Stealth Power

by Vikki Kestell

  What Zander said dredged up more questions. “What about the bad stuff that happens to good people? Who gets the credit for that? Is that God ‘reaching out’ to us?”

  “No. The bad stuff in the world isn’t from God. The Bible says that God is good, so bad stuff cannot be from him. Remember, when God made the world, he looked at it and saw that it was good—just like him. So, when the world started out, everything was good; it all worked as designed. Everything reflected God and his goodness.”

  “And then the sin thing happened?” I had, if you recall, spent a few years in church and Sunday school.

  “Yes. Then the sin thing happened. Sin didn’t just affect Adam and Eve. Sin ruined the goodness and perfection of the world—and it wasn’t a one-time thing, either. Sin has a corrupting effect, and it is still at work in the world. That’s why the world is getting worse, why the earth is wearing out, trending downward.

  “Parts of nature are still beautiful enough to blow our minds, but if we look close, we can see that the beauty isn’t perfect. Like, if we glimpse a mountainside forest, it might be breathtaking, but if we look closer, we can see the effects of disease, drought, fire, or overcrowding.”

  “And that’s because of sin?” The idea made me angry.

  “Yes—the decline of the earth is caused by the cumulative effect of humanity’s sin in the world: Adam and Eve’s sin, their children’s sin, our grandparents and parents. Your sin and my sin.”

  “People sound like the problem.”

  “Well, we are the problem. However, God has no desire to throw us away. He made us in his image and in his likeness, after all. We’re the closest thing to children he has. You wouldn’t throw your kids away if they screwed up, would you? You would love them and try to correct them, wouldn’t you? God feels the same way, so he decided to rescue us. That’s where Jesus comes in.”

  I looked away. “So, when do you get out of this place?”

  Zander glanced in my direction. He was disappointed at my abrupt topic switch, but he answered, “Soon. Maybe later today or tomorrow. The doctor will make that decision when he sees me this afternoon.”

  “Will you be okay on your own?”

  “Yeah. Izzie will help me out.”

  Izzie, short for Isabelle, was Zander’s sister. I liked Izzie, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Not since the barbecue for the homeless that DCC had organized in one of the city parks. Seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Izzie. Sounds like a good fit,” I snickered.

  He snorted—and winced. “Oh, I’m certain she won’t take advantage of the situation to boss me around, right? She wouldn’t do that, would she?”

  I snickered again.

  “You know, your visitor skills really stink.”

  “Right, and you have so many visitors that you can compare me to others?”

  “Half my Sunday school class has been in to cheer me up. Did a much better job, let me tell you.”

  I might have described Zander’s look as “condescending” or “arch”—if he’d been able to manipulate his swollen face. Instead, the melty Spumoni ice cream bruises just shifted around and made my stomach lurch.

  I cleared my throat. “You go to Sunday school?”

  Okay, I’ll admit that my question came out with a snarky sneer.

  “I teach Sunday school, Gemma.”

  What?

  I jumped trains. “So, if Izzie is gonna take care of you when you get out, who will take care of Abe?”

  That did the trick. Zander jumped trains with me.

  “Yeah, I agree. When Abe gets out, he will need someone to look after him. By then, I should be self-sufficient, able to use this arm a little, so I thought I would stay with him for a bit, help him out.”

  “That’s a great idea, actually.” His plan relieved my mind more than I’d realized it would.

  “Abe doesn’t have family anymore, Gemma. The church is his family now. I know the women of DCC will help out with meals and cleaning; I’ll stay there to keep an eye on him and handle his personal needs.”

  Abe doesn’t have family anymore. That smarted. Aunt Lucy had been Abe’s family until she died. I had tried to fill her shoes . . . a little.

  Not that much, if I told the truth.

  And there I was, just like Zander said, my emotions flip-flopping all over the place. Driving me nuts.

  Zander interrupted my brooding navel-gazing. “When you asked about the bad stuff in the world, Gemma, I didn’t quite finish my thought.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I was distracted when I gave him the go-ahead.

  “Sometimes the bad stuff that happens to us is the direct result of our own stupid choices. However, God gave the believer in Christ a wonderful promise. It is found in Romans 8, and says, We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. This verse means that God can take anything—even the bad things—and turn them or use them to produce a good outcome for his people.”

  “Oh?” God could use all the bad stuff happening to me to bring about good?

  “Yeah—but it’s important to recognize that this promise isn’t for everyone. The promises of God belong to those who belong to him—to those who love him.”

  So, not for me, I acknowledged.

  But, like a bulldog, Zander wouldn’t let go. “Gemma, what is even more important to recognize is that God has no desire to exclude anyone from his promises. Anyone. He wants every individual to belong to him. He calls to each of us. That’s what I meant the other day when I said that he would confront you. He is calling you, Gemma.”

  Confront me? Calling me? Is that what was happening? Because something was going on, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something deep inside—where I was raw and hurting.

  If I had said anything, Zander would have heard the shaking in my voice, so I stayed mute, my hand tucked into his hand, his strong fingers holding mine, warming them. Feeling so good. So right.

  ***

  I left Zander’s floor, took the elevator down to the ground, walked through the breezeway between buildings until I reached the Pavilion elevators, and punched the button for the second floor. I lifted my hand toward the doors to the MICU and they opened.

  I walked through but faltered and stopped just inside the unit. Something had shifted over the past two days, and I wasn’t quite clear about it yet, except . . . except I hadn’t asked the mites to open the doors. I hadn’t even thought about it.

  I had expected them to open, and they had.

  What is it? What has changed?

  I wandered farther up the ward, puzzling over whatever it was that was bugging me. I found Abe in the same MICU bed, but he was awake, staring at the ceiling.

  I touched his hand. “Abe?”

  He cut his eyes in my direction, not surprised at my presence. “Put my bed up, will you, Gemma? So’s I can watch for the nurses while we talk.”

  I pressed the button that raised his head, and he scanned through the glass walls of his room before speaking.

  “Gemma, how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine, Abe. Really. And, wow! You look a lot better than the last time I saw you!”

  “Well, I surely am. The doctor says he will move me into a regular room soon, maybe even today.”

  “I’m so glad. Zander may be going home today. His sister is going to help him out until he’s able to do for himself.”

  I took Abe’s hand, and he clung on to me. Holding his hand wasn’t the same as holding Zander’s, but it still felt pretty wonderful.

  “Abe doesn’t have family anymore. The church is his family now. I know the women of DCC will help out with meals and cleaning; I’ll be there to keep an eye on him and handle his personal needs.”

  For the first time in a long time, I was grateful for the existence of Downtown Community Church, glad that Abe could count on his church to be there for him. I was relieved that Abe had Zander in his life, too.

  “Za
nder said he plans to come stay with you when they let you out.”

  “He did, did he?” Abe chuckled, but the laugh bowed him up in the middle—just like it did Zander.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I got me some touchy spots ’longside my ribs.”

  “Well, you look amazing compared to the last time I saw you.”

  “Yep. Amazing is right. The doctors shake their heads every time they come check on me. Say, I’m appreciative of what those nano-thingies did for me.”

  A little of my ire toward the mites melted. “I told them thank you. For myself, too.”

  He squinted, perplexed. “You talk to them nano-things, Gemma?”

  “Um, well, yeah, I guess I do. The situation has progressed some. Gotten . . . friendlier.”

  Friendlier? Not at the moment! And sheesh. I did not want to detail what I thought they were doing in my brain or speculate over what they were doing elsewhere. Even Abe would vote to have me locked up.

  We chatted for a while. I told him that I’d seen Emilio, and he had forgiven us for calling in CYFD. Told Abe I’d passed on his message.

  We sat a few minutes more in companionable quiet, my hand in his, before I told him goodbye. I was halfway down the ward, passing another glassed-in room, when a wail disrupted the otherwise quiet busyness of the MICU. Inside the room, just outside a curtained bed, a girl, a young woman near to my age, sank into the arms of a middle-aged couple. I thought they must have been the girl’s parents.

  The girl wailed again, and her cry ratcheted into a scream of agony, primal and gut-wrenching. Her weeping—her utter heartbreak—swept across the ward. I stood mere feet from the drama playing out before me.

  I crept closer to the glass wall.

  “No!” she shrieked. “No! You have to try something else! He-he’s only thirty-one years old! We have a son! A son! He’s just a baby! He needs his daddy!”

  “Holly—Mrs. Galvez—I assure you, I promise you, that we have done all we can. I am so very sorry.” I saw the doctor then, harried and sorrowful, as she stepped from behind the curtain that shielded the patient’s bed.

  “Holly, please,” the woman holding her begged. “Please, dear. You must be brave.”

  “I can’t! I can’t! Oh, God, please help me! Please help John!”

  I couldn’t handle it. I ran from her raw, bleeding grief. I rounded the end of the ward, passed the “gatekeeper” desk, hit the door, and stumbled into the hall, sobbing for the girl who could have been me. The thick doors to the unit closed behind me and muffled the girl’s cries—but I could still hear her agonized protests.

  “He needs his daddy!”

  How well I related.

  I had been blindsided and struck dumb the night police officers informed Genie and me that our parents had died when our house burned—in the fire she and I had somehow escaped.

  “Oh. God, no, please! He needs his daddy!”

  I doubled over, fell against a wall, and bawled for that girl, mourned for her son who would grow up wondering why his daddy had left him. I wept for myself—because to this day, I did not understand why Mommy and Daddy had left me.

  Grinding the heels of my hands into my eyes, I stumbled down the hall, through the sitting area, toward the elevator—putting distance between me and the anguish I could not bear. The people in the waiting area looked stunned and apprehensive. Their gaze, as one person, was slanted toward the MICU, their expressions concerned or horrified. Some wiped surreptitiously at their eyes.

  I need to get away!

  As I mashed the elevator button several times, the girl in the MICU gave one last shriek that ended mid-scream. I turned and faced the sitting area and the MICU hallway beyond it. The elevator dinged. Its doors opened behind me, but I stood frozen and listening.

  To silence.

  What had the doctor told that girl? As badly as I wanted to escape her pain, I suddenly wanted to know: What had the doctor told her?

  I didn’t know what I was doing, but I strode through the lobby, down the hall, around the corner. I lifted my finger toward the doors. They sprang open, and I sprinted through.

  A few nurses were gathered around the young woman. She had collapsed onto the floor, maybe fainted? A nurse applied a cold towel to her face. Her parents hovered over them, clutching at each other. Sobbing.

  I slipped past them into the patient’s room and tiptoed up to the still figure behind the curtain. I placed my hand on his chest. It rose and fell in short, panting breaths.

  I sighed, then spoke aloud to the nanomites, my anger toward them swallowed up by the present need. “Nano. Do what you can to help this man. Please.”

  Mites pulsed from palm and fingers and flowed into his body. I withdrew my hand and stood back.

  And waited.

  A nurse came in and fine-tuned something in the man’s IV. I scooted out of her way.

  Out in the corridor, Holly came to; the nurses assisted her to a chair and offered her water.

  I glanced back to her husband.

  No change.

  Nothing from the nanomites.

  I waited longer. The mites would come back to me when it was time—one way or another.

  After an hour, I could bear it no longer. I entered the warehouse, but it seemed . . . empty-ish.

  “Nano?”

  We are working, Gemma Keyes.

  “Show me?”

  We cannot. You are unable to accompany us.

  “Well, can you tell me? What is wrong with him?”

  The man’s medical file appeared before me, all the pages of medical jargon and diagnoses, x-rays, MRIs . . . and CT scans.

  A tumor. In his brain. Glioblastoma multiforme. Deep within the parietal lobe.

  I searched for and found research on that kind of tumor. I pulled additional information from the warehouse, and absorbed all I studied.

  Malignant.

  Inoperable.

  Fatal.

  “Oh, no . . .”

  We are working, Gemma Keyes.

  “Thank you, Nano. What can I do?”

  Provide power to support our increased consumption.

  I stepped to the nearest light switch and placed my hand on it. A slow, steady warmth pulsed from the receptacle into my hand and up my arm.

  While I waited, supporting the mites’ energy needs, I tried to visualize them at the site of the tumor, tried to imagine them clear down at the cellular level—lasering the invading cells, detaching the cancer’s tendrils and tentacles from the man’s parietal lobe.

  The man. I looked again into his medical record and found his name.

  Right. John.

  John Galvez. Holly had cried out her husband’s name: John. They had a baby boy.

  The latest notations in his file were bleak: Comatose state. Decreased respiration. Liver and kidney functions failing. Blood pressure dropping.

  Were the nanomites too late? Was the damage too extensive? Were his brain functions already destroyed? And as the mites killed the tumor, cell by cell, what would become of it, of its cancerous bits and pieces? Would those cells float through John’s bloodstream and lodge themselves elsewhere to replicate and reproduce their deadly selves? Had the tumor metastasized and colonized other organs before now?

  Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried again to follow the nanomites, to see them at work. They said I could not accompany them, but I didn’t want to believe them. Wasn’t I part of the nanocloud? I didn’t want to be, hadn’t chosen it, but wasn’t I a tribe? What about all that, “we are six” business! And why couldn’t I find my way to them?

  I struggled to move down the warehouse, down its long, dark halls. It was like swimming in molasses, like running while tethered.

  But I kept trying, trying to go where they were. I struggled against the flesh and bone that held me back.

  Gemma Keyes. Do you trust us?

  “What?”

  You wish to see us at work. Do you trust us?

  Loaded question.
r />   “I—I don’t know.”

  You will not be harmed.

  Except I knew, already, that my presence in the warehouse and our communication—not to mention the other indicators of the merge—were predicated on “nano brain surgery,” on the creation and manipulation of chemical neurotransmitters traveling along artificially grown synapses.

  I wondered what, exactly, the nanomites were suggesting.

  They repeated their question.

  You wish to see us at work. Do you trust us? You will not be harmed.

  I exhaled. “Um, all right.”

  The room spun, and I lurched against the wall where the outlet was, slid down the wall onto the floor. I had the sense of the bottom dropping out from under me, of rolling, then being tugged and pulled, spun into filament, like a silken fiber, like the string of a kite unwinding, longer and longer. I spiraled away from the room, from its light, from my body.

  The warehouse brightened and lengthened, and I traveled down its corridors, floating, flying, speeding forward.

  Nanomites were with me, cocooning me, propelling us onward—they drove us toward a destination I could not see. But I could see them, the mites. They were luminous and shimmering, bending and reflecting light from the mirrors that flicked and flickered quicker than the wings of a hummingbird. They flew ahead, beside, above, below, around me. I glanced back—and saw the long line of mites behind me, each bound by a shimmering tether that was tied to me.

  Was I seeing the electrochemical transmissions of my own consciousness, trailing behind me, supported by the mites?

  They must have sensed the unease that shivered through me.

  You will not be harmed, they assured me once more.

  “What if . . . what if the bond breaks?”

  Your consciousness will return to your body. You will not be harmed.

  I shrugged off my fears and focused my “sight” forward.

  Ahead, the luminescence grew until we arrived at a glowing wall of nanomites so high I could see neither its height nor its breadth. They were massed upon a great, bulging, pulsing evil.

  The tumor.

  The nanomites were destroying it, excising it from the man’s brain tissue with the precision of, well, the precision of thousands of lasers: Delta Tribe at work.