“But he is cheating!” If anything, she quivered even more furiously, glaring at the boy in righteous fury.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, which at least felt real, I asked, “How is he cheating?”
“I don’t know!”
Edison’s Stolen Tesla Designs. Why did I get hooked up with the crazy ones? She looked entirely serious. “Then how do you know he’s cheating?”
She stood up very straight, and jutted out her chin in defiance. “Because I’m cheating, and he still keeps beating me!”
This was the boy who everyone had said was winning, and whose car I’d copied with the Machine. Personally, I suspected he understood engineering better than most twelve year olds. Especially since Lucyfar’s car would be whatever she could hack out of a chunk of wood with her magic knives.
Someone else took this much more seriously than I did. A squeaky voice shouted, “Don’t touch him, you villain.”
A diminutive figure shuffled out opposite Lucyfar. One of the shortest people here, I couldn’t make out much of anything except she was a girl with a particularly high-pitched voice. That was because she’d just come out of the bathroom wearing a pair of pajamas, the loose one-piece kind with the animal pattern and the hood like the animal’s head. In her case, it had a gray stripe over a cream face, that same pale underbelly, and the rest gray. Except for a dark patch ringing the brown eyes, and a lighter patch at the end of the tail. Unlike most of those costumes, this one did have a tail, hanging limp on the floor behind her.
I whispered to Claire, “She must have been inspired by your first E-Claire costume, the teddy bear outfit.”
She whispered back, “They’re called kigurumin. It’s a thing.”
Lucyfar forgot the supposedly cheating boy immediately. She turned to face the girl in the pajamas, hands held out from her sides like a gunslinger. “I don’t know you, superhero.”
The girl in pajamas squeaked (she had such a high voice!), “Then listen up. I am the Dook of LA, the Fantastic Frenetic Ferret, and I do not appreciate evildoers messing up my box car derby and harassing my friends!”
With a cold sneer, Lucyfar materialized one of her knives, and floated it over to bump the little girl in the chest. “I’m the big time, newbie. Do you really think you can stop me?”
Things happened very fast. The pajamas snapped tight over the girl, becoming part of her. She was a ferret, if an artificial-looking bipedal one. Her tail even lifted up off the floor, alive and thick now rather than a limp sleeve. In a flash, she hopped up on the knife, balanced on her toes and one hand despite it being about the size of an oak leaf. Her other hand pointed a black claw at Lucyfar’s face. “Yes.”
Something occurred to me. I’d spent most of my super-powered career hanging out with villains. Until they started chasing me down, I hadn’t grasped how many heroes there were in this city. This might not even be this kid’s first fight.
“Don’t make me get rough, girl,” warned Lucyfar. She materialized another knife, again poking the Fantastic Frenetic Ferret with the blunt end. At least, she tried. With the kind of speed and grace I normally only saw in Ray’s superhumanly enhanced reflexes, she hopped from the previous knife up onto this one.
Lucyfar blinked. “The kid’s got—”
…and that was when someone’s car fell off a table and clattered loudly on the floor.
The Ferret freaked out. She leaped into the air, backflipping to land on her feet, but only for an eyeblink again. Twisting around, she bit—with prominent fangs—at the direction the sound came from. There was only empty air in that direction, so she turned and bit behind her again, hopping off the ground. This turned into a frenzy, and for a good thirty seconds she bounced up and down, back and forth, doing handstands and aerial somersaults and a range of serious acrobatics, all in an impressive but failed attempt to bite her own butt.
She didn’t stay in one place, either. Careening around, she sent kids scattering and knocked over three different tables. The nearest was the one Lucyfar had been racing at, and the blond boy got shoved violently into Claire’s arms. He looked about as stricken and awed as any boy would be, planted body to body with her, and when she slid him back onto his own feet, the immoral vixen blew him a kiss.
Did I mention how much I’d missed having Claire around?
All the while, the Fantastic Frenetic Ferret snarled and squeaked and let out a series of weird grunts. I had to admit, they did sound kind of like dook dook dook.
Finally, in the middle of a particularly impressive back flip, the Dook of LA hit the wall and slid down to the floor, where she collapsed. She immediately started to snore.
I hadn’t been worried about Lucyfar hurting a child, but this sent me hurrying over to check on the girl. Her costume had returned to being loose pajamas, rather than a part of her. “Should we call an ambulance? She didn’t look like she hit her head.”
A girl in the crowd said, “She’s fine. She always falls asleep after her power goes crazy like that. It uses up a lot of energy.”
Fingers tugged on my sleeve. I turned to see Cassie’s anxious grimace up close. “Penny, I’m out of time. I’ve got to go.”
I gave her a warm smile. “Go on, and thank you. This was great.”
She hesitated, darted her face forward to give me a kiss on the cheek, and then ran out the door like she had Lucyfar’s knives chasing her.
Without being asked, Marcia dug into her pocket, and with a certain amount of grumbling under her breath, pulled the rest of her money out of her wallet and handed it to the woman in charge. Whatever club hosted this event was going to make a serious profit on the day, and have a lot of very happy members.
Claire, meanwhile, stood up on her tip-toes and peeked over my head at the crowd., although she winced when she did it. “I don’t see the signal. What else should we do while we wait?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Signal?”
“You’ll get it when the signal comes. I’m here on business as well as pleasure. Let’s craft while craft day lasts, okay?”
The same sentiment I’d gotten from Cassie, but given how rarely I got to see Claire this summer, I accepted with much more urgency. Tugging on one of my braids, I scanned the room, where kids were reluctantly getting back to their races. “I’m not sure… oh, hey, I know what I want to show you!”
Pausing to scoop up some blocks of wood from the original construction table, I righted one of the fallen racing tables and set them down. Taking off the Machine, I stuffed a chunk of wood in his mouth and ordered, “Saved Game Twelve.”
Marcia wandered up, and she and Claire watched as the Machine chewed through the wood, obeying my coded instructions. Lucyfar was still over near the downed Dook of LA, whispering conspiratorially with the boy she’d previously accused of cheating. That woman fit in way too well with a room full of twelve year olds.
The Machine finished eating its raw material, and regurgitated the whole thing in a nine-inch-tall statue of… well, it was almost a young woman. Even in an unpainted wooden statuette, it was clear her hair had been hacked off unevenly, and something like straw bound in to complete a ponytail. A sewed-on patch covered one eye, one of her arms had doll joints like mine, she had a plate on her stomach visible through her ripped dress, and one leg from the knee down was bulkier than the other, and furry.
Claire whistled, impressed in a serious and sober way. “You’re going the Sacrifice route, huh?”
I grinned so hard my cheeks hurt. She’d recognized the main character of Princess of the Closet Monsters. The grin lasted for only a few seconds before I got serious, too. “Yeah. It’s rough. ‘Brutal’, even. For most games, the peaceful, good-hearted options may take more skill, but the results are happier and friendlier. This… I’m not sure the game is appropriate for kids, and I’ve fought goat cancer zombies.”
Marcia mouthed the words ‘goat cancer zombies’ with a glassy-eyed look of speculative wonder.
Claire said nothing, just picked u
p the statue and studied the neck and normal wrist for the telltale scars from the game.
I read that silence perfectly. “It’s okay. I know Other Me is playing Vengeance route. I almost did, and she may have been smarter than me to give in to temptation. The Vengeance route isn’t evil, it’s powerful and righteous. I’m not entirely sure Sacrifice is good. If there’s a moral message in this game, I can’t figure out what it is. There’s no right or wrong, just decisions.”
Marcia, not a computer game player, nudged me with her elbow. “So, the Doodad—”
“—Machine.”
“Right. It can copy what it sees? Could you make a statue of me?”
Hmmm. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Stuffing another wooden block into his maw, I told the Machine, “Do it. Make a copy of Ouroboros. Include her clothes, please.” It paid to be specific, with something that took voice commands but didn’t think in any way I could identify.
Chomp chomp chomp chomp grind glorp clatter. He complied, spitting out a wooden statue of Marcia. He’d even mixed up the grain on the wood to capture her glaring tangle of costume patterns. Oddly, he copied her in the middle of the punch where she’d broken the table, not her current stance. See previous about having to be specific with voice commands.
Marcia squealed, picking it up, turning it over and over, peeking under the tunic’s skirt and squinting closely at the threading of her hair and how it half-covered her ears. Then she slammed it down on the table again, and said, “Okay! Now make my arm twice as thick.”
My brow furrowed. “What?”
She leaned over the table and kicked her feet behind her. “Come ooooon! I want to see how much it can customize!”
Marcia’s claims that she wasn’t really actually insane were not very convincing at the moment. Oh, well. It was my fault for liking crazy people. I stuck another chunk of wood in front of the Machine, and gave him a poke. “Go on. You can take her orders for altering this statue.” Looking over the table at the maniacally grinning black-haired girl, I added, “And no, he doesn’t know how to build weapons without a blueprint.”
Incapable of complaining, my Machine chewed up some more wood, then the arm of the statue. When he reached the shoulder he let go, and out slid a beefy, muscular, sleeveless arm.
Giggling at the absurd awkwardness of the statue, Marcia said, “Okay, now the nose! Make it two inches long!”
Claire tapped me on the shoulder, and beckoned with a curled finger. I followed her quietly across the room, leaving a laughing Marcia building an increasingly distorted replica of herself.
A boy around our age, probably the oldest kid here if Lucy didn’t count, waited for us by the wall. He had a closed cardboard box on the floor next to him, an uncomfortable expression, and a whole lot of oil stains on his loose shirt and pants.
Feet primly together, Claire stood tall and stiff, then bowed and swept a hand at him. “Bad Penny, my… contact. I know I’m not supposed to take sides, but I can’t let either of you founder when you need an introduction. This boy’s father—”
“No names,” the boy insisted. He had a hoarse, pleading voice.
I looked him straight in his hazel eyes. “Of course not. We’re professionals. We don’t get personal.”
“—sells items of technology you said you need,” Claire finished, having held herself in motionless pause during his and my exchange.
Tilting my head skeptically, I eyed Claire, then the boy. “Like a mind exchange device?”
He stared at me like I’d asked him to grow a second head. “Nobody has those.”
“Like a stasis field generator,” explained Claire.
Still nervous, the boy gave a brief, denying hand wave. “Not a real stasis field. Those are super rare. The cheap kind, for booby traps.”
“Good enough to hold someone in suspended animation for a couple of months?” I asked. After all, it didn’t matter if the thing actually stopped time. Only that it would let me store Meatbag Penny until I could swap back into my body.
He sagged a little in relief, while nodding at high speed. “Oh, yeah. My—the builder yelled at someone once for storing someone more than a year. That’s about the limit that it’s safe.”
Ha! Rubbing my hands together, I purred. “Excellent. That will be plenty. How much?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.” He said it almost in a whisper. It’s not the kind of number you let people hear.
The number smacked me across the face like a fist. Tesla’s Patents, I had a lot of money, but not that much.
Don’t panic, Penny. You have resources other fourteen year olds do not. Supervillainy could be very profitable. That, or I could go around the stasis issue and only grab my double when I was ready to switch minds.
Taking a deep breath, uncomfortably aware again that I was faking that gesture, I said, “Here’s what we’ll do. Claire and I will go yell at Marcia for whatever we’re about to find out she’s done—”
“Don’t look, you’ll start yelling now,” advised Claire, smirking already at the impending trouble.
“—and I’ll get back to you.”
Claire assured us, “I’ll provide her with discreet contact information. Completely professional.”
Well. That was all settled. Dreading what I would see, I turned around.
Proud of my steely willpower, I made it halfway across the room and was nowhere near the nervous tech-dealing boy when I shouted, “Machine, do not obey any more of her orders! And eat that right now! Lucyfar, you put her up to this, didn’t you?”
Dear Mom and Dad,
Enclosed find a lanyard I made at supervillain camp, out of human hair. It turns out my Machine makes a really great shaver.
Having A Good Time Today,
Penny
wake!
The best kind of awake, the kind where I didn’t actually have anything to do. I just lay in bed, arms folded under my pillow behind my head. This stupid robot body did have a couple of perks, and one was that it could really relax. No tense muscles. I could lay there and enjoy the peace until my thoughts interrupted.
By, say, reminding me that I did have something to do. Maybe not urgent, but I’d promised myself I would do it today. A nagging thought that had to be followed up on.
So, I got up, and got dressed, briefly thankful Marcia’s mansion had its own laundry room. My body might not get sweaty and icky, but boy was supervillainy messy. If this weren’t mad science fabric, I’d be covered in mud stains no matter what I did.
My power went all the way, on every tiny detail. This could be some Tier Three, nobody-knows-how-it-works fabric technology thrown in just as an aside while making a cool outfit. That excess was part of what bothered me now.
I snuck out through the secret garage. If Ampexia found out I was gone, she wouldn’t be worried. Gerty was fast asleep, and would be until someone mentioned breakfast or show time. Anyone looking in the mansion’s front windows would probably freak out at the hulking fuzzy robot, although they would have activated enough traps by then to make Gerty the least of their problems.
This trip I had to make alone, which meant no car. I experimented with the sliding boots, but I couldn’t get a good speed without whacking the sidewalk behind me with the force gloves. If I did that, stopping was equally hard, and these boots did not turn. Add sidewalk pedestrians to the mix, and they were useless for long-range transportation.
Maybe I should steal something from my double for that.
Still, the boots and gloves got me to Santa Monica, and it wasn’t that far a walk from where I had to share the sidewalk with other people to the train stop. Nobody bothered me. A man in a cape spotted me before I saw him, but when I looked in his direction he went back to talking to a couple of kids. In the other direction, people hung out on the beach, wondering how many of the people frolicking in swimsuits were the secret identities of heroes or villains. Not that Santa Monica’s beach is the most picturesque and clean and frolic-friendly.
I’d missed rush hour, and the light rail trains weren’t that crowded. No heroes attacked me, either, and I kept the potion staff, the one weapon I’d brought along, crossed over my lap.
A couple of stations in, a pair of teenage boys boarded the car. I wouldn’t have thought about them, but when they sat down next to each other they got out some textbooks and started talking. The textbooks floated up into the air, open to be read while one of the boys scribbled in a notebook. Summer school? After a few lines of writing, he clicked his pencil twice, and a tiny device on the nearest book turned two pages.
What was the statistic? One percent of people had super powers? Mom could quote it in her sleep and to several decimal places, I was sure. One percent would be over a hundred thousand powers in LA. Even point one percent would be upwards of ten thousand. Maybe two hundred fought or committed crime at any one time. The vast majority were like these two, just enjoying a cool talent or making their extra ability useful.
The light rail train south from Seventh Street was even quieter. Of course, no heroes would want to damage either line by starting a fight in them, would they?
But nobody followed me when I got off at Slauson, either. Before, I’d just been cautious. Now I was really alert, because someone else’s secret rested on my responsibility. I passed the spot where the samaritan had offered to help a teenage robot with a broken arm, and hoped that guy was having a good day somewhere.
Finally I rounded the block, and came again to the front gate of Junkment Day.
It hadn’t changed. Old tarps behind the gates and fence blocked passersby’s view inside. A sign declared they were closed.
Like last time, I jumped up, grabbed the top of the fence, and pulled myself over, to find the same wasteland of junk as before. I had to admit, I enjoyed walking over a layer of random metal objects as I crossed the yard and peeked into the shop. This, at least, had changed. Well, slightly. Now tools were laid out on the benches, the shelves held a few supplies, and an old, circular analog clock with a minute and second hand hung on the wall. Instead of eerily empty, the shop now just looked unused, but ready if someone ever brought a car in for service.
You Believe Her Page 29
