The first thing Amanda noticed when she arrived at Professor Pole’s classroom was Scapulus Holmes sitting in the first row. Suddenly she remembered that she was supposed to take him under her wing and show him around. There was no way she could do that now. She’d rather be pulled apart by wild camels. Then she had a thought: maybe Thrillkill had forgotten. The kid looked like he could take care of himself just fine. He’d found his way around so far. What did he need her for? She’d done all right without a guide. What was the guy, five years old? He was a Holmes. She’d carry on normally and see what happened.
Professor Pole was an affable man in his forties. As a child he had been burned in a house fire, and half his face was scarred and some of his hair missing as a result. If you didn’t know him, you might be afraid of him because he looked kind of scary, but once he spoke he was so funny and nice that you quickly forgot.
Not only was Professor Pole fun to be around, he was also brilliant. A physicist by trade, he solved astrophysics problems in his spare time, a pursuit he found relaxing. He also hunted for fossils and had even discovered some dinosaur bones on a dig in Montana. The class promised to be challenging, useful, and fun, and Amanda was looking forward to it, despite the fact that she’d heard it could be dangerous. She was getting used to risk now and wasn’t nearly as worried as she’d been a few months before.
“Boo!” yelled Professor Pole while the students were still jabbering among themselves. A couple of the kids dropped things on the floor and one or two clutched their chests as if they’d had a heart attack. “Explosions. That’s exactly how they occur. They’re strong, sharp, loud, sudden, and almost always unexpected. But you can prepare yourselves for them, and that’s one of the things we’re going to learn how to do in this dynamite class. Ha ha!” He beamed, obviously proud of his little joke. A couple of the kids groaned, but quite a few of them broke into nervous laughter. Amanda felt her body tense up. She was just sure he was going to try to scare them again.
“You there, Mr. Bramble.” Professor Pole motioned to Gordon. “Come up here, please. That’s right. Don’t be shy.”
Gordon Bramble, a me-too sort of boy who normally relied on his friend David Wiffle to take the lead, looked embarrassed and confused, but he managed to get himself to the front of the class.
“Now, I want you to add this liquid to this beaker. Before you do, please put these goggles on.” Professor Pole pointed to a clear vessel that contained glittering blue powder. It was sitting in a pan. The liquid he was referring to resided in a smaller beaker that looked like the larger beaker’s child. Amanda had visions of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. What a great film that was with Boris Karloff. She should watch it again.
Gordon took the goggles and nervously fitted them over his eyes. They made him look like a deep-sea diver. He eyed Professor Pole tentatively, as if to say, “Please don’t make me do this.”
“All right, go,” said the professor. Gordon stood stock-still. “It’s okay. I promise.”
Shaking visibly, Gordon held his arm out as far as it would go and gingerly picked up the beaker with the clear liquid. Then, standing as far away from the large beaker as he could, he poured about a drop into it.
“More,” said Professor Pole. “Do the whole thing at once. Upsy daisy.”
This baby talk seemed to embarrass Gordon so much that he stood closer to the large beaker and dumped the clear liquid in, whereupon a sparkly blue explosion blasted out of it and overflowed into the pan. It made a snapping sound, like a whip being cracked. It was more show than danger, though. The stuff didn’t even get on Gordon’s clothes. He winced and turned away, then slowly pivoted around and, seeing what had happened, smiled from ear to ear.
“Awesome,” he said. “Can I do it again?”
“Yes, you may,” said the professor. “How about a different color? But first, let me explain what just happened. The large beaker contained baking soda with blue dye and glitter. The smaller beaker contained white vinegar. Perhaps you can smell it.” Gordon wrinkled his nose and nodded. “The baking soda and the vinegar reacted and caused the mixture to explode. So for you cooks out there, never mix those two ingredients together or you’ll have a birthday cake to remember. Now, Mr. Bramble, would you like to do the honors?”
“Professor, Professor,” yelled out David Wiffle. “Can I try?”
“You’ll get your turn, Mr. Wiffle. Let’s see what Mr. Bramble can cook up.”
Now that he knew he wasn’t going to die, Gordon really got into the experiment. He mixed several different colors of dye and glitter and put them all into the same container. The explosion they created looked like the Fourth of July. He got so excited that he managed to trip. As he started to fall, Scapulus Holmes raced to the front of the room and caught him before he crashed to the floor. Now Gordon was embarrassed again. He murmured a word of thanks and asked if it was okay to return to his seat. Professor Pole nodded.
“Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” said the professor. “That was quick thinking.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Holmes. Ivy was right. He did have a nice voice. He was probably a good singer. As if Amanda cared.
As he turned to go back to his seat, Holmes caught her eye. Oh no. He was probably out to get her after that awful thing she’d said. He stared for a second, then slowly began to smile in a way that seemed to say, “Thanks for the joke.” In spite of herself, Amanda felt her lips widen, and before she knew it she was grinning too. The boy gave her a wink. Wait a minute. Was he serious or making fun of her? Whatever he was up to, she would not be made a fool of again. She felt herself stiffen. Holmes and Moriarty, Moriarty and Holmes. They were two sides of the same coin. She couldn’t believe she’d ever thought the ancestral Moriarty was cool. Well, she was over that bad girl stage. From now on she would give these guys the disrespect they deserved. She frowned. Seeing the change in her, Holmes’s face fell and he turned away.
Despite Holmes’s odd behavior, and despite the fact that Professor Pole’s program that simulated fires and explosions reminded Amanda of the Explosions! game Nick was so crazy about, she enjoyed the rest of the class and looked forward to the exercises the teacher had assigned. The students were not to try any more real-life experiments for the first few weeks of the class. Rather, they would simulate various types of disasters digitally, starting with the garage explosion and fire that had kicked off the class project last term. After that they would tackle electrical fires and gas explosions before moving on to dynamite and lightning fires. Professor Pole’s graphics were incredibly cool, but the real power of his program was in the physics and chemistry, which he’d worked on in consultation with experts around the world. Later on the kids would do lab experiments, but only if they achieved certain scores on the simulations and with strict safety protocols in place. Everyone was super excited, especially Simon, who started planning all sorts of weird conflagrations. He had some nutty idea about seeing if he could change Earth’s tilt so he could fix global warming. Amanda and Ivy were looking forward to seeing that.
“You can tease me all you want,” he said. “Glitter explosions in a beaker are nothing. The point of all this training is to solve big, important problems. If you must know, I wrote to that professor at UCLA over the break, the one who invented the microscope/cell phone apparatus we used to detect the sugar virus last term. I told him we used the lens from my glasses and it worked great. I asked him if he thinks that’s worth an academic paper, and I’m sure he’ll say yes.”
Simon and Professor Kindseth had discovered a way to turn a cell phone into a powerful microscope using an attachment manufactured on a 3D printer. The only catch had been that they didn’t have the proper lens for it, that is until they hit on the idea of using one from Simon’s coke bottle glasses. The microscope had worked beautifully, and they had discovered that the cook’s pink sugar was actually tainted with a destructive virus.
“That’s admirable,” said Amanda.
“I’ll say,” said Ivy.
“I’m impressed.”
“I think it’s nuts,” said Amphora, invading their little circle. “You’re twelve. There’s no way you could publish a scientific paper. Fugeddaboutit.” She sounded silly trying to affect a Brooklyn accent with her posh London/Cambridge way of talking.
“I don’t care about your opinion, dodo,” said Simon. “You know, one day your frivolous behavior is going to come back to bite you. You should get a clue and grow up.”
“You’re a prat,” said Amphora. “I’m going to blow you up in my simulations. It will make the class so much more fun.”
“You know what, you two?” said Ivy. “You’re getting so predictable you’re boring me. I’ve had enough. Come on, Amanda.”
Ivy grabbed Amanda’s arm, pulled Nigel’s lead, and headed off toward the Holmes House common room. Amanda glanced behind her. Simon and Amphora were still arguing.
3
Professor Redleaf’s Surprise
Amanda had never seen Ivy so edgy. She was normally the calmest person in the world, but something had rattled her. It couldn’t be Editta’s disappearance, which wasn’t even a disappearance yet. And it couldn’t be Simon and Amphora’s constant bickering because Ivy was used to that. What was up?
The two girls ducked into the Holmes House common room, which this day had been decorated to look like an airplane hangar. Amanda found it baffling. She didn’t know anything about planes, other than what she’d seen on the trip over from L.A., and she couldn’t figure out what she was looking at. Ivy dragged her over to a couch and practically threw her down. Nigel sat next to Amanda and let his tongue loll out.
“What’s going on?” Ivy demanded. She seemed more impatient than Amanda had ever seen her. Somehow her dark glasses made her look menacing when she was like that, which was weird considering that Ivy was less than five feet tall.
“Are you okay?” said Amanda, staring at her from this angle and that, trying to read her.
“No, I’m not okay. Something bad is going on around here and we have to find out what it is.” The reflection from her sunglasses flashed as she moved her head.
“You mean what I told you earlier? How do you know about that?” She leaned in and kept her voice low so their conversation would be private.
“How do I know about anything?” said Ivy too loudly. Amanda jumped back as if she’d been hit. “I’ve heard stuff. You know how good my hearing is.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Amanda tried lowering her voice again.
“There wasn’t time,” said Ivy softly, getting the message. “I know something is up with the teachers. They’re talking about catastrophe. We need to figure out what this is and fix it. They sound like they haven’t any idea what to do, and that worries me half to death.”
Amanda delivered the nutshell version of what she’d heard outside Thrillkill’s office. Ivy kept shaking her head. Nigel wagged his tail against her, whomp, whomp, whomp, and she scratched her leg. Between Ivy’s red hair and Nigel’s golden coat, they looked like life itself against the backdrop of the hangar. Amanda wondered what it would be like to have colored hair. Brown was okay, but it wasn’t very interesting.
“Yes, that confirms what I’ve been hearing,” said Ivy when Amanda had finished. “What worries me the most is that the teachers seem so disorganized. I’ve never seen them like this. Do you think Mavis is really going to escape? If she does, maybe she’ll break Blixus out of Strangeways too.”
“I don’t know,” said Amanda. “They’ve gone up against the Moriartys before. Why should this time be any different?” A thought struck her. Maybe losing Nick had made the criminals more desperate and dangerous. It probably wasn’t a good idea to raise the possibility, though. Everyone was sick to death of Nick, and every time she mentioned his name she felt like she was imposing.
“That’s what I can’t figure out,” said Ivy. “Unless they have whatever it is the teachers lost. Do you have any idea what it could be?”
“Not a clue.”
Amanda got up and started pacing, then remembered that she had to stay close to Ivy to keep anyone who walked in from hearing their conversation. She caught sight of the new clock Nick had hung up after breaking the old one, which had bothered Amanda with its loud ticking. Nick again. Why did everything have to remind her of him? If this kept up she’d do poorly in her classes. She had to exorcise him. Maybe she should learn to meditate. Or throw darts at his picture. Editta would probably have stuck pins in his effigy. Where was that girl anyway?
“Me either,” said Ivy. “We’re going to have to do it soon, though.”
“Yes. Maybe we should talk tonight.”
“Definitely. I’m a little worried about discussing all this in front of Amphora, though. She seems so distracted with all that fighting.”
“I know what you mean,” said Amanda. “She and Simon have gotten worse. Maybe they stored it all up over the break. Let’s meet somewhere we don’t usually go and she won’t look for us.”
“One of the labs?”
“How about the disguise room up on the top floor?” Amanda felt the most at home there. It was a theatrical place, full of costumes, wigs, makeup, and props. A filmmaker’s dream.
“Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Eight o’clock?”
“You’re on.”
Amanda was really looking forward to cyberforensics class. The previous term when she’d needed to get into the Moriartys’ computer she’d had no idea how to get past the logon screen. After that she’d promised herself she’d become an expert so that would never happen again.
The class was taught by Professor Redleaf, a white hat hacker of mysterious origin who was rumored to have broken into some of the most sensitive computer networks on the planet. A number of the older students said she came from the Amazon jungle. Others said she had been born in the heart of Africa. She always wore a white hat of one sort or another, Amanda guessed for symbolic reasons, and appeared to be completely emotionless, speaking in a voice that resembled a dial tone. She also seemed to be full of secrets, which wasn’t unusual at Legatum, but her manner implied that her secrets were rather more sinister than those of the other teachers. There was an air of magic about her, which was saying something considering that detectives are among the least magical people in the world. What really floored Amanda, however, was that as soon as Scapulus Holmes walked into the class, Professor Redleaf seemed to know him and even smiled at him, whereupon he smiled back and said, “Good morning, Professor. How’s that Silver Fern project coming along?”
Showoff! How did they know each other? Did this mean that Holmes was some hacking genius? Was he going to be the teacher’s pet? Amanda could feel herself fuming. She realized she was being irrational but she didn’t care. Sometimes irrationality was called for, and this seemed like one of those times. Who did he think he was, anyway? Here not half a day and already acting like the great Sherlock.
Professor Redleaf didn’t answer Holmes’s question out loud, but somehow Amanda got the feeling she had conveyed the answer anyway. Holmes seemed satisfied with whatever invisible message she had delivered and settled in his chair. Professor Redleaf started the class immediately after that, and told them that their project for the term was to divide into teams that would simultaneously try to hack into each other’s computers.
Instead of going by the school’s houses—Holmes, Van Helden, Dupin, and Father Brown—the students would be assigned randomly using an algorithm Professor Redleaf had written. Amanda was disappointed to find that she wasn’t on the same team as her friends, who had been split up as well, but when she learned that she would be working with the Wiffle kid, she just about had a fit, and so did he. Whiny brat that he was, he asked the teacher if he could be transferred, a question Professor Redleaf wouldn’t dignify with an answer. Normally Amanda and the kid found themselves competing, and the idea of working together not only didn’t sit well with either of them, but seemed to make them hate each other even more. Aman
da had no idea how she was going to manage this. The only consolation was that she wasn’t on the same team as Holmes and wouldn’t have to listen to his bragging. Not that she knew for sure that he would brag. She just figured it was in his genes. That and winking, apparently.
Amanda knew the class was going to be hard, but when Professor Redleaf offered an overview full of unfamiliar jargon (she’d heard of SSL and IP addresses, but that was about it), she realized that it was going to be way more difficult than she’d imagined. She was conversant with a variety of media capture and editing programs, but the technical details that made them all work were another thing. Apparently Amphora was feeling the same way because when Amanda glanced at her, her mouth was hanging open. Ivy seemed unperturbed, thank goodness, and Simon, well Simon was eating the whole thing up with a relish Amanda had seen only when he’d made the smartphone microscope last term. Needless to say, Holmes was smiling as if he knew something the others didn’t, which no doubt he did. Oh great. Another freakish Holmes.
Suddenly it occurred to her that perhaps they would all emerge from the school as freaks. Look at the kind of observational skills they were developing. They were so attentive and detail-oriented that they might never be able to turn off all that analyzing and would be beset by runaway trivia racing through their heads day and night. And what about the self-defense training? Could they ever walk down a street again without imagining that everyone they saw posed a physical threat? No wonder all the teachers were so weird. This stuff warped a person. It had certainly warped Sherlock Holmes, but funnily enough not her ancestor, G. Lestrade. He was too dumb to get it, and yet his stupidity had saved him and let him live a normal life. Maybe she should get out now, before she turned into a freakazoid.
Amanda Lester, Detective Box Set Page 36