Chapter 2: The Fall
Claire Bennet was standing on a rock ledge twenty feet above a dry creek bed, and she was grinning.
"You ready?" she called down.
The camcorder weighed almost nothing in my hands. Sony Handycam, MiniDV format — this was 2006 and the world still ran on magnetic tape. I'd spent the previous night figuring out the controls, rewinding old footage Zach had shot of what looked like a school film project. Establishing shots of empty hallways. A cat on a fence. Nothing useful. Whatever the original Zach had been, he'd been meticulous about labeling his tapes. This one said CLAIRE — NEW in Sharpie.
I hit record and framed her against the sky. "Ready."
She jumped.
The sound was worse than I expected. Not a clean impact — a wet, crunching series of collisions as her body struck the rocks at the bottom of the creek bed. Her left leg folded at an angle that legs weren't designed for. Her right arm caught a boulder on the way down and I could hear the snap of bone from where I stood, fifteen feet back, camera steady because the camera had to be steady, that was the entire point.
Claire lay at the bottom of the creek bed with her leg bent backward and her arm twisted underneath her, and for three seconds she didn't move.
Then the sound started. A low, crackling noise, like cellophane being crushed very slowly. Her leg straightened. Not the way a leg heals — not gradually, not with swelling and months of physical therapy. The bone snapped back into position with an audible pop. The skin, which had split open across her shin where a jagged rock had cut it, sealed itself like a zipper being pulled. Her arm rotated, clicked, and settled. The bruising on her forehead faded from purple to yellow to nothing in the time it took me to breathe twice.
She sat up. Touched her leg. Flexed her fingers. Looked up at me with blood on her shirt and gravel in her hair and a smile that belonged on someone who'd just gotten off a roller coaster instead of someone who'd just fallen twenty feet onto solid rock.
"Did you get it?"
"Got it." My voice was steady. The rest of me was not.
I'd known this was coming. I'd watched this scene — or a version of it — on a laptop screen in a different life, eating microwave popcorn, thinking cool effect. The reality of it was something else entirely. The sounds. The wrongness of watching bone relocate under skin. The smell of blood that was already drying before it finished flowing.
Claire Bennet was sixteen years old and indestructible, and standing ten feet from her was like standing next to a bonfire and being told not to think about the heat.
She climbed back up the rocks faster than anyone with normal bones should have been able to, leaving a bloody handprint on the limestone that was already turning brown in the Texas sun. "I want to go higher."
"Hold on." I lowered the camera. "Before you go again — how long did the leg take?"
She blinked. "What?"
"The leg. The compound fracture. From when you landed to when it was fully healed. I want a number."
"I don't know, like... a minute?"
"More like ninety seconds. The arm was faster — maybe forty-five. And the cut on your shin closed in under ten."
She stared at me. "You were timing it?"
"You asked me to bring a camera. I figured we should get actual data." I pulled a folded piece of notebook paper from my back pocket. I'd made it that morning — a simple chart with columns for injury type, severity, and healing duration. "If we're going to do this, we should do it right. Not just 'watch me jump' — actual documentation. Cuts versus fractures. Depth of wound versus closure time. Whether temperature matters. Whether being tired changes anything."
Claire sat down on the ledge, legs dangling over the drop she'd just survived. Blood from her earlier injuries was drying on her jeans. "Since when did you become a scientist?"
"Since you asked me to film something impossible. If it's real, it follows rules. Rules have patterns. Patterns mean we can understand it instead of just watching it happen."
The curiosity in her expression shifted into something I hadn't expected — interest. Not the polite kind. The kind where someone's brain catches a gear it hadn't been using.
"Okay," she said. "What do you want to test first?"
[Quarry — 4:47 PM]
We spent the next two hours turning Claire Bennet into a science experiment.
Small cuts first. She used a pocket knife — her own, pulled from a backpack that also contained a first aid kit she clearly didn't need and two bottles of water she definitely did. A shallow cut across the back of her forearm: seven seconds to full closure. A deeper one, same arm, intentionally through to the fatty tissue: twelve seconds. I timed each one on Zach's wristwatch and wrote the numbers in my chart while Claire watched the skin seal with an expression that was equal parts fascination and relief.
"You're not freaked out," she said during the third cut. Not a question.
"Should I be?"
"Most people would be."
"Most people aren't holding a camera while you heal a compound fracture. I think we're past 'most people.'" I set the camera on its tripod and adjusted the angle. "Same cut, same arm, but this time try being angry while it heals. I want to see if emotional state affects the speed."
She frowned. "How am I supposed to be angry on command?"
"Think about Jackie."
That got a reaction — a quick flash across her face, jaw tightening. Jackie Wilcox, head cheerleader, credit-stealer, walking popularity contest. Claire's feelings about Jackie were complicated enough to generate real irritation.
"Fine." She cut, and the anger held.
Nine seconds. Two seconds faster than the baseline.
"Adrenaline," I said, writing it down. "Or cortisol. Something about the stress response is accelerating it."
"That's... actually interesting." Claire looked at her arm like she was seeing it for the first time. "I've been doing this for weeks. Jumping off things, sticking my hand in stuff. I never thought about timing it."
"Jumping off things tells you one fact: you don't break. Timing tells you how fast, and how fast tells you why, and why is the thing that actually matters." I capped the pen. "Next test. I want to see if the fracture from the initial jump was faster or slower than the cuts, proportional to severity."
"So you want me to break something on purpose."
"I want you to drop from the ten-foot ledge — not the twenty — land on your leg at a controlled angle, and let me time the healing on a fracture we can reproduce. Same bone each time. Left tibia."
Claire pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Hands steady, eyes bright. "You've gotten weird over the summer."
"I did a lot of reading."
"About what, bones?"
"About asking better questions."
She held my gaze for a beat longer than a casual conversation warranted. Something working behind her eyes — not suspicion exactly, but recognition. The original Zach had been a good kid. Loyal, reliable, willing to hold the camera. But he'd been a passenger. The person sitting across from her now was driving, and she could feel the difference even if she couldn't name it.
Claire stood. Walked to the ten-foot ledge. Looked down at the rocks, then back at me.
"Ready when you are," she said.
We ran seven more tests before the sun dropped low enough to turn the quarry walls orange. Fracture healing versus laceration healing. Cold water versus ambient temperature. Claire submerging her hand in the creek and cutting underwater — six seconds, virtually identical to the surface baseline. Rest state versus post-exertion. Each result went into the chart with timestamps and conditions noted.
By the end, Claire was sitting on the tailgate of Zach's car — a beat-up Nissan pickup that had taken me five minutes to find in the driveway that morning — drinking water and reading the chart upside-down while I organized tapes.
"Adrenaline's the biggest variable," she said. "Everything else is noise."
"That's what the data says so far. But we only tested one emotional state. Fear might be different. Calm might slow it down."
"I'm never calm when I'm cutting myself." A half-smile. "That came out wrong."
"Noted for the research log." I closed the camcorder case. The MiniDV tape was labeled CLAIRE — TEST 1 in my handwriting, which was different from Zach's handwriting, and I needed to remember to practice matching it.
Claire hopped off the tailgate. She dug into her jeans pocket and held something out to me — a small, flat piece of rock with a dark stain on one side.
"Souvenir," she said. "From the first jump. That's the piece of limestone that was in my kneecap."
I took it. Dry blood and a chip of someone else's bone, offered like a friendship bracelet. "Thanks. I'll put it on the mantel."
"You don't have a mantel."
"I'll build one."
She laughed — a real one, the kind that made her look her age instead of a girl carrying a secret that would have buckled most adults. The quarry caught the sound and bounced it off the walls and for a half-second Odessa, Texas, was the best place on Earth.
I drove her home with the windows down because the AC in Zach's truck had given up sometime around the Clinton administration. She directed me to a neighborhood I already knew — a quiet street where a man in horn-rimmed glasses would be pulling into the driveway any minute, and a woman named Sandra would be setting the table, and a younger brother named Lyle would be pretending to do homework while actually playing something on a Game Boy Advance.
Claire opened the door and paused with one foot on the curb.
"Same time Thursday?"
"Same time Thursday. Bring a stopwatch. I want sub-second measurements."
She closed the door and walked up the path to her front porch, and I watched her go because I knew something she didn't: in this world, Claire Bennet's ability to heal from anything was going to attract the attention of a man who collected powers by murdering their owners and examining their brains.
The camcorder sat on the passenger seat. The chart sat in my lap. The rock chip from Claire's kneecap sat in my shirt pocket like a small, dark promise.
I put the truck in gear and drove back to a house that wasn't mine, already calculating how many days until the Homecoming game and what I could do with each one.
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