TORY: Gem shrugged. “I mean, you and the people you talk about…You’re all I know. I feel like I know them through you. The scientists talk to me some, but they don’t open up to me like you do. I’m not their friend.”
“Aw, Gem.”
For the millionth time in his life, he wished he could sneak Gem out of there and introduce him to Alex, Delaney, and Marisol. He wished he could take him to his siblings and tell them about how it had been Gem all along who had shown them some of their very favorite things in the world. Things that, now, completely impacted the way they thought, how they felt, what they believed in. Things that became a part of their hearts.
Gem deserved to have a place in their hearts, too, but he was completely classified from the public. Officially, Gem did not exist.
And unofficially, his life had intertwined with everyone Tory loved.
“Anyway.” Gem cleared his throat, his cheeks turning a little red. “Oh! I’ve been going through the unarchived children’s cartoons of the 2010’s. What a marvel. It’s such a mixed bag of masterpieces, whimsy, and awful reboots. I can’t wait until we see what the archive has from 2018.”
There were many things about Gem’s situation that Tory certainly didn’t envy. He wouldn’t trade the limited freedom he had for anything—not even the remarkable amounts of time Gem had to do what he wanted. He could never give up Alex.
But there was something about the way Gem was still excited about things like reading new comics—it was sweet.
It was a feeling that Tory missed.
He pulled his hand out of the energy conversion box. He was giving up, his hand tingling unbearably, like a hundred pins and needles were piercing his skin. Gem pulled his hand out as well, following him. Green energy flickered up his wrist and haloed his white hair for a moment.
“I wish I could hack into the archives somehow and just release everything from Gray America. Who knows what the censors could be holding back, anyway? I would very much like all of the seasons of Rainbow Crystal Deathsaves.”
Tory hummed. “My mom is the mayor. I could probably figure something out.”
“Let me know how that goes,” Gem smiled, his violet eyes beginning to glow as he scanned Tory. “Wow. Your powers have grown a lot since last time.”
“They have? I can’t really tell.”
“Yes. The more you use them, the more powerful they are.”
“Like a muscle?” Tory leaned in. He knew so little about his own powers—no one really knew much about superpowers at all. It was all theory and guesswork and very little scientific measurement. Gem had a bit of an insight that no one else had, though.
Gem frowned. “I suppose…no. A muscle is not quite the same. It’s more like…” He grasped at the air, the same way he had for the word aesthetic. “A canyon.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I’ve watched a lot of Gray America documentaries about plate tectonics and the formations of the Grand Canyon lately. One of the theories about how it was formed is that the Colorado River slowly carved it out over hundreds of thousands of years.” He looked at Tory. “Sorry, this is a little random. But I promise there’s a point.”
Tory nodded. Gem going off on excited tangents was his love language. Tory knew exactly how that felt. “You’re fine. You make everything sound super interesting.”
“Okay, cool. So, the way powers work is by using the energy that flows through you the way the Colorado River flowed through the Grand Canyon. The more you use your power and draw on the energy around you, the more it will naturally flow through you when you aren’t thinking about it. I can tell you’ve been using your power quite a bit! You’re just going to get stronger.”
Tory frowned. He didn’t feel stronger after using his power a lot in one day. He just felt drained. But he had noticed that manipulating certain materials had gotten a lot easier.
“Your alchemy power is certainly one of my favorites. It has such a gentle feeling to it.”
“I literally manipulate the composition of the things around me. Gentle is not the word I would use.” Tory huffed. “More like…contorting and…twisted.”
Gem shook his head. “It feels more like you see things in this world for what they truly are, and you break them out of their confines.”
Tory thought about the mess he left behind in the rundown street where he shot the Everlux video the day before. He wasn’t so sure about that.
“I was the one who enhanced your powers—when was that, four years ago? So when you get moody about it, you’re basically insulting me.” He grinned playfully, but Tory felt chastised anyway.
“Okay. Fine. Sorry.”
He heard a tap on the glass above them, and he looked up and saw his mother waving to him, gesturing for him to come up. Tory turned back to meet Gem's saddened gaze, which quickly adjusted into a content one.
“Stay out of trouble for me, won't you?”
Tory grinned. “Well. I am trouble.”
He laughed. “Sure.”
. . . . .
Tory spun in one of the scientist’s rolling desk chairs, his rings clinking against the metal beneath the arm rest repeatedly as he made it spin again and again.
Diane grasped the back of his chair and made him stop.
“Darling, you’re being a nuisance. We’re having a serious discussion.”
“So am I. I’m currently discussing how to break Gem out with my minions.” He held up his phone. “They said your pack of evil child-kidnapping scientists will be easy to break through.” He shot a stink eye at one of the people wearing a white coat. The man who saw him rolled his eyes back at him and continued typing away at the panel in front of several smart glass screens filled with hovering charts and data on Gem.
“Please don’t take your sass out on my scientists.” She shook her head. “You know that we care about him and his well-being very much. I would love to take that poor boy outside.” She looked through the windows, her lips sinking into her face and her eyebrows knitting together. “The best we could do for him was build a small one-way skylight for his room.”
“Couldn’t we take him somewhere, like—” Tory’s eyes lit up. “Like our backyard! It’s isolated, and it’s the condo on the highest floor. We’ll drop him off at the top and have everyone wear hazmat suits. He can just hang outside with us for a couple of minutes. It’ll be safe.”
Her gaze softened and she placed her hand on his cheek. “Oh, sweetheart. I know how much you want Gem to be happy. I want that for him, too. It’s…” Her eyes roamed the charts on the smart glass beside her. She took a long minute, mulling it over. “…No, it wouldn’t work, I’m afraid. If Gem wasn’t kept inside of his chamber, his power would affect everyone in Gale City, all of the time. The entire city would need hazmat suits—anything organic and living would. It affects people, animals, plants.”
Tory imagined a dog in a black hazmat suit. It was kind of cute. And dark.
“What if he wore a hazmat suit?”
She shook her head. “If it worked, that would create an insane amount of...well, pressure, for the lack of a better word. Taking off the hazmat suit would be kind of like pulling the pin off a grenade. A grenade that could level a city. Besides, the hazmat suit wouldn’t do much. Even in the safety of his room, Gem’s power still leaks out sometimes from his chamber. We can’t completely contain it—it’s like putting a lampshade over a very bright light bulb.”
“Right.”
“The best way you can help him is to keep training your powers and keep trying to decompose the neobond energy.” She touched one of the pinned images on the smart glass and it expanded. It was a shadowy video clip of some kind of shifting, green energy, adorned with long strings of calculations that Tory certainly could not decipher. “This is what’s constantly coming out of Gem. Neobond energy—what our superpowers are made of.”
Tory nodded.
Gem had the ability to manipulate neobond energy. That was his power. That was how he was able to make powers in other people stronger, and how he was able to sense it in others. He understood it. He had a sixth sense for it. It was a part of him.
Tory smiled a bit. That would be a neat hero name for him. Sixth Sense.
“He’s such a powerful neobond energy generator, and he can’t control it.” Diane went on. “It would be like holding back a tidal wave. It’s so much all of the time.”
One of the scientists spoke up. He had dirty blond hair tied up in a ponytail and patchy brown facial hair. “We tried figuring out if there was a way to concentrate it somehow. Imagine if we could use that constant energy source to charge the city? There wouldn’t be blackouts when the solar panel farms outside the dome fails, or during rainstorms.”
Tory’s teeth ground together, his eyes narrowing at the man. The man held up his hands.
“Hold on, hold on. We would have considered Gem’s needs and safety before any of that. If we found a way to siphon off his energy or concentrate it in some way, maybe we could allow him to lead a somewhat normal life. It would be mutually beneficial.” He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar.
Tory’s glare only eased a little—he still hated the idea of the city using him like some kind of battery. His stare could still burn a black hole into the space between himself and the scientist, sucking the poor man into oblivion.
The scientist went on. “That was the theory, of course. But only Gem has had any luck with controlling neobond energy, and it takes a lot of concentration. It took constant practice for him to be able to influence the energy flows through other human beings without...well, making them blow up.”
“He never blew anyone up,” Diane clarified immediately. “He practiced with dummies, which blew up, and then he practiced with animals. Dogs and cats.”
Tory’s eyebrow shot up. “You’re implying he blew dogs and cats up.”
“No! No. The animals lived, though there were...bad side effects for a few.” Her eyes didn’t leave the charts, but her eyebrows pushed together as if she saw something sad. “...Which were unfortunate.”
Tory’s heart hurt. He wished he could have been there for Gem somehow at the time.
“Where some people are able to run inhumanly fast and fly, Gem was born to create more heroes. He has the ultimate power. After he was born, his power pulsed from him with every heartbeat, and every single person in the hospital collapsed and fell unconscious. The people who were already close to death did not make it, and others were seriously injured. Everyone in his delivery room died. The ultimate power came with an awful price.”
Tory could have been swallowed up by the pit that story opened up in his heart. It was too much. He already knew pieces of it—he knew Gem’s parents were not alive, and he knew Gem didn’t like to talk about them. He didn’t keep pictures of them or have any desire to reach out to their family.
He also knew Gem loved stories with family tropes more than anything—he saw the themes in his recommendation lists. Tory loved them, too.
He knew Gem wasn’t a fan of pity—he preferred to be optimistic and to find joy and comfort where he could. Pity also wasn’t useful to him. Tory reigned it in until after his visits were over, and then it would shift into a deep, dark rage, because it was not fair. There had to be a better way. Gem deserved to have something of a family, of a normal life.
The ultimate power. What did his mom even mean? Who would ask for this? Why did Gem have to pay a price for something that he clearly had no use for? He wasn’t about to create some kind of army of supers.
He frowned, his eyes flicking up to his mom. What did she want with Gem? Why was she so interested in his progress?
What was she going to use him for?
Diane looked back at him and gave him a small, sad smile and held up a thin manilla folder, tapping its folded spine with her nails. “Well, anyway. I’ve gotten the report I wanted. How about that facial, darling?”
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