Yeah, he’d spoken to Remmy, and knew where she came from. The hint that she was from off-planet didn’t get a blip of surprise. Instead, he took a half-step closer, looming over me. “If you want to help her, get out of here. Leave Chinatown, now.”
I’d have bristled, but he was begging, not threatening. So I said, “What?”
“She hates supervillains. If you know her, you know that.”
I nodded. “She’s very serious about being good. It’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s a better person than I am.”
He paused, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “Yeah.” He clearly knew the feeling. But that moment of hesitation ended, and he looked back down at me, urgent again. “Well, she can follow you, and if she tracks you here… it’s bad enough if she finds out I’m a supervillain. What do you think she’d do if she saw this crowd?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Remmy would fight, even though she couldn’t win. She would fight with everything she had, show no mercy, and be breaking the truce. Someone would kill her.”
“There have been two close calls already. She doesn’t know how Earth works.”
He didn’t have to say more. “I’m leaving.” I walked out. No point in delaying.
Anyway, I’d already found out Spider couldn’t help me, right? I would have to find Remmy on my own. Or lure her to me but force her to talk rather than fight. Maybe that would work. Some kind of magnet invention, or something. Remmy’s combination power was impressive, but she had only low-tech materials to work with. Mostly copper and iron. Iron was magnetic, and copper… was vulnerable to magnetism in ways my super power understood better than I did.
I had left the building, and in fact was about to step into the street and summon my light bike, when I got another surprise. A tiny, gleaming figure swooped down out of the sky to hover in front of me.
I swept her into a hug. “Vera!”
Soft bell sounds echoed from within my arms. She was maybe softball sized. That was her head, the all too accurate fake Conqueror Orb, a crystal ball filled with swirling purple mist and a black pupil. The rest of her body amounted to almost nothing, being made of thin strips of ceramic that floated in a six-winged fairy shape below her head.
I’d always figured that body was purely decorative, but it did help her express herself. When I let go, she held out her arms, chip hands raised, in a caution to stay still.
I took a step forward. “I really need to get out of here, Vera. Can’t you follow me?”
She retreated, but not a full step. Her arms remained extended. She chimed at me. Did it sound scolding?
“I don’t want to hurry off either. It’s been months, and I miss you. You and Apparition both. I just―”
A soft, resonant girl’s voice broke in, “I missed you too, Bad Penny.”
Woah. I turned around to see a gray, ghostly figure float through a wall towards me. She looked young, late teens, with a sad expression that reminded me of Claudia, and wore only a simple white gown that hung down to her ankles.
The Apparition never changed. She couldn’t.
“I wish I could hug you,” I said to her. “I have so much to ask, about if you and Vera are doing well, to talk about games, and the trouble I’m having, but I’m worried someone will show up and get hurt if I stay.”
Hovering over me, she held out her hands, but didn’t touch. They would just go through me, and touching the Apparition felt like being dunked in ice water anyway. “We can go somewhere else, Bad Penny, but I do need to talk to you. I need help, and no one else is willing. Lucyfar got upset when I asked.”
Criminy. I needed to get my plan to confess to my parents in gear. Before that, I had to stop Remmy from forcing the issue in a bad way. But I couldn’t ignore this. “What do you need?”
Her eyes closed, and her head hung forward. “I’m tired of being a ghost. So tired. I want to un-kill myself.”
hat took you so long?”
I gave Claire a defiant, nay, scornful glower. “You’re the one who just got here.”
Unabashed and unabashable, Claire cocked a fist on her hip. “I mean you’ve turned into a hermit.”
Okay, she had me there. Fully capable of abashment, I reached back and tugged on one of my fake metal braids. “Well, first I had to figure out what I could even do for her.” My free hand indicated the Apparition, barely visible inside a tree.
“If you had called me days ago, you would have known days ago,” said Ray, arms clasped behind him. While capable of being abashed, that grin sure wasn’t displaying any abash right now.
I sighed, slumping forward. “I’m just glad dead people are patient.”
“Yes. We are,” said Apparition. Vera, probably incapable of boredom, floated among the branches next to her.
“And then Mom…” I waved a hand. Parents are too awkward to talk about. She might have pulled back on the training pressure, but she took taking up way more of my time. The one thing I was confident of was that she would have the coldest, most calculated screaming conniption ever if she suspected me of actual supervillainy.
I also didn’t want to talk about how nervous I felt going out for any non-urgent task, knowing Remmy was out there, somewhere.
Ray’s shoulders twisted as he looked all around the little garden. “Ironic indeed that the trail leads back here.”
Yeah, seriously. The Inscrutable Machine, in full costume for the first time in months, gathered in a fenced-off overgrown garden around the downtown library. The same garden we’d fled from last time, no less. I’d forgotten how Ray’s black bird mask gave him a weird, ‘plague doctor’ look. With the suit jacket bulking out his skinny shoulders, he looked like a classic minion.
This was my first time really wearing the new costume, and not surprisingly, it fit perfectly and was easy to move in. Even the stupid corset wasn’t really a corset and didn’t restrict me. It just looked corsety. The goggles on the mask didn’t give me the full visual freedom I liked from the old mask, but what can you do?
Claire had a new costume. Again. This one had to be an anime character, with the red and white bodysuit, the incomplete ruffly miniskirt, and white stockings. Yes, the bodysuit cut off at shorts level so there could be a few inches of skin before the stockings started. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and braided it like mine, even though it wasn’t really long enough. The patchwork stuffed doll half her size she kept tucked under one arm didn’t match.
Unlike myself and Ray, Claire could not possibly look more like myself if she’d worn an ‘I Am Claire Lutra’ sign… except that she had her power on enough that her totally visible face belonged to someone else, the golden-haired moppet she became while using it. I tried not to look at her too directly.
Ray cracked his fists as he studied the hidden door. “So, we take the back entrance. How shall we open it?”
Vera floated over as well, but I stuck an arm in front of them both. “Delicately. We’ll use the keys E-Claire stole and never gave back.”
Claire lifted her free hand to her chest, staring at us open-mouthed in shock. “What? Me?”
Everybody stared at her and waited. After a few seconds of that, she grinned, pulled a ring of keys out of the zombie rag doll, and flounced up to the door. It opened on the first try. She even knew which key went to this stairwell.
As we filed in, I explained, “This is a quiet, restrained operation. No collateral damage. We barely got past the Librarian last time, with a small army of top villains. Our goal here is for her to not notice or care we’re here.”
Ray nodded thoughtfully. “Should work. She hardly ever intervenes, and our target is neither a book nor anything as important as the Orb of the Heavens.”
“And we’re taking this door because we can make sure Mourning Dove isn’t home before we commit.”
They nodded at that. We crept down the stairs. These leather boots were wonderfully quiet. Ray, with that whole superhuman grace thing, rivaled Apparition’s ghostl
ike silence.
Claire’s high heels clacked loudly with every step.
I looked back at her at the right moment to catch her wobble on one of them. She gave me a defiant pout. “I’ll be better once I get back from ballet camp. Mom could walk tight-ropes wearing these.”
It wouldn’t do any good to argue, but I thought maybe Claire believed the Mynx’s stories maybe a little too zealously.
We peeked through the back hallway door. All was quiet. No hint of janitors, and Mourning Dove’s door was closed.
Apparition floated past us through the door, murmuring, “I do not feel the presence of my murderer.” The fingers of one hand trailed along the wall, until it yanked away and she added, “But something in her morgue repels me.”
‘Morgue’ was a good word. It hadn’t been a base in any traditional sense.
We eased past as stealthily as we could, everyone’s ears on alert. Vera watched Mourning Dove’s door the whole time. She would sense something long before we did.
Right?
Confession time: I didn’t know what Vera could do, besides the heat beam and overriding transmissions. I’d built her to comfort a lonely ghost, not for combat.
Undisturbed, we passed through the maintenance door and into the library itself. Claire redeemed herself and then some by jamming something into the lock so the door wouldn’t close.
“And this is the other reason we came in the back door,” I said. “It’s right next to our prize.”
We spread out around the display pedestal at the bottom of the library’s pit, and the bubble floating above it. Ray spread his gloved hands over the surface and whispered eagerly, “The soul sucker.”
Once you were told what it did, the mask with all the tubes and wires attached to it looked exactly like a device to extract someone’s soul. We just had to hook it up to something other than a book.
“How do we get it out of the case?” Claire asked, giving the bubble a poke.
“I’d prefer to grab the case and worry about opening it back at our lair, if we can do that without destroying the pedestal,” I said.
The Apparition laid her hands and forehead onto the bubble – although they sank partially through, I noticed. Her gray, transparent body shuddered. “With this, I can live again.”
Swallowing nervously, I volunteered, “I even know where there’s a body with no soul you can use.”
That idea was… creepy. What I really wished I could do was import Apparition into the robot I planned to make out of my mannequin. With someone living in it who could claim to be bad penny, I’d have a plan to clear my name ready to go. My super power even liked the idea. I had faint visions of metal hearts I had to not focus on too closely. Let the idea sit. My power seemed content to hold onto this one.
That would be perfect for me. For Apparition, it would barely be better than being a ghost. I pretended to rest my hand on her shoulder, the way she pretended to touch the globe. Tingling cold marked when I accidentally made contact. My gloves did nothing, of course.
When she looked up, I said, “You deserve to live again.”
Flickering black drew my attention. Mourning Dove, haggard, yellow, and wrapped in white leather, appeared on the escalator. As it slid her down to the bottom level, the vampire croaked, “She was never alive in the first place.”
Apparition spun around. “How dare you!” she hissed. It was only the second time I’d heard her emotional. The first time had been gleeful surprise. Now her voice dripped hate.
Vera hovered around in front of Apparition. Mourning Dove ignored the implied threat. She didn’t look angry, either. Maybe she sounded a little tired, but it was hard to tell. “The truth is the truth. You are not Polly Icarus, and never were.”
Was she trying to make this worse?
I snapped, “What are you talking about?”
Too late, I realized that was the dumbest question of all time, because Mourning Dove might answer it. Which she did. “Polly Icarus died of an asthma attack, hiding from gunfire near a battle with organized crime. When used to its limits, my power spawns self-perpetuating shadows. One of them found her and made itself permanent by copying her appearance and memories.”
Apparition pointed a finger at Mourning Dove’s face, and roared, “Liar! You were so busy killing everyone you could see that one of your black tentacles reached through a wall, and…” She hesitated for a moment, shuddered, and skipped past that memory. “I never had asthma!”
Mourning Dove didn’t even shrug. “The copy is less than perfect.”
Apparition hunched up, face lowered, fists pulled close to her chest. She sounded like she was crying. “You couldn’t even apologize. You ignored me, because I can’t touch you. But this time, I have allies. Vera will fight for me, and the Inscrutable Machine. We will burn your evil corpse to ash.” She placed a shaking hand on Vera’s head―the one thing she could touch.
This was my time to interrupt. Actually, It was a couple of minutes past, but I leaped into action better late than never. Sweeping my arms in denial, I said, “We are here on an errand of mercy, not murder.
This time Mourning Dove did shrug. And was that a touch of bitterness in her gravelly voice? “I cannot be murdered. I am already dead.. A robot of flesh and a robot of shadows are both still robots, not people.”
I shook my head, stiff and determined. “I don’t care who is or isn’t alive by what standards. I don’t care where either of you came from. Polly wants a body, and I heard this device transfers souls. I don’t want to argue about what a soul is, either. I’m sure I can make it work on her. That does not sound like the kind of crime you’d object to, so please let me take the device.”
Apparition, thankfully, kept silent, arms by her sides and holding back her anger. Mourning Dove stood there dispassionately, the way she had since we’d started. “Take it. It can not help her. The device drains, but does not transfer, and would give her only nonexistence. A cruel man who claimed to be righteous created this machine as an instrument of brutal torture. It has no other use. Even in that, he failed. This city teems with weapons just as deadly, and easier to wield. It will do no more damage in your hands than on display.”
Oh, criminy. Mourning Dove might argue interpretation, but I was sure she wouldn’t lie about this. I clung to hope, for Apparition’s sake. “Then I’ll fix it with my power. It upgrades existing inventions.” Sometimes. When it felt like it. I could already feel its interest in upgrading my mannequin into a robot, but I felt nothing for the soul sucker. Even if I got an inspiration, would it be what I wanted?
I would try.
Yelling in the distance cut off any further thought. People had noticed the confrontation between the Inscrutable Machine and Mourning Dove, but that wasn’t it. They either got on with their reading, or leaned against windows and over railings to watch us and take photos.
“Excuse me. I have a crime to stop,” said Mourning Dove.
And in the distance, an all-too-familiar, almost expected voice shouted, “Bad Penny!”
Holding up my hands to Mourning Dove, I barked, “Don’t, please! She’s a hero.”
Ray and Claire both stared at me. I couldn’t clearly see Ray’s expression through his eagle mask, but I could certainly hear the stiff amazement in his voice. “Oh, no way. No wonder you have been hiding. You should have told us.”
Claire folded her arms, chin lifted and beaming with smugness. She practically gave off light. “I knew those reports of a girl in power armor weren’t you.”
Remmy and her power armor arrived at the top balcony, leaped out into space, and floated down to the bottom of the pit with us. Well, not so much ‘floated’ as ‘fell more slowly than she should in a cloud of hissing steam.’ When she hit the floor, she still did so with a loud crunch.
This was Claire’s moment. She opened her arms, and her rag doll fell onto the floor, only to pick itself up and waddle towards a nearby chair. Twirling with delight―and managing it gracefully even with th
e high heels―she sang, “Diversion time! Go forth and reproduce, my children!”
Claire’s moment over, it became my moment. I leaped on top of the doll, keeping it pinned with its mouth to the floor so it couldn’t chew on my clothing. “We are not destroying the library, E-Claire!”
Remmy clenched her fists, hunching forward. From inside the welder’s visor faceplate of the suit, she snarled, “What is wrong with you? Just stop it! You pretend to be a good person, then destroy everything! When I rip that mask off, I’ll tell everyone who you really are!”
“This is getting personal,” croaked Mourning Dove.
Still sitting on the doll, I held up a hand to warn off the vampire. “Yes. It is personal, so please don’t do anything.”
Delicately, Claire stepped between me and Remmy. Leaning towards the younger girl, one hand on the hip of her outrageously pink costume, Claire asked, “Do we have to fight?”
She looked so upset, so sincere, that only when I heard the smack did I notice Remmy slapped her.
Criminy, Claire had really poured on the juice. She’d gotten me with her mind fog. She still looked silly and adorable flailing her arms as she staggered on her high heels and fell back on her butt.
Only on her butt, at least. Ray got enough control to have an arm out to catch Claire’s shoulders. The only part of his face the black mask revealed was his mouth, but it pulled into a tight frown I did not see very often. Ray was angry.
Flipping up her mask, Remmy smirked, her eyes wide with pride and fury. “I built my psi blocker into this suit. I’ve prepared for this. None of you can touch me.”
Her wild glare included Mourning Dove. Had I missed something while Claire put my brain in time out? Did I… remember Mourning Dove releasing a cloud of dark smoke, which Remmy had waved aside with one hand? Or did I just think that should have happened?
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 12
