Kim was pacing the length of the laboratory of the Middleton Space Centre, lacking anything better to do. Her mind was still in turmoil over what had happened yesterday in Go City and her sleep -what little she had gotten- had been wreaked with nightmares.
The good news was that the robber, a man by the name of Bruno Theeves, was now in stable condition. The doctors said that he had made it thorugh the worst and would live. Unfortunately the good news ended there. Whatever Kim had done to him had torn him up but good. The doctors still couldn’t believe they hadn’t found a single bullet in his chest, considering the nature of the damage. They figured that Theeves would probably never walk again and spend the rest of his life eating through a straw.
She knew her father worried about her being put on trial for this, but Kim had other things on her young mind. She had almost killed a man. It had been an accident, sure. Under normal circumstances she would never, ever have done such a thing. These weren’t normal circumstances, though. Far from it.
As was evident by her hands, which wouldn’t stop glowing anymore.
It had started soon after she had gotten out of the jail cell she had put herself into. She hadn’t been a hundred percent certain that she should be allowed out after what had happened, but her parents had insisted. One step outside the building, though, the press had been all over her, asking questions about the incident.
The incident, she huffed dejectedly. That was so pretty a word for what could have been the death of a man. A criminal, yes, but still a man.
With the press bombarding her with questions, rumours, and barely veiled attacks on her person, she had found the glow returning to her hands once again. Adrenalin, she reminded herself. How could anyone stay calm and collected in the middle of a sea of reporters who smelled blood? Her parents had noticed and ushered her out of there as fast as humanly possible, but ever since then the glow refused to go away.
It didn’t help, of course, that she found herself unable to calm down. First they’d been waiting for news from the hospital, waiting to learn whether or not Kim was now a killer. Then, after the thankfully positive news, she kept worrying about what would happen next.
Team Go couldn’t help her, it seemed. She had talked with them again, but it seemed that none of them had ever really had much trouble getting a handle on their powers. The offer for Kim to use Aviarius’ power siphon was still open, of course, once Mego managed to finish reconstructing it. Which could be tomorrow or… well, never. The superhero was honest enough to admit that he wasn’t sure he’d ever get it right. Which meant that Kim could not count on help from that corner.
There was, of course, another expert on Go Glows she could possibly consult, but so far she refused to even stray in that direction. There had to be other options.
Her father was doing his best to find a solution. Sometimes it was hard for Kim to realize that the scatterbrained, good-natured goof she had for a father was also one of the world’s most brilliant scientific minds. And not only that, he was also friends with quite a few more brilliant men and women. Then there was her mother, one of the leading neurosurgeons in the world, and on first-name basis with just about every other leading expert in the medical field. Added to that were a number of scientists that Kim had helped in one way or another over the last years. All of whom her father had contacted within the last 12 hours.
Which meant that a think tank of unparalleled calibre was present right now, trying to figure out what had happened to her and how to help. And despite being thankful that all these people were trying to aid her, she couldn’t help but feel like a laboratory animal. A dangerous, potentially lethal laboratory animal.
Endless hours had been spent analyzing the energy her hands emitted. Every scanner imaginable had been used, every method ever devised by the human mind applied. For eight gruelling hours Kim had been prodded, scanned, analysed, and put through her paces. Unfortunately so far they had little to show for it except her rising anxiety.
Kim just wished Ron was here, making some dumb joke or other to lighten the mood. Unfortunately he was nowhere to be found. Well, considering what had happened, could she really blame him if he didn’t want to be close to her right now?
“We know very little of the Go City meteorite and its radiation.” Professor Kruger, one of the world’s leading experts in radiation, had spent the last five years of his life analysing the few fragments of the meteorite that had been recovered from the Go City crash site. He was also the personal physician of Team Go.
“About half of its mass is composed of elements not found in the periodic table,” he continued. “The fragments we recovered are inert, not emitting any more radiation. What little we know we gathered from analyzing the members of Team Go.”
“And?” Kim’s dad asked.
“Well, the radiation, while similar in all members, seems to change significantly as it shifts through different spectra. The blue glow emitted by Hego is different from the red glow emitted by the Wego twins and so on.”
James sighed, massaging his temples. “So that means Kimmie’s white glow is different again?”
“I’m afraid so, James. The only thing I can tell you is that… well, it seems to be growing stronger. Slowly, but steadily.”
Kim looked at the assembled scientific minds, all of whom looked quite helpless.
“Any theories on how I got these powers then? I mean, I refuse to believe that going a few rounds with Shego is all it took to hype me up this way.”
Her mother took up some CT images they had made of her not two hours ago, looking them over with two colleagues of hers who were experts in radiation-related diseases.
“I’m not really sure, Kimmie,” she said. “The CT picked up what appear to be trace elements of the meteorite in your body. I… I really can’t say, but it is possible that they have… always been there. Just inert, so far, so we never caught them during your check-ups before.”
“Always been there?” Kim asked, looking at her confused. “How…?”
“One thing we did find out, Kimmie,” her father said. “It seems that… well, the day the Go City meteorite came down is… your birthday. You were born the same day it crashed to Earth.”
“And from the astronomical data we could gather,” one of her dad’s old college buddies, an astronomer, added, “it seems the meteorite might have passed over Middleton before crashing in Go City. Theoretically it could mean that meteorite matter, burned up by the heat of re-entry, rained down on the town that night.”
“And a newborn would be more vulnerable to any form of radiation than an adult or even an older child,” her mother added.
Kim nodded. She had never matched the dates in her head, but from what little she knew of how Team Go had come about, it could possibly coincide with her birth date.
“That doesn’t explain why it’s happening now,” she said, though. “I mean, if these trace elements have been in my body for seventeen years now, why did I never notice anything before?”
Professor Kruger pushed up his glasses as he sat down next to her. “I talked with Mego and he told me that their powers seem to be increasing. I checked and the meteorite trace elements in their blood are emitting more radiation now than last year when I gave them their last check-up. I have no idea how such a thing is possible, really. If anything the radiation rate should slowly decay as the meteorite traces approach their half-life span, but to increase… I’m baffled, quite honestly.”
Kim looked around at the other scientists gathered, but none of them offered up any solutions. They all looked quite a bit out of their depth.
“So… what now?” she asked, hating how scared she sounded. The glow on her hands seemed to be brighter now and she constantly felt as if some kind of low-level current was running through her body. It made her skin itch and seemed to be getting worse.
“We’ll keep at it,” her father said, sounding more confident than he felt. “We’ve only been working on this for less than a day now, Kimmie. I’m afraid it is going to take a bit longer.”
“How much longer?” she asked, feeling panicked. “I… I almost killed a man, dad. And I have no control over how this works, I can’t…”
“Kim, calm down,” her mother said, seeing how the glow on Kim’s hands started to increase in proportion to her anxiety.
Kim noticed her hands, gasped, and immediately ran out of the lab, looking for some place with no people around. She was dangerous. People close to her were in danger of being crippled like that poor man or worse. She needed to be somewhere safe; somewhere she couldn’t hurt those she loved.
She ran out onto the large tarmac of the Space Centre, looking around. There were a few people milling about in the distance, but no one in the immediate vicinity. Good. Now all she needed to do was calm down. She could rein this in. Just a matter of keeping to together. No sweat. She could do anything after all.
A sharp pain ran down the length of her body and Kim gasped, falling to her knees. Her hands kept glowing, the light refusing to die down. She touched the floor to steady herself and the cement under her palm suddenly cracked as if some tremendous weight was crashing against it. The same cement that was designed to withstand the exhaust plume of a launching rocket.
“No, no, no,” she muttered. “I won’t be beaten by this.”
She heard footsteps approaching and immediately whirled around in panic. Her parents and several of the scientists were coming towards her.
“Stay back,” she yelled at them, scrambling backwards. “It’s not safe.”
James stopped, seeing what his daughter had done to the reinforced cement floor, and kept the others back, even his wife who wanted nothing more than to go and hug her child.
“She is starting to emit high-level radiation,” Professor Kruger said, consulting a hand-held Geiger counter. “It’s similar to the Go meteorite in nature, but different. I can’t say, but… it might be… toxic. We shouldn’t…”
“Kimmie, there is a bunker over there,” her father pointed at a small concrete building off to the left of the tarmac. “It’s designed to protect the flight crews during tests of experimental engines and fuels. It’s shielded and can withstand even a nuclear explosion.”
Kim, understanding what her father was saying, got to her feet and ran over to the bunker as fast as her legs would carry her. James looked after her, feeling painfully helpless.
“We need to do something,” he told the others, his voice shaking with desperation. “And we need to do it fast.”
His wife, fighting back tears, looked at him. “There is one option we haven’t tried yet, right?”
James nodded, then took out the Kimmunicator Ron had given him last night.
“Wade,” he dialled up the hacker. “Has Ronald found Shego yet?”
TO BE CONTINUED