Chapter 188 – Vegas Vacation

Alex was totally excited about their road trip. They’d had a ton of fun in Paradise Valley with Ray and Nicole and Robyn, but now it was just the three of them driving around having an awesome time.

And just talking about stuff.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be getting fitted for the maid of honor dress for Willow’s wedding, but Willow already has my measurements on her computer so she gave ’em all to the wedding boutique ladies and I just have to come in for a fitting at least a day before the wedding, and I have to fly in for the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner anyway, even if Willow said the wedding was gonna be super-simple, so I’ll have more time to hang with you and Cindy and everybody.”

Hanna nodded. “I am glad I am not ‘in’ the wedding party. There will be photographers there because of Willow, and some because of Jack, and I do not want my picture all over the internet. You have a much more effective disguise than I do, and the articles about Terawatt I have tracked down all think she must be Orphan age or older. No one thinks that someone superheroing for several years already could be a teenager.”

Alex pointed out, “Well, we did do all this stuff to make A.L. Mack into Willow Rosenberg’s bestie, so this even makes sense.”

Shar pouted. “Auntie Willow told me I had to wait till they were back from their honeymoon before I could go out there. Sophie got to be a flower girl in a wedding this summer and it sounded really fun!”

Alex pointed out, “You don’t like wearing really fancy dresses.”

“Ick.”

“And Sophie loves ’em. And you’d have to walk down the aisle in front of hundreds of people scattering rose petals and not run out before you got to the front.”

“Okay, maybe I wouldn’t like that.”

“And some of the important general-type people Jack’s gonna have to invite might recognize you as Charlie McGee and that could be a problem.”

“Crap! I mean crud.”

“Thank you. And then you’d be stuck in your frilly dress for the whole wedding, and you’d have to hold still the entire time, and then you’d have to stay in the dress for the entire party after the wedding.”

“Ugh.”

“And there probably won’t be any kids for you to play with the entire time, because I have no idea if Willow or Jack is inviting relatives with kids. So you would be bored out of your gourd.”

“Okay, fine, I don’t wanna do it. Maybe while you’re gone I’ll go on YouTube and watch videos of flower girls.”

Hanna smiled. “Cindy showed me several but they were all where the flower girl messes up totally. If they’re young enough they don’t even know it.”

“Crud. I totally don’t wanna screw up Auntie Willow’s wedding.”

And they talked about Hanna being ‘the hot exchange student’ at her school and dating Charlie. They talked about Alex going off to college and dating Ray. They talked about Shar’s ‘boyfriend’ Dennis and Shar’s summer camp and Shar’s besties Sophie and Maria.

And Shar wondered, “So what do you have to do as the maid of honor? You don’t haveta date the best man, do you? Ray wouldn’t like that.”

Alex grinned. “No, I just have to walk down the aisle when I’m supposed to and stand where I’m supposed to during the ceremony, and make a little speech at the dinner, and be in the pictures before the wedding, and help Willow get dressed in her wedding gown just before the wedding, and I’ll probably have to help Jack and Willow sneak off to their hotel when the party’s over so people can’t put yuck all over their car or anything.”

Shar looked horrified. “You haveta stand up in front of everyone for the whole wedding and you can’t move?”

“Yep.” She even popped her ‘p’ like Jack. “And then Willow and Jack are off to Belize for their honeymoon. And then they’ll be back in a week and a half, and we’ll need to get you packed up and moved to West Virginia and get you registered for school and all that other stuff. And I’ll miss you so much!”

Shar pouted, “Uncle Jack told me I’ll prob’ly haveta be Shar O’Neill while I’m in West Virginia.”

Just thinking about the name change made Alex want to cry.

And except for getting sad about Shar moving, which Hanna was totally looking forward to, they had an awesome time. Even if Hanna was wearing a genuine Driscoll Enterprises ‘What Would Terawatt Do?’ t-shirt, which Alex had to practice not looking embarrassed about. Even if Hanna and Shar wanted to go to the Santa Monica beach, too. The museum and exhibit center were up, and they were massively crowded, and it was expensive. But there was some stuff she didn’t know. They had an entire clam-monster excavated and cut open and preserved so you could look at it and see what it looked like inside. And it was a lot bigger than just the part Alex had fought. And there was a little movie theater where they showed the big battle with Terawatt and Azure Crush and the SRI fighting the giant clams. Somebody really smart had gotten film footage from several different photographers who were all filming at the same time, and put it together so that it gave you a 3-D feel like you were standing at the edge of the beach watching the battle.

Alex was pretty sure Hanna muttered, “I miss out on all the fun.”

And there was a ton of Terawatt merch in the gift shop. Alex checked that it was all from Louis’s company and not bootleg junk. She had no idea about the Azure Crush stuff, but she figured when she got back, Terawatt would give Azure Crush a call and let Az know that her agent ought to make sure she was getting her cut of the proceeds. And there was a lot of ‘clam’ merch, especially for sale at carts outside the museum. She hadn’t thought about how many really dirty jokes and puns you could make with the word ‘clam’. And she totally didn’t want to explain all of them to Shar, even if Shar knew the dirty meaning of the word.

Alex was pretty sure she hadn’t known that when she was nine.

At least Hanna handled it well. Not a lot got to Hanna. But that was partly because Hanna had missed out on a lot of stuff for fourteen years. And Hanna totally wasn’t embarrassed about walking up to some of the beach vendors and going through their merch and looking for bootleg Terawatt stuff while the vendor stood right there and complained. She found one guy with bootleg merch and just stood right in front of him and called the cops on him.

Okay, she was Action Girl. If the guy attacked her, even with a weapon, she wasn’t going to worry. Okay, Hanna wouldn’t have worried if the guy attacked her with a live giant clam monster.

They drove through Beverly Hills, and they drove down Venice Beach, and they had an awesome time just looking at people and stuff they’d heard about. And they ate dinner as they drove east toward Barstow, so they got to their motel room about nine. Alex ate a snack while Shar showered and dried her hair, and then they went to bed. Even if they talked in the dark for maybe an hour.

*               *               *

In the morning, after Alex and Hanna showered, they ate breakfast at a little local diner that the motel manager said was her favorite. It was pretty good. And Alex also got a couple breakfast burritos to go, so she had something to eat on the way to Las Vegas.

Vegas was pretty amazing. There were casinos that were like everything you could imagine, even if they just drove past and looked at the outsides. They took the time to go into the Luxor before they headed out and took the Boulder Dam tour which Shar was really psyched about. It was really pretty cool. The huge generators were cranking out so much power that Alex could feel it from where the tour group was. And the tour guide promised that no one really got buried in the concrete when they were making the dam; that was just an urban legend.

After that, they headed east to some hiking spots out in the desert that were totally awesome. There were places that looked like no one had been there in ages. And there were places that looked like someone had been there a hundred years ago and maybe died there.

Shar wanted to go climb a hill, so they found a place they could pull off the highway and drive for a ways. Then they headed off toward the east, where there was a nice ridge that wasn’t too steep but would totally burn off a lot of Shar’s excess energy. It had to be a good five hundred feet higher than the sandy desert they were hiking across.

It was a long walk, and so the ridge turned out to be higher than they thought. It was maybe a thousand feet high. And when they hiked up to its top, they could see that it was several thousand feet above the floor of the big valley on the other side.

Shar pointed to a spot in the middle of the valley. “What’s that?”

Hanna stared, and then pulled a collapsible telescope out of her hiking pack. “Three story building. Most of it’s probably a factory, based on the structure and the window arrangement. A couple of outbuildings, and a really long driveway that looks graded instead of paved.” She scanned around a little more. “Aaaaand two people running desperately and regularly glancing over their shoulder which they should know will cut their speed by a significant fraction.”

Oh, crud. “What are they running from?”

Hanna scanned the area. “Nothing visible.”

Crud!

“Invisible monsters? Can I go kapow ’em?” Shar asked eagerly.

Hanna pointed out, “It could be a trap for us. I have maintained surveillance for tail cars, but I have not searched the car today for bugs or beacons. And we have discussed our plans repeatedly in the car.”

“Crud, I didn’t even think of that. But how could they get all set up this far ahead of us and then hide all the evidence fast enough when we didn’t even know where we were headed until a little while ago?”

Hanna stopped and studied the scene. It was far enough away that Alex could hardly make out that there were people out there. Hanna calmly said, “Front person still running. Rear person just went down. Hard to tell, but it looked like she was attacked by a dust storm. Maybe an invisible predator who can’t mask the sand it kicks up all around it. Maybe a fault in a ‘cloaking’ system.”

Alex winced. “We need to get down there and save her.”

Hanna asked, “Which is more likely? Someone suspected you or me of being a superheroine, they got ahead of us while we were walking out here, and they set a trap? Or we picked the one place and time in the entire Southwest where Terawatt is needed?”

Alex admitted, “Before Paris, I would’ve said door number one. Totally. Now I’m not so sure.” Then it hit her that she was overlooking something major. “Shar? Why did you want to go camping in the desert? And why did you want to hike to this ridge?”

Shar sort of huddled in on herself and confessed, “I had this dream. It was people out here in the desert yelling for help but inside that building there. And this ridge was in it. When I saw the ridge from the car, I knew we were supposed to hike out here and help. And I didn’t tell you because … well, because the whole thing sounds dumb. I didn’t think you’d believe me, and if you didn’t believe me, we’d never get out here. Sorry.”

Alex snapped, “That changes everything. I’m going in fast. You’ve got the sat phone. Alert Jack first. You carry Shar and run for my position.”

Shar pleaded, “Can’t you take me? Hanna can run way faster without me, and you can fly just as fast.”

Either way, she was bringing Shar into a possible battle zone. And leaving her all by herself up here in plain sight was maybe worse. Crud!

At least she could protect Shar pretty well, and nothing was going to be sneaking up on her with Shar as an early warning system. She went silvery, pulled Shar into her morph, and jetted toward the downed woman.

When they reached the woman, there wasn’t anything around. The woman was just lying on the ground breathing really hard and choking. Alex looked around to see if there was anyone who might be using TK to throttle the woman. Nothing. She used her own TK to feel in the woman’s throat, and it was like the tissues were swelling up from a medical thing, not at all like her throat was being clamped shut.

“ALEX!” Shar screamed.

She looked up and saw. Three different things like dust clouds were all closing in on them. Those weren’t moving with the wind, either. Not unless the wind decided to come at them from all directions at the same time.

Alex hit one with a lightning bolt, and it disintegrated. Shar hurled a fireball at another, and it vanished as the fire swept through it. Alex smacked the third one with her TK, and it slammed into the ground, only to shakily rise back up.

Shar roasted it with a fireball before it could move any closer. She pointed at the guy still running toward the building and yelled, “You gotta save him!”

Alex went silvery and jetted toward the guy, who was staggering and flailing his arms like he was trying to fight off a swarm of bugs. She got to him just as he fell over about a hundred yards short of a set of airlock doors into the building.

A huge swarm of the dust cloud stuff was attacking the poor guy. Alex hit them with a burst of lightning and fried them. The guy coughed and struggled to get up, but it looked like he wasn’t going to be able to get to his feet. It looked like he wasn’t going to be able to get to his hands and knees.

Alex kept an eye out for more of the dust clouds, and she used her TK to move the guy into a sitting position. Then she landed behind him and gave him her best Terawatt tones. “Don’t turn around. Just tell me what is going on here. Now.”

The guy coughed horribly but managed, “Nanobots. Solar powered, but can’t hold together in high winds. Night and wind our only defense. We found a cave. They’re loose all through the building. And they’re replicating in the cave. And they’re evolving. They can … Can take over people they infect. Can form a cloud that looks almost like a person. They looked like Ricky. We’ve got to stop ’em.”

“Where’s the cave?”

He coughed a bunch more and pointed off at the ridge, about fifty degrees from where Alex had flown in. “Can’t miss. Two dead bodies … and all our gear … in front of cave. Nanobot swarms got us before … before we could kill the replication units. Not safe in daylight without lotta wind …” He passed out.

Alex looked around. She could see two more dust clouds. Okay, not dust. Clouds of evil, solar-powered nanobots that could take over people. And if they could replicate, they had to be able to break down matter to do it.

Gray goo. She knew this scenario. It was from a science fiction book she read a long time ago. If the nanobots got a chance to break everything else down to keep replicating, soon there wouldn’t be anything left except nanobots.

“Crud!” She couldn’t lift the guy and herself, so she lifted him in the air and raced to the building. She shoved him in the airlock where he’d be safe, or at least as safe as he could be when he was probably already infected by the nanobots.

Then she flew back to Shar. Shar was just standing looking down at the woman’s body. She sounded upset as she said, “I tried doing CPR like they showed us in class, but it didn’t do any good.”

Alex started to explain about the nanobots and how they shouldn’t get too close to anyone who might be infected, but she spotted Hanna running at them at high speed, which for Hanna was saying a lot. As Hanna got closer, she yelled, “Dust clouds in pursuit!”

Alex yelled back, “Get behind Shar!” She leapt into the air and swung off to one side, so Shar could attack straight ahead and not have to worry about accidentally hitting Alex.

There were half a dozen swarms still pursuing Hanna. One of them looked like a person drawn with pixels in an old videogame without enough resolution. It wasn’t completely opaque, either. And another cloud looked like the same thing, only with a rabbit instead of a person.

Alex hit two of the trailing swarms with lightning bolts. A massive fireball swept through the air, taking out three of the swarms, one after another. The person-swarm collapsed into a ‘dust cloud’ and tried to run away. Alex blasted it to bits just as Shar hit it with another fireball.

By the time Alex regrouped with Hanna and Shar, Hanna had just about caught her breath. Alex directed, “I need your sat phone. And I need both of you to listen to what I tell Jack.” Hanna handed it right over and pressed the redial button.

Jack instantly answered the phone. “A.G., this is O’Neill. Sitrep?”

Alex crisply replied, “Terawatt here. We have a gray goo situation, and I think we’re early enough to contain it, thanks to Shar having a premonition or something. We’ve got a plant several hundred yards north of our current position.”

“Hang on a sec,” Jack cut in. “Burn’s slicing up some GIS databases, and survey says … Xymos. They’re supposed to be working on ‘novel imaging and visualization approaches’ according to what she just dug up.”

Willow added, “Uh-oh. Two of the bosses may be Orphans. Julia H. Forman and Ricky Morse. Maybe I’m being prejudiced, but they’re way too good-looking to be doing the kinds of jobs they do … and Julia’s listed background has at least some fake businesses in it. And we’ve been looking for a Julia Harrison who had probably changed her name. That’s not suspicious at all.”

Jack said, “And if you’ve got two Orphans there, this could be the last bit of the America bloc, so expect up to three more Orphans. And they’re creating deadly nanotechnology?”

“Right,” Alex answered. “We’ve got one survivor and one not. They were chased across the desert back to the building by swarms that look like dust clouds. The guy was conscious long enough to tell me the stuff is solar-powered and can’t stick together in wind. So get the National Guard out here with flamethrowers and leafblowers and huge fans. Lightning and an EMP would work, too. But the clouds will attack people, infect ’em through the nose and mouth, and take them over. And maybe turn ’em into more nanobots. The clouds are getting smarter, too, unless I’m mistaken. I just saw one that was impersonating a person and one that was a fake rabbit, but neither moved right and they look ‘lo-res’ and you can see through them. There’s also a cave we need to find ASAP where the nanobots are doing major replication. Then we need to come back here and clean out the building. The guy said it was infected, too.”

Jack told her, “Roger that. We’re mobilizing as fast as we can call up Guard units and get Top Banana to move in Army Reserve troops.”

She insisted, “Remember to warn them. NBC protocols. And ordinary firearms are useless. Fire and lightning totally work.”

Jack grumbled, “Which means Shar is out there, too, right?”

“I couldn’t leave her by herself miles away on the top of a ridge!” Alex protested.

Hanna added, “Shar is not the one at risk at the moment, general. This time it is me. I cannot fight a nanobot cloud without a flamethrower or a lightning generator.”

“What? You didn’t pack your Ronco pocket flamethrower along with your bat-grapples?”

Hanna flatly replied, “Mom found the grapples in my bag and took them out. So I promised her I would not take the grapples, and I stuck to my promise.”

Alex said, “We need to get moving on this op, sir.”

Jack grumbled, “You’d think you could go one stinking vacation without finding trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” Alex agreed unhappily. “Terawatt out.”

She handed the phone back to Hanna and said, “I’ve got a rough heading for the cave, and I know what to look for when we get close. Their gear and two dead teammates. So I’ll fly Shar and you run after us.”

Hanna stiffly said, “No sir. In this situation, I am the vulnerable unit. If you’re going to fly anyone, it needs to be me. Pyre can defend herself against this threat. I cannot.”

Alex sighed. “All right, I’ll pull everyone into my morph and I’ll puddle us over there as fast as I can.”

“You can’t fly both of us?” Shar asked.

Alex frowned. “Sorry. No. Together we’re maybe 350 pounds including gear. Maybe more, depending on all the stuff Hanna’s got in her pack. I can lift 315 pounds. We’re at least 35 pounds too heavy.”

Hanna suggested, “Perhaps you and Shar could fly right above and behind me while I run at my best speed along your vector. That would give me protection.”

Shar agreed, “Yeah, and you could just fly me alongside instead of doing the silvery thing, so I could throw fireballs whenever I need to.”

That sounded like the best plan she had to date. “Okay, that’s what we do. Hanna, take off in that direction toward the foot of the ridge.”

Hanna ran as fast as she could, with Alex and Shar flying twenty feet behind her and twenty feet over her head. It only took minutes to race the distance it had probably taken that guy’s team over half an hour to cover, because Hanna just dodged every nanobot cloud and let Alex or Shar fry it. And Hanna was really running fast. Alex figured Hanna was moving better than forty miles an hour.

Alex spotted the cave opening before she saw the two dead bodies on the ground, or the gear near the cave entrance. She hit both bodies with her lightning, just in case they were now nanobot factories. Hanna glanced at the equipment and snatched up a bag of them. “Thermite! Perfect for me!” she told Alex.

Alex figured that meant the Xymos people knew fire was the way to go with whatever would be in the cave. She said, “Shar, you roast everything that doesn’t look like ordinary cave stuff. I’ll provide light and lift, and I’ll zap anything that comes your way.”

“Incoming!” Hanna called out.

Eight or nine human-shaped clouds came out of the cave. Each one looked like the same guy. Alex wondered if that was supposed to be one of the Orphans, because it was a handsome guy. Alex also wondered if that meant the nanobots had eaten the guy and made some sort of template off him. Ick. She couldn’t decide which was worse: competent, deadly Orphans or incompetent, deadly Orphans.

Alex murmured to Shar, “I got left.” She started zapping cloud-guys from her left to her right, and Shar started fireballing everything on their right. Then Shar hurled another fireball directly into the mouth of the cave.

Alex whispered, “Don’t make fires we have to go through later.”

“Oops.”

They flew into the cave opening, with Hanna moving to cover their six with a big flashlight and some of the thermite devices. Alex went silvery, so she could keep an eye on Shar and Hanna both. There was no telling how many nanobot clouds could be in a cave where new nanobots got cranked out. And there was no telling how the clouds ‘thought’ if they even thought more than following some basic rules.

Shar’s fireball had stuck to a wall just past a little turn in the passageway. That was good. It had cleared pretty much every nanobot cloud to that point, and it provided plenty of light, and it made things hard for the nanobots who wanted to move past the fire. They turned the corner past the fire, and they moved down another tunnel to a place where the tunnel widened a bit and ended.

“Ooh!” whispered Shar.

“Yeah,” Alex agreed. One whole side of the ‘room’ was a gross fungus-like yuck that was fizzing with life. If the nanobots were alive. “You need to incinerate this whole room.”

“Totally,” whispered Shar. “Put me down and back up a few yards and stay silvery. And Hanna needs to move even farther back.”

Alex did it. Hanna slid back to where that fireball was holding off any nanobots that might come to the rescue.

Shar stepped forward and cleared her throat. Her hands began to glow with a bright white light that lit her up like she was surrounded by little spotlights. Her hair began to blow in a breeze that was only there for her.

Alex told herself it wasn’t right that a little girl like Shar had to do stuff like this, but burning slime off of walls was one thing. They might have to do something worse when they got to the Xymos building, because there were probably Orphans and infected people in there, and things might get really ugly.

A corona of fire surrounded Shar, and she just ignored it. Suddenly the walls and floor and ceiling of the room simply burst into flame. The rocks were on fire or melting or, in a few places, boiling. The heat was horrific. Alex had to back up. Then she had to back up some more. Shar didn’t seem to notice.

Once the entire room was molten slag, Shar simply turned and walked out. The corona of fire stayed around her and squeezed itself down the tunnel.

Alex hissed, “Hanna! Retreat!” And she flew back down the passageway until she was outside of the cave. Half a dozen more nanobot clouds came at her and Hanna, but Hanna already had a trick ready. She used a thirty-foot length of heavy steel cable like a bolo, only with some of the already-ignited thermite knotted in the far end of the cable. Then she whipped it around herself fast enough that it was a threat to all the nanobot clouds. And maybe to Alex, if she got much closer. But as soon as a flaming ball of thermite whipped through a nanobot cloud, the cloud would partially disintegrate and frantically retreat. Alex zapped everything that Hanna didn’t burn up.

Shar walked out of the cave. No wait, she wasn’t walking anymore. Her feet weren’t really touching the ground.

“Shar, you’re flying! Your TK …” Alex stopped talking, because Shar didn’t look happy at all.

Shar was crying. And her tears were a silvery, sparkly stuff. Like maybe they were full of nanobots. Alex thought her heart might freeze in horror.

Alex instantly threw a pulse of lightning at Shar, but it broke up when it hit Shar’s corona. Alex took a deep breath and threw as big a bolt of lightning as she could manage. The light was nearly blinding. The air between her and Shar sizzled and ionized. The sand on the ground between them went molten.

The lightning blast melted in the pure white heat of Shar’s corona.

Shar whimpered, “I’m sorry, Alex.”

Alex was utterly horrified, but she grabbed Shar by the carotids anyway.

Or at least she tried to. A TK force like a wrecking ball slammed Alex into the ground. If she hadn’t been silvery, she would have been crushed into a bloody pulp.

Hanna reached into her daypack. She grabbed the stealth knife she had smuggled through airport security. She had promised not to take her grapples, and she couldn’t smuggle a handgun through airport security without some risk, but a stealth knife that didn’t flag when going through metal detectors was a different matter, and her mom hadn’t said anything about high-tech weaponry other than the grapples. She threw it expertly at Shar’s throat.

Shar ignored it. The knife hit the corona and melted like a sno-cone lobbed into a blast furnace. Nothing was left before it got even a quarter of the way to Shar’s body. Shar simply turned and flew up the ridge toward the ridgeline.

Alex watched as Hanna sprinted up the slope after Shar. Alex was still dragging her silvery form out of the crater Shar had made. That really hurt!

Alex went normal and headed up the slope, easily passing Hanna. She didn’t know what she was going to do if her lightning was useless and her TK wasn’t good enough. If she had to, she could maybe go silvery and dive into Shar’s corona and attack her physically, but it would probably kill Alex before she got close enough to touch Shar.

But Shar simply stopped on the ridgeline and turned around to wait for them. That was probably not a good thing. Alex slowed down and let Hanna catch up to her.

“Got anything?” Hanna checked.

“I was hoping you had a brainstorm,” Alex admitted.

“You’re the one who comes up with the great plans,” Hanna insisted.

Alex realized she did have one last thing she could try. “Move to her nine.”

“Roger that.”

They moved closer. Shar was floating fifteen feet off the ground now, but her corona was even bigger than before. The flames were melting the sand underneath her. Shar looked at Alex and timidly said, “Alex, I’m totally sorry. I can’t stop it. It’s the nano-stuff. They must’ve got in me when I tried CPR on the lady, and they really like it in me. It’s like my TK fits in with their programming, and my telepathy fits in with their little network stuff so they can make these clouds that work together. And so they can track where the other clouds are and what the clouds are doing. There’s still a bunch in the building, and nobody left in the building except that guy you rescued is even in control of themselves anymore. This is really, really bad. Please don’t hate me.”

Alex tried, “Shar, if you can’t drop your corona, maybe you can do some electrokinesis of your own. You could shock yourself and fry all the little nanobots. Or maybe you could grab them with your TK and yank ’em right out. Or you could use your telepathy and talk to ’em. Tell ’em to stop. Or tell ’em to turn off.”

Shar closed her eyes and concentrated. Her corona grew bigger. The molten sand under her was turning into a bubbling lava. The heat was so brutal Alex had to back up another thirty feet.

She opened her eyes, and Alex gulped. They weren’t Shar’s pretty eyes anymore. They were turning silvery.

“Alex? I tried. I really, really tried. I promise! I couldn’t do it. The nanobots say they can’t let go of me because they were made to make more nanobots and to find better places to make more nanobots and to find ways to learn, and they think I’m … Is ‘optimal’ a word?” She stared at Alex and said, “Oh. I see it is. Well, that’s what they think I am. Which is totally not fair.”

Alex whispered, “Shar, we can still work together to beat this. I have an idea.”

Shar frowned. “Yeah, I can see. And Hanna thinks you’ll come up with something really smart, but I don’t think it’ll work. Ooh, that’s a better idea. Thanks.” She glanced over at Hanna for a split second before turning back to Alex. “SLEEP FOR A MINUTE.”

Alex collapsed bonelessly to the ground.

Shar watched as Hanna instantly reacted. Shar had to use some TK to toss Hanna backward before Hanna charged right into her fire. She stared as Hanna scrambled to her feet and moved really fast again. “FREEZE FOR HALF A MINUTE.”

Shar lifted higher off the ground as her corona grew some more. “Hanna? I know you can hear me. I can see what you’re thinking. I’ve got to do this. Tell Alex I love her and this totally isn’t her fault. Tell her … Tell her I can choose not to be a gun. Tell her I said … ‘You stay … I go … no following’.”

She lifted higher up into the air. “Hanna, as soon as the freeze wears off, grab Alex and run. Run as fast and as hard as you can. And don’t stop.”

She jetted off toward the Xymos building, her corona flaring around her and trailing off behind her like a comet.

Hanna had a pretty damn good idea what Shar was about to do, and there was no way she could stop someone who could kick Terawatt around like a soccer ball. As soon as she could move, she scooped up Alex’s unconscious body and sprinted across the ridgetop and down the slope. She was pretty sure she couldn’t get far enough away in time, but she was going to give it her best try ever.

Shar flew toward the building. She had been using the nanobots’ connectedness for several minutes, calling all of them back to the building. She could see dust storms racing toward the building, and she could see things like fuzzy people running toward the building, and there were even two cars that had turned around and were racing back to the building.

She knew what Auntie Willow and Uncle Jack had figured out about her powers. She’d known for a while. Ever since Willow thought about it while she was talking to Jack on the phone in Alex’s backyard. She knew Alex knew, too. She’d seen it in Alex’s mind, along with a whole bunch of other important stuff.

She remembered another line from her favorite movie. “You are who you choose to be.” And she knew who she wanted to be.

When she was about two hundred feet above the center of the Xymos building, she whispered, “Terawatt.” And she concentrated as hard as she could, no matter what the stupid nanobots wanted.

The blast disintegrated everything within a mile that wasn’t already fifty feet underground.

The fearsome light flashed well above Hanna’s position. She had worried about this, but she had Alex in a fireman’s carry and she had made really good progress down the slope. And she had thousands and thousands of tons of ridge between her and the blast. She just refused to look back. She had read about Lot’s wife, but she did not think this would turn her into a pillar of salt, not even metaphorically. However, looking back might get someone killed, even if it just led to her falling the rest of the way down the rocky slope.

She hadn’t expected there would be a double pulse of light. She didn’t know what that meant, but she resolved to ask Jack as soon as she could, because it might be really important.

The pressure wave was next. It hit the ridge like a car crashing into a house. The shockwave knocked her down, and she slid on her chest rather than risking Alex getting smashed to pieces. Rocks that had been up on the ridgeline went flying like they had been shot out of a gun, and everything else seemed to be trying to turn into massive avalanches.

She kicked off one rock and leapt, landing gracefully on a big flat piece that was roughly diamond-shaped. It slid down the slope like a shaky surfboard. Hanna struggled to keep her balance while carrying Alex and while keeping the flat rock under her. Under her and also tilted up enough in the front that it kept sliding down the slope instead of tumbling end over end.

That lasted for another several seconds, until the front hit something a lot more solid, and then she found herself being hurled into the air.

Alex woke up right then and screamed, “SHAR!” But Alex did what she always did. She reacted. She flew straight up and yanked Hanna into the air with her. The rocks tumbled down mercilessly, crushing everything including themselves.

Alex flew on down the slope and far enough away from the tumbling rocks that they would be safe.

Once they landed, Hanna looked around and checked that they were really safe. Well, as safe as you could be when you were one ridge away from a nuclear blast. She glanced at Alex and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“No! Shar!” Alex was starting to cry. That wasn’t a good sign.

Hanna gently insisted, “Alex, we cannot save her. There is nothing left to save.” The mushroom cloud was rising up high enough to see over the line of the ridgetop. “This was a nuclear blast. There will be radiation. And fallout. And other effects I do not know about.”

At least they were west of the blast. They were slightly south of west, just as Alex’s car was slightly north of west. And the light breeze was blowing from the west to the east, so the fallout would drift away from them.

Damn. Alex’s car. A nuclear blast put out a huge electro-magnetic pulse. Alex’s car’s electrical system was probably fried. Hanna wondered if the EMP had affected Alex enough to wake her up from Shar’s mental attack, or if Shar’s minute had just ended. Hanna had not been keeping track. And her nice digital watch that Charlie had given her was ruined.

She checked, and the satellite phone was dead, too. And her flashlight. And everything else electronic in her daypack.

She tried again. “Alex? You need to take me and fly west, upwind, so we don’t fly through any radioactive fallout, to somewhere safe. Maybe Boulder City. Then we need to call Jack. Alex?”

But Alex was staring at the mushroom cloud and shaking her head. “No. No. No no no no no no!”

Hanna tried to explain. “Shar said goodbye. She knew what she was doing. She said she loved you. She said she could choose not to be a gun. She said, ‘You stay. I —”

But Alex took over the phrase. “I go. No following.” She stared at Hanna in utter hatred and screamed, “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP HER?”

Hanna tried, “I c–…”

But Alex was gone. She was jetting away to the west, away from the mushroom cloud. Hanna had never seen Alex move so fast before.

She didn’t think Alex would stop and call Jack. She wasn’t sure Alex would ever stop.

She checked, and even her little compass was wrecked. The EMP had ruined it, too. She glanced up at the position of the sun, oriented herself, and started trotting to the northwest to get to the highway. It was only a few miles, and she knew a lot of people would be arriving to find out what had happened. None of them would believe that the correct question was to ask who had happened.

 
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