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then that Smokey seemed to catch on.
    “This little lagoon,” he said. “It’s part of the underground river here. It provides hydroelectric power for the backup generator.”
    “You really are a bright and shiny penny,” said Rudi. She turned to me and held out her hand. “Your earpiece, please.”
    I debated only a second before handing it to her (not even wondering how she knew I had it), then turned back to the conversation at hand.
    “So this is how we get out,” Electra was saying. “Any idea how far it is until it breaks the surface?”
    I shrugged. “Couple of miles, I think. We’ll have to share the rebreathers.”
    I turned to speak to Rudi, but saw her hurrying to catch up to Megaton, who had walked away from us without a word.
    I saw Rudi hand him something – presumably the earpiece – and then he glanced at me before turning to her and mumbling something I couldn’t catch. Then he turned and continued walking away as Rudi dashed back to us.
    “Okay,” she said with a grin. “I’m ready to take a dip.”
    “Wait,” I said, an idea suddenly occurring to me. “If everything’s shut down, then my entire reason for only using one power – so that they can’t figure out who I am – goes out the window. I can teleport us out, or phase us through the walls.”
    “No,” said Rudi, “not yet.”
    “Why not?” asked Smokey.
    “Because I said so, that’s why,” Rudi insisted, hands on her hips. “Now let’s go.”
     
    *****
     
    Traveling by underground river is different and will give you a story to tell the grandkids one day, but it is not highly recommended. We ended up letting Rudi and Josh (who, brave little fellow that he was, never once whined or cried) use two of the rebreathers while Smokey, Electra, and I shared the third.
    It really wasn’t a particularly long trip – only about twenty minutes. Thankfully, the river never went too fast and there weren’t a lot of obstructions.
    The point at which we came up wasn’t really the end of the river. In fact, it was another underground cavern, where the water formed a lagoon much like the one that we originally entered.
    “Now you can teleport us if you want,” said Rudi as we trudged up out of the water.
    “Oh? So what was wrong with before?” I asked.
    “Josh and I have subcutaneous trackers,” she said nonchalantly.
    “What?!” I practically screamed. Smokey and Electra were also bug-eyed over this news.
    “Tracking devices – under our skin,” she said. “Kind of like GPS.”
    “So those goons at Chamomile know where we are?” asked Smokey.
    “No,” Rudi said, shaking her head. “After we left, there was another series of explosions that destroyed the tracking equipment.”
    “But I fried both the main power grid and the backup,” Electra said. “Why was the tracking device still working?”
    “It works differently – kind of like email,” Rudi replied. When we all looked at her blankly, she went on. “You know how if your email goes down, the messages just kind of pile up? Then, when your email comes back on, all of the messages are still there – even those that someone sent to you while your account wasn’t working?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “The tracking worked the same way. The info was still being recorded – the tracking system has its own battery for that purpose – and whenever the main power came online again, they’d be able to see what happened.”
    “So if I had teleported you out,” I said, “the system would have recorded that?”
    “It would have seen us wink out and reappear somewhere else, which would mean teleportation,” Rudi replied.
    “But if you knew it was going to be destroyed before the data could be retrieved, why couldn’t Jim just teleport us back at Chamomile?”
    “Because I didn’t know it would be destroyed,” Rudi answered. “I couldn’t see that far into the future concerning the tracking. But I did see that Jim would be able to safely teleport us