Page 50 of Goblins Don't Count
“More careless, but not better. If you weren’t cautious, I wouldn’t suggest these.”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “I’m not cautious, or I wouldn’t be a police officer.”
“It was a compliment. Caution means thinking before acting. If you were an impetuous officer, you would have gotten yourself killed long ago.”
I looked down at those vines and shifted my weight slightly, feeling it respond to me, like it was learning my movements. “I did. I died the second I wrote to the Goblin King.”
I leaned forward, and it slowly moved that direction, then when I leaned back, it stopped abruptly, making my body jerk. Okay. This seemed fairly simple. To rise in the air, I pulled my left leg up, tugging on the vines, and the hoverboard followed, tilting until I pulled the other leg up as well, until I was level, three feet from the ground, the same height as Sashimi when I looked up and saw him.
He wasn’t smiling. He nodded, though. “Good. Five more minutes of practicing and then we can take off.”
“Five minutes?” I shook my head. “Maybe five hours.”
“You’re a natural. Also, the boards are linked. I can just have them work together as one unit if you’d like.”
I shook my head and then focused on putting the thing through as many maneuvers as possible. If I or it went out of control, he’d take over. I was determined not to lose control. I still had to figure out how to clean up the mess I’d made at the governor’s ball with my compelling dress. The dress of evil. If only Sashimi had enormous spider bots that could somehow sweep it all away, like he’d taken care of my raccoon.
After five minutes, I looked over at Sashimi, and he gave me a nod. “Shall we? Our second date is bound to be even more momentous than the first.”
I made a face at him. “That’s terrifying. Our first date was momentous enough. People are targeting witches. The sushi shop was attacked by rocks.”
He blinked at me. “Rocks can be very hard.”
“And windows are notoriously weak against hard things.” I sighed heavily, steaming up the screen on my helmet. “Is this going to be another disaster?”
He cocked his head at me, his visor clear so I could see his shadowed face. “If you listen to my sister, dating is always a disaster. At least our dates might help you find murderers.”
I slowly nodded. “That’s true. There’s a purpose to the pain. That’s okay then. Let’s go break into the Courthouse.”
He smiled and then his face mask went black, as did the rest of the garage. A circle of purple appeared high above, and Sashimi led the way, only visible because of the heat sensors that had kicked in on my goggles, so he was an orange blob. I tried not to freak out with everything being dark, and just followed him up to the ceiling, which had opened out, with faint heat lines running along the sides of the tunnel as we entered. We were moving slowly, riding through the shaft until Sashimi’s voice came into my ear, quietly spoken.
“Are you ready to speed up?”
No. But we’d gone deep in the earth and it would take forever for us to regain the surface if we kept going at this pace. “Let’s go.”
He shot off ahead of me, barely visible as a distant orange blob. I crouched down on my disk and rested one hand on the edge. I shot up and then started spinning. I brushed the edge of the tunnel with my shoulder and then hit the opposite side before I yanked the edge and held on, so the disk was sideways as it shot up the tunnel.
Sashimi’s orange blob was getting closer and closer, but I wasn’t sure how to slow down. When I got to him, he flipped his disk to the side and flattened himself to it as I rushed by.
“Very fast for your first time,” he murmured in my helmet.
“Just getting the disaster over with quickly,” I mumbled while I held onto the side for dear life.
“If you relax your grip, it will automatically slow. Also, if you lean back.”
I carefully took off one hand and raised my body slightly, and I did slow so the lines along the side weren’t just one streaming trail, but broke up into dots. I leaned back and adjusted the sphere so it was under me, which made it easier to relax.
“Good,” he said, and then I heard a thunk under my disk as he knocked on it. “I’m right beneath you. The hatch is coming up soon, and you’ll want to slow down even more while I activate the invisibility shields in our suits. I can lead if you’d like, since you might be unfamiliar with navigating through the city’s skyline.”
Was it time to start laughing hysterically? My heart was still racing too fast, but we weren’t turning around now. “Yeah. You can lead. That would be great.” If I could control my speed, he’d have been leading the whole way.
He tipped one edge of my disk down and then passed beside me as we continued through the tunnel, his dark visor nothing but an orange blob veined with lines of red and purple, and then he was above me, my disk once more flat like an elevator that was lifting me instead of sideways like a frisbee. The tunnel opened up, and we came out of a nice grassy field. It was such a relief to be able to see again, even if everything was shadowy and dull in the night. He dropped beside me and brushed my disk with his, so I slowed and shifted direction to horizontal rather than vertical.
“If you stay low, you’ll probably avoid the trees,” he said, crouching on his disk. Then he disappeared, leaving nothing but a blob of orange as the heat sensor kicked back in. I clung to the disk, ducking lower when a tree-branch nearly took my head. We were in a gated park near Lafayette square, surrounded by tall mansions crowded together, probably half a mile from the court house as the bird flew.
The first corner made me nervous, but I moved like I was guiding a board, and the disk reacted the way I hoped. I started relaxing as I followed Sashimi at a relaxed pace, through the streets, above the traffic, invisible to everyone. When we got to the block the court house was on, Sashimi said, “We’ll put on more speed until we vault ourselves up to the top. Ready?”
“Of course. I was born ready.”
