Her Majesty shrugged. “It runs. And the brakes must work, or I’d have hit you. What more do you need?” Her rough, gravelly voice echoed from within the helmet, quietly mocking. “Now let’s roll. Places to go, children to deliver, paychecks to earn.”
My hesitation, surprisingly, had little to do with the car. I hadn’t had much to eat or drink the previous day, but even so… “I have to take a leak.”
“So what’s stopping you?” That yellow face kept smiling away. “The world is your toilet.”
I wasn’t going to admit that I’d never been out of Bakersfield before and that the idea of finding a tree to piss on was as foreign as… well, sleeping around a campfire a few hundred feet away from fresh corpses. I was halfway convinced that the moment I took my dick out, some snake was going to leap out of nowhere and try to bite it.
Thankfully, we seemed to be in a snake-free zone that morning. Maybe Smiley had murdered them all before going to find the car. I zipped up my jeans and limped back to the road, feeling every ache and scrape I’d picked up the previous night.
Her Majesty nodded to the backseat, where she’d already loaded her saddlebags and the mangled remains of the electric motorcycle. “Grab a change of clothes from your bag while you’re at it. Pretty sure your precious Academy has rules against showing up in bloody clothes.”
“You didn’t go there, I take it?” Anyone rated Cat Three or above was supposed to, but I had a hard time seeing Smiley in superhero school.
“Academy’s for Capes. You see any Capes around here?”
I admitted that I didn’t and climbed up to dig through the saddlebags for my own small pack. I pulled out one of my two remaining shirts and, conscious of her unseen gaze, swapped it for what I was wearing.
She pointed at my jeans, which had been torn in half a dozen places when I was thrown from the bike. “Pants too. Can’t imagine the Academy wants to see your chicken legs any more than I do.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I felt my cheeks flush. It was bad enough that Jeremy had more or less counted my ribs, I didn’t want Her Majesty knowing I only had the one pair of jeans. “You and the Academy can suck it up.”
“Fair enough.” That smile seemed amused now. “If you want to walk around school with your sweet little ass hanging out for the world to see, that’s your business, kid.”
Since leaving Mama Rawlins’, I’d been out of my depth and mainly focused on not dying, but her vaguely condescending tone sparked some of the anger that had gotten me all those years at the orphanage. I glared at her yellow, cheerful face. “I’m not a kid, Your Majesty.”
“Seems to me you passed up the chance to prove that last night.” Her amusement seemed to have only deepened.
“Seems to me,” I parroted, not wanting her to know that I’d been kicking myself over that very decision most of the night, “that you’d have murdered me if I did anything else.”
“I guess that would have depended on your performance, kid.” She didn’t move at all, but I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the way her pants clung to the twin curves of her hips and inner thighs. “Maybe I’d have eaten you alive,” she added, “or maybe a whole different kind of eating would have taken place.”
The good news is, I wasn’t blushing anymore… but only because all my blood was elsewhere, and I was hard as a rock. I swallowed twice, my mouth suddenly dry, and tried for a casual tone. “I don’t have to be at the Academy before tonight…”
Smiley’s laugh was sharp, loud, and vaguely metallic. “You had your chance. Post-battle horniness is over, and with it any chance of me jumping your skinny bones. Now put some fresh-fucking-pants on. If I see even a hint of penis, I’m cutting it off.”
The organ in question deflated like one of those balloons you see in birthday parties on vids. If it hadn’t been attached to my body, it might have even made a desperate dash for safety. As blood fled to safer regions, I found myself embarrassed all over again.
“These are the only pants I have,” I finally admitted.
Her Majesty stopped dead. After a very long and uncomfortable moment, she shook her head, muttering something under her breath. Then she shrugged. “Well, unless you’re packing a peanut, nothing I have is gonna fit you. I guess you’ll have to go as you are.” Her voice regained its smile. “I always wanted to moon the Academy… just never thought I’d find a Crow to do it for me.”
•—•—•
Los Angeles was exactly like it appeared in the vids… and nothing like it. The skyline was instantly recognizable—gleaming towers rising to dizzying heights as if they were trying to touch the sky—but the cameras hadn’t captured the sprawl that lay beneath; concrete and metal and glass and dirt in every conceivable direction. It took us three hours to reach that mess, and then another two hours to get to our destination.
Part of that was the traffic. There still weren’t many cars on the road, but bikes—from electric motorcycles to human-powered bicycles—were everywhere. Part of it was the fact that the tunnel we needed to take had been shut down as a result of some sort of battle the previous week. But most of it was just that the city was fucking huge.
Seen up close, Los Angeles was kind of a
