Chapter 19

I was an emotional mess when I returned home. Based on my experience with Kalie, I had twenty-three days before I would give birth to Jordan. That meant in a week I would be the equivalent of almost three months pregnant. Around that time my belly would begin to show signs and up until then there would be other signs like increased hunger, restlessness when sleeping and more emotional generally.

It helped that I looked as bad as I was feeling. Besides behaving without my usual sass, I looked pale and withdrawn. My head injury resulted in large patches of baldness. I could have sped up the hair growth, but I didn't feel like it, I had a haircut to bring all my hair to buzz cut length and wore a wig when I needed to look presentable. The ability to swap my hair for different colours and styles would make me even harder to find when I wanted to disappear.

I was probably not at my most logical but I had to make decisions and make them quickly. My first and most obvious was that I didn't want anyone to know of my ability to resurrect someone. I was sure it was a limited type of resurrection, where I need their DNA and soul. I had no way of knowing how long a soul lingered after death. I wanted so badly to tell Stacy. I loved her and should have been able to tell her everything, but a telepath would be able to hear anything that I revealed. Likewise, I couldn't be around a telepath while I was thinking revealing thoughts. I had a brief respite while they looked for and hired a new telepath since Jordan was no longer available.

My body would start showing signs of changes within the first week and if Stacy was making love to me, I was sure she would notice, so I had to use my emotional vulnerability of having died and come back to life as well as lost Jordan as an excuse. I would also need to go away for an undetermined length of time to birth Jordan, breastfeed her until she was fully mature and stop thinking about it so my surface thoughts wouldn't give me away. I couldn't go before the week was up because I wanted to stay for the funeral. Actually, not wanted but needed to stay. I knew she was in my belly, so I wasn't grieving, but no one else could know that, so to keep the secret, I had to be there. I was still shaken up from the whole affair so manufacturing tears would not be the problem.

Two things occurred to me regarding my death. First, my age had returned to just fifteen, not almost sixteen which meant my body had done a full reset. I was also missing a day which meant I had gone into a deep sleep for more than my usual sixteen hours, presumably to repair as well as restore. My initial thoughts were that my face reset had been interrupted and just started again, but that wasn't the case. I had died and that had caused a whole-body reset.

The other thing was that I was too squishy to be a superhero. I was wearing a Raven suit for a reason, but I looked into the Raven suit and although it was classed as bulletproof that was only true for a certain calibre of bullet. It didn't cover explosions, energy blasts or mad scientist weird weapons. I wanted to help people, but most of the time I was called in, it was to find the culprit, not save someone and the said culprit didn't want to be found. They were even prepared to make sure that they couldn't be found and as my ability to find them became more well known, an incidence like this was inevitable.

That was the excuse I was going to give to Stacy and the team. I was re-evaluating my career choices and needed some time away to determine what I wanted to do with my life. Stacy was the hardest one to leave. She offered to give up superheroing, but she loved the life and I couldn't do that to her. I did consider it. If we weren't worried about a telepath I could tell her everything and I wouldn't have to bear this burden alone. My power was both a gift and a burden. Since I was able to save my granddaughter and now my best friend, I would never regret having this power, no matter what sacrifices I would have to make.

Making decisions was only one part of the equation. Somehow I needed to work out the logistics. It was hard enough to go through pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding when I had Talia to help me, to go through it alone would be a nightmare. The pregnancy and breastfeeding I thought I could manage. I could order food online whether that was takeout or home delivery of shopping. I thought I could get away with others seeing the obvious weirdness of a rapidly progressing pregnancy or growing child by renting a holiday home in a busy high rise and changing my face every few days. The different wig possibilities would add to that dynamic.

For the childbirth, I would need help. Unlike the usual process, I could predict the exact day and initiate labour deliberately. What I needed was secret help. Talia couldn't take two months off, but a week was possible. Kalie would have to come as well, but if she was only present for the end days of the pregnancy and the first days of breastfeeding, the weirdness would not be apparent and if I had a different face on she wouldn't know that it was her cousin let alone her grandfather. The trick was convincing Talia to help. She was not a midwife or qualified in any sense of the word and was more than a bit reluctant.

I wasn't that keen myself, to be honest. I was firmly of the belief that being close to pain relief was a very good idea as well as expert help. However, there could be no official record which meant no hospital, no proper midwife or other experts. And no pain relief. I tried to console myself that they hadn't let me use pain relief last time anyway and I had carefully chosen my body to make pregnancy and childbirth as easy as it gets.

Talia reluctantly agreed to help, but only because I admitted that if she said no, I would be attempting to go solo. She wanted to be present in case she needed to call an ambulance. Of course, Talia didn't know who I was giving birth to and I didn't like her even knowing that I could clone people. If she was ever questioned by a telepath it would all come out and that possibility had kept me awake some nights. I did have a disappear strategy if it ever came out.

Chapter 20

The other major decision was that I couldn't have Jordan be an exact clone of herself. That would give the game away. She also still needed an identity. Changing Jordan's face to look like someone else, was not a problem. I was confident after my experience with Kalie that as long as I left the core read-only DNA intact, Jordan, or whatever she was called, would still be herself. This also gave me the possibility of using some DNA from one of my cases.

Hannah Serra was an abduction case I had worked on where the perpetrator was a Null. I had identified him easily enough, but Jordan was unable to read him. We had used my evidence to obtain a warrant to check his apartment where I found more DNA evidence of Hannah's presence. Fortunately, for the case, but not for Hannah, he kept trophies of all his victims and we obtained enough evidence to put him away for life. We were pretty certain that Hannah was killed, but he dumped his victim's bodies at sea and it was never found. Age-wise she had been sixteen. I didn't know whether I was able to age a cloned body to anything past fifteen, but if not it would be close enough.

The biggest downside was that it was a high profile case in New York because Hannah's parents were very rich. I'm not sure if it would be kindness or nasty cruelty to believe that their daughter had survived with little memory. The fact that Jordan was a telepath would help her fit in, but it would be likely that an investigating telepath would be involved so she would either have to pretend that the experience had caused her to develop telepathy or a Null state. It did mean I had to choose a location in the states for my rental location. I chose Florida because I would only need Talia for one day and there were lots of attractions that we could take Kalie to. I would have to go to the park either very pregnant or with a small baby, but that was still doable.

I wish I could have discussed all this with Jordan, but if wishes worked, she wouldn't need me to rebirth her. I had to do what was practical and what I thought she would like. We had both commented when we had worked the case how nice Hannah's parents were. I had expected entitled rich parents with a superior attitude but instead found a lovely couple devastated by the loss of their daughter.

I thought a few genetic modifications that would make Jordan's life easier would be appreciated. After all, Jordan had expressed envy about my hairlessness, strong nails and ability to eat what I wanted without putting weight on. In addition, I decided to give her the elements I had tried and tested with Stacy so that she would have a rewarding sex life if she would ever go out on a date. So her bottom, vagina, clitoris, nipples and feet were all going to be highly reactive. Hannah's DNA indicated only an A cup in the breast department, so I increased that size to a C cup. Partly because that is what she had had as Jordan and claimed to be satisfied with, but partly as that would suggest she had matured and time had passed suggesting she was older than when she was abducted.

I contemplated other changes but decided that I needed her to be a close match for Hannah's DNA to the point where it would be a ninety-nine point nine percent match and indistinguishable from Hannah's original DNA. I knew that just because she looked like Hannah, that didn't mean they wouldn't test her DNA.

Having her inside me also gave me the chance to examine her read-only DNA much closer as well as the rest of her DNA that was now 'live'. Two things occurred to me, I could alter my DNA to become a telepath and Jordan had another ability that she didn't talk about either because she kept it a secret or she didn't know. Unlike in Kalie's case, becoming a telepath did not require any alterations to my core DNA, likewise with her other ability which was to partition the mind. To be honest, I didn't want to become a telepath and yet, at the same time, I didn't want a telepath to be able to read my mind and this would solve that issue.

Telepathy itself was nothing like I expected. It wasn't the case that a telepath reached into people's minds to read their thoughts. No, people were constantly shouting their thoughts and a telepath just had the ability to hear them. And the reason why telepaths couldn't hear other telepaths was more of a feedback mechanism. If you could hear people shouting their thoughts from some distance, imagine how loud your thoughts would sound. As a consequence, telepaths naturally reduced the loudness of their thoughts so that it was only a whisper and even other telepaths wouldn't be able to hear them. They could, however, deliberately speak louder which allowed telepaths to talk to one another, but only what they wanted to say, not unwanted accidental thoughts.

Partitioning the mind was a wonderful ability that was the ultimate in multitasking. You could set a part of your mind to do something different to the other parts. It might be something simple like work out a shopping list while your main mind was on the phone with someone or watching TV. I played with having both abilities and it allowed me to have a compromise where I was telepathic but the part of my mind that could hear other people's thoughts didn't report those thoughts to my main mind unless there was a good reason. My main mind still needed to be telepathic or I couldn't learn to reduce my shouting to a whisper, but I had the sensitivity of my main mind at the minimum. The hope was that I would get all the benefit of having an unreadable mind with none of the consequences of hearing unpleasant thoughts.

I loved the ability to set part of my mind on task and then forget about it until it chimed in with a conclusion. So I could be constantly alert, even when I was asleep while not worrying about it. I set that up about a week after I had left Australia, not realising how tense I was about going to sleep until I had played with Jordan's abilities and come up with that solution. Not surprising when I think about it in hindsight. I was, after all, killed in bed shortly after I had fallen asleep.

I did a bit of internet research to see how Hannah's parents were doing and the answer suggested not very well. Hannah was an only child and without her in their life, her parents had withdrawn from society, with her father resigning from being the CEO of the family company. It had only been about three months since she had been abducted and they were clearly still grieving. The process was even harder because there was no body to bring them some closure.

That element of my plan was a bit hard to deal with. I was constantly having second and even third thoughts about it but just couldn't find a better answer. Jordan would have to decide what she was going to tell them. I would have to stay away which was also giving me some emotional pain. I was trying to save my best friend, but in the end, I was going to have to leave her to fend for herself and have nothing to do with her. I couldn't or connections could be made and secrets revealed.

The other element I was struggling with was my relationship with Stacy. She had not wanted me to go and I couldn't tell her when I would be coming back. At least now that I had protected my mind from telepaths, I could return after Jordan was ready, but I would face some questions about becoming a Null. Not that I was one, but I wasn't going to admit to being telepathic. I phoned her every night but refused to answer when she phoned me out of the blue. I couldn't admit that the reason was because I needed to change my voice box back to one she would recognise. I couldn't do video calls because I didn't want her to see me pregnant and after the baby was born, a crying baby would be hard to explain. I claimed that I was on a journey of self-discovery. We were both going to live for a very long time and I needed to work out what I wanted out of life. I claimed to be meditating and even did do that so that I would look practised when I returned and my phone was permanently on silent.