‘Incoming!’ yelled Alfie. ‘Get inside!’
In a flurry of fur they fell through the door, Janey shoving it closed with her foot just as the lead SParrow bared its teeth. Clunk! There was a thump as it hit the wood, then another as it fell to the floor. Janey waited for the other eleven to hit too, but instead there was a furious rasping, cheeping sound, then all went quiet.
Janey shook her head. ‘This SParrow power is the last thing we need.’ She headed for the kitchen. ‘You go to G-Mamma’s house to make sure Jamie didn’t just come home, and I’ll check around here.’
‘Spylab in two minutes,’ said Alfie, sprinting up the stairs two at a time.
Janey ran through every room, calling for Jamie, and even checked in the garden. The garage doors were firmly locked – there wasn’t any way that he could be in there. Disappointed and not a little worried, Janey headed up to the Spylab, where Alfie was already pacing.
‘No sign of him,’ he said.
‘Let’s see if this shows us anything,’ said Janey, shoving the video into the player.
It showed the security footage from various angles around Solfari Lands. They studied it for several minutes, quickly establishing some SPI entrances and exits: G-Mamma arriving, running after the squawking turkey and giving up at the turnstiles; Trouble at full stretch, with a squadron of little fighter birds after them; Alfie and Janey themselves, turning up with James, talking to each other, and James slipping off among the trees. They scoured the footage from the camera near the Spylab, watching a small, flitting figure run through the doors barely seconds before the ground rocked . . .
‘The explosion,’ said Janey.
Alfie paused the tape. ‘So James did go to the Amphibian House.’
‘And probably to the Spylab,’ said Janey. ‘Remember, he was in that room at the back for a while when he was still a chimp. He must have . . .’
She couldn’t bring herself to say it. He had to have been in there when the bomb went off.
‘We don’t know that,’ said Alfie firmly. He hit fast-forward, staring at the figures who milled around in no particular order, looking like puppets. ‘Let’s try the perimeter fence camera.’
There was nothing until the end of the video, by which time they were practically cross-eyed trying to work out who was where. Then suddenly Janey cried out. ‘I saw him! That’s Jamie, isn’t it?’ She pointed to a shadowy form scrambling nimbly up a tree and jumping over the three-metre-high fence that enclosed the whole zoo. ‘It has to be him. Only an ex-monkey could shin up a tree that quickly.’
Alfie nodded, peering at the dimly lit vista beyond the perimeter fence. ‘Where’s he going? There’s not much beyond there. Just fields for miles and miles, and then our old school.’
Janey got to her feet. ‘Do you think that’s where Jamie was heading?’
‘Worth a try.’
‘We should Wow up properly,’ said Janey. Who knew what Jamie was running from? Whatever or whoever was blowing up Spylabs, she’d rather have the best gear to tackle them.
Moments later, both in their SPIsuits, the two Spylets grabbed an ASPIC each and headed out into the twilight. If they stuck to the back roads, they wouldn’t be seen. And if they were, they’d just look like kids out skateboarding, in slightly peculiar outfits.
‘Er, weren’t you supposed to SPIV your folks?’ said Alfie as they skirted the high street and set off across a car park.
Janey felt guilty for about a millisecond, but she truly believed that it was time for Jane Blonde to take control of this mission. ‘I don’t want to get their hopes up,’ she said. ‘Let’s find him first.’
They were at the school gates now. Checking that nobody was watching, they both pushed one foot down on the back of their ASPICs so the boards stood on their end with the Spylets still suctioned on. Then they slid straight up and over the railings and hit the ground at speed. Swiftly they split up and circled the school, peering into every single window – even the few on the first floor, with the aid of their ASPICs.
‘Nothing,’ said Alfie.
‘Where can he be?’ Janey was getting extremely worried. By now it was fully dark, and her brother could be very frightened, alone for so long.
‘Oh, Mum must be home,’ said Alfie suddenly.
Alfie’s house was at the far edge of the school grounds. Sure enough, there were lights on all over the ground floor.
‘Or Jamie.’
‘Let’s go and . . .’
Before Alfie could finish his sentence, there was a strange juddering from the ground beneath them. Both Spylets wobbled on their ASPICs, and Janey stared in horror at Alfie’s house. ‘Another explosion!’ she said. She zoomed in with her Ultra-gogs. ‘There’s smoke coming from your basement. And . . . Zoom!’ She focused on a familiar boyish outline vaulting the fence. ‘There’s Jamie!’
They both knew what that meant. Another Spylab had just been blown up.
And James was running from the scene of the crime.
‘Blonde!’ An anxious voice blasted up from the SPIV on Janey’s chest. ‘Update!’ shouted her father.
‘We’re at the Hallidays’,’ Janey shouted into her own SPI Visualator, swerving around the swings on the school playground as they neared the house. ‘There was an explosion, and Jamie was running away.’ At the same time Alfie was telling his own mum what was happening.
‘We’ve got it,’ said her father. ‘Don’t go in,’ he added sternly. ‘Understood?’
Janey paused for a moment, a little sulkily. Judging by his loud ‘tut’, Alfie had just been told the same thing. ‘OK,’ she said after a few moments. ‘But can I at least go after James?’
‘Oh yes!’ Her mother’s voice rang out. ‘She should do that.’
‘All right,’ said her father, only half his face visible in the screen. It looked like he needed a good shave, and his nose seemed to have spread across his cheeks. ‘See if you can track him down. And then straight back to the Spylab at home. We’ll rally there at eight p.m.’
‘Presuming it’s still there,’ said Janey.
‘We’ll double-check,’ said her father abruptly. ‘Go and find your brother.’
‘Right,’ said Janey. She swivelled her ASPIC around to face the way James had gone. ‘Coming?’ she said to Alfie.
To her surprise, he shook his head. ‘I’m checking for clues. And making sure my footy cards aren’t in little pieces. See you back at the lab.’
Janey nodded. ‘Fingers crossed I’ll have Jamie with me,’ she said, pushing her Ultra-gogs more firmly on to her nose. She knew she had a lot of ground to cover, and quickly – Jamie had bounded over the fence into the woodland surrounding the school. Seized by an idea, Janey headed back to the playground.
At the bottom of the slide she ollied the ASPIC, then hurtled up the mirror-smooth ramp so fast that her ears pressed against the side of her head. She was at the top in less than two seconds; angling her body towards her board like a ski jumper, Janey felt the board part company with the slide. She was flying! The sensation was amazing.
Alfie looked on with a mixed expression, half disgust and half utter admiration. ‘Air it, Blonde!’ he called back.
Janey loved this feeling of freedom, of sailing through the air. All too soon it was over. After shooting across the fence, clearing it by a good half a metre, Janey pointed the nose of her ASPIC down and headed for the ground. It wouldn’t fly forever anyway, as it was more of a hoverboard. With a little bounce the ASPIC made contact with the path at the edge of the woods.
‘Night vision,’ she said hastily to her Ultra-gogs. In the thick of the trees, she could hardly see. Obligingly her spy glasses switched to active infrared and the objects before her danced up before her eyes in stark black and white. Hovering along a foot above the ground, she was now able to see a grey squirrel running along the branch of a tree, and the bushes moving where something was making them rustle.
Janey slowed and jumped off her ASPIC to investigate. Strapp
ing the board to her thigh, she pushed into the bushes at the place where she spotted the movement. To her disappointment there was nothing odd, only a faint set of marks on the ground where some tiny animal had rushed around in a circle and burrowed under some roots.
Back to the main track she went, looking up from time to time as she ran. The squirrels jumping in and out of the web of branches above her head seemed to be getting more frantic, soaring through the air with their tails and front legs outstretched, flying higher than Janey had on her ASPIC. It was really quite beautiful to watch . . . until two squirrels, in their haste, ran right into each other and toppled to the ground. Landing lightly, cat-like, they stood up for a split second, then pelted away to the safety of a hole in a tree.
‘These squirrels are crazy!’ Then it suddenly dawned on Janey what she was watching. ‘They’re being chased.’
Would James be chasing squirrels? She whispered his name a couple of times as loudly as she dared, but there was no reply other than an odd, harsh cawing sound from high above her head.
‘Oh no.’ The sound was alarmingly familiar, and almost instinctively Janey flicked the titanium blade into position on her Girl-gauntlet. It didn’t make sense though. How would the velociraptor, with its lack of balance and its tiny front legs, have managed to climb a tree? Surely she and Alfie had finished him off at Solfari Lands.
There was only one way to find out. Making her way as quietly as she could to a small clearing, Janey pinpointed roughly where the noise was coming from, then jumped. As her soles made contact with the leaf-strewn ground, there were two identical thuds. Her Fleet-feet detonated, and Janey shot upwards. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of a smooth overhanging branch; in one slick movement she swung herself through 360 degrees like a gymnast, then vaulted upwards, landing lightly on top of the branch.
She steadied herself against the trunk, looked around and suddenly spotted the shape she had been searching for. James! He was some way over to her left, huddled under a bush, believing himself to be camouflaged by the undergrowth. His chocolate-button eyes flashed with fear as he peeked out between the leaves, looking in the branches above for whatever had been chasing him.
Following the direction of James’s gaze, Janey looked up. The cawing creature was in the tree directly above her head. And it had seen her. Or felt her presence – she wasn’t sure which, but she knew from the gasp in the bushes below that James had seen her too, and was fearing for her safety.
‘Zoom,’ she squeaked to her Ultra-gogs, at the same time holding out a hand towards James and hoping he would understand that he needed to stay quiet.
But when she saw what the spy glasses had focused in on, her heart almost stopped. Unconsciously Janey put a hand over her heart, willing it to be quiet. This time Jane Blonde had surely bitten off more than she could chew.
A glittering eye – cold, tiny and dangerous – was peering down at her. How could it see her through the dark? Too late, Janey noticed the red dot of the active infrared on her Ultra-gogs. She might as well have sat there with a sign over her head saying ‘EAT ME’. ‘Photo,’ she whispered to her Gogs as loudly as she dared. ‘And night vision OFF!’
Janey gasped when she saw the photograph taken by the Ultra-gogs: an immense, razor-sharp beak, easily as long as Janey’s arm, rounding up to a slight hump below two gimlet eyes, but then extending behind its head like the handle of a sword; a pair of great hunched wings, with one, two . . . three talons that would have matched Trouble’s sabre claw for sheer deadliness; long feet that scrabbled uneasily for a foothold in the slender branches at the top of the tree.
What was it? The pelican? It could have followed them from Scotland somehow. It surely couldn’t be the velociraptor, but the noise it made was so similar . . .
No time for that now. The creature was getting restless. Crowing ferociously, it reached out one of its three-clawed feet, grappling through the air above her head. It was trying to catch her. Panicking, Janey ran as far as she could along the branch she was on, hoping to be able to leap like a squirrel across to the next tree, but the moment she entered a patch of moonlight the creature stirred excitedly, skimming her ponytail with a claw. She whipped her head around, hoping to knock the monster off balance, but in a matter of moments it had sliced through the platinum strands and was on her again. Now she had no chance . . .
But just as she held out her Girl-gauntlet, ready to slash through the leathery leg descending through the leaves straight at her, there was a noise below. ‘No!’ she shouted, horrified.
James had run out from the cover of the bushes. Cupping his mouth, he stood in a shaft of moonlight, fully illuminated, jumping up and down and shouting with his strange voice that sounded so out of practice, still so animal-like. The creature had paused and was listening, watching. The second that he saw he had the creature’s attention, James ran, scrambling and scampering over tree roots and low bushes, making as much noise as he possibly could. ‘Jamie, no! I can . . .’
But she had dithered, and in that moment the monstrous, ugly bird roused itself from the foliage, unfolded its great sinewy wings and flapped off across the forest. ‘Jamie . . .’ gasped Janey. ‘Not Jamie, please.’
Without taking care to look where she would land Janey leaped from her branch. The ankle that had twinged before now bent at right angles; Janey heard it snap like a dry stick. Her head swam and black mist gathered around her eyes, but somehow her spy instincts prodded her into action. Using her extended titanium blade to slice through the straps of her ASPIC, she flopped full length along it as though it was a surfboard, and with her good foot she pushed off after James, following the path he’d made through the leaves.
She land-surfed through the undergrowth to the edge of the woodland just in time to see her little brother turn and stare, terrified, at the vast batlike creature bearing down on him. Then it opened its horrendous beak and carried the small boy away like a hawk snatching a mouse.
‘Drop him!’ screamed Janey, dragging a toe through the dirt to brake and trying to stand up, run, grab her brother’s foot. But her ankle gave way, and the last thing she saw before a thick fog dropped down over her eyes was a taloned foot sailing towards the hills . . .
‘Blondette, wakey wakey, pale milkshaky.’ The familiar voice buzzed over Janey’s face in a bothersome fashion. She opened one eye to look at G-Mamma. ‘Rise and shine, Spylet mine.’
Sitting up groggily, Janey found her parents, G-Mamma and the Hallidays all peering at her from various parts of the Spylab next to her bedroom, concerned. She was lying on the bed in the corner. Her ankle throbbed gently but had been Wowed, so when she flexed it gingerly it no longer felt broken. ‘What happened?’ she asked, her tongue feeling too thick for her mouth.
Alfie pointed to the clock, which said 4.45 a.m. ‘You didn’t arrive at eight, so we sent out a search party’
‘Passed out on the forest floor with ankle pain,’ said G-Mamma, mixing something in a glass. ‘I think you need a tonic. Drink this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Melted Mars bars.’
Janey took the glass and, as she sat up, remembered with horrible clarity what had just happened. Or rather, what had happened several hours ago. ‘Oh! Jamie . . .’
‘He was nowhere to be seen,’ said her mother tearfully. ‘You didn’t find him?’
‘I did! He was there in the forest, but there was this thing, this big bat-creature, like that raptor at Solfari Lands, only with wings and a big handle jutting out of its head, and it carried Jamie away, and he looked so scared . . .’
Her father groaned and put his head in his hands. Janey stared. Was she imagining it, or had his hair grown again? It looked coarser, thicker and blacker than it had the previous night. She jumped as he sat up and looked straight at her.
‘We need a plan of action,’ he said firmly, getting up from the bench and pacing and scratching at his arm. ‘Halos, you need somewhere to stay for a start, as your house is barely habitable at t
he moment.’
His glance went from the Hallidays to G-Mamma, who said hotly, ‘Look, there’s hardly room in the garage to swing a Trouble. I can’t be having visitors in there.’
‘How bad is your house?’ asked Janey.
‘Trashed,’ said Alfie. ‘The Spylab’s completely gone, and the rest of the house sort of collapsed into the hole.’
Janey swung her legs over the edge of the bed. ‘I . . . I think I might know what’s going on,’ she said hesitantly. ‘That’s the third lab now that’s been blown up, and we know for definite that Jamie was at Solfari Lands and at the Halos’ place. I think maybe he’s so mad at what Copernicus did to him, he’s smashing up the Spylabs so that Rapid Evolution can’t be performed on anyone else.’
The adult SPIs all looked at each other, pondering what she’d said. Then Boz shook his head. ‘That may be, Janey, but it doesn’t help us find him now, does it? Where do you think this creature was taking him?’
Janey shrugged helplessly. ‘Maybe it has a home . . . a whatever you call it that eagles sleep in.’
‘An eerie,’ said Alfie, looking pleased with himself.
‘Yes. Good,’ said Boz. ‘So here’s what we’ll do. Hallidays, get some essentials together, and you can have James’s room for now, just until we . . . sort things out.’ Janey could tell her father was avoiding saying ‘until we find him’. ‘Gina, you and I should go out beyond the forest and try locating James. G-Mamma, perhaps you could fetch Agent Dubbo Seven across from Oz. We need his tracking skills right now.’ He nodded, ticking people off on his fingers.
‘What about me?’ said Janey.
‘Blonde, I need you to do some research,’ he said, putting his hands on her shoulders.
‘Research,’ echoed Janey in a hollow voice. She knew what that meant: staying home. Staring at the computer. Missing out on the mission.
Jane Blonde: Spy in the Sky Page 6