4-H-N On The Trail, Chapter Three

4-H-N kicked out of her stand and scorched the supermarket tiles, as swirling turbid liquid swallowed potent particles and summarily swelled to a greyish-white mountain rising above the stacks. Yorkshire puddings had hit the quadrant in a big way, and from a retail perspective the only problem was the panic-buyers were racing for the emergency exit rather than the tills. Soggy vastness heaped itself over aisle-top after aisle-top, while the bloating batter encroached outward as well as up, squeezing every last breath of space from the avenues between. It was so like a nightmare that as 4-H-N Habitrailed ahead she began to think she’d fallen asleep in front of the telly again, watching either a Katsuhiro Otomo film or Delia Smith.

Moltron mustered all his might to shuck off the residue which by now was greater than himself. His familiar smooth-sided figure heaved free upon the monstrous mound.

Getting a bit much, this. He’d only come in for some water.

The roof was near, and mostly skylight. Seizing one of the ceiling-beams Moltron shattered a path and swung out upon the night, where advertising blimps bumped directly overhead. Those were his stepping-stones to altitudes from which he might jet in fluid form what distance remained to a passing ship and hitch a ride clear of this chaos. Far below, 4-H-N skidded through the sliding doors and screeched to an about-face as she spied her objective scaling first the rope and then the air-bag.

Not on her watch. And not when firewood was just to her left.

In an instant she was pounding again, and logs tumbled from their tidy outdoor stack to vanish into the mouth of her funnel, then fly skyward as a hail of splinter-shards which shredded the barrage-balloon. It sagged, taking Moltron with it and pulling free of its moorings. The last of its gas carried it over the car-park like a swift scudding cloud, bound to settle heavily on the industrial estate across the highway. 4-H-N gave chase, using a stationary hover-truck as a ramp to jump four busy lanes of skimming space-cars. She hit the ground rolling and retracted the wheel, collapsing it again to a backpack and letting her legs maintain the pace. A mighty crumpling din sounded out as the blimp came to rest, its canvas hide speared by ruined bits of steel which held it a precarious hammock high between flat warehouse roofs.

Residual wisps of propellant had sparked a steady blaze. Moltron fought his way out of the burning deflated wreck, as 4-H-N clattered and clanked her way up the fire-escape to face him.

Only by that time, he already wasn’t there.

His body was, but Moltron’s gaze, never the sharpest nor the most incisive even at the best of times, had fixed itself on a perspective light-years beyond 4-H-N.

Atop the watch-tower, adjacent to her, another girl stood.

She wore an Earth-style school uniform, and was busily smelling of chocolate cake.

The ruin creaked and swayed. 4-H-N hoped this wasn’t going to take long, because that was starting to look like time she didn’t have.

“His mind is too tiny for truth to hide,” Mini-Flash Pseudangelos pronounced at last. “There is nothing here of your knickers, 4-H-N, nor of sonic showers, nor clandestine circles of boys. Indeed, the only boy of any recentness I find is the male Mini-Flash at Target Harbour.”

The last words were the two that did it. 4-H-N whipped round to stare on the tower-top.

“Target Harbour?” she cried.

Sue nodded confirmation, as one who’d just reread a line of text. “The boy who hired him,” said she. “The boy who paid him there and departed. The boy who stole your ship.”

With a catastrophic tearing rend the fallen zeppelin gave it up, dragging half of two crumbling warehouses along with it. Sue disappeared as quickly as her smellsake at an overattended birthday party, while Moltron snapped out of his trance and handled the situation as he’d done hundreds of others before. From her new craggy precipice 4-H-N watched his muscular body summarily melt amidst plummeting rubble below, to seek out the nearest storm-drain and be borne safely far from her reach.

Not that he even mattered anymore. That was what 4-H-N had been left to grapple with, on a roof surrounded by collateral damage and flickering flame.

Because she’d known.

She’d known from the start. None of what she’d learned to the contrary, from Auntie Green to Flashfrond, had made sense. Now all of a sudden, everything did.

4-H-N had been right all along.

And she knew who the boy at Target Harbour was.

END OF CHAPTER THREE