ any nurses, a massive oversight in my opinion.)� She was deeply asleep, almost comatose.� I didn't like how close she was to a coma, to be honest, but I needed her deeply under for this surgery, so I wasn't going to try to do anything about it just yet.

"Dan. Do your powers work on deer?"

He shook his head.� "Only humans."

Damn. "Then after I open Suri up and take the baby out, I'm going to need you to knit her back together and stabilize her, because I've got to stabilize the baby."

"Do you need a scalpel, or can your powers do the incision?" Dr. Jansen asked.

"She'll be better off if I use my powers. Less blood loss."

I took a deep breath.� Time to get to work.

First I opened up the deer. I sealed the edges of the incision, which would make it harder to heal it, but I needed the deer to not bleed out in the few minutes it would take me to get the baby out of Suri.� I frowned as I noted the size of the deer � I'd expected a deer to be much more massive than a human, but this one actually probably weighed only 130 lbs or so, not much more than Suri herself (and to be honest, less than me... I maintain a sufficient quantity of muscle mass that in my short baseline form, I actually look like a woman who works out. Like I said, gymnast body, not svelte supermodel. I have to grow taller to pull that one off.)� More of the deer's mass was concentrated in her actual body and less in her legs than a human, even though she had two extra legs, and unlike a human I could use her up in feeding the baby's need, but it meant I would have to do a lot more work to keep her from dying prematurely. Damn.� Well, I'm a city girl; I didn't know how big deer really were until I touched one. Most of my experience with deer was seeing them dead on the side of the road on the rare occasions where I had to drive through the boonies to see a client.

I turned around and reached for Suri, letting go of the deer for the moment. I stopped the blood flow in her abdominal region entirely for a moment by closing up capillaries and some of the minor arteries, and pushed her flesh apart, cell by cell, until I had her opened up to the uterus.

The baby sat within a placental membrane, as babies do, filled with amniotic fluid.� The membrane was too weak; the moment I took it out of the support structure of the uterus, its own weight would rupture it.� "Algernon. I need a localized null-gravity field centered around Suri's abdomen, the incision in the deer and the path between.� Can you do that?"

"I'm just going to null everything above the level of your waist."�

"I can't afford to start floating here."

"Hence, I leave gravity on your legs.� You won't float, Meg.� I've fought you often enough that you should know this."

I felt a sudden sense of dizziness, queasiness, almost nausea.� And literal light-headedness.� With gravity working on my legs, and no gravity for my torso or head, my blood was rushing to my legs and my stomach and intestines were floating up inside my body.� I tightened up most of the blood vessels in my lower body, keeping too much of my blood from escaping down there, and shut down my own ability to feel my digestive system.� At the same time I was severing the amniotic membrane from Suri's uterus, separating it bit by bit so I could take the whole baby bundle at once.

He was huge.� He didn't weigh anything at all in the null gravity field, but he was easily the size of a month-old newborn, not a fetus at all.� If he had been a newborn yet, however, he'd have been badly malformed.� He still had the translucent not-quite-skin of a fetus, and his head was even bigger in comparison to his body than a typical newborn, with his fingers and toes somewhat atrophied, stubby and webbed.� I lifted him out quickly and placed him inside the incision in the deer.� The deer's uterus was too small for him at the moment, since she hadn't been pregnant already. I made the uterine muscles expand until they were just large enough to accommodate this amniotic sac, and then attach the sac to the uterine wall, connecting the blood vessels to the placenta.�

The deer's body would reject the human tissues if I let it, so I swept through her first to find and kill any source of infection, and then I shut down her immune system completely. I could protect her from infection myself until she brought the baby to term, at which point I figured we'd all celebrate with venison for dinner.� The deer wouldn't survive the baby's ravening need any more than Suri would have; it had more central body mass to draw on to feed the kid, that was all.� And I could dissolve some of its organs to feed him, not something I could exactly do with a human, at least not an innocent human.

"Okay, give me gravity back."�

With gravity restored, I began working on integrating the baby into the deer's body, balancing her hormones, connecting the baby's placenta to her blood supply. Because I was willing to let the deer have a stroke or a heart attack, I could increase its blood pressure beyond what I could do for a human, and so I could feed more blood to the placenta than Suri's body had been able to support. That would keep the fetus from becoming malnourished. I kicked amino acid production into high gear � deer make their own amino acids, since they only eat vegetable matter and usually vegetable matter without significant protein content, and a full-grown deer who wasn't pregnant would need to make a lot fewer than a pregnant one.

"Meg!� Dr. Sun isn't healing!"

Daniel's voice cut through my near-trance state. I broke free of the work on the deer and turned to Dr. Suri. The incision I'd made in her body hadn't finished sealing up; it wasn't bleeding, because I'd sealed the edges, but it was still a gaping hole into her uterus, vulnerable to infection and anything else. When I put my hands on her I knew that her uterus wasn't shrinking, either, although it should start with no more baby or placenta inside. Her heart was fluttering, very weak, and her brain activity was dangerously low.

I tried to stimulate healing, the release of blood sugar, adrenaline to keep her heart back on track.� Her body simply didn't respond to me. �It was as if normally I could whisper in the tiniest voice to get the exact results I wanted, and now I had to scream into the wind. I put forth more effort � when I strain my powers it's usually because of the complexity of what I'm doing, but here, it was simply raw force.� It still wasn't working.

I suspected I knew what was wrong, and narrowed my attention down to the level of the mitochondria, to the supplies of ATP they churn out and release into the cell.� The mitochondrial output of this particular cell was very low � understandable, because the oxygenation of the blood was also very low, because Suri was barely breathing and her heartbeat was slow, weak and irregular, but what was really distressing was that the cell didn't have any ATP in its stores.� These were power mitochondria.� They should be producing at least enough ATP to keep Suri alive, even in the absence of oxygen and food; really powerful Proximas can run on whatever the mysterious energy source our power mitochondria draw from for some time before finally giving out. But they weren't, because there was no circulating catalysine in her blood stream, which was because the brain centers responsible for making catalysine didn't have the resources to do it.

Everything was interconnected. Suri was simply out of life energy.� She had burned through all of her resources, and she didn't have enough left to get more.� In just the way a fire needs a spark and a dead battery needs a jump, all the chemical reactions that the human body performs to turn food and oxygen into energy require some energy to get started, and Suri didn't have any left.� What was worse, this was not a problem either Daniel or I could fix. Healers use the target's resources; the draw on my own power when I heal comes from the energy required to manipulate millions of tiny molecules in very small ways, not from the energy required to make cells divide, multiply and make new proteins. There was absolutely nothing Daniel could do, and very little I could either.

This was the kind of thing Lifeliner's powers had been good for.� Or Psychophage, though honestly that bastard spent much more of his time stealing other people's life energy for himself than giving it back to others.� I tried to think, desperately, if I knew anyone else with a power remotely similar to Lifeliner's. But it wouldn't have mattered, because we didn't have time.� If there was someone here I could modify using Lifeliner's DNA to give them his powers... but there was no one whose genetic profile I knew well enough, and besides, unless the existing neurological powers control was a close match to Lifeliner's power, they'd have very little control...

No, scratch that. There was someone here whose genetic profile I knew perfectly and whose brain was probably already wired to handle the power. Modifying my own DNA would be damned stupid � I'd run the risk of losing my actual power, and then I wouldn't be able to correct the problem � but I had, in the past, experimented with temporarily granting myself other people's powers by altering my cells' messenger RNA to include code matched from someone else's DNA. My brain couldn't easily adapt to certain powers � superspeed had resulted in my smacking into several objects rather quickly, because my brain didn't move as fast as my body did, and telepathy had overwhelmed and nearly paralyzed me. But Lifeliner's power was probably similar enough to my own that I could temporarily adopt it and immediately use it.

I used the little sample I had stored in my chest to sweep through my own body, altering RNA and sometimes directly altering proteins. In a moment, I felt a disorienting wave of vertigo as the world changed.

Every person in the room became a fuzzy blob, visible to my power � which normally only could "see" people when I was in physical contact with them or had a channel of organic matter to reach through to them � but without the fine detail I normally can perceive, and it was wavering in and out. In addition to the blurry sense of their organic structure I could also "see" auras that seemed to represent their energy state � Suri had almost no aura, whereas extremely powerful Proximas like Algernon and Jason were blindingly bright � and I felt a sense that I could reach out and pull on the aura, like peeling a thread away from braided licorice or a tuft of cotton candy out of a big blob of it. I didn't try. The blurriness of my powers-sense and the vagueness of the auras made me fear that any attempt to actually use my powers across distance, even the new powers just acquired from Lifeliner, would go badly.

Lifeliner had been able to affect anyone within a few feet of him, although usually he had touched his targets when feeding energy into them � he'd said it sharpened his focus. My powers had no distance component, so my brain wasn't properly prepared to handle perceiving at a distance, although adding Lifeliner's power to my own had apparently tacked the distance component onto my own power. This kind of thing is why it's generally a bad idea to mix powers or give one person multiple powers; they interact in unexpected ways.

I touched Suri again. This time both my own power-sense and the new energy perception I'd acquired came into very fine focus. In addition to feeling Suri's energy depletion at the organic level of the biochemistry in her cells, I could "see" the weakness in her as painfully thin and weak threads of dimly glowing life woven in and around a great mass of darkness.

"Algernon, I need you.� Come here."

He stepped forward warily.� "What do you want?"

"Your ATP." I wasn't going to tell them that I'd just given myself Lifeliner's power, so I pretended that I could in fact actually affect ATP at the chemical level. "Suri's life force � her body's supply of ATP, which is the battery that runs every cellular process � is badly depleted. You're quite possibly the most powerful Proxima here and you can turn on your powers to a high level without burning or freezing everything like Jason would. I need to transfer ATP from you to Suri's body. If you hold my hand and kick your power on � maybe null the gravity over on the other side of the room or something � you'll start making extra ATP and I can take from you without weakening you."

"What happens if I say no?"

"I ask for another volunteer. If everyone says no, Suri dies. I can't do this with my own ATP because if I'm healing I haven't got the energy to spare."

"That sounds a lot like Lifeliner's power," Dr. Jansen said.

"Sure does, but Lifeliner didn't actually need to touch people. I do."

"Psychophage needed to touch people."

"Yeah, I'm really Psychophage. I tortured Dr. Mystery into making me look just like her when she showed up to kill me, and I've been pretending to be her ever since."

"Just get it done, Meg," Algernon said tiredly, and reached out his arm to me.

I took it, one hand holding his and the other resting on Suri's head. "Start using your power."

The "aura" I'd seen before as blindingly bright and somewhat blurry had resolved into thousands, perhaps millions, of individual strands of light when I touched him. When his power kicked into motion, I felt the change in his body, felt neurons fire and neurotransmitters pump into his bloodstream, and saw the strands of light grow brighter, thicker. I reached on one of the strands, "pulled" it, rolled it into a ball, and unrolled it into Suri's body, where it sank into the dark mass of null energy and vanished.

Across the room a folding chair suddenly buckled with a shriek of snapping metal and crashed to the floor.

"Hardcore, Al," Jason said. "You gonna bring down the ceiling over there?"

"It's only four gee's," Algernon said. "The problem is that people have been standing on that folding chair and already weakened it. It's not a stepstool, people."

And then he gasped, and his head whipped around to look at me, as I yanked on several hundred strands at once and pulled them free. "I felt that."

"How many gee's are you putting out now?" I asked.

"One and a half. Let me turn it up�" His energy slowly increased, and I found how to tap him without hurting him. I could pull the threads over to Suri through my body, connect them directly, and let the energy flow directly. The power that would have gone to increasing the gravity at the far end of the room instead bled directly into her body.

"I should be pulling seven gee's, but I'm barely managing to stay above 1.5. How are you doing this?"

"I told you, ATP," I lied.� "Your power mitochondria make tons of it when you're using your powers � that's what fuels the paranormal stunts we can all pull." That much was true. My next statement was a bald-faced lie, however. "I can pull it out of your cells and feed it into Suri's. Then she'll have the energy to respond to Daniel's power or mine, and actually heal."

"So you can effectively do the same thing Lifeliner and Psychophage could do?"

"I can do about ten billion more things than they could do, so it doesn't come up much. I can't do it as efficiently as they could, either."� This was technically true, because of the learning curve and because Lifeliner at least had been able to work at a distance, which I lacked the brain structures to be able to do.

As more and more energy fed into Suri, the dark mass all throughout her and around her grew lighter and lighter, and began to resolve into individual strands of light. She grew brighter and brighter. I finally stopped pulling from Algernon when Suri was slightly brighter than Jason � which, in a resting state, she probably should be, since Suri's mitochondrial output was higher than his normally, and he wasn't using his powers.

"Try her now, Dan.� It should be possible to heal her from here."

He put his hands on her abdomen, and almost immediately the wound started to shrink.� "Yeah, she's responding now.� I can take it from here. Thanks."

I turned back to the baby and the deer. In the few minutes I had been gone the deer's hormonal balance had started to shift again, because the baby wasn't emitting the exact same form of progesterone that deer use. Dammit, I was going to have to monitor this constantly.� I rebalanced the deer to maintain the pregnancy, completely shut down the nerves to the deer's legs, and started breaking down the flesh on the legs to generate amino acids and lipids for the baby to take in and make into protein and fat.� I dissolved a little bone into the bloodstream as well, since the baby didn't have enough calcium. By the time I was done the baby would probably have consumed most of the deer's legs. I didn't have a problem with this � I eat meat � and I knew that most of the Peace Force were omnivorous as well, but I suspected that even those who loved hamburgers and juicy steaks would probably be bothered to excess if they could actually see the deer's legs dissolving, so I worked from the center outward and only did a little. I'd have to repeat the work periodically, but if I dissolved the whole thing at once, not only would the Peace Force probably freak out but the deer's liver and kidneys would purge a lot of it before the baby had a chance to make use of it.

"All right," Dan said, sounding exhausted. "Dr. Sun is healed, to the extent that I can; Mystery, I'd like you to take a look at her later and make sure there's no long-term damage you need to deal with, because I can really only deal with acute conditions and really obvious chronic problems. But right now I think she should rest. Can we take her back to her room?"

"Please. Clear the rest of this clown car out as well. I'm going to have to stay with the deer to keep the pregnancy going, so I want a cot I can sleep on, and my food, and books, and a TV. With a DVD player."

"Anything else?� Grapes, fans, dancing boys for your amusement?" Algernon asked.

"Mm, the dancing boys might help my morale. Any volunteers?"

"No," Jason said.

"You can't dance anyway. Any volunteers who aren't Jason?"

"I think we've catered to your needs enough, Meg," Algernon said.� "Let's clear out of here, people. Jason, help me push Dr. Sun back to her room."

They all left, leaving me alone with the deer and the baby. In a few minutes, Cyberna came in with the rest of my food following her on an automated rolling food cart.� "Here's the rest of your dinner," she said.� Her helmet tilted down as if she were studying the deer in front of her.� "You really put Dr. Sun's child inside that doe?"

"I really did.� Why, did you think I couldn't?"

"It just seems... wrong.� It would have been one thing to transfer the baby to another woman, but to gestate a baby inside an animal... Won't the animal reject the baby, or something?"

"Sure, if I let it. Which I'm not going to."

"What about interspecies diseases?� Isn't that how AIDS got started, some sort of connection between humans being too close to monkeys?"

"Mare, this is me you're talking about.� A much older, much better trained me than the me you went to school with, and that me cured Doctor Sun of multiple sclerosis and de-aged her to 20-something.� There are going to be no biological consequences of using a deer as a host mother, because I won't let there be any."

"It just seems wrong," she said stubbornly.

"This from the woman who runs around in a suit of armor."

"My armor is a machine. People, and babies, are more than machines.� How do you know there isn't some psychological reason that people need to grow inside their mothers?� Maybe some sort of telepathic connection?"

"Suri will be in much better shape to provide a telepathic connection to her baby when she isn't dying."

"I'm not saying it was wrong to stop her from dying�"

"Well, yes, actually, you kind of are.� Or that someone should have died.� This baby is simply too large for a human woman.� Besides, I didn't see you volunteering to be a host mother."

"How big is the baby?"

"About 11 pounds, and he's not actually done yet.� I can't remove him from the womb until his lungs and digestive tract can handle it. If he stays on the same growth curve he's likely to hit 13-16 pounds before he can be born, and he's consuming maternal resources faster than a human woman can supply them and still survive.� I can kill the deer in the course of the pregnancy; I wouldn't be able to let a human die."

"I guess."� She stared at the deer for another minute before turning away.� "I just wish there had been another way to do it."

"If wishes were fishes, fish for dinner would be a lot less expensive."

"I guess.� It just seems wrong."� And she left, before I could say anything else.� Not that there was really anything I could say.� When people declare that something "just seems wrong", they're rarely amenable to logical arguments.�

For the next few hours, I alternated between eating, reading and checking on the baby, with a few episodes of self-modification thrown in to counteract my growing sleepiness.� By breaking down the GABA in my bloodstream, I could go without sleep for up to two weeks � I'd tried it � although my thought processes would start to get seriously disordered around the sixth day.� Theoretically I might be able to go longer than two weeks, but at that point, the things I think make so little sense and my concentration is so badly shot that I lose the ability to keep modifying myself, and I end up falling asleep and enduring what seems like 8 hours of nonstop REM sleep, waking after numerous horrible dreams to feel as if I haven't rested at all, although my ability to reason and do logic has returned so it's pretty obvious that I have.�

In this case, I thought I might actually need the entire two weeks.� The baby wouldn't survive without me checking on him about every two hours, because the deer's biochemistry kept unbalancing itself in response to the chemicals the boy was putting out.� I suspected that the deer's body was desperately trying to miscarry a pregnancy that was not only alien but killer; perhaps some of the strategies that human fetuses try on their mothers to increase their own supply of blood or nutrients, which cause disorders like pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes in the mother, don't work the same way in deer and were alerting the deer's body that it should try to reject the pregnancy.�

Or perhaps I'd missed something small, some switch I needed to throw in the brain, some stimulation of a gland somewhere, to preserve the pregnancy indefinitely. I was no expert on deer the way I was on humans, and the problem with a power like mine is that it doesn't come with a handy-dandy wizard for doing things you really don't know how to do, like Dan's power does. The first three times I used my power on anyone but myself, I used it to kill; the fourth time, I undid the damage I'd just done to the third person, but even that I only managed because I just retraced my steps backward.� It was years of study and experimentation (and killing or torturing people, which is what my power does when it's wielded by someone who doesn't know what they're doing) before I learned to heal.

In any case, I could maintain the pregnancy, and the health of the baby, as long as I checked up on them and rebalanced any process that was going out of whack, every two hours or so. And it was clear I would have to do this until the baby was developed enough that he could be born. And he didn't seem to be in any hurry to do that.� In order for me to decant him from the womb, he'd need to have fully developed lungs, of a size equivalent to his body and with all the appropriate surfactants, and a working digestive system that could process the superconcentrated breast milk I'd already determined he would need... or solid food would be all right too, but I wasn't holding my breath for that one.� My guess, based on his rate of growth, was that he would get to the point of development that a 3-month old baby has before he would naturally secrete the hormones that would lead him to be born if he'd remained in his mother's body. If I did it, I could take him out any time after his lungs and digestive system were ready, but it didn't look like they would catch up to the rapid development of his brain and the phenomenal growth of his body for another week or two.

As the hours wore on, it became painfully clear what I'd let myself in for.� It was night, and the Peace Corps had all largely gone to sleep, and anyone who was still awake probably had better things to do than entertain me.� In fact they'd locked me in. I found this more amusing than distressing, because I had some very slender pieces of medical equipment with me and nothing better to do than flatten my arm into a pancake, slide it under the door, grow it until it was tall enough to reach the door lock, and pick the lock... admittedly this took me the better part of an hour, but what else was I going to do, read a book? They had given me some, but chosen them completely at random, so I had two contemporary romances, a true crime book about a guy who may or may not have killed his wife, a guide to ice fishing, a travel book for Ecuador, a conservative argument that children need fathers more than anything else and so unmarried women with kids shouldn't be given welfare and that will encourage them to get married, a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting (which, under the circumstances, I found both laughable and kind of tasteless), and a Very Important Work Of Serious Contemporary Literature that seemed to be about a middle aged man having a midlife crisis. I read some of them, because I was bored, but none of them were science fiction, fantasy, historical, feminist, political, murder mysteries, thrillers, Proxima interest, or about hot gay guys working through relationship crises.� The true crime book was the closest to something I'd have picked out for myself. No one had dropped off a DVD player, let alone any DVDs, so I was alone with next to nothing interesting to do, all night.�

I checked on Suri a few times, but she was sleeping.� She was probably the reason they'd locked me into a single room with no bathroom � they could have sealed the medical ward instead, but Suri was in it. I very nearly got bored enough to repair Lifeliner's destroyed face just because I could, and only at the last minute remembered that Ciana had wanted to have forensics go over the body before I eliminated the wound evidence.�

When morning finally came, I was in that eerie state of boredom and suppressed exhaustion where I was irritable, punchy and somewhat giggly.� When Ciana brought me breakfast, I made sure to tell her, at great length, how annoyed I was with Peace Force hospitality, and demanded some privacy so I could call one of my neighbors to feed Brian the cockatiel.� My neighbors couldn't feed, or in fact be allowed to see, my cats for obvious reasons, which was why I'd brought them with me, but everything else that indicated my unusual nature or actual career was locked in the basement and my neighbor didn't have the key for that, only for the front door.� Brian wasn't visibly different from any other cockatiel.� I didn't, however, want the Peace Force knowing that I had a neighbor with keys to my house, just in case they got ideas about breaking into my lab.

And then Suri came in.

She looked much better. Removing that baby from her had had great effects in improving her color and alertness.� She was still in a wheelchair, she was still too thin and too swollen, but she wasn't half-conscious and her breathing was good.� "How is my baby?" she asked.

"He's fine.� How are you?"

"I have been better," she admitted, "but at least I seem to be improving."� She rolled forward.� "My poor boy is confused.� The sound of the heart he hears is completely different now."

"He hasn't got much ability to store memories, so I'm sure he'll get over it pretty quickly."� I put my hand on Suri's shoulder.� Her thin nightgown was cotton, which I could work through easily.� "I want you taking vitamin and mineral supplements multiple times daily.� You're massively depleted on everything, but especially iron and calcium.� Dan can give you a schedule for taking the supplements to maximize absorption. �While I'm here with the baby, I can make sure your body takes up nutrients properly so you don't end up with anemia and osteoporosis, but there's not much I can do if you don't take the nutrients in the first place."

"Of course," she said.� "Thank you."� She turned her head to look up at me.� "Have you found anything else to tell me about?"

I shrugged.� "You're weak, your store of nutrients is basically gone, there's no fat anywhere on your body, you won't menstruate until you get your body fat percentage back up, and Dan already fixed the rash but unless you treat your skin with moisturizing lotions, the lack of body fat might keep it dehydrated and make it prone to breaking out in itchy rashes again.� Is there any of that you didn't know already?"

"I didn't know I wouldn't menstruate until my body fat is restored.� What about breastfeeding?"

"You can't do it.� In fact..."� Slowly I adjusted her hormone balance as we spoke, making the change gradually enough that my power wouldn't cause her pain.� "I'm adjusting you so your body stops thinking it's pregnant, because you do not have the resources to try to make breastmilk and if your body tries it will slow down your recovery.� I've fixed up three volunteers in the Peace Force to nurse the baby, so he'll be taken care of.� Don't try to feed him formula�"

"I know," she said.� "The others told me what you had said.� How is his development?"

"I'm retarding the growth of the brain areas that control his powers, so he'll require puberty to trigger his powers like everyone else.� Otherwise he'd get them in infancy, and given what he's got, I think that would be a remarkably bad idea.� Aside from that everything's completely out of sync, but if I can get it all synched up so everything's at about the same developmental level when he's born, he'll be approximately a three-month-old."

"What about the rapid growth?"

"Engineered to drop off anyway.� But I'll make sure.� Once he's born he should age normally... well, normally from three months, anyway, so you can expect him to hit all his physical milestones and some of the mental ones three months earlier.� It won't make him a prodigy; by the time they're two, three months doesn't make much of a difference."

She nodded.� "You mentioned his power.� You know what it will be?"

"Sort of."� I let go of her and stepped away, my work done for the moment.� "His powers complex resembles mine, but with distance components I see in you.� And he's got your power mitochondria, obviously.� So he's going to have a lot of energy to work with and his power will probably be like mine, but from a distance."� I looked at her hard.� "Are you sure you don't want me to abort?� Or alter his powers genetically, at least?� I'm not sure anyone should ever have my powers with a distance component."

"I am sure that I don't want you to alter his powers or kill him, yes." Suri's eyes pinned me, the way I was used to from her.� I was pleased she was healthy enough to do it, but not overly happy with how it felt to have her gaze drilling into my brain.� Deliberately I summoned up a memory of "The Song That Never Ends" from the Lamb Chop show. Why, yes, I am extraordinarily immature.� I like to have stupid television shows for small children, like Sesame Street and Lamb Chop (and, okay, Pokemon) on in the lab while I'm working.� It relaxes me.� And besides, really annoying songs from children's shows are good for blocking telepaths.�

"Primus didn't knock you up with his kid for good reasons, you know."

"I know.� I presume that the reason the baby's powers are similar to yours is that yours are similar to Primus'?"

"Yeah � Primus has no outward-facing component at all, I've got touch-activated outward-face, and the baby will have distance-transmissible outward-face.� I doubt he'll have your range because telekinetic powers use up much more raw energy than telepathic ones, but if he can make everyone in a city block die, that's really more power than anyone needs."

"I can make everyone in a city block die, Meg."

"He'll be able to do it by making their skin fall off.� Sure, people end up no less dead that way than with sudden stroke, but it's a lot more horrifying.� Trust me."

"I know that."� Suri sighed.� "Meg, you were raised by wolves.� To be honest, my metaphor may be unkind to wolves.� And we know very little of Primus' youth, but he was a Roman gladiator.� They were often slaves, who bought their lives only so long as they could keep winning fights.� It's likely he experienced horrific traumas himself.� The fact that the first thing you learned to do with your power was to kill has colored your entire adult life.� That doesn't make your power evil, or determine that anyone with a power similar to yours must abuse it as you have.� It means that your choices are bad, and if you had had different experiences, perhaps you'd have made better choices.� My son will be raised by Proximas who know of the power he'll develop and teach him to make good and moral choices with it, not by a pedophile and an emotional abuser."

I stared at her.� "Are you trying to say that I'm evil, or are you trying to say that people who are abused by their parents necessarily turn into supervillains?� Because either way, I reject your premise in the first place."

"Obviously people who are abused by their parents don't necessarily turn into supervillains," Suri said, a touch of impatience in her voice, "and it's rather disingenuous to try to twist my words around to imply that that's what I said.� Even if we restrict ourselves to discussing antisocial behavior, without going so far as to talk about supervillainy, no, it's not true that people who were abused, by their parents or anyone else, will necessarily become bad people.� The world is full of those who overcame the pain they suffered to perform acts of heroism, and even more so of those who overcame that pain to live quiet, normal lives, no different than anyone else.� In your case, though, the pain broke you, and yes, I believe that is why you became a supervillain.� You have the power to do great good or great evil, and because you are who you are, because you have endured what you've endured, frequently you choose to do evil."

"Jason suffered nearly as much as I did, and he's one of your precious heroes.� Dr. Jansen lived through the Holocaust.� So did Isak Spiegel.� I can't top that.� And Professor Octohedron didn't put up with anything worse than being called a nerd in high school, so if suffering and abuse makes supervillains, explain him."

She sighed.� "I'm fairly sure that �being called a nerd in high school' is a euphemism for �being socially isolated and emotionally abused, possibly physically abused, by his peers for years during his formative years', so I'm not entirely sure that Octohedron's life was as free of turmoil as you're trying to imply.� And as I said, suffering does not make supervillains.� Or even bad people.� But in your case, what you went through as a child interfered with the development of proper ethics and short-circuited much of your empathy, and that, coupled with your power, has made you a criminal who commits blackmail and murder.� Not everyone who suffers becomes such; not even everyone who suffered something very much like what you suffered does.� But you cannot deny that the things you suffered shaped you into who you are, and regardless of whether you want to believe it or not, who you are is a person who commits criminal acts, including murder, frequently.� That would be defined by most people as acts of evil."

"Of course the things I went through made me who I am.� The things everyone goes through make them who they are, good and bad both.� But you're talking like you think I have no concept of morality.� That I run around killing people because I think it's fun.� You know damn well I do what I do because it's got to be done."

"In your opinion."

"I don't see you making much political headway against the Human Definition Amendment.� Sure, everyone loves the Peace Force, except the half of the country who thinks you're in league with the black helicopters and you've taken over the UN and you're the vanguard of the upcoming Proxima conquest of America, and they're authorized to resist you by beating Proxima teens to death for being purple, and then lying about it on the police report to cover for the good ol' human boys who were just having some fun, after all."� I put my hands on the deer, looking away from Suri to focus on the baby for a moment.� "Nearly as I can see, your world-saving antics just make matters worse, because you make the human rednecks who hate us even more than they hate brown people feel inferior, and they won't feel like they've got their balls back until we're all dead.� At least when I blackmail politicians with cancer, I'm making sure the Proxima voice in Congress is as loud as the voice of the bigots who want us declared animals so they can go get hunting licenses and shoot us legally."� The pregnancy was stabilized again.� I looked up, straight at Suri.� "Do you really think I enjoy doing this kind of thing?� That I like to kill people?� You think I think murder's fun?"

"Perhaps not fun, but yes, I do think you enjoy it," she said softly, looking into my eyes, and I wanted to look away so badly I almost had to use my powers to lock myself in place.� Why did Suri have the ability to make me feel like a clueless teenage thug again?� "You're consumed with rage, Meg.� I don't blame you for that; rage is a normal response to the things you've suffered.� But instead of trying to find constructive outlets for it, you let it rule you.� You're smart enough to find rationalizations for why you're allowed to kill people, but it all boils down to the fact that people are objects in your eyes.� Some are precious things, objects you seek to protect or heal based on how much they remind you of yourself.� You have allies, such as Professor Octohedron, but you largely hold them in contempt or keep your relationship strictly business.� You pride yourself on how much of your humanity you've retained because you live in a house and keep pets rather than living in a lair with minions, but the truth is, you have no friends, and what human contacts you make are as superficial as possible.� You put on a new face every few days to have anonymous sex with another stranger, and that's the deepest your interactions with other people might go for months at a time.� And when you have the opportunity to vent your rage � when a person appears who you can justify harming, because they fit the profile of those that threaten or harm people you see yourself in � you take great pleasure in harming them.� Often quite sadistically."

"Because a man who just beat a baby near death deserves a kind death?� Or deserves to be allowed to go home to do the same thing again?� The justice system is a joke; it spends all its time prosecuting innocent or relatively harmless people for being brown or Proxima or foreign, while white Sapiens men whose families have money routinely get away with murder.� Children are taken away from good mothers who don't speak English or who raised their kids to be self-sufficient enough to take care of themselves in an apartment at the age of 10, but two-year-olds are reunited with mothers who burn them with cigarettes and fathers who throw them at walls.� Women are raped and tortured on videotape and juries let their rapists go on the grounds that the slut probably deserved it anyway.� Yeah, I'm filled with rage.� Why aren't you?"�

I shook my head.� "I'm sorry that the last time I tried to play nice and work within the system, I got kidnapped and imprisoned for half a year, so I don't have the luxury of calling the cops down on criminals.� I'm sorry that domestic abusers and rapists work behind closed doors where you superheroes basically never see them;� 80% of all rapes are committed against victims who know the rapist, but 100% of all the rapes stopped by superheroes are stranger rapes, in public, and you can't even get all of them, which means you successfully manage to stop some small fraction of what was only a tiny percentage of all rapes in the first place.� You do nothing against the threats I deal with.� The cops do nothing.� I work in the ER, I see what really threatens people.� And what am I supposed to do about it, fix people up and send them back out to get hurt again?� Turn a blind eye?� Rape victims don't get justice, abuse victims don't get justice, gays and Proximas and prostitutes don't get justice when someone society says is worth more than they are beats the crap out of them."

"So you elect yourself judge, jury and executioner, and strangle people with their own inner organs."

"Mostly I just make their heads cave in and their faces melt off.� Faster, and just as horrifying, so if it's going to have a deterrent effect at all it'll be just as good as something more creative."

"But it has no deterrent effect, because you have no way of publicizing the crimes you executed them for, so as far as anyone knows the victim was murdered horribly by a Proxima serial killer, which does your larger cause of Proxima rights even less good than our �superhero antics', as you put it.� And exactly what good does it do humanity to kidnap a group of college students and subject them to deadly medical experimentation?"

"If you're talking about the werewolves, they were rapists.� They had it coming."

"Perhaps in your mind they did, but if so, why did you gift rapists with super-strength, heightened senses, and sharp teeth and claws?� The surviving victims of your experiments were well situated to become extraordinarily dangerous criminals themselves if we hadn't been able to capture and rehabilitate them."

I shrugged.� "They wouldn't have gotten out if you hadn't broken into the lab, and the plan wasn't to let them go with the werewolf modifications.� I needed Sapiens to test the mutagenic virus on; the only way we're going to survive long-term is by outbreeding the Sapiens, and the actual act of reproduction works much too slowly.� If the virus had worked, I could have turned half the population of the city into werewolves, and then they'd have had much bigger problems than persecuting Proximas."

"And it has never occurred to you that the crimes committed by the strong against the weak, the crimes you avenge, can easily be committed by Proximas as well?� In the world you envision where everyone is a Proxima, how would you go about punishing rapists who are powerful telekinetics?"

"Since they wouldn't be able to predict which of their victims would have even more powerful telekinesis, and since telepaths and psychometrists would be able to detect the crime if they successfully committed it, I'd think there would be a lot of deterrent effects of everyone being a Proxima."

"They could well predict the powers of their victims if they know the victims, given that as you say, eighty percent of such attacks are against one that they know.� Telepaths can erase the evidence by removing memories of an assault they committed, or mind-controlling their victims in the first place.� And Proximas as powerful as Primus simply don't care whether they are caught or not; they know they have impunity, because there are none powerful enough to punish them."� Her voice held a note of bitterness.� Too late, I remembered this was not an academic conversation for Suri, not anymore.� Not that it ever was for me, either, but I'd never been victimized by a Proxima.� Well, unless you counted the time I had sex with Primus, but I'd never told him to stop so it hadn't actually been rape.�

"I'm sorry," I said.� "I know Proximas can harm other Proximas, as well as Sapiens.� I'm not working to achieve a perfect world, just a better one. �And yeah, okay, some of my methods might be questionable and maybe the werewolves weren't the best idea I ever had, but you act like I'm some kind of mustache-twirling wannabe world conqueror, or one of those mad scientist crazies who doesn't care if they make a black hole at the center of the Earth as long as it's for Science.� I kill people because they're going to kill again, or hurt children, or rape people, if I don't.� Or because they're trying to use the law to destroy Proximas.� I don't do it for fun.� If I liked killing people why would I spend so much time trying to save lives?"

"You could spend all of your time saving lives, so why do you waste any of it killing people if you take no enjoyment in it?"

I took a deep breath.� "You don't have the first clue what I do with my time, do you?� You know why SARS and the West Nile virus never got footholds in this country?� Why rates of AIDS are dropping dramatically despite the fact that idiots think the existence of anti-virals means that condoms are totally pass�?� Why we haven't had a flu epidemic despite being overdue for one?� Why people aren't dropping dead of drug-resistant superbugs all over the place despite the antibiotics in the food supply for the past fifty years?� The CDC doesn't have any Proximas with the power to contain pandemics on their staff; they can only chart this stuff, and come up with vaccines, mostly after the fact.� I do it.� I stand pretty much alone against plagues, pandemics and bio-weapons.� You remember that time you went after Dr. Demonic's lab in East Germany and you trashed the place and he gloated that he'd already released the virus into the water supply?� You know why only two people died of that?� Demonic's a lot better at engineering death bugs than that.� Didn't you wonder?"

"You went to East Germany."

"Right!� I don't even speak the freaking language, but I was out there on the ground, inoculating the local townspeople, mutating the bug into a much less harmful version, using mosquitos as vectors to transmit vaccines for the virus, and I healed half a hundred people who got sick anyway, and I only missed two.� Because one of Demonic's henchmen owes me for his kid's muscular dystrophy being cured, and he tips me off when Demonic tinkers with superplagues, and I'm there.� You have no idea how many millions of lives I might have saved from epidemics that didn't happen, do you?"

"Neither do you, Meg, since by definition they didn't happen, so there's no way to know how many would have fallen ill and died."

"Well, it would have been a lot.� Demonic's virus alone was engineered for a 70% kill rate.� You know the Black Death had a 30% kill rate, right?� Imagine what a superbug with a 70% kill rate would do.� How about the anthrax scare from 2001?� Did you know it's not an issue anymore, because common weeds in every big city in the US produce anthrax-eating phages that get into the air and the water supply and eat anthrax spores?� Did you know that when it got on the news that someone had lost a vial of weaponized smallpox, I made a rhinovirus that was tagged with smallpox protein so every person who got the cold I made is now inoculated against the specific strain of smallpox that got lost?� I have probably saved more lives than you ever have, you and your whole team, but I don't get any credit for it.� You don't even know."

"Of course I know," Suri said, her voice infuriatingly calm and patronizing.� "Why do you think you're still free?"

"I�what?"

"You're very powerful, Meg.� And against most people, deadly.� But as you said, your power has no distance component.� You can't break through Ciana's forcefields or Mare's armor.� Jason and Algernon could immobilize you from a distance with cold or gravity.� Raymond could make you feel such guilt that you would immediately surrender yourself.� So could I, or freeze you in place, or make you sleep.� Yet every time we have fought you, we have stopped your plans, freed your victims, destroyed your labs and equipment... and allowed you to escape.� Did you truly think you were so skilled that you were accomplishing that all on your own, when at least six members of the Peace Force could take you down at a range where you couldn't possibly fight back?"

I stared at her.� I'd never thought about it before.� I'd always thought I'd managed to generate enough chaos that between collapsing buildings, burning materials, and the general confusion of battle, no one with the power to stop me in my tracks was paying enough attention to do it before I could blend into the population and vanish.� But of course changing my form would never have stopped Suri from finding me again, not without a convenient radio tower like the one I lived near (and if that worked so well, how had Ciana found me to recruit me for Suri's sake?)

"You've... been letting me go?"

"I don't approve of your methods for fighting for legal protections for Proximas; they can too easily backfire, quite aside from being immoral.� And I very much disapprove of most of your research projects into quickly transforming large numbers of Sapiens into Proximas.� Every time I hear of someone who died in one of the ways you prefer to kill, my heart breaks and the guilt weighs on me, because I am the one who ordered you to be let free, even though I knew you would do it again.� Just as you are horrified at the notion of letting child abusers go home to the children they tortured, I am horrified when I let you go and you use your freedom to kill."� She looked away from me, at the deer.� "I do it regardless.� Because I am aware that you defend humanity from pandemics and bio-weapons."

"How long... have you..."

"The whole time, Meg.� Even when you were with Primus.� I've known all the time."� She looked back up at me.� "I could lock you in a cell with laboratory access, in the basement levels of this building.� I need never tell the government that I have you, and I needn't even cut off your ability to research, entirely.� But I know much of your effectiveness comes from your freedom to mingle with the population, to sense what diseases average people may be carrying and what natural resources may be available to you to stop serious illnesses.� I know also that you save lives in emergency rooms and children's hospitals; you may make the children you save into Proximas without anyone's consent, but if they'd otherwise have died of cancer or car crashes or abuse, what difference does it make?� Certainly better to be a live Proxima than a dead Sapien, no matter what troubles may come of one's power.� So..." She sighed.� "I gave the order to let you escape, no matter what you have done.� Because more will live who would have died, if you are free, than will die who should have lived.� Every killing you commit weighs on my conscience, because I have allowed it."

"Does Ciana know about this?"

"No.� Only what my orders are, not the justification for them.� Mother Bear and Singularity know the whole truth, but Sapphire lives in a world where the line between good and evil is simple and easy to draw.� I choose to give her the luxury of simply following orders, without having to wrestle with her own morality as to whether the orders are right or not."

This upended everything I knew about my relationship with the Peace Force.� It made a frightening amount of sense, though.� Most of their other opponents had entire teams � the World Unity Collective (Primus and his gang), the Proxima Menace, al-Qaeda, the New World Order, Libertad Sudamericano � or hired minions, such as the Circle or Dr. Demonic.� Other solo operators like Octohedron or Optometron had a gadget for every contingency, so there was no one glaring weakness they had that could be exploited.� Despite my buying some equipment from Octohedron or Wilcox or Lamont on occasion, I don't usually do gadgets � I rely on speed, acrobatics and my power to defend myself � and I admit it, my need to touch my targets (or transmit my power through organic material that's touching them, anyway) is a serious weakness.� And I don't do minions, or work in groups.� After Min died, I couldn't even bring myself to bioengineer some guard dogs.� I surround my labs with killer plants, but that's about it.� So really it had never made sense that the Peace Force had never been able to capture me.� I very much disliked the notion that Suri had been letting me go, since it meant my continued freedom was contingent on her continuing to believe the world was better off with me free than captured.� But it didn't seem that there was anything I could do about it.� Unless I infected Suri right now with some sort of disease that would weaken or destroy her powers, and she spread it to the rest of her team... or if I took even more dire steps, such as killing them all directly... there was no way around it.� They could capture me if they wanted to.� They had the power.

So I needed the power to counter them.

I turned away sullenly, letting my mind fill with stupid commercial jingles and themes from kids' shows.� I couldn't pursue this idea with Suri right here in the room.� "Well, I'm so glad that my activities in defending the world from disease meet with your approval," I muttered.� "Go get out of here, Suri, I've got to tend to your baby."

"We'll speak again," she said calmly, and wheeled herself out of the room.� Sometimes I really, really hated that woman.

The next several days were mind-numbingly boring.� I couldn't sleep more than two hours at a time, so most of the time I just stayed up, altering my biochemistry to endure the sleeplessness. I couldn't go out and get laid, and while I did strongly consider the possibility of seducing one of the Peace Force guys, preferably one of the younger ones who hadn't been around when I'd been a member, in the end I decided it was too much like sleeping with other supervillains � don't mix business and pleasure, that's my motto. I prefer to be completely anonymous to the guys I screw; I don't like the idea that they look at me later like they've got one over on me just because they've seen me naked, like they weren't every bit as vulnerable (or actually moreso, given my power) in the act as I was. I'm using them, not the other way around, and if they never see me again, they might even realize it. My hosts gave me all the food I could want, but couldn't seem to find it in their hearts to actually give me entertainment options I'd actually find entertaining. I didn't want to talk to Suri again, not since I'd learned that she'd been letting me go, and the rest of the Peace Force didn't seem to want to talk to me.

So fine. I had a lot of work to do anyway. I spent my efforts on the baby, studying him, tweaking his genetic code in small ways to correct problems that Primus wouldn't have had the skill to notice, evening out his development so the disparate maturity levels of different aspects of his body and brain would start coming together. I developed a picture in my mind of him (visually � with the senses that come with my powers, I already knew what he "looked" like, but that doesn't translate into a visual picture.) I knew that when he came out of the deer's body, he would have blue eyes and light brown skin and the tiniest bit of silky black strands on top of his baby fuzz, and by the time he was several months old the blue eyes would darken to brown but would be a lighter brown than his mother's, more milk chocolate than� the almost black color of her irises. I knew that he would have eyes shaped like Primus', and lips like Suri's, and that when he was done growing his fat baby arms and legs would have elongated into an adult body approximately six feet tall, assuming he didn't use his powers to modify his shape. From reading his genes, I knew he would be smart, and he would be powerful, and he would be breathtakingly handsome as an adult but probably a bit skinny and geeky looking as a child, with limbs that would have a predisposition to overgrow and leave him a little clumsy and coltish. I knew that even if he weren't exposed to spicy food until late in his childhood he'd still probably like it, and that he'd have a high pain tolerance, which would probably lead him into all kinds of outrageous childhood escapades and get him sorely bruised before he grew into his power.

Suri hadn't provided a name for him yet. In my mind, I named him after my dead best friend, the first person to see my potential and try to help me achieve it without trying to take advantage of me the way my father did. David Chandrasekhar. It probably wasn't going to be his name, but at this point I was spending a lot more time with him than Suri was, and maybe she could just call him "the baby" and feel no need for anything more specific, but I'd delivered a lot of babies in my life. This one was special. He needed a name, even if it wasn't going to be his name permanently.

I did take breaks, mostly to visit my cats. Pikachu was settling in comfortably, and had grown very fond of Alannah, which made me extremely jealous. Angelkitty was still angry at the entire universe for bringing her here away from her home, and was spending her time in angry swoops and divebombs. Of course she never actually managed to divebomb Alannah's head � it was impossible to see Alannah's power at work, but I could see Alannah doing things like dodging out of the way of a power dive at just the last possible moment, before Angelkitty could change course, over and over, always perfectly, and knowing her power I knew now that she was probably jumping back in time, using her knowledge of the divebomb that actually hit her to avoid being divebombed in the new timeline. As I lacked any such power, I got a headful of Angelkitty claws, more than once.

This gave me an idea. In part because I was curious, in part because I didn't have my lab with me and couldn't do my more sophisticated analyses, in part because I was bored senseless, and in part because I wanted my cat to stop attacking my head, I experimented with incorporating Alannah's power into myself. It was much more difficult to do than it had been with Lifeliner. His power over life force had several points of similarity with my own; Alannah's was completely alien to me, so much so that it took me a few hours of effort just to figure out what parts of her genetic code were for her power. Several times I thought I had it integrated, only to find that it just wouldn't work. The possibility that I might have to do a brain hack on myself to make the power work was discouraging, since it's my policy never to hack my own brain � no one has the ability to fix any mistakes I might make if I accidentally disable myself messing with my own neural tissue. I gave up in frustration after a while, letting the mRNA stick around in my system since I didn't see how it was doing much of anything, but giving up any active attempt to make the power work.

And then, after correcting the doe and David's mutual biochemical warfare once again, I half-fell asleep, leaning up against the deer's body. And I kept sensing that they were wildly out of balance, without any warning as to how they got there, and I would correct it, and drift off again, and find them wildly imbalanced again and correct that, and it was starting to feel as if I were trapped in some sort of horrifying Groundhog Day time loop of fixing problems with the pregnancy. Like one of those dreams where you keep thinking you're awake, and you can't actually make yourself wake up, because every time you wake up you're really just dreaming you're awake.

Then the thought came to me that a Groundhog Day time loop was exactly what Alannah's power was supposed to be. I came fully awake with a shock of adrenaline, and focused my mind, deliberately trying to imagine myself back there at the moment when I was correcting the imbalance � and I found myself there, no longer sitting up straight as I'd been when I just woke up, but leaning up against the deer with my hands pressed against her body, my power already active inside her.

I corrected the imbalanced hormones, again, and purged the mRNA. I still had Alannah's original DNA sample, stored as a tiny benign tumor in my breast tissue; now that I knew how to do it, I could give myself a temporary copy of her power at any time, but damned if I was going to keep it when I didn't need it. My dreaming mind had apparently figured out how to activate the power, and then kept doing it over and over without my volition. That was a nightmare scenario I never wanted to live through again. Even though I was curious about many things � among other things, my power mitochondria have a much higher output than Alannah's, and I wondered if I would have the ability to jump further back in time than she did, and if I could jump back further than my temporary acquisition of the power, and what would happen if I did and then I never took the DNA from Alannah, would that create a paradox? It was all very fascinating and also in the category of things Meg Was Not Meant To Know, along with what would happen if I attempted to modify my own DNA or my own brain. I don't do experiments without a clear exit strategy, and I wasn't about to start messing with time willy-nilly; I wasn't a physicist, and most of what I knew about time travel came from watching Star Trek, not likely the most accurate of resources.

In the end, Angelkitty calmed down and responded to Alannah's multiple offerings of raw fresh fish. I still felt insanely jealous when I saw my cats sitting on Alannah's lap or curled up next to her on the ratty old couch in the room the Peace Force had made available for my cats. They were my cats. They weren't supposed to like my enemies. I had actually been happier with Angelkitty's infuriated attacks on my head; if she was angry at me, that meant she didn't like it here, and that meant she wanted to go home with me and be my kitty again. Of course I knew this was ridiculous, that I couldn't take my cats home until David was born, and I should be happy that my cats were getting along with their caretaker, but what can I say? I never pretended to be a nice, rational person; if I weren't a jealous bitch, maybe I wouldn't be a supervillain either.

I stopped going to check on my cats, since the urge to kill Alannah because they liked her and were ignoring me was getting worse every time I checked up on them, and spent all my time with the growing baby. The work I was doing was getting more complicated as David burned through more of the deer's resources. The doe's legs were gone entirely now, and her entire gastrointestinal system, and all of her body fat. I was going to have to start breaking down the muscles of her neck and back soon, maybe pull in and reabsorb most of the layers of skin. I was pretty sure that David wouldn't end up needing to consume an entire deer to grow, given the difference between the mass of a deer and the mass of even a three-month-old baby, but he was using quite a bit of her up.

And then he started fighting me.

There are all sorts of urban legends of unborn Proximas manifesting in response to a threat to their mother (or to themselves... horror stories circulate of women who went to get an abortion because the amniotic fluid test came up positive for catalysine, and the child manifested and killed the abortion provider or something like that. This always happened to a friend of a friend, or perhaps the person telling me about it heard it on the news. I've never tracked down any actual documented instances of this occurring.) I'd long thought them to be bullshit. An unborn fetus hasn't got much brainpower; even David, who had close to the full brain development of a neonate by this point, was still pretty damn dumb. No one wants to acknowledge how incredibly stupid babies are, but they kind of are.

But David was manifesting, his catalysine spiking, and he was using his power to fight mine, to push me away from the deer that was his host mother. I could sense that his own adrenaline was high, and that he was getting stress chemicals from the dying deer through the placental membrane. Unbelievably, he was somehow sensing that my power was killing his deer-mother, picking up on the stress hormones that circulated through her body as I broke her down bit by bit (she wasn't conscious, even as conscious as a deer ever gets, nor was she able to feel pain, but plenty of her systems were failing and signaling her brain about the problem, and apparently my shutting down her pain response hadn't entirely prevented her body from responding with stress.) Of course, being approximately as smart as a garter snake, David had no way to know that my power was feeding him, that he was killing his host mother � my guess was that some dim but fully formed subsystem in his lower brain was sensing a threat to his host, and spiking his catalysine in response, which was conveniently allowing him to access a power that could actually do something about it. He couldn't have healed the deer; had she been hit by a car while he was inside her, the spike in his catalysine would have done him no good whatsoever, but he was fighting my power the way Primus' body fought my power.

The difference was that Primus was a two thousand year old adult and David was a fetus. Even a fetus with the brain development of a newborn baby is no match for an adult. I shut his catalysine production down, forced the brain regions that controlled his power to go dark temporarily, and then purged the deer of stress chemicals and pumped her full of endorphins to fool the baby into thinking his host mother was deliriously happy. Then I let the power control regions of his brain come back on line, but with no catalysine production they would remain dormant until puberty, as they were supposed to.

This incident stunned me. I had never believed in any of those stories of fetal manifestations; human fetuses simply didn't have the brains yet to work their powers, let alone enough of a connection to the mother to actually sense a threat to her. David's attempt to fight my power made me rethink everything I had thought about the timeline of powers development. This would be an exciting area of research; if I could get my hands on some pregnant women with Proxima fetuses growing inside them (or pregnant women with Sapiens fetuses that I could reconstruct quickly into Proximas), I could put the mothers under stress and test the fetuses for power development. I'd have to put some thought into how to do it; the experimental concept was completely unethical, which didn't bother me, but the idea of holding innocent pregnant women and exposing them to stressors that they believed to be life-threatening did, in fact, bother me. So I'd have to find some way to get hold of a cadre of pregnant women who weren't innocent. Turning men into women and impregnating them was a possibility, but it introduced too many variables; I would never be certain that I hadn't missed something significant in the transformation from male to female. Hmm. Women who had murdered other pregnant women to steal their fetuses was a definite possibility, especially since I could trick the targets into voluntarily surrendering themselves to me by promising them actual pregnancies, but the trick would be getting enough of them out of jail to form a decent experimental sample...

I tabled the concept. There were enough other scientific challenges in front of me at the very minute, and if I did too much thinking about how I could do something as blatantly illegal as freeing murderers from prison, impregnating them with Proxima zygotes, holding them captive long enough for the zygotes to become fetuses and then exposing them to terrifying stress tests to see if their fetuses would manifest, Suri was likely to pick up on it and stop me. As long as I was here, and unable to do anything about shielding myself from her power, I didn't dare think much about anything Suri would disapprove of, including my half-formed plans for ways I might be able to shield myself from her power.

So instead I thought about the baby.

He wasn't a fetus anymore in my mind, even though he hadn't actually been born yet; we were still working on surfactants for his lungs that would allow him to breathe properly. He was a full-fledged baby, and it didn't matter that I hadn't seen him yet with my eyes; I had seen him again and again with my power, so often that I could picture him in my mind. I had felt him take action, had felt him try feebly to protect his host mother, like a two year old trying to stand between an unconscious mother and the man who'd knocked her out. He wasn't just a lump of protoplasm anymore; he obviously had feelings, and a will of his own, even if he didn't have much of a directed consciousness yet. His attempt to push my power away had been as real an action as any baby's grabbing at my finger... moreso, actually, because the finger-grab is an instinct, hard-wired into the human brain. Whereas for obvious reasons humans aren't hard-wired by evolution to use superpowers.

Suri came to visit him about once a day, get an update on his progress, and let me check her over. She was improving steadily; Dan had her on a number of injectable vitamin supplements, and I helped her body absorb the supplements and replenish its depleted resources. Slowly, color was starting to return to her skin, browns and reds replacing the dull grayish tone she'd had before. Her hair still looked like shit; I recommended to her that she cut it all off, so that new healthy hair could grow back in without the burden of all that dull, depleted stuff stuck on the end of it. She told me she'd take it under consideration.

I did get the distinct impression that Suri was making herself show an interest in the baby. That wasn't exactly right � it wasn't that she wasn't interested. She would ask me all the right questions, and she would put her hands against the swell in the doe's belly to feel David kick, and she sang to him sometimes. And for all I knew she was in constant telepathic contact with him. But assuming that she wasn't... it was a little odd that she only came to visit the baby that she'd risked so much for once a day.

I suspected I knew what was going on. Suri wasn't superhuman. Well, okay, she was a telepath, so yes, by definition she was superhuman, but like every other Proxima she had the same emotions, the same kinds of thoughts, as any human being. She had an enormously powerful sense of ethics, and was driven almost entirely by a sense of what the "right" thing to do would be, by her own lights. Suri would never be jealous of the people taking care of her cats for her, would never be gratuitously bitchy to people she had unfairly wronged in the past just because she was irritated. But she couldn't be perfect. And no matter what she thought about whether David deserved to live or not, it had to mean something to her that Primus had raped her to create him, that half his DNA belonged to the man who had brutalized her.

Suri wasn't about to show me if she felt horror or grief or rage over what Primus had done to her; knowing her, I wasn't sure she'd have shown her feelings to the Peace Force. I'd stolen her boyfriend after I was done with Jason, seducing a man approximately three times my age who'd been Suri's lover before he was mine, and the only thing she'd ever said to me about it was that Isak and I were probably too different to make it last, but she wished us happiness. She'd said nothing about how she felt about slowly succumbing to multiple sclerosis, she'd shown no fear when she'd first recruited me and I'd threatened to kill her just so she'd stop telling me that I had the potential to be a good person, she hadn't reacted more than to thank me, calmly and cordially, for healing her and making her youthful again. But I knew, from the chemicals I could feel circulating in her bloodstream when I touched her, that Suri felt when such things happened to her. She wasn't nearly as detached and calmly accepting as she pretended to be. And I knew that what Primus had done to her must have done some kind of emotional damage, even if she was never going to voluntarily show it to me.

She was trying to do the right thing by her son, as she saw it. She had called on me, a person she saw as an amoral, broken and monstrous creature, her greatest failure as a mentor, to save her baby; she expressed the necessary interest in the baby now that he was not inside her body any longer. I was sure she'd pretend to be a doting mother when he was born. But I suspected that even the almost inhumanly controlled Suryabati Chandrasehkar couldn't make herself love the product of Primus' rape of her. Or if she could bring herself to love him, she still couldn't bring herself to bear the reminder that he was for very long at a time.

Whereas I didn't have any such mixed emotions. When he'd still been inside Suri, killing her, I had wanted to destroy him because it was the easiest thing to do, a solution to Suri's illness and a blow to whatever Primus' plans might have been. I'd forgiven Primus a lot since he'd been the one who'd ordered me to be rescued from Sonnebend, but he'd gone much too far this time, and I felt pretty unconflicted about wanting to thwart whatever he'd intended by impregnating Suri. When I'd discovered the baby's power, I'd felt a chill, because I knew how dangerous I was and a person having my power at a distance was a threat. But now that I had spent a week or so in working with the baby, trying to preserve his life and health, I'd come to see him the way I saw every other baby I had healed.

Babies were precious. I loved them � enough that I'd never have one of my own, because I wouldn't inflict the genes of my child molesting father and my cold bitchy mother on a child... let alone the genes of the violent, amoral killer with a terrible temper that I was. Yeah, nothing Suri had said to me about myself was actually news. I knew I wasn't a good person and that I probably couldn't be trusted long-term around a child; hell, when I wanted to kill the woman I'd asked to take care of my cats because my cats actually liked her, how could I possibly handle sending a child of mine to school, or seeing them grow up and fall in love? People who hurt children are the lowest of the low, in my opinion, and I wasn't going to take the risk of becoming one by having a child myself. This didn't change the fact that I loved babies, and I would have happily opened a practice doing nothing but saving babies and children if we lived in a world where I could get away with publicly admitting to my powers. Most of the work I did in emergency rooms were in the children's ER, both because children could be transformed into Proximas with full control of their powers and no ill effects on their brain, and because saving children's lives was what I really wanted to do with my time.

But the kids I saw in the ER, or kids who I was healing in order to have something over on their parents, like Mindy Lightman... I saw them for short periods of time. I made them feel good, and then I healed their bodies, and if they were old enough to have any comprehension of what was going on they usually loved me for it, with the brief uncomplicated love that children can feel suddenly toward anyone who's nice to them. I didn't stay with them hour after hour, day after day. I didn't obsess over them. The longest I spent working on any single child before this had been the baby I'd brought back from the dead, and that had been a few hours. I was spending far more time with this baby than I had with any other patient, ever � I'd been with some of my experimental subjects longer, of course, but they were expendable and I never thought of them otherwise. David was no longer expendable, to me.

In the end, it was almost a full two weeks before David was ready to be born.

I hadn't gone without sleep the whole time, but I hadn't had longer than three hours at any point, and a dozen micro-naps can't do for your brain what one full night's sleep can. I could ameliorate a lot of the symptoms of exhaustion, but human brains need to go offline to do various important tasks related to memory, emotional state management, and judgement, and I couldn't just do these things for myself with my power because when your brain is screwed up with lack of sleep, the last thing you want to do is use your powers to mess with your brain. So I was a mess � irritable, jumping out of my skin, prone to wild mood swings (I managed not to break down crying in front of the Peace Force at any point, but that was because I could use my powers to control whether or not I started having the physiological reactions involved in crying, not because I didn't feel like bawling my eyes out for no particularly good reason.) I could no longer concentrate on anything; my mind felt like it was packed with cotton balls. Fortunately there was no longer anything I needed to concentrate on; I didn't need to keep the deer alive or her pregnancy going if I was going to remove David.

Several of the Peace Force attended the birth. Daniel was on hand to take care of the baby after I'd delivered him, because by this point everyone could tell I was in no shape to do it any more. Suri, of course, was there. So was Sapphire and Mother Bear, and my three volunteers to nurse the baby. None of the others bothered to show up. I didn't think they liked the baby much, for the same reason I hadn't when I'd first gotten here � he represented what Primus had done to their mentor.

It was very anticlimactic. I split the deer's belly open, including the amniotic sac, reached in and removed a small bundle of goo-covered infant, severing the umbilical cord as I did so. Daniel took David from me to do his Apgar tests and clean him up, and I stopped the deer's heart. "Anyone for venison?" I asked, probably tastelessly but at this point I was wired, punchy and could probably have gotten a lot more inappropriate if Daniel hadn't come back with the baby. Of course, he gave the baby to Suri first, which gave me the thoroughly inappropriate desire to punch him in the face. Hadn't I worked my ass off for nearly two weeks, drained myself dry, made myself half-crazy with sleep deprivation for the sake of that baby? Why did the woman who could barely bring herself to visit him on a daily basis get to see him first?

Oh, yeah, because she was his mother. "Thank you, Daniel," Suri said, quietly. "And thank you, Meg, more than I can ever express.� Would you like to hold him?"

I didn't even answer that, just took him from her. David hadn't cried when I'd delivered him; he'd just screwed up his little face in annoyance. Now, clean and wrapped in a diaper and soft receiving blanket, he was looking around himself in apparent fascination. I've delivered lots of babies; none of them had ever been so clearly able to look around themselves. Or hold their heads up, which David was doing. He was an adorable, fat-cheeked cherub the color of coffee with a little creamer, with the blue eyes and tiny bit of black hair that I'd expected to see. I'd been picturing him for two weeks, and yet somehow it had never fully sunk in that this would be a baby at nearly the three month mark for development, not a neonate. David was more alert, stronger, and had better control of his own vision than any baby I'd ever delivered, for the obvious reason that no baby I'd ever delivered had had twelve months to develop.

"He's so beautiful," I said, which is probably the most clich�d thing you can ever say about a baby, but at that moment I meant it. He was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen � not objectively, but at that moment, I felt it to be true. I wanted to cry, I was so overwhelmed with relief and joy and protective tenderness toward the baby, and I hugged him to myself, pressing my own cheek to his smooth baby skin.

"You need to get some sleep, Meg," Dan said to me. "You're completely wasted."

I glared at him. "What, are you afraid I'm so tired I'll hurt the baby? I would never hurt this baby. Look at him. Isn't he the sweetest thing ever? Look how alert he is."

"I'm not afraid you'll hurt the baby, I'm afraid you'll fall over from exhaustion," Dan said dryly. "I don't even know how you've managed to stay awake for two weeks, but you need to sleep."

"I got some sleep already," I protested. "I had a nap just yesterday. Two whole hours."

"May I have him back now, Meg?" Suri asked.

I wanted to say no, but she was his mother. With bad grace I handed him back to Suri. "I'm going to have to check on him frequently, to make sure his rapid development curve has finally flattened out. We can't have him aging faster than a normal child. And I have to make sure the breast milk I made for everyone to lactate is actually doing the job right and he's getting the right nutrition. And I have to monitor his brain so he doesn't spike his catalysine and start prematurely manifesting his powers."

"Of course," Suri said. "After you've rested, I would be happy to have you check up on the baby. But right now, Daniel is right. You need some sleep, Meg. You deserve it, after all you've done."

I did deserve it, didn't I? I'd worked hard. I deserved to get some rest. Swaying on my feet, I let Dr. Jansen lead me somewhere; I hadn't much of a clue where except there was a bed in it. I fell on the bed in my clothes � which I'd been wearing non-stop for two weeks, and while I can absorb any sort of organic dirt such as food stains or deer blood or my own body odor, I felt that sleeping in clean sheets with them on was wrong. I was too tired to absorb them or transform them into pajamas, so I just stripped to my underpants and crawled into the sheets.