Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis

by Richard Roberts

  At least, on this side. When I pushed through those doors, I found myself walking through a wall of red sparkles, scanned by red beams.

  Oh, yeah, this was the stuff. Computer games were great, but the craving definitely lessened when my regular life got just as weird.

  So, what strangeness would I find up here? Something the super power I could admit to might help with? Did a giant centipede need an adjustable traction bench?

  Mostly I passed rooms with closed doors, and perfectly ordinary looking nurses who smiled at me when they saw my badge. One room had a guy with obvious cyborg parts in a bed, and most of the parts I could see were three quarters disassembled so tubes and wires could be stuck in. That was cool, but he was asleep, so I didn’t disturb him. A lot of the doors stood next to windows into the rooms. Curtains blocked most of those, but one closed door had the curtains open. Peeking in showed me a man floating in a tank of liquid, straight out of the movies.

  I swear he smiled and winked at me. Should I go in? Tempting, but… he wasn’t alone in that room. Three people in lab coats bustled around his tank, and interrupting a medical treatment would also be thoughtless.

  A couple of treatment rooms with what I was pretty sure was not normal equipment might be worth a look, right after the open double doors.

  That connected the hallway to a large room with rows of beds. White walls, a lot of space, and the shared, open area suggested patients who didn’t need much looking after. In the bed nearest to the door, Juno sat with a peaceful smile, unrestrained and staring at no―

  GAAAAH.

  Juno. It was Juno. She looked exactly the same as she had the last time I’d seen her, on a tiny moon orbiting Jupiter. Long, long braids the same agouti brown as my own. A face that looked enough like mine to make me hope I’d be that pretty in ten years. A figure I doubted seriously I’d have, ever. The floral print hospital gown was different. So was her expression, pleasantly smiling, but also blank.

  Actually, the last time I’d seen Juno, she hadn’t been on Jupiter. She’d been on Earth, on the other side of a portal, in an abandoned basement. Clearly, not so abandoned that someone hadn’t found her.

  I found my voice, so weak I wasn’t sure anyone would hear. “Nurse?”

  A short, solidly built, grandmotherly woman in scrubs drifted up to me. “Yes.. Penelope?”

  “How did she get here?” I sounded far away, like hearing someone else speak.

  “Jane Doe-”

  “Juno. Her name is Juno. Was Juno. I don’t remember her last name, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll never find her family.” Wait. Should I be admitting I knew this stuff?

  The sheer relief in the nurse’s sigh convinced me that, yes, this risk was worth it. “Thank heaven. Finally, someone who knows something about this case. She was found in a cellar six months ago, in a catatonic state and with multiple broken bones. No sign of a fight, and no sign of how she got in. The cellar did contain a stone arch that suggested a gate, but experts examined it and said it was an archaeological find, but didn’t actually do anything. Her physical wounds healed easily, but we’ve never seen a mental state like this. She’s not under a spell. She’s not unconscious. She can eat, and walk, and obey very simple commands with some guidance. Total dissociation. Brain scans show she has psychic super powers, but they’re not doing anything, and she’s not thinking about anything. We even called in Mourning Dove, who said the patient―Juno―has no soul. Interesting, but not medically useful. It’s not a vegetative state. There’s no reason she couldn’t wake up any second now.”

  My thoughts tried to race, still fogged by the staggering surprise. What was safe to tell? Everything important and useful. Okay. I shook my head, slow and solemn. “She’s not going to wake up. At least, I don’t think so. Juno was the victim of a long-term telepathic takeover. The perpetrator hollowed out her mind, destroying the original Juno completely so that they could operate her brain and body like a puppet.”

  That was what Harvey had said, right?

  The nurse shuddered, and even crossed herself. My expression must have been even more bleak than hers, because she put her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you. I’ll relay the information to the doctors, but not who provided it. Everyone who works up here knows how to not get personal, on top of regular patient confidentiality.”

  I nodded, my sense of security returning. Except the screaming kind of halted it. Maybe not screaming, exactly. Yelling. Someone, not far away, was upset and confused. Maybe multiple someones. How far away was hard to tell. Hospitals, it turns out, have heavy-duty soundproofing.

  Thumps accompanied the yells. It sounded like they came from down the hall, right outside the Exotic Injuries Ward―

  The doors slammed open so hard that one broke a hinge. Whatever the sparkly red wall did, it didn’t deter intruders, because a figure in power armor stalked right through it into the ward.

  Crazy power armor. Mad science tended to look makeshift, but this suit could win prizes. The core looked like an elegant copper-plated robot, almost doll-like, with pretty, engraved scrollwork. That included a stiff but human facemask. On and between these plates someone had attached… stuff. A backpack that looked like a repurposed car engine with a Tesla coil sticking out of it, for example. Folded up blades. Impressively thick pistons ringed the vaguely female figure’s lower legs. And so on.

  One oddity particularly stood out. Instead of the gauntlets I might expect, the suit had thick leather gloves with skeletal brass struts along the back, identical to my newly made weapons. Not quite identical. This person had small hands. In fact, all the proportions were off.

  The facemask slid up, and I found out why. A tiny girl, two years younger than me, inhabited that suit. What a day for surprises. I’d never expected to see Juno or Remmy again.

  Remmy looked good. Red-faced with anger, but her cropped pigtails were growing back, and she had rounder, better-fed features and moved with a more confident grace than when I’d seen her last. In homemade power armor, it was hard to tell, but she might have grown a few inches.

  Her high-pitched voice managed an impressive amount of threat and fury. “Bad Penny. I’ve finally tracked you down.”

  One arm extended, finger pointing at me accusingly. Remmy’s attention shifted to the arm itself, so I looked there, too. A large compass set into the outer plate pointed straight at me. The tip of its arrow, of all things, was a penny.

  That made way too much sense. Remmy had recovered one of my cursed pennies from Jupiter. She knew they were linked to me somehow, and her power to cobble other inventions together did the rest. She had a tracker that led straight to me.

  As we both stared at it, the compass veered off course, wobbling all over the place. Okay, a very unreliable tracker that led straight to me when it worked.

  Remmy stomped her way up the hall. The nurse abandoned me, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Upon reaching the doorway to the dormitory room, Remmy gave her own start of surprise and gritted her teeth. “And here you are with Juno. Of course.”

  “What? No. Look at her!” I spluttered.

  “Shut up!” Remmy yelled. “I don’t know what they do to supervillains here on Earth, Bad Penny, but I’m going to drag you to the authorities and find out. I’ll tell them everything about your crimes on Jupiter, and add those to the mile long list they must have for you already.”

  Oh, criminy. Oh, oh, criminy biscuits. I’d been coasting along on the knowledge that the rules of getting personal kept my identity safe. At least, they gave me time to fix things. Even if a hundred people knew who I was, nobody would tell the cops, or my parents, or the public.

  Remmy didn’t care. She had no reason to keep my secrets. If I escaped her, even if I defeated her, she might yell them to the world. How was I going to get out of this? Could I?

  Ugh. It didn’t matter if I could. There was one much more important consideration.

  UGH. CRIMINY.

  I had to.

  Rai
sing shaking hands, I said, “Listen, Remmy, we can’t fight here. I’ll fight you outside, okay? Or surrender. Or whatever you want, if you’ll just leave with me first. This is a hospital.”

  She furrowed her brow, confused and suspicious. “A what?”

  I didn’t have to explain. Realization began to creep over her face immediately. She might not be used to using the word, but she knew it. She looked up, and at the nurses’ station, and at Juno, and the beds. Realization turned to horror. “That’s what’s wrong with this place. You conniving monster. You knew I could never fight here, where I might kill sick people. We’re leaving.”

  She reached out, grabbing me by my shirt and hoisting me off my feet. The power armor gave her plenty of strength, and enough height, to do that. I… stood still and let her, although the fabric bunching at my shoulders really hurt with all my weight hanging on it.

  My eyes started to tear up, and not from pain. From fear. My whole body tingled with fear. This was it. I had no weapons with me. Remmy was definitely not stupid, and I would need to be heavily armed to defeat her. There was no way to prevent a lot of public noise, with people watching who did not know the rules of superhero secrecy. My father might be around the corner.

  My parents were going to find out. What would they do? I couldn’t imagine. At best, the rest of my summer would be a nightmare. Not allowed to use my power. Not allowed to see my friends. Not allowed to go out alone. Watched constantly. Yelled at, or worse, bleak disappointed silences. They might never trust me again.

  And almost worse than that, Remmy still hated me. Hated me with a growling fury that had her stalking like a tiger down the hall. Hated me so much that she’d chased me to Earth. Some part of me had really hoped that she would figure out what actually happened, and maybe, just maybe, someday she would like me as much as I liked her.

  One more thing leaped to the fore. A question that had bothered me for six months, and now couldn’t wait.

  “Is Calvin okay?” I blurted out.

  Remmy stopped pacing. “What?”

  I had to hurry, before she went off ranting again. “Calvin. Is he alive? Did he recover? We didn’t have time to see if Juno had killed him. I had to trust you to take care of him. Did he make it?”

  Remmy gawked at me, a tight, red-eyed expression so hurt and offended that for a moment she left anger behind. “Yes, he’s alive. No thanks to you.”

  Shivering, I let out a ragged sigh. Thank Tesla. Calvin had been a great guy, a hero. More than that, a good person. It was such a relief to know he was alive, it blotted out my terror for a moment.

  Still staring at me bug-eyed, Remmy said, “He doesn’t remember what happened on Kalyke. What you did left a lot of holes in his memory for months before then, but… yes. He’s okay.”

  I sighed again, and nodded.

  Remmy dropped me.

  I wasn’t ready for it, and hit the floor tiles on my knees and palms, hard. By the time I even caught up with what was happening, Remmy had charged down to the open door of the room with the recovering cyborg. Seeing him in his bed, she recoiled, bunched up her fists, then crept into the room with exaggerated caution.

  A couple of seconds later, glass and wood and bricks crunched, the sound of someone in armor jumping out a closed window.

  Gentle hands hooked under my armpits, pulling me to my feet. The nurse I’d been talking to asked, “Are you okay? Are you in any pain? If she did anything to you, even if you don’t think you’re hurt, you should let us examine you.”

  I shook my head, bewildered. “No. She didn’t do anything but pick me up and drop me. And draw a lot of attention.” People were still shouting outside the ward, although a lot less.

  “We know all about keeping secrets, remember? We don’t answer questions about who was here, what happened, or who our patients are. Not to the police, not to the press, not to superheroes, not to family, not to anyone.”

  From the cyborg’s room, a gravelly, amused voice chipped in. “And in gratitude, no one ever starts a fight in a hospital. We don’t want to tempt them to let something slip.”

  “We wouldn’t anyway,” the nurse promised, also amused.

  Okay! Okay. Remmy had left, without saying anything the public would hear about my identity. Thank goodness for hospital soundproofing. Now I just needed my hands to stop shaking long enough to dial my dad’s phone number.

  I would go see that movie with him, not because I needed to relax, but because there was no way I could find an excuse to duck out to Chinatown today. Although, if I could think of one, I would use it. Remmy hadn’t given me away today, but my already dwindling time just got a lot shorter.

  No more delays. I was going to see Spider.

  om knew. I wasn’t sure what she knew, but she knew something was up. All I needed was an excuse to go out for a few hours without my parents. Normally, that would be easy.

  Not this time.

  I spent the whole next day with her, until too late to plausibly go out anywhere. Claiming to have absorbed my father’s lesson on not pushing too hard, she took me with her to do shopping chores―with a little training on the side.

  The whole day became one extended pop quiz. She spent a long, long trip to the grocery store asking me questions about ambush tactics and cover. That almost became an argument, since at first the questions were ridiculous and stupid. What you can use as defensive cover depends entirely on what you’re hiding from, right? A refrigerator aisle will do a good job blocking a flame attack, not because of the cold but because they’re solid. It won’t do anything against a serious modern firearm except conceal you, which is actually pretty good because it’s hard enough to hit targets you can see. Those refrigerators would be a disaster against a melee super strength enemy, who will just knock them over on you. And how smart is this opponent, anyway? How loud? If you can hear them coming and they don’t destroy the place, they’ll never find you in a maze like a supermarket. Can you fool them into searching the aisles for you while you hide behind the pharmacist counter? It was all so situational! I had to nail her down to specifics before I could even hope to answer questions, but being so specific meant forty million questions to answer.

  The clothing store was worse. At irregular intervals, she would point at a spot and tell me an enemy was there, and make me find a place to hide. At first, she gave me five seconds. Then she cut it down to three. When I said I would leave my handcuffs trap on the floor for them to walk over, we switched to her telling me to go hide, and then she would come find me.

  That was just embarrassing. When time ran out, she would walk straight across the store to me as if she had a tracking beacon.

  Knowing that Remmy did have a tracking beacon on me, and it could activate at any moment, kept these exercises from becoming fun.

  The errands, and tests, didn’t get any easier. I never even found out why we went to the farm equipment store, other than to get questions about how strong I thought someone would have to be to break through leather straps, or how likely someone was to slip walking on chicken feed.

  Of course, she couldn’t do that two days running, right?

  No. No, the day after, I found out Aunt Bounty was coming to visit. Her first name was Bonnabelle, but her entire life, nobody would pass up a chance to call her by her middle name. You could tell she was Mom’s sister. Not that she was obsessed with numbers, no. Aunt Bounty liked cats. She only brought four this time, and Dad had to break out the robo-cat to keep her soothed. Aunt Bounty is a lot of fun, much more jovial than Mom, as long as she never had to go thirty seconds without petting a cat and you thought ‘toxoplasmosis’ was a good punch line to a joke.

  Even before Aunt Bounty arrived, Mom had me help her bake a cake. That had been the secret purpose of the grocery run. The secret cover story? Can you even have one of those?

  While I made the cream cheese frosting, I remembered that our house might look normal, but Dad had it layered in exotic defense mechanisms. They wouldn’t stop anyone cr
azy enough to break in through the front door, but stopped teleports, lasers, spy beams, telepathic command fields, all the weird mad science stuff. Remmy’s tracker wouldn’t work while I was at home. That certainly helped me keep from freaking out the rest of the day.

  Not that I could afford to get complacent, either! The next day, for sure! Besides, that would be Saturday. Best day to visit Chinatown, right?

  I escaped by means of the sullenly impatient, “Can I go out and play now? Or do you need to hold me hostage another week?” maneuver. I figured pretending to be impatient would be convincing, since I actually was impatient.

  You learn these tricks when one of your mother’s specialties is reading body language.

  So. Thanks to Mom, I hadn’t been able to plan ahead with Ray or Claire, or schedule a ride with Claire’s Mom. I didn’t have a cover story that would last more than a few hours. Certainly not past dark. Plus, I didn’t know what activated Remmy’s tracker.

  Speed was of the essence. That gave me an excuse to wear my teleport bracers. I felt much, much safer with those, thanks to all Mom’s training stressing the importance of mobility. With the occasional quick boost from those, my bicycle took me down to school in record time. In my subterranean lair, I―

  “Woah.”

  The new costume and eerily accurate Penny mannequin still stood in my front room, but now the mannequin had a helmet.

  Mad scientist goggles were not really engineer or scientist goggles. They were airplane pilot goggles from waaaaaay back when. It hadn’t occurred to me to go back to the source, but someone had. A gray cap with copper bulbs over the ears and long flaps sat on the mannequin’s head. Goggles and a copper gas mask covered the face, fastened separately to the ear bulbs. In back, a flap to let out my pigtails was closed with a panel that had two fake pigtails hanging from it. Sort of. Long copper springs. It looked like someone trying to make fun of me.

  Ha! Just like Bad Penny would!

  Out loud, to reduce the creepiness, I said, “So. Pros: This was exactly what I needed after losing my previous helmet on Jupiter. Minuses: Someone broke into my base to deliver this.”