“Hi.” I held out my hand for Gwendolyn’s, and she took it. She wasn’t expecting to move, but I pulled her up, plopped myself in the chair and brought her down onto my lap. She looked nervous but didn’t move off of me.
“This okay?” I asked, just to confirm, and she nodded yes.
“Great, another couple,” the rocker kid on the opposite side of the room groaned, and I wanted to laugh at his theatrics.
“Well, if Lilith would stop crashing all your dates, you’d be one of us, A.J.,” sad Echo, the raven-haired Native American woman who could change into animals. The man next to her—Asher was his name, if I remembered correctly—grinned at his woman and wrapped his arms around her. There was a lot of love in this room.
“The first girl that doesn’t run away from me can have him.” Lilith was grinning then stuck out her tongue at Echo. The women in this room were something else. I was curious what Gwendolyn thought of them.
“Let’s get down to business, shall we?” Phillip stood and lifted a remote toward the TV. We were looking at some sort of map of Seahill, but the bay was red- and orange-colored.
“What’s going on?” Rose asked, while looking through the paperwork in the folder.
Phillip looked like he always did, a blond-haired pretty boy—the puppet master of the world.
“The colors on the map show the levels of toxicity in the bay. There are high levels of a dangerous algae. There were also traces of the toxins at the water plant last night that had rusted the doors of the emergency shut-off room. Arthur did containment work, but evidence shows whatever is happening with our water is not good. There is a chance it could spread, and once it gets out of the bay and into the Pacific there will be no containment. People are getting sick—even the air around the water is causing respiratory issues. Take care of everything else in the city, but this needs to become a priority. We have to fix this before it destroys our planet.” He looked around, and the whole room was quiet.
The information on the screen and in the folder, wasn’t good.
“Any idea where the toxins are coming from?” Echo went into cop mode, asking questions for everyone to hear.
“No. The results from testing showed high levels of nitrogen, phosphates, and potassium—common in fertilizers, which would explain the bloom in algae. The rivers are partially frozen, so they haven’t been able to tell from their samples if the toxins are coming from inland, although from the map you can see it’s especially red by the mouth of the Hatcher River. Could be something to investigate. I have my people at Griffin Enterprises looking into the chemical aspects, but this requires more. Arthur and Gwendolyn, I’m putting you guys on this. Echo, Asher, use your gifts to sniff out what you can from nature.”
We were getting delegated, and for a moment I felt proud of myself for being here. I’d taken a stand with them before, and now I would be doing it again.
“Everyone else, keep your eyes open and your communicators on. That’s the big bad news; now onto the good news. If you guys successfully save our planet again, then we will be having another Hero Society wedding.” He looked at the girl sitting in the unicorn onesie, who just winked then flashed a blindingly big diamond on her left hand.
Everyone hooted and hoorayed. I guess we needed to solve this water problem so I could dance with my woman at a wedding. I side-eyed Gwendolyn to see what she was making of all this noise, and my heart warmed at her smile. She was happy for them, her little hero family.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gwendolyn
“I can’t believe you just build these complex robots in one night. You’re a fucking genius,” Arthur exclaimed as we walked along the bank of the Hatcher River.
“It comes easy to me. There is already stuff like this made, though. I just added my own thing to it.” Even though comments like his come my way often, I still didn’t know what to do with them. To me, making robots was fun. I liked coming up with ideas and figuring out how to make it work. My power of metal manipulation made it easier. I didn’t need a lot of tools or equipment to make my ideas into reality.
“You made a freaking fish cam. Gwendolyn, that’s amazing.”
I just gave him a simple smile as my thanks. I watched on the remote screen as my little robot fish swam up the river, looking for anything suspicious.
So far, we’d found most of the life in the water was dead. Only a few live fish were swimming around instead of the normal schools. Something was killing the life in the water, and the plants on the banks were showing brown in their foliage.
“Poor fish.” I felt bad for them. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t their fault.
“I think I see something ahead. Like a building.”
I looked up to where he was pointing and could just barely make out what he was seeing. Maybe it was a building. We’d been walking for an hour and a half—about time we ran into something. But it was odd to have a random building in the woods.
The closer we got, the more I could make out. It wasn’t just a building. It was a large, warehouse-sized building directly over the river and allowing the water to flow through. Somehow, I doubted that was approved by the EPA.
“Let’s check it out,” Arthur said, a little quieter this time. In case there were people around, maybe?
“I don’t think so. I mean, we have no clue what’s in there.”
“That’s why we need to check it out, see if we can figure out what the deal is.” He made a valid point, but there were a lot of unknown variables here.
But I followed him on, still pushing my robot fish forward to get a look inside the building. We stopped walking and stayed behind a tree close to a six-foot fence that surrounded the open property.
There were two men at the security gate about twenty yards away from us.
What was going on here?
Looking back down at my fish, I knew I needed it to be a little stealthier for this mission inside the building. On the screen I saw an opening where a small section of the river flowed through the building. The color of the water changed to a dark brown as I neared the opening. It was hard to see with the camera, almost as if someone had dumped coffee in the water.
“What the hell?” Arthur was now looking at the screen with me. It was odd for sure.
My little fish made it through the opening, and I shifted it to look up to what was above the water. Bright lights, very bright lights.
“You didn’t happen to give your fish legs, did you?”
I shook my head. That would have been nice, but I didn’t. We’d have to see what we could in fish form. I didn’t see anyone right by my robot, so I brought it to the concrete edge they’d created and pulled up on the knob slowly.
The fish cam became clearer as it slowly rose out of the water to look around.
“It looks like a garden.” An obvious observation, but I was confused as to why that was there, and the need for it to be guarded like it was. So many new questions were rolling through my head.
Two men were walking over to a tree that seemed to be dead.
“Did you put a microphone in this thing, by chance?”
I shook my head. If I would have known that I would have been spying on people instead of just being in the river, I would have made it more into a ninja spy fish instead of a normal robot trout.