The Children's Hospital

32

“Horrible sparkles shot out of her eyes, and she made this nasty, urping noise, and her tongue got really long, and it struck at me, like she was a big lizard. Then I had the seizure, the one that she gave me.” Maggie was testifying in front of the Committee. They were arranged behind a curving table: Dr. Snood; Dr. Sundae; Zini, the nurse-manager; Dr. Sasscock; Karen; the three nurses: Betty and Bonnie and Camilla; Frank and Connie; Monserrat, the tamale lady; Arthur, the senior lab tech; John Grampus; and finally Vivian, the only really friendly face that Jemma could identify from where she stood, a few feet behind the witness sofa hand in hand with Pickie Beecher. She and Pickie, the last witnesses, would testify next. Dr. Tiller and the other attendings were seated next to the Committee table, along with Emma and some others from the PICU staff.

“And you’d not ever had a seizure disorder in the past?” asked Dr. Snood.

“Certainly not.”

“What’s this with the tongue, Maggie?” Karen asked. “I don’t remember that from before.”

“Yes, a big green tongue. A tongue of fire.”

“No tongue in your statement,” said Vivian. “Are you just now remembering this, or just now making it up?”

“Am I on trial here?” Maggie asked. “I’m telling you what I remember, okay?”

“No one is on trial here, Dr. Formosa,” said Dr. Tiller. “We are only trying to sort out some extraordinary stuff.”

“Did Dr. Claflin say anything to you before she attacked?” asked Dr. Sundae.

“Attacked?” said Vivian. “Attacked? Has it been established that an attack has occurred? All the evidence seems to indicate that a miraculous healing has taken place. Have we been attacking the children in our care, Dr. Sundae? What gruesome violators we must be.”

“Look in the mirror, young lady, and tell me you don’t see gruesome spots. They’re on all of us. And if a duck with no history of seizures suddenly develops them in the context of a mystical eruption, then that duck was attacked.”

“Please,” said Dr. Snood, making a little noise with his gavel. “Dr. Formosa, answer Dr. Sundae’s question.”

“She said, Now you will taste my power.”

“Maggie, Maggie, your nose is growing,” said Vivian. Dr. Snood rapped again.

“Thank you, Dr. Formosa. I think that’s enough.”

Maggie got off the sofa and walked back into the standing crowd, glaring at Jemma as she walked forward with Pickie to sit down. Jemma found her attention mostly drawn to Pickie’s slippers as he kicked his feet back and forth over the edge of the sofa. A darker purple than his pajamas, they were in the shape of elephants, complete with trunks that curved up from the toes.

“We just have a few questions for you, Pickie,” said Dr. Snood. “There’s no reason to be afraid.”

“I am not frightened,” said Pickie.

“Do you know what happened yesterday, with Dr. Jemma?”

“Of course.”

“Will you tell us what you saw?”

“What was in her came out. It’s very simple.”

“But what did you see?” asked Zini. “Was there green fire?”

“I saw what I saw,” said Pickie. “What was in her came out.”

“Was it green?” asked Dr. Sundae.

“It was inside of her. Inside the inside. It is inside her now.” All eyes turned to Jemma. She looked at Pickie’s slippers. The whole Committee tried to get Pickie to tell a coherent story; no one succeeded. He would only repeat that what was in Jemma had come out, something she could have told them herself, and he admitted that he had seen it in her before, but not pointed it out because he thought she must notice it herself — with things like this, he said, you just have to wait for it to happen. A few more unilluminating questions later, Dr. Snood told him he could go back upstairs, but instead of leaving, after he climbed off the couch, he turned and climbed up into Jemma’s lap. Jemma told her story again, and responded to questions. Yes, green fire, she said. No, it was not hot, not to me, not in the usual way. No, I can’t make it happen right now. Yes, I’m trying to make it happen. There were no visions. There were no voices. Nothing like this has ever happened before. I prefer not to repeat my board scores in front of an audience. Suffice to say that they were quite low. I don’t know what happened to Janie’s hand.

“Has the angel been talking with you?” asked John Grampus.

“Not about this.”

“Have the carpets been talking to you?” asked Karen. “Any voices at all?”

“No.”

“Why did you attack Maggie Formosa?” asked Dr. Sundae.

“I don’t remember that I did. I only remember feeling sick that morning, and almost passing out.”

“Do you think you could have been possessed?”

“I suppose anything is possible, Dr. Sundae.”

“Jemma,” asked Vivian, “what do you think is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Jemma said. Vivian frowned, because Jemma was supposed to give a more detailed answer. Vivian had a theory that would require a PET scan for validation, something about enhanced activity in the parietal cortex. Jemma, feeling more and more persecuted as the questioning continued, though everyone, even Dr. Sundae, and especially Dr. Snood, was interrogating her with the utmost politeness, lapsed sullen. The hungover feeling she’d had since Rob had awakened was lifting, the sleepy, pliable state giving way to a need like horniness, but absent of lust. She wanted to burn again.

Word came a few hours after Jemma and Pickie were dismissed that the Committee had formally requested that Jemma refrain from any more extraordinary manifestations until further study had been accomplished. A series of tests was scheduled, Vivian’s PET scan among them, to begin in the morning. Dr. Snood, Dr. Tiller, and Emma were constructing a randomized double-blind trial, to begin within the week, in which they planned to compare Jemma’s efforts, provided she could make them again, with conventional therapy in low-risk, low-acuity children. Jemma, meanwhile, was excused from all clinical duties, assigned the impossible task of devising a way to blind herself in the study. She retired to the call room, to hide from eyes struck by the rumor of wonder, and faces not empty of fear. Everywhere she went, people turned to each other and made murmuring noises that sounded to her distant ears like bracka bracka bracka. “What does it mean?” people asked her, like she should know. “What does it mean?” asked John Grampus. He caught her — literally, reaching out to nab the edge of her yellow scrub gown as she passed by him where he sat on the ramp, sitting on the ground with his knees to his chest, his back to the balustrade, and a big purple hat pulled down over his eyes, as if he was at siesta. “She never mentioned anything like this to me.”

“It was a surprise to me too,” Jemma said, tugging at her gown.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and I can see the whole place, every secret room and every potential space, all laid out in my head like a 3-D blueprint. And some days I thought I could see the time laid out just like that, another blueprint, but unfolded across the days to come.”

“I thought she never told you what was next.” One fierce tug and the gown came free of his fist. Now she could run away, but she stayed a moment more.

“It’s not from her,” he said. “I used to think it was from Him.”

“What’d you see?” she asked, squatting down now next to him.

“Shuffleboard and codes and people dating.” He shrugged. “Who are you, though, that you did that?”

“Just another third-year med student,” she said. “Just another moron.”

“What else can you do? What else can I do?” He pushed his fingers at her in an abracadabra gesture.

“It’s all pretty weird,” she said.

“Worse than weird,” he said, and drew his hat down farther over his eyes. “You can go now,” he said. “Don’t come complaining to me when you start to feel used.”

“I don’t… I’m not… I don’t even understand… Oh whatever,” she concluded, and continued on, in a sort of huff, and the next time somebody pinched at her clothes — Ishmael saying he just had to talk to her — she offered the first excuse that came into her head (I have to pee), pulled away, and powered down the ramp, head down now, until she got to her room. Jeri Vega’s mother was outside her door.

“You’ve got to come upstairs,” she said.

“I’ve got to pee,” Jemma said, and now it was true.

“Right now,” the lady said. She’d been eating red licorice while she waited. A string of it still dangled from her mouth — somehow it made her look even tougher than usual — and she held a braided whip of it in her hand. “She needs you.”

“I’m not allowed,” Jemma said.

“Bullshit. The sun’s not allowed to shine? Are we not allowed to breathe? Is this place not allowed to float? Come on. Right now.” She held out her hand. Jemma ducked around it, put her back against her door, and her hand on the doorknob.

“I’m not allowed,” she said. “And anyway I couldn’t even if I tried. I don’t understand it at all — it’s so very strange, Ms. Vega. Not right now, I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry but now I’m going to go inside. Goodbye.”

Ms. Vega was drawing back her whip hand as Jemma turned the knob and backed through the door. She heard the soft blow fall. “Get out here you stupid bitch,” Ms. Vega said. “Don’t tell me that shit you stupid bitch. I can tell a lie when I hear one. What kind of monster are you, you stupid bitch?”

“Lock the door,” Jemma whispered to the angel, so no one can get in. “Give it the special.”

“It is already done,” said the angel. Jemma stepped backward, all the way to the toilet, and sat down.

Rob was not even with her. He was still in the PICU, still monitored though quite thoroughly well. She imagined him sitting up in bed in the too-small hospital gown printed with frolicking puppies and kittens. “I kind of like it,” he said, when she offered to go replicate something that would fit better. “Size Prader-Willi — it almost fits.” He’d smiled at her, and then his expression had fallen back into the one he’d been wearing since she woke him up. Jemma had never seen someone look so consistently bemused before. He’d heard how she described herself as his fiancee while he was asleep, and argued that this constituted an acceptance of the proposal. Over and over and over she denied it.

She imagined him with her, seeking to summon him. She outlined a space for him in the air, drew his reclining shape, arms above his head, and thought she could see the pillow denting a little in anticipation of his head. Let it be… now! she thought, and whispered, imagining the puppy and kitten gown settling empty to the bed in the PICU as his body, reduced to arcing energy, or drifting mist, was transported to reconstitute itself in front of her eyes. It did not happen, but she felt a surge, a wave in her belly, that she knew was fire seeking egress. She looked out into the room, up to the window; still filled with blue sky. She was waiting for dark.

“I am born,” she said quietly. “I grow up. My brother dies my parents die my lover dies the world drowns I get pregnant I develop miraculous healing powers.” It made no more sense when spoken aloud than when spoken in her head. Why not Rob, or Vivian, or Dr. Tiller, or one of the parents, or one of the patients; why not Josh Swift slouching greenly down the halls and restoring health to all his fellow-sufferers? Why not Pickie Beecher, kung-fu baldy? He was already… eldritch. She held up her hands, palm toward palm, a foot apart, and let a green flare pass between them.

She opened up her mind, imagining an uncovering as slow and massive as the opening of an observatory dome, seeking to make herself receptive to the answer, and asked her questions again, and tried to conceive of the mouth that might speak the answer. She lay there waiting, hearing nothing, watching the window darken, blue into deeper blue, until it was the very color of Rob’s eyes. Then it was time.

She started at the top; it seemed like the right place. In the psych ward she found Thelma asleep, a three-month-old magazine spread across her vast chest. Jemma went past her. The first two rooms she looked in were empty. But in the room called Sage she found all three anorexics gathered together vomiting in the moonlight. Jemma hardly knew them; even when she was on the team that covered this floor, they’d been Vivian’s responsibility. Their families were all gone; none of them had been the sort to get many visitors, especially during bad weather. They had only each other and Thelma, whose great wonderful fatness they could look at no longer than they could stare into the sun. They restricted more and more, and as the weeks passed began to binge, something all three, high, pure anorexics who had defeated their bodies by becoming creatures of pure will, would have disdained in the dry world. Jemma remembered the discussions from rounds, the team wondering how to keep them from shooting powerful coherent arcs of vomit out the windows that the angel would not keep shut, or how to keep them from tearing out their TPN IVs. Dr. Snood, desperate, had kept one of them sedated for a week while she was fed through her nose, but when she awoke she took off the weight as easily as she would an ugly sweater.

By the time Jemma visited them they had made themselves ghastly-beautiful. From the door she saw them gathered under the window, around a plastic tub that stored toys by the bushel in the playrooms. They held hands and brushed up against one another languidly, arching their necks and throwing back their heads to swallow their fingers before adding another unit of barf to the big bucket. They were surrounded by the remains of their feast, vanilla-ice-cream puddles glowing in glass dishes shaped like leaves; candy-bar wrappers in neat heaps; chicken skin and chicken fat glistening in patches around them in a circle, and bones under their feet. Jemma trod on two large cupcakes as she approached them, her green hands clasped behind her back. They did not notice her until she was quite close. Their pajamas, altered, short, hanging dresses of sage, pumpkin, and ocher, and their hair, brittle but long and styled with particular care into identical sets of heaped and cascading curls, their dramatic poses, their bare feet among bones, their long, sharp nails, and finally their number all gave them an ancient Greek air; though they were exquisitely frail, and close to dying, they seemed as powerful as they were pathetic, three purgies discharging their eternal duty. Jemma, nearly upon them, felt a little afraid, but still laughed out loud. They all turned at once, and spoke from left to right.

“It’s a stomach flu,” said the first one, defiantly. “Who are you?” asked the second, more meek. The third, finger in mouth, merely stared.

“I am the great fatty,” Jemma announced, then brought her hands forward, and struck. Green fire spilled into the air as she grabbed at them. They all shrieked identically, and tried to escape, but she was too close for them to evade her, and they were too weak to break away. They were so thin she could hold all of them in her arms. In three blows she made them right, all four of them burning together. First she restored their organs, heart and lungs and guts ruined with months of self-consumption; no sooner had she wanted it done than it was done, the three girly shrieks climbing into song as Jemma pushed with her mind and her spirit. Then she restored their flesh. She filled them with fire that burned for an instant and was gone, leaving muscle and fat in its place; they popped out of her arms, but remained bound to her by fire. Lastly she restored their minds — already they felt covered with abomination. She weeded their brains, reaching in with fire fingers to rip out that perception; right or wrong, truth or distortion, it was hers to command, and must come out with her, and when she commanded it to scatter on the dark air it must do it.

When she released them they threw up their arms, as if in praise or surrender, and then fell to the ground, strong bones cushioned by newly upholstered fat. She left them sleeping beside the vomit tub, scattering candy wrappers back and forth between them with their breath. She wiped her feet and moved on.

In Pickie Beecher’s room she fell, hands-first, on the Pickie-shaped lump in his bed, but it was only an artfully arranged pillow, bitten through in places and leaking stuffing. She cast it aside and went out, looking in all the empty rooms and not finding him there. When she closed her eyes and thought about him she thought she could sense his special wrongness at the periphery of her consciousness, a little blot on her mind, but she could not figure this sense into an idea of where he was. She walked by Thelma again, still asleep, though snoring loudly now in the way of the obstructive sleep apneic. Jemma reached out to touch her, knowing that she could shore up the muscles of her pharynx if she throttled her just so, but then she wondered if what was in her might run out, and if children didn’t have a greater claim on it than adults. She passed Thelma by and walked on to the rehab floor, creeping past a pair of nurses seated at their rocket station. Monitors and thin plastic towers stuck up fortuitously, hiding Jemma from their view, but she felt regarded by the giant yellow alien head mounted on the wall behind them, which seemed to follow her as she went in halting, sneaky cartoon steps along the blue-black carpet, under the light of bright false stars.

Five paralytics, two amputees, one serene vegetable, and a girl named Musette, twenty years old but with the physical, intellectual, and emotional repertoire of an eight-week-old; none of them could withstand Jemma, though their parents offered unexpected assaults on her. “What are you doing to my baby?” was the question that they asked as they sat up out of sleep, or as they clawed at Jemma, or threw syringes like darts, or tried to whack her with a spare IV pole. “Watch and see,” Jemma told them, striking them too with the green fire; to disconnect their voluntary musculature was as easy as flipping off a switch. They crumpled to the floor and watched with unblinking eyes as their children flew from bed in a Christmas-morning leap, or as bones grew in slender filligree from pale stumps, to bud and bloom in green fire that took the form and then the substance of muscle, ligament, and tendon, fat, fascia, and skin. Jemma’s mind performed new motions determined by the problem: the spinal lesions of the paralytics glowed in her head, galling and bitter and ugly; she smoothed her thumb just over the spot on their spines while doing something that made her feel as if her brain was sneezing, shoving violently at either end of the wrongness and holding every fiber of the bundle in her consciousness, counting them like the hairs of a head and commanding them to unite. Bone and flesh had to be encouraged, delicately at first, and then ecstatically, to venture into the air and fill up the felt, phantom image with a real thing. The vegetable required a shout, spoken silent on Jemma’s lips, but sounding louder than any word previously spoken inside the child’s head. She sat up with a start, folding violently from the hips, and her eyes flew open with her mouth. “I’m awake already,” she said sullenly. “Jeesh.”

Fixing Musette was a stranger task. She lay in her bed, gnawing on her fists and looking out the window at the moon, her gown rising up just below her breasts. Rivulets of drool ran down her wrists and arms to drip from her elbow. She made a constant noise, a low little moan interrupted every few moments by a cough or a giggle. Her mother was on the floor, her head at Jemma’s foot, an IV pole dropped at her side.

Jemma put her hands on Musette’s head, her fingers disappearing into a thick mass of greasy black curls. It was easy to make over her mushy brain, to burn it until it was perfect, but harder to restore the lost, neverborn personality. Jemma thought it would be, like everything so far, a matter of will; she only had to want it enough, to push hard enough, and it would grow inside of Musette like the ruined tissue of her cortex. So Jemma pushed hard; this patient burned brighter than any previous. Musette’s lungs, chronically wet and infected from aspirating her own saliva, dried up; her skin, blighted by acne, cleared; the greasy fountain in her scalp, which formerly put out such volume that she left stains wherever she lay her moaning, idiot head, slowed to a trickle, just enough to put a lustrous shine in her hair. Jemma kept pushing even when these things were done, because she still sensed only blankness inside. Musette’s snaggly, sharp teeth straightened and dulled, hairy moles leapt away from her skin like black ladybugs taking flight; still she was blank. It wasn’t until Jemma, hopping with frustration, accidentally stepped on the mother’s face that she realized what she must do to put the child right. As her foot touched flesh she understood how Musette must be filled. She slipped out of her clog and felt along the mother’s face with her bare foot, working her big toe into the lady’s mouth, then pushed her hands deeper into Musette’s now enviable curls. She could not put a name to what flowed into her toe, up her spine and over her shoulders, down her arms and hands into her fingers and into Musette, but she felt as if she were transplanting and transforming the desires and daydreams of the woman at her feet, every aspect of a lost child meticulously imagined during twenty years of caring for the body holding its place. What the mother had dreamed became real, or what the mother had guarded was returned to the girl who had lost it.

Jemma finally took her hands away and fell back against the window, repelled somehow by the enormity of what she’d just accomplished. She was suddenly very afraid of Musette, afraid of what she might do, this new thing. Maybe she would be angry that she’d been pulled from her blank heaven, placed in a punished world, and afflicted with the capacity to understand what she’d lost. Musette turned her eyes from the moon and sat up, patting her hair like someone whose first concern upon rising is the state of their coif. She yawned and put a hand on her belly, then looked up at Jemma. “I’d like a cheese sandwich, please,” she said.

“Can’t help you,” Jemma said, and hurried away, casting back a thought to release the mother as she passed through the door. She was not the least bit tired as she raced down to the eighth floor, feet striking green sparks from the stairs. She thought she should be exhausted, but she was exhilarated, running down the rainbow hall of the heme-onc ward, and there were all sorts of complicated issues, aspects of what she had done, what she was doing, and what would come before she finished, that should be crowding in her brain. She ought to just have a seat and consider things, but she could hardly be expected, right now, to do something so boring. Exhilaration drove her and excused her. She tore by the nurses’ station, ignoring their shouts. When she stopped outside Ethel Puffer’s door she noticed that one was pursuing her.

“Just what do you think—” Her shrieky little whisper was silenced when Jemma paralyzed her vocal cords. In a display of skill that developed as she exercised it, she took away control of the rest of the nurse’s muscles in a slow upward stroke, toes to scalp, so she did not collapse but folded slowly to the ground.

Jemma’s hands gave the only light in the deep dark of Ethel’s room. “I am here,” she said.

“Go away,” said Ethel.

“There’s something I have to do. Something wonderful.”

“You’ve got some shit on your hands. Kryptonite or something.”

“Or something,” said Jemma.

“I’ll call the nurse.” Ethel’s voice was coming from different places around the room, but Jemma could not hear her moving.

“She’s right outside the door. Where are you?” She could feel her, if she couldn’t see her. From across the room she could feel the hideous wrongness in her leg. Jemma let the green fire go out from her in a flare; it showed her Ethel crouched by the door, her hands thrown over her eyes. The fire reached out, caught her up, and drew her forward, hurrying reluctantly on her tiptoes, her diver’s back gracefully arching. They collided next to the bed, Jemma laughing, Ethel screaming as they burned together. Jemma ran her hands down the girl’s back and bottom and, leaning her chin over Ethel’s shoulder, fastened her hands on the sick and healthy thighs. She ran her mind around and around the tumor, burning it down a little with every pass, until it was gone, and juicy muscle grown in its place. Then she went looking for the mets, her perception racing on fire into Ethel’s lungs and brain, burning out every mote of wrong stuff. Jemma thought she heard the very last tumor cell cry out, Mercy! She showed it none.

The fire dimmed; they came unglued. Ethel fell to her knees, her face pressed against Jemma’s thigh. “Fucking bitch,” she said, before she timbered over to the left. Jemma caught her shoulder just in time to keep her from striking her head against the edge of a nightstand.

As Jemma reached for the door it opened and filled with an angry nurse. Jemma struck swiftly, pressing her thumb against the rounded end of the woman’s nose, turning her off. She dealt similarly with the two others clustered around their sister fallen in the hall. She stepped among the fallen bodies to get into Josh Swift’s room. He was asleep, but woke before she could touch him.

“You’re here!” he said, spastically uncovering himself. “I’ll be ready in a second.” He hunched over to stare at his limp penis, so small it was lost entirely under the bushy hair. “Come on, come on, come on!” he said to it. “She’s here!” But it would not rise. “Maybe you should touch it,” he said. She almost did. It almost seemed like the thing to do, to make a fine pincer of her thumb and forefinger and go questing for the grub in the alfalfa sprouts. She even started to do it, Josh watching her hand drifting through space and saying to her, “Finally, finally,” and to his penis, “Come on, you stupid!” But her hand changed course just before she touched him, rushing up, centimeters from his skin, over his belly and chest, hand spreading from pincer into claw to fasten around his throat. She dragged him from his bed and held him up before her. He was four foot two without the platform heels he wore when not in bed. He looked up at her, lust abated by fear, eyes full of extra innocence from his extra chromosome, his mouth agape.

What she did to him was not gentle. Healed by science or healed by Jemma, it hurt to get better, but this felt like murder. It wasn’t like with Musette, where her fire wrote on something blank. Here she was burning away a whole person, someone who died a little more completely as each cell gave up its extra copy of chromosome twenty-one. Josh’s old face screamed and twisted up in last fear even as his new face smiled and shouted for joy. She lifted him, or he grew on legs lengthened by fire, until she had to stand on her own toes to keep her hand at his neck. Her fingers slipped away as his neck thickened, and her hand slipped down his chest as it broadened and rose, until her fist was pressed into the hollow of his sternum. The other Josh was flying up in green embers, each fiery piece asking Jemma a different question: Why couldn’t you love me… What’s wrong with me… Why couldn’t you just put it in your mouth, just for a second, would that have been so difficult… you hardly would have noticed it.

Head full of fire, he opened his mouth to the ceiling as the clot in his brain burned out. He took in a gasping breath, then leaned his head forward and expelled it as swirling flame from his nose. Then the fire was gone, and they stood together in the bright moonlight. Jemma, fist still on his chest, looked at his body, at the too-big hands and feet, the thin layer of sweat that made him look as if he was glowing, the new penis, still not terribly big but no longer anything anybody would laugh at, standing almost flush against his belly. As she watched it formed a tiny ball of goo that jumped immediately to the floor, falling plumb on a shining line to strike between their feet. Josh raised his hands to his face. “What did you do?” he asked her.

“Figure it out,” Jemma said, and she was off again. Magnolia’s room was right next door. She was asleep in the middle of her plush menagerie, her arms wrapped around a monkey half her own size, whose boneless arms and legs were twisted around her neck and head and chest. Jemma stood for a moment watching her sleep, watched in turn by a dozen pair of lustrous glass eyes. The animals seemed to be clustered around her defensively. Jemma suffered a brief vision of the soft little bodies springing at her, and tearing ineffectually at her flesh with felt teeth. She had to move aside a seal pup and a pony to uncover Magnolia’s hands.

Perhaps because Magnolia never woke, this one seemed like the gentlest yet. The fire played out subtly along her skin, and as Jemma went into her to make the change only her hair stirred, unfolding from its carefully sculpted style (tonight it sat upon her head in a shape like a giant molar) to wave in its full length first to the left and then to the right, as slow and graceful as kelp. Jemma conceived the fix as an argument. For a period of time that could be measured only by the languid ticking of Magnolia’s hair, Jemma instructed a stubborn stem cell in the marrow of Magnolia’s hip on the proper synthesis of hemoglobin. Like this, she told it, holding up in her mind the lovely molecule, pointers of green fire indicating the place where the cell was doing wrong, and how to do it right. It wanted to know why like that, and not like it had always been done. It wanted to know who Jemma thought she was, barging into the marrow in the middle of the night to demand that the sun rise in the west instead of the east. As if in defiance, it squeezed out some faulty molecule. You’re killing her, Jemma said furiously. Her who? the cell asked. Who is she, and who are you?

I am… Jemma said. I am… Who was she? Who was she, to do these things, to declare a new order to the sick body? It was not a question profitably to be pursued, here in the middle of things. She crushed its stubborn will, the smallest violence she would do that evening, commandeering the machines of its molecular industry and churning out perfect hemoglobin in a swelling tide. See? she asked it. Now do you see?

Yes, it said, and it proclaimed the secret to its neighbor. But with that information it passed along also a hint of feeling, the sullen residue of wounded pride. Jemma tried to burn it out, afraid it would turn sweet Magnolia into a sulker who’d eschew the taste of delight to feed on habitual resentment. But it resisted her. Before the hair had ticked twice the residue had spread everywhere and declared itself to the greater Magnolia, the sleeping child who seemed to open an eye to its clamoring, then shrug and turn her attention from it, so it sank down somewhere into her, and was hidden. Then Jemma was distracted by the rest of the fix, unweaving the fibrosis of the dead pieces of lungs; inflating the nubbin spleen; revitalizing the infarcted areas in her knees and hips.

Jemma opened her eyes and let go of Magnolia’s hands. The girl lay still asleep, looking no different except in her hair, which was wilting to her pillow, where it lay in a stiff corona around her sighing head. Jemma put the seal pup and the pony back in their places, frowning. There was a residue in her, too, a grime of worry that she had put something wrong in the girl even as she made her right. But the worry sank away into hiding, also, and did not keep her at Magnolia’s side, where she might have spent the whole night trying to root out the maybe-imaginary flaw, and it did not keep her from continuing on to the next room.

No tumor withstood her. She proceeded down one side of the hall and up the other, stamping out osteosarcomas and Wilms’ tumors and rhabdos and neuroblastomas, all the proud, selfish flesh quivering and dying under her hands. She imagined repentance for some, last-minute declarations by the tumor that it would be good and retire back into the fold of normal tissue. Others were defiant to the end, sucking greedily at her fire, trying to overcome her with appetite, but they burned and popped like brittle insects. She left behind a trail of exhausted, healthy children and temporarily incapacitated parents. She left them all in their rooms, and yet they stayed with her in a way that made it feel as if she were being pushed along at the head of a tumbling pile of children. So when she came to Juan Fraggle’s room, the last on the floor, she stood for a moment with her cheek pressed hard against the door, feeling a marvelous pressure on her neck and back and thighs. She pushed back and kicked the door open, making a gunslinger entrance because she was sure she’d have to take out his whole extended family before she could get to him, and wondering if she could get them all before somebody clubbed her with a bedpan. She leaped into the room, hands up and fingers pointed. The family was clustered around the bed, bodies three-deep in some places. Nobody tried to brain her. They all just looked at her calmly. “We know what you are doing,” the boy’s mother said, and they began to move aside, opening a short little corridor to the patient.

“Don’t hurt him!” one of the little cousins called out as Jemma rushed down the corridor, afraid probably because of the fierce, awful expression on Jemma’s face; she did not look like she was bringing something good. Juan shrank back in his bed as she came to him, colliding with the bed rail, throwing up her hands and bringing them down on his bony chest in a single note of applause. Fire flew up from the place she struck, as if splashed from a puddle. Someone, not Jemma and not Juan, screamed, but Jemma hardly heard. She made a pass over him, from head to toe, burning out the fungus hidden in little balls in his liver and brain, and pinching out the malevolent white-cell clones that sought to flee from her in his swiftly moving blood. Her fingers curled on his chest, clutching at the thin muscle and making bruises that vanished and were made anew, and vanished and were made anew. She sank into his bones, and burned them so hot he seemed lit from within. Now he did scream. The wicked clusters of cells perished in fire, leaving his marrow empty and barren, but she called new cells out of the barrenness, calling and calling to them with the purest desire she had ever felt — she’d wanted Rob and she’d wanted her very own handsome midshipman and she’d wanted her parents to be alive again and wanted Calvin back but she’d never wanted anything like she suddenly wanted this — until they came, bursting suddenly and violently into her perception like a load of sequins fired from a cannon. She puffed up his wasted flesh. His sunken chest rose under her bruising fingers like a miraculously restored soufflé, and his bald head sprouted hair that grew in a cloud into the most astounding afro she’d ever seen on any boy.

She slipped through gaps in the closing family, and left them huddled around the bed, Juan’s muffled cries fading as soon as she was beyond the door. People had gone ahead of her to the seventh floor, to proclaim for or against her coming. There was no hope now of sneaking. She was spotted as soon as she came out of the stairwell. A bulky nurse came lumbering down the hall at her. Jemma raised her hands, sure she’d be crushed by the abundant flesh when she turned her off. But the nurse stopped whole yards away and waved her forward, and said, “Hurry up, we’ve got one coding.” Jemma followed her, the nurse pumping her arms at her sides and huffing in good imitation of a locomotive. She looked over her shoulder at Jemma and called back, “What part of hurry up did you not understand?” Jemma tried to hurry, her gait unsettled by the churning fire in her, considering how even super powers could not protect you from being ordered around by nurses.

It was a bloody code. A liver-transplant kid Jemma recognized from in-and-out stays in the PICU lay on her bed, bleeding from her mouth and nose and eyes. Emma, on emergency loan from the unit, was doing chest compressions on her while another nurse bagged her through an ET tube. With every compression a little more blood would seep out. To Jemma it seemed so obviously not the way to save her life.

“Where’s the fucking FFP?” Emma asked, not looking up.

“She doesn’t need it,” Jemma said, raising her hands and taking a few unsteady, jiving steps toward the bed.

“Are you crazy?” Emma asked, and then noticed who had spoken. She opened her mouth in surprise, but kept compressing ever more vigorously. Jemma felt but did not hear the cracking of the girl’s ribs. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Emma said flatly. One of the cracked ribs was scraping the pleura of the girl’s lung, putting a feeling in Jemma that was no easier to abide than the noise of nails on a blackboard. When Emma stopped compressions it was a relief. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said.

I’m not, Jemma wanted to say, but as she approached the bed she found she could not talk at all. Her head fell back on her shoulders, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, and she moaned, overwhelmed with the green fire, which was stirring in her belly now like the worst nausea. She didn’t need to see the girl to find her; her illness was blazing, bright and wrong — it grabbed her, it commanded her. Jemma fell the last foot or so, her hands fastening just above and below the girl’s left hip as she landed on her knees beside the bed. Jemma’s mouth opened on its own, wider and wider until the fire came out, preceded by a bass, vibrating urp, a sound she had never made and did not know she could make.

It went up in a green fountain, broke against the ceiling, and came down, not like rain, but like a falling river, sweeping Emma and the nurse aside. The fire burned more violently than before — Jemma saw the ambu bag swinging wildly back and forth at the end of the ET tube before the tape on the girl’s upper lip curled up like a waxed mustache and the whole apparatus flew from her mouth to bonk Emma on the head, making a pain that registered in Jemma’s head as a dull blip — but it burned silently, and where Jemma knelt it was very quiet. Inside the girl it was very quiet, too, the silent aftermath of a final argument between the girl and the visiting liver, which Jemma understood, as soon as she touched her, she had rejected as utterly as an unsuitable lover. Jemma found herself arguing with the rest of the body, advocating for the liver, extolling its many virtues (and hadn’t the liver always been her favorite organ, the bright maroon spot in the dreary semesters of anatomy, physiology, and pathology?) and arguing that the body should take it back. She imagined herself in pajamas and pigtails, sitting in a room whose walls still held a few posters of kittens in baskets, where not all the stuffed animals had been banished under the bed to nestle against the pornography and the marijuana tin, where the panties of innocence and experience lay twisted together in the dresser drawer. She imagined herself sitting on the bed next to the body, dabbing now and then at the bleeding eyes with the tail of a stuffed tiger. He’s just so great, she said, meaning the liver. You guys belong together, really. He’s really good for you, and you’re really good for him. Everybody was talking about you two, about how well you went together. People were talking about homecoming. She went on, extolling his handsome, unique vasculature, his capacity to store glycogen, the marvelous complexity of his cytochrome p oxygenase system. The praise fell on uncaring ears. Jemma herself was not entirely convinced, liver lover though she was. She had argued with similar half-heartedness, years ago, in bedrooms similarly reflective of liberation and corruption, for the sake of unworthy boyfriends who had wanted another chance. And she had listened to similar arguments made by others on behalf of her first lover, and caved to them not believing them. This girl was made of sterner stuff than she; her mute rejection ended up convincing Jemma, so she turned to the afflicted liver, suffering almost to death under the lashing fury of the girl’s immune cells, and said, Who do you think you are, anyway? Have you no shame, sir?

Holding the poor thing in her mind, she understood what she must do: not convince the body that it must accept the unacceptable, but redeem the insufficient, wrong thing. Boyfriends could never be changed, only exchanged, but this liver was hers to remake. She gave it a shake, as if to say, Shape up, and it did. It put off weary failure and became strong and quite literally new — she burned off its old surface proteins and sugars and copied new ones off of the neighboring cells of the body. Intrepid T cells suddenly realized they were doing wrong, like someone who wakes from a dream of rage to realize they are punching their mother in the face. They gave up their work of destruction and slipped sheepishly into the bloodstream. With the liver jumping in her mind like a little shepherd dog, Jemma fixed the girl. The liver made clotting factors that Jemma multiplied by ten, one hundred, and one thousand, and rushed them in streams to all the bleeding places. It seemed to make a noise, like a grunt, as it tried to raise the oncotic pressure in the girl’s blood, to suck back the fluid that had given her a swishing, beach-ball belly. Jemma helped, and the belly collapsed. The girl arched in her bed as the fire raged in and out of her, burning the yellow out of her skin and eyes, unstitching the scars from her belly.

The fire contained inside her once again, Jemma felt seasick. Closing her eyes made it better, but then she could only walk into the wall. The big nurse took her hand and led her to the next room, and Jemma discovered that it was nice to have a helper in this enterprise she had thought would be solitary. Irene was the nurse’s name. Jemma had known it, but did not remember until their hands met. She was a smoking nurse, with a little emphysema, which Jemma took care of in the hall — she was so full of fire that she could not imagine that she couldn’t spare some for her helper, and in fact the only part of her that was weary was the part that could have held back — and a lazy thyroid, which Jemma infused with vigor as they approached the next patient, an infant recovering from a bilateral enucleation for retinoblastoma. Jemma opened her eyes on his eyeless face, and looked deep into his empty sockets. She saw his eyes rolling toward her from a great distance, two perfect white stones approaching bigger and bigger from the horizon. At last, greased with fire, they were rolling stationary in his head, and when they stopped, perfect clear blue matched and lined up with perfect clear blue, she half expected candy or quarters to come pouring from his mouth.

There was a double trio of craniosynostoses: two Crouzon’s, two Pfeiffer’s, and two Panda syndromes. Jemma wrapped each head in bandages of green fire, which muffled the screams of the children as their bones split apart and shifted, and their heads molded out of their Quasimoto shapes. Brains and minds constrained by the misshapen skulls sprang suddenly free of idiocy. There were a few other children stuck partway through a series of surgeries now never to be completed by dead genius hands, like a three-year-old boy born as jawless as an ancient fish, who’d been temporized with a strange, bony handle like the stiff beard of Tutankhamen — as Jemma fixed him a dozen chins surfaced and sank in her mind, collected on account of a relatively innocent fetish, staring at stranger boys in classrooms and supermarkets and wanting to bite their chins. For these few patients Jemma completed additions, but for most of the children on the seventh floor she replaced deletions. To a thirteen-year-old girl with a half a lung taken away on account of a carcinoid tumor Jemma restored tissue that shined swan white and billowed like curtains. She returned the gut of a three-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old who’d gladly suffered a gastric bypass then nearly died when a partially digested burrito leaked past loose staples into her abdomen. It made for a strange sort of barbecue, cooking that fat in green fire. It sizzled but did not smoke, sublimating into fire, not air, that turned and helped consume what it had just been. She confined herself in the two-chambered hearts of the cardiac kids, imagining new doors, and opening them onto new rooms. Why only four chambers, she asked herself as she worked, because she could just as easily imagine six, eight, ten, and twelve chambers, super-hearts with more room for blood and more room for love, but she restrained herself, though it was a little unsatisfying to construct a merely normal heart.

By the time she had finished on that floor she was burning worse than ever. She could not swallow the fire again, or put it away, and it almost blinded her usual senses. Irene escorted her down to the next level, sensibly deciding to take the elevator. When it opened the chime seemed a gong to Jemma. It unsteadied her and rang in her teeth. A crowd, all curious and mostly friendly, was waiting for her. “Anybody coding?” asked Irene.

Nobody was coding, but Ella Thims was infected again. Jemma was led to her, and she glimpsed her before she touched her, lying in her crib, naked but for her ostomy bags, staring up at a motionless mobile and emitting her septic cry. Jemma picked her up, holding her over her shoulder, as if to comfort her, though she knew what she was about to do would not be comfortable. At the first pat on the girl’s back, the fire struck, and sank in. Ella screamed, her usual septic complaint breaking apart as she voiced it into something more ordinary but just as loud. The ostomy bags burst as their contents boiled, and the plastic melted and blew away among the observers like shreds of tangible smoke. There was much to make right in her. Jemma tried to go system by system, but found she could not restrain herself, and could not be tidy about her work.

Jemma rolled her up, undoing the bastard corrections of the surgeons. The ostomies closed as her ureter and gut sprang elastically back into her belly, and she rolled up worse than she’d ever been before she was born, legs and pelvis folding over each other until she was half child and half ho ho. It was not a comfortable state, but Ella was too shocked to breathe, let alone scream, and she hung that way not even for a whole second before she sprang straight again, exchanging regression for progression, unrolling into a whole girl. Jemma dropped her, but her fall was slowed by a net of fire that extinguished as her feet hit the floor. She jumped and screamed, and stuck her bottom out at the crowd, bending over so everyone could witness the creation of her anus. A tiny green mouth opened in the blank space, then belched forth a cyclone of flame that Ella, shaking her ass now in what looked less like pain than a dance of exultation, fanned over the whole room, so the observers threw up their hands and ducked their heads, and felt surprise at the coolness of the fire.

In Tiresias Dufresne’s room she and Irene got a surprise. Just past the door, Irene was shoved back as Jemma was pulled into the room, falling on her hands and knees. The door slammed and was blocked with a dresser that struck Jemma’s shoulder as it was pushed over the carpet. When Jemma stood up Tiresias’s mother struck her in the face, again and again, no ladylike slaps but full fist punches, right and left and right again, Jemma’s chin pointing this way and that, and fire flying from her mouth to hang on the unliving walls and die there. She hardly felt the punches — for all their strength it felt like being slapped with a heavy pillow, and she could barely see the fists flying at her. What she saw very clearly was the lady’s grotesquely dilated heart. It seemed to hang in the air, shining from within a giant body made of shadow. It was ailing, and it cried out to its proprietor and to Jemma, saying, Stop, stop. Jemma could feel the coronaries closing and closing, and hear the heart’s desperate shrieks as they rose and rose. It was really rather a meek heart, she thought, unsuited for residence in a fearless glorious bitch. Jemma could not tell if she was asking a question or making an accusation, she only heard the words, over and over: “Would you take away my baby, take my baby!” The heart shrieked so high it seemed to be singing, and then it began to warble as its steady fast rhythm degraded into fibrillation. The lady managed one more punch before she finally clutched her chest and fell forward, carrying Jemma with her to the floor.

She might have crushed her, but before her great weight could settle on Jemma’s chest she rose up on a pillar of green fire. She struggled at the ceiling, shouting and cursing, and wriggling in exact imitation of her fibrillating heart. It was a pleasant way to strike back, Jemma thought, at those who assailed you — with cruel healing fire, causing the worst pain and giving a sweet gift. Jemma touched her everywhere, because she was everywhere ravaged, and she fell back to the carpet a well woman. Jemma rolled aside just in time, and rose unsteadily, crawling up the side of Tir’s bed, as his mother lay on the floor, keeping very still for somebody sobbing so loud. Tir himself was easy to make right. His mind was already reaching and reaching — all his life he’d been reaching for it — for the body that was just beyond its grasp. Jemma merely kicked him into his own reach. He sprang from bed and stripped off his clothes, white flannel pajamas crawling with grinning monkeys, then jumped up and down on them where he’d thrown them in a pile. After half a minute of it he stopped, breathing heavily, and looked up at Jemma. “I hate those fucking pajamas,” he said. The dresser finally fell over, just missing Tir’s mother’s leg, and witnesses poured into the room. Jemma was aware of Tir kneeling down to poke at his mother’s shoulder with his finger before the fire obscured her vision again.

They had another surprise, more pleasant, in Cindy Flemm’s room. “She’s seizing!” someone cried behind Jemma, as the expanding sliver of light from the door fell over her trembling legs. But she was not seizing. Moving up, the light caught Wayne the fat CFer crouched between her thighs, his hair dripping, and his round shoulders shining with sweat. It was charming, Jemma thought, how they took so long to notice they were being observed. The curtain of fire was opening and closing and opening. Jemma saw them look over at the crowd in the door. They did not spring apart, but very calmly began to untie the hopeless tangles of their IV tubing.

“Get off me!” Cindy said, when Jemma had rushed them, her hands skidding on their slick flesh.

“I can’t move!” said Wayne, thinking she was talking to him. It was strange, but not particularly difficult, to do two at once. The fire and her mind split into distinct streams, one for Cindy, one for Wayne. Jemma considered, because they were still connected, how she could weave them into a single, fantastic creature, something that finally could be self-loving but not selfish, a whole world sufficient unto itself. But she restrained herself again, and with one half of her mind stretched new gut like taffy for Cindy while the other stretched itself over Wayne’s every cell, to instruct them in the proper regulation of transmembrane chloride concentrations. They were already screaming, and rushing fire cascading from the bed to the ceiling hid them, so no one but Jemma noticed that they punctuated their rehabilitation with a tremendous orgasm. Jemma, embarrassed, felt as if she were conducting the thing, though it was not anything that proceeded from her. She took her hands away from them, sharing for a moment their sensation of falling, and retired back into the arms of another guide.

Jeri Vega’s mother was the only one to actually hand over her child to Jemma. She was waiting in the door of their room, staring impatiently down the hall. “Finally!” she said, when Jemma came to the room, and shoved Jeri into her arms. Jeri, not her usual calm, glaring self, was crying, and she only cried louder as Jemma burned her. Her giant, fibrotic liver receded over her guts, and settled, small and soft, underneath her ribs. Jemma, used now to instructing recalcitrant livers, undid the enzyme defect within a single pass of her attention. The hair on Jeri’s back and legs and shoulders all stood up straight against the fire. When Jemma gave her a single, rough shake it all detached, and floated gently to the floor. Jemma bent a thought at her single eyebrow, seeking to divide it, but it resisted her. She only succeeded in making it look a little less sinister.

The rest of the floor went by very quickly, for all that each fix seemed to go on forever; when Jemma was touching a child, she felt like she had always been burning them, and like she would always be burning them. But really each one took less time, perhaps because Jemma was getting better at what she did, and her imagination, become lithe in the fire, was quick to construct paradigms of healing individual to each illness. A little Russell-Silver dwarf, eight months old but only as big as a duck-pin bowling ball, was the last on the sixth floor. Jemma played a game, tossing her back and forth from hand to hand, and with each toss she got a little bigger, until it was a great chore to heave her the short distance from hand to hand, and then she was merely holding her in one hand, then the other, and finally her hand was trapped under the plump new bottom.

On the fifth floor the doors of the PICU were closed against her. At the head of a big crowd now, she kicked clumsily at them.

“Who’s there?” someone asked.

“The fucking candyman,” said Emma, who was bearing Jemma up now. “Who do you think?”

“We’ve decided not to let her in.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“These kids are really sick. You can’t just come in here and mess with them. You can’t just…” The muted noise of a scuffle came through the doors, and then they parted, revealing Rob Dickens.

“Sorry,” he said. He took Jemma from Emma, and led her into the unit. Through gaps in the curtain blowing in her head she could see nurses and doctors and parents restraining each other. Janie was holding Maggie by her arms. Maggie didn’t struggle, but she scowled and said, “You’re all going to be very sorry!”

“Take me to Jarvis,” she whispered to Rob.

“He’s pretty stable,” he said. “There’s…”

“Him first!” she said, so he took her. The boy’s feet were sticking out from beneath his sheet, covered with fuzzy hospital socks. Jemma removed them and took his big toes in either hand. Except for the ventilator-driven movement of his chest, he was totally still. It seemed like a crude operation, what she did, stuffing with fire-fingers the portions of his herniated brain back up into his skull, no more elegant than pushing the stuffing back into a broken pillow. But it worked, and when she stroked his hot swollen brain it shrank down. She perceived the lost neurons popping back into life as lights coming on in a city seen from a distance. An exhortation to his pancreas, a stoking of its nostalgia for the lost beta cells, called them so vividly into memory that it required only a nudge of flame to make them real. They released such a triumphant chorus of insulin that Jemma found herself groping after his plummeting blood sugar, grasping and raising it just in time to spare him a seizure. He began to wake, bucking against the ventilator until Rob pulled the tube. Jemma considered his perfectly healthy body and was unsatisfied, because there was still a wrong thing in him, a shadow on his brain cast by a past horror. It mocked her when she tried to touch it and lift it, and when she sought to know what it was she could only see it as an obscure shape, like a monster under a blanket. She could not burn it out, or undo the past, but she imagined that she straightened out some of the places in the boy’s brain that went crooked under the shadow. It all failed to make him more friendly. He sat up, drew his fist across his mouth, looked around at the crowd around the bed, and launched a right hook at Jemma’s face. The punch was wide. When he tried again, Emma sat on him. Jemma left the two of them bucking on his bed and turned away, hooking herself to Rob’s arm again.

She was feeling more and more tired now, but mightier and mightier. Here in the sicker regions of the hospital, her power seemed to grow. To the murmur and thrill of primary pulmonary hypertension she said hush, and they grew still. The mushy brains of the meningitic grew firm and springy at the touch of her mind. Every species of shock, cardiogenic, neurogenic, septic, anaphylactic, she calmed. It got so she did not even have to touch them to make them well. Flame bridged the distance between her fingers and their skin, and it was over in moments. She held her hand over Marcus Guzman’s face. He had been stable on the LVAD since she touched him. In her imagination he was a big piece of rotten meat, but she called a boy out of it. He came clawing up, tearing with his teeth at the back rot and the gray gristle, squirming free, maggot-boy, a fire lit in the center of the next bloody flower to rise from his mouth. I’m back! he shouted in her head, whole and alive in her mind and in the world.

The few adults who were still struggling against their captors had barely broken free before she had finished. “Take me downstairs,” she said to Rob. They slipped away in the confusion generated by the waking children, who would not stay in bed, upsetting IV poles and tugging on wires.

She leaned heavily on Rob as they passed into the NICU, recalling the night of the storm, when she and he had passed hand in hand through the same doors into the drama of a universal desaturation. The bays were similarly chaotic now, partly because the babies were upset and misbehaving again, and partly in anticipation of Jemma’s arrival. They went to the nearest baby before anybody marked them, a former twenty-four-weeker born the night before the storm. He was still small at thirty-three weeks, and missing most of his gut from a bout of NEC, and possessed of a bad brain on account of a head bleed, and his lungs were ruined from prolonged intubation. Jemma fixed his head and his lungs and his gut, spinning it out in her mind like a little thread of yarn. Then she picked him up, unsticking his monitors and setting off the klaxons. That got everybody’s attention. Every adult in the bay turned to look at her just as she was holding the baby up, and they all saw it ripen and swell in her hands to the size of a proper three-month-old. It shrieked in pain, and then, as the fire passed, in hunger.

She inflated other preemies, enough to decorate a birthday party, it seemed, and she imagined them strung together in a squirming, drooling arch. She moved through the NICU, leaving fat three-, four-, and five-month-olds in her wake, babies whose shoulders squeaked against the side of their plasticine bassinets as she lay them back down. She noticed now, and wondered how it could have escaped her before, that the sicker and more complicated babies were gathered around the King’s Daughter, as if she had called them to her, or complicated their illnesses by proximity. So in the far bays, at her outermost periphery, were the feeders and growers, the former preemies who had escaped brain damage and sepsis and even intubation. Closer in were the babies with an isolated event, one bad night, a little head bleed, a plunge in and out of sepsis, a lung that collapsed and reopened as if it were trying to wink. In the next circle: two or three small events, or one big one — a bigger bleed, a chest tube, another NEC. Still, these babies had made better recoveries than those who were one step closer to Brenda, babies missing gut, or with lungs jackhammered into shoe leather by the pounding of the ventilators, or bleeds that wiped out the whole brain.

Jemma went back and forth among these rings of acuteness, passing closer to Brenda and then farther from her. She could hear the murmurs of the spectators as clearly and remotely as the buzzing of a mosquito; they asked each other what she was doing when she shuffled with Rob into one bay to lay hands on one or two patients before leaving for another bay, then coming back a few moments later. Jemma did not know herself what she was doing, or who was declaring this order, but she understood that she must touch Brenda last, and she perceived her as the greatest wrong, the densest wrong; it did not surprise her that all the lesser wrongness should be drawn to her in imperfect circles. It seemed to Jemma a form of praise, how they submitted themselves to her in orbit.

She’d dart, in her slow, blind, guided way, into Brenda’s bay and fix one on the periphery: the baby with leprechaunism, small, hairy, with pointy ears that Jemma tapped with her finger into a round shape. An anencephalic that would have been let to die in the old world; here it was treasured and trapped with the respirator and a hanging tangle of inotropes. Green fire spilled like long hair from the back of its open head. Its pointy black eyes collapsed in their sockets and grew back as orbs of flame that preserved, when they’d cooled, the color of Jemma’s fire. Two conjoined twins, whom Dolores and Dr. Walnut had not dared touch because they shared a bowel and a liver, Jemma separated as easy as the halves of a cream cookie, with the same simultaneous clockwise and counterclockwise twist of the wrists that she’d practiced a thousand times as a child. And, almost finally, she fixed an awful Harlequin Fetus, who’d toddled precociously through the nightmares of generations of medical students. Jemma had stared obsessively at the pictures in her embryology book, fascinated by the horny skin gashed with deep fissures, so the child seemed to be wearing a costume of continents, and by the eyes, twin bulging black puddings. Jemma was fascinated and repelled by the skin, compelled to touch it more often than was probably good for her or for the patient. Rubbing your cheek against him was like rubbing it against a tree. Jemma lifted him with both hands, pulling him out of his isolette, pulling him free of his monitoring leads and of the precious PICC that was his only access. She looked for a moment into his big eyes, as black and lusterless as the eyes of a crab, and then gave him a gentle shake. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to shake a baby, no matter how they were so eminently shakable, or how much you wanted to do it, to silence their endless complaint. So one of the more sensitive spectators gasped at the first shake. Others, less delicate of sensibility, shouted as Jemma shook the baby harder and harder, its head lolling on its limp neck, but the arms and legs barely moving on joints that behaved like they were immobilized by leather casts. The little brain sloshed in the skull, relieved by fire of injuries as they were sustained. Fire shone from the crevices between the plates of skin, and jumped up in eruptions as Jemma shook. The baby seemed to be making a joyful noise as she shook it, and she found herself falling into a rhythm — cha cha cha—when the skin came flying away in rough, heavy pieces. There was warm, soft skin underneath. The puddings swelled and popped, revealing a pair of hazel eyes. Jemma put the steaming baby down and turned away. She took a deep breath and held it, treasuring the ordinary air in her lungs like the finest marijuana vapor, and looked out over the unit. Every nurse, physician, and parent of the NICU was crowded into the middle bay, some of them holding well children, all of them staring at her. A crowd pushed gently and fearfully from the door, making ripples of pressure that pushed the nearest observers out of line toward Jemma, people who stepped back again as soon as they came forward. Jemma let out her breath and reached beside her for Rob, her hand closing on the square bulk of his shoulder. She did not lean on him, but tipped forward instead, saving herself from falling by taking a few clumsy steps. She stopped, stood straight, then did it again. In this way she traveled to the center of the room, through the parting crowd, until she stood before the little dais where Brenda was raised in her isolette. She looked up the steps — there seemed to be a few more now than she remembered — and paused, feeling suddenly depressed and intimidated, the exultation in her soul collapsing suddenly away somewhere inside of her, folding, brilliant and shining, into an encompassing darkness. She’d had this feeling before, standing before dawn in front of the hospital, feeling like it was going to tip over and crush her, not wanting to enter but knowing that she must.

Rob walked up against her, and put his arms around her, and gave her a fortifying squeeze. “Just one more,” he said. “You can do it.” She stumbled on the first step. He failed to catch her when she fell, though his hands grabbed at her. She climbed the steps with both hands and feet, like a child. She raised herself up at the top, hands pulling on the frame of the isolette as she pushed with her feet, tipping the whole device a little, so the baby rolled inside, and Jemma came face to face with her through the plastic wall. As Jemma stood the black aniridic eyes held her own. They seemed to suck at her; Jemma thought she could feel something passing out of her own eyes and traveling the line of her sight to disappear into the baby’s, and she could not name what was being drawn out of her. Jemma gave a little cry of distress, the first she’d uttered that night.

“Are you all right?” Rob asked behind her.

“Open it up,” Jemma said to him quietly. He flipped the latches at each end of the box, and the plastic wall fell open. When he pressed a button the baby emerged automatically, born on a broad tongue of plastic. Still holding Jemma’s eyes, the baby lifted a hand and brought it over her body to point squarely at Jemma. Close to her, and with the baby lying in the open air, Jemma could finally see that she was pointing squarely at her belly. Jemma reached out and took the seven-fingered hand. Brenda grasped hers and brought it to her mouth.

The fire came, a trickle at first, then a flood, and then a torrent. Jemma felt like the child was executing an operation on her, not the other way around. Brenda sucked so hard on her finger that it ached, and the way the fire raced up her spine and down her arm made her feel like the child was consuming her very essence. The obvious things were relatively easy to fix: extra fingers dropped off and got lost in the blankets; the rabbit mouth fused and pursed; the teratoma pinched away and rolled off the platform, making a noise as it fell like a balloon full of oil and marbles. The deeper wrongness: heterotaxy; the double-outlet right ventricle; the sequestered bits of lung, the blood infection and the endocarditis; the chromosomal microdeletions; all yielded with scarcely more effort. But the deepest wrong, something even Jemma’s deep sight could not properly delineate or describe, but only sense, was different. Trying to scorch it was like trying to light a wet sponge with a warm rock. Jemma would have failed if the child had not revealed to her, with her greedy sucking, that there were reserves of fire she had not tapped for any of the other children. Even as Jemma was drained she was filled again, brighter and hotter, until no one could look at her, and Rob, pushed back, had to crouch halfway down the steps. Jemma thought she felt her baby touch on the inside of her belly as wave after wave of fire washed from her and into the mouth of the child before her. At the end she had become angry — she did not know if it was at the child or the wrongness in it, and she was cursing roundly at the top of her lungs, all sorts of obscenity and nastiness leaping from her mouth. She fell to her knees again, furious and weak, pulling the child, still attached to her finger, on top of her. Jemma found herself wanting both to preserve the child and destroy the unnamable thing inside it. It occurred to her that she must look like she was wrestling with a rabbit or a teddy bear.

The struggle ended suddenly, after Jemma had thrown her rage and fire-subsidized will at the unnamable in an attack so vicious and huge she knew it must be the last and best she could do, and she imagined herself dashing the child against a stone in her mind, releasing another child, a well child, the monster’s flawless twin, the longed-for image of its unruined self made real. Jemma opened her eyes on the baby’s, so close that their lashes were touching. The child opened her mouth and Jemma’s finger, the skin all pruny now, slipped out. Brenda took a few deep, huffing breaths, and began to cry.

Jemma came down the steps with the child in her arms. Rob stood up as she reached him. “All done,” he said.

“Almost,” Jemma said. She looked over the crowd, conscious of all the reciprocating stares — Emma and Dr. Tiller and Monserrat and Janie and Vivian and John Grampus and Father Jane — and she finally appreciated how huge a crowd she’d been drawing along behind her. Exhausted but still vigorous — only the fire was bearing her up but it did a better job than her ordinary will ever had — she looked over their heads or past their faces, searching for Pickie Beecher. In the newly harrowed hospital, he stood out more plainly in her mind, a beacon of wrongness. She knew he was in the room, but not where, until she saw a glint near the door, the red and blue light of the monitors reflecting off his shiny bald head. She passed the baby to Rob and went in pursuit. Outside the bay she saw him passing through the main door. She called out, “Stop!”

“You can’t catch me!” he said. “You can’t touch me!” He paused a moment longer to taunt her, leaping in the air and clicking his heels together, then turned and fled. He was quite fast, and Jemma certainly would not have caught him if he had not looked back to stick out his tongue. So he ran headlong into Ishmael’s knees, who stepped out of a corridor just in time to impede him. Pickie bounced off the big man and fell back flat on his back. Jemma was on him before he could get up.

Jemma thought it would be easy. With such obvious wrong under her hand, and all her deep reserves available to her, she was sure she could burn this boy’s brain clean quicker than a good spanking might take. Maybe the healing would take the form of a spanking—take that you crazy little bastard! But when she tried to fix him, her fire turned back on her, burning through her skin and into her blood — she swore she heard her baby cry out with her in pain. She caught sight of Pickie again and again, where he lay under her, as a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were forced together against the cuts, so they made a nonsense picture and a shape as random as spilled liquid; as a doll, a construction of grief, a mechanical boy who missed his brother with the untiring efficiency of a machine; as an abomination, a dripping boy-shaped clot rising to life in a dark room. At the touch of him against her mind she was overcome with nausea, and rolled off him, retching and dizzy. He stood up above her, giving her an offended look. “Not me,” he said. He turned and walked casually away, past Ishmael, who was sitting on the carpet rubbing his bruised knee, but another Pickie remained in his place, an imaginary Pickie even paler than the first, whose open mouth vomited streams of blood over Jemma’s whole body. It pressed between her lips. At the taste of it she fell again, lost under waves of nausea and blackness and fire that dimmed and dimmed with every agitated breath she took, until it was extinguished.