“Sadly, there are no Kill Cannons left,” I joked.
“But you’ve got a little bit of me.
And that’s way better.”
“Huh?” Eve didn’t catch it.
I tried so hard, connecting my joke to her prayer.
Man.
“Never mind.
And, uh, you might want to duck.”
This time, she understood immediately.
It was hard not to, when her brother came charging at her with a furious cry of “You can’t hide!”
He practically announced his attack so she wouldn’t accidentally get hit by a fatal blow.
Eve pressed herself to the floor, grabbing a handy iron pipe.
The wall above her head exploded in a shower of meat chunks under the force of her brother’s steel fist.
And I don’t just mean that figuratively.
The guy’s arm from elbow to fingers had turned into solid steel.
He miscalculated his strength a bit and lurched forward after the punch, exposing his back to Eve.
She finally decided to fight back.
With a piercing, truly girlish battle cry, she hit her brother with the pipe.
The metal sank into his flesh like hot plastic.
The pipe practically cut off a whole chunk of his body, from shoulder to waist, like slicing a loaf of bread.
Gruesome.
Now I understood.
Something was seriously wrong with their bodies.
Either a side effect of their ability to rearrange their own flesh, or a consequence of abusing it, or maybe a birth defect they couldn’t fix with their power.
“You’re trying to kill me, and I don’t even know your name.
What the hell?” Eve shouted at his back.
“My name?” The head spoke, turning to Eve independently of the body.
“My name is Phase Two, Duplicate Two, Second Attempt, Second Child, Second Best.”
As he spoke, his body rearranged itself on the fly.
His spine sank inward and swapped places with his abdomen.
Where his shoulder blades had been, pectoral muscles appeared.
His right arm twisted, becoming his left, and grabbed the pipe that was still separating his body into two parts.
The result of the metamorphosis was that he was facing his sister again.
Horrifying.
Now I understood why this day was the worst of her life.
You wouldn’t wish such a family reunion on your worst enemy.
“My name is,” he finally exploded, screaming right in Eve’s face, “‘Get back in the tube, boy.
You make me sick!'”
He’d gotten so worked up, literally hot, that he practically evaporated the metal pipe with his body, finally restoring his integrity.
Shocked by his outburst of both temperature and rage, Eve flinched back from her brother.
Okay, enough torturing the girl.
Time for me to step in.
“Shoes!” the youngest suddenly yelled out of nowhere, deciding to contribute to the conversation.
He threw a shoebox right at Eve’s face.
“Cover your ears, girl.” I appeared in front of Sam, deflecting the harmless projectile, then clapped my hands together as hard as I could, directing the air wave right at the crowd of strange children.
Excellent non-lethal way to neutralize weak opponents.
With enough skill, the shockwave can be very powerful, directed, and extremely unpleasant for the senses.
My father could probably knock down a small building or kill a couple of hundred people with such a technique.
I’m not him yet.
But it was enough for the kids.
It threw them against the far wall.
The two youngest literally splashed against it in a spray of mincemeat.
There was definitely something wrong with their bodies.
Even an ordinary person shouldn’t have received such serious mechanical trauma from that.
These kids can turn their bodies into metal, but they’re absurdly fragile the rest of the time.
But they can regenerate.
As I could see with my own eyes, even the destruction of their brain didn’t stop their ability to reconstruct their bodies.
As I thought, they’re not so easy to kill.
Even brain damage doesn’t stop them from using their power to heal.
That’s impressive.
I’m almost envious.
That power is practically godlike, especially if they can extend it to other living beings.
If I feel them trying to alter my own body, I’ll have to act fast.
Fortunately, my overwhelming speed advantage is on my side.
Worst case, I’ll have to use space to permanently put them down.
I wouldn’t want it to come to that.
Eve handled them herself in the past.
Yes, there must be a weakness.
There’s a reason they were kept in tubes and called defective compared to Samantha.
And why can’t Eve manipulate her own body as freely as they can?
“Oh, my ears!” a pitiful moan came from behind me.
Eve had conjured herself pink earmuffs that protected her from the sound.
But she hadn’t taken care of the old man.
Well, collateral damage.
It shouldn’t have caused him serious injury.
Probably.
“Shoes?” The youngest recovered fastest and looked at his empty hands.
But there was nothing there.
Oh, so recovery is automatic.
Without a whole brain, they don’t have self-awareness.
Good to know.
“Over here, hurry!” Sam hurried, suggesting we follow her into a new pink tunnel.
And although I could keep them in mincemeat form indefinitely, this was her superhero origin story, not mine.
So I wouldn’t steal her thunder.
Let her take the lead.
So I left the super-kids to recover and followed the doctor into Eve’s pink burrow.
We ended up in a completely pink cave carved into the building’s foundation.
The hole behind me immediately sealed with pink stone, the same as everything around.
Okay, another protective dome.
That would buy us some time, but not solve the problem.
*
*
*
“Okay, Doc,” Eve said, dispelling her pink earmuffs and turning to the old man.
“Why didn’t you tell me my powers have limits?
These kids turn themselves into things, and I can’t change them back.
The atoms around them, the atoms of the air inside them, yes.
But not them.
Why?”
“Good question,” I agreed silently, having asked myself the same thing a second ago.
“I had to do it, Eve.” Oh, so his ears were fine.
“Otherwise, you’d be omnipotent.
We had to give you limits.”
He said it so casually.
Not “put limits on you” or “cripple your power.” No.
“Give you limits.” As if he’d done her a favor.
He sure had a silver tongue.
“You could turn blood into chocolate, a heart into a rabbit, or even influence consciousness through neurochemical reactions in the brain.
We couldn’t allow that.
Nothing should be that powerful.”
The classic story of a creator fearing his own creation.
“And the only way to prevent it was to implant a mental block in you.
To give you a pre-conscious refusal to alter living biomass.”
Now that was interesting.
If that block was artificially implanted, and she was created that way, then it could be removed or at least weakened.
Damn it.
If that worked, Eve would be potentially the most powerful of us all.
Yes, I know she gets exhausted from using her powers and can’t, for example, transform several tons of material at once.
She’s not Doctor Manhattan in a skirt.
But if she could directly affect the matter inside an enemy or even their mind, the stamina cost wouldn’t be too high, right?
What is this feeling?
I got goosebumps.
There’s a hidden power.
Who’s the main character here, me or her?
With the right approach, if this power had fallen to me, I’d definitely find a way to remove the mental block or at least bypass it.
Or to some other brilliant being like Robot.
I can’t even believe Eve just ignored it all and kept playing with her compressed air.
“Yes, but…” Eve began weakly.
I think I’d accidentally sped up my perception while thinking, so impressed was I by the doctor’s revelation.
But she was interrupted by an outside intrusion.
The pink stone cracked and exploded into fragments.
One of them hit the doctor right above his eyebrow, causing a deep gash.
“Leave us alone!” Eve screamed, reaching her boiling point.
She transformed herself into a ridiculous pink juggernaut and charged into the attack herself.
She could have done that from the beginning.
Not to mention that I could have…Oh well, let her have her fun.
I leaned toward the doctor.
“Freeze,” I ordered him.
I pulled a medical needle and thread from his own lab coat.
How thoughtful of him.
“What?” He didn’t understand.
“Ow!
What are you…”
Now there was a neat, still bleeding stitch.
Super-speed medicine.
“Why are you doing this?” Eve was shouting as she attacked Number Two.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
She was really getting into it.
This was starting to look like a one-sided beating.
The little ones couldn’t get through her armor, and she tossed them around like live bowling pins in a deadly game.
Where was all that strength coming from in those thin little arms?
I didn’t see any external signs of extra power, like reactive jets from her elbows.
It seemed she’d created something like an artificial muscle cascade under that armor from compressed air.
Very inventive, but also pretty crude.
“Why?” Number Two shouted back, finding an opportunity for a useless retaliatory blow against Eve’s armor.
“You, sister, are the only reason we exist!
The sole purpose of our creation, our destiny, is this!”
He hit Eve again with his stone fists.
This time he even managed to chip a little piece off her armor.
He was really fading.
Wait.
That was…
yes.
His skin was peeling off.
If this kept up, she was going to kill them all.
I caught Eve’s hand just as she was about to smash her huge pink fist into her brother’s face.
“Stop.
He’s had enough,” I told her.
She just gave me a confused look.
“You’re still here?” “Look,” I nodded toward the guy, and everyone, including him, followed my gaze to his hands.
They were starting to decompose right before our eyes.
“Of course,” he suddenly said, completely calm.
“Too long outside the tube.
But it doesn’t matter now.
We can’t go back.
They don’t care about us anymore.
Now they have you.”
As he spoke, his skin began to blister with pus-filled sores.
The same thing, as if on command, started happening to the other children.
So that’s how it ended last time.
That’s why I’d never heard of Atom Eve’s brothers and sisters.
They all simply died that day, never knowing life properly.
“What?” Shocked, Eve dispelled her armor and, for the first time, stepped toward her brother not to hit him.
I didn’t want to interrupt their touching farewell, but this was their only chance to survive.
“Time to remove the limits, Doc,” I turned to the old man, who’d been silently watching the tragedy.
“If everything you said is true, Eve can save them.
Fix the defects in their bodies.
How do we remove the mental block?”
“I…
no,” he recoiled.
“It’s…
impossible.
The block can’t be removed.”
Was he lying?
Was he so afraid of giving her full power that he would abandon these, essentially innocent, children?
I couldn’t tell.
“Goodbye, sister,” Number Two said.
His body was already smoking.
He was literally evaporating into a caustic, foul-smelling toxic fume.
“It was nice meeting you.”
“No!
No!
No!” Eve cried out, tears streaming down her face.
“Do it, Eve,” I then tried to pressure her directly.
Maybe if she got emotional enough, she could break the block herself.
There must be a way.
“This is your family, and this is your power.
Only you can save them.
Just do it.
Break the damn block!”
“I…” She clenched her little fists in despair, straining her omnipotent power uselessly.
“I can’t!
I can’t!
I ca-a-an’t!”
By the end, she was sobbing uncontrollably, unable to take her eyes off the foul, toxic puddles that her newly found family had become.