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Chapter 171 – Off DaysSo after the conference call, Willow came in and gave them the update on her conference call. She had called Bill Lee and Lieutenant Marshall, and then the three of them called Alex’s dad and big sister, and they had talked it over. They figured Danielle was more than smart enough to adapt GC-161 to give Orphans powers even if the default formula really was bad for Orphans. And they all figured that could be tested just by trying out GC-161 on blood samples from the Team Two Orphans when they got back from India. And Annie had some ideas on safe ways you could make GC-161-like compounds, and Alex’s dad had some ideas on ways they might be able to protect the SRI Orphans from GC-161 exposure.
And then at the end of the hour, Janet came back. Alex went normal and poured the punchbowl of Diet Coke down the toilet in Jack’s tiny private bathroom. The fizz was mostly gone after being poured into a punchbowl and left for an hour. Janet took another blood sample and rushed off to go do hospital stuff.
Willow smiled at Jack. “Well, I know you have stuff to do, and I told Walter you were dying for some extra paperwork to fill up your day since I was going to be busy elsewhere …”
Jack stuck out his tongue in a pretty good imitation of Willow. Then he said to Alex, “You have fun today, and I’ll see you at dinner. And if you show any symptoms at all of radiation exposure, I want Terawatt at the hospital bugging Janet ASAP. Understand?”
Alex grinned at him and snapped off a salute. “Roger that!”
Jack grinned and made ‘shoo’ gestures with his hands. “Scram! Beat it! Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn!”
Willow told Alex where her car was parked, and so Alex went silvery again and flew back out through the HVAC system on the roof and hid under Willow’s car until Willow came out. Then Alex puddled in as Willow got in the car, and Alex hid on the floor until Willow pulled into a garage.
“Okay, you can come out now,” Willow said.
Alex went normal, even if she was in her Terawatt uniform. “Okay, but I am sort of noticeable now.”
Willow smiled. “Jack brought home the Annie Farrell bag, so you can go out with me in disguise and no one will see Terawatt or Alex Mack. No one’s gonna see Willow Rosenberg either, because I’m wearing a disguise, too.”
Alex teased, “It’s not gonna be that Psylocke costume, is it?”
Willow giggled. “Nope. First I’m gonna take you up to see where our new house is gonna be, and then we’ll come back here and I’ll put on my wig and fake glasses, and we’ll go off to a mall an hour away where we can just mall-walk.”
Alex reminded her, “Well, okay, but if I’m in the Annie Farrell disguise I can’t shop for clothing or anything like that.”
Willow shrugged. “Okay, but I’m not really big on the clothing shopping thing anyway. I’m more computer games and books and DVDs and looking for stuff for cosplay. Most of the clothes shopping I do is on-line, unless I’m getting something that’s got to be tailored properly like a business suit. Or lingerie. And swimsuits.”
Alex asked, “How many DVDs do you and Jack have total? And aren’t you worried about Charlie seeing some of the naughty stuff you’ve got?”
Willow blushed a bit. “Yeah, there might be one cabinet of DVDs I have to have a lock on. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Charlie goes over to Grover’s house to see stuff of the porn-ish type, or at least R-rated stuff he isn’t watching with Hanna. Hanna’s not interested in slasher flicks and monster movies, because they don’t scare her and she can’t stop complaining about how stupid the ‘heroes’ act in ’em. Right now she’s watching a lot of Hitchcock so Charlie and Jack can show her ‘High Anxiety’ in another week or two.”
Alex just shook her head a little. “I am totally glad I’m not the one who had to give Hanna that whole The Talk or The Other Talk because Hanna’s whole experience with sex was pretty much watching reindeer do stuff and have babies.” She knew from talking with Hanna that Hanna’s ‘dad’ had told her the basics about menstruation and how to deal with it in a frozen wilderness, but he hadn’t really given her the ‘birds and bees’ talk. Mr. Heller had probably figured he and Hanna weren’t going to live long enough for her to need that talk, and he’d very nearly been right. The big jerkhead.
So Alex slipped into the casual Annie Farrell outfit she hadn’t gotten to wear in London: the padded leotard, a loose top and pants, casual shoes, the wig, and the glasses. Then Willow drove her over to where Mrs. Murdock’s house used to be. Willow had a bunch of pictures on her phone of the old house. The pictures weren’t too promising. The front yard was all overgrown. The back yard was this really steep drop that looked like it was about a seventy-five degree slope. The house had an old-timey kitchen that didn’t even have room for a real fridge, which was in the dining room. There was one really old bathroom and two not real appealing bedrooms and a living room. And if you were sleeping in a bedroom and you had to go to the bathroom and there were other people in the house, forget about having any privacy. And the house had a deck which was old and hanging out over that huge dropoff. No wonder Willow didn’t like it.
That wasn’t what Alex saw when Willow drove up to the site. The front yard had been leveled and looked like it would someday be a nice play area. The house was gone. The big space under the house was now a lot bigger, and it was a huge poured-concrete basement area at least the size of Jack’s entire house, with big openings for maybe bay windows on the dropoff side. And the construction crew was already putting in the first floor and building the framing for the walls.
Willow showed her the blueprints she had worked up with a cooperative architect. The house looked like it would have room for maybe two visiting couples in the den and the library on the first floor, and then upstairs there was room for a master bedroom and bath plus three other bedrooms and a playroom and two bathrooms for kids.
“Willow, how many kids are you planning on having?”
Willow blushed. “I’d never figured I was the mom type, but since Jack I really want a boy and a girl, and we might have to have more than two kids to get one of each gender. So … at least two.”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. Domestic Willow was really cute. “Just don’t turn into the Octomom.”
“Ick. Like that’s gonna happen. I’ve got a doctorate to earn before we’re even gonna hatch baby number one.”
When they went back to Jack’s house, Willow put on a sloppy oversized sweater that concealed all her curves, a pair of ugly cat-eye glasses, and a long brown wig.
Alex pointed at herself and asked, “Isn’t this a lot of work just to go to the mall?”
Willow nodded. “I just need to get out of the house, and I’m pretty tired of Willow-pics showing up on Instagram and Tumblr every time I go shopping or to the gym or anything. You know there’s something wrong with the world when you’re trying to be a software company CEO and computer security consultant, and you’ve got ‘Hustler’ trying to get you to pose nude for them.”
Alex reminded her, “Yeah, I already got that part.” She was just lucky that no one knew where Terawatt lived.
Willow said, “Right. Like I could forget. Poison Ivy had another pre-trial hearing, and three different skin mags offered to defend her for free if she posed naked for them. Boy, she was not happy about that. Still, they don’t know she is naked. Everyone thinks those leaves are like a fancy bathing suit.”
They walked out to Willow’s car. Alex admitted, “Well, I’m not sure she’s really ‘of sound mind’. She spliced herself with plant DNA, which is pretty much a sign of non-mind-soundness right there, and now she wants to protect plants a lot more. How much of that’s because of stuff that happened to her brain when she mutated herself?”
So they drove off to a shopping center in a town about an hour’s drive away. They talked about Poison Ivy, which led to the Batman, which led to what a crab Bruce was, which led to whether he was being nice to Julie, which led to boyfriends, so they just had a normal girl-talk deal about Ray and Jack and Charlie and how Louis turned out to be a way better boyfriend for Marsha than Alex expected, which probably wasn’t fair to Louis. And then they talked about Shar, and their families, and growing up, and all that stuff.
Alex finally asked, “So I saw a picture of Cordelia Chase. Is she an Orphan, too? She’s really pretty.”
Willow scowled. “No, she just has Chase genes and her mom’s genes, because, hello, trophy wife! Her mom made a whole deal about ‘natural childbirth’ and all that, but she had Cordelia while she and Mister Chase were in Monaco, so she probably lied about the ‘natural’ part and did the ‘all drugs all the time’ thing. But she popped an heiress so she was done and she spent the rest of her time keeping in shape and being the queen of the city and lording it over all the other moms. Plenty of moms complained about Mrs. Chase when I was really little and they didn’t know I could understand what they were really saying. Cordy’s a late summer baby anyway, and nobody ever accused her of being a brain or even a great athlete, just a ‘shake your pompoms’ cheerleader. I know her birthday, because she always told people that if they went to my birthday party, they were off the invite list for her party, and she had like over a month to check up on people to see if she needed to disinvite them. The only people who ever came to my b-day parties were like Xander and Jesse and the other outcasts. Jonathan and Marcy and like that, people who were never gonna get invites to her party anyway.”
Boy, one of these days, the SRI was going to have an op in Brazil, and Alex was going to make sure to go give Cordelia Chase a stern talking-to. What a jerkhead.
So then they talked about childhood friends, like Xander and Ray and Nicole and Jesse and Robyn and Fritz. And fun stuff they did as kids with their parents. And whether having an older sister was great or cruddy. Alex told Willow a ton of stories about Annie, since none of them were really bad. About the worst thing she had to tell about Annie was the time in high school when that jerkhead intern at the lab was getting Annie to do all their project for him and Annie was so busy mooning over him that she took over their whole room with research junk and Alex ended up moving out into the backyard shed … which might have been okay if they hadn’t gotten their once-a-year downpour that very week and it turned out the shed roof was no longer waterproof.
Willow had a bunch of stories about her and Xander and Jesse when they were really little, so Alex told her some Ray stories and some Robyn stories and some Nicole stories. They just chatted about old stories and how their non-classified lives were going, and they ended up sitting at the mall drinking soda and chatting for hours. They never did get to the bookstore or the videogame store. The most they managed was going to this really cute greeting card store so Willow had birthday cards and Christmas cards and Hanukah cards and Halloween cards and other holiday cards and stuff like that, because she needed cards for Jack’s family and friends, and the SRI soldiers she had met, and the SRI scientists she had done stuff with, and the SRI superheroes, and on and on. She just needed about ten times more cards than she’d needed one year ago because she had so many more great people in her life, and she insisted on buying Alex lunch to thank her for all of it.
Okay, Alex had a calzone from the little Italian place in the food court, then two burgers from the burger place, then a large special from the Chinese place, and finally a banana split from the ice cream place. She was hungry after spending all that time being silvery that morning, so it wasn’t her fault.
On the way home while they were alone in the car, they talked more about some of the classified stuff in their lives, and that was fun, too, except for the ooky parts Alex just skipped over. Willow was really enjoying doing her DHS work from an office in Jack’s building, and Walter and the other people there were really nice, even if the base MPs had to do whatever the crankypants base commander wanted. And Willow was helping Cindy take some on-line college courses that Cindy was totally stressing about, and really Cindy just needed to learn how to study effectively and how to write a paper quickly, so she didn’t use up so much of her time.
Then, when they got back to Jack’s house, they took off the goofy disguise stuff and spent the rest of the afternoon fixing a big dinner with a couple of desserts, and just having a great time chatting in the kitchen. Cindy came over, too, and the three of them just chatted about guys and movies and recipes and phone apps and other cool stuff. Okay, they did get into a fun argument about which Hollywood stars could secretly be Orphans, although Alex knew they couldn’t tell Cindy that Buffy Summers really was one. There were a lot of very hunky movie and TV stars in the right age group.
Hanna and Charlie came by after school, and Jack came over from work, and then Janet, and finally Grover arrived. Jack and Charlie had to get the card tables and folding chairs out so there would be enough room for everyone.
And after dinner, Janet said, “I have an announcement. There was no detectable trace of any of the chemicals we were looking for in Alex’s blood, not even elevated CO2 levels, so I think we can assume Terawatt can carry someone or something dangerous in her silvery morph and not get contaminated.”
Willow smiled naughtily and told everyone, “And I have an announcement. In a couple weeks, the Pulitzer Prize committee is going to announce the winners for this year … and A.L. Mack is gonna have to go to Columbia University in May for the big luncheon to accept her Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography!”
Everybody clapped and congratulated her, even though Alex frowned at Willow, because she had totally not wanted Willow to go bust into the Pulitzer website and peek at the list of winners.
And Willow had a fancy sheetcake that said ‘Congratulations Alex!’ on it. Jack had picked it up from some bakery and hidden it in the trunk of his car. Alex ate three pieces of it, because it was really awesome, with chocolate cake and a sort of orange marmalade filling between the two layers of cake, and a chocolate-orange buttercream frosting over it, and little half-slices of candied orange standing up to decorate the top so it was really pretty, too.
Then it was time to leave, so she hugged everyone and thanked them all and then changed into a clean Terawatt uniform. She went with Jack, who drove his official car down to the airstrip. Then she puddled into a totally oversized picnic basket that Jack carried onto the Cessna while she used her TK to float above the wrapped up stuff someone had loaded in the basket.
Once Jack set her down, he told her, “You can pop out now. And you can eat everything we packed in the basket, if you want. And I am not letting you starve to death on ops anymore. That scared the heck out of me. Be sure to tell the Tera-mom that she needs to call me up and yell at me some.”
Alex flew out of the basket and went normal. “She is not the Tera-mom, okay?”
But Jack just gave her a smirk. And a hug. “Maybe you won’t need to do anything big except school jazz until the Pulitzer luncheon. Just remember to eat before you go into the luncheon, okay? They probably won’t have enough food for the room otherwise.”
* * *
It turned out that Jack and Willow had packed some stuff in the picnic basket for Alex to eat on the flight home. There was a big serving of blue jello. She had a pretty good idea whose idea that was. There were two more pieces of that yummy chocolate-orange cake. And there were a couple of chicken salad sandwiches. And there were plastic forks and spoons in there, too, along with some paper napkins that said in big party-style letters ‘because you’re tera!’ Alex smiled when she saw that. And she ate everything before she got home.
Okay, so she ate the cake first. It wasn’t like she needed to go on a diet or anything.
When she bailed out halfway between Edwards Air Force Base and her house, she was going a lot faster than her normal top speed, so she got home before 7:30 at night.
When she flew through the water runoff system and into the garage, everyone was waiting for her in the kitchen. She hastily checked, “Is everything okay?”
Her dad smiled. “Shar got really excited about five minutes ago when she realized you were on your way here.”
Shar was having a bowl of ice cream for dessert, so she just nodded and said, “Mmm-hmm!” around a big mouthful of chocolate ice cream with a ton of maraschino cherry halves on it.
Her mom admitted, “We were pretty worried when the news reports started coming in, and Ray showed us the YouTube videos of you fighting supervillains.”
Alex scowled a little. “Boy, you’d think when there’s a supervillain who just killed a whole ton of soldiers and melted their tanks and stuff, people wouldn’t stick around filming it when the supervillain fights Terawatt. Those doofuses could’ve been burned alive if Terrorist Fire Lady had won that fight.”
Shar swallowed a big mouthful of ice cream and insisted, “Terawatt always wins! Everybody knows that!”
Her dad carefully pointed out, “Well, it is true that everyone I know thinks you’re pretty much an unstoppable force of nature. People think you stomped that giant spider —”
“I didn’t.”
“— and Gojira —”
“That was mostly Shar.”
“Nuh-uh!” Shar argued.
“— and you saved three continents from silicates in one day —”
“I only did some of it.”
“— and you saved Santa Monica and you saved Iowa three times —”
“That was the SRI.”
“— and the list just keeps getting bigger.”
Alex’s mom shook her head. “Why don’t you ask Willow what she thinks? Or Hanna, or Grover, or even Jo Baker? It probably never occurred to any of those people over there that you might lose.”
Shar chipped in, “I watched you on YouTube stuff, and you totally owned that b–…” She looked to both sides at Alex’s mom and dad. “That creep.”
Alex’s mom just said, “Thank you, Shar.”
Shar checked, “Does that mean I can have another scoop of ice cream?”
Alex’s mom glanced over at Alex and smiled. “Well, if Alex needs some ice cream, maybe you could have a little more.”
Alex shrugged. “I could eat …”
So her mom fussed about her ‘sunburn’ and made sure she used some of her dad’s burn cream before Alex ate a big bowl of ice cream and Shar found out that she was too full to finish her little scoop of plain chocolate, so Alex finished Shar’s ice cream off for her. Alex’s dad patted his stomach and grinned. “Usually that’s the dad job.”
And a few hours later, after she’d been working on homework Ray had brought by, she finally went to bed. A tiny voice asked, “Alex? Can I sleep with you tonight? I was really, really scared when you were on the big missile because you can’t pull your pieces together like the Iron Giant if you get all blown up.”
Alex let Shar slip into her bed and snuggle up against her side. “I was pretty scared there, too.”
* * *
So on Wednesday morning, she was back on schedule, even if she was ‘sunburned’. She just didn’t bother with foundation, and she used some more of her dad’s burn cream. It really made a huge difference in how her burn felt, and it made her skin look a lot better.
She drove Shar to school and did two circuits around the block looking for anyone or anything suspicious. She’d been doing it pretty regularly ever since the start of school, but she was sure her mom didn’t think of doing stuff like that when driving Shar to school in the mornings. And she was also sure her mom didn’t know how to look for stuff like that either. Okay, Alex wasn’t exactly Miss Super-spy on this kind of stuff, but she’d learned a lot from Jack. And Jo Lupo. And even Hermione and Willow.
She was just glad that there was still no sign of anyone snooping around Shar. Or just prowling around the outside of the school.
And then it was off to her school. Naturally, she didn’t get twenty feet past the front door before someone spotted the sunburn.
Trish was standing there with half a dozen of her BFFs, most of them from the theater group, and she said, “Geez Alex, I wish I could skip a couple days of school and go lay out on a beach.”
Alex went with her cover story. “Yeah, me, too. It was another meeting at Corcoran College, only this mentor is big on nature photography. So we went down to this nature preserve in South Carolina, only it’s mostly swamp, and he didn’t tell me ahead of time, so I didn’t have the right clothes, or a decent sunhat, or even a bottle of sunscreen. And I totally ruined one of my fave pairs of sneaks and I got tons of sunburn because he doesn’t believe in sunscreen so he didn’t bring any either, but he looks like he’s been out living out in the wilderness for thirty years. At least he brought enough bug repellent, or I’d look like one giant bug bite now.”
“Eww,” Trish complained. “That sounds like total fun. Not. Aren’t you supposed to get to go to exotic places and take pictures and do awesome stuff on these things?”
Alex shrugged. “Not really. They just want to see if I’d work out as someone they want to mentor, or if I’d just be a huge pain in their neck. About as exotic as it’s gotten is the time I got to walk past some of the Washington D.C. embassies and try what they call ‘architectural photography’. The time I got to go to western Virginia to photograph horses on some horse farms, it rained like crazy, so I was soaking wet and really cold the whole time.”
Trish’s sidekick Peonie frowned. “You should tell people about this stuff. Everyone in the whole school thinks you’re getting to jet off to like New York City to eat caviar and photograph hunky underwear models or something.”
Alex smiled. “That’s a whole other kind of photography. These are all news photographers or photographers who do stuff like ‘National Geographic’ publishes. I was sort of hoping one of the big-name sports photographers would think about mentoring me, but no luck.”
Trish complained, “Why not? Is it because you’re a girl? Because you’re great on photography! Jill says the photos you got of her playing tennis were awesome.”
Alex just answered, “Well, that’s because I have really good camera gear. It’s always easier to get good shots if you have really good equipment.”
Nature — whose real name was Wendy but she was way too over-dramatic all the time to go by her old boring name when she could pick out a stage name for herself — fussed, “Because all you need is good equipment to run into a super-battle and take amazing photos without peeing yourself and trembling like the leaves of an aspen tree!”
Nature talked like that all the time, so Alex wasn’t exactly impressed by the sincerity there. But that was why Nature pretty much only got the acting parts where she could totally over-act. Elissa called it ‘chewing the scenery’. Louis called it ‘William Shatner-level ham’.
And then Kelly was in the hall with her posse, and they were handing out lollipops that said ‘VOTE FOR KELLY’ on them. But Alex saw them totally ignore a group of the Science Club guys.
Kelly spotted Alex and asked, “How’d you get time to go sunning yourself? You’re supposed to be doing college stuff! That’s so not fair!”
“Yeah!” her posse agreed. “Totally!”
Alex sighed and went through her cover story again.
Kelly just groaned. “Whatever. As long as you don’t get some weird mosquito disease and give it to me so I can’t be prom queen.”
Now it all made sense to Alex. Kelly was only handing out those ‘vote for me’ suckers to people she thought would go to the prom, because only people at the prom could vote. She complained, “You don’t run for prom queen! You just go, and people decide to vote for you or not.”
Kelly glared at her. “Says the creep who had an entire political machine cranking out votes for homecoming!”
Alex fumed, “I didn’t know! And when I found out, I told Louis to stop it! And anyway, all he did was send out a bunch of texts. Once. That’s not at all like the mean stuff you were saying about people.”
Kelly ignored that. “Anyway, only people who go to the prom get to vote, so all your geeks and emos and skaterboys and other freaks won’t be there to jack up your numbers.”
Alex protested, “They’re not freaks! They’re nice!”
And then, just because things weren’t bad enough, Louis and Marsha popped up. Louis had obviously heard what Kelly was saying, because Kelly was a little loud, and they were right in the hallway. He said, “Besides Kelly, you were just barely scraping your way into the Homecoming Court, so Alex beat the snot out of you not even counting the don’t-go-to-prom types.”
Alex glared at him. “Louis! Stop it!”
“Are you even gonna go to prom?” Amanda asked.
Alex shrugged. “I want to, but I’ve still got my commitments for Corcoran College, and they don’t care about stuff like my senior prom. I’m pretty sure Ray’s college won’t do anything like that.”
Kelly stared in surprise. “Ray’s already got a college lined up? I thought he was trying to get a big basketball scholarship.”
Alex couldn’t keep the proud smile off her face. “Georgetown. Ray’s gonna be a Hoya. Full four-year scholarship, too.”
Natalie said, “Well, he oughta get a great b-ball school to grab him, because he was totally amazing in that championship game. He was like UCLA-good.”
D interrupted, “Kelly, we gotta get to homeroom!”
Kelly grabbed her backpack. “Okay. We’ll hand out more at lunch.”
Louis asked, “Can I have a couple?”
Alex just stared at him in surprise. Marsha, too. Okay, Kelly’s posse stared at him in surprise, too, because he had just dissed Kelly hard, and now he was asking for candy from her. Kelly just ignored him and flounced off down the hall.
Louis looked at Alex and Marsha. “What? So I’ve got a sweet tooth!”
Alex just warned him, “Louis, if you do an ad campaign for me on this, your dessert is gonna end up on the floor every day for the rest of the school year!”
He stared at her in horror. “Not my dessert!”
But people were talking about Kelly’s big push for prom queen pretty much all day. Even at the last period yearbook meeting with Mina and the yearbook staff. It took Alex like five minutes to get people to focus on the yearbook instead of how weird it was that Kelly was trying to get prom votes with lollipops. And since the yearbook staff had lots of people from the ‘unpopular’ groups, there were plenty of people in the room who were in the ‘no lollipop zone’ and weren’t happy about it.
She finally got people to pay attention, and they went over the stuff they still needed to do for the big end-of-year push. There had been three groups that got behind schedule at one time or another during the year, but she and Mina had gotten them all back on track, so they were all ready for everything except the very last-minute stuff. And most of that was going to go on the DVDs instead of fighting to try and get it into the paper part of the yearbook. So mainly Alex wanted to make sure they had a big work party with people signed up for different shifts during the day they were burning all the DVDs on the computer lab machines.
Moe pretended to complain, “It’s not the same. I haven’t gotten screamed at once this whole year in yearbook meetings. You’re setting a bad example!” Everyone thought that was funny, so Alex pretended it didn’t bother her. Because yearbook meetings should NOT be all screaming and stuff.
So they wrapped up the meeting fifteen minutes before the end of the period, and they had time to munch on Mina’s homemade shortbread cookies and complain about Kelly some more, even though Alex ate cookies instead of complaining. And like always, she ate more cookies than anyone else, so Mina gave her a baggie with a dozen more cookies in it, and that made Alex feel sort of embarrassed.
Then, after the meeting, Mina and Mr. Carson asked her, “Are we going to need a special page for a Pulitzer Prize winner or maybe nominee?”
Alex sort-of-fibbed, “You know they aren’t going to make the announcements on that for another couple of weeks.”
But Mina said, “I’m going to go ahead and put together a double page on Alex winning a Pulitzer, and we can just adapt it if she just turns out to be a finalist, and we can yank it otherwise.”
Alex could feel her face burning. She told Mina, “I don’t think you should do a whole double-page spread.”
But Mr. Carson insisted, “We did four whole pages on the basketball team. I definitely think we should do at least a two-page spread for something a lot more important. No one gets a Pulitzer while they’re still in high school. Most of the winners have been doing serious journalism for decades. But a yearbook staff with a real Pulitzer Prize winner on it? We’ll be pointing at this year for a really long time.”
And no matter what Alex said, she just could not talk them out of it. It wasn’t like she could tell them she felt like a fraud because she had been misusing her superpowers to get that footage.
When she picked up Shar at the Boys and Girls Club, Shar asked, “How come you feel embarrassed? Is it ’cause Dennis told me I was pretty?”
Alex groaned to herself. “No, it’s because Mina and Mr. Carson want to put a big thing in the school yearbook about my Pulitzer Prize. And I’m sure Dennis is a very nice boy.”
Shar admitted, “I like him, and he’s cute, but guys sure think some weird stuff.”
Alex told herself it was just a really good thing that most girls didn’t have powers like Shar, or most guys would probably be getting set on fire pretty much daily. Guys like Jackson? Maybe hourly.
And then her tPhone buzzed in her pocket, but she was driving so she had to wait until she could pull over safely to check her phone. Fortunately, it was just a text that there was a conference call the next day during her lunch period.
* * *
But Thursday morning, Alex hardly got to school before the problems started. The first problem was that there were posters up. Every poster looked kind of like one of those motivational posters, except it was the size of a sheet of paper, and the border wasn’t black but a dark red, and the letters under the picture were a bright yellow, so they were nearly the school colors.
The second problem appeared before Alex even had time to read one of the posters. Kelly and her posse stormed up to her and yelled, “Did you do this?”
“Do what?” Alex asked.
But she had a good guess, because Kelly was waving around two of the posters. Alex grabbed them and read them.
One had a big picture of Maggie Walsh and underneath it, it said ‘Vote for Kelly or I’ll turn you into a zombie!’ And the other one was a picture of Danielle Atron and under the picture it said ‘Vote for Kelly or I’ll sic supervillains on you!’
Alex looked around. Louis was sitting in the cafeteria area chatting with Marsha. She looked at him and yelled, “Louis!”
He looked up, and when he saw it was her, he ran right over with Marsha trailing behind. “What’s wrong?” But Kelly glared at him and shoved one of the posters in his face. He winced. “It wasn’t me! Honest!”
Everyone just gave him stony looks, except Marsha, who said, “It couldn’t have been Louis, because I was at his house until after eleven and then he still had hours of homework to do.”
Louis added, “Yeah, and if I did ’em I would’ve made them look a lot more professional. These look like someone cranked them off using a cheap desktop printer.”
Kelly stopped and thought it over. “Okay, that part I believe.”
Alex insisted, “I even threatened him if he did any campaigning for me for prom queen.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “What would Miss Nice do to threaten him? Ask Ray to give him a wedgie?”
Louis complained, “She threatened to dump my desserts on the floor every lunch for the rest of the school year!”
Kelly groused, “Honestly, Alex. You are like the least threatening person on the planet. ‘Ooh, don’t do that, or I’ll cry in front of your mom!’ Get real.”
She stormed off with her posse in tow. Louis waited a few extra seconds. Then he smirked at Alex. He whispered, “Least threatening person on the planet? She has no frigging idea.”
But there were more posters, and they were all over the school. There was one with a picture of Robert Kinsey that said ‘A vote for Kelly is like a vote for Senator Kinsey!’ There was one that was a photo of one of Kelly’s lollipops that said ‘If you vote for Kelly you really are a sucker.’ And there was one that was a picture of the Masked Marauder guy off the Pam Anderson episode of Saturday Night Live, and it said ‘If you don’t vote for Kelly you are a gay virgin nerd.’ The principal was really ticked off about that one.
Alex looked really closely at all of the posters, because there were like nine different ones. The quality ranged from ‘really nice Kinko’s printer on super-expensive glossy paper’ down to ‘old inkjet on really cheap paper’. She was guessing a lot of different people were all doing this as a group, because the frame was exactly the same size every time and the color of the text and background was really close and not white on black. So she had three guesses who was behind this. None of them were Louis. At least, not this time.
Interlude XXXIMaggie Walsh managed to suppress a smile as the three Orphans hopped out of the helicopter onto the tarmac of the base’s primary heliport. All of India One’s vaunted plans and dreams were down to one cryo-ship currently lost in space, and these three.
Oh, of course there were still India bloc supporters in Asia. She knew the names of all five of them, as well as their current whereabouts. She wasn’t concerned about them, given that they had no support and no power base. Also, each of them had been identified by Joseph Frady, thanks to his willingness to undercut everyone and everything, including his own power bloc, for more fame and attention. That meant that those five Orphans were currently being investigated by their own countries and might soon be in prison or on the run, and begging desperately for the primary bloc’s help.
And the America bloc was now down to three or four stubborn Orphans who were hard at work on yet another brainless scheme, this time in southern Utah, just east of Las Vegas. She certainly wouldn’t mind if an armpit like Las Vegas was wiped off the face of the planet. She would just wait until they failed again, and then she would see if the survivors wanted to join the winning side. If not, she would send Frady another information packet, starting with far more detail on Julia and Ricky. In the meantime, there were other unaffiliated Orphans in America. That included all the SRI Orphans, along with some loose Orphans that it would not be smart to grab, like Joseph Frady and Bruce Paine, or else the Orphans it would be a waste of time to touch right now, like Buffy Summers.
America bloc? Essentially down. India bloc? Essentially down. She really ought to send Terawatt a thank-you card. She amused herself for a couple of seconds imagining the consternation and panic in the SRI if she sent a thank-you card to Terawatt care of Jack O’Neill’s supposedly-secret HWAAA office in West Virginia. The card would probably be subjected to more analyses than NASA’s moon rock samples had gotten.
She was going to have to deal conclusively with Terawatt one of these days. The woman was demonstrably the most dangerous being on the planet, and determined to thwart Maggie’s efforts. That conversation in Ogden’s Marsh had been most informative.
Maggie had been hoping that perhaps Terawatt was a sociopath who could be co-opted, or else a weapon who could be re-directed. But the woman was intelligent and strong-minded. Even worse, she was convinced that she was right. And sharp enough to deduce exactly the type of trap she was in. She had been scared at being trapped inside a fuel-air bomb, but had simply refused to let her fear control her. That kind of bravery and self-control was extremely dangerous. And despite her fear, she had managed not to give away more than one or two useful details while they talked, and had simultaneously thought her way out of a death trap. Maggie had always prized intelligence, and an intelligent opponent really made her feel alive. It was really a shame that she was going to have to kill both Atron and Terawatt before much longer.
She stepped forward with her group. P$ychon4ut and Marcus Karenin and An Shu Liao walked forward to meet her.
She shook hands with Karenin first. “Marcus. Welcome to our base. I have read most of your papers. You are quite the writer.”
“Thank you. May I call you Maggie?”
“Please do.” She turned her head. “Halsey. Well done. I have a present waiting for you down in your private … room.”
He grinned evilly. “Is there any chance that your people could make her look like Willow Rosenberg before I … meet her?”
She replied, “I already foresaw that you’d make that little request. She looks as much like Rosenberg as we could manage, and she’s already locked in your favorite cage.”
He rushed off. Psychopaths could be remarkably easy to control, if you understood their psychopathy. Maggie was just glad that the soundproofing on Halsey’s private dungeon room was extremely good.
She turned to face the last of the threesome. “Liao. Welcome to your new home. Now if you could take care of the last thing I asked of you?”
The woman struck like a snake. Karenin was down on the tarmac before he even realized he had been struck in the neck and kicked in the solar plexus. Liao had Karenin’s wrists bound behind his back and his ankles bound together before he was aware that he was in real danger.
Maggie smiled. “Thank you.” Then she nodded at her people. Two Orphans grabbed Karenin and swiftly tied his elbows so they were nearly touching. Two more picked him up and carried him.
She walked alongside the struggling man. “By the way, once we realized that Singh had been tipped off about our little terrorist surprise, we tracked down Singh’s mole in our group. It was really quite easy. Then Halsey and Liao both had some quite interesting information on your ‘defection’. Liao even sent a copy of your plans with Singh. Did you really think you would be allowed to pave the way for his return some time in the future? Ah, well, we all have our little weak spots.”
“Put me down! I demand it!”
She smiled ruthlessly. “Oh, I intend to. I’m going to lower you very carefully. In fact, I’m going to let you find out what happened to your mole.”
Karenin abruptly paled and went silent.
She led the group downstairs, and through the building, across the courtyard, and out through the garden area to the high wall that separated their compound from what some of the compound referred to as ‘Walsh’s playpen’ when they didn’t think she was within earshot. She nodded at the man operating the winch. A hook swung over. Dangling from the hook was a simple system with two wide plastic straps. Karenin was held upright so that one strap went under his chin and the other strap went under the base of his skull. Then the straps were snapped in place so that there was not enough room for Karenin to get his head free.
Karenin was lifted up by his head until his feet passed over the top of the wall. Maggie walked up the metal stairs so she was atop the wall. “Now I want you to appreciate this. It’s not really for you, of course. It’s really a reminder for everyone on the base that crossing The Collective is a very dangerous, very painful proposition, and is not to be undertaken lightly.”
She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled sharply. The brush within earshot rustled here and there. Then she nodded at the winch operator, and he slowly lowered Karenin down on the far side of the wall.
Karenin couldn’t open his mouth due to the pressure against the underside of his chin. Still, as soon as he saw what was coming out of the bushes and waiting for him, he began to scream.
She instructed the winch operator, “Lower him slowly. I’d like him to still be alive and screaming ten minutes from now, so every person in the base has a chance to get the message.”