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Mitzi McNinja moved down the mountainside, silent as a thought. Balancing herself easily in fingers and toes, she crept through the brush, between the rocks, and finally found herself just where she wanted to be: some hundreds of feet over the house of Ann Wales.
Mitzi's lip curled in the faintest hint of a sneer, under her mask. The area had been cleared of the trees best for sniping or dropping on the house, but this only encouraged the brush to grow. And this stone outcropping here – if she planted her explosives just so, the whole great mass of granite would sheer off the mountainside and plunge down, crushing the tiny house and anyone in it to pulp. She was already planning where to set the secondary charges – she needed to lift the stone just far away from the mountainside that it wouldn't bounce off target. She settled the weight of her backpack of explosives, and reached out a black-gloved hand to explore the depth on the crack that ran along the rock face.
Twin flames of agony stabbed into her arm, deep. She was already moving, flinging herself backwards into the brush – but her fling was a flop, and she ended up on her back on the stones, staring at a sky suddenly too bright.
A snake? she asked herself muzzily. It couldn't be a snake. It was too cold for snakes. Her body was suddenly filled with weight like lead, but she finally managed to roll her head to one side and see what had bitten her.
It was not a snake. It was something steel, ribbed like a shower hose but tipped with gleaming hypodermic needles. Those needles were now buried deep in her arm. A sentry, she thought. A robot. Why didn't her son warn her that Ann had robots?
There was a light blinking on the 'head' of the thing. And the sound of scrabbling below her, claws on stone. She waited, pretending to be helpless.
The noise grew closer, and a sleek white-furred head poked out of the bushes and looked at her. It was a dog with the face of a tiny, fluffy fox, all white with black eyes and nose, and it yipped at her like she was a prize.
No, she thought at the dog. Go away, don't look at me, don't-
The dog bounded to her and licked her face with a wet clammy tongue. Mitzi fought her paralysis, strained every ninja muscle and nerve trying to rise – and couldn't. Maybe her shoulders raised a hair, maybe not. All she could do was stare up at the sky, and endure this dog licking her, and listen to the sound of something larger and heavier coming up the hillside.
It was Ann Wales, of course. She was wearing an armoured vest and helmet, and she stomped through the bushes with all the grace of a falling tree. Mitzi was not in any condition to take advantage of her clumsiness.
"Good morning, Mrs. McNinja," Ann said, politely touching her fingers to her forehead in what was not quite a salute. Her washed-out blue eyes eyed Mitzi up and down, settling at last on the thing on her arm.
"Ah, I see you've met one of the automatics," she said chattily, crouching on her heels and reaching over the prone woman to grab the metal snake by the tail. She was in the perfect position for Mitzi to knee her in the stomach and send her flying out into empty air – but she couldn't even bend her legs.
"Hmm," Ann said, examining the snake. "You know, I actually had this geared towards a partial hit on a larger person. With you getting the entire dose, at your weight...ummm. And what's this?"
She rolled Mitzi over and rummaged through the backpack. "Oh, Mitzi. Explosives? For me? You shouldn't have."
I wouldn't have set them off, Mitzi wanted to say. I would have just placed them, showed you that you were vulnerable, let you see how easily you could be destroyed. Warned you that ninja are not people to be associated with. Warned you away from my son. But she couldn't talk; her tongue crawled in her mouth like a drugged fish in oil.
Ann rolled Mitzi back onto her back, and frowned down at her. "Now I thought I said, Mitzi, that I would not tolerate you sneaking around here without my permission. I'm afraid there will have to be a punishment." She paused, and eyed Mitzi up and down, her long strong-muscled body in black-and-grey ninja gear. "So, let me see."
Ann rummaged in her pockets and produced a coin. "Here we are. I'll flip this, and if it comes up heads, I take you to the Doctor's office to recover."
Mitzi's eyes widened with fury, and she fought against the drugs in her system. No, no, she would never allow that, never!
"And if it comes up tails, I set the timer on those explosives under you, step away, and turn you into ninja-confetti. It will be hard to get away with, true: I may have to make sure that I lose a few bits, like your arm there. And Doctor McNinja will be halfway to his dream of being an orphan! Doesn't that sound just ducky?"
She grinned, her teeth gleaming white in her pale face, and flipped. Her eyes did not move from Mitzi's face as she caught the coin in mid-air; they held their gazes for ten seconds, for twenty, before she casually looked into her palm.
"Hmm. I wonder-best two out of three?" and she flipped again, twice, hand blurring as she tossed and caught.
"Well, three for three. I guess fate has spoken." She leaned over Mitzi, lifted her off the ground in her arms – she was shockingly strong – and threw her over the edge of the rock face.
Mitzi would have shouted if she could; instead she landed in a rather thick briar patch, face-up. She barely felt the thorns stabbing at her; it hurt worse when Ann came around the rock and grabbed her, sliding her over one shoulder and carrying her downhill in a fireman's carry. Which was a little less alarming than being carried in the other woman's arms.
Ann hauled the drugged woman through three gates and confirmed her identify to several robots rearing out of the leaf mold underfoot. Finally she was at her house, rolling Mitzi into the passenger seat of her massive battered Ford sedan.
"Off to see the Doctor!" Ann sang, and her little white dog sat in Mitzi's lap and licked her face for encouragement.
"Surprise patient!" sang Ann Wales, strolling into Doc's front office with someone over her shoulder. It was-
"Mom?!" Doc shouted, dropping his clipboard. "Here, bring her into Room Three!" He raised his hand to Judy, and she waved back, quickly rescheduling. One of the patients waiting half-rose to his feet as though to protest, and Judy glared at him as only a very large gorilla can.
The patient sat back down.
"What happened to her?" Doc asked, helping his mother be put down on the table, cupping her head in his hands. Her pupils were dilated, her limbs moved freely, she couldn't have a back injury or Ann wouldn't have brought her in like a sack of grain.
"Forty cc's of Dinezen," Ann said crisply.
Doc's eyes shot to her. "Forty? How?"
"She was trying to blow up my house-"
Mitzi groaned, the best she could come to "I was not trying to blow it up, I was trying to crush it under rubble."
"- and one of the sentry machines injected her."
"Forty is an awful lot," Doc said, looking into Mitzi's furious black eyes. "But her heartbeat's strong. Any difficulty breathing?"
"Coin," Mitzi rasped.
"What, Mom? What did you say?"
Ann opened her mouth to speak and was rudely shoved aside as Dan suddenly appeared, ninja-silent. "Mitzi," he said, leaning over her, "Mitzi, who did this to you?"
"Souvenir," Ann said, tossing a coin to the Doctor; he caught it in mid-air with a quick snapping gesture, and then looked at it.
"Flipped a coin," Mitzi slurred.
"Who, what? Ann flipped a coin and then did this to you?" Dan snapped, his moustache seeming to bristle with rage. He looked around, but Ann had quickly slipped away.
"No," Doc answered, "she said that Mom was going to blow up her house. One of Ann's robots got her."
Dan was silent for an instant; then he picked Mitzi's backpack off the floor, looking at the contents. Plastic explosives, detonators. He looked at Mitzi, who was working her jaw back and forth, trying to get her words out. They both jumped as Doc laughed behind them.
"This coin? This is the coin she flipped?" Doc said, holding it out to them as though it was a prize. Mitzi stared at it; it looked like the right coin. A heavy silver dollar, with scratches on one side. "Because this is a Two-Face coin, you see. And because the coin is lighter on the scratched side, it's more likely to come up heads. Mom. Mom?"
Mitzi let her muscles sag against the table. "A trick," she conceded. "She was never going to kill me?"
Doc showed her the coin, and then made it disappear.
"Maybe next time she won't be feeling so forgiving."