Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Spring 1994

  Leeds

  “Give me that,” Maryam said, reaching for Elaine’s cigarette and plucking it out of her hand. She took a long drag off it, then dropped it on the grass and stamped it out.

  “Hey, I wasn’t finished with it!”

  Maryam ignored her, watching the cricket field on the other side of the chain-link fence. The match was maybe half done. Boys in trousers and jumpers ran about, yelling, though as far as she could see there wasn’t a ball in play. There’d be no better time to do this. She unclipped her black hair so it fell past her shoulders, pulled her jumper and bra off, and shoved down her school skirt, stockings, knickers, and shoes. Naked now, she handed all her clothes to Elaine, who was suddenly looking skeptical.

  “You really going to do this?” Elaine had dirty blond hair wrapped up in a purple scrunchy at the top of her head, with maybe a quarter of it falling out to frame her pale, freckled face. Her eyes always seemed to get really round and shocked whenever Maryam cooked up a plan like this. You’d think she’d be used to it by now.

  Maryam grabbed the nylon fabric of the ripped-up tent she’d rescued from the bin that was exactly the right size for her purpose and wrapped it around her waist. “Yeah, I am.”

  She closed her eyes and focused. She had practiced this, but never in public and never with a target in mind. Go big, bigger than she ever had. Huge, or there’d be no point to it. Her skin started to tingle, which grew into a heat that went all the way to her bones. A hiss and a crack sounded from nearby power lines as her body grabbed hold of that electricity.

  Grow, grow, grow.

  Elaine let out a squeak and stumbled back, and Maryam opened her eyes on a world turned distant. Small. Like looking down from a balcony. Elaine blinked up at her with a stupid owl-like expression, and Maryam grinned madly.

  She stepped right over the fence, planting her bare foot on the grass on the other side, her brown skin contrasting with the bright green, and went striding across the back field of the pitch in just a few steps. She could break into a run and cover miles in a few minutes. She could pick up cars and shove them out of her way. Knock over poles. She could do anything. But right now, she merely walked, like she was strolling through the park, letting people get a good look at her.

  The screaming from the spectators was extremely satisfying.

  Her long hair stayed draped past her face and over her chest. Not that she had much in the way of breasts to show off, and she rather expected that all joking aside, the fact that she was so very tall would draw more attention than her toplessness.

  Be interesting to find out, anyway. Which was only part of why she was doing this.

  She didn’t linger. This was just an experiment. A bit of dabbling, to see what would happen. Just enough time to let people take photos, maybe a bit of video if someone was taping the match. She had her exit strategy all mapped out, stepping over the fence on the opposite side of the field while the panicked shouting continued behind her. However much she wanted to glance over her shoulder to enjoy the chaos she’d caused, she resisted temptation. The air of mystery was more important.

  Across the street was a park surrounding a duck pond, lined with enough tall trees to offer a bit of shelter. Plunging into them, she offloaded energy, and size, with a flash and a crack of static, returning to her normal height in almost an instant. Now that she was hidden among the trees, no one would notice.

  Wrapping the tent fabric tightly around herself, she jogged off, and no one was even looking for her. Elaine was waiting right where they’d agreed to meet, in the yard outside a water tower about half a kilometer from the cricket field.

  “Well?” Elaine asked, handing her back her clothes and keeping a lookout as she rushed to put them on.

  “I did it!” Maryam grinned madly.

  “Brilliant!” Elaine grabbed her arms, and together they hopped up and down in a quivering dance of teenage enthusiasm.

  That evening, the house was its usual chaos. Her two older siblings—both on break from university, which seemed a bit much—were arguing at the kitchen table about rail passes or the price of beef or some nonsense. Their mother was simultaneously fixing supper and yelling at their father in Farsi. Maryam only knew that she’d told him “please turn on the news” because he got up to turn the television on immediately. Maryam had only been two when the family left Iran, and her grasp of her native language was flimsy at best. She sometimes thought she ought to repair that, but never seemed to find the time, between studying for A-levels and figuring out her power. Nobody but Elaine knew she’d turned an ace. Well, nobody until today.

  She went to the sitting room to join her father. From the sofa, he smiled a fond but absent-minded greeting at her, half watching the television while reading a newspaper. She took the chair near the sofa. This was the moment she’d been waiting for, but she couldn’t seem too eager. She didn’t usually watch the news, hiding away in her upstairs bedroom instead. She couldn’t exactly tell everyone to just shut up now without giving herself away.

  Her mother wandered in, wiping her hands on a towel, and her brother and sister were still arguing in the kitchen. “Be quiet!” her mother told them when the BBC News logo came up.

  The lead story was about some turmoil or other in American politics. The second about an oil spill someplace in Africa. Maryam began tapping her feet. What if she hadn’t made the news at all? But finally there it was, halfway through the broadcast.

  “And here in Britain, a cricket match outside of Leeds was disrupted when a previously unknown ace made an appearance—”

  God, she’d made the news. And yes, there was some grainy home video footage of a towering otherworldly creature taking long deliberate steps across the grass and away. It was marvelous, like something out of a bad movie. Her siblings had come in from the kitchen to watch and stood with their mouths open in disbelief. Maryam had to be very still. Not react at all.

  Her father stroked his chin. “Leeds? That’s just near the school, isn’t it?”

  Gaping at the television, her mother asked, “Anyone we know?”

  “Of course not, we don’t know any of those kinds of people.”

  Me, Maryam wanted to yell at him. Those kinds of people were me.

  Maybe she ought to keep this secret. Not be such an exhibitionist. But the newscast was still going on, interviewing spectators who’d been at the match. “A giant! She came out of nowhere!” one of them said.

  “How does a fifteen-foot-tall woman come out of nowhere!” her mother exclaimed. “She had to have come from somewhere.”

  The video showed gigantic Maryam leaving the other side of the field, then cut out. So no one had really seen where she went. She’d ducked behind a building and that was that. At no point had her face been visible.

  “Well,” her mother said, then wandered back to the kitchen.

  Maryam had been sitting right there and neither of them recognized the giant girl on the screen as their own daughter. Well, indeed.

  She ran up to her room to phone Elaine, who answered on the first ring as if she’d been waiting. “Did you see it?”

  “That was fantastic,” Elaine said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “You know what this means?”

  “What?”

  “I’m doing it again.”

  Fifteen feet. That was as tall as she’d ever gotten. Almost five meters, the commentator said. She could go taller. She knew she could.

  * * *

  Maryam had done some reading when this first started happening to her. Growing to an immense height, or changing shape into something much larger than one’s self, was a fairly common wild-card power that had been studied and classified, and she was introduced to the concept of proportional strength. A larger frame required more strength to carry itself around, much less be able to move or run or do anything at all. There had been cases of wild-card victims who’d grown to twelve, fifteen, twenty feet—but still maintained the proportional muscle mass and strength of a normal human. They were incapacitated. They couldn’t move. But some got the strength they needed, and it made them powerful. Radha O’Reilly, Elephant Girl, was a case Maryam had particularly studied. A woman who could transform into a full-grown Asian elephant, who couldn’t just move normally, but fly. Researchers agreed that telekinesis was involved.

  Maryam was lucky. Her strength grew with her height. She hadn’t been able to really test this yet, but she planned to.

  The seco nd exhibition—experiment, she still thought of it—was even better. A children’s football match, so there were sure to be enthusiastic parents with video cameras on hand. She started on the other side of the school and then casually strolled across the end of the field, as if she were just having a ramble and the game happened to get in the way. Didn’t even look at the screaming crowd and fleeing children. She heard them well enough. Continuing past the field, she went on to a wooded greenway and ducked into the trees, where she let off a clap of energy, and then ran before anyone could connect that disturbance with the giant woman who’d just marched across the way.

  On that evening’s newscast, she was the second story. “Another sighting of Britain’s newest ace! This time at a student football match, where spectators were shocked—”

  “Is that woman even wearing any clothes?” Maryam’s mother exclaimed at the television.

  “Yeah, she’s got a thing around her,” Maryam said, then shut up. She wasn’t supposed to be interested.

  “The police should do something,” her father said.

  “She isn’t breaking any laws,” she shot back. Actually there was probably a law against toplessness. But not against just walking, even if you were fifteen feet tall.

  Her mother snorted a laugh. “How’re they going to arrest her, then?”

  Maryam smiled to herself. Ultimately, that was the thing that was going to save her. Who could possibly stop her? Who would ever try?

  * * *

  Maryam lay on her bed, papers spread out around her, checking schedules for highly public, high-profile events. Local sports matches were all well and good, but she couldn’t just keep popping across obscure fields and expect people to continue paying attention. She was also on the phone with Elaine.

  “You should go public,” Elaine stated.

  Maryam didn’t know that she could. Those people, her father had said, scorn in his voice. That raised the question: What if she had turned up a joker, and grown horns out of her head or five extra legs? What if she hadn’t been able to keep it secret, what then?

  She didn’t want to think about that.

  “And then do what?”

  “Charge for autographs. Get a sponsorship. Make a little money off these stunts.”

  “It’s not about making money,” Maryam grumbled. Then what was it about? She hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Just … she could do this thing, she was an ace, she ought to do something with it, right? Make a splash, get attention.

  Was that all she wanted? Attention? She hadn’t thought herself so shallow.

  Elaine huffed at her in disgust. “But I bet you could make a lot of money.”

  “Doing what, being a freak?”

  “Well I don’t know, you work it out!”

  “Wait, I found something.” Maryam sat up and read the story more closely. “This is it. This is perfect.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a new hospital opening, a big charity event. Prince Edward will be there. Can you imagine the press? They’ll get some amazing video.”

  “Prince Edward? Em, you can’t. That’s … there’ll be so many police there. Security will be really serious.”

  “And you think they can stop me?”

  “That’s not the point! They might not try to stop you, they may just shoot you!”

  “They wouldn’t. It’s not like I’ll actually get close or anything. I’ll just show up at the end of the street and wave or something.”

  “So what, you’ll just keep doing this until someone figures out who you are?”

  “No one’ll figure it out. They haven’t yet, have they?”

  “Maryam Shahidi, you’re addicted! You’re a thrill-seeking addict!”

  “You going to help me or not?”

  “Fine. Where do you want me to meet you?”

  * * *

  Maryam was thrilled. The crowd was stupendous, and TV cameras were everywhere. The royal motorcade had already made its way to the front of the hospital. She’d get close enough to wave to the prince, then walk off again before anyone even knew what was happening.

  She and Elaine got as close as they could, outside the barricades of the police cordon. Maryam had the routine down by now, stripping off her clothes and shoes, arranging her hair loose down her chest, hitching the nylon fabric around her hips and between her legs like some makeshift loincloth, like she was some Biblical Goliath. Ha, maybe that could be her ace name, Goliatha …

  “When you start making money at this, I need a cut,” Elaine said, gathering up her clothes.

  “You do, do you?”

  “I’m your assistant. I deserve something for handling your stinking knickers.”

  “My knickers do not stink!”

  Elaine rolled her eyes.

  “Just meet me down by the river. I’m counting on you, Elaine.” She said it like this was some secret mission upon which the fate of the nation depended. Elaine rolled her eyes again and backed away.

  Maryam closed her eyes and pulled energy into herself.

  Grow. Bigger. Even more.

  A great thrilling charge passed through her body, down to her bones. Like she had taken in a breath, and the breath just kept going, her lungs expanding. Like stretching a muscle that had never been stretched before.

  When she opened her eyes again, the ground seemed faraway. Elaine, who now didn’t come up any higher than her hips, backed away, wide eyed, before turning and running like a girl in a bad horror movie.

  Maryam could look inside second-story windows. She could step on cars. Kick over trees. She laughed, and her voice came out big. Time for her moment.

  She came around the building, stepped over the police barricade, took another long stride that brought her into the open—and had no place to go. The street was packed with onlookers, news vans, rows of photographers, and the sleek black limousines of the royal motorcade. The glittering party in orbit around Prince Edward himself stood before the front entrance of the new hospital. Impeccably dressed in a medal-festooned Royal Navy uniform, Prince Edward posed for the endless pictures and video being taken, caught in the middle of cutting the ribbon tied in front of the doors.

  Someone screamed. Maryam couldn’t tell where exactly the scream had come from; noises from the crowd seemed tinny and mashed together. The extra height made a difference in all her perceptions. Then came another scream, and another, and the crowd lurched, as every single person tried to move away from her. Chaos ensued, and the police moved in, trying to manage the sudden stampede. All the cameras were suddenly on Maryam, and she had no place to go. At least not without actually stepping on people. A deeply unpleasant prospect in bare feet.

  All this attention. Pandemonium, all because of her. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it?

  The moment she spent frozen in place, undecided about what to do, her face turned full to the crowd, and what seemed like a million camera shutters went off. Prince Edward, his navy cap settled over a studiously curious brow, merely blinked back at her.

  If she could just get across the street, to the car park past the row of shops, she could catch her breath.

  Maryam set down a foot and the concrete of the pavement cracked. More screaming followed. Well, this wasn’t good.

  Uniformed police and security were replacing the civilian crowd. Only a matter of time before someone arrived with a gun. Maybe that was enough of a show for one day. Maryam turned on a heel and ran back the way she had come, behind the new hospital building, hoping the structure would hide her. Not bloody likely.

  She kept running, her footfalls pounding like a jackhammer. Glancing behind her, she saw that a couple of intrepid photographers chased after her. Oh, that really wasn’t good. She needed to get away, to hide just long enough to shrink back to normal—and then what, run around the streets with tent fabric wrapped awkwardly around her? This was ludicrous.

  Well, at this height her strides carried her away fast, so she kept going, dodging down narrow lanes and around buildings until she reached the riverside park where Elaine should have been waiting for her.

  Elaine was not waiting for her.

  “Dammit!” she muttered and let off the burst of energy that dissipated her power and brought her back to normal size. Only this time was she aware that a lightning burst like that in the middle of a cloudless day was like sending up a signal flare.

 

1 2 3