Naomi reads the article.

Then she reads the article again.

Then she decides it is time to go visit her cousins in Canada.

Well - what is it, two weeks until the end of term? She can wait two weeks. The world isn't going to end in two weeks. Probably.

It's going to be a very antsy two weeks, though.

It quickly develops that "taking the mutant threat seriously" involves hunting down mutants and murdering them where they stand. And the Sentinels have the ability to sense mutants, somehow, so they don't hurt any humans! As long as they don't get in the way.

Two weeks—

—ten days—

—six days—

—two days—

—and she puts away her pen, hands in her last exam of the year, goes back to her residence hall, picks up her suitcase, and gets on a bus. Her cousins will be very surprised to see her, but she's not sticking around to find out how much worse it's going to get.

Halfway to the border, there is a loud clanging noise of metal on metal, two ovals imprint themselves into the roof of the bus, and the vehicle comes to a stop with an ominous grinding sound.

Ah, fuck. Should've gone two weeks ago. Should've gone last month.

A man gets out of his seat and bolts for the door. The Sentinel peels the roof of the bus open and plucks him out, then crushes him messily, drops his mangled corpse to the floor of the bus, and jumps off the bus to go hunt down some other hapless unfortunate.

There is a moment of stunned silence before people start screaming.

Naomi does not start screaming. Naomi is thinking things like well, at least it's not a matter of the Sentinels indiscriminately stopping all traffic to the border and I hope he hasn't bled on my suitcase and what are we going to do about the bus?

The answer to the bus question doesn't get answered for a while, because most of the people involved are screaming instead of doing productive things, but it transpires that the bus has been rendered non-operational. The driver radios for help.

There is no blood on her suitcase; other people aren't so lucky.

She could drag out a towel and sacrifice it to help the unlucky ones clean up, but she doesn't have that many towels to spare... on the other hand, if they're all going to be getting on the same replacement bus, she'd rather the ex-passenger not come along, in whole or in part. Out comes the towel.

Not all of the blood is willing to come out. One of the unlucky passengers had a piece of brain land on her. She appears to be in shock.

Yikes. Well, the towel can help with one of those problems. For the being in shock part, she's got nothing.

She makes a faint whimpering noise when the towel scoops the brain off her. There's still a smear of grey fluid on her skirt.

She manages to find a clean corner of towel with which to slightly decrease the amount of grey fluid, and then she is all out of ways to help with that.

Eventually the bus company sends someone to tow the bus back to the nearest town and finds a hotel to put up the traumatized passengers in.

Naomi attempts to rescue her towel in the sink of the hotel bathroom, with mixed success. Eventually she leaves it crumpled in the bathtub, rinses out the sink very thoroughly, washes her hands, and goes to bed.

She wakes up in the middle of the night to the confused impression that she is drowning. The bed is soaked in a dark gritty slime; when she struggles to free herself from the blanket, it's like trying to swim through tar. With a blanket on top of her. She claws at her face, desperate for breath; her nose and mouth are full of the stuff. It's pressing in on her from all sides, smothering her, scratching and sliding over her skin; it pours itself down her throat, creeps up under her pajamas, digs itself under her fingernails and presses at the corners of her eyes. Even her ears are full of muck. It has a heavy, oily taste, like something that belongs in the working parts of a car; and it's warm, verging on uncomfortably hot, not cold like she'd expect from something textured so much like mud.

Somehow, despite the grit and slime that fills her aching lungs, she stays alive and conscious long past when she would've expected to black out. She fights and fights, squeezing her eyes shut, trying to cough or vomit to clear the stuff from her lungs and stomach, and the only outcome of all her struggle is that it eventually finds its way past her underwear and discovers two more orifices to fill. The way it moves is less like a liquid and more like a living thing, trying to crawl inside her through every available opening. The grit rubs her skin raw; her insides feel ready to pop like an overfilled water balloon.

And then the slime does something deep inside her body that hurts more than all the rest of it combined, hurts enough that she does black out for a second—

—and when she wakes up, she can see through walls.

The last of the slime is absorbing itself into her skin; the abrasions from the grit are healing, and she can feel that, in a really extraordinary amount of detail—but the most spectacularly obvious change is the landscape of bright swirling lights painted on the inside of her eyelids. No - she's not seeing this with her eyes. Her eyes can only see in one direction. This is... every person, every bug, every blade of grass, every - microbe? - within a few hundred feet of her hotel room, shining brilliantly in psychedelic colour.

What the sweet galloping fuck.

She's not a mutant, is she? She can't possibly be a mutant. If she were a mutant, that Sentinel yesterday would've had something to say to her. Is she hallucinating? This is one hell of a hallucination, if so. The... whatever it was... has finished merging with her; her sheets still feel damp and unpleasantly gritty, but she's breathing real air now, the taste of oil fading from her tongue. She opens her eyes and sits up, venting a confused cough as she fumbles for the bedside lamp. Her sheets, surveyed in the light, are soaked with a red-black fluid unpleasantly similar to blood. Her skin is clear of it, though, and when she drags herself out of bed and removes her now thoroughly disgusting pajamas, she can watch fresh smears slowly fade from her hands.

It's early in the morning, well before dawn; moonlight spills between the curtains to compete with the dim yellow glow of the lamp. Her new sense combines seamlessly with the mundane view from her eyes, overlaying it somehow so that she can see both pictures at once without sacrificing any detail from either. Except that where her normal human vision is limited by light and direction and distance, the - life-sense? - is perfectly happy to tell her about the blood-soaked towel in her bathtub and the couple having sex across the hall and the spider snoozing in the ceiling and the roadkill smeared along the highway, all at the same time, bright and vivid and beautiful.

"What the fuck," she says aloud.

Nobody answers.

She sighs, and tries to turn her new senses inward. It's disturbingly easy. If she focuses right, she can watch her own cells divide. Her lifeforce shines a bright and bloody red, laced with threads of black; nothing else she can see has anything like those colours or that pattern. Nothing else she can see has a single solid colour like that at all; they shift, dreamlike, red edging into yellow, green to blue, blue to violet. Her own life stays the same, gleaming under her skin like bad cartoon lava.

Well. It doesn't take a genius to surmise that the new sense and the way she looks in it are both gifts from her nighttime visitor. The question is, what the fuck is she going to do about it?

If the replacement bus comes bright and early, she might be out of here before the hotel notices that her bed looks like she committed several murders in it. On the other hand she might not, and she doesn't have a good explanation. What the hell does she say, 'sorry, I think I was raped by an alien slime monster that gave me superpowers'? Yes, that'll go over well, particularly in this political climate.

Could she be a mutant? Is this what manifesting as a mutant is like??? She fucking well hopes not. Can the Sentinels even find mutants before they manifest, or is she in danger now that she wouldn't have been yesterday? Should she be bolting for the border as fast as she can go? Her new abilities don't seem obviously useful for that purpose; if she is in fact a mutant, she is probably just fucked.

In which case, regardless of whether she's going to die horribly later today and despite the fact that she is now completely spotless, the first thing she's going to do is take a fucking shower to get the memories off her skin.

She steps around the remains of a bug ground into the carpet, clearly visible to her new inner sight, and heads into the bathroom and picks up the bloodstained towel and—freezes. Because she can taste the traces of blood and brain under her hand, feel her new power absorbing them, sorting and analyzing the dead mutant's DNA and filing it away in some kind of metaphysical sample drawer.

"What the fuck???"

The towel does not volunteer a reply. She drops it on the floor and turns on the shower and scrubs herself pink. By the time she feels enough like herself again to go get dressed, it's well after sunrise, and the mess in her bed is even more obvious.

Someone knocks on her door.

She answers it, looking not quite as unsettled as she feels but still pretty damn unsettled. (And making sure there's no clear line of sight between door and bed.)

"Good morning! They sent a new bus."

"Oh good. I'll get my stuff."

She's one of the first ones onto the new bus, abandoning the ruined towel and pajamas in the hotel room. In the general scramble last night, nobody gave their names to the hotel; even if they find the mess before the bus gets underway, nobody should be able to tell for sure that she was involved. (And just in case, she leaves the window open, to make it plausible that somebody climbed in.)

The bus continues bussing along.

A few hours later they find that their planned route is currently unsafe due to hosting a conflict between a group of Sentinels and the "terrorist" group the X-Men. They're currently debating whether waiting and hoping they all go away will lose them more or less time than going around.

A fly buzzes in the window. She flaps her hand at it. It bounces off her fingertips, and now she has another sample in her imaginary drawer. Ick.

...if she tries, can she 'see' far enough ahead to watch the fight? How far is it?

Far enough away that they're not in immediate danger, but not much farther: a few miles.

She closes her eyes and 'looks' as hard as she can, but she can't stretch her senses that far. It's hard to tell how much of the distance she managed to cover. Enough to reach well into the zone where there are no more people because they've all run away by now, at least.

Eventually the fight wins, the "terrorists" victorious but having sustained casualties. The bus continues along its route; it's not long before the first corpse comes in range.

Oh boy. She tries not to look significantly queasier than anybody else, but can't quite get herself to stop looking.

She wants to get across that border as fast as possible.

She also, somewhat to her surprise, wants to destroy the Sentinels until no trace of them is left.

Vengeful fantasies aren't a usual thing for her, and this wasn't even anyone she knew - but they're fucking up an entire country, and she would very emphatically like them to quit that.

The sample drawer opens. She's not sure how to articulate the sensation, even inside her own head. But one dead mutant and a bug are not, it turns out, the only things tucked away in there. It also has - other things. A long coiling worm-lizard-snake-thing with stubby limbs and massive three-part jaws; a stick-limbed whip-tailed skeletal creature with sharp claws and huge batlike wings; a massive hulking beast like an elephant crossed with a triceratops crossed with a nightmare. She flips metaphorical pages, nicknaming them in her head. The worm-lizard feels like a Tunneler; the lanky bat feels like an Imp; the big one feels like a Tank. Next is a scaly worm with fins and a dragon's head; she calls it Leviathan. A muscular hoofed creature with the horns of a ram, the build of a moose, the teeth of a hyena, and the skin of a crocodile gets to be Warhorse. She's not sure what to call the sixth thing; she's not even sure whether it's a plant, a mold, a fungus, or something else entirely. It doesn't seem to fit in among the rest of her collection.

What is she meant to do with all this? She might like a Tank or two, but she wouldn't like to acquire one suddenly in the middle of this busful of innocent bystanders. She resolves not to do anything with her stored samples until she's got some time to herself in a nice isolated spot where she can be fairly sure of no interruptions for a while.

The bus is disrupted several more times on the way to the border. They aren't personally accosted again, but various road damage and two flat tires at once lead to them being put up in a hotel again.

And Sentinels pass by close enough that Naomi is pretty sure she'd be dead if she were a mutant. So the inexplicable powers remain inexplicable. Maybe she is hallucinating it all.

Is 'alone in hotel room' isolated enough to start playing with her little library? ...probably not, but she's curious. Maybe she can start with the weird mold. Weird mold seems a lot easier to explain than horrifying monsters.

She sits in the bathtub in case of weird mold explosions, and tentatively opens the library. ...oh, there's a copy of her in there, that's super weird. Well, she can mess with that later. Right now, she's going to find out what happens if she... selects? extracts? ...the weird mold.

Nothing seems to happen at first. Then she feels a twinge and turns her senses inward, and—that's an egg. A round soft-shelled egg the size of a marble, swelling rapidly in her womb.

That is not the result she was expecting.

The egg grows for half a minute, up to the size of a tennis ball, then stops. Naomi stares at her own midsection in confusion and alarm.

"...well," she murmurs to herself, "aren't I glad I didn't start with the Tank."

The egg remains dormant. When she focuses, she can tell how to make it come out.

Does she want to make it come out?

She imagines herself riding a Warhorse into battle, leading an army of Tanks, the sky shadowed by a cloud of Imps. If she doesn't play with this stuff, she's never going to learn how it works. Okay, egg, out you go.

Logically speaking, it should hurt, maybe not as bad as giving birth for real but definitely more than a papercut. But it doesn't hurt. Instead it feels - like sex, better than sex, a crashing wave of pleasure that leaves her limp and gasping when the egg finally pops out. She has to cover her mouth with her hands to stifle a dizzy moan. It takes her another minute just to gather the strength to sit up.

And there's her egg, round and reddish, covered in clear sticky fluid and filled with mystery goop. She pokes it. It's soft and squishy, but the shell is tough enough not to break at a touch. Tentatively, she commands it to split, and makes the stuff inside huddle in place instead of pouring down the drain. It answers to her will as easily as another limb; its lifeforce is marbled red-black just like hers. She can make it grow a little, although its growth is limited sitting at the bottom of a bathtub without anything to root itself in; she can make it wither, and then consume the withered parts for fuel; she can make it reshape itself, climb the side of the tub, roll itself into a ball, form a tiny goopy castle and then harden its outer surface until it goes 'tick' when she taps it with her fingernail. In its semi-liquid form it's a dark red nearly indistinguishable from black, but when it hardens it lightens to a red-brown that looks almost like clay.

She giggles.

Then she feeds it the scraps of its eggshell, makes it eat its hardened outer covering and squish itself down into a roundish lump and harden again; now it just looks like a weird rock.

"I wonder," she muses, "what my range is on controlling this stuff..."

Well, there's an easy test. Just leave her weird rock here when the bus moves on in the morning, and see whether she stops being able to affect it before or after it passes outside the range of her life-sense.

...she could make some more, in case the amount of goop involved has anything to do with it. And, you know. It's not like making these eggs is exactly a chore.

Five eggs later, she's exhausted enough to have trouble sitting up. That probably makes it time to stop. She sighs regretfully, piles her lumpy red rocks on the bathroom floor, hauls herself to her feet, and takes a shower with the last egg for company. Just to see what happens, she hatches it and pours it down the drain. Its journey through the building's plumbing doesn't seem to do it much harm, although being diluted with water makes it lose some cohesion.

She finishes her shower, drops a rock out the window, packs the rest in her suitcase, and goes to sleep.

The next morning someone comes to get her again.

The blob of goo that she washed down the drain has either gone outside her range or been diluted past recognition overnight. Or both. She can't see it anymore at all.

As the bus pulls away, she makes her abandoned goop-rock split itself in half and eat its shell and spread out and grow and form more rocks. This stuff is pretty versatile. Maybe she should call it Clay.

Something interesting happens as she gets farther and farther from the pile of Clay next to the hotel: she can see it, but she can also kind of see... from it? If she concentrates, she can shift her life-sense viewpoint to the rocks, or split it and see from both angles at once. It's kind of unsettling. No, scratch 'kind of': it's unsettling as hell.

She maintains control of the pile of rocks right up until the point where she and they can barely see each other, but as soon as they're out of mutual life-sense range, she loses the second perspective and is back to just herself again.

They finally reach the border.

There is a Sentinel blocking the border crossing.

Well at least it's not murdering everyone in sight.

...is anyone allowed through?

Well. No one has actually gotten close enough to check, yet. The woman who got brains on her is curled up making whimpering noises.

Curling up and making whimpering noises honestly seems like a pretty rational reaction to the situation at hand.

...all things considered, Naomi really doesn't want to be the first one to go say hi to the giant killer robot.

Everyone seems to agree with her.

Eventually someone tries to make a break for the border, but instead of approaching the murderbot he sprints at a diagonal towards the un-boothed forested area of the border.

The Sentinel turns its head and fires a laser at his feet. The ground explodes in a shower of dirt and rock; he isn't killed, but he is left moaning in pain and clutching his leg.

"Next time the world starts ending," Naomi mutters to herself, "I'm leaving a lot sooner."

Then she grabs her suitcase and starts walking. South. Fleeing the country by legitimate means has clearly failed her as a solution, but at this point she's confident enough in her mysterious and slightly disgusting otherworldly powers that she's willing to strike out into a random bit of wilderness to experiment.

As long as the wilderness she makes a break for isn't in Canada, and she doesn't suddenly turn up more powers, these ones actually mutant in nature, the Sentinel ignores her.

She is getting very far away from that Sentinel, and heading into the nearest patch of woods until she can no longer detect humans by their lifeforce or man-made structures by their ground footprint anywhere inside her range, and then she is unpacking her Clay and making it break open its rocky shells and eat some shrubs.

...as soon as the Clay has munched a few leaves, the bush it's consuming gets added to her internal library. It's not quite as fast as touching things herself, but that's interesting. (If she made a plant with her powers, would she give birth to a seed...? She can experiment later.)

Viscous red goo spreads out to carpet the forest floor, eating all the grass and bushes and fallen twigs that it finds. Her library expands by several more plant species. Then she makes the Clay heap itself up to form walls and a roof, and harden its outside and inside while leaving a layer of free-flowing goo in between, and she steps into her lumpy new home and heaves her suitcase onto a Clay shelf and and double-checks that there are no people anywhere in her range. There aren't. She takes off her clothes and packs them away and sits down to make a Tunneler.

Its egg grows to the same size as the Clay eggs, and emerges in just the same fashion. She lies there for a minute, panting, then sits up to examine her new creation.

The baby Tunneler hatches itself at her command: a foot-long squirmy pink lizard, tiny legs flailing. Its every movement is controlled by her will, and as easy as moving her own body; when it opens its beady little eyes, she can see through them.

"What the fuck," she says, and hears her words echo dimly in tiny lizard ears.

Okay. That's... more convenient than otherwise, really. She sends the Tunneler outside; the Clay on the ground tastes pleasantly sweet to it, so she has it lap some up, then sends it burrowing into the dirt. Its fearsome jaws and sharp little teeth chew through rock with hardly a pause, and she can feel it growing, its tunnel widening from a pencil-thin hole to a burrow big enough for her to crawl through. That's around the point where its growth starts to slow. Rather than having it keep digging around at random, she brings it to the surface a little ways south of her cabin and sends a glob of Clay rolling over to follow it, then has it chew its way back underground and start making a Clay-coated tunnel out to the approximate edge of her base range. Her lifesense expands to follow it, relayed by the Clay.

Can she control two of these things at once? Let's find out.

When she makes another one, she has to pause the excavation while she lays the egg, but once she's through with that part, she can send out the second Tunneler and control it just as easily as the first. She makes a third, a fourth, a fifth, and sets them all to expanding her network of tunnels, digging deep beneath the earth and avoiding anything that looks like civilization. They can sense buried pipes and cables - something about the way the vibrations of their digging reflect back to them - and she has them route around those. It would be a bad idea to attract attention by breaking something.

By this point her life-sense has such a wide coverage from so many angles that she's starting to feel like an all-seeing goddess. She's pretty sure the radius of her network isn't much more than half a mile, though, and that is insufficiently all-seeing and goddesslike for her purposes - barely twice her base range. She hatches five more Tunnelers and sets them to work.

Eventually a Sentinel wanders by.

The reaction of the wildlife within sensing range is enough to tip her off long before it gets close enough for her to personally see or hear. She has her puddle of wet Clay soak itself into the ground; the hardened stuff is enough like real rock that it probably won't be suspicious, but a puddle of oozy dark red stuff thirty feet in diameter might look weird enough to be worth investigating.

...is that the setting sun, shining in the open door of her Clay cabin? Yes it is. She has been here all day and she's not hungry, thirsty, or sleepy and doesn't have to go to the bathroom. That's... convenient? Hopefully this Sentinel isn't about to come kill her and make it a moot point.

The Sentinel wanders closer by.

Well that's nerve-wracking.

It wanders reasonably close to her hut and then wanders away.

Okay. Still not a mutant. Cool.

In her distraction, she stopped tunneling; she starts that up again. The sun sinks below the horizon, and her tunnel network steadily expands. She discovers that if she needs a Tunneler to retreat along its tunnel, it's much faster to cover it in liquid Clay and have the Clay slide it along than to make it crawl backward with its own stubby limbs. Maybe she can slime-scoot herself across the border in a tunnel deep beneath the earth. The Sentinels probably aren't watching for that.

For now, though, she's too nervous to dig that far north even if she does it two hundred feet below the surface. She stays a respectable distance away from the border and digs her tunnels out and down, sneaking under roads and cities, dodging around pipes and sewers.

Some hours into the night, she blinks and realizes she's been daydreaming, running the Tunnelers on automatic. None of them seem to have gotten in trouble. She keeps the pattern going with the fraction of her attention that is apparently all it needs, and turns her thoughts to learning more about her power.

It would be useful to have some normal animals as scouts and spies. She has some Clay ooze up through the ground, then sends it sliming around to trap and eat some wildlife. Her library expands by six squirrels, some miscellaneous less-identifiable forest-dwelling rodents, three raccoons, and an owl. She's glad she doesn't have to watch the Clay dissolve them; seeing their struggles with lifesense is bad enough.

...somehow it just seems so much more gross to lay raccoon eggs than horrible demonic worm eggs. Why? She has no idea. But if she wants raccoons, she's going to have to make them herself.

The raccoon egg hatches twins. She feeds them wet Clay; they reach adult size in less than a minute, bright-eyed and slimy. She sends them scampering out into the forest and hatches two more. A coyote stumbles across one of her Clay puddles; the Clay engulfs it, and now she has a coyote in her library too. The raccoons seem more useful, though. She has them wash the Clay from their fur and hide in bushes to watch for trouble.

Owls next? Hmm - no. First she wants to see if she can make creatures that make other creatures. Otherwise this project is going to have one hell of a production bottleneck.

Half her raccoons are female. She tries to figure out how to make them grow eggs. It doesn't work, not even if she tries to have them hatch more raccoons - not even if it's the same raccoons, the child a clone of the parent - not even if she has the prospective mother sitting in her lap at the time.

The floor of her hut is almost an inch deep in egg-related fluids. As soon as she notices, she has trouble forgetting again; it's very attention-grabbingly gross. She has the floor crack to release some liquid Clay, and the Clay absorbs all the fluid. Sitting in Clay feels much nicer.

What else could she try? ...she's in that library; she could hatch a clone of herself, see if Second Naomi inherits all of First Naomi's otherwise-unique powers.

No, she decides, she's not in nearly enough trouble yet to make that experiment worthwhile. No hatching creatures with human brains until she expects to need a big army in a big hurry. —That, or if she thinks she might need an extra Naomi for the brainpower, to handle all this hatching and tunneling and spying and wildlife-grabbing; she's definitely doing more things at once than she would've been capable of yesterday, but it seems like there's still only about one Naomi's worth of real conscious creative problem-solving attention.

For now, though: owls. They come out three to an egg; she hatches twelve. As far as she can tell, none of her creatures are hungry, not after that first meal of Clay to get them up to adult size.

...come to think of it, if she hasn't eaten in almost a whole day, where is she getting all these eggs? Never mind eating for two, she's not even eating for one! She starts another Tunneler growing inside her, and this time pays close attention, but she can't quite tell if the rest of her is lighter by one Tunneler egg once it reaches laying size. If only laying them wasn't so distracting, she might be able to gather better data. As it is, she hatches three more and still can't quite figure out if she's wasting away. Maybe she should eat some Clay herself, just to be sure. She does that. It tastes nice. Sort of like fruit syrup.

The sun rises. She hatches six more raccoons and sends them sliding through her tunnels to lurk by the sides of roads as spies. With bellies full of Clay, they're walking relays for her life-sense. (When she sends one out with no Clay, just to check, it's as much under her control as ever but she can't use it as a sense relay. She sends it back into the tunnels to fill up, then has it scrounge through somebody's garbage for discarded newspapers.)

The situation has gotten steadily worse for the country, the newspapers report, although they don't actually frame it that way. Humans who support mutants (and maybe even humans who are just suspected of supporting mutants) have started to be killed by Sentinels as well.

There are plenty of Sentinels in her range, but none of them have reacted to anything she's done.

Well. That's some fucked up news. And kind of changes the game as far as hiding in the woods is concerned.

One of her Tunnelers makes it to what she thinks is probably Lake Champlain. She closes off the tunnel behind it and has it break through into the water, just to see if it can survive there. Result: nope, it drowns. She lays another one to replace it. It occurs to her to retract all her visible Clay patches belowground, to avoid them being spotted in the daylight; she does that.

Okay. Is 'Sentinels might randomly murder me even though I'm not a mutant' enough imminent danger to make cloning herself worthwhile even if it results in a helpless infant twin sister in an adult's body? ...Yes. Yes it is.

She tries that.

The egg grows to the size of a watermelon, with a thick hard shell and a nearly-finished human infant inside.

Getting this one out is going to hurt, isn't it.

Well. No point chickening out now. She pushes.

It hurts. It hurts a lot. She's fortunate that there's no one in earshot, because she screams at the top of her lungs, screams and screams until her voice gives out. Her raccoons go idle; her Tunnelers stop chewing. She isn't doing anything except shove this fucking egg out of her body, inch by agonizing inch.

But the pleasure isn't gone, either. It is a transcendently glorious and awful experience, the longest and most painful orgasm of her life.

When it's finally over. she rests for a few minutes, then resumes all her tunneling. A few minutes after that, she sits up and looks at her egg. There's blood all over it; she vaguely remembers sensing real injury on its way out, but whatever might have happened to her, it's already healed. She has the Clay on the floor consume the blood and weaken the shell, then hatches her new... baby.

She can see through her infant clone's eyes as soon as it opens them. She pours Clay down the baby's throat, feeding it as fast as she can. Soon she has a toddler, a child—two minutes of fast-forward puberty, and she's looking at a perfect copy of herself. And looking back at herself through the copy's eyes. There's twice as much Naomi to go around, mentally as well as physically, but still only one perspective; her two brains share every thought, merged into a single 'I'.

"This is weird," she says from in her original body.

"Tell me about it," she agrees, this time from the new one.

"Would it help if we put some clothes on?" (Being naked and covered in goo is a fair bit weirder when she has to see it from an outside perspective.)

"I don't think so."

"Straight to business, then," says First Naomi, and each of her selves starts gestating a Tunneler. It works perfectly. Two simultaneous egg-layings are twice as distracting as one; she staggers the next round by a minute, checking to make sure Second Naomi's offspring aren't detectably different from First's. As far as she can tell, her second self is fully functional, indistinguishable from the original in every way.

First Naomi starts gestating another clone. Second Naomi climbs down into the tunnel network and sends herself slime-sliding away; if any one of her is as good as the next, her odds of survival are greatest if she doesn't keep any two of them in the same place. A Tunneler near the northeast edge of the network angles itself downward and loops around to carve out a small cave. Slime-sliding is unpleasantly reminiscent of her nighttime encounter with the invasive slime-thing that started all this, but she can keep most of her attention on other things, take deep breaths with her aboveground set of lungs to remind herself she's not suffocating. The pitch-dark tunnels aren't so bad when their liquid Clay lining glows so vividly in her life-sight.

A Sentinel starts wandering in her general direction.

Second Naomi reaches her destination, curls up, and starts gestating a Tunneler.

First Naomi decides to hold off on laying this egg. The approaching Sentinel is far enough away from her hut that she's pretty sure it couldn't hear her from there, but she doesn't know how fast they can move, and she doesn't want to find out what it would do if it found her while she was still screaming. She makes sure there's no liquid Clay visible aboveground, and waits.

The Sentinel keeps wandering in her general direction for a while, then stops wandering and makes a beeline for her.

—tunnel time bye.

With both of her belowground, it's much harder to distract herself from the traumatic associations. She collapses her hut and the tunnels immediately beneath it, sucking everything deeper until there's thirty feet of dirt between the surface and the first hint of Clay; her suitcase, wrapped in a hasty shell of hardened Clay, follows her original body as she zooms southwest along the deepest tunnels in the network. And if she's whimpering quietly the whole time, well, there's nobody else around to hear it.

The Sentinel finds the point where she disappeared and starts digging downward.

There's plenty of innocent dirt there, along with a few traces of hardened Clay; the liquid stuff is receding into the ground faster than the Sentinel can dig for it, and Naomi is five hundred feet below the surface and speeding away as fast as her slime-coated tunnels can take her.

The Sentinel eventually gives up and leaves.

Well, now in the place where her hut used to be there's a lot of empty collapsed tunnels that make kind of an ugly hole in her Clay network, but on the plus side, she wasn't just murdered by a Sentinel. Call it a win.

Also, apparently the lowest layer of the network is deep enough underground that Sentinels can't see her down there. She adjusts her tunneling strategy accordingly, and sends a few Tunnelers north to see if they can cross the border safely as long as they do it from far enough down.

Her original body arrives in a Tunneler-carved cave, not far from the bottom of Lake Champlain. No one's going to hear her scream down here; she lays her egg, hatches baby Third Naomi, and starts feeding her Clay. Meanwhile, Second Naomi keeps hatching Tunnelers to expand the network.

A mutant enters her range. Then another, then another--there are a lot of them, moving as a group.

Oh boy.

...all right, where are they and where's her closest Tunneler, can she open up a tunnel nearby?

A little ways away, yeah.

Up goes a Tunneler.

The mutants freak out slightly when the thing appears!

Yeah that's fair. This is one of the oldest ones; the tunnel it makes is big enough for two people to crawl through it side by side. Unfortunately that means that it's a giant scaly worm-thing whose front end is mostly composed of big sharp rock-chewing teeth and it's five feet in diameter at that point. She has it close its mouth and attempt to look contrite while she rearranges the Clay to retract it.

Then the Tunneler slurps back down its slime-lined tunnel, and half a minute later, a very wet raccoon pops out and starts beckoning to the mutants with humanlike sweeps of its little arm.

(Meanwhile, she leaves Third Naomi curled up at the southernmost point of her range making Tunnelers one after another, and has First Naomi and the slightly bedraggled suitcase start heading north. She's pretty sure a couple of those Tunnelers have made it past the border unharmed, and she would like at least one of her to follow them. Second Naomi starts gestating another clone.)

The mutants confer, and then a subset of them enter the tunnel.

It's dark in there, and slimy. But the slime doesn't slip under their feet or linger on their hands when they touch it. Very well-behaved, that slime.

The tunnel angles downward. When it forks, Naomi blocks the same-level fork with a wall of living Clay, to direct the mutants down the fork that leads to the next level down.

First Naomi and her suitcase are getting close to the border. Third Naomi is the one nearest the mutants. She sighs, abandons her latest Tunneler spawn, and slime-slides up the tunnels to meet them; she can't think of a way to get a raccoon to mime 'please ride the sixty-mile-an-hour underground waterslide to Canada', and she doesn't want to alarm them by snatching them away without warning, so this is going to require actual human words.

The mutants proceed cautiously down the tunnel.

And a naked girl covered in slime comes rocketing up the tunnel toward them.

"Hi," she says, stopping about ten feet away. "Sorry about the mess. I can get you all to Canada but you have to go waterslide-style and let the tunnel do the work unless you want to walk all fifty-odd miles of it five hundred feet underground—that's how low you have to be before the Sentinels can't see you anymore. Well, they can't see me that far down. I don't know if it's different when you're actually a mutant."

The one in front steps forward. "It would certainly be a good thing to have a route out. Is this a one-time or ongoing offer?"

"...I hadn't realized you might want to delay taking it. Uh, the offer's open indefinitely, unless you all get murdered before you make it back into the tunnels, in which case sucks to be you?"

"We'll certainly want to evacuate the children immediately, but we have the ability to fight Sentinels and win, and the resources to find other mutants with less ability to get out on their own."

"Oh, I've found the big boys, have I. Well. I'm digging more tunnels as fast as I can; keep the gross raccoon, I can use it to hear you if you're in range of my network. Who's going to Canada on this trip? Send 'em down. And if you don't have any more questions, I'd really better get back to work."

"Alright."

"Bye!", she says, and zooms away on a splash of goo.

(Second finishes feeding Fourth, and sends her out into the network while Tunnelers dig her a cave near the middle. Third starts another clone on her way to her resting place. The western Tunnelers are making headway under the lake, and First in the north has just about decided she's far enough past the border to risk coming up for a look around.)

The mutants return to the surface, confer for a little while, and then a group of them consisting mostly of children but with a few adults along, presumably to mind them. The children seem delighted by the slimy tunnels, and have to be dissuaded from attempting to do unwise enthusiastic things.

As each person enters the tunnel, the slime bunches up to wrap around them and pull them farther in. Soon the expedition is a long train of slime-blobs, steadily accelerating up to speeds that could keep pace with a car. Just to make sure, Naomi blocks off all the wrong turns with plugs of hardened Clay, ten feet thick and indistinguishable from the lining of the walls, long before the slime train ever reaches them. They spiral down to the lowest level and then head north, taking the most direct possible route to the Canadian-side tunnel entrance where First Naomi is currently de-sliming herself and putting on clothes.

Meanwhile, the gross raccoon is licking slime out of its fur.

The raccoon is deposited in the lap of a man in a wheelchair, and then the group starts leaving the way they came.

Deep underground, Naomi's Tunnelers keep pace with the departing mutants.

It's going to take almost an hour for the kids to reach Canada. In the meantime, she keeps producing new clones, making sure she only hatches one at a time so the distraction won't interfere with her work. It gets easier as the number of Naomis grows. Third hatches Fifth, Fourth hatches Sixth, Second hatches Seventh, Fifth hatches Eighth... she pays close attention, but as far as she can tell, every copy is perfect no matter how many generations stand between her and the original. She stops keeping track of who hatched who when she's satisfied that it really doesn't matter. Her bodies distribute themselves into the tunnels, producing new Tunnelers as fast as they can lay the eggs without sacrificing the mental clarity she needs to extend the tunnels and transport the children and pay attention to that raccoon.

Hi! a voice in her head says. Who're you?

???

I'm a telepath, my name's Edie.

Why are you reading my mind?

She pauses the egg-laying cycle, because no.

I'm not reading your mind! I'm talking to you. I'm not listening to anything except what you send back on purpose.

Okay, good. Don't start. Why are you talking to me, then?

You're really weird. You're not a mutant! How are you doing this without being a mutant?

That is a long, gross, terrifying, irrelevant story, she says. Wait, are you one of the kids?

...Yes.

Well. My name's Naomi. Nice to meet you. Definitely don't read my mind.

I wasn't gonna!

Good!

She tentatively resumes egg-laying. There's thirteen of her now; she can lay eggs almost continuously from her various bodies, producing another clone every two minutes, and still have enough attention left over to handle the whole network without faltering.

How's the story irrelevant?

Because the way I got my mysterious new powers doesn't tell me anything at all about what they are or how they work. I'm figuring it all out from scratch.

Oh. Do you know if other people could get them?

I wouldn't have the first clue how to try giving them to anybody, and the way I got them was unpleasant enough that I hope it never happens to anybody else. Also they're really weird and gross.

People are dying.

I noticed. Anyway, giving more people my powers would be a waste. Making more copies of myself is faster and it lets me keep the whole tunnel network connected, which is way more efficient than having a bunch of different ones.

Okay.

...what?

I'm really curious.

About what, how I got my powers? Don't be. You wouldn't enjoy knowing. I sure don't.

People say that about lots of stuff.

Yeah?

Like frog guts or where babies come from.

I'm not just saying you'd regret knowing, I'm saying I do. Bet you don't hear that about frog guts.

Sometimes people who've just had to dissect a frog wish they hadn't.

Dissecting frogs is fun. This wasn't. And I bet somebody's going to be mad if I traumatize you.

Okay.

And look at that, you're almost here!

The exit tunnel spits out its train of passengers into a spacious Clay-walled building in the middle of the forest. First Naomi is there, clean and fully dressed. Slime separates itself from the emerging passengers and flows back down the tunnel to redistribute itself throughout the network.

"Thank you," says one of the adults, a blue-skinned red-haired woman in a trenchcoat.

"You're welcome."

A little boy with blue fur and a tail teleports into her arms. She hugs him tightly.

Adorable.

"My tunnels don't go much farther than this and I haven't had much time to explore, so all I can tell you is we're in the middle of the woods somewhere north of the border and there's nobody around for a quarter mile," she says.

"That will do," she says. "We've mostly been avoiding civilization lately anyways, except when we're rescuing someone."

"Figures. If you need anything, uh, my unsettling slime is edible and that's about all I've got in the way of hospitality up here."

"I don't suppose your tunneling ability let you find any iron ore."

"Probably wouldn't recognize it if I saw it, why?"

A girl--preteen or early teenage--raises her hand. A thick steel bangle on her wrist starts rotating around it.

"Because me."

"Oh, cool," she says. "I can't do 'mining for iron ore', but I can probably do 'raccoons digging through trash', if you want."

She nods. "That would help!"

She sets her network to producing another batch of thieving raccoons. "It'll take a while for everything to get here, though. I should really figure out how to make the tunnels go faster."

"Why aren't we slimy?" the girl standing next to her asks.

"Because I figured you didn't want to be. I can re-slime you if you like." A blob of goo peeks playfully out of the tunnel.

She peers suspiciously at it. "No thanks. So you just sucked the slime off us?"

It blobs back down the tunnel. "Yep!"

"Huh. Neat. How's your power work?"

"What d'you mean?"

"How'd you make the tunnels? Where'd the giant worm thing come from?"

"I made the tunnels with giant worm things, of course."

"Where'd you get the giant worm things?"

"Hatched 'em out of eggs."

"Where'd you find the eggs?"

"I am giving you the runaround because I don't wanna talk about it!"

"Oh. Where'd the slime come from? Why are the slime and the worms you?"

"What do you mean, why are they me?"

"Telepath."

"The same one I was talking to earlier?"

"...Yes?"

"Why didn't you say so?"

"It didn't seem relevant?"

"Kind of impolite, talking to somebody when you know you were just talking to them a minute ago but they don't, and not saying anything about it."

"Oh."

"It's the sort of thing you'd do if you wanted to trick somebody into saying things they wouldn't have said if they'd known who they were talking to."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, now you do."

She looks down.

"Everyone I talked to already knew, before."

She sighs. "Yeah."

She and magnetism girl hug very tightly.

Balls of slime filled with assorted trash start fountaining out of the tunnel entrance. They've eaten all the non-metal parts already, leaving just the wires and hinges and staples and screws and bolts and brackets and one badly rusted cast-iron frying pan.

Magnetism girl half turns away from the hug, her face lighting up. The various metal objects soon lose their defined shapes, becoming instead fluid snakes of iron that conglomerate in the air into a shining metal ball at about adult head height.

"There's more where that came from, but I don't know how long you're all planning to stick around."

"We could use a lot more metal," the magnetist said.

"Okay, but that doesn't tell me whether I should be aiming for 'what I can get in two hours' or 'what I can get in two days'."

"Do we have any reason to go anywhere else?"

"You're in the middle of a forest with nothing to eat or drink except weird slime, a choice of beds ranging from 'dirt with roof' to 'dirt without roof', and no bathrooms?"

They all look at each other.

"We've been roughing it for a while," the blue woman says.

"Sure, but up here you don't have to avoid civilization for fear of murderous robots."

"We're slightly concerned that if it becomes public knowledge that there are X-Men in Canada they won't keep stopping the Sentinels at the border."

"Well, fair enough. I welcome suggestions on how to make the place more hospitable, then."

"That's what I want the metal for," the girl says.

"...?"

"To make houses and stuff with."

"..that's not an explanation."

"What would be an explanation?"

"An explanation would explain how you were gonna do that."

The ball of metal morphs into a slightly crude dollhouse.

"...there's no way I'm gonna come up with enough metal to make an entire house out of anytime soon. I built this place," she gestures at the large Clay room they are currently in, "I can build more like it if you tell me what you want."

The children start excitedly yelling things. Most of them are implausible, like "giant waterslide."

Do the adults have any contributions here.

The adults have reasonable house-related contributions.

Then she can build a reasonable house or two!

The adults herd children into houses.

And Naomi sits, and forty-and-counting clones of Naomi disperse themselves through the tunnel network as it grows to cover an increasing fraction of the land area of the United States. (She sends a few tunnels farther north, too, just in case. And has her raccoons scavenge for metal.)

It's annoying that her Tunnelers drown so easily. She wonders if she can do something about that. Is 'mix and match' an available function here? Let's find out. If she tries to, say, copy and manipulate the samples in her library, instead of calling them up to become eggs...?

She can do that. It turns out to be a difficult, finicky, frustrating, attention-consuming process, but she gradually hacks together a prototype of an amphibious Tunneler, borrowing functional bits from the Leviathan where necessary. Amphibious Tunnelers are slightly worse at tunneling than the normal kind, but they can dig near water without dying if she accidentally or deliberately breaks through. She distributes them appropriately.

Okay. Her personal safety is taken care of. Time to start experimenting with ways to fight Sentinels.

She finds a nice big empty bit of wilderness which doesn't have any Sentinels anywhere near it at the moment, and sends her biggest Tunnelers there to build a nice big cave where several Naomis can experiment with making things like Imps and Tanks.

Tank eggs are even bigger than human eggs.

There are fifty-three of her by this point, but as the Tank egg reaches its final size, she makes sure everything in the network is engaged in easily paused activities, in case the egglaying is too distracting. Just having it in there hurts. She's not sure this clone is going to survive giving birth to it.

But it doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy to just leave that clone sprawled on the cave floor, whimpering in pain and unable to stand. She's got to try it at some point. Might as well be now.

She lays the egg.

Her safeguards against distraction turn out to be very necessary. It hurts a lot more than producing another clone. Flesh tears, bones snap; the egg rips its way out to lie on the cave floor in a spreading puddle of blood.

Much to her surprise, the clone lives. And her new powers obviously come with accelerated healing, because it takes about a minute and a half for all the damage to reverse itself.

A blob of Clay carries the egg up to the surface to hatch; she doubts it would fit through the tunnels if she hatched it in the cave. She hatches the creature and feeds it gallons of Clay; it goes from an ungainly stumpy-legged thing the approximate size and shape of a baby elephant to a huge horned beast, so big it barely fits between the trees of this sparse forest, with a heavy jaw full of strong sharp teeth and a thick tapered tail like a lizard's. Its sharp-scaled hide is a dark glossy brown; the majestic fan of its bony neck frill is decorated with long sharp spikes.

It's impressive. She feels accomplished. And decides to take a break from egg-laying for a few minutes before she tries making a Warhorse.