You Believe Her

by Richard Roberts

  Your Daughter,

  Penny

  ad science farm tools converted into weapons, check.

  Heart of steel carefully concealed behind multiple layers of armor, check.

  Burning desire for revenge, check.

  It was time. Finally. I had been waiting on this rooftop for two hours. The lack of muscle twitches and human body stuff did make me more patient, but I was still pretty bored by the time the parasite stepped out of my front door. My bet paid off, and the thing roughly inherited the hours I used to keep. Plus, Ruth’s car was pulling away when I started to wait, so I knew she had company, and wouldn’t want to just hang around indoors.

  Having seen her sister’s car, it was no surprise that Cassie stepped out of my house with the parasite. They walked side by side, shoulders not quite touching, with a glowingly excited Cassie doing most of the talking. It was actually sweet that she was finally getting a chance to spend time with me, even a fake me.

  I wouldn’t let that slow me down. When they reached the intersection with Los Feliz, I teleported into the air in front of them, dropping down to land in a crouch, a few body lengths away from the body thief.

  The parasite looked a little surprised. Cassie let out a squeal. Her cheeks turned pink, and she took a small step away from the parasite. Her head jerked from side to side, looking at me, at the parasite, at me, at the parasite, alternating her mouth opening and biting her lip as guilt flooded her face.

  My double looked as amused and forgiving as I felt. She gave Cassie’s shoulder a pat. “If you want to make it up to me, go get the duffel bag in my parents’ garage.”

  That poured cold water on my amusement. Gritting my teeth, I told it, “They’re not your parents.”

  Cassie took one more glance between us, turned, and ran down the street towards my house.

  The thing in my body put her fists on her hips—my hips—and leaned a little to one side, giving me an impatient, skeptical, direct stare. “So?”

  What a ham. I took a step forward, and blinked the rest of the way, right up face to face. Grabbing a fistful of her blouse at the lapels, I hoisted her up off her feet. My real body was heavy, but the robot arms could handle it.

  She winced. Her weight hanging from her bunched-up shirt had to hurt. She still kept staring me right in the eyes.

  I stared right back. “You took away everything, parasite, and left me for dead. But I’m back. Repaired, re-armed, and ready to fight. Your little vacation living my life is over.”

  Halfway down the block, Cassie saw us and squealed. In chorus, the parasite and I shouted, “Just go get the bag, Cassie.”

  She took off running again.

  Just as cold, but with an extra layer of sarcasm, the parasite asked, “Is that your message? Because I have one for you.”

  She unsnapped her belt pouch, and stuck her hand into it. I’d expected her to be armed. How could I humiliate her in a fight if she wasn’t? That didn’t mean I was going to let her shoot me, and as she pulled whatever it was out, I grabbed her wrist with my free hand so I could get a look.

  The device she held wasn’t a gun. It didn’t look like a weapon at all, just a hexagon-sided tube with a button on the end.

  A bomb. The thing in my head always did love bombs. Letting her go, I took a sharp step back to blink away.

  Before my foot touched the pavement, the crazy parasite pushed the button, with both of us standing on ground zero. Purple color exploded around us, but my foot touched down, with my eyes focused to teleport twenty feet behind the parasite.

  OW! Ow ow ow! Criminy! My arms burned, and smoke rose out of my costume with a sizzling noise. Criminy again, I was fireproof, so the copper bands around my arms must have just gotten really, seriously hot!

  Also, I hadn’t teleported anywhere.

  I took another step back. Nothing. The pain lessened, slowly. My lab coat hadn’t burned through. My arms worked. At least I wasn’t actually damaged.

  I gaped, and could hear the squeak of shock in my own voice. “You destroyed my teleport bracers?”

  The parasite stepped back, and that seemed like a good idea, so I did it, too. Her invention left a dome of faintly purple-tinged air, with frozen, deeper purple clouds, and we both got clear of it, which let us glare at each other again.

  Prodding my arms, which didn’t make the burning bracers hurt either more or less, I demanded, “How could you do that?”

  She stood straight, stiff, and smugly superior. “Greatest mad scientist of the century, remember? You got the robot muscles, I got to keep the power.”

  More pokes revealed the bracers hadn’t turned liquid, so not hot enough to melt. Another backwards step confirmed they didn’t work. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. After the Machine, this was our best invention. Forget the clock or the spaceship or the super cheerleader serum. Easy teleporting is the most useful power ever.”

  Her glare didn’t show the slightest trace of guilt. “Yeah, and that’s why I couldn’t let you keep them. I knew you’d be after me, and the bracers made you a hundred times more dangerous. I asked our power to get rid of them. I’ve been carrying this bomb with me since three days after we split.”

  The bracers had cooled to where they no longer hurt, and curiosity filled the gap where the pain had been. I gave the dome another look. Perfectly even, it didn’t move, or fade. It hadn’t been solid. Probably it continued underground as a full sphere of… just purple, glutinously opaque in some places, near-invisibly transparent in others. “What even is that stuff?”

  “Hardened space. It prevents the more obscure manipulations of physics, and the feedback destroys the device that tries to teleport, or… whatever.”

  My turn to glare condescendingly. “Or whatever? What does hardening space even mean?”

  The parasite shrugged, looking nonchalant, but unable to keep the awkwardness out of her voice. “You know what this power is like. The effect looked like making space hard. I think maybe it freezes something quantum, which stops other quantum effects from happening.”

  Which was a shot-in-the-dark guess. Like I understood quantum physics. My power understood everything, but the parasite wasn’t actually my power.

  Cassie returned, running hard up the sidewalk with the packed bag in her arms. Criminy, she was fit. I sure couldn’t have run all that way in my real body.

  The bag contained lumpy, hard things. Mad science, certainly. I slid the weather sponge into my grip.

  But before then…

  I jerked my head at the dome. “Turn that off. It might hurt someone.”

  Now it was her turn to give me the ‘are you stupid’ stare. We kept trading those. “It’s a bomb. It doesn’t turn off. That’s the whole point of bombs. You use it, it explodes, and it stays exploded. Look.” She lifted up the tube again, and clicked the button repeatedly. Nothing happened. Point made, she threw it into the bushes.

  Both of her hands now free, she unzipped the duffel bag. I watched the process carefully, ready to blast her with excessive amounts of precipitation. She didn’t pull out a weapon, though. She took out my old flight rotors, and tossed them across the distance to my feet. “Here. If you want something to dodge with, you can have these.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You put bombs in these, too?”

  She scowled, angry. “Criminy, no. Dad repaired the one Heart of Gold broke. That’s it.”

  “She’s telling the truth!” burst in Cassie. When I looked at her she backed up a step, but kept talking despite a rising blush. “She can’t use them. They don’t work for her. So they’re yours.”

  I raised the other eyebrow. “This was your idea?”

  The parasite smiled, wry and affectionate, which echoed my feelings. “Not entirely, but she pushed for it.”

  Neither of us being angry just made Cassie blush more. I couldn’t help remembering her in Chinatown, talking about relationships with a maturity most grownups didn’t have. That all fell apart when she thought about m
e. Even if I didn’t return her feelings, how could I ever get mad at that?

  Then something clicked, and my smile turned into a grin. The parasite couldn’t fly with my rotors, huh? Good. I could use all the evidence I could get that she wasn’t me. Crouching, I buckled them in place on my wrists and ankles, making sure to keep the sponge free in case this was a trick and I had to fight. When they were all set, I stood, and gave the twists to activate them.

  My feet shot out from under me, and my back hit the pavement with a bang. Getting my wrists properly under me pushed me back up, only to send me tumbling into the grass, where I flopped and rolled until I managed to turn the fans off. After that, I lay there, panting for breath until I got my bearings back. No, my robot body wasn’t tired, but some things you have to do.

  I glared at the parasite. “What did you do to them?”

  She watched me with her arms smugly folded. “Nothing. Dad fixed one. That’s it. I can’t control them right anymore. They don’t make sense like they used to. You think you’re the original, so I wanted to prove that they don’t work any better for you than for me.”

  Cassie had watched the display open-mouthed, wide-eyed, horrified and guilty. The parasite nodded at her now. “Give me my latest invention, and stand clear.”

  “Uh… Penny… I mean, you and Penny… I don’t…”

  I nodded at her. “It’s okay. I came here for this.”

  Cassie pulled out a chunk of steel and thick, twisted copper wires that looked kind of like a high-tech goat skull. Not a lot like that: it had the wedge shape, and the placement of the wires resembled horns, except where there should be eyes. The only control I saw was a single button, so maybe another bomb? Dodging that wouldn’t be fun, but my robot body was fast, and my original body’s aim was terrible without the focusing visor helmet I’d left on Jupiter.

  It might be a projectile weapon. That wedge did have a front, which wasn’t pointed at me yet.

  This was about pride. About showing her who the real Penny was, and rubbing her nose in defeat. If there was a physical prize on the line, I would hit first, but like a gunfight I had to wait for her to make a move and outdraw her.

  Goofy logic like that is why she got to push the button while I waited for her to do something threatening.

  The world flickered like a shutter. I recognized the effect. I’d been teleported. My clothes felt different, looser. I held a heavy weight in my hands.

  Why, that devious little brain worm. She’d switched our places! Not bodies, alas. I was still a robot. Just a robot standing next to Cassie, who had taken out a football-sized empty plastic egg, and wearing the parasite’s clothing, which was actually my clothing anyway. It all fit. Our bodies were the exact same size and shape, after all, except at the joints.

  Cassie didn’t do anything with the egg. We were both distracted by the parasite yelping in pain.

  Face twisted in a grimace, my double danced from foot to foot, squeaking, “Ow! Criminy! Hot! Stupid fireproof robots!”

  I winced in sympathy. The bracers might have cooled down to where they didn’t hurt my ceramic (Plastic? Carbon mesh?) shell, but human skin was a lot more sensitive.

  She wasn’t in so much pain that she couldn’t claw at her left wrist, prying off the Machine and throwing it at me. She was in too much pain to do that right, and it landed closer to her than to me.

  I couldn’t leave her hurting like that. She might really burn her arms! But turnabout was fair play, so I slid off her belt and belt pouch, which still had something jingling in it, and threw it on the ground, too.

  Then I pushed the button, and switched us back.

  Parasite Penny sighed in relief, then went, “Gaak!” and dropped the location switcher so she could grab the waistband of her pants and hold them up. With these essentials taken care of, she gave our blue-haired friend a scolding glare. “Cassie!”

  Cassie, guilty and blushing, took a half step forward holding the no-doubt-soundproof egg, and stopped.

  It would have been too late anyway. I walked over, bent down, snatched up the Machine and the pouch, and snapped the Machine back where it belonged onto my wrist. Then I gave a peek in the bag. Ooh, jackpot! The remaining cursed pennies!

  Taking one out, I rubbed it between my fingers, so they could both see it didn’t stick because I’m the real Penny. “Okay, first, you should be ashamed at dragging Cassie into this. Second, this was the dumbest plan ever, and I’m ashamed at how bad you are at using my brain. Third, how dare you try to steal my Machine!”

  Parasite Penny forgot her sore arms, and bared her teeth at me in sudden fury. “My Machine! My power made him! I go around every minute of the day feeling naked because he’s not on my wrist. I’m going to take him back, and sooner or later my power will show me how to make him listen to the real Penny.”

  “I’m the real Penny, and the Machine knows it!” I shouted.

  Clenched teeth turned to a sour, tight mouth. “And your plan wasn’t any smarter. Did you even think about what you would do? You just thought you’d shake me around and I’d cower?”

  …kind of, yes.

  I grinned, and took a step forward, getting a grip on the weather sponge and holding out my right arm so she could see it. “On the other hand, I’m still armed, and you’re out of tricks. I’d say my stupid plan beat your stupid plan, wouldn’t you?”

  From the widening of her eyes, she agreed. Not the fear that I would like, maybe, but certainly alarm. She even grabbed Cassie’s hand to run away.

  Alas, there wasn’t any point to that. I’d seen the car speeding up the street towards us. Mom and Dad’s car. And sure enough, it screeched to a perfectly calculated halt, and my dad climbed out of the passenger side in such a hurry that he had to struggle with his seat belt.

  Dad stared at me, stricken, his hurry turning suddenly into paralysis. My heart felt like a lump of cold metal in my chest. Which it was, but it hadn’t felt like that. The rest of me felt creepingly like a hollow, mechanical shell.

  While I wrestled with seeing Dad for the first time since I’d been transformed, Mom got out of the car. She stepped quite deliberately between us, breaking my eye contact with Dad, and with it the spell of horror and grief. Solemn, half mother and half Audit, she demanded, “Bad Penny, what are you doing? You can’t go stalking Penelope in her private life. This is getting personal.”

  Dad took a half step out from behind her to say, “We’re saying this for your own sake.”

  I bunched up my fists, then forced myself to be calm and address my mother. “I’m not taking that, for several reasons. Primarily, getting personal would involve invading her secret identity, and she does not have one. She operates solely under her legal name, which she took from me, by the way, and under that name stole my body and attacked me. She split Bad Penny and Penelope Akk so we don’t have an inviolate private life anymore. The only reason I don’t follow her into her home is because it’s you and Dad’s home, too.”

  Mom’s expression didn’t change. “Gray areas like that get people killed.”

  “Gray areas are all she left me with, but if everyone needs the rules made clear, that’s fine. I’ll go get an official ruling.”

  My double didn’t get it. Mom probably did, but was in too much control to show surprise. Cassie looked even guiltier, actually chewing on her thumbnail and looking nervously between me and my parents.

  Ah, right. She must have called them, to protect both her Pennys. Again, not something I could blame her for.

  Dad got it, and like Cassie could not hide his shock. He stepped out ahead of Mom, crouching a little to get closer to my level. The pleading in his face and voice were unmistakable. “Stay away from Spider. Please.”

  Criminy, I would just have to hope my expression looked composed as I met his eyes. “Everybody keeps saying that, and they never have my best interests at heart.”

  Turning around, I marched across the intersection, to go get a ride from Ampexia. With my teleport brace
rs destroyed, that was the best I could do.

  “Bad Penny…” Dad called after me, awkward and hesitant.

  If he wasn’t going to use my right name, I wasn’t going to respond. One person did need and deserve a final response. I stopped long enough to give Cassie a pained, but honest smile. “I’m not mad at you. I mean it.”

  She sagged in such relief that my double had to grab her and hold her up.

  Exit Penny Akk, a little victorious and a lot defiant.

  hinatown meant waiting for the weekend, because it was pretty hard to pretend to be a tourist or regular shopper even in civilian clothes. I’d have to hide my neck and hand and look murderously overdressed for the summer, and even that might not work because my shoulders didn’t move right. People spot that kind of thing.

  Fine by me. Let everyone who told me not to talk to Spider stew in fear of what will happen.

  Ampexia was one of those, but she respected when someone wanted to be alone absolutely. It was kind of nice. Certainly a change of pace from all my previous friends.

  And so, on a gloomy Saturday night when clouds threatened to drizzle despite the time of year, I said goodbye to my driver’s-license-equipped teammate and a worried goat, to enter the most dangerous party in the world.

  It was a good night for being invisible. Chinatown was packed, and something big must be happening in the superhero community. Villains were gathered in groups everywhere, gossiping. Some seemed pleased. Some argued. I got a couple of waves, and then they went back to their discussions.

  Undisturbed, I slipped through the crowd of goofy costumes to the mall’s door down to the underground parking garage. This was the most direct way down to Spider I knew of, and if I did this thing, I was going to go all the way.

  Grabbing the handle, I gave it a dramatic twist and pull.

  Locked.

  Okay, maybe making an appointment would have been a good idea, except I had no idea how to do that. I’d always either walked in, or she’d sent for me.