Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (54 page)

I looked at Ray and Claire, shrugged, and we ran over to the exit, and through it. I immediately sailed off my feet and had to be caught by Ray and Claire. After all that time in space, I’d still forgotten I’d have to pass through the light gravity of the moon. Fortunately, I had minions to do the grunt work, like drag my clumsy carcass through the second portal into Earth’s more comfortable gravity.

Mmmm, Earth. Smell that underground car park air, asphalt with a hint of giant bug! Nothing like it in space.

Claire’s eyes snapped shut when we entered the garage, and she put her hands over her face. Oops. We’d also forgotten Spider. At least she wasn’t very close, hanging a dozen yards away in a thicker part of her web.

Not so far away we couldn’t hear her clearly. “You deserve a villain’s welcome and a debriefing, Inscrutable Machine, but we have time for neither. Change clothes immediately. I have received disturbing messages from Ceres, but if we hurry, your secret identities will be strengthened, not harmed.”

Mom and Dad! I was so close to seeing them again!

I really wanted to do it without them asking probing questions about me doing the bidding of a rhino-sized super-intelligent criminal arachnid. I hurried over to the creepy silk pod where the clothes I’d left in my lair waited. Claire’s were waiting for her in a stairwell, which was a thoughtful touch.

Tying my shoes, I hopped out of the cocoon to see Vera and the Apparition in the corner, hugging each other. My memory whirled. Had she been there when we’d walked in? That spot had been awfully grey.

What happened to The Apparition while we were gone? Had taking Vera away drained her into near-invisibility? Did Apparition know the moment Vera returned to Earth and come looking? A hundred suspicions pulled themselves up short. They were happy now, with Vera jingling like sleigh bells, and Apparition listening to a language that only made sense to her and the Orb of the Heavens.

Claire was already out, looking fixedly at the happy inhuman couple and not in any way at the giant spider. Ray stood between her and Spider, since really all he’d had to do was take off a few items.

“So, what’s this super amazing alibi you’ve prepared?” he asked.

“It centers around an interesting piece of trivia I learned recently. If you enter a space of null time, you were always there, since time stopped,” she sort of answered. She sounded quite light and amused about it.

Abruptly, a blank white glowing door opened up next to us. Spider waved a foreleg in our direction. “Not to be melodramatic, but step into the light.”

Eh. What else was I going to do? I stepped into the light.

I fell into my father’s arms, and that only because I lost my balance for a second. Nothing had happened. I’d just been teleported back into my lair, where my dad, my mom, Claire’s mom, and Mech all stood very unwelcomely in the elevator shaft. Miss Lutra had Claire wrapped in a hug almost as engulfing as the one my parents gave me.

Mech, power armor and all, held Ray’s arm to steady him. “Are you sure they’re okay?”

“There was no time for anything to happen to them.” For all he sounded terribly confident, Dad held me to his chest like I’d just been saved from a tank of nuclear sharks.

I felt a faint tingle in the back of my head. Nuclear sharks? Seriously, superpower? No.

“Could someone tell me what’s going on? And can my parents get out of my secret laboratory? It’s not my underwear drawer, but criminy!” My voice fluttered. Should I have said that in front of my parents? Mostly I just had left a lot of tools here that could be anybody’s, but the cursed statue was in the back, and I did not want him seeing that!

If my nervousness seemed anything but authentic, nobody showed a sign. Claire’s mom hit the button sending the elevator up.

“I think this explains most of it, Princess.” Dad handed me a much creased and downright rumpled paper. I stuck a pinkie out to show him I’d noticed the P word, and looked it over.

It had started out as elegant stationary, but had endured hard wear since. It read:

Brian and Beatrice Akk,

I try to respect your desire to not be in communication with me. I sincerely believe you will forgive this lapse because of the importance of this message. Your daughter is technically unharmed, but has been the victim of a practical joke by the Inscrutable Machine, a practical joke that has gotten out of their hands. Penelope is trapped in the field of Fourth Dimension’s temporal negation device, in her clubhouse under the middle school she attends. Her clubmates are trapped with her. So, unfortunately, is the device itself.

It is the nature of high schoolers to misunderstand boundaries and push too hard, but this was not acceptable. I will make it clear
to the Inscrutable Machine that until your daughter enters the superhero world of her own volition, she is not a target even for minor harassment.

Any information or technology I obtain that may help free your daughter will be passed along to you immediately.

With Deepest Regret,

Spider

“Temporal negation device,” I repeated. I let that sit for a moment. “How long have I been out?”

Nervousness crept up my legs. I could have been in the field for thirty seconds or a month. I would have no way of knowing. Just how much hooky had I ended up playing?

“Four days,” said my mother, and I let out a sigh of relief. In the ‘thirty seconds’ range, then.

My sigh choked off halfway through. “My homework!” I squeaked. It hadn’t even occurred to me until now. I was going to be eating so much shame when I went back to class.

I took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. “My grades are good. I can absorb a couple of zeroes.”

Dad let go of me. Reluctantly, but he did. Rubbing the top of my head, he said, “That’s my mature little girl,” entirely unaware of the ridiculous contradiction or the damage to my pride.

I jerked a thumb at Claire, still being held off the ground in Miss Lutra’s embrace. “I think I need to talk about this with my friends, if you don’t mind.”

Mom nodded. I gave them both another hug. It was hard to let go until she gave my shoulder a pat and a little push. “Go on.” She even helpfully distracted Dad by saying, “High school students. That makes so much sense.”

They both looked across the street at Upper High. “You are not combing their yearbooks, Beebee.”

She sighed in theatrical surrender.

I tugged Ray away from goggling starry-eyed at Mech. It was hard to remember sometimes that as much as we rubbed shoulders with heroes and villains, he and Claire were still giant fans. Miss Lutra put Claire down with such convincing sniffling that I began to wonder if she’d known about our going to Jupiter after all.

Behind me, Mech said to my dad, “The Fourth Dimension’s machine turning up after all this time. I can’t wait to get a look at it.”

“Tech thieves. Brilliant tech thieves,” noted my mother.

Just a hint of post-crying rasp to her soft laugh, Claire’s mom said, “Don’t even think about it, boys. Teenagers need their space, and their space is feeling very much invaded right now. They’ll get it for you later.”

“If I was good at patience, I wouldn’t be a superhero,” quipped Mech. This was apparently hilarious, because Dad, Mom, and Miss Lutra all snorted.

Ray, Claire, and I walked around the corner of the building, with me admiring how well Miss Lutra had just given us cover for private talk. We’d only just stepped out of sight when I heard Mech speak up sharply. “Brian. You need to hear this.”

“Hmmm?”

“One of Jupiter’s smallest moons just blew up like a nuclear bomb. The light from the explosion only reached Earth about five minutes ago. Then a minute ago, NASA picked up this.”

The next voice I heard, high pitched and badly staticky, was Remmy’s. “People of Earth. I am the Kludge, protector of the Jupiter colonies, and I have a message for you. You are not welcome here. Your supervillains are not welcome here. If the Inscrutable Machine return to our space, I will deal with them personally.”

That seemed to be it. The silence dragged on, until my mother commented, “That does seem to explain what keeps happening to the Jupiter probes.”

“Do you think this stasis field really was a prank, or cover while they went into space?” my dad asked.

Emotion drifted out of Mom’s voice, although her tone still only hinted at the Audit’s cold reason. “Spider has only been caught lying twice, which is why I note her phrasing that she will punish the Inscrutable Machine, not that she has. It would seem she’s waiting for them to return to Earth.”

Mech chuckled. “Blew up a moon. Spider’s going to have to punish them hard for them to not be strutting like roosters all over Chinatown.”

“Those moons are less than five miles across, Mech,” chided my mother, the keeper of all numbers everywhere.

“No one will care how big or small it was,” he countered. Nobody said anything, because they knew he was right.

I dragged Ray and Claire further, until whatever our parents discussed next, we couldn’t hear it.

My back hit the brick wall with a thump. How to say this? How could I tell anyone that I was creeped out about my power, where it came from, and what it could do if I didn’t keep it in check?

Claire gave me no chance. Slipping her arm into mine, she cooed with unabashed glee, “Penelope, did you know you’ve just achieved one of the biggest milestones any villain ever can? Ray is going to seethe in jealousy when it hits him.”

Completely derailed, I shook my head. “It’s missing me.”

She squeezed my arm closer. “A supervillain has truly arrived when a superhero arises just to stop her.”

I snorted, but Ray’s face lit up as if Claire had suddenly passed him the secret to life. Wow.

Then my brain tingled. A supervillain creating a superhero, huh?

Heh. Heh heh heh. My grin joined theirs. “You know, maybe I don’t need to reform Bad Penny. I just need to make Penelope Akk into a hero.”

This was going to be a fun semester.

Ray took my other arm, and the three of us looked up at the sky and laughed. They were pretty good at it.

“HA HA HA HA HA!”

Richard Roberts
has fit into only one category in his entire life: ‘writer.’ But as a writer he’d throw himself out of his own books for being a cliche. He’s had the classic wandering employment history – degree in entomology, worked in health care, been an administrator and labored for years in the front lines of fast food. He’s had the appropriate really weird jobs, like breeding tarantulas and translating English to English for Japanese television. He wears all black, all the time, is manic-depressive, and has a creepy laugh.