“Gravita!” Kiara’s voice made me snap my attention back to the skyscraper behind me, and as I turned to look, I saw it had begun to lean away from the river, wobbling as it pivoted toward the other skyscrapers in the immediate vicinity.
Fighting against the urge to vomit, and still unable to breathe, I pulled myself into the air on an arc that sent me over the river and toward the tower. With a pull at the end of my arc to slow my fall, I tumbled to the ground in the snowed-over plaza between the tower and the river. Even as the building built up dangerous momentum pitching away from me, I held up my hands and closed my eyes, the better to focus. I gasped, forcing my lungs to take in air as the incredible momentum of all the mass falling away from me overwhelmed my grav-sense. My mind cast back to my experience with the snow in Wisconsin, but this wouldn’t be quite the same. I couldn’t just focus on the signature from one type of matter. No, for this, I would have to make a field over a thousand feet high, and a few hundred feet wide and long. There was nothing else for it—either I could do this, or I couldn’t. The tower had both a hotel and hundreds of condominiums. If it came down, the death toll would be—I couldn’t think on it. This would work. It had to.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding as I warped the spacetime around and throughout the tower, inverting it from pulling down and instead pulling it up. I opened my eyes as the gravity around me dropped to zero. With having to spread a field over such a wide area, I couldn’t make the field end abruptly, as I usually preferred. Instead, the field dropped off gradually as it moved away from the building until, at around fifty feet from the structure, the curve of spacetime returned to normal.
The salt from the nearby sidewalk trembled in the modified gravity before floating into the air around me. I tried my best to ignore it, keeping my eyes trained on the tower instead. At first, I was convinced it was too late—the tower was falling too fast. But, as I watched, its trajectory lessened until only seconds later, it hung still in the air at an impossible angle. And then, incredibly, the tower began to swing back up to right itself.
I took in a ragged breath at a horrendous shriek that filled the air. In disbelief, I watched the base of the tower shred apart, leaving the rest of the building free to rise into the air.
“No!” I shouted.
With a shove of power, I pushed myself up to follow the skyscraper, and within seconds, I had cleared the top of the tower. Looking down, I watched as the behemoth structure continued to accelerate as it rose higher into the sky, my concentration so set on maintaining the field around the building that I could barely think through what to do next.
“Gravita,” another urgent voice spoke in my ear. “Do you have a plan here?”
“Working through one!” I pivoted in the air as my thoughts slammed into overdrive and I frantically searched for a place I could set down the tower where it wouldn’t cause any more damage than necessary.
Kiara sounded amused, despite the magnitude of the situation, as she spoke over the radio. “Well, if you’re open to suggestions, I have an idea.”
I nodded, then realized there wasn’t anyone who could see me, as she finished explaining her plan. “Is everyone okay, though, if I’m gone for that long?”
“Is she serious right now?!” a new voice nearly shouted over the radio.
“Just go!” Kiara said. “We have most of this under control at this point, and more arbiters are arriving every minute. You’re the best one to handle that building.”
“Right.” I grimaced, too stressed to think too long about how dumb I just sounded. Embarrassment could come after lives weren’t on the line.
By the time I changed the trajectory of the field around the tower, it had risen a thousand feet into the air, still hanging at an impossible forty-five-degree angle. With a twist of my wrist, I flattened out the field around the building to kill its acceleration upward, even as I contorted the field to pull the behemoth structure lightly to the east, out toward Lake Michigan. Because I had only cancelled out the upward acceleration and the building was already moving upwards, it continued to rise, even with the new forces acting on it.
I swung around to float underneath the tower as it began to inch its way along the path of the Chicago River. Luckily, by following the river, I wouldn’t have to concern myself with avoiding most of the skyscrapers between the lake and me. Instead, I concentrated on keeping the entire field around the building even. I tried to ignore the feeling of sweat percolating between my back and suit, my eyes fixed on the metal and concrete structure and the path it would need to follow ahead.
I made minor adjustments to the field as the tower crept along its path out to the lake. As I neared Michigan Avenue, I was relieved to see the police had already cleared traffic from the bridge over the river. From the building, there was a growing trail of debris coming from the shattered bottom floors of the structure, where large portions of steel and concrete had broken away to float serenely in my modified field. From smallest differences in the field, those free-floating chunks were slowly fanning out behind the building, and the further away they moved, the less my field held sway. Finally, at a critical point a few dozen feet from the building, the debris slipped back into the earth’s influence and tumbled down to the river below.
I started to slow the building’s momentum even before it had cleared the last skyscrapers. By the time we were over Lake Shore Avenue and the Lakefront, we were inching through the air again.
Below me, four hundred yards to the south, was my impromptu landing field—the Lakefront trail just south of the Lakeshore Avenue Bridge. I was grateful to see someone had let the police know my intentions. Even as I held out a hand to spin the tower around a hundred and eighty degrees to orient it south instead of north, I could see a police crew working frantically to clear the area.
A minute later, once I had received confirmation from the crew that the path was clear, I moved the skyscraper into position and began to ease up the field around it. As the behemoth wall of glass descended toward the ground, I noticed the line of trees along the pathway that would prevent the building from resting evenly on its side.
With a wave of my hand, I conjured a bubble of rippling spacetime that washed over the trees along the quarter-mile walkway, which snapped them at their trunks and sent them toppling to the ground. It was far from a perfect solution, but it would do.
When the base of the building was only a dozen feet from the ground, I slowed its descent so it was only inching along again. I winced as the tower pushed into the ground, leaving the top that was still in the air to swing down the remaining thousand feet to rest along the frostbitten ground immediately adjacent to the frigid lake.
I touched down onto the asphalt of Lakeshore Avenue, which ran parallel to the now-resting skyscraper, and made sure I was on the eastern side of the line of cars stopped behind the police barricade to the bridge. I lowered my hands and slowly let the field around the tower dissipate back into the normal fabric of spacetime. From the time I had first made the field until then, I knew anyone inside the structure would have been experiencing, for the most part, the weightlessness of microgravity. Knowing that, I wanted to give everything in the building time to gradually settle to an orientation perpendicular to its original position.
After using my power over such a large area without any breaks, and with training so much of my concentration on absolute control, I was prepared for the sledgehammer of pain that crashed into my head the moment I stopped accessing my power. Still, I found it hard to stay on my feet at the crippling pain. I took a steadying breath and the pain eased, if only slightly.
“Well, the President may want to take back that medal after this.” I took another deep breath as I broadcast over the radio. “But Trump Tower’s tucked away, safe and sound.”
“Good.” I could hear the relief in Kiara’s voice. “We’ve just wrapped up the fighting here, so take whatever time you need to rest up before heading back.”
“Alri
ght,” I agreed. “I’m gonna spend some time helping out evacuating the tower. Something tells me they’ll need help with this cleanup.”
“Sounds good,” Kiara said. The HUD in my visor blinked yellow, indicating I was now on a private, encrypted channel with just her. “And Amber? Good job. I’ve seen Jake do some impressive things over the years, but what you just pulled? I think you’re giving him a run for his money.”
“Gravita?” I turned to see a young man, perhaps the same age as Alan, standing a few feet away. Next to him I could see a gathering crowd of onlookers who had abandoned their parked cars in favor of a better view of the skyscraper on its side less than fifty feet away.
“Yes?” I smiled out of habit, but then reminded myself he couldn’t see my face under my helmet.
“Er...” He looked taken aback at finding himself talking to me. “Can I get a picture with you?”
“Sure thing, kid.” I nodded.
He looked a bit green as he stepped up next to me and pulled out his cellphone to snap a picture. Glancing at the people gathered around us, many of whom also had their phones out and trained on me, I gave one final wave before pushing myself into the air.
As I flew off to the base of the tower to start helping with the evacuation effort, something told me Nicole was going to want a detailed explanation that afternoon of the day’s events, given the field day the media would have from the optics I had just provided to a wide swath of Chicago.
19
“CALM DOWN.” I KEPT my eyes trained on the road ahead, even as a car horn blared behind us. “Just focus on what’s ahead of you.”
“I hate Chicago.” Sam’s fists were white from her iron-grip on the steering wheel.
“Yeah, people here can’t drive.”
I shook my head as the red mustang that had been honking behind us served across the double yellow lines to our left and sped past us. A second after darting back into our lane, the driver waved his fist out his window, a certain nameless finger extended.
“On the plus side, if you can drive here, you can drive pretty much anywhere.” I scratched my neck under my chin. “Except maybe Boston. Or Philadelphia.”
“Not helping!” She slammed on her brakes as a car waiting at a stop sign to our left gunned the gas and raced into our lane, cutting us off just before the stop light.
“You’re actually doing really well.” I shrugged as we came to an abrupt stop. “Nicole completely freaked the first time she got behind the wheel. Drove a few blocks with the parking brake still on.”
“Remind me why I asked you, instead of dad?”
“Because it’s a tradition?” I tilted my head and looked over at her. For her part, she kept her eyes trained forward, even though the light stayed red. “I taught Nicole how to drive.”
“Right.” She nodded. The car jolted forward from her pressing down on the gas pedal too hard at the sight of the traffic ahead of us moving. “Daddy-daughter time.”
“Gentle on the gas,” I advised. “Maybe after a few more sessions we can see about borrowing Nicole’s car so you can learn smooth pedal work.”
“I don’t need to know how to drive manual.” Her eyes went wide as we turned onto a rustic country road.
“You do if you ever need to borrow Nicole’s car.” I flipped the radio on and started tuning through the preset stations.
We arrived home an hour later. Sam had driven very well, all things considered. I had the strong impression she would be a less impulsive driver than Nicole, but then, I could have predicted that when Sam was only two.
As we came into the house, we found Nicole seated at the dining room table. Across from her was a boy who looked to be about her same age, though I had never met him before.
“Hello?” I looked between the two of them as I came into the room. Sam, meanwhile, hung up my set of keys on one of the hooks on the near wall, rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen.
“Oh, hey!” Nicole snapped her head up at my voice. She pushed herself to her feet and came around the table to head me off. “Ethan, do you remember I told you about my cousin, Jackie, who’s staying with us for a bit?”
“Umm, yeah?” He nodded toward me, though my gaze was drawn toward the kitchen at the sound of Sam snorting out whatever she had been drinking. He, too, glanced toward the kitchen before he looked back at me and smiled. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, Ethan.” I spared him a quick smile before looking back at Nicole. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“Sure.” Nicole stared daggers at Sam as she poked her head into the room. “Ethan, give us a minute, k?”
“Party starts in ten minutes.” He glanced at his watch.
My eyes flashed at Nicole as she grabbed my arm and pulled me into the living room.
“Jackie?” I hissed as soon as we were out of earshot of him.
“Look, mom, I really like him,” she whispered. She sat on the couch and leaned toward me as I sat next to her. “I wanted him to meet you and dad, but when I tried to explain, well, what happened to you, I sort of panicked.”
“And your solution was to tell him I was your cousin?”
“You know, most parents would be happy to learn their children are bad at lying.”
“Okay.” I massaged my temple. “We can think through that later. What’s this about a party?”
“Party?” Jake asked as he came into the room. “What are you two talking about?”
“Ugh, I don’t have time for this,” she growled.
“Nicky?” Ethan appeared in the hallway leading to the dining room. “We really need to get going.”
“So, dad.” Her eyes fixed on Jake with a glint of mad desperation. “Like I was saying, some of my friends are having a pool party, and Ethan invited me along. Can I go?”
“Hmm...” He narrowed his eyes as he studied Ethan. “Well, it’s not a school night. What does your mother think?”
“She said it was fine.” She glanced at me. “I mean, when I called her.”
“When you...?” He trailed away at the frantic look on her face.
“Oh, dad!” Sam didn’t quite come skipping into the room, but the glee on her face was unmistakable as she looked his way. “I was in the room when mom called. She did say it was fine for Nicole to go, but she also wanted to make sure Jackie went too. You know, cuz she’s new to the neighborhood, and everything?”
“Jackie?” He twisted around to stare at her, looking a second away from a breakdown.
She grinned as she turned to me. “You’d like to go to the party, wouldn’t you, Jackie?”
“Parties aren’t really my thing, Sam.” I raised an eyebrow as I looked back at her, but she just flashed me a too-innocent smile.
“Yeah, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it.” Nicole shook her head vigorously.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Jake put his hands on my shoulder, causing me to turn and look up at him. He gave me a grin that was easily as wide as Sam’s. “I think you’d have fun, Jackie. You should go.”
I glared at him with murderous intent. “I don’t—”
“You know, there are going to be a ton of people there.” Ethan interrupted me as he looked down at his watch again. “With today being the start of winter break and all. I don’t see any problems with you tagging along, Jackie. You should come.”
“It’s settled, then.” Jake winked at me. “You two just be back before midnight. Don’t forget we have to catch that flight to LA tomorrow morning.”
“Come on.” Sam bounded over and made a scene of looking me over. “You look just about my size. You can borrow one of my swimsuits. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the swimming, you know?”
I once again glared at Jake as she grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the room. I didn’t have to look Nicole’s way to know she was glaring too.
“We’ll hurry,” Sam patted Ethan on the arm as she passed.
The sound of pounding music saturated the air as we climbed
out of Ethan’s car outside his friend’s house.
“Hey, Ethan?” Nicole smiled at him as she pulled me back. “Do you mind if Jackie and I hang back for a bit? I need some help with my top.”
“Sure thing.” He smiled. “I’ll see you inside.”
Nicole froze as he leaned forward and gave her a lingering kiss.
“I hope you brought a condom,” I muttered as soon as he had disappeared into the house. “Based on that tent he was pitching...”
“Mom!” Her face burned as she wheeled on me. “How could you say... we haven’t—I haven’t—”
“Oh calm down.” I laughed. “I was just teasing you. Man, you really think I’m a prude, don’t you?”
“I forgot,” she muttered. “Mom was always more uptight.”
I frowned. “I’m not really sure that’s fair.”
“Okay, whatever.” She waved her hand and started up the cement walkway toward the house as I followed. “I just wanted to warn you. There might be alcohol in there.”
“I figured as much.” I raised an eyebrow.
“And... I was planning on having a few drinks.”
A part of me appreciated her brazen honesty. A very, very small part. “Okay.”
“What?” She paused and stared at me. “No lecture?”
“Jake and I have already told you, repeatedly, the risks and dangers of underage drinking. By now, I don’t think anything I can say is really going to make a difference. You’re not far from being an adult. It’s about time to start treating you like one.”
She blinked but didn’t say anything. After a few seconds of silence, she turned and held the front door open for me.
We made our way through the dimly-lit entry room toward the back of the house, where the noise was the loudest. A minute later, we found ourselves back out in the cold night of the back yard, where the music was being piped in through loudspeakers set against the side of the house. There was a roaring fire in an entrenched fire pit along the edge of the tiled patio, and I spotted Ethan in the sizable group of teenagers dancing near the warmth of the flames. He was, I noticed, already dancing in the middle of a group of girls.
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