Well, so what? I thought. They were just boring kids, stuck on the ground, doing homework. With bedtimes and a million grown-ups telling them what to do, how to do everything, all the time. Alarm clocks and school and afternoon jobs. Those poor saps. While we were free, free, free. Soaring through the air like rockets. Being cradled by breezes. Doing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted.
Pretty good, huh? I almost convinced myself.
I glanced down again and refocused. Then I scowled. What had, at first glance, looked like just a bunch of boring, earthbound kids schlepping to school together now turned, upon closer examination, into what looked like several big kids surrounding a much smaller kid. Okay, maybe I’m paranoid, danger everywhere, but I could swear the bigger kids looked really threatening.
The bigger kids were boys. The smaller kid in the middle was a girl.
Coincidence? I think not.
Don’t even get me started about the whole Y chromosome thing. I live with three guys, remember? They’re three of the good ones, and they’re still obnoxious as all get-out.
I made one of my famous snap decisions, the kind that everyone remembers later for being either the stupidest dumb-butt thing they ever saw or else the miraculous saving of the day. I seemed to hear more about the first kind. That’s gratitude for you.
I turned to Fang and barely opened my mouth.
“No,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. I opened my mouth again.
“No.”
“Meet me at the northernmost point of Lake Mead,” I said.
“What? What are you talking about?” Nudge asked. “Are we stopping? I’m hungry again.”
“Max wants to go be Supergirl, defender of the weak,” Fang said, sounding irritated.
“Oh.” Nudge looked down, frowning at the ground as if it would all become clear soon.
I had started a wide circle that would take me back toward the girl below. I kept thinking, What if that girl was in trouble, like Angel, and no one stopped to help her?
“Oh! Max, remember when you got that little rabbit away from the fox, and we kept it in a carton in the kitchen, and then when it was well you let it go? That was cool.” Nudge paused. “Did you see another rabbit?”
“Kind of,” I said, my patience starting to wear thin. “It’ll take two seconds.”
I told Fang, “I’ll catch up with you guys before you’ve gone forty miles. Just keep on course, and if anything weird happens, I’ll meet you at Lake Mead.”
Fang stared ahead, the wind whipping through his hair. He hated this, I knew.
Well, you can’t please everybody all the time.
“Okay,” I said briskly. “See you in a few.”
20
The thing about Iggy was, well, sometimes he could figure stuff out like a real scientist. He was that supersmart, scary smart.
“Do we have any chlorine?” the Gasman asked Iggy. “It seems to be kind of explosive when mixed with other stuff.”
Iggy frowned. “Like what, your socks? No, we don’t have chlorine. No swimming pool. What color is this wire?”
The Gasman leaned over and examined the tangled pile of stereo guts spread out on the kitchen table. “It looks like a robot came in here and threw up,” he observed. “That wire’s yellow.”
“Okay. Keep track of the yellow wire. Very important. Do not confuse it with the red one.”
The Gasman consulted the schematics he had downloaded off the Internet. This morning Iggy had unfrozen the compressor fan inside the CPU, so the computer now worked without shutting down in hysteria every ten minutes. He had just fixed the computer, presto change-o.
“Okey dokey,” Gazzy muttered, flipping through pages. “Next step, we need some kind of timing device.”