Steampunk! Part 21

"Uh . . . yeah." I shake my head. "Let's get out of here."

We sit under some dying trees by a chain-link fence. Sc.r.a.ps of rubbish have blown among the roots, and the earth feels damp. I spread my sweatshirt out for her to sit on so she won't get wet. For a moment she hesitates, looking at the sweatshirt and then at me. No one's ever looked at me like that before. Her eyes wide open and her lips not quite closed. Her neck is slowly turning pink.

"Thank you," she says, and smiles.

We share my lunch, as usual. I have some chocolate cake from Dad's birthday, and she carefully eats half before handing me the rest. Then she leans back on the tree while I flick through her notebook. When I reach the picture from Venus with the green jungle and the black smoke, I hold it up.

"So . . ." I say. "You were going to tell me about this one?"

She swallows, then nods.

"OK," she says. "I guess you've waited long enough.

"The rising smoke came from a chimney - from dozens of tall, fat chimneys that loomed over a vast line of buildings, like giant factories and warehouses, made of stone and concrete and iron and tin. There was a gaping hole in the forest, where the trees had been cut and the ground opened up. Huge machines were tearing at the earth, pulling up tons of soil and rock and carrying it into factories. Stacks of tree trunks were piled outside, for fuel, Steam Girl supposed. There were no people to be seen, only thousands of strange gray robots shaped like men, who bustled about among the buildings and machines, like a hive of worker bees.

"When they first saw all this, Princess Lusanna began to cry. Her father's face went dark.

"'Take us down,' he rumbled. 'I would find out who has done this thing.'

"Steam Girl and her father, along with the king and three of his bravest warriors, landed in the forest about a mile away. They crept to the edge of the clearing and watched as several robots marched stiffly by. The robots carried guns of a kind Steam Girl had never seen before. Steam Girl hated guns more than anything, and she never, ever used them.

"As soon as the robots had gone past, Steam Girl whispered to her father, 'Back in a minute.' And before he could argue, she left their hiding place and ran across the open ground to the nearest building, where she crouched behind a low wall of crates and then slipped in through the door.

"It was a factory, all right. There were machines and conveyor belts and cables and tubes. There were workers, too - hundreds of robots, pulling levers and turning cranks and carrying wood to the giant furnace at one end of the room. She noticed more robots lying half a.s.sembled on the conveyor belts, and guessed that's what the factory was for. Robots building more robots.

"But that was only part of it. There were other production lines, too, making machines she'd never seen or even heard of. Heavy iron engines that smelled of fire and oil - some with wings and some with wheels. Ugly big guns and bombs with fins like sharks. There were boxes and tools made of a strange artificial material - unnaturally smooth, light, and dull. And flat gla.s.s screens like empty mirrors, and long snaking rubber-coated wires that hung around the room and over the floor.

"Steam Girl's head was spinning, but she was determined to solve the mystery of this infernal factory. As quietly as she could, she made her way across the factory floor, ducking from woodpile to conveyor belt, avoiding the robots and looking for clues.

"Near the middle of the room was a raised platform with a commanding view of the whole operation. There was no one there - just a desk and two chairs, a vase of bright-pink flowers, and one of those curious machines with row upon row of b.u.t.tons and a blank gla.s.s screen. And all over the desk - the chairs, the floor - stood piles of paper, covered with printed text and diagrams and handwritten notes. Quickly and carefully, Steam Girl crept to the edge of the platform and glanced around to see if she had been noticed. Then she reached up to the desk and s.n.a.t.c.hed an armload of paper.

"A high-pitched scream filled the air, cutting through the constant roar of the factory. Robots looked up from their work and stared at the platform where Steam Girl crouched clutching her stolen papers.

"'Shrieking Vines,' she muttered, realizing too late that the vase on the desk wasn't merely decorative.

"Then she jumped to her feet and ran as fast as she could - leaping over conveyor belts and darting between the quickly converging robots - until finally she was out the door and sprinting for the cover of the jungle. Behind her shots rang out, louder and faster than any firearms she knew of. The ground around her feet spat up fistfuls of dirt. But somehow she made it to the trees unharmed.

"'Run!' she yelled, and her father and the Martians took off through the forest, with bullets splintering trees and cutting leaves to ribbons all around them. But Steam Girl paused a moment to catch her breath, then reached down to her belt and pulled out a gadget she'd never tried before."

"Ha! I know what's coming next!" I cry, interrupting her story.

"Do you?" she says, looking at me sideways from behind her gla.s.ses.

"Sure." I grin, slipping off the wall and crossing my arms. "It's gadget time! So what is it today? A Steam-Driven Instantaneous Escape Facilitator? Oversize Extendible Robot-Neutralizing Punching Arms? A Rocket-Powered Jet Pack Flying Machine?"

She stares at me for a moment and then laughs so hard, she gets the hiccups. I can't stop smiling, especially when she wipes her eyes and puts her hand on my shoulder.

"You're OK," she says. "I think we'll get along just fine."

I can feel my face blushing, but she's already turned away to dig through her bag. When she straightens up, she's holding what looks like a rusty tin can with a string at one end.

"Huh?" I say. "Is that it? Doesn't look like much -"

Then she points one end of the can at me and pulls the string. There's a loud COUGH! and the air fills with steam and something damp and heavy hits me full in the face. I yelp and trip over backward, and then it's like someone's tossed a wet fishing net all over me. I wave my arms and legs around and just get more and more caught. I can hear her laughing again, even harder than before, but it doesn't seem very funny to me.

"GET ME OUT OF HERE!" I shout at the top of my lungs. "G.o.d d.a.m.n IT! IT'S HORRIBLE!"

She eventually manages to stop laughing long enough to try to free me but without much success. The net's so sticky, it gets all over her, too, and soon we're both caught in a big gooey mess of strings and glue and soot and each other.

There's a moment when I suddenly realize I'm lying on top of her, my face pressed against her neck. She has one arm around my back and a hand on my cheek. And at exactly the same time we both stop struggling and lie there in silence.

Her soft white skin is slowly turning pink.

At last we get ourselves out, and as we sit on the dusty concrete, picking bits of sticky web out of our hair and off our clothes, she tells me the rest of the story.

"The Web-Weaving Tangle Trap caught the first wave of pursuing robots," she says, "giving Steam Girl and her friends enough time to get back to the airship and safety. They rose up into the sky with gunfire rattling at them from below.

"The king was elated. 'What an adventure!' he said with a laugh.

"Princess Lusanna was so excited, she quite forgot herself, throwing her arms around Steam Girl's father and giving him a big kiss. The king laughed even harder at that, until the princess turned the brightest red anyone had ever seen and ran off to her cabin."

I close my eyes then, picturing the scene. If I'd been there, I'd have kissed Steam Girl. She'd have laughed, with a low, throaty giggle. Perhaps her breath would quicken, and her throat would turn pink, and I'd have to swallow very hard before I could speak. . . .

But when I open my eyes again, she isn't smiling or blushing. She isn't even looking at me, but at the thin brown gra.s.s that's forced its way through the asphalt.

"And what about Steam Girl?" I ask. "What did she do?"

She glances up and our eyes meet. She looks so sad.

"She - well, after all that running, I guess she was tired." She sighs. "So she went to take a rest in her hammock. But as she took off her jacket, something fell out of the pocket and spilled across the floor. The papers she'd s.n.a.t.c.hed. What with getting shot at and everything, she'd completely forgotten about them till now.

"So she leaped up and spread the papers out across the floor. To her surprise, they were in English. There were maps of Venus, Mars, and Earth; lists of equipment; and plans of attack. With a rising sense of panic, Steam Girl realized they could mean only one thing: all those robots and weapons and fighting machines were being prepared as an army of conquest.

"Reading on, she found ominous references to some kind of superbomb, able to destroy whole cities in a single awful flash; poisonous gas that could kill an army in minutes; and even man-made plagues for releasing into a population's water supply or the air they breathed. It was unimaginable, inhuman, horrible. . . .

"It was a plan for the end of the world."

On the way back to cla.s.s, she's quiet. But I'm buzzing.

"So what happened?" I say, dancing around her as we walk. "Did Steam Girl show the papers to her father? And then did they -?"

"No," she says quietly.

"What? She didn't show him the papers? How come?"

She hesitates a moment, as if trying to decide whether to tell me what comes next.

"There was one more thing," she says at last. "On one of the papers. On the back, written in pencil, over and over."

I wait, but she seems to have stopped talking, and we're almost at her cla.s.sroom.

"What was it?" I stand in front of the door. "Come on, you have to tell me! Or I won't let you go to math."

She gives me a withering look. "All right, I'll tell you. But . . ."

"But what?" I'm desperate. The second bell is about to ring.

"Never mind," she says. "It was a name. Her father's name. His full name - Professor Archibald James Patterson Swift. Again and again."

"Whoooa!" I breathe. "So - what? Was he behind the factory? Did he have, like, a secret life where he slipped off to Venus and planned the destruction of Earth?"

"Don't be stupid," she hisses.

"It would be a good twist, though, wouldn't it?" I say. "Y'know, the heroine's father turns out to be the villain -"

"It wasn't him," she repeats, more firmly this time. "He's a good man, who'd never do anything rotten like that. No matter what people say about him."

"Why? What do people say about him?" Now I'm confused. Does the father have secrets, after all?

But the second bell rings and she pushes past me into the cla.s.sroom and closes the door behind her.

She isn't at school the next day, or the day after that. I look for her everywhere, but she isn't in cla.s.s, or by the incinerator or even in the library. By Thursday I've slipped back into my old routine, eating lunch by myself and catching up on homework.

Mrs. Hendricks has given us a new a.s.signment: write a short story in the first person, present tense. I sit in the cla.s.sroom trying to ignore Michael Carmichael and come up with an idea, but all I can think of is Steam Girl, and that's her story, not mine.

So I start writing about a boy who has his own adventures, traveling around the universe in a rocket ship called the Silver Arrow. In my story he flies to Saturn, which is like a huge ocean of poisonous gases, so the natives all live in cities they've built on the rings high above the planet's surface. When Rocket Boy (that's what I call him) lands on the first ring, he sees this huge hairy monster chasing a frightened girl. So he makes a really loud noise with his rocket's engines and scares the monster away. The girl, who turns out to be the princess of Saturn, is so grateful, she throws her arms around him and kisses him on the lips, blushing pink on her cheeks and on her long pale neck, her heaving b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed against his chest. . . .

But then I stop, because I know what Mrs. Hendricks would say. She hates it if we write something like "heaving b.r.e.a.s.t.s." She calls it a cliche and says we should write about things that are real. Which makes me want to say, "I don't like writing what's real, because mostly what's real is boring and sucks." But I don't say that. I just nod and say nothing.

Anyway, this time it is real, because that's what this girl is like. I know, because I based her on Steam Girl, who definitely does have heaving b.r.e.a.s.t.s and long, lithe legs and all that stuff. Well, the Steam Girl in the notebook, at least. The real one has heaving b.r.e.a.s.t.s, too, come to think of it, but also heaving shoulders and a heaving stomach and heaving thighs and b.u.m. She's all about the heaving. And the weird thing is I don't mind at all. I'm even starting to like it.

So when she finally reappears on Friday, I nervously show her Rocket Boy. I've even done some drawings of him and the princess, but they look pretty stupid compared to hers. I'm worried she'll say it's lousy, but instead she gives it back without saying much at all. "Great," she says, sounding distracted. I don't think she's even read it.

"How come you weren't at school?" I say, a little disappointed.

But she doesn't answer my question. "Did I miss much?"

I tell her about the short-story a.s.signment, which is due in a week.

"You should do Steam Girl," I say.

She looks at me like I'm stupid. "That's not for teachers," she says.

"What do you mean?" I ask. But I already kind of know.

"All they want to read about is miserable people living stupid, boring lives. Unhappy families, unrequited love - all that c.r.a.p." She grimaces. "And the worst thing is . . . none of it's real."

"Sorry," I say. "I didn't mean - it's just - well, I think Steam Girl is great. Really totally awesome. I swear, if you typed it all up and got it published, you could be a millionaire."

She stares at me for a long time. I can feel my cheeks starting to burn.

"Listen," she says at last. "I don't care about being a millionaire or Mrs. Hendricks or English grades or school or any of that stuff. All of that means nothing."

"OK," I say.

"All I care about is this." She brandishes her notebook like a weapon. "This is all that matters. All that's real."

This time I don't say anything.

She hesitates for a moment, her eyes slipping away from mine and drifting across the concrete and the garbage and the thin, sickly trees. Then she turns and walks away.

That afternoon in biology, Amanda Anderson comes over and says, "Hi."

I almost choke. "Uh . . . hi," I say.

"You're pretty tight with the new girl, right?" she says. "That weird girl with the hat?"

"Flying helmet," I say, and immediately regret it.

"What?" She looks at me like I've just started speaking Mongolian.

"It's not a hat." I've lost all control of my mouth. "It's a flying helmet. Like pilots wear. Apparently . . ." I trail off lamely.

"Well, whatever," she says. "So what's her deal? Is she one of those creepy cosplayers or something?"

"I don't know," I say, which is true. "She's good at drawing. And she tells amazing stories."

"Huh." Amanda frowns. "What kind of stories?"

"Um . . ."

I'm not sure how much to explain. I mean, Amanda is the Shrieking Vine of Venus, right? She's already caused one black eye. What if she's just pumping me for intel to pa.s.s on to Michael?

But I was friends with her once, and I want to believe she's a decent person. It's not her fault the whole Barbie thing got out of hand. Or that her boyfriend is a creep. Maybe she's genuinely trying to understand. Maybe she wants to patch things up. Maybe I still have a chance.

"They're about this character called Steam Girl," I say at last.

"Steam Girl?" She screws up her face.

"Yeah. She has adventures . . . on Mars and stuff."

"G.o.d, how lame," Amanda says.

I feel bad that in my mouth it does sound lame. It's like a betrayal.

"Does she ever take off that stupid hat?" Amanda says.

"I dunno," I say. "Not that I've seen."