“Dr. Woll is our monkey,” Gravy confides. He and Dairy agreeably head off somewhere.
“Do they ever make sense?”
“Not recently,” Woll says, with a shadow of sadness.
She leads me down a corridor lined with workers hunched over computers and microscopes and flasks and bottles. As we walk, people come up to her with tablets and clipboards, some of which she looks at, some of which she signs, some of which she waves away.
“We’re a partnership of business, government, and military,” Woll tells me. “A collaboration. And our mission is very specialized research. So, collaboration plus laboratory equals . . . ?”
“Collaboratory?”
She snaps her fingers. “You got it, Jake.”
Stopping in front of a computer screen, she clicks a mouse. Up comes a familiar image: a map of Cedar Creek View.
“Twelve years ago, a mass of xenogel fell to Earth. But you know that. Xenogel is a metamorphic compound with extraterrestrial origins.” She clicks the mouse again. Several red dots appear on the map. It only takes me a few seconds to realize what they’re marking. Cedar Creek View Middle School. The Fosters’ house. The Cedar Creek View Fashion Valley Galleria Mall. Half a dozen other locations.
“Sinkholes,” I say.
She gives me a nod and a pleasant smile. “And at every one of the sinkhole sites, we’ve found this.” She takes a little glass cylinder sealed with a black rubber stopper from her pocket. A few drops of silvery gray fluid wiggle inside.
“We call it xenogel, and it’s spreading under Cedar Creek View. Expanding. Reproducing. It’s reaching out, for what purpose, we don’t know. How far it will spread, we have no idea. Does it have a plan? We haven’t got a clue.”
She pauses, maybe thinking I need time to process this information. But all I can think is, I’m xenogel, the same as the stuff underground, reproducing.
“Can you show me how to stop changing shape when I don’t want to?”
“Absolutely. And so much more than that.”
“I’ll be able to turn into any animal?”
Woll laughs. “Jake, that’s just the beginning. You’re capable of so much more. We can help you achieve your full potential.”
Part of me says, Yes, cooperate with them. You deserve answers and knowledge.
It’s everything I want.
Another part of me says, Remember the Fosters.
Here I am, taking a tour of a science lab, hoping to get something out of it, like I’m the only important person in this whole thing. If Agnes were here, finding out what happened to the Fosters would be her priority. And she wouldn’t be shy about it. Night Kite is not shy. She’d just come right out and demand answers.
“So, what happened to the Foster family? Are they dead?”
Woll smiles. I can usually tell the difference between a nervous smile, a truly friendly smile, and a fake smile.
I can’t tell anything at all from Dr. Woll’s smile.
“The Fosters?” she says. “You know them?”
“I was there when they got taken over by the xenogel blob. I saw what happened to them.”
“You keep late hours, Jake. Tell me, what did you see?”
“There was a sinkhole. Xenogel came out of the sinkhole. It gobbed over all three Fosters, and then the Fosters were . . .”
“Were what?”
“They were all . . . weird. They talked funny. They didn’t know how kitchens work.”
“So, not dead, then.”
“No, maybe not, but imblobstered.”
“Blob plus imposter. I like that.” Woll smiles again. This time it looks like a genuine smile. “Well, Jake, as you said, the Fosters are at home, right where they’re supposed to be. As for them behaving weirdly, it’s no surprise that coming into contact with the xenogel left them disoriented. There’s still so much we don’t know about how the xenogel works. For example, the xenogel did something to the Fosters, but I assume you can touch people and objects without ‘imblobstering’ them?”
I have to hand it to her. That’s a very good question. When I was a baby blob, my dad touched me, and I didn’t imblobster him. I just became a human baby. And I’ve touched millions of things ever since.
Woll looks at her watch. “Few things get done in a single afternoon, and I hope this won’t be your only visit. In any case, it’s getting late, and I don’t want you to leave here today without gaining something of value. So why don’t we show you what you really are?”
My heart thuds. I swallow. “Yes. Yes, I would like that.”
On our way down a corridor, a worker hands her a small tablet. “You left this in the cafeteria, Doctor.”
“We’ve been busy here,” Woll explains to me. “I’m losing track of things.”
The picture on the lock screen is Woll and two kids. Blond. Blue-eyed. A boy and a girl. It’s the twins, Dairy and Gravy. They’re smiling nice, happy, smiles. Even though they’re identical to Gravy and Dairy, they’re somehow . . . different. More normal.
Dr. Woll takes me into a white-walled lab dominated by a cylindrical tank in the center of the room. The tank is about the size of a refrigerator. Liquid swirls inside, the same vivid blue as toilet bowl cleaner. Maybe it is toilet bowl cleaner. Maybe this is a giant toilet. I don’t know science stuff.
She taps the screen of her tablet a few times. From the top of the tank descends a thumb-sized blob of silvery-gray goo.
“Xenogel?” I ask.
“An isolated strand of it. We took it from the sinkhole at 33 degrees, 27 minutes, 47 seconds north, 112 degrees, 23 minutes, 46 seconds west.”
“Those sure were a lot of numbers and words.”
“Sorry. We like to be precise here. That’s the parking lot outside the Cedar Creek View Fashion Valley Galleria Mall.” She sets her tablet down on a desk. “Have you heard of the Humongous Fungus?”
I bet Agnes has heard of the Humongous Fungus. Agnes, whom Woll hasn’t mentioned once, even though it was Agnes who betrayed me and told Gravy and Dairy what I was.
“No.”
“Its proper name is Armillaria ostoyae, and it’s the largest living being on Earth, a fungal organism that covers almost four square miles of the Malheur National Forest. We think the xenogel beneath Cedar Creek View is like that, only possibly bigger.”
“Then . . . I’m part of a bigger living being?”
Woll checks her watch again. “We have thirteen minutes to get you back to your mother. I’ll call for Tami and Leonard.”
She sets her tablet down and digs her phone out of her pocket.
I can’t help wondering how much Agnes could find on that tablet.
While Woll’s distracted calling for my ride home, I reach for it.
Unlike Agnes, I don’t carry around a backpack, and I don’t even have a pocket big enough to stash it in. But I do have something almost nobody else does: the ability to make my own pocket. The twins can change shape without being shaken and stirred and softened by the Hum, and if they can do it, why can’t I?
Be like hot grease, they told me. Be less congealed.
Or maybe, to say it in a less weird way, I just have to relax. Loosen up. This shouldn’t be much more complicated than forking my tongue or giving myself webbed toes.
While Woll’s on the phone, I close my eyes and picture soft, loose things. Melting ice cream. A can of soup plopping in a kettle. Pudding.
In one quick motion, I snatch the tablet and tuck it under my shirt, and dunk it into my pudding belly. It goes in with a little burping noise. Now it’s inside me.
It’s gross.
I’m gross.
But I have the tablet.
Chapter 12
MY STOMACH RUMBLES WITH WOLL’S tablet inside. I talk to the twins to cover the noise. We’re in the back of the van with Tami and Leonard in the front.
“When you said Woll was your monkey, that’s not really what you meant, is it?”
“She is definitely our monkey,” Gravy says. “And we
love her very much.”
“Do you mean mother?”
“Bake is correct,” says Dairy. “Woll is our beloved mother.”
I don’t even bother to correct her about my name.
“Does that mean she’s also a goo alien? Does that mean . . .” I have a hard time actually getting the words out. “Does that mean, she’s my mother, too?”
Dairy laughs. “No, Bake. You are funny.”
The van finally pulls into the alley behind Dale’s.
Tami unlocks the door. “We’ll be in touch about your next visit.”
“Okay, good, great,” I say, getting out.
Dashing through the back door of the guitar shop, I wave at a confused and befuddled Dale, who’s still absorbed in diagnosing Stringy’s neck, and I make a straight line out the front door.
Mom stands down the street beside our parked car. And with her is Agnes on her bike.
I stroll up casually. Am I overdoing it? Should I have aimed for jaunty instead of casual?
“Hi?” I say.
“Hey, Jake,” Mom says. “Where’s your guitar?”
“I left it with Dale. There’s a buzz on the seventh fret.”
That sounded normal. I think.
“I was just telling your mom how I wanted to check out the guitar shop,” says Agnes. She’s out of breath, red-faced, sweating.
“You never told me Agnes plays guitar,” Mom says, as if I’ve been keeping a secret.
“That is right. I never did tell you that.”
Does Agnes play guitar? I don’t think so. But she could probably learn it in a couple of hours while doing push-ups.
“Ms. Wind, I need to talk to Jake for a second.” Agnes begins to walk off. When I don’t follow, she pinches my shirtsleeve and leads me away.
At the corner, a little too close to Big Blue Biter the mailbox, she says, “The tracker I planted on the hazmat creeps went off and led me here. I tried to reach you, but your phone must be broken—”
“I turned it off.” My voice drips with ice.
Her mouth hangs open. “Okay. Well, I raced here because I knew you had a guitar lesson, but by the time I got here, you were gone. And then the tracker said the van was heading back to the dead mall. I put two and two together, and . . . did they kidnap you? Are you okay? What did they do to you? How did you escape?”
“The twins visited me at home on Friday, and I went with them today voluntarily. I met Dr. Woll there. She knew who I was. She knew what I was. She knows all about me. And it’s your fault.”
Agnes closes her eyes. When she opens them, she looks at the sidewalk, at the mailbox, anywhere but at me. This, from a person whose stare is usually so direct it could burn holes in concrete. She takes a breath and holds it, like she dreads letting it out. Then, “I contacted Dr. Woll,” she admits. “I told her about the goo sample we collected from the sinkhole on the first day of school.”
My throat closes up. “You said you wouldn’t.”
“I know. I didn’t think there’d be any harm in it.” Her throat sounds a little closed up, too. “I used an anonymous email address to contact her, and I mailed her the sample without a return address. There shouldn’t have been any way for her to identify me. There shouldn’t have been any way for her to identify you.”
“Well, thanks to you, she did.”
“But how?”
I struggle to keep my voice down. “That doesn’t even matter. You made a promise.”
“I know you’re upset, but the only reason we agreed to keep the investigation to ourselves was because it would be more fun that way. That’s what you said. That’s what I agreed to.”
“You know I had more reasons than that to keep this a secret.”
“I know that now. But I didn’t until the seal incident. And I sent Woll the goo sample before I knew you were an alien.”
“So you’ve been lying to me for a while.”
Red rises to Agnes’s cheeks. “You were lying to me longer than that.”
If I let my cheeks turn red, I’ll probably become a full-on lobster, so I try to stay calm.
I glance over to Mom to make sure she’s not watching, and then I reach under my shirt. There’s a loud plopping pudding sound, but it’s not difficult to expel the tablet from my belly, because my belly doesn’t really want to keep holding it inside.
“Was that . . . in you?”
“Yeah,” I say, embarrassed for some reason.
“That’s weird but cool.”
“Just take it.”
She holds out a Ziploc bag and has me drop the tablet inside.
“Who does this belong to?”
“It’s Woll’s.”
Her eyes get big.
“Jake?” Mom calls from down the street. “Time to get a move on.”
“Be right there!” I lean in closer to Agnes. “Woll told me some stuff, but I think she’s holding back. Do your Night Kite wizardry on the tablet and see if you can find anything out.”
Agnes gives me a firm, businesslike nod.
As I turn to walk away, she says softly, “I’m sorry I sent Woll the goo sample.”
I pretend I don’t hear her and walk faster.
Chapter 13
BENEATH A SPRAY OF STARS in the calm night sky, I sit cross-legged on the roof. The brightest of the stars glare at me like they’re accusing me of something.
Growler, curled up in my lap, growls when I scritch behind her ears. I wish I had my guitar. My fingers are twitchy, but Stringy is still with Dale for the seventh-fret buzz I lied about. I should probably call him and tell him Stringy’s fine.
Growler’s growl changes pitch to a warning. I brace myself for . . . something.
Agnes’s head appears over the edge of the roof. “I know I’m the last person you want to see right now, but can I come up?”
Growler settles back into a normal growl.
“Growler says okay.”
“What do you say?”
“I don’t know.”
Agnes springs nimbly over the eaves and sits a couple of feet away from me, giving me space. The rumble of air conditioners fills the painful silence.
“Any news about the Fosters?” I ask after a while.
“Just came from there. Their car’s still in the driveway, and the sinkhole’s filled in. But they’re not home.”
“That’s bad, right?”
“Probably, yeah.”
The air conditioners rumble on.
I clear my throat. “I’ve been thinking, how did Woll know I was an alien just from the goo sample you sent her? How did she link it to me?”
“Good question. Have you figured it out?”
“The first day we saw the twins at school, they were collecting garbage and I gave them my juice carton. They must have brought it back to the Collaboratory along with all the other trash. Woll knew the goo from space splash-landed here twelve years ago, so there was a good chance that if any of the alien goo took human form, they might be attending Cedar Creek View Middle School. She probably ID’d me from traces I left on the carton.”
“Yeah,” was all Agnes said.
“That means it wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have accused you of betraying me. I’m sorry.”
“And I shouldn’t have sent her the sample. We agreed we wouldn’t. So, I’m sorry.”
Crickets chirp, invisible in the dark.
Agnes removes Woll’s tablet from her backpack. “I’ve been working on this. Most of the files are encrypted. I haven’t cracked them yet, but I did access a few files. Stuff that Woll probably didn’t think was all that important. I found out some things, and I wanted to talk to you face-to-face.” She hesitates. “It’s bad news. Do you want to hear it?”
I do not want to hear it. But not hearing it won’t make the news less bad. “Okay.”
She taps in a password.
“How’d you figure out her password?”
“If you’re going to be a crime-fighter, you must learn the methods
and practices of criminals.”
“Are you saying you did something wrong?”
Agnes scrolls through screens. “I did something illegal. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It used to be illegal for women to vote. If thwarting evil is illegal, then I’d rather be a criminal. Anyway, you’re the one who stole the tablet.”
“I wonder if Woll’s figured that out yet.”
“She’s not stupid. But I blocked her ability to track it or change the password.”
She hands me the tablet. The screen shows a diagram made of white dots connected by white lines. It reminds me of a spiderweb flecked with dewdrops. The drops are all labeled with numbers.
“A star chart?”
“Yes.” She taps the screen, and two of the dots change from white to green. So does the line connecting them. “This is our sun. And this is the Crab Nebula.” From her backpack comes an enormous pair of binoculars. She points them at the sky and spends a few seconds looking and focusing. “There it is. Have a look.”
I take the binoculars and aim where she’s pointing.
“I don’t see anything.”
“A tiny bit left. A little more. Just a bit up. See the gray smudge?”
“Okay, I see it.”
Agnes takes a breath. “That’s where you’re from.”
I think I gasp a little.
“Jake . . .”
“Just give me a second, okay?”
I keep looking, imagining myself as a blob, sailing through all that empty space between the Crab Nebula and Earth. Did I have any thoughts back then? Things I’ve forgotten? Or was I just peacefully asleep for the whole journey, without a trouble on my mind?
I have to force myself to lower the binoculars and come back down to Earth.
“What’s the bad news?”
“The Crab Nebula is sixty-five hundred light-years away. That means the light leaving it takes sixty-five hundred years to reach our eyes here on Earth.”
My brain churns. “If I came from there . . . then I spent at least sixty-five hundred years in space. That means I’m older than the pyramids in Egypt. It means I’m older than—”
“The English language,” Agnes says softly. “Older than Stonehenge. Older than the invention of the chicken.”
“But I don’t have any memories from before I landed here. I don’t feel that old. This doesn’t feel like bad news.”
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