That should have fascinated me. I loved this stuff. Instead, I couldn’t shake the gnawing anxiety that my mother might solve the mystery of my powers before Robot Penny and I could complete my plan. Mixed with the horror of the disaster physically on the horizon, I couldn’t concentrate.
Were those licks of red amidst the brown? Were we closer than I thought?
Dad stepped onto the hover sled, and put a clear plastic bubble over his head, then handed me mine. I donned it. As soon as it sealed around my neck, it filled with cool, fresh air, a welcome relief in the hot sun. The front had disks and goggles that looked charmingly like a conventional gas mask, too.
We stepped onto the sled, and it floated us above the canopy of brown, spaced-out trees that made up this ragged Southern Californian excuse for a national forest. The horizon didn’t change as we flew. Were wildfires always this big? Hadn’t this one started only an hour ago?
Our flight followed the road we’d pulled off of to park. After the forest, it shrank down to two lanes, but with cleared dirt on either side so wide, it could have stayed four lanes.
Before we’d gone very far, Dad dropped us down to the road, in a spot that looked the same as any other.
Pulling my duffle bag full of my equipment off the sled, he instructed, “First, put on your flight rotors and make sure they work.”
I did, strapping them all on and doing the wrist and ankle rolls that sent me hopping five feet into the air. Thanks to my training with Mom, I even landed gently and under complete control.
“Second, hand me your phone.”
I did, although with a certain antsyness. My secrets felt all too bare as it was.
After a little prodding, he handed it back. My map and GPS showed us, the stretch of forest we were in, and a dotted line connecting this road to another out of sight between the trees.
Dad put both his hands on my shoulders and crouched to look me in the eyes. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him so serious. Not angry, but solemn, focused, and tinged with worry. His deep, slow tone matched the expression. “No matter what, do not take your mask off until we are back in the car. If you see fire at all, take off, go back to the rest stop, and call me. Your job is to cut a firebreak, thirty feet wide, along the line shown by your map. I will be in the next sector doing the same thing. This is the farthest spot from the wildfire, and there are other firebreaks in the way. We’re providing the last and least important backup defense between the fire and homes around the edge of the forest. Real firefighters who know what they’re doing will actually fight the fire. I don’t expect you to ever see it, but if you do, drop everything and run. Okay?”
I swallowed. This was nothing like the game of heroes and villains play-fighting. “Okay.”
“And if you can’t build the firebreak with your powers, remember, this is the backup’s backup. No one is going to die because of your failure, but if you succeed, we know that no matter how bad things get, the fire doesn’t get past this line. If you get into trouble, remember that rangers are watching this whole area. They’ll spot you. Okay?”
I nodded. Despite the pleasant air inside the high tech mask, my throat felt dry and scratchy when I spoke. “Okay.”
Lunging forward, Dad wrapped his arms around my shoulders and squeezed me just this side of the point of pain. When he let go, he whispered, “I am so proud of you, Penelope.” Without another word, he got back on the hoversled and flew away.
It was a good thing I had the least critical job, because now that I faced it, I had no idea how to pull it off. Clear a thirty-foot path of empty dirt over most of a mile? I didn’t have the tools for that!
Only one thing came to mind. My baby, my Machine. Eating things was what he did. This was a whoooole lot of eating, though, and my Machine was a wee thing. Even consuming all the scrub and the occasional tree along the way wouldn’t grow him big enough to make good progress.
Not to mention if the fire did somehow catch us. Wouldn’t wooden plates burn? Or would the Machine absorb the fire, like it did all energy surges beyond background average?
The latter, had to be. That still didn’t leave me with enough material to reach a working size.
I looked down at my feet, planted on dirt, which is basically powdered rock with a dash of carbon and water slime.
I uncurled my Machine, twisted him until he activated, and set him down by the road. “Eat down into the ground one foot. Eat that one foot deep layer thirty feet in that direction. Loop back. Keep doing it, along a line that way.” I pointed in the appropriate directions. “Got it?”
He didn’t answer. Totally obedient, stunningly good at understanding verbal directions, alive in a way I couldn’t define, he didn’t actually think. But he did obey, burrowing into the ground, chewing industriously.
The first few minutes creeped. They dragged. They took forever. By the time he reached the end of the first thirty-foot lap, my Machine had barely added enough shiny rock plates to eat a foot wide path at a time.
He kept at it. With nothing else to do, I monitored him, and watched my GPS to make sure we were headed in the right direction. Any fallen branch or ragged bush we passed got chewed up like the dirt beneath it. When he reached his first actual tree, I had to run clear as he ate the stump to knock it down, then sucked the trunk in like a string of spaghetti.
If only it had been nearly as fast. I was trying to figure out if we had reached a third of the way when I noticed how dark everything had gotten.
Looking up, I saw brown. The smokey smudge blocked out the sun overhead.
In the distance, I heard a faint crackle, and a sound like drumming hooves.
Straining to look through the trees, I saw flickers of orange.
No way. I was supposed to be the last backup. I’d been here half an hour, tops. How could the fire have gotten so close?
Dad’s instructions were clear. I had to leave.
But there were houses on the other side of this unfinished firebreak. They’d already been evacuated. Probably. But even so, people could lose their homes, all their belongings, maybe pets. Everything they owned.
Dad’s instructions had been absolutely clear.
Robot Penny appeared, right in front of me, stepping out of the air and into the shallow ditch left by the Machine. Her Bad Penny costume’s goggles and mask hid her expression, but I could easily imagine the glare from the anger in her voice. “Why haven’t you finished this, yet?”
She was the last person I’d expected to see, but the person I needed most. “Listen, we have a problem. Mom got a clue, literally, and she’s following it. Our battle has to―”
“There’s no time for that!” Robot Penny yelled, waving a furious arm at the fire, much easier to see than before.
“There’s no time for anything! It’s too late! The next road is too far, the Machine isn’t big enough to cover that distance before the fire arrives, and I don’t have enough material to feed it to get it that big!” I shouted back.
“We’re supposed to be a genius. Figure it out. I’ll buy you time,” she snapped, stepping forward to disappear with the last word.
Where did she go? What could she possibly think she could do?
I scanned the woods for movement. The problem was, fire moved. Most of it might still be a blur behind the haze of tree trunks, but flames roared in branches within sight , twisting and flashing.
On those branches, stood my robot duplicate. She whirled like a dancer, arms waving everywhere, and her energy channeling gloves ripped the fire out of the wood as if she could actually touch it. With the branches left black instead of red, she hurled the streamer of flame back towards the wildfire, and presumably toward already burned wood.
If she could do this, I could.
So much easier said than done.
Umm. I could order the Machine to dig deeper, but I had surely reached the point of diminishing returns. Crawling forward along a line wide enough to do any good would take too long. I needed an entirely new st
rategy.
One occurred to me. Whether it would save us all or firemen would tell me I was wasting my time, it was the only strategy that came to mind.
“Machine! Stop digging forward, and dig down, instead. Ten feet should be enough. You’re wide enough. Recycle the rock as a six-inch-wide wall, as tall as… uhh, that branch! And keep eating, extending the wall that way!”
For a good sixty seconds, it looked like it wasn’t going to work. It took too long for the Machine to dig down, and stretch up its body in an insectoid tower. Yes, it started building a wall, which the hole rooted enough to stay upright, but this was slower than digging a path!
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to be patient. The Machine could work exponentially. Stretched along such a deep hole, it started moving faster. Its bulk grew, as it consumed much more material than went into the wall. Said wall extended, until we were moving at a walking pace.
Pretty soon, that would be a running pace. Then I wouldn’t be able to keep up.
My Machine still didn’t have enough time. The fire moved irregularly, not in one single front, especially with Robot Penny appearing and disappearing to strip sections of it and send them back where they came from. It was still close enough that my skin felt baked, even behind the wall. Without my mask, I’d be dead, from smoke, from seared lungs, and from heat prostration.
Peeking out past the wall, I saw Robot Penny in the thick of the blaze. Her body’s shell was composed of particularly hard ceramic. She wore a fireproof costume, with a fireproof wearer. Only her hair might burn, and she had that tucked under her leather flight helmet. Charred as that was, it hadn’t ignited.
Something creaked and snapped. By now that happened constantly, but this one boomed louder, right up close. Behind me, where the wall had been keeping out sparks, a flaming tree branch bounced over the top.
Mecha-Me saw it. She teleported to the branch, sweeping up the flames that reached for already darkened, overheated trees on my side of the wall.
I shouted, “Throw the fire at the Machine. Machine, grab that branch and eat it!”
Robot Penny startled. It was nice to be the one thinking half a second ahead of her, for once. Then she got it, and poured fire onto the Machine’s extending arm. The flames winked out, their terrible heat sucked in for recycling as mechanical energy. In fact, after that meal, it grabbed the still shouldering branch and sucked it down much faster.
My double returned to her side of the wall. I patrolled mine. Nothing as big fell over the wall again, but burning twigs did tumble in the heat-driven wind past the line we were working, and blasted them with my staff. I got a layer of ice, a layer of glass, a ball of darkness, jelly beans, and something scary that left the tree it hit fused into one shiny surface. All of those random effects extinguished the fire.
We weren’t making it. The Machine had stalled at a pace a little slower than I could run. It had plenty of material, but could bite through rock only so fast, no matter how big a mouth it used. I could see the road up ahead, but a wall of burning trees had reached my wall, and Mecha-Me couldn’t pull the fire out of them fast enough.
Wetness occurred, and lots of it. Water fell out of the sky in torrents.
What in Tesla’s Plumbing Disinterest? Was it raining? In early July?!
No. The water came from a woman floating in the sky, holding a blue ball in front of her. It gushed into the air like an ocean, raising violent columns of steam as it hit the line of burning trees―but also stopping the path of the fire.
Soon, wet black trees formed a firebreak of their own, and my savior floated down to meet me.
It was Marvelous. Her hair had grown back past her shoulders since I’d eaten a chunk of it off in our duel. She had the look everyone expected from a heroine, and hardly anyone with super powers actually did have: Tall for a woman, naturally full-figured but firmly muscled, and sporting thick, wavy brown hair. You could easily imagine that after putting out this fire she would hurry back to her classes at an exclusive private college for people with powers. Her costume showed off a lot of midriff, but the top and bottom weren’t much worse than tight. For a crime fighting costume, it almost counted as tame.
The centerpiece of her green and gold, shoulder-less blouse-style top was a lapis lazuli plate, twisted in the shape of flames. I guessed it provided the blue sparkly field surrounding her and kept her safe from the fire. Supervillain instincts screamed at me to steal it. That such a thought would occur to me at all at a time like this suggested exertion and heat had made me a little loopy.
The water she sprayed came from a beach-ball sized globe of what looked an awful lot like elaborately carved ice. Ice or glass, Marvelous had dug into her reserves and come heavily armed to face this fire.
Yeah, I was definitely overheated. My skin felt so baked that the water raining down over it stung.
Hovering down in front of me, only inches off the ground, she scolded, “You’re not supposed to be here! What will Brian say if I tell him you were right at the edge of the fire, trying to outrun it?”
Drifting in closer, she looped one arm around my shoulders, and with her other arm holding up the ice ball, laid her cheek on the inflated top of my bubble gas mask. In what was practically a whisper compared to the noise of the fire nearby, she added, “I hope he’s as proud and impressed as I am. It’s only because of your wall that I might be in time to save the day.”
I had nothing to say to that, and she let me go, then gave me a push. “Go. Evacuate like I know he told you to. I’ll finish up here, and see you soon.”
Boggled and exhausted, I held out my hands to the Machine. “Come here, you. Leave all that stuff you ate behind. I want the real you back.”
Several seconds of creaking and grinding later, a crystal flap fell off with a loud clunk, and my Machine crawled out onto my hands. Wrapping him around one wrist, I took off, heading back to the road.
Criminy. From up here… along a path between the roads stretched devastation, black and orange, most of it still actively burning. Quite a lot of trees, or at least parts of trees, remained unburned, food that would keep the fire raging.
I thought I could stop that? The whole idea made me feel faint. But I had. A tall, thin wall and a deep trench formed a line across the landscape. On one side, the inferno. On the other, a forest.
A few blackened spots suggested Robot Penny had a lot to do with keeping that line secure. Now that would be Marvelous’s job, flying down the length of the wall and dousing everything with water.
Flying, it didn’t take me long to get back to the road. I set down on the edge of it. Flying long distances on these rotors really made my wrists and ankles hurt.
Besides, the thing I was hoping for happened. Robot Penny teleported in front of me.
She growled beneath her mask, not loud, but like someone panting for breath. She looked like she was panting for breath. Biological habits die hard. “I hope we managed to contain this. It could still leap the road.”
I gave my head a shake, reached for my gas mask… but left it on. As instructed, I would keep it on until I got back to the car. I ought to obey something Dad had instructed me to do. “I don’t understand why this was even necessary. I was miles from the fire when we started. Dad described this as the last backup defense.”
“Arson,” answered Robot Penny, sounding so mad I expected her to raise her mask and spit. “Someone tried to get ahead of the firefighters.”
“No way. These fires were deliberate? Who would do that?”
Looking back at the black and orange mess raging along one side of the road, my double shook her head. “I don’t know. Lucyfar is finding out now, and when she does, that person is going to have a very bad day.”
I blinked at that. Huh. “She really is complicated.”
A small note of dark humor entered Mecha-Me’s voice. “You still have no idea. I need to get moving. Maybe I can help elsewhere.”
“Wait a second!” I reached out, but didn’t need
to grab her. She stopped and waited for me to talk.
I explained as fast as I could. “Someone is watching us now, with drones, or a telescope, or something. Marvelous may have seen you, and we look way too much alike in these gas masks. Mom is already sniffing around. I’m running out of time. I might need to go home and confess now, and hope they’re happy enough about stopping the fire not to kill me.”
She took hold of my upper arms, and gave them a squeeze. “No, don’t. Can we make it one more night?”
I fought down my anxiety and seriously thought about that question. “Probably. I’m pretty sure. Mom isn’t in a hurry, and this fire is a big distraction.”
“Then we’ll do it tomorrow. I’m ready, and if we don’t follow your plan, I don’t have much of a future with Mom and Dad, myself. Cassie will call you this evening and invite you to the beach tomorrow. She and our friends will hold off the crowd, so we can get through the fight this time. I need this as much as you do. We’ll make it final, and you can go home victorious and tell our parents the truth.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. She didn’t wait for anything else. Turning, extending a foot, she disappeared. I guess saying good-bye to yourself is kind of pointless.
Besides, she had a point. One of many things I hadn’t thought about was that if Mom and Dad found out about Robot Penny while raging at my bad behavior, she’d get a heaping helping of the blame. Someday, they would forgive me. Robot Penny would lose all chance of having parents, ever.
In no mood to fly, I walked down the road towards the rest stop. Eventually, Dad floated down out of the sky and landed his hoversled next to me. He looked pretty charred himself, and leaned down to give me a tired, affectionate smile. “What you did today was incredibly stupid and brave, Princess. You clearly have what it takes to be a hero.”
Pride and guilt warred against each other inside my heart.
isaster did not strike that evening. As I’d hoped, our firefighting adventure kept Mom too distracted. Presumably, someone told her I’d gone above and beyond the call of duty. She never asked, just focused on making sure Dad and I were relaxed, fed, hydrated, and generally medically taken care of. She made him take a cold bath first, so things must have been pretty bad in his section of the fire. I got one right after, sitting in the tub and letting the baked feeling leech out of my skin.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 25
