The hospital was a sterile, humming box of white tile and fluorescent flickers that Jeremy could feel in the back of his throat. To the nurses, he was just a concerned classmate, a boy who knew what it was like to be trapped in a bed. But as Jeremy walked down the quiet hallway toward the intensive care unit, the high-purity shards in his pocket pulsed with a cold, predatory rhythm.
The refined mineral was acting as a lens. He could feel the hospital's electrical grid, yes, but he could also feel the leakage—the strange, frantic bio-electricity of the "changed" scattered throughout the building.
He stopped at Room 312.
Greg Arkin lay there, a pale shadow of the boy who had skittered through the woods. He was hooked up to a dozen monitors, his skin a translucent grey. He looked broken, but Jeremy could hear the "noise" coming from his marrow—a high-pitched, frantic chittering of energy that the doctors probably mistook for a seizure.
Jeremy stepped to the bedside, his shadow falling over Greg's convulsing form. He didn't feel pity. He felt a deep, resonant curiosity. Greg wasn't just a boy; he was a biological engine running on high-octane meteor fuel.
"You're burning up, Greg," Jeremy whispered, his voice steady. "The hunger... it's too much for a human mind to carry, isn't it?"
Greg's head snapped toward him with a jagged, insect-like click. His voice was a dry, rasping hiss. "Need... need to find... her. The mate. The scent... it's everywhere..."
Jeremy's eyes narrowed. He understood now. The meteor rocks hadn't just changed Greg's body; they had overwritten his soul with the base, predatory instincts of a hive. Strength, speed, and a ravenous, single-minded lust for a "mate" that would eventually consume him.
"I'll take the weight," Jeremy said. He reached into his jacket, his fingers brushing the Emerald Shard from the Shifflett Mine. The stone acted as a filter, a cold glass wall between Jeremy's consciousness and the madness of the power he was about to touch.
He placed his hand firmly over Greg's sternum.
ZIP.
The sensation was a violent, physical assault. It wasn't the clean "Static" of a wire or the silent "Ice" of Sean Kelvin. This was raw, red-blooded power. Jeremy felt his own muscles swell, his heart rate doubling, tripling, until his chest felt like a pneumatic hammer.
Through the emerald shard, he felt the Speed—the ability to see the world in slow-motion frames. He felt the Strength—the capacity to tear steel like wet paper. And then, he felt the Hunger.
A dark, oily wave of predatory instinct tried to surge past the shard and into Jeremy's brain. It was a buzzing, frantic need to hunt, to claim, to dominate.
Jeremy let out a low snarl, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the shard. He focused on the "Ice" he had stolen from Sean, using that borrowed cold to freeze the insectoid lust before it could take root in his mind. He didn't want the madness; he only wanted the mechanics.
With a final, jagged pull, the connection snapped.
Greg Arkin let out one long, shuddering breath and went limp. The oily sheen on his skin faded, his muscles smoothing out into the lean, soft frame of a normal teenager. The "insect" was gone.
Jeremy stood over the bed, his chest heaving. He felt... monumental. He looked down at his hands; they weren't trembling, but they were vibrating with a microscopic, lethal frequency. Every sound in the hospital—the drip of an IV, the heartbeat of a nurse three rooms down—was a deafening roar in his ears.
Jeremy turned to leave, his skin still prickling with the new, stolen power, when the door swung open.
Clark Kent stood there, holding a small bunch of wildflowers. He stopped dead, his eyes darting from the flatlining monitors (which were slowly beginning to reset) to Jeremy's glowing, energized face.
The moment Clark entered the room, the Emerald Shard in Jeremy's pocket went into overdrive. It didn't just make Clark sick—it made the air between them hum with a violent, emerald tension.
Clark staggered back, his hand slamming against the doorframe. He looked like he'd been hit by a physical wave of nausea. "Jeremy... what... what are you doing here?"
"I was just checking on him, Clark," Jeremy said, his voice sounding unnaturally fast. He forced himself to slow down, to breathe. He could see the dust motes in the air moving in slow motion. He could see the individual pulses of the fluorescent lights. "He's sleeping. I think the crisis passed."
Clark looked at Greg, then back at Jeremy. There was a dawning suspicion in his gaze, a realization that Jeremy was "brighter" than he had been an hour ago.
"You're carrying more of them," Clark wheezed, his skin turning that familiar, sickly grey. "The rocks. They're... they're everywhere on you, aren't they?"
"They're my medicine, Clark," Jeremy said, walking past him toward the door. As he brushed past Clark's shoulder, the friction of their two energies caused a visible spark to jump between their jackets.
Clark winced, his knees buckling for a second.
Jeremy didn't stop. He walked down the hallway, his steps silent and impossibly quick. He had Electricity. He had Ice. And now, he had the Speed.
He was no longer just a boy from 1989. He was becoming a masterpiece.