by Jess Keating
“What do you mean ‘one of us’?” Grace asked. “How? The robot is useless.”
“We don’t need it!” I glanced at Arthur, who already had a mischievous grin on his face. He knew exactly what I was thinking and held up the straw to prove it.
The others looked at me like I was cracking up from the pressure, but I knew I was onto something. “See, we don’t need to control the elevator if we’re already in there.” I raced over to the bathroom sink and grabbed a paper towel, tearing away a tiny corner and popping it into my mouth. Chewing slowly, I drew more than one puzzled look from the others.
“Tesla, what are you—” Charlie started.
“This is how we do it!” I brought the straw to my mouth and spit the tiny wad of wet paper into it, turning my aim toward Bert.
He clued into my plan a moment too late.
“Don’t you dare!” He lifted his hand to block me, but I let out a quick blow and the spitball shot through the air, landing squarely in the middle of his glasses with a SPLAT.
Mary clasped her hands together. “A blow dart!”
“Hold on.” That was Leo now. “You want to use a blow dart to administer the drug and steal the antidote?”
Mary grinned excitedly. “It could work!”
“That’s right,” I said, grinning at her. “We do it old-school. One of us hides in the elevator, above the ceiling. When Victor’s buyer steps inside, we use a blow dart to send the sedative down, they fall asleep, we’ve got ourselves a perfectly good antidote, and we haven’t been caught. The rest of the plan stays the same. Only one of us is at risk, and the rest stay hidden.”
They were all silent.
Bert reached up and plucked his glasses from his face, picking my goopy spit wad from his lens with a grossed-out grimace.
“Eww,” he said, attempting, and failing, to flick it from his finger.
Arthur watched him with glee, his smile growing wider every second as Bert’s disgust grew. “I don’t know about you all,” Arthur said, watching Bert wipe his fingers on the front of his pants. “But that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
In our ears, Grace agreed with him. “You’ve sold me,” she said. “Who wants to be in charge of the blow dart?”
Silence.
I scanned the possibilities in my head. Charlie was most athletic, so she’d be our best option. Or maybe Leo, because he was fastest in a pinch, in case he needed to move quickly. Even Grace, with her thin build and ability to talk herself out of every situation, might be a smart choice.
But then I realized that whoever was in that elevator with the antidote would also be closest to harm. That was the only variable I needed to know.
“I’ll do it,” I said quickly. I forced an easy smile on my face. “It was my idea, and I’d hate for one of you to get all the glory.”
“We’re all risking something here, Nikki,” Mary said. She hadn’t fallen for my false bravado. “You don’t need to protect us.”
“I’m not.” I walked to the sink and bent over, turning on the faucets to let some cool water rush over my hands. “I actually got some practice with blow darts while I was in Costa Rica.” I splashed my face, wanting to appear cool while angling my face away from Mary and Arthur, who would no doubt be able to smell my lie easily.
There’d been no blow-darting in Costa Rica. But if I was going to keep them away from that elevator, they’d have to believe me.
A peek at Arthur’s quizzical expression in the reflection of the mirror told me that he didn’t buy it. There really was nothing that got past him.
I pressed my lips together and tried to implore him telepathically. Don’t say a word.
“Okay, Tesla,” Grace said finally. “It’s all yours. Leo is going to create a small diversion on the floor below so Nikki can get into the elevator shaft. Bert, you’ll have to help her up.”
“You can trust me,” I said, swallowing my fears.
The truth was, I was worried about the buyer. I’d rather mud-wrestle a hippo than try to steal from a billionaire who’d let the whole world suffer from a deadly virus if it meant he’d make money on the cure, especially using only a straw and gravity. But I wasn’t about to tell them that. This was our only choice.
“I’ll get that antidote.” I gave Mary a quick hug, snagged the small tranquilizer dart from Frog, and slipped it into my jacket pocket along with the straw. “Be ready to move on my signal.”
“We’ll be ready,” Mary promised.
“And, Nikki?” Leo spoke in my ear again.
“Yeah?” I smiled at him, even though he was nowhere with us in the room. I wanted more than anything to give him a giant hug before I went up in that elevator, but I’d have to settle for his words in my ear.
“Don’t miss,” he said.
I laughed. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Take it from me: If you’re claustrophobic, don’t sneak into a dark elevator shaft in a creepy hospital that was founded in 1123. It does nothing for your nerves.
My insides were shaking like I was on my eighth cup of coffee. And I’d never even tried the stuff before, except for a sip from my mom’s cup one morning. (Coffee is terrible and tastes like ground-up dirty socks, if you ask me.)
See? That’s how you can tell how nervous I was.
I was rambling.
Shifting my weight, I hoisted myself up onto my elbow. Stretched out on my stomach with my head directly positioned above a small hole in the elevator ceiling, I’d had plenty of time to contemplate how on earth I’d ended up in this mess, and how much bigger of a mess we’d be in if I didn’t get it right today.
One shot. One dart.
What if I blew it?
Like, metaphorically, I mean. You know, messed it up?
I’d inspected the tiny needle dart in my pocket, and it wasn’t super strong. That was fine when Frog was going to be launching it with mechanical force. But my lungs weren’t nearly as strong. What if whoever I was knocking out was wearing a thick jacket, and I couldn’t pierce it? Or what if they happened to look up and noticed a random twelve-year-old girl peering down at them from the elevator ceiling like some sort of haunted gargoyle? They’d contact the police and all eight of us would get arrested again with zero hope of ever returning home.
My stomach clenched. Agent Donnelly would never let me out of his sight again. I wiped away a sniffle with the back of my hand. The dust in this place was no joke.
Oh God.
Another horrible image to worry about: What if I sneezed and accidentally blew the dart onto the floor and wasted it? Or accidentally stabbed myself and ended up knocked out above an elevator in a foreign country?! I’d have to explain to the others that the world was going to end because of allergies.
“How you doing there, Nik?” Leo’s voice made me jump.
“Great!” I said, then immediately grimaced. I sounded way too excited to be telling the truth. “Fine,” I amended. “It’s fine. Totally cool up here. Tons of room, too.”
Leo laughed. “Yeah, you sound really chill and under control.”
“I just want to get this over with,” I admitted. “It smells like something died.”
“Well, it is a hospital,” Bert replied, joining in the conversation in my ear. “I bet tons of people have died in this very building.”
“We’ve got him!” Grace interrupted. “We’ve got eyes on Victor!”
I sucked in a breath, gripping the straw and blow dart in my left hand while angling myself toward the hole again. While Bert had helped get me into the elevator shaft, the rest of the team had stationed themselves around the entrances of the building, scanning for anyone who looked like Victor.
“Does he have it?” I hissed. “The antidote. Do you see it? Where are they?!”
The questions tumbled out of me. The last time we’d been around Victor, he’d wanted us to be there, and totally played us for fools. This time we had the element of surprise.
I wasn’t going to waste it.
>
Grace continued to relay information. “Second floor,” she said. “It’s too early to tell if he’s carrying anything. Could be in his jacket pocket maybe. If anyone’s in a position to be caught, turn off your GeckoDot now.”
I peeled the dot from my earlobe and stuck it to my forehead, so whatever Grace was recording from her point of view would be projected where I could see it.
A brief flicker blipped in front of me, then a crystal-clear holographic image of one of the hospital waiting areas appeared. A pile of magazines on a stark white tabletop. A woman in blue scrubs, clutching a clipboard as she scurried past the elevator bank. Then, finally, a tall man in a plain white button-up shirt and black pants sat casually but kept peering around the room. Like he was waiting for someone. There was no doubt about it: It was Victor.
“That’s him!” I confirmed. “Grace, how are you getting this without him seeing you?!” Instantly, my worries went from the rest of the team to Grace, who was clearly close enough to this bad guy to get such clear footage.
I heard the tiniest lilt of a laugh. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Mo gave me a makeover.” She tilted her camera view toward herself, showing off a face nearly completely covered in gauze bandages. “It’s the latest fashion. I call it Mummy After a Bad Fall. I look like a particularly unfortunate patient.”
“Nice job, Mo,” I said.
“Thanks,” he whispered back. “We used about half the gauze in the supply closet, but she’s totally pulling it off.”
Grace’s camera flipped back to Victor, and my eyes trained on the small envelope in his hand. There was definitely a lump—something tube-shaped, maybe—pressing against the paper sides.
His ankle bounced on his knee, and a flash of irritation tore through me. We were all working our butts off to stop him from ushering in a global catastrophe, and here he was looking so relaxed he might as well have been ordering a cheeseburger for lunch.
“Look!” I whispered, glaring at a man in dark glasses, a green polo shirt, and a Louis Vuitton messenger bag who’d appeared in the corner of the projected image. “Could that be the guy who’s buying the antidote?” I chewed anxiously on my lip, desperate to get out of here as quickly as possible. “He looks rich.”
“That’s not him,” Arthur replied. “He’s got a stuffed animal in that bag. He’s waiting to see his kid. Probably had minor surgery. Tonsillitis, I bet.”
I made a face. I’d forgotten that hanging out with Arthur and Mary basically meant you felt like an idiot at least half the time.
“Never mind,” I muttered. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined I was back in Costa Rica with my parents. It was becoming a habit now, finding some solace in their imaginary presence. Had Martha even had the chance to let them know about the mission before she’d been arrested? The list of things I’d need to apologize for was growing by the second.
“He’s here!” Charlie’s voice jerked me back to the present, and I refocused on the hologram in front of me.
Charlie was right. A man with tousled graying hair and a button-up shirt with khakis had sidled up to Victor, sitting opposite him in the waiting room. He glanced up expectantly, giving Victor the tiniest of nods.
“Something isn’t right,” Arthur said. “That can’t be him.”
A sharp edge of uncertainty cut through me. “What?” I demanded. “What do you mean? That’s obviously him, Arthur.”
“It can’t be,” he said. “Look at that hair! A guy who can afford to buy a multi-billion-dollar biological agent can afford to get a haircut. And that shirt? You can see the plastic remnant from a department-store tag on the sleeve. There has to be someone else here …”
“So he bought a new shirt,” Bert replied. “That doesn’t mean he’s innocent! It means he went shopping!”
My nails dug into my palm. Whatever was happening, I only had one dart, and one chance to get the right guy, or the whole mission failed.
“Grace, am I darting this guy or what? I need to know!”
Grace didn’t hesitate. “Yes, dart him.”
“No!” Arthur said. “It’s not him! I know what you think you’re seeing, but you’re wrong. He’s obviously here to trip us up.”
I shook my head in frustration as I watched the scene play out before me. Grace was right: The man—the one Arthur was convinced wasn’t the buyer—got up from his chair and sat right next to Victor. His hands fidgeted as they spoke briefly. He was clearly nervous and constantly checking over his shoulder.
“He’s not acting like an innocent man,” Mo pointed out. “Arthur, I think you’re mistaken on this one, sorry.”
My stomach turned as Victor reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a thick envelope, passing it over quickly. “The exchange,” I whispered. “It’s happening! This has to be it!”
I strained to hear what the two men were saying, but Grace was too far away for any clear audio. Still, the picture gave us all the information we needed: Victor had passed along the envelope and accepted another package in return. What more was there to know?
“That’s got to be the payment,” I said. I bit the inside of my cheek and weighed what I was seeing. Arthur wasn’t infallible. He was a genius, like the rest of us. But he was also human, and humans make mistakes all the time. I was certain of it: He was wrong on this one.
Which meant I had a job to do in about thirty seconds.
Charlie seemed to agree. “Nikki, he’s heading to your elevator right now.”
“Don’t do it!” Arthur repeated. “Something isn’t adding up here!”
Grace overruled him. “Our job isn’t to catch the buyer, Arthur,” she explained. “The only thing we care about is that antidote. This is where the exchange was supposed to happen. These two are the only men in the room exchanging anything—they’re the only ones even talking to each other. We’ve got to move now while we have the chance.”
My pulse slammed in my chest as the man stepped inside the elevator directly below me. My vision flickered slightly—I’d been holding my breath for too long while the others argued. I forced in a gulp of metallic air as quietly as I could.
I pressed the dot on my forehead once, turning off the GeckoDot’s visuals. The team would still be able to hear me, but for now, I was the only one who could see what was going on below me.
Grace’s voice was measured in my ear. “Bert is ready for you on the ground floor, Nikki.”
I placed the dart in the straw and brought it to my lips, readying myself to blow. Squinting one eye shut, I tried to imagine a giant target on the man’s neck, impossible to miss.
Taking in one last breath, I wrapped my lips around the straw—now was the moment. Only a few seconds had passed since he’d stepped in the elevator. He’d pressed the ground-floor button once.
Now, I told myself.
A tinny ring made me nearly drop the straw right onto his head.
“What happened?” Bert whispered. “Did you do it? Nik?”
I didn’t dare say a word.
The man was receiving a phone call.
I probably should have darted him right then, while he was distracted, and his neck craned ever so slightly to listen to the phone in his left hand. But that’s when I noticed it: the tiny bit of plastic that Arthur had mentioned.
The price tag had been mostly torn away, leaving only a scrap and the plastic thread.
“Do you see, Nikki?” Arthur whispered. “Can’t you see this isn’t right? There are others that Victor could be working with here—”
A faint rustle sounded, followed by a thudding of feet, racing on the tiled floor.
“Arthur!” Grace said. She was angry now. “Shh!”
I burned through all of Arthur’s arguments at warp speed in my mind, but every single one was knocked down easily by Grace’s reasoning. The timing. The meeting. The exchange.
It was just the plastic tag of a new shirt.
He was the right guy. And if I hadn’t been convinced of th
at, the next words out of the man’s mouth told me everything I needed to know, as he talked with whoever was on the other end of that phone call.
“Yes,” the man said. “I got it. The antidote is ours.”
Thank you.
Certainty flooding my body, I dropped my face as low as I would dare to the hole in the elevator ceiling, bringing the straw to my mouth, and took aim. A patch of tanned skin stared up at me, above his shoulder and below his ear.
I blew out as hard as I could and watched as the dart zinged through the air, its small feather twisting like a glowing firefly, and lodged directly in the man’s neck.
“Bert,” I said, watching the man begin to sway slightly. “He’s all yours.”
What do you do after you secretly drug a criminal and steal a billion-dollar, world-saving antidote from him?
Well, you run.
Everyone on the team had a job to do after our target collapsed. Bert snuck into the elevator, hitting the emergency stop and halting it between floors to grab the package from the target’s backpack, along with his wallet to find out his identity. I dropped down from the ceiling like an awkward spider monkey and helped Bert while the others staggered their exits from the hospital so as not to arouse any suspicion.
Our plan was to meet in the back corner of a local café, a quick tube trip away from the hospital. Bert and I were the last to arrive, and my knees still shook with nerves as I collapsed into the chair that Leo shoved out for me.
“You did it!” he exclaimed. He gripped my shoulders in both hands and scrutinized me, then planted a kiss on my cheek. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt at all?”
I blushed, painfully aware that the others were watching us. “I’m fine!” I replied. “Everything went well. It was almost …”
“Easy?” Bert offered.
“Almost too easy,” Arthur said. A troubled expression clouded his face. “Listen, I know that you don’t believe me, so—”
Bert laughed, still a little giddy from our success. “Aww, Artie, don’t feel too bad for being wrong on this one,” he said. He held up his bag with the antidote in it and waved it happily. Even Arthur couldn’t dampen his spirits now. “Nobody’s right all the time. Shall we celebrate? Donuts on me!” He handed the bag to Grace and rubbed his hands together, heading over to the counter, where a row of pastries was displayed. I had to admit, the promise of sugar and fried dough made the whole day seem a little brighter. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d actually finished a proper meal.