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Chapter 187 – Summer VacationsAlex took advantage of Shar’s remaining time at summer camp to drive up to Sacramento and go to the comic con going on there. She wore khakis and a nice button-down shirt, and paid for a press pass, and spent the day walking around with her good Canon around her neck and her GoPro on a Joby strap and the rest of the gear she wanted in a fanny-pack. She focused on the Terawatt cosplayers, and there were a ton of them. She got over a hundred stills and maybe twenty really good pieces of video and ten pretty good interviews. She even had index cards with a little disclaimer typed up on them and a place for the person to sign.
She also went over to the Driscoll Enterprises booth that had the big Terawatt sign up, and she ‘interviewed’ Marsha about working for the official Terawatt merchandiser, and putting together a costume, and standing around all day ‘being’ Terawatt.
Marsha told her it was totally weird being Terawatt. Guys wanted to take pictures with her. Women wanted to take pictures with her. Kids wanted to take pictures with her. Terawatt fans wanted to take pictures with her. Families wanted to take pictures with her. Other cosplayers wanted to take pictures with her. Other Terawatt cosplayers really wanted to take pictures with her. Other booth babes talked to her like she was a professional booth babe. Other Terawatt cosplayers came by and mostly said nice things about her costume but two totally dissed her for not being authentic enough. And guys could not stop staring at her, which was kind of amazing for the first few minutes, but then it got really creepy. It was way more exciting when it was Louis or incredibly hot guys, and way more creepy when it was weird, smelly guys who breathed through their mouth and asked her creepy stuff like ‘can I touch your hair?’
Alex drove home that night, thinking about how she could use her footage of Terawatt cosplayers in half a dozen different ways. Frank would have a good idea about which courses required video projects, and what you were supposed to get out of the project, and what the teacher was really looking for.
* * *
The next day, Jack and Willow called just to give her a heads-up on the Paris deal. Willow happily said, “The French are totally happy with Terawatt. You may get a medal from them! They figure things would’ve gotten really icky if you hadn’t stopped the CTX guys on the west side of that sector, and if you hadn’t helped at the factory and the water station, and if you hadn’t put out the fires in that church because there was no way they could get fire trucks in there safely for maybe a day.”
Jack added, “And next time you’re going anywhere, even if it’s just a vacation, you’re taking a gym bag. Or I’m sneaking one out to you.” He paused and added, “Oh, and the Brits and the Irish and the Italians are scrambling like mad to get medals for you before the French do, and the Finns are trying to come up with grounds to give you one, too.”
“Wow.” But mainly she was worrying about where she was going to keep all that stuff. “You’re gonna have to store all that stuff for me.”
“Store it? Are you of the wacky? As someone here says …”
“Nyah,” Willow made a noise like she was sticking her tongue out at Jack.
Jack just kept going. “We’ll display it all! We’ll have a museum exhibit with Terawatt mannequins that have medals you’ve earned from around the world. Maybe in the Smithsonian. Because you deserve it and you’re that important.”
She felt like she was blushing hot enough to set her shirt on fire.
And he didn’t stop. “And we’ll have pictures of your most famous battles, and a big map, so everyone can realize who the chintzy medal-hoarding bastards of the world are, because India ought to be giving you every medal they can think of. Russia, too. And the Japanese want a big ceremony over there this fall to give you a bunch of awards.”
Willow changed topics. “I figured I’d better do a little tampering with your images in the airport camera footage just in case someone guessed you were a silvery blob because you were on vacation and you didn’t have your uniform with you. But someone already got into the French and New York airport footage and altered some pixels here and there. I’m figuring it was Hermione Granger, which means she now knows what you really look like.”
Alex sighed. “Well, it’s not like I wasn’t going to tell her if she needed to know.”
Jack pointed out, “Hey, at least she’s looking out for you. If anyone else tries facial recognition software on all the airport traffic, you’re in the clear.”
Willow added, “And I took care of the San Francisco footage, and then I sent Hermione a thank you from Annie Farrell. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course I don’t mind. Thanks. That was really nice of you.”
Jack teased, “I would’ve said ‘that was really nice of me’.” His voice changed to Serious Jack. “But Marshall Lawson is still in hiding. The guy he was helping? Turned up at an emergency room in Marseilles. And Majestic swooped in like a flock of vultures and flew off with him as soon as he was out of the OR and before anyone could interview the guy.”
Willow mentioned, “Majestic is another one of those companies like Blackwater.”
Jack grumbled, “Majestic? Those guys make Maybourne look like Saint Nicholas. Hell, they make Blackwater look like Goodwill Industries.”
Alex asked, “So where did the CTX come from?”
Jack complained, “Need to know, which means they’re not admitting they cooked it up.”
Willow chipped in, “And Aroon? That gangster druglord guy behind it all? He’s got a huge biochem background.”
“Oh, no, don’t tell me he’s another Maggie Walsh protégée,” Alex groaned.
Willow replied, “Nope, but he was an Orphan, and his banking history as far as I could track it back suggests he probably worked for Majestic’s research arm for several years, so I figure he’s one of the Majestic scientists who cooked it up originally, only he figured it worked really well as an addictive party drug, and then something happened that made him decide to stop raking in the dough as a druglord and switch to terrorism.”
Jack guessed, “Probably Lawson sticking his nose in, or Majestic trying to clamp down on a security leak, or something completely stupid and accidental. General du Vallée told me that it may have started when three of Lawson’s men got ripped up by what were probably two CTX cases just a few days before the toxin release.”
Alex scowled. “Lawson yelled at me about that. He said it was his case to handle because ‘they’ were his men.”
Willow reminded her, “This was an Orphan. He was going to dump this stuff all over Paris sooner or later. Maybe his timetable got wrecked enough that he didn’t get a chance to spread the poison over a lot more of the city.”
Jack suggested, “Or before he could make stupid amounts of drug money first.”
Alex complained, “That’s just swell! That’s all we need. First they make millions of dollars of profit and then they wipe out a major city. When they were losing tons of bucks on creepy projects, I at least had some hope they’d have money troubles someday.”
Jack tried to sound perky. “On the bright side, we’ve handled the mysterious Orphan project in central France now, and Majestic got an enormous black eye and a bunch of bullet holes in the ass out of this, and Mr. Lawson is no longer running around solving Majestic problems in his usual style, and with any luck, some idiot Majestic exec will put out a hit on Lawson, and he’ll wipe out most of the corporation for us.”
The only thing Alex was happy about was the first thing on Jack’s list. And what was wrong with world politics that the U.S. DOD thought funding people like Blackwater and Majestic and Academi was a good idea? And how stupid and jerky did these guys have to be to not figure out they had an Orphan working for them developing a secret CBW weapon and then not warn other people about it?
* * *
The next day, Alex finally managed to lift 315 pounds with her TK during her morning exercises. Okay, it gave her a miserable headache that required four ibuprofens, a quart of chocolate ice cream, a couple cups of hot fudge topping, and most of the bag of Oreos. But it was a steady improvement. She checked her tPhone where she was keeping her lift data, and she had been increasing her TK lift about ten pounds a month since she started working out with the weights. At that rate, by the time she finished college she was going to be lifting maybe a third of a ton!
Oh, crud, how was she going to get that much weight to work out with?
At the end of the week, Alex and her folks drove up to the summer camp to pick up Shar. The place was even crazier than the day they took Shar up, because now there were campers running madly all over the camp looking for other girls who were their new best friends for life so they could hug them bye and cry some and promise they’d stay in touch and stuff.
Cellphones and smartphones and computer tablets totally made saying bye at the end of camp a lot better, because you could get everyone’s number and email addy and IM and Skype and Facebook and Twitter and everything, and you really could keep in contact pretty easily.
Shar came running over in a camp t-shirt and camping shorts and about a dozen lanyards, each of which had a wooden or plastic heart. She leapt into Alex’s arms and hugged her ferociously. Then she hugged Alex’s mom and dad and insisted, “I got presents for you in my trunk! No peeking!” Then she dragged all of them over to meet her cabinmates, who were all running around dragging their families all over the place.
Alex noticed that Kelly was standing there watching her girls run around excitedly. Kelly was smiling, but it was a part-happy, part-sad smile. Kelly looked over at Alex and smiled. “Shar was great. They all were. I had a great cabin this time. Sometimes it just works like that.”
Alex smiled back. “I have a feeling Shar and Maria are gonna want to come back if they can be in your cabin. They’re both totally excited.”
Kelly explained, “Well, Maria was in Jen’s cabin, but Shar and Maria got together every chance they had, so we had some good between-cabin relations. Not like when I was being a you-know-what and telling my kids to be awful to you. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I learned a lot about you the summer we were both out here.”
Kelly snorted quietly. “Saint Alex. Alexandra the Great. I was so stupid! I had homeroom and classes with you year in and year out, and I never figured out you were Terawatt until I was looking in my yearbook after graduation. There was that A.L. Mack picture of Terawatt, and I realized. It was you with a mask and a wig. Maybe not even a wig, because that’s your real hair color, isn’t it? I didn’t think about it, but your hair just got dark all of a sudden for no reason. And short. It’s so you wouldn’t look like … her. You’ve been walking around with superpowers for years, and if it was me I would’ve totally been zapping everyone who pissed me off, and tripping people, and just being mean all the time.”
Alex muttered, “Me? Terawatt? I totally wish I could have her powers. She’s awesome.”
Kelly just looked out at the kids. “I thought about it a lot. Who in the whole school could be that tera if she had Terawatt’s powers? Not me. And totally not Libby. It would have to be someone really brave, and really selfless, and really dedicated. Someone really smart, too. Someone who cares more about everyone else than she does about herself. Someone who has a team of people who watch her back and defend her and give her alibis and get her homework when she’s out of town. That ‘Corcoran College mentor’ scam was genius. I wouldn’t have thought of it in a zillion years. But you used it way too much. When I thought about it and looked over all the big Terawatt super-battles, I realized that was how you were getting out of school to go be a superhero. And really, there are only a couple of girls in the whole school who have Terawatt’s body, not counting the falsies in your leotard. But I remember looking at you when we were changing into dresses at Homecoming. You have abs like a WWE Diva. There is like no one else in town who could’ve beaten up Azure Crush.”
Crud. Was she going to be able to talk Kelly out of this? Should she even try? Yeah, that was the real question.
But Kelly kept going. “And you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it couldn’t be anybody except you. Mystery Kid was our age, and I realized if I got freaky powers, I would’ve totally panicked. Unless I had the world’s smartest big sister to go to for help, and your dad’s like the smartest biochemist at the plant or he wouldn’t be head of research now. And everyone knows Atron kidnapped your family. Why? Duh. Totally makes sense now. I just don’t know how you do it. Most of the stuff you fight? I’d be peeing my panties and hiding in a closet, superpowers or not. And the whole time, you’ve just been tera to me, and I never even said thanks. So this is my thanks. I’m keeping my mouth shut and never ever telling anyone. And if there’s ever anything you need, just ask.”
Okay, that went so much better than Alex was expecting. They just hugged, and Alex walked back to the car.
On the way home, Shar went on and on about all her new friends, and Counselor Kelly, and all the neat people at camp, and all the fun stuff they did, and the cool things she made for people, and how she couldn’t wait to go back next year, and how she and Maria totally needed to get Sophie to go, too. And in the middle of a long story about getting to go horseback riding and then pet the horses and feed them, Shar just stopped and said, “Oh, and Kelly thinks Alex is Terawatt and she thinks Alex is the most amazing person ever.” And she was just off on another story about swimming lessons with Counselor Jen who was really nice with the bad swimmers and who totally liked other ladies because sometimes she thought about Counselor Kelly and sometimes she thought about Camp Director Sue and sometimes she thought about how she wished she could tell her mom and dad without getting kicked out of the house.
When Alex’s mom and dad got worried about the Kelly thing, Alex sighed, “Yeah, Kelly figured it all out. And she’s being totally nice about it because I was nice to her when I could’ve used my superpowers to be mean to her and I didn’t.” Alex didn’t mention the ink pen and a couple of other things over the years. “She told me I was awesome and she was totally keeping my secret forever.”
Alex’s mom breathed out a big sigh of relief. “How many people are going to figure it out sooner or later?”
Alex shrugged. “You’d think that everyone who saw me when I started superheroing would know it was me. Back before Hermione, I didn’t really have a good disguise, and I didn’t take enough precautions to hide my identity, and maybe there are plenty of people around town who know who Terawatt is, but they think they’re the only one, and they’re saving the world by keeping my secret. Like Dave Watt. Or Gloria.”
Alex’s dad uncomfortably asked, “What are we going to do if your secret gets out?”
But Alex had already thought about that, maybe too much. “Well, we could move to the Roswell base and be safe on a military base, so Dad could keep doing cool biochemistry research, only it would be under a government research grant with the SRI instead of with the factory. And Annie could come to the base and finish her degree with distance learning, because I know Jack could find some professors who’d go along with that. And I suppose I could go to the Air Force Academy as me, only everyone would know why I’d keep having to take off for several days at a time. But Shar might have to stay with Jack and Willow for keeps, or else maybe she’d have to out herself as Pyre and go to school on the base like the kids of the soldiers. I don’t know. And I have no idea what Mom would do about her job, even if I’m sure there’s a ton of jobs like hers that people need done around military bases, and I know Jack would help her get a job she liked. And Ray would have to go to college somewhere the SRI could protect him, even if maybe he’d have to stop playing basketball because that would be really hard to keep him safe, and he’d be totally unhappy about that and it would be all my fault.”
Her dad instantly said, “It wouldn’t be your fault at all, honey.”
Her mom frowned. “Sounds like someone has been worrying about this a lot.”
Alex admitted, “It’s not just me. I think Jack and Willow have a whole ton of contingency plans for stuff like this. And I really do not want to know what Jack’s contingency plans were if Senator Kinsey had really tried to threaten Willow or Charlie, because Jack can be a pretty scary guy when he has to.”
And then Alex found out the worst part of Shar going to summer camp. Shar had gotten to hear a bunch of boy bands she didn’t listen to around Alex.
And one of them had a big hit single about Terawatt, and all the campers had been singing it for two solid weeks, and now it was Shar’s favorite song.
“See her go, see her go,
She’s one with the wind and sky,
See her go, see her go,
How can a hero fly,
Here she comes … to save the day …
See her lightning rage …”Alex just put her face in her hands and tried not to act totally embarrassed.
* * *
With Shar home again, the TV and radio were on a lot more, and Alex was home a lot more, and Alex was getting a lot more Top 40 radio than she’d had for a couple weeks. Because Alex had been really busy. And when she was with Ray, they didn’t listen to Top 40 stations. And Aunt Ashley totally didn’t.
But all that meant that Alex was hearing ‘See Her Go’ like all the time. And if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, Shar had Maria and Sophie over one day, and Shar taught them the dance moves her cabin had done for the song, which had been part of their skit they did for Skit Night. And then they practiced together for hours. And then Alex had to watch them perform and she had to applaud and tell them how great they were, even if she was really embarrassed. Even if they were just amazingly cute.
And even when Shar wasn’t listening to Top 40 radio, she was singing that song. Or watching ‘The Click Five’ singing it on TV. Or in their video, which was on YouTube and stuff, so you could watch it anytime you wanted.
And it wasn’t even like The Click Five was all that tera. And they were a ‘boy band’ and they weren’t anywhere as great as the Backstreet Boys or ’N Sync or …
Oh, crud, she used to be just like that with her own boy bands. Maybe worse. Ugh.
* * *
The good news was the Skype from Hanna. “Alex! Guess what? I’ve got almost two full weeks at the end of July! Mom says I can come out and visit you if it’s okay with you. And your folks.”
Alex teased, “You mean you don’t want to spend ‘almost two full weeks’ with Charlie?”
Hanna grinned, but admitted, “He is going camping with his dad. Janet says Jack is trying not to let Charlie feel left out, what with the wedding and the honeymoon and the new house and all that. Even if Charlie’s new room is a lot nicer than his old one, and it is a lot farther from his dad’s bedroom. And Willow designed a lot of soundproofing in the walls and floors. She told him that the soundproofing is a ‘two-way street’ and when I told Mom that, she scowled a lot and said, ‘you are not to take that as permission to have sex with Charlie in his new room, do you understand?’ I think she knows Willow gave you a bunch of tips for sex with Ray.”
Oh, crud. Alex could feel her face turning red. “Willow totally overdid the encouragement, and by the time she was done I was so not in the mood. I still haven’t done it with Ray.”
Hanna nodded. “We have not gone all the way yet. Charlie is very insistent that we take precautions and we not do anything I would be unhappy about later.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Hanna calmly added, “And one time when I let Charlie give me an orgasm with his fingers, I clenched my legs so hard I injured his hand, so I think he is worried about some of these things. Maybe he will talk them over with his dad on the camping trip and get some good advice.”
Alex managed not to cringe. But she did kind of wonder how Az managed to have sex with Sergei and not just break him in half. Not that she was ever going to ask. Instead, she said, “We’d love to have you visit! You could stay in my room with me and Shar, or you could have the guest bedroom. I’ll clear it with Mom and Dad.”
Hanna smiled. “That’s tera! Totes awesome! And other things I’ve been working on saying so I blend in better.” She changed subjects, saying, “Mom helped me find a part-time summer job, so I’m working as a sales clerk in a clothing store. It is a very frustrating job, but Jack explained that I needed to treat it as a covert op, and that makes it much easier to deal. And it makes it easier for me to fit in, even if some of the fashions they sell are totally of the yuck.”
Alex giggled. “You spend way too much time talking with Willow.”
And at dinner, as soon as she asked, both her parents just said, “Okay.” They didn’t even do that thing where they looked at each other for ten seconds without saying a word out loud.
Her mom looked at Alex’s expression and said, “Honey, you’ve been really responsible — I mean, you’re the most responsible teenager on the planet — and we all know you really wanted Hanna to come out and spend an entire term with you. This is only going to be … what? A week? Two weeks?”
Alex admitted, “We have to get plane fares worked out, but right now it looks like the most she could do would be ten days here, and a day of travel on each end.”
Her dad asked, “And are there any special dietary issues, or anything like that?”
Alex shook her head no. “Hanna eats everything. I mean, the stuff her ‘dad’ made her eat when she was a kid was so yuck I don’t want to think about it. So now she’ll eat anything you serve. Even if you served pig intestines or something.”
“Eww!” complained Shar.
Her mom pointed out, “Alex, some people do eat pig intestines. What do you think chitlins are?”
“Really?” Alex felt the gorge rising in her throat. “Yuck! I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Shar asked, “Can Hanna stay in our room? With us? I’ll even take the sleeping bag and sleep on the floor if you say yes.”
“We do have a guest bedroom, you know,” Alex’s dad hinted.
Alex tried not to smile too much. “We’ll probably stick with our bedroom and do sleepover stuff every evening.”
Alex’s mom frowned a little. “All right, but remember that Shar needs her sleep.”
“Me, too!” Alex insisted. “It’s not like I stayed up forever when I stayed over at Hanna’s. She gets up at six-thirty or seven every morning. And her mom has to get up early and get to work, just like you.”
* * *
It turned out that Hanna was going to be able to stay for eight days. Jack couldn’t exactly allocate a Cessna to fly teenagers around the country for sleepovers, and it wasn’t fair to ask him. So Hanna was flying in on a Tuesday, staying Wednesday to Wednesday, and flying home on Thursday. And she was flying in and out of San Francisco International airport. That was also saving her and Janet about a thousand dollars in airfare, which Alex thought was totally crucial.
So the weekend before Hanna came, Alex flew down to spend the weekend with Annie at Roswell. It was about 940 miles, which was too far for Alex to fly as Terawatt, even if her flight speed was picking up along with her TK lift. She had asked Willow if it was possible to build a speedometer into her tPhone, and Willow had just downloaded an app onto her phone five minutes later, because all Willow needed to do was pull down GPS data with time data and then do some easy math. Alex had tested her new speedometer out that very night by zooming off to the interstate and back a couple times, and with her best morph shape she could go 133 miles an hour. But there was no way she could fly like that for over seven solid hours to get to the Roswell base. And she’d have to eat like half a cow to recover afterward.
She just took a commercial jet from Fresno to Roswell on Friday afternoon. She could afford it, and it only took a few hours even with the connection in Las Vegas which was really annoying because the entire concourse was ringing constantly with people playing slot machines and losing all the remaining money they hadn’t lost while they were gambling in casinos before they came to the airport to go home.
That, and some local scumbags tried to rob her. She had her roller bag and her computer tablet, and a woman walked over and asked if she’d seen an eight-year-old girl with bright red hair. And while she was talking with the woman, a skuzzy guy tried to slip up behind her and swipe her suitcase. A year ago, she wouldn’t have noticed. But after a ton of super-battles and stuff, she did a way better job of situational awareness. So when the guy went for her bag in a slick walk-by, Alex stuck her leg out and tripped him. Not that it was really her foot that tripped him, but it was close enough to fake everyone out. And the guy fell on his face since he had already tilted forward as he grabbed her bag. So she grabbed the wrist of the woman and sat down on top of the bag-thief. Hard. Alex pulled the woman over on top of the guy and used a little TK to trip her up so she crashed on top of the guy, and then Alex just yelled for the police while she dialed 9-1-1 on her phone. Airport security was there before the guy scrambled out from under Alex and the woman, and Alex even agreed to press charges and come back to Las Vegas for the trial, which pretty much no one bothered to do, which was why these creeps weren’t in jail about a dozen times over.
The connecting flight was fine, and the guy sitting next to her didn’t want to make her mad after seeing what she did to a team of baggage thieves in half a second. Jo Lupo was waiting for her when she walked out of the Roswell airport. Jo told her, “I brought your gym bag. We decided Terawatt has a reason to fly down and meet Annie Mack and spend a day getting to know her, but we couldn’t come up with a reason that a famed photojournalist would get free access to the SRI areas on the base. So hang out with Annie as Terawatt, and then pretend to fly off. And you can hang with her at her apartment as long as you want, just stay Terawatt when you’re out. I’ll drive you back to the airport Sunday.”
Alex dived into the gym bag, changed into Terawatt, and took her seat next to Jo. “I can do that.”
Jo laughed. “Okay, before we get near the base, just take off and fly to the lab. You know the building. Annie’s on the second floor with Dr. Ledbetter’s group. Sam made sure you’ve got clearance and you’re expected.”
Alex checked, “How are things working, with a major horning in on your Team Two stuff?”
Jo shrugged while not taking her hands off the wheel. “Better than I figured. She’s still working at getting herself back in shape after being in space for months and then being stuck in isolation for so long. And she’s working with Marshall’s group on getting her power under control. So she’s done a couple of training sims with us, but she’s done ’em like she’s some rookie fresh out of the Academy and she had us act like she doesn’t have seniority.”
Alex figured things could have gone a lot worse. “She’s got amazing potential. There’s another universe where other-Sam is the only woman in combat in the entire armed forces, and she mainly does it on other planets. And she’s saved the Earth dozens of times, including she once took out an entire enemy space armada. By blowing up a sun and taking out a solar system.”
Jo glanced over. “An entire alien invasion force? And blowing up a real star system? Sounds more like the X-Men than an astrophysicist.”
Alex explained, “She did it by using her brain. She’s better than she realizes at thinking her way out of a crisis, so someday you may have to order her to start using her brain while you and Carlson hold off … whatever.”
Jo admitted, “Sometimes the shit you know about people is just crazy. I mean … if there was another me in another universe, you’d tell me, even if I was a supervillain, right?”
Alex nodded. “Sure. The villain thing is how I knew about Maggie Walsh. And Colonel McNamara. And Poison Ivy. And Selina Kyle. And England’s Lord Deathstrike.”
Jo muttered, “Have you ever thought about how lucky we are that someone in another universe needed help and picked you?”
Alex admitted, “Yeah. I thought about that a ton when I first got back home. And I totally didn’t think I was good enough to be on that team when other-Hermione came and invited me.”
Jo snorted in derision. “You? Not good enough? May I remind you that you have almost single-handedly saved the world maybe a dozen times in one year? Even the Fantastic Four don’t hit those kinds of numbers.”
Alex tried not to blush. She would have admitted that she always had kind of an inferiority complex because of Annie, but she knew Jo would glare at her. And she didn’t want to talk about what Maggie Walsh had said to her, because she’d sound like she was bragging.
So Terawatt flew to the SRI main building and dropped in on the researchers. Everyone was pleased to see Terawatt again, and Annie was totally excited. Not as excited as her professor the fangirl would have been, but excited. And Alex even got a tour of some of the research projects, like what they wanted Annie to work on in conjunction with ongoing work by Dr. George Mack up in Paradise Valley: a protective chemical so people couldn’t just throw GC-161 on Jo or Riley and kill them. Not that it would probably kill Riley, because his red and white blood cells were still stupidly protected and his healing factor was still ridiculous. But Jo Lupo and Mark Carlson and Jill Valentine would all be at risk. And Dr. Ledbetter had a group working on possible accelerants for GC-161, and he had a group working on possible genetic markers to identify Orphans instead of throwing GC-161 on people to figure out if they were an Orphan or not, and he had a group working on antidotes for the kind of stuff that Dr. Deemer had cooked up.
So Terawatt had dinner with Annie and Dr. Lee and Dr. Ledbetter and as many of their people as could fit at a table in the mess. And afterward, Terawatt had to say, “Thank you for all of your hard work, and I’m hoping to talk with several more researchers while I’m in the area this weekend.” And then she flew over to Jo’s apartment until Annie actually got home.
Alex spent a couple of hours just chatting with Jo and having a nice time, even if Alex was in her uniform, until Annie finally called and said she was a few minutes from the apartment where she was staying for the summer. So Alex hugged Jo, grabbed a Terawatt gym bag and Alex’s roller bag, pulled them into her morph, and flew over to the spot Jo had showed her on a map. When Annie drove up, Alex just flew in behind her and stayed above the security cameras as Annie walked to her place.
Alex flew in as Annie opened the door. It was a furnished apartment that was really like a nice hotel room, with a little kitchenette and living room area, then a door into a tiny hall that had doors to a small bathroom and a medium-sized bedroom. Alex dropped her stuff in the bedroom, dived into the gym bag to change, and went normal as Alex. Then she hugged Annie hard. “I really missed you!”
Annie hugged her back. “I missed you, too. I mean, they’re keeping me so busy I hardly have time to do anything else, but I really miss all of you. I’m hoping I’ll get to spend three weeks in August at the plant with Dad and the group, but the research here is really awesome.” She grinned at Alex and corrected herself. “I mean, it’s really tera.”
They got to spend the evening just watching TV and chatting, even if Alex needed lots of snacks, which meant she went through a bunch of the energy bars in her gym bag. And in the morning, Alex ate all of the oatmeal Annie cooked up, even if it was just instant oatmeal.
When Annie had to go to a meeting for a couple of hours, even though it was a Saturday, Alex just changed into Terawatt and flew over and visited Sam for a while. Sam wanted to work out even though she’d had a morning run, so they talked while they did weight training together along with Alex’s TK weight-lifting work. Alex was kind of surprised that Sam was impressed with Alex’s inverted-situps trick because it was just TK. Then they had lunch together at Sam’s apartment, and Sam remembered about Alex’s calorie consumption, so she made extra chicken sandwiches.
Then Alex and Annie spent the rest of the day together at Annie’s place. Jo came over for dinner and brought four entire pizzas, telling Annie that anything Alex didn’t inhale could just go in the fridge for leftovers. Alex stuck her tongue out at Jo, which just showed she wasn’t as mature as she liked to think.
In the morning, Alex ate a bunch of the leftover pizza for breakfast and just had a great time with Annie until it was time to go to the airport. She threw all her stuff into her bag, pulled her bag and the gym bag into her morph, and took off. Then she caught up with Jo’s jeep about halfway to the airport and just swooped in and took over the shotgun seat, with the bags going in the seat behind her.
She hugged Jo goodbye when Jo dropped her off at the airport, and she flew home. Through Las Vegas again. And no one tried to snitch her bag, although a handsome guy tried to talk her into loaning him fifty bucks so he could win way more than that at the slots with his secret system and he’d totally pay her back triple what she gave him. Did people really fall for that stuff?
* * *
On Tuesday, Alex drove up to the airport with Shar along for the ride. Shar was so excited she couldn’t sit still. Alex finally had to let Shar tune the car radio to a Top 40 station and sing along to the songs she liked. And since the drive was all the way to the airport, Alex had to listen to “See Her Go” three times.
Alex finally admitted, “Shar, it makes me feel really embarrassed when I hear that song.”
Shar pouted. “I know, but it’s my favoritest song ever! Because it’s about you, and you’re my hero and I love you. And it means millions of people love you too and think you’re totally tera! I mean, Sophie would totally do non-girly stuff if Terawatt said it was okay. And her mom thinks you’re tera, too.”
Alex just reminded her, “You know, that pout doesn’t work on me.”
Shar grinned. “But it still works on Uncle George. And maybe it’ll work on Auntie Hanna.”
Alex sighed. “Shar, you’re not supposed to use your powers for evil. And I think that pout counts as one of your powers.”
Shar pouted. “But I like my pout. It’s fun, and it gets me my way more. And I’m not supposed to do the other stuff I can do. And Sophie says girls should totally practice on pouting and smiling and flirting and stuff like that to get your way, because it totally works for her mom.”
“Ugh.” Alex so didn’t want to get into an argument about stuff Sophie and her mom did.
But Shar must have seen — or picked up telepathically — that this was really bugging Alex, so Shar switched to one of Alex’s CDs. Fortunately it wasn’t Pink, because Shar totally didn’t need to know that you could write a song and use the f-word as one of your rhymes.
They parked the car in short-term parking and walked in to meet Hanna. Alex made sure Shar had her cellphone in the inside pocket of her overalls so no one could steal it and she couldn’t lose it. Alex’s mom had just sewn a little pocket on the inside of the bib of all of Shar’s overalls and even sewn in a zipper closure, because certain people had been known to play on the monkey bars at school and hang upside-down and have their phone fall out of their pocket and get lost until Willow used the GPS to locate it and then Alex walked around the playground calling Shar’s phone number over and over until she heard the ringtone and she finally found it buried in the bark mulch under the play structures.
The flight was on time, but Alex and Shar were a few minutes early, and Alex knew how long it took to get off a plane and get down the concourse, so Alex took Shar over to a food court and they got ice cream. They both finished their food before Hanna showed up, and Shar even managed not to get ice cream on her clothes or on her face, which was really handy.
Hanna walked out, and she was walking with three other teenage girls. She fit right in with them, even if she was totally the prettiest of the group and the other three were wearing a lot more makeup. But the three girls rushed over to a group of parents off to one side, and Hanna made a beeline for Alex.
After they hugged and Hanna hugged Shar, and they got Hanna’s suitcase, they walked out to the car and Shar gushed, “You look so pretty in that outfit.”
Hanna tossed her bag in the back and grinned. “You like my disguise? Mom thought I would be a lot less conspicuous if I looked more like all the other teenagers. And Charlie said all I had to do to avoid jerky guys was find girls who dressed like me to go chat with. And Jack said I was not allowed to take my grapples even if you told him we were going to go visit some place with lots of skyscrapers.”
Shar asked, “Did you bring them anyway?”
Hanna admitted, “I was going to, but Mom took them out of my suitcase and told me not to put them back in. And really I could not carry anything that would not get through an airport metal detector. But I brought plenty of clothes just in case. Cindy told me I needed to make sure I had outfits for going somewhere really nice, and going somewhere nice, and going out to eat, and just being casual, and meeting your friends, and going biking or hiking or camping.”
Shar eagerly jumped on that bandwagon. “We should go camping! We can take the SUV and Uncle George’s nice tent and three sleeping bags, and we can go see stuff you’ve never seen and I’ve never seen and Alex hardly ever sees, like L.A. beaches and California mountains and Nevada deserts and maybe we could drive through Las Vegas because I always wanted to look at it even if I’m too young to do anything fun there.”
Alex tried not to think about the L.A. beach she’d gotten to see most recently.
Hanna grinned. “That sounds like a lot of fun! If Alex’s mom and dad think it’s okay. And if we can keep Alex fed …”
Shar broke into giggles. Alex just kept driving, but she stuck her tongue out sideways at Hanna and said, “Nyeh.” That just made Shar giggle harder.
After dinner, they brought up the idea of a little camping road trip. Alex’s mom and dad looked at each other for a couple of seconds. Then her dad said, “You’ll want to take the SUV.”
Her mom said, “And no taking Shar places not appropriate for children.”
Her dad added, “My first reaction was worrying about you three being safe, and then I realized that was silly. It’s not like you’re three ordinary girls.”
Shar insisted, “Yeah, anyone tries anything with us, and … kapow!”
Hanna grinned. “As Jack says, ‘Ah pity tha fools!’ ” It wasn’t a great impression, but it was good enough.
Alex said, “We’ll still be careful.”
Hanna smiled. “And we have a satellite phone!” She held up something the size of a six-year-old cellphone but with a thick antenna sticking up on one side. “Willow hacked it so it’s on your Tera-network.”
“It’s not a Tera-thing, okay?” Alex grumped.
Alex’s mom smirked. “And don’t call me the Tera-mom either. She’s touchy about that.”
So they spent the evening planning out their ‘road trip’. On Wednesday and Thursday, they would do stuff around town. On Friday morning, they would drive down to L.A. and do tourist stuff before driving eastward. They couldn’t get a campsite in the area on such short notice, so the first night would just be at a motel in Barstow. Then on Saturday morning, they would drive up to Vegas, tour the sights, and go see Boulder Dam, which Shar wanted to see because she’d learned about it in history class. Then they would drive out toward Red Rock Canyon and camp overnight somewhere around St. George or Cedar City. Then on Sunday morning they would drive back toward home, stopping in the mountains around Ridgecrest to hike and maybe camp out, too, but if the camping out thing didn’t work, they were only a few hours from home and they could just drive back late that night instead of the next day.
And Alex’s dad had all the camping stuff packed up and in good shape. The four-person tent. Sleeping bags and camping mattresses and camping pillows. The camping stove and camp cooking gear and a box of food for camping trips. Alex figured she needed to put together a shopping list for extra stuff, because they totally needed to make s’mores.
* * *
Julia sat at the head of the table and glowered at Ricky. There were only four of them in the room, and the guy was being a pain. Again.
Ricky complained again, “I don’t like being the one who has to bring Jack into this. Why can’t you do it? He’s your husband!”
Julia fumed, “He’s already noticed I’m not very wife-like. He probably would have divorced me already, if it wasn’t for the children. That, and losing his job over uncovering a big internal scandal at his old job and not just burying it for a big pay raise.”
“We’re the last four Orphans of the America bloc, and you’re having rugrats with a homo inferior. No wonder we’re screwed.”
Ricky added, “You could have had my kids, you know.”
Julia snapped, “It’s critical to know if we can interbreed with them and still have Orphans for children. It was important when I started this for the Spencers, and it’s still critical. And anyway, Jack is still our ace in the hole on this, even if he has no idea.”
“We had one programmer die in Davenport, we had one turn out to be a mole for the India bloc, and we lost number three just when we’re having trouble keeping our nanobots from doing exactly what we forecast as our worst-case scenario. We have to get Jack in here and coding for us.”
Julia fumed, “Which is what I said. And I need Ricky to get him here. He’s far more likely to come out and work for us if Ricky asks, because he still thinks Ricky is his friend. If I ask him to come out here and leave the kids with a nanny, he’ll tell me to go fuck myself.”
“I don’t like depending on some homo inferior when we can’t get it done ourselves.”
Ricky pointed out, “Hey, we’re not all Margaret Walsh. Some of us are better at other skills.”
“Obviously. Can you believe Buffy Summers is one of us? Buffy Summers? The woman’s got the brains of E. coli.”
“Hey! I resent that! My bacteria strains can do something useful!”
Julia snorted. “Look, some of us are just attractive, like some of us are just attractive and athletic. Plenty of Orphans are not brilliant and not ultra-aggressive.”
Ricky smarted off, “Tera-aggressive?”
Julia growled, “Shut up. I don’t want to hear about that freak. She’s probably another Orphan who’s figured out how to acquire superpowers, and she’s running her own scheme. We’re her enemies. She’s got to wipe us out and wipe out the primary bloc, and once she’s taken down every major threat, she’ll reveal her real identity, get elected President, and then take over the planet. Duh. And you thought Singh was a nightmare. Forget Walsh. If we don’t get this working perfectly, we have no chance against her.”
Ricky grumbled, “Okay. I got the message. I don’t feel like being electrocuted or having my larynx slowly crushed to a pulp or whatever else she does to her victims.”
Julia nodded. “So we’re agreed. Xymos needs Jack here as a programmer, and Ricky needs to be the lure.”
“But once he’s done what we need, is there any reason he can’t have an accident? After all, we’re out in the middle of the Great Basin Desert. We’re over forty miles east of Vegas. People get lost out here and die all the time.”