“All Sentinels!” Shelly called out. “There’s someone on the Ferris wheel!”
My stomach dropped into my feet as I looked up. We all saw him: two-thirds of the way up on the Ferris wheel, some idiot stood in one of the cars filming the godzilla’s rampage. At that moment the monster pulled itself up from the burning wreckage to crouch atop the car park, roaring its defiance.
“Oh shit,” Seven said.
It threw back its head and screamed a challenge. No longer blinded, it was primed for action, and anyone flying through its near field of vision was toast. Now the fool on the wheel panicked. How he’d managed to stay up there when the other fliers were evacuating everybody from the park, I had no idea.
Lei Zi turned to us. “Riptide, waterspout to its head! Astra, Seven, you go for the idiot! Go!”
We got. Riptide pulled a funneled wave from the harbor and slapped the beast with it. It didn’t flash into steam, but a water spout in the eye would distract anything and the monster snapped at the fountaining stream as I grabbed Seven and leaped skyward for the wheel.
“Move!” Shelly yelled. “It’s tracking!”
We smacked into the swinging car, almost spilling its passenger. Seven clung like a limpet to my back as I reached in and grabbed the teenage boy scrambling up off the car floor. High-energy plasma cooked the air behind me as I threw all of us down, heading for water. A crash and roar of frustration told me the wheel was history as I hit the water for what had to be the tenth time that morning. Reversing direction underwater, I brought us up under the pier.
“So much for the sport coat,” Seven said as I hoisted us all onto a platform.
I slapped my hand over the giggles, biting down on relief-fueled hysteria. Between Riptide’s distraction and Seven’s supernatural luck, we’d gotten away with it.
The boy shook his camera. “If you destroyed my footage I’m going to sue.”
Seven pushed him back in the water.
We dropped him on Streeter Drive and returned to our improvised forward base at the corner of the Children’s Museum. The godzilla still squatted atop the parking garage, blasting plasma-jets. The rides and concession stands didn’t so much burn as blow up. I sighed.
I’d loved that amusement park, especially the Ferris wheel.
Seven dropped his arm and stepped away from me when we landed.
“Safe and sound, boss,” he said.
Lei Zi shook her head. “At least the idiot gave us a way to take the thing down—probably your ‘luck.’“
He looked blank. I’m sure I did too.
“Look at the Ferris wheel.”
The godzilla’s plasma-jet had cut right through it, snapping spokes like thread, slagging cars, twisting the whole thing off its frame. The shattered frame, a matching pair of pylons, cantered drunkenly—ripped away from the hub they’d supported.
“I don’t... oh.” The left pylon came to a jagged point, making the thing a lance more than a hundred feet long. Oh no.
“Yes,” she said. “If we let it get off the pier this mess is going to become a complete Charlie Foxtrot. The trick is to penetrate its hide. Do that, I’ll take care of the rest. Can you do it?” The air around us grew sticky with a gathering electrical charge. Lei Zi’s name meant Mother of Storms, and I could feel her bringing the lightning.
Seven and Riptide looked doubtful, but I took a deep breath and nodded.
“I can do it. Just keep it off of me.”
“We will.”
At her signal, Riptide pulled more water from the harbor. I leaped into the air to drop immediately back down into the park. Landing at the base of the wrecked wheel, I braced myself, kicked, and the already stressed pylon sheared off at the base with an explosion of snapping bolts. My heart in my throat, I heard the sizzle and hiss of heavy mega-watts above me as Lei Zi electrified Riptide’s spray around the godzilla’s face to distract it from the noise I made.
“Go, go, go!” Shelly chanted in my ear.
The pylon weighed tons and I fought to balance it as I rose, swinging around for distance. No jet of plasma burned me out of the sky, but I desperately wished I were still carrying Seven with me; with him as a passenger, if the thing shot at me it would fall over its own feet before it hit us.
Riptide’s attack had it biting at the air. It jetted madly, its attention fixed away from me as I came around and