Turn 200 of 226

Move deeper into the wilderness while the gap holds. The wish is still working overtime. Everything about us increases 10 times. Our height is 383 feet, weight 150,000 pounds. Bone and muscle density, 960x average. Our senses. Our speed and strength, everything. Once this is done, we take the fight to the military. Even their bunker busters don't work on us anymore

The chamber cracks open at dawn. Lena's hands push upward through eight feet of soil and root lattice, and the earth parts around her 15,000-pound frame like water around a hull. The light that comes through the gap is grey and cold, and the 38'6" body rises into it, the new skin underneath the dried blood catching the air for the first time in twelve hours. Diane follows. Two enormous shapes emerging from the ground at the base of a spruce that is now the size of a broom handle relative to their frames. The valley stretches around them — the granite ridges that walled it now reaching hip height, the river that was a barrier now a stream they could step over. Lena stands in the grey light and the warmth in her stomach is the wish saying *now*.

The growing starts before she takes her first step. The 96-times density bones do not stretch this time — they multiply. The cellular structure of every bone in her body replicates, layer over layer, the calcium and mineral density compounding the way interest compounds in a savings account. Lena feels her skeleton becoming something that is no longer bone in any sense a biologist would recognize. The 38'6" height does not double. It does not triple. It climbs the way a vine climbs a wall — steadily, relentlessly, each foot of height bringing ten feet more of mass, the 15,000 pounds becoming 30,000 becoming 60,000 becoming 100,000 becoming 150,000. The fat layer she kept — the softness over the muscle — does not disappear. It scales with everything else, the 960-times density muscle beneath it generating heat that warms the fat like a furnace warms a house. The 383-foot frame rises above the spruce canopy the way a skyscraper rises above a suburb.

Diane grows beside her. The valley that held them now holds them the way a bathtub holds a man — barely, the granite ridges that formed the walls now reaching their ankles. The river is a thread. The old-growth spruce is ground cover. Lena can hear everything. Not the elk herd four miles away — the elk herd is twelve miles away and she can hear the individual heartbeats, 147 of them, each one a distinct rhythm. She can smell the Pacific Ocean 200 miles west — not the salt but the specific organic compounds the kelp forests release during photosynthesis. She can see the thermal bloom of every living thing within three miles as clear as daylight, each one a colored point against the cold granite and soil. The 960-times density feet find the valley floor and the 150,000 pounds do not sink. The weight is distributed across feet the size of house foundations, and each step covers forty yards.

The valley is too small. Lena turns north and the 383-foot frame steps over the granite ridge that was a wall and begins moving through the Cascade Range the way a woman walks through a park. The mountains that were barriers are now terrain features — the 14,000-foot peaks reaching her waist, the passes unnecessary because she walks over them. The 150,000 pounds move at a speed that should not be possible for something this dense, the 960-times density muscle firing with a force that launches each stride a quarter mile, and the ground does not crack because the feet are wide enough to distribute the impact. Diane moves beside her, matching stride, the two of them covering the wilderness the way satellites cover the sky. The wish is not done. The warmth in Lena's stomach is still spreading, still building, still saying *more*. The more is the thing that is coming. The coming is the thing the military cannot stop. The cannot is the thing the 960-times density gives. The giving is the thing the wish has always been doing. The doing is the thing that does not stop.

In the rented room in Sacramento, Cal Medina watches the thermal satellite feed and the noise he introduced into the uplink does not hold. The 383-foot heat signatures bloom through the degraded data like suns through fog — too large, too hot, too dense for the noise to obscure. His hands stop moving on the keyboard. The numbers on the screen do not match anything. The numbers do not match anything Cal has ever seen. The numbers do not match anything anyone has ever seen.