American Hero - George R. R. Martin Page 0,62

we all had to drive to the secret location with bags over our heads. It was really boring, especially because Haley spent the whole time talking about how the bag was going to mess up her hair.

So we get to the secret place, and we take off the bags, and there’s this whole subdivision that’s in the process of being destroyed.

I’ve been really impressed by the technical crew, with all the robots and flames and so on that they’ve created for the challenges, but this one was really mind-blowing. It was like a little part of the suburbs got hit all at once by forest fires, mudslides, and an earthquake. They had everything in the mix but a hurricane. And of course there were people screaming and wanting to be rescued.

So the Candle and I get to work. We don’t even have to talk, we’re so totally in synch. He starts freezing things and building slides to escape on and building up bulwarks under buildings that are about to topple.

Right in the middle of all this is Peony the Pelican, scooping people up with her bill and flying them to safety. Some of the people were actually stunt people, and others, in the real dangerous places, were dummies.

Haley is there too, floating overhead being nearly weightless. For the most part she was just a cheerleader, though John and I let her think we were following her instructions while it was perfectly obvious what needed to be done.

It isn’t Haley’s fault that her power was pretty useless for the challenge. But I don’t think she’s going to be the American Hero with just the power to change her weight. If she could affect gravity outside herself, maybe that would be a useful power, but she doesn’t have it.

Everything went great until one of the houses began to slide off the cliff. John froze the mud underneath it with his blue fire, but the house was still going over, so saving it was up to me. Peony the Pelican isn’t a heavy lifter. She just isn’t built for it. But a dragon’s back is like an arch, and that’s what I used. I threw Puffy toward the house and gave him my power, and he was airborne right away and flying down to the beach. He arched his back and held the house up long enough for John to rescue the people in it.

The trouble now is that I can’t animate Peony again. She’s lying in the middle of the suburb that’s blowing up and falling down, and part of the deal I have with the management here is that I don’t actually personally get involved in anything where I could get hurt, that only my stuffies can be in the action. Because I’m a minor, and they won’t want my parents suing them blind if I get hurt.

So I can’t get to Peony to reanimate her, and now I have to work with Puffy or Mister Slithers. So I choose to stick with Puffy because he’s really strong and he can stomp out fires and knock down obstacles and prop up buildings and walls and things.

The one thing he can’t do is pull people out of buildings, because all he’s got are clawed feet and a mouth full of fangs. So that’s the part where we start to fall behind.

I should have used the centipede. Because that way I could have sent the centipede into that building and located the baby in the crib. Or baby doll, actually. And then I could have told Haley or John or somebody, and they could have pulled the baby out.

But we all missed the baby, and the house burst into flame, and we lost, and it’s my fault.

I was stunned when they told us we’d lost. I thought we’d done incredibly well.

So now we’re in the Discard House. It’s a big house, but as soon as I walked into it, I knew that it was full of angry, miserable, unhappy people who had been living together far too long, and that it was just going to be awful.

People yelling and blaming and complaining. That’s all that happens here.

And of course the first person I see is Cleo. And she’s all so happy to see her darling little girl, and it’s all phony and fake.

I don’t imagine I’m going to see much of the Candle, either, because there are so many grown-up women here. And guys, too, if what I hear about him is real.

So