Days of Future Juniper, Chapter Three

So saying, Flashchasm pointed one finger from the hip of his tunic. A small controlled energy-emission poked a hole in the plywood wall behind Mini-Flash Juniper.

“All you have to do is tell me what you see through it,” Flashchasm explained.

Flashagate was slowly shaking his head in indulgent fondness for his crony, while making no pretence he wasn’t enjoying this too.

For the hole was at waist-height, and Mini-Flash Juniper was going to have to turn her back on these two keen spectators and bend over double before them to peek through it. The very thought of doing so made her want to gather her yellow skirts tight about her.

“You know very well there’s nothing on the other side,” she told the boys quietly.

Their amusement at this was raucous. By now the Special Program girls had wandered over, attracted by the commotion. Everyone was watching.

“I shan’t,” Mini-Flash Juniper said.

“I shan’t!” Flashchasm sang back. “I shan’t, I shan’t!”

“You shall,” Flashagate corrected her. “Someone seems to be forgetting she’s joined the side that’s going to make that the motto for girls across the quadrant. It won’t be ‘I shan’t’ anymore. It’ll be ‘I shall.’ No matter what it is we tell you to do.”

They weren’t like any boys Mini-Flash Juniper had met before. When next she implored them, it was without the least trace of subterfuge.

“What made you hate me like this?” she cried. “What made you hate all of us?”

“Pick one,” was Flashagate’s only reply. “This, or the game.”

Juniper looked back at him and Flashchasm, drawing a deep breath as she did. Within the span of that inhalation, she saw it all.

From the Flashball-ejection apparatus booming overhead and her hands clapping fast around its spherical yellow projectile, the flightless boys floundering below. Thence a quick flitting dash to outstrip Flashagate, because he hadn’t exactly been private about those slow reaction-times, whilst Flashchasm’s shot at the wall had already given away which side he favoured. The match hadn’t even started yet and this hopeless pair had already handed her the means of whittling their confidence away. Of course they’d want to play on, growing more and more desperate in fact, but the home-team would have lost by the time the first visitor-point was scored.

Mini-Flash Juniper released the same breath.

The game would go that way. But she couldn’t do it.

Because Mini-Flash Bumblehub was atrocious at sports.

Most of the Special Program were. It had often struck Mini-Flash Juniper as a difference in her that she was reasonably good.

And although she didn’t know why she was impersonating Mini-Flash Bumblehub here and now, she guessed she’d find out when she was a little bit older, and for now it seemed the thing to do to assume her reasons were going to be valid.

She couldn’t blow her future self’s cover.

Even if that meant the hole in the wall.

Mini-Flash Juniper saw it. Yet everyone was still waiting. The humorless smiling boys, and the wide-eyed girls who thought she was somebody else.

Even a full awareness of the facts didn’t seem to be sufficient to make her do this thing.

There was something in these Intelligentsor visions. It wasn’t that Mini-Flash Juniper was oblivious to it. Besides imparting knowledge, they had helped her in other ways. Teaching her lessons about how to know her friends and enemies for what they were. Forcing her to face her fears. Not to mention giving her the chance to royally smack a loathsome specimen who’d hurt and shamed her before.

And Mini-Flash Juniper agreed that that one in particular had been very therapeutic. She’d felt much better afterwards. But what could she possibly gain from the situation she was in now?

That was the question that kept her where she was, still and breathing, glaring at her horrid hosts.

Because it was all their fault. If they hadn’t said…

Wait.

To whose defence had Mini-Flash Juniper sprung in the first place?

Hadn’t it been the very same friend who’d taught her it wasn’t always the right time to serve out to boys?

Juniper closed her eyes in satisfaction. She had her answer at last.

There was one thing in the galaxy, after all, that she wanted more than to not have to do this. It was to know Neetra would be proud of her.

Suddenly nothing was too much to do.

Mini-Flash Juniper, resolved at last, turned to face the hole and get it over with.

What she turned to see instead was 4-H-N and the room at Flashlab Central where they’d built the portal. Juniper was back in her blue, and you really and truly couldn’t go wrong with Luttertons.

Her eyes flew at once to Mini-Flash Bumblehub, but no such luck.

The classmate Juniper vaguely remembered was in the process of transmuting to one she’d never have been able to forget. Smaller and rounder than Bumblehub, though clad in the same beige tunic and boots, this erstwhile schoolfellow looked at Juniper and 4-H-N through eyes so wise and mysterious as to be of no common sort, even among the Special Program.

“Mini-Flash Meek,” Juniper breathed.

4-H-N scrambled to the security-monitor and called up an image of the recreation lounge. There the real Mini-Flash Bumblehub slumbered, mouth agape and knickers showing, atop a heap of other comatose partygoers. It was obvious she hadn’t stirred since well before dawn. Whipping back around 4-H-N proceeded to do some gaping of her own, as did Juniper. Mini-Flash Meek may have been diminutive, but both girls knew that was so only in the most prosaic sense.

Their unexpected visitor stared meaningfully back. Upon her lips she placed a finger.

And then, in the way Mini-Flash Meek did so well, vanished clean away.

THE END