The ceiling fan above my bed turned with a lazy rotation, casting an uneven patchwork of shadows on Kara's bare skin as she stretched cat-like against the sheets. I'd left the window ajar—to catch the distant thrum of the city's 3 a.m. heartbeat, but not so much that the sensation of her thigh pressing against mine under a mess of sheets would be altered. Her fingers made idle loops on my sternum, her nails just catching with a spark when I took a ragged breath in. "You're thinking too loudly," she whispered against my collarbone, her warm breath against my skin, which was still damp from my showers a half-hour prior.
That is when the air rent itself three inches above my nose with a sound like a zipper being torn apart too quickly. A miniature bowler hat came first, followed by Mxy's reversed face, grin spreading farther than it ever ought. "Klyzyzk Klzntplkz," he warbled, syllables dripping with the same level of glee that preceded a city block melting into a strand of taffy every other time he appeared. Kara tensed, but I just groaned and flipped a pillow over her head before she reduced the unsuspecting imp to a cloud of cosmic dust out of sheer principle.
The Fifth Dimension reeked of burnt sugar and static, a location where gravity was a guideline rather than a law. Mxy appeared with a fluid movement, sitting cross-legged in a neon green armchair that wasn't there a moment before, tapping a foot against empty space. "You," he pointed a wagging finger at me, "are rattling the fabric of timelines with the glee of a toddler trampling melted wax." Behind him, the very fibers of reality itself throbbed with the rhythm of his annoyance, amoeba-like bursts of color compressing with the sickly glow of a developing migraine headache. I crossed my arms—not in defense, but just for the sensation of Kryptonian fibers against my skin, a reality I wanted, rather than something fluid and abstract.
Kara relocated under the pillow, her burr resonating against the mattress. Mxy's smile hardened into a blade-sharp edge. "Ahhh, but what's a little chaos among cousins?" he whispered, wiggling eyebrows undergoing a fleeting transformation into chrysalis-like caterpillars. I didn't deign to answer, simply waved a dismissive finger to rewind Mxy's bow tie into a pretzel shape.
A blur of heat radiated from behind him, a sound akin to a hot knife piercing ripe peaches accompanying the separation of the air itself. Ms. Gsptlsnz's high heel led the procession, followed by legs which ignored the constraints of Euclidian geometry, her figure bending space-time around herself much as gravity warps the trajectory of light by massive objects. "Boys," she sighed, and the single syllable held the impact of a black hole's suction.
Mxy went limp, his bowler hat sagging over one eye like a penitent dog. Ms. Gsptlsnz moved fully into the bedroom—not so much into the bedroom as the bedroom adjusting itself to her existence, its walls expanding and contracting to let her in.
She touched one perfect nail against my forehead, and I found myself fourteen again, with ramen noodles and a college ID that never existed in this reality bobbing up in my mind. "You miss what it's like to have the weight of mortality," she said, a gentle smile twisting her face, with Kara thrashing out underneath us, her nails sunk so deep into the sheets Kevlar would unravel. "But darling, you're not playing house. You're juggling supernovas."
I swung my jaw open—to dispute, to dodge—but a laugh bubbled out instead from Mxy, and his voice usurped control of my vocal cords mid-sentence. "Oh-ho! The kid believes because a silver-suited telepath fluttered her lashes at him, he had the right to repurpose Legionian protocols of romance?" The words resonated strangely, echoing through realms; I clenched my molars, trying to shake the sensation out of my teeth. Ms. Gsptlsnz shook her head (actually, her eyes rolled a full 360 degrees) and snap her fingers together twice.
"You're right," I confessed, belatedly, pressing my sternum, where Kara's heartbeat pulsed against my skin. "I was greedy. Wanted to see if I could catch a glint of being human, even for a night." The words quivered in the air, a live wire singing with energy.
Mxy's smile relaxed its corners, growing almost fatherly—and this was worse, somehow, than the teasing. Ms. Gsptlsnz cupped my face in her hands, and for an instant, she showed me what she saw: me, a godling trying on a mortal skin for a costume party, holding on tight to a reality that wasn't mine in the first place. And they were suddenly gone—not a wisp of smoke, no rent in the fabric of space itself, just a sudden lack where a presence had been, a kind of vacuum pressure manifest in a hiss of released breath.
Kara yanked the pillow from her head, her eyes fixed on the empty space looming above us. "That pesky little gremlin has some nerve—" She caught herself, her nose flaring as she detected the lingering trace of fifth-dimensional energy on my skin. Her scowl turned sulky, her grip on my wrist tightening. "Nathan, why do you smell of guilt and burnt sugar?"
I turned onto my side, my mouth brushing the ridge of her cheekbone where the sweat glistened. "That's because Mxy's fragrance budget outmaches his common sense," I whispered, but she wasn't having it—not with her palms pressed against my chest, her fingers tracing the rhythm of my pulse in Morse code. I let out a breath through my nose, timing the ceiling fan cycles until the silence hardened into points.
"I'm fine," I lied, my words gritty even against my tongue. The fan's shadow carved an uneven path over her collarbone, tracing tension ridges on her jawline.
***
The scent of moist soil and adolescent sweat filled the greenhouse, thirty-two sophomores packed tightly between rows of hydroponic lettuce and my off-the-cuff lecture on nitrogen-fixation bacteria.
I held a Petri dish in one palm, observing Carlos Mendez's eyes bug out as the genetically modified rhizobia radiated a bright blue glow in response to UV lighting. "So when I say legumes cheat," I whispered, agitating the culture so it throbbed with a faint radial pulse, "they've actually evolved a strategy with aliens."
A hush fell over the sophomores, and two girls in the back began frantically scribbling notes. It's surprisingly simple to hold a classroom's attention if your lecture outline includes Martian topsoil and Kryptonian composting methods.
Blocks downtown, Kara would be churning out burnt toast in my apartment once more—the piercing shriek of the smoke alarm already resonating against my eardrums at 1/16th standard playback speed. I let the waves wash over me, closing my ears against the sound much as Amina Rodriguez asked about the possibility of interfacing with the Tower of Babel's biotech via soybean roots.
A shiver ran up my spine. Batman wasn't wrong about my employment with children, of course—with regard to teaching, I was the only one who could make photosynthesis feel like a conspiracy theory.
"Depends," I told Amina Rodriguez, who was centered among a kaleidoscope of theoretical discussion, her words punctuated by my classmates' excited murmurs, "are we speaking of the original tale, circa Genesis? Or Luthor's appropriation of the nanofiber Tower he pilfered from Apokolips last Tuesday?"
By dismissal, Jamal Chen had drawn a crude concept for a Babel-Soy fusion reactor in the margins of a notebook page, Lucia Park was having a dispute with the hydroponics computer about the nitrogen content of Kryptonian topsoil, and I had seventeen new messages from Kara, each one increasingly scribbled and illegible as her annoyance with the toaster grew ever farther afield into what I'm pretty sure is currently a full-blown kitchen appliance inferno.
I hung around just long enough to see Carlos palm a vial of glowing rhizobia ("For, uh, extra credit?" he sweatily fibbed) before jetting into the staff bathroom at some velocity that caused the motion detectors to create a strobe effect.
The aroma of burnt wheat and Kara's lavender shampoo wafted through the air, an inconsistent duo that shouldn't have given my heart a flutter but did so anyway. She was squatting over the charred appliance when I phased into the wall, her sweatpants sagging on her hips and a fire extinguisher clutched in one hand as an afterthought.
"It's alive," she declared, kicking the toaster with her foot strong enough to rattle the dent she created in the countertop. "As in Frankenstein's monster alive. It just kept coming back from the dead so it could burn more bread."
The soggy tendrils of her hair plastered against her neck told me she'd been battling her tangles for at least twenty minutes, and this situation just went from frustrating to a question of her ego.
I reached around her shoulder to prod at the smoking mess, my fingers resting just a moment too long so the wiring would supercool into obedience. "Most people would just buy a new one," I whispered against the shell of her ear, noticing the catch in her voice when my thumb passed over the base of her neck.
Kara turned in my hold, her knee wedging itself satisfyingly between my legs even as she scowled for effect. "Where's the fun in that?" she muttered, but the words were lost against my mouth when I kissed her, her flavor a combination of char and Kryptonian adrenaline burn. The extinguisher thudded against the floor, unnoticed by both of us.
This is what our days had consisted of—Kara creating small, controllable fires, me extinguishing them in a manner that left fingers entwined and an apartment smelling of ozone and charred breakfast foods. With Mxy's help, I had promised myself a change—to stop handling reality like a child in a sandbox, fingers diving into timelines simply out of curiosity about what a rearrangement of pieces would look like, about what new story one might tell.
This promise held for a total of seventeen hours before Kara discovered me recalibrating the molecular composition of her coffee cup so it would produce a singing note when stirred. She didn't complain. Not really. Not when her moans later that night were so in sync with the notes being produced.
Peace wasn't the absence of chaos, I came to understand—it just required a precise adjustment of chaos's amplitude. I'd honed my skill level in metered chaos dosage—rewiring an occasional traffic light pattern for greatest comedic impact, monkeying the acoustics in the teachers' lounge so Coach Marlowe's snores rendered the tune for "Bohemian Rhapsody" just for entertainment's sake. Purely harmless, scientific dabbling.right up until Kara's eyes suddenly swiveled towards the window with a bloodhound's tracking instinct, her irises expanding so rapidly I heard her eye muscles creak.
The scream shattering Metropolis wasn't human anymore. It began with a girl's cry outside the Metropolis Youth Center three blocks north—that distorted halfway through a wail into something with gears grinding away in place of vocal cords—and then coalesced with Kara's, who launched herself into the air with her sweatpants bursting at the seams.
Behind the glass, I watched the first metallic fist shatter a Chevrolet's roof as if it were aluminum foil, although the face peering up from within the transformation remains wide-eyed with terror and mouths a sound best left unmade in a human throat.
By the time I hit the pavement running, the intersection has turned into a ballet macabre. A woman in a business suit glided with an otherworldly sense of choreography, her stiletto heel plunged deep into a fleeing cop's jugular with her limbs stretching out into sword-like segments.
The nano-swarm of the OMAC went to work quickly, and I watched infection snake underneath their skin like mercury flowing through an artery, reprogramming biology with a series of clicks and whirs.
Kara dove low, grabbing a cyclist who was only half-transfused when he grabbed the back of her shirt—and then a rib cage exploded out of him like an armory, unleashing flechettes that pinged harmlessly against her skin but splintered the bus stop behind her.
I caught the next one in mid-leap, my fingers burrowing into the chrome plating over his sternum. The man underneath gasped, his eyes flickering from human dilation back to the cold blue glow of Brother Eye's control.
Fifth-dimensional perception stripped away layers of code—I recognized the work of Maxwell Lord throughout, the Kill switch setups couched in civic benevolence. "Easy," I whispered, pressing my thumb against the OMAC node glowing bright at his temple. The nanites backed away from my touch like vampires from sunlight, slinking up neural fibers as I reimprinted their programming with something even older than human fear.
He fell, dripping with sweat and convulsions, just as Kara swung past with two more struggling hostages in a fireman's hold.
They weren't targeting me. Not for a moment. The OMACs parted around me like water around a boulder, oblivious to everything my being from a different dimension didn't allow. A chrome-plated teenager with braces launched herself past me, her fingers extending into vibro-blades fixed firmly on the falling figure of Kara Danvers.
I grabbed her wrist, the shudder of resistance trembling under the metal even as the honors-level student named Emily shrieked inside her mind. My other hand clamped on the base of her skull, unleashing a torrent of unmediated imagination energy rewriting Brother Eye's delete orders into folding paper birds. She spat black fluid onto my boots before falling unconscious, her conversion reversal spasming wildly out of control.
Kara cut a look at me in the middle of dodging, her hair charred from a close miss of a plasma blast. "Why don't they—" A construction worker tackled her through a window of a diner, his forearm overshifting into a rotary cannon just in time. I chased after her, phasing through a wall of falling bricks, pressing my palm against the forehead of the infected worker, who was wracked with convulsive sobs.
His nanites melted away under my skin, fleeing back into the marrow of his bones, where they would take forever to rid themselves of me. He clung shudderingly to my shoulder, his breath a toxic stew of fear and rot. "I'm invisible to them," I said against the crash of breaking glass as three infected civilians ran past me towards the location of Kara's heat aura.
The neon sign of the diner shining into the pool of transmission fluid spreading from my feet distorted the words "EAT" in very unpleasant ways as Kara came out of the wreckage with the construction worker draped over her shoulders.
Her left foot was bare, the melted sole from the hell-tech the OMACs were packing leaving a strip of goo on her calf. "So you're telling me," she huffed, shaking glass out of her tangled hair with a dog-like shake, "that some dude built an army of toast-murderers, and they're only after me?"
A chrome-plated accountant came out of the alleyway, blades emerging from his fingers aimed directly at her kidneys. I grabbed the guy by the collar, my pinky brushing against the OMAC node nestled behind his ear—a shriek cut off as the nanites coursing through his veins turned suddenly brittle and killed, leaving him trembling and human in my grasp.
"They're not just after you," I confessed, noticing the pupils retreat to normal as the accountant's tie waved in the updraft from a flaming car. "They're after all metahumans. You just happen to be the juiciest prey on the block."
The laugh was pointless, a scoffing sound overlapped with the crashing of bricks as an OMAC smashed past the diner wall—a teenage girl with her braces shining brightly against the chrome nonetheless. I caught her in mid-leap, pressing my forehead against hers until her shrieks turned to moans, the infection bursting from her skin in a greasy black trickle.
"Maxwell Lord is the puppet master," I went on, wiping my sleeve with a grimace against the girl's regurgitated guts. "Brother Eye's lusting after capes, and these people are just bullet cases to him."
Kara's eyes narrowed, noticing the beginning of the remaining OMACS' convergence—not fleeing, not adapting, but circling, wolf-like, around a wounded prey. They moved with a fluidity they lacked just a moment before, a fluidity that indicated a cohesion they previously lacked—a movement of chrome-plated flesh that rippled in perfect sync.
I knew about it before she did—a change in programming, a transition where Brother Eye ceased considering the OMACS individuals and began considering them something else entirely—a tool, a weapon with a mind of its piece.
"Oh, that's cute," I muttered, eyes fixed on the accountant's teeth sharpening into monomolecular blades. "They're trying to evolve."
But my next blast of fifth-dimensional energy went beyond healing him—it redeefined the terms of the battle itself entirely. A shimmering aura of desert heat hovered between us, and I imposed a new law with my words: "No puppets allowed." All infected civilians within a three-block radius suddenly stiffened into marionettes with severed strings, their chrome peeling away from sweat-drenched faces contorted in confusion.
The accountant gazed up at me, chewing on his split lip with his newly blunt teeth. "Did I... did I just try to eat somebody?" he whispered. Before I could respond, a granite-crushing grasp clamped onto my shoulder, courtesy of a disgruntled Kara. "Nathan, you'd better be speaking in sentences that don't sound like a bad anime dub."
I let my breath out through my nose, observing the final OMAC nanites break apart into a faceted dust within the air itself. The street appeared like a paused video loop—a car mashed but suspended in an impossible position, pedestrians caught in mid-wail, even the flames on the overturned food cart were momentarily static, a CGI effect. Time itself was my playmate here; I'd pocketed the moment the instant Kara's boot came off.
"These virus-infected bystanders are Brother Eye's project for tracking metahumans," I lectured, speaking slowly, as if I were standing in front of a classroom in the greenhouse, explaining the process of photosynthesis. Kara's eyebrow twitched; she didn't appreciate my teaching-tone whenever I used it on her.
"Maxwell Lord is controlling the sattelite Brother Eye who is in turn controlling these people as OMACs. Normally, Wonder Woman would kill him in a few weeks to stop this, but— "
Kara's growl stopped me. "You wanna actually murder him? Preemptively?" Her heat vision wavered perilously close to my eyebrows. I wrapped my hands around her wrists, holding her back despite her Kryptonian muscle fibers thrumming with tension against my palms.
"No," I let out a deep sigh, pressing my forehead against hers so that our ragged breaths intertwined. "I want to reroute the murder. It shouldn't be on Diana's conscience." This sucked, of course—not just because the truth hurt, but because I already knew what the branching universes would look like if the Murder actually went forward—Maxwell killed with a sword, with a lasso, or with my fingers pressed against his ribcage, damp paper folding in on itself.
This is when the accountant decided to regurgitate black fluid onto my shoes once more. Kara's hold relaxed a degree of strength as she sniffed in disgust. "Priorities, Boy Scout," she said, gesturing to the field of icy carnage—the melted pavement, the floating shrapnel, the scores of dazed civilians with newly functional wrists.
"We gotta get those civilians outta here before your temporal bubble bursts." I kissed her temple instead of an answer, relishing the flavor of carbon burn and purple flowers with sweat. The instant I unfroze the universe, Brother Eye would be alerted to its minions turned renegade.