The left rear door and its frame both looked intact. If he was able to open it, he could try to ooze out of the car and get underneath it while staying in shadow. He took another look at the slender shadow and grimaced. It's gonna feel like I'm in a movie where they're trying to get past those lasers in art heists.

Cautiously, Nick tried the door. It wouldn't budge. I was afraid of that. Well, worst case, I can have Petra eat the locking mechanism. Or the whole door...

Nick really wanted to drink a second bottle of water, but he held off, since those might be the last three bottles of water he ever had. He had to keep wiping sweat off his hands while he “programmed” Petra as best he could. Never thought I'd be a programmer. Nick grimaced. Because I suck at it.

It took a while, but he managed to pry the interior covering off of the door, exposing the metal. Then the alien device got to work eating the aluminum and spinning up a shield. At the same time, Nick tried to make sense of the locking mechanism, to figure out how to work it manually. It was pretty easy to see how to break it, but getting it to unlock without power was going to be a matter of fiddling with springs and such. Nick wasn't worried about breaking it, just about breaking it while it was still locked.

Writing off the door as a total loss, Nick waited until Petra had finished with the aluminum disk, then set it to eating the window glass and spitting out glass cubes. It was taking a while, and Nick was seriously considering just breaking the glass, since he could scoop it up later if he had to feed it to the space rock. Eventually, though, Petra cleared the window glass from the side door, leaving a hole to climb through.

Now came the hard part. Nick carefully checked to make sure there wasn't a jagged edge of glass ready to cut him to ribbons. He was reluctant to remove his shirt; he didn't want any more bare skin than he had to have, but he needed something to grip hot surfaces with. In the end he managed to rip out a piece of the carpet and use that like an oven mitt.

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The aluminum disk badly needed a handle. Gripping it by the edge would expose his fingers to the rays of the Death Star. He reached out with care and set the disk down outside, leaning against the door, hoping that it wouldn't roll away or anything. It stayed put.

After all that effort to make the aluminum disk, Nick pulled up the rest of the carpet as a better shield. He stuck it out the window, verifying that it wouldn't immediately burst into flames or anything in the sunlight. Next, he started dropping a lot of the food on the hot ground, hopefully in the shade of the car now. The water bottles were too precious to risk dropping, so Nick stuffed them carefully into the big pockets of his windbreaker.

He was about ready to climb out when he realized he had forgotten to pick up Petra. I absolutely cannot risk Petra being hurt by landing hard. Granted, it's a rock, and the girl alien thought nothing of throwing it on the ground for me. But it's not like I have a spare handy.

In the end, he decided to abandon one water bottle and hope it wasn't destroyed by sunlight, rather than risk leaving Petra behind. Wrapping the carpet over his head and shoulders, and gripping the window frame with carpet scraps, Nick rolled out the window and tumbled to the ground.

HOT!

Nick started to jump up from the burning hot ground, but flinched back when it felt as if his hair almost caught fire. He got his feet under him, his sneakers taking the worst of the heat, and hissed at the pain in one arm. It can't be that bad, it can't be that bad, it stings like a motherfucker but it can't be that bad...

It was a couple of minutes before he could do anything besides concentrate on walling off the pain. Finally, his breath got a little less ragged, and he learned how much he could shift his feet safely. He very cautiously pulled the carpet off of him and set it on the ground, partly under the car where it felt slightly cooler.

“Out of the frying pan,” he whispered, then gave up on talking for the moment.