“Sure do. It’s on loan, except the owner doesn’t want it back because a soul sucker is such a nasty thing. Ray can go get it, or Vera.”
Over by the next junk pile, Claire bent down, and when she straightened up, lifted a familiar silver mask and book. “Won’t have to. The weenie stole it. Guess he found he had no use for it.”
She tossed it to Remmy, who turned the sucker over and over in her hands, studying it as she approached the mind copying machine. Her legs wobbled a little more than I liked, but she was clearly happy. “Oh, yeah. I can do this, easy. I’ll strip some of the conduit material out of my gloves.”
“I can’t―”
Ray took my hand, squeezed it. “Yes, you can. Let her help. And ask about the other thing.”
…how did he even know there was another thing?
Lifting off his bird mask, Ray leaned his head in to touch his forehead to mine. As my cheeks burned from the closeness, he whispered, “There’s no bigger compliment you can give her than asking her to do what you can’t.”
I winced. Was Ray telling the truth, or saying it to help me? Because I wanted… criminy, trust the boy, Penny. “Remmy, I have no right to ask this of you, especially since you’re so sick, but can you alter the machine a little more for me? I have this plan so people will believe I’m a hero, but it involves copying a mind not into a person, but an object. Like, about fist-sized. I know, it’s weird.”
“Uhh…,” Remmy fumbled. “I’d like to. I’m not… it could be done, but I’d need parts. I only combine things, and I’m not totally sure what I’d need for that.”
“We are in the figurative motherlode of parts.” Claire grinned and clasping her hands behind her back.
Remmy looked around at the junk. “Yes, but… I don’t know what any of it does. I’m sorry. I’d really like to. I almost can, but… maybe if I spend some time here and poke at what’s available, I can figure it out.”
“You going home and getting well is more important. Helping the Apparition is plenty,” I said, flatly. My sense of right and wrong could only stretch so far.
Claire groaned. “You are both so goofy.” She walked up to me with full Lutra slinkiness enabled, wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and gave me a hug. She stepped away, and raised both hands. One held a ring shaped like a bird.
Oh, criminy. I’d stuck that in my pocket and forgotten about it, hadn’t I? And forgotten my best friend was a pickpocket in training as well.
My thoughts weren’t reacting fast enough after that fight. By the time I’d thought all that, Claire had the ring on her finger. I started to wave my hands in denial. “No no no―”
Claire touched Remmy on the back of the neck. Light and darkness flashed side by side. I might have been too slow to convince Claire not to, but I managed to get there in time to hold her up so she didn’t fall.
I kept another arm ready for Remmy, but didn’t need it. Yes, the pigtailed twelve-year-old let out a yelp and jumped about three inches in the air, but she landed with solid poise.
“How’s… the cold?” Claire mumbled, eyelids fluttering.
Remmy took a deep breath, and shook her head, hard. Her super-short, still-growing pigtails flapped. “Ha. Ha! I feel great again! And I understand, now. That thing. Over there. With the tubes. If I run those wires through them, it will split the feed. I can do this! I just need… a turntable. It’ll be a triple instead of double node, and I’ll need plates of some kind for the arches and the pedestal to move on.”
Well. Maybe the staff wasn’t the piece of Good Penny’s gear I’d be glad I brought. My arm not supporting Claire fished around in my pockets until I pulled out the right metal wafer. A web browser translator and I had spent a few hours figuring out the Russian on these little babies. “I believe I can get the Machine to make you just the thing, with enough raw material.”
“Raw material,” Claire mumbled, flapping her arm at all the junk.
“Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!” Remmy cackled, bouncing from foot to foot. Man, the ring packed a wallop.
Remmy threw that extra energy into building, ripping the book out of the mask and wiring that mask over the wooden skull. She dragged a metal stool out of a pile and welded it onto one of the rotating, interlocking plates my Machine built. Being a smart girl, she’d packed a toolkit into her armor. Or maybe that’s what actual engineers and mechanics who knew what they were doing did automatically.
Claire recovered completely and Remmy’s buzz wore off at about the same time. The flushed, sagging look worried me, but I let Remmy wave me off with, “I’m fine. I can finish. I remember enough,” and stood next to her, looking to see if she was worse off than she would admit.
When she did finish, I didn’t wait. “Vera. Portal to Ceres, please. And thank the Orb of the Heavens for being so helpful. Neither of you has to do this, and I appreciate it.”
Vera nodded. Her pink glow shone a little brighter, and she made a few of her soft bell noises.
A few feet away, a door opened in the air. On the other side, I recognized, not Spider’s Ceres space station, but the rounded inside of a Jupiter colony spaceship, which had to be Remmy’s. Full service. Very nice.
Remmy crossed her arms, although a smile marred her stubborn look. “You’re not getting rid of me until I know I’ve saved your friend. I think this works, but we have to test it first.”
I crossed my arms back. “Says you, sister. I not only trust your workmanship, but I didn’t bring an empty human body to download Apparition into. Finding one is the next step. I thought at first I’d use Juno’s, because the Jovians ripped out her soul, but when I thought about it…”
Remmy scrunched up her nose, wincing at the thought. “That’s too creepy. No.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t do it. People aren’t shells. Even if they’re empty.”
Apparition floated up close enough that we could see her big, warm smile even on a transparent face. She leaned down to kiss first my forehead, then Remmy’s. The touch of her lips was a spot of almost painful cold tingling. Floating past us, she said in a dreamy tone, “You’re both so silly. You don’t have to find me a body. I like this one.”
Mammon’s spare mindless minions still sat or lay around the room. They were a little freaky looking, but really only robots with different technology, right? Apparition settled her hands on the shoulders of one that had been mutated but left mindless.
I blinked in shock. “You want… that? You don’t want to be human?”
She giggled, softly and wryly. “I want to be alive. You can’t feel it, but I can. This body is alive. I’ll have flesh and blood, and half the people I know don’t look human. She’s beautiful, and I bet she can breathe water. I’ll be able to live with people on the land again, or go get lost in the ocean, just me and Vera, as we choose.”
I couldn’t deny any of that. The minion didn’t look less human than, say, Bull. This one was much fishier than Octopus Girl, with a pair of long, feathered gills hanging off the back of her head, emerging from iridescent green and yellow hair. A lot of her body shone, covered in tiny scales. Her eyes weren’t as big or strangely pupiled as Octopus Girl, but did have rainbow irises. Her many leaf-like fins would be hard to clothe, but… I guess that was a mild problem, and not mine to worry about.
A thought hit me. “Maybe this was a good idea. I’d have forgotten to ask, otherwise. Remmy, show me how this thing works?”
We manhandled the mermaid minion into one of the gates and closed the rings around her. Apparition didn’t need direction, and curiously, the restraints built into the rings seemed to touch and hold her. Remmy pulled the levers that switched the flow from one arch to the other, and set it to transfer, not copy. As a nice touch, I could tell the difference at a glance. For a transfer, the silver mask fit tightly over the wooden skull’s face. For a copy, about an inch of space separated them.
The final step required, of all things, turning a crank. Remmy did, and as it swung around, the machine buzzed quietly.
Apparition faded and disappeared.
Several tense seconds later, the mermaid girl gasped. She started laughing, weakly and awkwardly. “I forgot… I forgot I need to breathe.”
“So this body has lungs?” I asked, feeling… well, kind of awkward. Technically, I’d done much weirder stuff, but nothing came to mind that felt this strange.
She wriggled excitedly in her bonds. “Yes! I breathe now, and I have a heartbeat, and my blood is so warm, and I can smell the mud and grease, and taste my own mouth, and feel… so many things I couldn’t list them. I love this new body, and I don’t want to leave it. I can’t leave it! I just tried! I’m alive, Penny, and it’s all thanks to you and your friend Remmy!”
Time for another weird and delicate question. “Does Vera…?”
Apparition and Vera both shook their heads. I didn’t press. Whether they considered Vera better off as a robot or flesh-and-blood, either answer was something I wouldn’t be able to understand even if they explained.
Remmy and Ray, applying their genius to practical rather than philosophical purposes, unfastened Apparition from the mind transferring machine. When the last restraint pulled away, she let out a squeal and threw her arms around my neck.
Ow. This body had more than human strength. But unless I thought I was in danger of bone fractures, I had no intention of complaining.
“Thank you again, Penny. I’ll see you soon, but right now, I bet that swamp has an outlet to the sea. Come on, Vera. Let’s go swimming!”
As she ran for the door, scales shimmering and fins waving, I called out, “See you soon… Polly!”
From the other room, I heard her laugh. “That’s right! I’m Polly again, now!”
Which left Remmy.
Except it didn’t. Claire held Remmy’s arms from behind, marching her through the portal already. Ray dragged her armor over too, and pushed it across.
Remmy staggered free, dancing a bit in the lower gravity of the spaceship. Grinning hugely, she shook her fist at us, and ranted in stilted drama queen fashion. “I see how it is. I will get you, Inscrutable Machine! When next you come to Jupiter, the swift hand of Justice will be waiting.”
I grinned back. “I look forward to it. Fly home as fast as you can, and use that disease-curing machine, okay? I don’t think that ring helped you as much as some people assumed it would.”
Claire stuck her tongue out at me.
The portal, not under any of our control, chose that moment to wink out.
Claire dusted off her gloved hands. “Sorry, but if I hadn’t stepped in, you two would be hugging and crying all night.”
All night. Yeah. I grimaced. I was going to be so late getting home.
Especially since first we had to move the mind-copying machine back up to my lair. Ray could lift it, at least, but it was big and awkward, and he had to use my teleport bracers to get it through doors or up steep stairs. We succeeded eventually, and left it sitting in the fake summoning circle room next to my robot control device.
We dumped an old couch on the metal grating to the Undercity, until we could relock it and seal the door beneath. I made sure we did that, because while I didn’t tell Ray and Claire, I’d seen… something in the last dusty tunnel between the buried house and my bone pit. Back in the gloom, crawling on the ceiling, I would swear I saw three scrawny creatures with eagle heads and forelegs like eagle claws. Were underground griffon ghouls a thing? I did not want to find out by surprise.
At last, I stood in the main hall, back in my street clothes. I hadn’t put the Bad Penny stuff back on the mannequin. That could wait. It was… I didn’t dare look at my phone; it was so late.
“Thanks, guys,” I said. “Now I have to go home and find out just how busted I am. If I don’t call you, Claire, come by tomorrow and see if my parents will let me talk to you.”
Ray and Claire stepped together in front of the entrance to the magic elevator. Their folded arms declared I was not going anywhere.
“Uhh… guys? You can’t protect me from this…”
Ray had the decency to grit his teeth and look uncomfortable. “I am loathe to make your trouble with your parents any worse―”
“―but we need to know the plan. No more putting if off,” finished Claire, more decisively.
I stared at them blankly. “What plan?”
“The plan,” Claire insisted.
“Oh.” Duh. Look, I was getting tired and slow. Well… yeah, I had my machine. I’d need their help for the next step. Now was the time to lay it out.
Taking a deep breath, I explained, “I’m going to turn that Penny clothing dummy into a robot that looks like me. My power is chomping at the bit to do it, and to build a heart out of gold that I can copy my personality into. The robot will be Bad Penny for a while, and I’ll publicly defeat her, clear my name, and then go confess everything to my parents.”
Silence stretched on for several seconds, accompanied by unreadable, expressionless faces on my two best friends.
Finally, Ray said, “That…”
And like last time, Claire picked up when he didn’t want to finish. “…is the stupidest plan I have ever heard.”
Ray’s face tucked down in guilt and embarrassment. “It won’t work. Making a fake crisis and solving it to be the hero never works. People find out.”
“What will you do about the robot after?” Claire demanded.
“Let her go. She can live her own life,” I said.
Claire propped a fist on her hip, her eyes boring into me with their skepticism. “And you think people won’t spot that in about five minutes?”
Ha! Ha ha ha!
I grinned. Oh, did I grin. “Exactly.”
“Beg pardon?” said Claire.
“Bwa?” added Ray, knowing his cue.
I allowed myself a smug toss of my pigtails. “That’s the whole point. There is absolutely no way that my parents won’t find out the truth. I will have to run, not walk, back to them as soon as it’s over, and tell them everything. Guys… I’ve tried. I can only say it if I have no choice. So I’m not going to give myself any choice. And it will come at a moment when it looks like I could have gotten away with the whole thing, but I chose to be honest. Parental rage will be thirty percent, tops. Not fun, but livable.”
They gaped at me. Ray looked at Claire. “Is this ‘So insane it just might work’ insane?”
She laughed, weakly and shaking her head. “I don’t know. But we’re behind you either way. Plus, it sounds like fun.”
f course, that all assumed I wouldn’t have to confess tonight. I stood in front of my kitchen door, trying to figure out how I would say it if I had to.
It was way after dark. No way my Mom would miss that I’d been in a fight.
Okay, Penny. Let them make the first move, but if it looks like they know, or even are getting close, spit it out. Damage control, right? Maybe this was the best way, after all.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
Mom waited in the kitchen. Dad sat a few feet away, in his padded swivel chair in his office.
After a couple of heartbeats of silence, Dad leaned forward and whispered, “Oh, thank Tesla.”
Sitting in a chair at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, Mom sounded completely calm. Too calm. “I admit, you pushed the limits of my timetables. In another fifteen minutes, I would have called you, no matter what I was interrupting.”
Oh, criminy. Mom had a schedule. This was falling apart already. What would they do? What would they say?
I stared at her, like approaching doom, as she stood and walked around the table to me.
“I know what happened, and what you’ve been hiding, Penny,” she said, in the Audit’s even, emotionless tone.
Confession time. I had to. I had to. My mouth fumbled. If she already knew, how could I start? An apology? No, just say―
Mom placed her hand on my shoulder, squeezing tight enough to reassure, and leaned down to say softly,. “I know Bad Penny has
been harassing you.”
Relief hit me so hard, I had to grab a chair and sit before my knees fell out from under me. The part of me that had known my mother for fourteen years noticed that this was exactly how I would react if she was correct.
Dad made no attempt to hide the warmth, affection, and worry in his own voice. “We’ve heard reports of Bad Penny’s activities, Princess. I know she followed you into the hospital.”
Mom stood behind me, hands rubbing both my shoulders with expert gentleness. “It’s been hard to decide what to do about this. Bad Penny isn’t technically getting personal, since your identity is public knowledge, but it’s bad form. If you want, the community will stop her, or your father and I will do it ourselves, except it’s clear to us that you don’t want that.”
Adrift in this unexpected conversation, I tried to find new words. “No. Let me. Please.”
“Is it really that important to you that you handle this yourself?” Mom asked, concerned, the Audit’s robotic tone abandoned.
I nodded. “Yes.” Boy, was that an honest answer.
“You should at least let me check your injuries,” Mom suggested.
I shook my head, pulled against her hands. “I’m fine.” I definitely did not want her seeing the weird bruises riding Vera would have left. I didn’t know what those would look like, but not a battle against Bad Penny.
And again, the voice of experience with my mother told me: It’s okay that you’re obvious. They’re expecting secrets.
“Can we hug her now?” Dad asked.
Mom held up a hand. “Not quite. Penny, we will support you on this. You’re fourteen, and that’s an age where establishing your own relationships, positive and negative, is important to psychological growth. But all you have to do is say the word, now or at any moment, and we will get Bad Penny off your back. All right?”
I smiled up at her weakly. “Thanks, Mom.”
And with that, hug time arrived. Mom, right next to me, got to me first, but Dad arrived swiftly. The hugs were gentle, expecting me to be bruised and sensitive, but they also clearly did not want to let go.
Eventually, they had to. Mom walked over to the oven, opened it, and took out a casserole dish. Fresh macaroni and cheese. Tesla’s Unremarkable Earlobes, she had timed me. Thank goodness thwarting a lair-invader took the same time as… uhh… thwarting a younger lair invader.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 18
