Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
I didn’t like hospitals. Nothing good ever happened there.
“It’s a high risk Prime/Prime pregnancy,” Nevada said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the baby is using his magic. He’s aware,” Mom said. “Being born is scary. We don’t know how he will react.”
“But you gave birth to all of us and we were fine.” We were all Primes.
Mom blinked.
“You almost killed Mom,” Nevada told me. “You wedged yourself in and refused to be born.”
“What?”
“And the doctor. They pulled you out and you choked him. It took three people to pry you free.”
“You’re making this up!” I turned to Mom.
She had this weird expression on her face.
It was true. “Mom! You never told me!”
“You never asked. We were very lucky you didn’t transform in-utero.”
How would anyone know to ask about something like that?
“The difference is, none of us were empathic,” Nevada said. “And none of us were using our magic in the womb.”
“There is a good chance that our son is empathic,” Connor said. “He’s linked to Nevada’s feelings. Sedation is out of the question. So is the Caesarean.”
“Even if they counter the pain with a spinal block and I remain completely calm,” Nevada said, “Empathic babies are almost always severely traumatized by a C-section. We don’t understand why, but we’re not going to risk it.”
Connor was a Prime Telekinetic with slight empathic powers, which I didn’t ask too much about, because when I looked him up on Herald, the social network for Prime groupies and gossips, the consensus said it was some kind of sexual thing. I didn’t want to know what sexual things my sister’s husband did. There were boundaries.
Most of the time Primes married within their type of magic. Pyrokinetics married other pyrokinetics, animator mages married other animator mages and so on. Nevada’s and Connor’s talents were wildly different. Nobody could predict what their baby would be like. The speculation on Herald ran rampant. I’ve found over seventy threads discussing it.
We knew the baby was telekinetic, because some of his powers leaked to Nevada, giving her temporary telekinetic abilities. According to Connor, that also meant that the baby was a Prime, and with the caliber of his parents’ magic, he wouldn’t just be a Prime. His power would be off the charts.
It was perfectly possible that Connor’s empathic talent made it over to their baby and got a boost from my sister’s mental abilities. Which meant a Prime telekinetic with no control over his magic, and possibly capable of leveling a building with a flick of his finger, was about to be squeezed, grabbed, and ejected out of his warm shelter while bathing in psychic pain and anxiety from his mother. If she went into full blown labor in the helicopter…
Oh my God.
“Can this thing go any faster? Make it fly faster.”
Mom wrapped her arm around my shoulders. “Calm down.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t have enough hands to catch everyone.”
“If the helicopter goes down,” Connor said, “Catch Nevada first.”
Nevada turned to me. She was wearing that older sister expression that said, “stop freaking out, the adults got this.” It used to drive me nuts, but right now it was like a soothing cold shower on my raw nerves.
“The contractions aren’t that strong yet. Wait. We will be there in a minute.”
I shut up and willed the Cobra to fly as fast as it could.
We landed on the hospital’s rooftop helipad. A dozen people waited for us, six in tactical gear armed with automatic weapons, and the others in identical baby blue scrubs. Did they coordinate this? If Nevada was giving birth to a girl, would they have showed up in pink scrubs? Somehow, I had a problem with it, but I couldn’t quite put it into words, and I had bigger issues to worry about.
They loaded Nevada into a wheelchair, and we all rushed in a herd into a big freight elevator. It went down and almost immediately stopped. The doors slid open, revealing a hospital hallway with walls painted in pale cream. An announcement echoed, a pre-recorded artificially calm female voice pronouncing the words with crisp precision.
“Code PPB. All non-essential personnel clear the 17th floor.”
We made a left out of the elevator and sped down the hallway toward metal doors that looked like they’d come out of a space station and had been used to contain violent space monsters.
“Code PPB. All non-essential personnel clear the 17th floor.”
Nevada exhaled.
“Contractions?” Connor asked.
She nodded.
The doors slid open, we passed through, and they sealed shut behind us. Two of the security people peeled off from our group and stayed behind. I glanced over my shoulder. One of them keyed a code into the door lock. The lights on the door turned red. A metal bar pointing toward the ceiling – that I thought was just a weird part of the door - rotated forty-five degrees before the other guard locked it in place. If someone tried to force the door apart, they would have to rip through the bar to do it.