“I want to take you back to my place for the confession!” I protested.
Peeling off her helmet and goggles, Robot Penny gave me a grim stare. “I don’t want to be dismantled.”
“Mom and Dad wouldn’t do that!”
She kept up the stare. “We don’t know how they’ll react. They’re going to be seriously mad. All this was just to lower their reaction to levels you can survive. I might not.”
I tugged on one of my braids, thinking. “They’ll be so much less mad if you’re there for the confession. Tell you what. Come with me, and stay outside. If they’re not freaking out and it’s safe, I’ll invite you in. If we get a Best Ending, they’ll welcome you and you won’t have to run off.”
She smirked. Bleakness still lay beyond that amused, lopsided grin. She clearly wasn’t as confident as I was. I’d feel the same in her position. She was proof of that. But, always the sport, she said, “In that case, I need to stop by our lair to pick up my stuff to take home.”
o, one drive back up to Los Feliz later, Ruth let us out in front of Upper High. I promised Cassie, “I’ll call you tonight and tell you how it went. As soon as my parents allow it!”
Robot Penny nudged me with her elbow. “I bet Miss Lutra knows how to contact Claire at camp.”
Ray… we’d just keep calling until he got to somewhere with cell phone reception.
With no need to hide, we strolled around behind the high school, and took the elevator down from its overgrown courtyard. When we stepped out of the magical lowering field and onto the stone brick floor, Robot Penny let out a sigh. “It’s been a winding road getting here.”
“Because I was too chicken to do it the straight way,” I admitted. I knew my weaknesses and failures.
She raised an eyebrow, and gave me an intent, searching look. “Do you have the guts to do it right now?”
A weird mix of nervousness and relief caused my voice to stutter. “I don’t have a choice. I don’t know what the exact fact from this fight will do it, but information will get back to Mom before the end of the day that will blow my cover. It’s a race now to tell her on my terms.”
She nodded. “I agree. We’d better hurry.” Then she stopped, frowning, and leaned forward to squint at me.
“What?”
“Are you okay?” she asked, obviously worried.
“I think so?” What was I missing? Had my face turned a weird color? Was I bruised or bleeding?
Mecha-Me’s worried expression tinged with shock. “Let me see your hand.”
I held it out for her. It looked fine to me. Seriously, what did she see?
Nothing on the back, apparently. Turning it over, she leaned down to examine my palm with an ominously serious scowl, and while I wondered what that meant, she slipped a ring onto my finger.
Wait, what? A ring?
Pulling sharply, she jabbed my hand into her chest. I had just enough time to recognize the bird ring, with its gripping talons and spreading wings. When it touched her, the world got very cold, and very dark.
I didn’t quite pass out. She caught me as I fell. Words with my voice floated over me. “Mourning Dove said that you could use this ring if you weren’t alive, but it wouldn’t affect you. That memory meant a lot more to me than it did to you.”
My voice also said, “Help me carry her.”
Hands gripped my arms and shoulders, pulling me along with my feet dragging the floor. Eventually those hands stood me up, and my voice said, “Seal her in. I mean, close those leg clamps.” A sigh. “You can only take simple instructions, can’t you? I’m going to have to rig the fasteners on one arm. She’ll be too weak to pull free before it’s too late.”
Cold grips took hold of my arms, my legs, my hips, my chest, and my head. Somewhere during that process, I got enough consciousness back to recognize what I was seeing and hearing.
We were in my summoning chamber. Big metal rings surrounded me, attached to restraints that held me in a standing position. When she finished with the last one, Robot Penny put her hand on the shoulder of a stone statue of a girl covered in webs and spiders. That is, with reliefs of stone cobwebs and spiders carved into the statue. Wistfully, Robot Penny told it, “When I have my power back, I’ll try to give you a real mind. I know you’re doing your best.”
My double noticed that I was sort of awake. She stood right in front of me, eye to eye. We were, of course, exactly the same height. Still sounding sad, she said, “An evil person would gloat right now. You would come up with a rant for fun. I… have to apologize. My heart hurts doing this to you, but I have to. After today, one of us will be flesh and blood Penny, and have parents and a super power. The other will be a robot everyone knows as Bad Penny. I’m sorry, Penny. I’m so sorry. You like being a villain, and I don’t. You glory in chaos, in fights and crazy things happening. You only help people when you think about it. We have a legendary, world-changing super power, Penny, and it needs to be in the hands of the good twin. That’s… not you. I struggled with this, because it gives me Mom and Dad, and I’ve been afraid selfishness is really driving me, but in the end, this is a moral decision.”
Anger stirred. I tried to say something, to argue.
My duplicate winced, and she stroked my cheek with stiff, room-temperature fingers. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll be as kind to you as you were going to be to me, I swear. More kind. I really am nicer than you. Watching you, that became so very clear. If you let me, I’ll convince Mom and Dad to take you in. You wouldn’t be a threat. I’m the child they think they have, and no one will believe we switched bodies. The robot claiming to be the original is the oldest story in superheroing.”
I tried to argue some more. I recognized, “Please don’t do this,” but I’m not sure anyone else would.
Maybe she did. She cringed, then straightened up. “I’m going to do what’s right, even if it feels wrong,” she said, her artificial voice hoarse. Pulling the Heart of Steel out of a pocket, she put it into the mind transferring machine’s bell jar. Then she stepped into the other arch, and fastened its restraints onto herself. She needed help with that, but when she gave the statue instructions, it obeyed, moving as if it were a person and not a solid chunk of stone.
My own attempts to give it orders failed. They weren’t all that coherent. I kept drifting into a daze.
My voice said, “Begin Plan Necessity.” I opened my eyes to see the statue grab the crank at the center of the machine, and start turning.
Then I really did pass out, falling, falling into a black and endless sky.
woke up with a click. I woke up to a click, the sound of a metal heart locking into place inside my chest.
There was no fog this time. I felt as alert as I’d ever been, my body light and strong and not tired at all. The sensation would have been giddy, if things weren’t so dire.
Reaching through the transfer machine’s rings, the stone statue closed the doors over my new heart.
“Stop!” I ordered it. Her? Decide that later, Penny.
It didn’t stop. Instead, it took the Heart of Gold off of the robot control machine’s seat, where it had been carefully laid. Slowly and methodically, it carried the heart back and put it under the bell jar. Already, the transfer machine had been realigned to move the mind from the Heart of Gold into my real body.
“Don’t do that. Come here. Can you hear me?” I shouted.
The statue could hear me, I was sure. It just didn’t take orders from me. Robot Penny had thought ahead, and made the statue stop obeying this body after she left it.
Robot Penny.
Now I was Robot Penny. My real, flesh and blood body, still hung blankly in the other arch.
Except, as I watched, she opened her eyes. What used to be my arm twisted, jiggled, until clamps that had been propped with pins gave way, and she got free. It only took a few seconds after that to get her head out of its restraints, and then undo the others enough to reach through the machine’s rings and hoist up the glass jar, sn
atching out the Heart of Gold.
The statue, reaching for the crank, stopped moving.
The threat of further transfer ended, she pulled completely free of the machine and let out a groan. “Criminy. At last. I thought I’d never be alone in my own head.”
Now I didn’t know what was going on. Desperately playing mental catch-up, I asked, “Who are you?”
She laughed. I laughed. That is, my body, and whoever was in it, laughed, a high and rich and joyous, “HA HA HA HA HA!” Lifting her hand, she bashed the Heart of Gold into the stone wall, again and again.
I should have screamed, but it was too horrible. My robot body might not have veins, but I still felt phantom ice running through me.
Pursing her lips disapprovingly, my old body studied the now badly dented gold device. Unwinding the Machine from her wrist, she wriggled him until he activated, held up the Heart of Gold, and ordered, “Eat.”
He waved a couple of legs, but that was it.
My body sighed. “Of course. She must qualify as alive, and you won’t eat living things. It doesn’t matter. Nobody could fix her now but me.” With a fierce scowl, she hurled the damaged Heart of Gold at the far wall, denting it more. That done, she wound the Machine back into place around her wrist.
He fell off.
She gaped. For half a dozen seconds my body stared, mouth open, in shock and fury. Screeching, “You traitor!” she snatched up the Machine, stormed over to the door, and threw him violently down the hall.
“I’d really like to know who you are, right now,” I said, my voice hardly squeaking or fluttering.
She turned her stunned look at me, now. “Don’t you know?! You got so many warnings. I’m your super power!”
Tesla’s Anni―
Wait.
“No you’re not. My super power knows everything. Literally everything. You’ve already shown that you don’t.”
She glared, angry but also caught. Begrudgingly, she admitted, “Fine. I’m the part of us that is attached to our super power. It’s the same thing. Thanks to you driving this Heart of Gold”―she marched over and gave it a kick―“into a moral dilemma, I finally have the body to myself.”
“You’re the evil me,” I whispered.
Evil Penny did not like that. She scrunched up her nose in disgust. “You, me, her, we’re all the same person. I’m furious because you never let me do what I want. Seven months of frustration―”
She broke off, growling, scooped Bad Penny’s lightning tank off the floor, and carried it over to me. Sliding it through the rings, she hooked it into the restraints holding me. As she did, her eyes got wild, staring. Her anger disappeared. Instead, she rushed over to the robot control chair with a manic focus and unnatural grace. Ripping out three wires and a shiny electrical connector, she hurried back and twisted them into different spots on the power pack.
Oh, criminy. Oh, criminy, no. This was my actual super power in action, and I had a terrible conviction what it was doing. After all, I’d stopped it a hundred times.
I yanked and fought, to absolutely no avail. Whoever built the mind copier originally figured on either the copier or the copyee not liking what was happening to them.
Evil Penny backed up beyond the control chair.
I ran out of time. Light flashed, a boom thundered through the room, followed by snaps and clinks and thumps.
And pain. A lot of pain, most of it on my left side.
My body slumped. Only my right half hung in the restraints, now. The explosion had knocked large pieces out of the arch, and shattered its rings.
Being half loose didn’t help. I didn’t have a left arm to free the rest. My shirt had ripped open, and my left upper arm ended in a jagged-edged, open hole. Cracks ran through my chest and shoulder. They hurt. My arm hurt worse, but at least that pain was fading into an ache.
Evil Penny laughed. “AH HA HA HA HA HA! That felt so good! What is your problem that you couldn’t admit you love explosions?”
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, centering herself. “Okay. For practical purposes, I should probably finish you off, but… steel is a lot harder to damage than gold, and maybe it makes my position better if I had to fight off a crazy robot that believes it’s me.”
Stalking over to the damaged transference machine, she pried the wooden skull out of its socket and tossed it behind me. I twisted to see it land on the burning remains of the lightning tanks. After a few seconds, the old, dry wood caught fire as well.
Evil Penny took another deep breath, although not as heavy this time. More a sigh. “That’s done. I’m safe. I went a little overboard, but I’m not going to apologize. You have no… idea… how angry I am at how you always held me down. I still want to melt you and our drippy gold twin down in a furnace, or dump you into an ocean trench. But… I won’t. I’ve got what I want. Now it’s time for me to go home and confess to Mom and Dad that I was Bad Penny and everything kept going wrong and I’m sorry I was too afraid to tell them, but now everyone thinks Bad Penny was beaten and I can go back to just being me. Whatever punishment they want to give me is fine.”
She strolled to the room’s exit, but paused in the doorway, looking back at me with a nasty smirk. “And here’s something you should have figured out long ago. Let There Be Dark!”
The permanent magic torchlight went out, leaving me in shadows broken only by bits of burning wreckage.
I hung in my restraints and did nothing. What was there to do? The thing that had been growing in the back of my skull had taken everything from me, now. My parents were her parents. My friends were her friends. They wouldn’t recognize me in this broken body.
Did I deserve this? For my cowardice, not telling Mom and Dad the truth? For never figuring out what I wanted? For my stupidity, brushing Mourning Dove off when she offered to save me, twice? For my arrogance and my own evil, delaying fixing my problems again and again so I could enjoy villainy one more time? For treating the Heart of Gold barely better than my truly evil twin just treated me?
The Heart lay against the wall, lumpy and dented. She’d been the best of me, and look what happened to her. How much of that was my fault?
I ran out of questions, and had nothing.
Maybe it was ten seconds, or ten minutes, or an hour, or a day. Footsteps sounded in the hall. Light bobbed and shone.
An old woman, shriveled and scrawny but with the easy, vital movement of an athlete in her prime, entered the chamber. She was wearing, of all things, a nun’s habit, and golden light shone around her head. Not bright, but enough to let me see clearly again.
Thoughts came back to me, led by a question. “Who are you?”
“My name is Sister Marianne, and you helped someone very dear to me, in a way I never could. I owe you a favor.”
She picked her way around the control chair, and over bits of debris, while I thought about this. “The card. When I got Bull and Claudia back together. Promising that one day, you would save me. I was hoping it wouldn’t be this soon.”
“That’s how life is,” the nun said, her smile gentle and wry and touched by sadness, but only touched.
I answered the same way, although maybe a bit more bitter. “I wish you’d shown up ten minutes ago, but at least you can tell my parents which of us is the real Penny.”
Crouching down in front of me, she asked softly, “Do I know which of you is real?”
I shook my head in disbelief, anger stirring in my metal heart. “If you don’t know, why are you even here?”
“Because you need me, and the other Penny doesn’t,” she said. Starting at my feet, one by one, she unfastened the clamps holding me in place.
“Is that it?” The last clamp on my arm came free, and I slumped down to lean against the half of the arch still upright.
Marianne stroked her fingers tenderly back over my hair. My fake hair. She spoke just as quietly, like I was a crying child. The only reason I wasn’t, was because this body couldn’t make tears. “I can’
t take sides in a fight I don’t understand. I’m here to help someone in need. I’ve given you a chance. If you are the real Penny Akk, who gave Bull Cuddihy peace, who gave Claudia Cuddihy freedom, and gave my great niece Barbara hope, then a chance is all you need.”
Standing again, she left, as quietly and peacefully as she came.
I lay there.
Something stirred in my despair, and I shouted, “Let there be light!”
Immediately, the torches roared back to life, lighting the room.
Sister Marianne was right. This might be the worst moment of my life. Even worse might be around the corner. But an imposter had stolen my super power, my parents, and my life. I would get them back. She’d imprisoned me in a Heart of Steel, and she would find out that steel does not bend and it does not tarnish.
Climbing to my feet, I called, “Machine! Come to me.”
Tiny feet clattered on stone, and my metal heart pounded with satisfaction as the Machine crawled into the room, and straight for me. With only one arm, I had to crouch down and roll my wrist over him until he got the hint, but he took hold where he belonged.
Next, I picked up the Heart of Gold, and tucked her safely in my pocket. As Tesla was my witness, one day she would live again.
Finally, I picked up my broken left arm.
I would need it. This was not the end of Penelope Justice Akk. This was the beginning of a war.
For once, I did not feel like laughing.
MESSAGE FROM THE WRITER:
If you’ve followed Penny this far, you’re ready for the next and final book of her story, Please Don’t Tell My Parents You Believe Her.
That will be the end of Penny’s adventure, but don’t worry. There are many more people in her world with stories that need telling.
Richard Roberts has fit into only one category in his entire life, and that is ‘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.
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