For disclaimers, please see Chapter 1.
Author's Notes:
Sigh. Still no MutantX muse. Sigh.
Sigh.
"Adam?" Cynthia said into the dark room, before flipping on the light.
Adam stirred, his eyes opening and blinking them at the sudden harsh light. "What is it?"
"Something's happened."
"What is it?"
"Just get dressed. You're needed at Sanctuary."
"…martial law has been declared…"
Click.
"…electromagnetic pulse in a remote area…"
Click.
"…the President has vowed to punish those responsible…"
Click.
"...the attempted terrorist bombing is sending shockwaves throughout…"
Click.
Shalimar put the remote down on the table after switching off the television. "It's on every channel."
"It's big news – it's what we've been told to fear." Emma glanced at her watch. "And it's only been
20 minutes since it happened."
"Call me paranoid, but isn't it odd the White House had a statement so soon? Only minutes after it happened? That seems a little prepared in advance to me. Like Homeland Security has just been waiting for an opportunity like this…"
Shal broke off when she noticed Emma rubbing her temples.
"Headache still bothering you, Em?" Shalimar asked.
Emma grimaced. "Yeah. It's getting worse." She reached for the bottle of aspirin on the table in front of her, but the bottle slid over into her hand before she had reached very far.
"Em, I didn't say anything earlier when you moved Jesse and I across the room, but now I have to ask. How long have you been able to do this? Is this new, or something else you've been hiding?"
Emma shook her head after taking another two aspirin, swallowing them along with a sip of water. She set the glass back on the table. "It was a week or two before Brennan fried the warehouse. It was little things at first – I wasn't even sure it was happening. I'd reach for my shampoo in the shower and it just felt a little closer than it should have been – I wasn't reaching all the way to get it. It was getting strong enough to actually show you guys when Brennan had his overload, and our world got turned upside down."
"Now that you mention it, I remember you complaining about them for a while. That was your complaint about Brennan and Jesse at one time, that they were giving you a headache. Remember the cereal incident?"
Jesse walked into the room and drew their attention. "I can trace Brennan's comm signal at all. I have to go look for him."
"Maybe it was a terrorist act, Jess. Maybe it wasn't him."
Jesse shook his head. "We both know how unlikely that is. Em? Can you sense him? Can you tell me if he's still alive?"
Emma shook her head. "He'd be way out of my range, even if I didn't have this headache."
Jesse noticed the aspirin on the table. "That's," he glanced as the bottle, "not helping?"
Shal answered for her. "No… I think this has to do with her mutation. The shield, the whole moving objects with her mind thing…"
"Telekinesis," Jesse supplied.
"Whatever. I think she's having trouble adjusting to her mutation."
"Hello, I'm right here," Emma said.
"Is that true, Em?"
"I don't know, but I'm worried. Adam's not here to see what's happening with my genetic code. We all know the risks that come with another mutation – at some point, it'll be too much, and we'll die."
"Brennan," Jesse whispered, pain evident in his voice. "We have to find him."
"I wish I could help, Jess, but I can barely concentrate."
"I can't lose Brennan, if it's not already too late. And you are my best hope – the area that EMP covered is huge – we can't search for him on foot – it'll take too long to find him. I need you."
"Jesse, you know I would help if I could, but I just can't."
Jesse rubbed his hands across his face. "There's got to be a way. Do you really think you're mutation is causing the pain?"
"I don't know, Jess. And without Adam here, there's no way to know."
"He'll be here in a few hours."
"What?" Shalimar asked.
"I called Cynthia. She said she'd send Adam, but it will take him a few hours to get here."
"You called that old woman who tried to kill us?" Shalimar raged.
"It's more complicated than that, Shal. She's my grandmother," Jesse explained.
"What? Holy fuck, I can't take much more of this. My head is going to explode." Shalimar leaned back into her chair. "Your grandmother? Your grandmother tried to kill us?"
"I don't think she was trying to kill us."
"So those balls of energy were for what? Massage therapy?"
"Shal – drop it. I need to focus on Brennan." Jesse turned back to Emma. "Please, Emma. I need you. It'll take hours for Adam to get here – and then whatever time it takes to examine you and try to find a cure. It took weeks to come up with the right medication the last time this happened. If Brennan is hurt, he might not even have a few hours."
Emma nodded, and closed her eyes, her fingers still rubbing her temples. A moment later she cried out.
"I'm sorry, Jess. I can't."
"I can't wait. Maybe I can fix you."
"Fix her! Fix what? What do you know about genetics, Jesse?" Shalimar demanded.
"More than most genetic scientists, Shal. I've worked with Adam for years."
"That doesn't mean you're qualified to do this. And if you can, why don't you take Emma to the lab and do it normally?"
"Because that would take weeks, even for Adam. And I know that Adam is better at genetics than I am, at least in the traditional way. But think about my powers, Shal. I affect matter, down to the smallest particles, particles that make up DNA. We don't have weeks. We need to find Brennan now."
Emma groaned, their arguing just increasing her pain. "Jesse? Even if you could stop the headaches, I still wouldn't have the range."
"So we'll get you closer. We'll take the Helix and when we get close, you could sense him."
"It's too much of a risk, Jesse. You can't just muck around in her DNA," Shalimar ordered.
"And I can't let Brennan die, if he hasn't already." Jesse voice broke as he said it.
"Do it," Emma whispered.
"What?" both Shalimar and Jesse asked.
"I said 'do it'."
"Absolutely not!" the feral roared.
"Look," Emma said quietly, "if we were in a battle against the GSA, we'd risk our lives for each other without a second thought. This isn't any different. And…" she continued, cutting off Shalimar who opened her mouth to speak, "…I trust Jesse. He's walked us through walls. That's far more invasive than what we're talking about."
"But…"
"No buts, Shal." Emma turned and looked at Jesse. "I trust you, Jesse. Do it."
Jesse took a deep breath, pondering the level of faith Emma had in him and hoped he could live up to it. He stood up and formed a syringe in his hand. She looked at him questioningly. "It's just a mild sedative, just to keep you still. I'll remove it when I'm done. No side effects, I promise."
"None besides him changing your DNA!" Shalimar groused.
Jesse injected Emma, and she slumped in her chair.
"Shal, please – it'll be okay."
Jesse sat down opposite Emma and then closed his eyes so that he could concentrate more easily.
He could hear Shalimar protesting, demanding that he leave Emma alone, but he couldn't. This could help her as well as Brennan.
Jesse reached out; embracing his new abilities to the fullest extent he could and found a matter field that told him everything he needed to know about the objects around him, like finding the sheet music for the universe. He realized that the matter field had always been the way he had interacted with matter, he had just never noticed it before. When he changed matter, he played the music differently, so to speak.
The matter around him vibrated softly around him, a low hum of harmony of objects in balance – but with two discordant notes. Jesse concentrated on the larger cacophony, and recognized the structure as Emma. The strands of her hair, the softness of her skin, the weight of her muscles – on the surface they appeared normal, but the whine of imbalance came from something deeper. The other note must be Shal, but right now, he need to concentrate on Emma.
He looked deeper and as he suspected, her DNA trembled, its vibration wrong and glaring – screeching out into the rest of her body and causing pain.
This has happened before.
Jesse remembered the retro-viruses that Adam had injected them with previously attempting to slow their genetic mutation. Adam had hoped to find a splice of genetic material that would stabilize them, but without success so far.
Jesse focused on the DNA in a single cell, feeling along its length for gaps or areas that felt unstable. He combed through the various chromosomes, noting the harmony of each one. He quickly discarded those that felt stable, and isolated the source of the trembling structure - a single chromosome.
He felt along the double helix and realized the problem. The hydrogen bonds holding the nucleotides together were weakening, and some bonds had failed altogether.
Without treatment, Emma would die. It was just a matter of time.
Jesse repaired the first bond only to find it immediately broke again. He repaired it a second time and watched it closely for the stress pulling it apart as it snapped, and realized it came from another nucleotide segment – essentially another gene. Frowning, Jesse realized that the gene had only recently become active.
Emma's mutation had caused this one gene to turn on, but also tear apart other pieces of her genetic code.
Jesse examined the gene more closely, and found that unlike most of the code around it, it had the normal hum of every day matter - stable matter. Like tracing the individual threads of a spider's web, Jesse mapped out the areas of stability and instability until he found it – the keystone, the piece that should hold it all together.
This is what Adam has been looking for all these years.
The keystone, or in this case, a single base-pair had the wrong structure. At that spot on the strand, it should have been an Adenine-Thymine pair, and instead it was a Cytosine-Guanine pair. When Adam had written the RNA and fused it with their DNA, rewriting their own codes, he had made a mistake.
In software, you'd call it a bug. In DNA, you'd call it a death sentence.
As the stress from that flaw and moved along the strand, some previously dormant genes had been activated, and others went dormant. Jesse realized that the newly active ones explained her growing powers, and the dormant ones… god only knew what would happen from that long term.
Jesse switched the pair, CG to AT, and the strand seemed to shudder, and then bonds began snapping back together, like an unraveled rope suddenly re-braiding itself. Jesse watched as the dormant genes turned back on, as well as a few other genes burst to life.
Within moments the strand snapped together, finally whole and unstressed. Jesse noted that the discordant note in the matter field had disappeared – at least for that cell.
Now knowing the problem, he worked at a larger level, willing the change to occur in all of Emma's cells, as easy as creating a wall out of thin air. He didn't need to concentrate now that he knew the music.
Finished, he dissolved the sedative and then opened his eyes.
Shalimar stroked Emma's hair and she began to stir. "You better hope she's okay," she said to Jesse.
"Actually, Shal, I think she'll be better than ever." At Shal's questioning look, he continued. "I found what Adam has been searching for. I've stabilized her mutation. She won't go through this again."
"Are you sure?" Shalimar asked skeptically. "How do you know?"
"I can just feel it, Shal. Just trust me. She's gonna be fine."
Emma opened her eyes just then and blinked a few times. Shal stroked her hair again. "You okay?"
Emma that about it for a moment, and then smiled. "No more headache."
"Told you so, Shal," Jesse beamed.
"Hey, my headache may be gone, but it doesn't mean I want you two to start arguing again."
Jesse smiled. "Do you think you can try to find Brennan? Just see if you can feel him?" Jesse pleaded.
"Something happened, didn't it? I can feel your excitement. Mind if I catch up?"
Jesse nodded and felt the incident replayed in his head at warp speed for Emma's benefit as she absorbed it.
"Stable? Really?" she asked.
Jesse nodded.
"Can you do this for Brennan? Shal? All the mutants?"
"Maybe. I'll certainly try."
Emma stood up easily. "Then let's see what I can do." She closed her eyes and extended her senses, and how quickly they responded surprised her. She sent them flying forward and realized she had already gone beyond her normal range. She opened her eyes to give them an update and Shalimar gasped.
"What?"
"Your eyes. They're glowing."
Emma glanced over at the mirror and saw that her eyes shimmered with white light. Somehow, it felt right, and she extended her power further, and saw the white light begin to seep from her skin. Meanwhile, her mind covered dozens of square miles.
"Jess, my range has definitely increased – I'm not sure how much yet. I'm still going – but let's get to the Helix. If Brennan is still alive, I can find him."
03/06/2006
More Author's Notes:
Genetic engineering is pretty much a mystery to me. I have no idea if what I wrote makes any sense… just go with it... "suspension of disbelief" and all that.
Also, sorry, this chapter is pretty heavy-handed. The concept of Jesse fixing their mutations was supposed to develop gradually, but considering I'm muse-less, I'm just trying to hang onto the plotline right now.
Feedback is appreciated - maybe you'll help me find my story muse again.