Chapter 1: Growing Pains
The first thing Danny noticed was the tingling.
It started in her feet, a pins-and-needles buzz that crawled up her ankles. She frowned, shifting her weight from one Converse-clad foot to the other on the cool tile floor of the mall atrium. Maybe she’d been standing too long waiting for Jenna, who was forever “just one more minute” in the dressing room. She glanced down. Her laces looked tight. The buzzing deepened into a low, subcutaneous hum, a vibration in her very bones.
Then the seam of her right sneaker sighed and gave way with a soft pop of stitching.
“What the—”
The floor dropped.
No—she rose. The world sank. The polished marble squares of the floor shrunk, the grout lines narrowing into fine hair-cracks far below. The buzzing became a full-body resonance, a cellular thrumming that made her teeth ache. Her perspective tilted, lurched, then stabilized at a dizzying new altitude. She was eye-level with the second-floor railing. The potted fern hanging from the ceiling was now a knee-level shrub.
A deep, internal creak echoed in the cavern of her ribs, a sound of scaffolding being violently expanded. Her jeans, soft and worn, became a tourniquet, then with a sound like a gunshot, the denim at her knees split open. The fabric of her simple grey t-shirt pulled taut across her shoulders, the sleeve seams shrieking as they unraveled.
She raised a hand—a giant’s hand, long-fingered and strangely elegant—and her fingertips brushed the textured white ceiling tiles. A fine dust of acoustic insulation sprinkled down onto her auburn hair.
Silence, for one heartbeat. A frozen tableau.
Below her, a man staring up at the neon sign for Sunglass Hut slowly lowered his gaze. It travelled up the length of her—past the torn knees of her jeans, past the newly exposed stretch of her thighs, past the tight confines of her shirt, up the long column of her throat—and met her own wide, horrified eyes. His jaw unhinged. His shopping bags hit the floor.
The scream he let out was a high, thin wire of sound that pierced the mall’s ambient Muzak. It snapped the tension for everyone.
Chaose erupted—a symphony of shattering glass, wrenching metal, and human panic. It wasn’t just her.
Everywhere, women were growing.
Danny watched, her head pressed against the ceiling, as a woman by the fountain doubled, then tripled in height, her designer dress becoming a scandalous miniskirt before the fabric surrendered entirely with a luxurious rip. The woman’s new height placed her head and shoulders amidst the faux crystal droplets of the atrium’s central chandelier, which swayed dangerously. A teen girl by the pretzel stand shot upwards like a sapling in fast-forward, her phone clattering to the ground as her hands became dinner-plate-sized paddles. She stumbled, her colossal foot coming down on a wrought-iron bench, flattening it with a shriek of protest.
The air filled with a cacophony of structural complaint. The escalators leading to the second level groaned under the sudden, immense weight of a group of growing women, their steps buckling. A support beam near the food court let out a sharp crack. Every woman was reaching the same impossible apex—fifteen feet of sudden, bewildering womanhood.
“Jenna,” Danny breathed, her voice a stranger’s—deeper, resonant, a vibration in her own chest. She turned, the motion slow and perilous. Her hip bumped a giant column; she felt the impact through her bones, but the column shuddered. Four-panel directories, neon signs, potted trees—they were all now obstructions at waist level.
She saw Jenna. Or rather, she saw Jenna’s legs—fifteen feet of them, ending in a pair of now comically small leopard-print ballet flats, the straps bitten deep into the swelling flesh of her insteps. Jenna’s polka-dot dress was a belly-top, the hem riding high on her thighs. She was gripping the metal frame of the clothing store entrance, her head bent at a severe angle to avoid spearing herself on the dropped ceiling of the storefront.
“Danny?” Jenna’s voice was a thunderous whisper, filled with terror. “What is happening? My feet are killing me.”
“I don’t know,” Danny called back, her pragmatic mind cutting through the shock. “Can you get out of there?”
“I’m stuck! The doorframe—I’ll bring the whole thing down!”
All around them, the reality was settling, and with it, a new kind of chaos. The initial screams were fading, replaced by a booming, low-register din of confusion, shouted questions, and crying. The male shoppers—ordinary-sized, five-to-six-foot-tall men—darted like mice through a forest of gigantic, bare legs. They gawked, they tripped, they pointed. Some filmed on their phones, their screens tilted up at dizzying angles.
A man in a security uniform ran up, skidding to a halt before Danny’s shins. He had to crane his neck back, his hat tumbling off. “Miss! You need to—you have to—stay calm!” His voice was tinny and absurd from so far below.
Danny looked down at the top of his head. “Calm,” she repeated flatly. “Right.” The word felt silly. Her bra was digging into her ribs like a vengeful wire. Breathing was an active, conscious effort.
A crash from the west wing—the sound of breaking glass and a collective gasp. A woman, trying to move, had misjudged her new spatial relationship and shoulder-checked the giant pane window of the Apple Store. A intricate spiderweb of cracks bloomed across the glass.
Movement was the next problem. Danny experimentally shifted her weight. Her new center of gravity was unfamiliar, high and precarious. She took a step. It was a long, sweeping stride that covered twenty feet of mall floor in one go. Her foot came down, and she felt the tile give just a little, a hairline fracture whispering its protest beneath the ball of her foot. She froze, mortified. She could break the world just by walking on it.
“Okay,” she muttered to herself, the dry humor that was her default survival setting kicking in. “So. Walking is now a high-stakes negotiation. Good to know.”
She looked at Jenna, still wedged in the storefront. “Can you bend down? Get out of the doorway and just… sit on the floor?”
“My dress, Danny!” Jenna wailed, though the complaint was undercut by the sheer scale of her predicament.
“Your dress is already providing a public service as a belt,” Danny said. “Just crouch. Carefully.”
With a groan of tearing drywall, Jenna slowly extricated herself, kneeling on the mall floor. Even on her knees, she was taller than most of the store signs. She looked at her crushed feet and started to cry, great, heaving sobs that shook her shoulders.
Danny scanned the atrium. It was a forest of giant women in various states of undress and distress. Some were curled in fetal positions, overwhelmed. Others were trying to help, their giant hands gentle but clumsy. Two women were attempting to pry the shoes off a third, whose feet had swollen grotesquely around the straps. The sound of it all—the deep voices, the sobs, the crashing, the groaning building, the panicked chattering of normal-sized people—was a physical pressure.
A new sound cut through: the wail of sirens, multiple, approaching fast from outside.
“We can’t stay here,” Danny said, more to herself than to Jenna. “This ceiling isn’t meant for this. The whole place could come down.”
“Where do we go?” Jenna whispered, wiping her nose with the back of a hand the size of a dinner plate.
Home. The thought was a primal tug. Her apartment, with its nine-foot ceilings. She’d still have to stoop, but it was a known variable. Here, everything was perilous and public. “We go home. Or we try.”
“How? I can’t fit in my car. I can’t even fit through most doors!”
Danny’s mind raced, assessing. The main exits were glass double-doors—maybe twelve feet high at the arch. It would be a tight squeeze, might involve breaking the framing, but it was possible. The parking lot, though… a sea of compact cars and SUVs. Unnavigable. “We walk,” she said finally. “Stick to the big roads. The sidewalks. We’ll figure it out.”
The sirens were right outside now, flashing red and blue lights painting the giant legs in garish, rhythmic strokes. Megaphone feedback screeched.
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION INSIDE! THIS IS THE POLICE! ALL… ALL INDIVIDUALS OF INCREASED STATURE ARE ASKED TO REMAIN CALM AND STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
Danny exchanged a look with Jenna. Individuals of increased stature. The absurd bureaucracy of the phrase, amid this catastrophe, almost made her laugh.
“Do we stay?” Jenna asked, hope flaring in her huge eyes.
Danny watched as outside, through the glass walls, police cruisers and a fire truck skidded to a halt. Officers spilled out, their heads tilting back, their hands going to their mouths or their holsters. They had no plan. They were looking up at a problem they had no frame of reference to solve.
Staying meant being a specimen in a crumbling glass cage. It meant being someone else’s problem to manage, contain, or study.
“No,” Danny said, her voice firm. “We’re not camping out in the wreckage of a Claire’s. We’re going. Can you walk if we get your shoes off?”
With a determined wince, Jenna nodded. Using their new, formidable strength, they snapped the straps of her flats like thread. Jenna’s relieved sigh was a gust of wind.
Moving through the mall was like navigating an obstacle course built for dolls. They stepped over benches, around light poles, and ducked under the second-floor walkways. Other women saw them moving with purpose and began to follow, a ragged procession of giants, moving in a slow, careful ballet of immense power and profound fragility. They whispered to each other in their new, low cello voices—“Watch the pillar.” “Step over there, the tile is cracked.” “My god, is that my phone? It’s so small.”
It’s so small.”
Jenna’s whisper was a hollow boom as she stared at the tiny device in her palm, a silvery speck. The procession behind them had swelled to maybe two dozen women, a grim-faced caravan picking its way through the ruins of retail. They moved in a cautious, syncopated rhythm—a step, a pause to assess the groaning floor, another step. The air stank of perfume, sweat, shattered plaster, and the sharp, clean scent of fear.
Danny led, her jaw clenched. Every movement required forensic attention. To reach the bank of main exit doors, they had to pass the food court. The once-distant sizzle of griddles was now a noise at her shin-level. The sprawling plastic signage for ‘Great Wok of China’ hung eye-level, its cartoon dragon leer now oddly intimate. She ducked beneath a support beam, feeling her short hair brush the dusty metal.
“Hey!” a man’s voice shouted, shrill and angry. “My wife is in there! Let me through!”
A group of men had formed a nervous clump near the Pretzel Palace, held back by a single security guard whose authority had evaporated. One man, in a polo shirt and glasses, was pointing frantically at a woman in their group—Danny recognized her as the one who’d been crying over her wedged feet. She was now walking carefully, holding the hand of another giant woman for stability.
“Sir, you can’t—” the guard began.
“Megan! Megan, look at me!” the man screamed, waving his arms.
The woman, Megan, stopped. She looked down, her face a landscape of anguish from Danny’s perspective. “Jeff?” Her voice trembled. “Jeff, I’m so scared.”
“I’m here, baby! Just… just stay there! The police are outside!”
Danny watched the interaction, a cold knot in her stomach. The distance between them wasn’t just physical. It was a chasm of lived experience. Jeff saw his wife, terrified and colossal. Megan saw her husband, a familiar face now small enough to cradle like a pet, his voice tinny and distant. How could that bridge ever be crossed?
“We should keep moving,” Danny muttered, more to herself than anyone.
But the scene had caused a bottleneck. The giant women ahead had paused, unsure. The police megaphone outside continued its looped, staticky commands, now with an edge of panic. “REMAIN IN PLACE. AID IS COMING.”
Aid. Danny snorted. What aid? Giant stretchers? Cranes? They were on their own.
It was then the tingling began again.
A phantom echo at first, deep in the marrow of her shins. She froze mid-step, one colossal foot hovering over a toppled water fountain. “No.”
“Danny?” Jenna asked from behind.
The hum returned. Not the deep cellular resonance of the first time, but something sharper, more aggressive. It was a high-tension wire vibrating inside her flesh. A searing heat followed, racing up her calves, her thighs, coiling around her spine.
“It’s happening again,” a woman ahead moaned, the sound ending in a gasp.
The growth wasn’t slow. It was violent.
Danny’s world exploded upwards. The ceiling, which she’d been carefully avoiding, slammed into the top of her skull with a crack of drywall and a shower of white dust. She cried out, stumbling. The floor plummeted another fifteen feet. The second-floor railing was now at her waist. The great geometric skylights of the atrium, once distant, were suddenly within reach, the morning sun blinding through the glass.
Her body was a theater of ruin. What remained of her t-shirt gave a final, pathetic rip and fell away in pieces, catching briefly on her elbows before fluttering down like giant grey leaves. Her bra straps snapped, the material tearing. Her jeans, already shredded, were now a denim bracelet around one vast ankle. The cool mall air washed over skin that felt hypersensitive, every nerve ending screaming.
A symphony of destruction erupted around her. The sound was colossal. Concrete supports cracked with reports like artillery fire. The groaning escalators tore from their moorings in a shower of sparks, crashing down onto the first floor in a tangled avalanche of metal. The great central chandelier, which had been swaying, was now directly in the face of a woman who screamed and batted it away; a million crystal shards exploded outward in a glittering, deadly cloud.
Danny threw her arms over her face, feeling sharp bits ping against her skin. She lowered them, blinking through dust and terror.
The scale was incomprehensible.
She was thirty feet tall. Her head was in the steel rafters of the mall’s roof structure. She could see the gritty texture of the insulation, the rust on the bolts, the pigeon nests. Below, the mall floor was a detailed map, the people on it scurrying, screaming ants. The police cars outside were Matchbox toys, their sirens thin and ridiculous.
The other women were all with her, a forest of titanic flesh. Jenna was clutching a steel I-beam for support, her face white. Megan, the woman whose husband had called for her, was hunched over, her head pressed against the ceiling of a second-story store, her shoulders breaking through the roof. She was sobbing, great heaving sounds that shook the structure.
The logistics of their size were now apocalyptic. Danny’s foot, bare and wide as a sofa, covered a quarter of the fountain’s concourse. A single step could crush a car. A panicked turn could bring down a wall.
“The building’s coming down!” a voice roared—a woman with a face streaked with dust and mascara, holding a support column that was buckling under her weight.
She was right. The symphony of strain had become a crescendo. With a deafening, grating shriek, the main roof support along the east wall bowed inward. A section of the skylight above Danny shattered, and a cascade of glass and daylight poured down, slicing through the air. A shard the size of a door glanced off her shoulder, a line of fire followed by a warm trickle of blood.
Panic, pure and electric, shot through the giant women. The careful coordination shattered. Survival was individual, primal.
A woman near the shattered Apple Store bolted, a desperate, staggering lunge for the main doors. Her hip hit a load-bearing column. The sound was a deep, final thunderclap. The column snapped, twisting like a broken toothpick.
Time seemed to slow, then snap forward with vicious speed.
The ceiling directly above Danny sagged. A network of cracks raced across the plaster like forked lightning. With a final groan of surrendering steel, a vast section of the roof—insulation, steel girders, ducts, and the remnants of the shattered skylight—collapsed.
It didn’t fall on Danny. It fell around her. She was too tall. The avalanche of debris crashed onto the mall’s second floor and rained down into the atrium at the level of her chest and legs. She felt the impact through the air, a concussive wave of pressure and noise. Chunks of concrete and twisted metal pummeled her legs, sharp edges biting. She instinctively curled forward, arms over her head, as a dust cloud, thick and choking, engulfed everything.
The world became brown, loud, and full of pain.
Coughing, she waved a hand, trying to clear the air. The dust slowly began to settle, sifting down through the beams of sunlight now cutting through the new, gaping hole in the roof.
The mall was gone. In its place was a cavernous, partially open ruin. The second floor was mostly obliterated, a jagged shelf of broken flooring and jutting rebar. The main floor was a wasteland of rubble, smashed kiosks, and buried stores. The ants—the people—were gone. Hidden, buried, or fled.
Silence, broken only by the crackle of small fires, the drip of water from severed pipes, and the low, pained sounds of the giants.
Danny looked at her body. She was covered in a fine white powder, streaked with grime and blood from a dozen shallow cuts. Her skin was goosefleshed in the open air. She was naked, utterly exposed, and the vulnerability was more paralyzing than any height.
A sound to her left. Jenna was pushing herself up from where she’d fallen against a miraculously standing wall. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead, a scarlet rivulet cutting through the dust on her face.
“Danny?” Her voice was rough.
“Here,” Danny croaked.
They looked at each other, two thirty-foot-tall women standing in the wreckage of civilization. The other survivors were stirring too, emerging from the dust like primordial beings born from the collapse. There were maybe ten of them now. Others were motionless, buried or broken.
The police megaphone was silent.
Danny took a shuddering breath. The pragmatic part of her brain, the part that had gotten her through a childhood of moving apartments and lost friendships, forced its way through the shock. They couldn’t stay here. The structure was unstable. There could be gas leaks. There were certainly fires.
And there was the unthinkable truth: they were a danger simply by existing. Their bodies were weapons of mass destruction in a world built for dolls.
“The doors,” Danny said, her voice a dusty rumble. “What’s left of them.”
The main entrance was a tangle of twisted metal framing and broken glass, partially blocked by a fallen girder. It was a tight fit, but possible. They had to hunch, to turn sideways.
Danny went first. She crouched, the movement making her muscles scream in protest, and edged through the wreckage. The torn metal scraped against her ribs and back, leaving fresh streaks of red. She emerged into the blinding light of the parking lot.
The scene outside was a vision of surreal collapse. The overhang covering the mall entrance had partially fallen. Cars parked near the front were crushed under chunks of concrete. In the distance, on the wide six-lane avenue beyond the parking lot, traffic was a frozen, tangled mess. She could see hundreds of tiny figures moving, some pointing, many just standing and staring at the ruined mall and the giants emerging from it.
The scale of the street, the cars, the light poles—it was all wrong. A standard streetlight stood just over twenty feet tall. Its bulb was at her sternum. A city bus, parked haphazardly across two lanes, looked like a child’s toy she could kick.
Jenna and the others squeezed out behind her, one by one, a line of dust-covered colossi blinking in the sun. They stood together on the vast plain of cracked asphalt, unsure of their next move, their shadow a small mountain range.
A new sound cut the air: the distinct, aggressive thrum of helicopter blades. Two news choppers and one military-looking bird swept into view, circling at a cautious distance. The downwash from their rotors buffeted Danny’s face.
This was it. The moment they became a spectacle, a problem to be contained on the evening news.
A woman behind them—Megan—let out a raw, guttural scream of frustration and grief. She picked up a chunk of concrete the size of a refrigerator and hurled it with impossible, terrifying strength. It sailed in a high, lazy arc over the parking lot and crashed through the roof of a distant PetSmart with a booming crump.
The helicopters bobbed in the air, backing up.
“Stop!” Danny shouted, but her voice was lost in the rotor wash and Megan’s sobs.
This was the new calculus. Not just size, but strength. And rage. And grief.
Danny looked at Jenna, then down the long, exposed stretch of the avenue. Home was miles away. An impossible journey. They were targets out here. But staying was surrender.
“We can’t follow the roads,” Danny said, her mind racing, mapping the city from this new, impossible altitude. “They’re too narrow. We’ll cause… that.” She pointed at the destroyed store. “We go through the back. The industrial park behind the mall. Wider spaces. Fewer wires.”
“And then what?” Jenna asked, her eyes wide with a blank horror.
“I don’t know,” Danny admitted, the truth stark and simple. “We find somewhere to… to be. Somewhere we won’t break anything just by breathing.”
She took a step, her footfall a soft, seismic thud on the asphalt. The helicopters tracked her. She ignored them, focusing on the gap between a crushed SUV and a fallen sign. One step at a time. That was all there was now. To move was to invite chaos. To stay was to die, or to be caged.
She led them away from the main road, away from the staring faces and the circling eyes in the sky, into the shattered back lots and the unknown world that was now, irrevocably, theirs. Every step was a negotiation with a planet that could no longer hold them. Every breath was a storm.