Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (34 page)

“Penny, honey, would you be okay if Brian and I went out this evening? We’ll be leaving around five, and I doubt we’ll be back before midnight. The community wants to have a meeting, and at the last minute they decided they have to have Brian Akk and The Audit’s input,” Mom explained from the other side of the door.

“I don’t see why I wouldn’t be,” I responded.

“I agree. You’re not the kind of girl who gets in trouble by herself.” She knew I wasn’t. Penelope Akk was intelligent, mature, reliable, and had friends who were the worst influences any girl could ask for.

I wouldn’t be able to let this go, would I? It was the lack of supplies that really killed me. If I could build an invention or two, clear my inspiration, I’d be able to relax. Until then, this would eat and eat and eat at me.

I heard Mom’s voice again, but faint and way down the hall, talking to Dad. I scooped up my phone and sent Claire a text message.

“Maybe tonight after sundown?”

ay and Claire met me outside my lab. They would have to wait a minute. I took the elevator down, wrestled my way into my jumpsuit as fast as I could, and grabbed my weapons. Before I hopped in the elevator back up, I scooped some pennies out of the evil statue. As I dropped them into a pocket, it occurred to me that touching them might not have been wise. Eh. Nothing seemed to happen, and I had a hunch the statue was attuned to me—mostly because I’d carried it around for hours but it had affected Claire’s Mom in seconds.

As I stepped back out onto the playground and kicked the door shut behind me, Ray asked, “May I try the teleport rings?”

“I thought you didn’t want them?” I asked defensively. I’d gotten attached to these rings fast, hadn’t I? I slid them off my arms before the argument could go further, and I looked even more selfish and insecure.

When I poured them into his hands, he fastened them around his own forearms and explained, “I can’t afford any short cuts. I have to be faster and smarter than my opponent. I only want to try them out. You said they work on muscle energy, and I’d like to see just how far I can push that.”

I shrugged, opening my mouth to explain how they worked. As I did, I reached up to tap the activating switch for my light cycle. I finished neither action, because Ray’s hand darted out and closed over mine. “I thought a good test would be providing us transportation to our objective.”

“That’s out on the other side of Glendale!” Did he have any idea just how exhausting the bands were?

Well, no. That was part of his point.

“Okay, fine,” I sighed.

“If you ladies will step in close?” Ray leered, his grin almost projecting off his face. You couldn’t suspect his motives, because he wasn’t bothering to hide them.

Claire tried anyway, of course. “This has nothing to do with teleporting at all, does it?” she teased him as she stepped up next to me. There was just enough space between us for him to duck through, and once behind us he crouched down, scooped his arms up under our thighs, and lifted.

A moment later, I was sitting on his forearm, leaning back and holding onto his shoulder for balance but still as securely held as if me and Claire were a couple of pillows. It was just a tad scary to think what exercise was doing for the already super-strong Ray, given what it had done for me and Claire.

Oh, right. He didn’t know how to work them. “They’re not thought-operated, but they might as well be. Focus on where you want to go and take a step.”

He leaned forward, my view jerked, and we were standing on the sidewalk outside the schoolyard. Well, Ray was standing; we were sitting in his arms. He didn’t even need to take a deep breath. Oh, man. These rings really were made for him.

“I believe this will work. If you ladies will hold on tight? As tight as you want, in fact,” Ray joked, and then he took a step, and another. Jogging, then lightly running. His gait was all I could keep track of. With each step the world moved, and, since I wasn’t aiming, it felt like a badly spliced movie. After the first few teleports, he spaced them out to merely every three steps or so. That gave me enough time to realize we were already heading up Los Feliz.

This operation would take us even further out in the same direction as the last one. If it made a few people less likely to believe we were based at Northeast West Hollywood Middle, that was fine by me.

I could feel Ray’s slim body rocking in an even rhythm, hear his deep but steady breaths. Yeah, not even he could handle teleporting like this forever. Maybe he was pacing himself somehow? All I could really do was speculate. I spotted when we left Los Feliz behind and when we crossed over the bridge, but I couldn’t keep track of the world flickering around me. I heard a squeaky crunch, and then another before I realized what had changed.

Ray was jumping from car to car now, in traffic, using the rings to jump not to the next car but to one way down the street each time. The densely packed buildings of Glendale danced around us. Cars honked, always behind us. Not many. Maybe for some of these drivers this wasn’t the first time a superhero had used the roof of their car as transportation.

Glendale disappeared behind us. Ray leaped between spread out cars on the highway, while desert scrub and thinly spaced businesses appeared and disappeared. He stooped, gave a big jump with both legs, and we landed on a sidewalk by a chain link fence. The fence went on and on and on, lit around the edge, and surrounded a big, dark hill.

This had to be it. Puente Hills landfill. Its treasures would be mine!

Ray set us on our feet, then sat down on his butt. His hands moved unsteadily as he slid the bracelets down his arms and peeled them off. “That was fun, but we will not be doing it again,” he chuckled in a theatric wheeze. Personally, I scooped the bracelets up and put them on as fast as possible.

“Do you think the fence is electrified?” Claire asked. It was certainly solid. And tall.

“Why go to this much effort to guard trash?” I asked more rhetorically.

If I was going to be whimsical, Claire could play. “Maybe they get a lot of supervillains stealing materials.”

“Health and safety issues,” Ray corrected us, rising back to his feet. “No matter what it looks like, it’s still a pile of garbage.”

It looked like a big crescent hill cut into terraces, with grass all over it. Protected by a fence made of telephone pole sized posts, with twisted iron wires an inch thick. Well, I didn’t need any more steel back home, but I hadn’t brought any with me either.

Peeling The Machine off my wrist, I gave it a twist to get it started and tossed it onto the fence. “Eat a hole for us to walk through, would you?”

It did. If the fence was electrified I couldn’t tell, but if the fence was electrified my baby sucked that all up the way he did the metal wires—eerily like he was eating spaghetti. The Machine doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size, eating faster and faster, until when we walked triumphantly through the gap he looked like a pillbug the size of a large dog.

No way I could lift that. “Carry him up to the top of the hill, Reviled,” I commanded. Stepping forward away from Claire and Ray, I studied the dark shape of the hill above me. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Five steps, each one taking me up a terrace to the top. I stood on the crest, arms folded impatiently, and looked out over the huge misshapen landfill and the lights of the highway. I even managed to keep my knees from buckling underneath me before the aching exhaustion faded. Score one for getting in shape.

My friends weren’t going to let me be the only one to show off. Sure, we had no audience but each other, but what kind of supervillains would we be if we didn’t keep up the drama? Ray tucked The Machine under one arm and climbed a sheer cliff one handed to the first terrace, then jumped up to the second, grabbed the edge in one hand, and vaulted around onto his feet. He caught up to me in seconds. Claire couldn’t match our speed, so she didn’t try. She figure skated around the grassy lawn, swooping around in wide arcs, spinning in circles, and winding her way up the hill from behind.

Well, that had been fun. I took The Machine out of Ray’s grip with both hands. So heavy! I half-placed and half-dropped it onto the grass. One reminder not to get too cocky. I now had the proportional strength of a mildly fit thirteen-year-old girl.

I pointed at the ground in front of The Machine. “Dig. Separate individual materials and bring them back. Most of it will be variations on wood pulp, and that I don’t need. No more than a cubic meter of anything.”

“A cubic meter of most anything will weigh over a ton, Bad Penny,” Ray cautioned me.

“All right, a half… let’s say a ninth of a cubic meter maximum of any material.” That would be a little over a foot in each direction, right? I didn’t need much more than that of anything I couldn’t get easily. Oh, wait. “Get me a full cubic meter of sugar. I’m going to need a lot of that in the near future.” Another thought. “Extra metals and plastics you collect can be split up to make mini-Machines to help gather, and a storage silo for whatever you scavenge.”

Claire came zipping up. “I like that. If we leave a tower behind, everyone will think we did something nefarious when we’ll actually have helped recycle the landfill. This is my kind of villainy.”

While she talked, The Machine decided I’d finished giving orders and started to obey. The pillbug shape curled up and dug into the ground like a cartoon gopher, sinking into a hole in the packed but artificial earth.

Ray was rather less enthusiastic. “Not mine. We’re robbing a hill in the middle of the night. We could be in for hours of standing around staring at a hole.”

“The bigger The Machine is, the faster it works, right? When it comes up, we could feed it a tractor,” Claire suggested. She waved a hand at the bottom of the hill, where the cranes and dump trucks and industrial vehicles clustered.

I gave her a slow, amused head shake. “Those have to be tens of thousands of dollars each. I’d feel like an idiot going to this much trouble not to steal my ingredients, then steal a truck to do it.”

Ray split the difference. “Maybe some wheelbarrows.” Then he contradicted himself. “Or maybe we won’t have to.”

Why? Because The Machine came back, widening the hole in the process. It had become rather fatter and more multicolored than when it descended. Plates along the surface lifted and slid around, metal rods extended from inside and planted themselves into the ground around the hole.