Usually Agnes can’t wait to tell me things. Not this time. This time, it’s like she has to tear it out of herself.
“The nebula is a supernova remnant,” she says. “A supernova remnant is the remains of a dead star. That means . . . it means . . .”
Oh.
I get it now.
“The star doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. The place I’m from . . . my planet . . . my home . . . is gone.”
Agnes looks like she’s in actual physical pain. “Yes, Jake.”
I can’t find a word to describe how I feel. It’s not like I ever knew my home world. If it still existed, if it hadn’t burned up in the fire of an exploding star thousands of years ago, it’s not like I could hop into a spaceship and go there now. So why should I feel bad about any of this? Why should I feel so hollow inside? Why should I feel so lost?
I wipe my eyes. “That sucks.”
Agnes lets me sniffle in silence. She doesn’t try to tell me I shouldn’t be sad. She doesn’t try to cheer me up. She just lets me be alone while keeping me company.
“We’re still friends?” I say eventually.
She gives me a light punch on the shoulder. “Friends and allies. Night Kite and Star Hammer.”
“More like Night Kite and Star Pudding.”
We laugh.
I feel just a tiny little bit better.
Chapter 14
WHILE I WRESTLE WITH THE idea of being an ancient orphan from a dead world, and while alien goo expands beneath the surface of Cedar Creek View, I still have to go to class.
“Writing on paper is a normal school activity!” says Mr. Brown with more cheer than I’ve ever heard from him. “Everyone! Get out paper and write on it.”
The entire class blinks and stares at him.
Parker Zeballos raises her hand. “What are we supposed to write about?”
“Appropriate school things!” Mr. Brown says with alarming enthusiasm. “I will engage in this activity as well.”
He scribbles away.
“What the ever heck?” I whisper to Agnes.
“I’m going to conduct an experiment on him,” she whispers back.
She gets out a blank piece of paper and brings it up to Mr. Brown’s desk. “I’ve completed my appropriate school writing.”
Mr. Brown beams at her. “You are very good at school writing.”
And now, Agnes does something incredible. She removes a little package from her pocket. And from the package she withdraws a foil-wrapped strip.
It’s gum.
The room grows quiet as we all watch this drama play out. Every crinkle of the foil sounds like a car crash. When she puts the gum in her mouth and works her jaw, I can hear how it sticks and pulls away from her teeth. I can hear her sloshing saliva. We all can. Agnes is chewing gum, right in Mr. Brown’s face. And not just chewing it. She’s smacking it. She’s massacring it.
“Is that gum?” asks Mr. Brown.
We tense for an explosion.
“Yes,” Agnes says between the horrible grinding motions of the entire lower half of her face. “It’s chewing gum. And I am chewing it.”
“What an interesting activity,” says Mr. Brown. “I, too, would like to chew gum.”
She hands Mr. Brown a piece. He unwraps it. He puts it between his teeth and sucks it in like a vending machine taking a dollar.
Mr. Brown is chewing gum in class.
Something’s happened to the real Mr. Brown. He’s been replaced, just like the Foster family.
He’s an imblobster.
First the Fosters.
And now Mr. Brown.
I take a look around the room.
If Mr. Brown’s an imblobster, anyone could be.
Anyone at school.
Anyone who was near the mall.
Anyone who was near any of the sinkholes.
Anyone.
Maybe it’s odd that with everything going on I can still enjoy stale chicken nuggets on the edge of the soccer field, but Agnes is enjoying nothing, which sort of evens things out. She taps away at Woll’s tablet, muttering words you’re not supposed to say at school, such as “#%@$” and “%^&@$.”
“Night Kite never curses,” I remind her around a mouthful of stubborn nugget.
“$%^&@#@!” she says.
“Still can’t get into those encrypted files?”
“I got into them fine.”
I swallow some nugget. “Wow, really? When did that happen?”
“During breakfast push-ups. I took a free online encryption course last night, and it led to a breakthrough.”
“That’s fantastic, Agnes! So why are you saying ‘%^&@$’?”
“Because it’s not like Woll’s got a file named ‘TOP_SECRET_PLAN_DO_NOT_READ.’ It’s just endless work stuff. Payroll. Employee schedules. Purchase orders.”
“Jobs are boring,” I observe.
“I mean, just listen to this stuff: Five thousand sticky note pads. Twenty cases of printer paper. Four gross cartons of toilet paper.”
“Why would they buy gross toilet paper?”
“Gross is a quantity, Jake. It means twelve dozen.”
“I just learned something!” I eat a nugget.
Agnes goes on listing all the things the Collaboratory has purchased, and after a while I understand why she’s been cursing. It’s a very long list.
“Fifteen miles of copper wire, speaker cones, capacitors, rectifier modules—”
“Wait. Those are things that Dale has lying around in his shop. They’re amplifier parts.”
“Dale’s shop doesn’t have room for the size of these components. We’re talking twelve-foot-diameter speaker cones. Six of them.”
I spit nugget bits. “Agnes, that’s it! You found the answer. I know what the Collaboratory is doing. With an amplifier that big, you could make a huge noise. A huge, deep, low noise.”
“A noise like . . . like a Hum. But why? What does the Collaboratory get out of it?”
“Think about what the Hum does.”
“It turns you all pudding-y and shifts you into a seal.”
“I think we’re almost there, Agnes. We’re really close to figuring this all out.”
Agnes gets a determined look on her face. A Night Kite look. “There’s only one thing to do, Jake.”
“Don’t say it.”
“I am going to say it. We have to break into the Collaboratory and spy on them and then thwart their plan!”
“You’re just looking for an excuse to crawl through air shafts and play with smoke bombs.”
“Jake,” she says, very seriously, “I’m going to share with you my philosophy of life, the one and only thing in the whole universe I know to be true. I think you’re ready to hear this.”
I check my pocket for a pen to write down whatever Agnes says next. “Okay. I’m ready.”
“If you are ever given a chance to climb through air shafts and toss smoke bombs, you absolutely must climb through air shafts and toss smoke bombs.”
“That definitely does sound like your philosophy. Me, my philosophy is if you are ever given a chance to be dissected, you probably should avoid being dissected.”
“Ugh, Jake, that is a good philosophy,” she says, deflated.
The bell chimes, and we get up to go to our classes.
“Let me think about it.”
“Fair enough. I really don’t want you to get dissected.”
“I know. That’s what makes us friends.”
Agnes heads off to Geometry, and I’m on my way to Math for People Who Aren’t as Smart as Agnes when Dairy and Gravy catch me alone.
“Bloblet Jake,” Dairy calls out.
I have no idea if they even attend class or just hang out on campus as insects or erasers until they want to bother me.
“Will you be regurgitating to the Collaboratory?” asks Gravy.
“I hope you mean ‘returning’ to the Collaboratory.”
“Which is the one that means coming up from th
e stomach and spilling all over the place?”
“That’s regurgitating.”
“Please do not do that at the Collaboratory. Please do the other thing.”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Dairy blinks. Gravy blinks, too. They blink at the exact same time. Maybe it’s an imblobster thing. Maybe it’s just a twin thing.
“But don’t you wish to be less congealed so you can turn into bugs and sledgehammers whenever you want?” says Gravy.
“You guys can turn into sledgehammers?”
“Sledgehammers are easy, Cake. They don’t even have moving parts. So, tell us, when can you regurgitate and be a sledgehammer?”
I almost agree to it. I could ditch school and we could go right now and after a few lessons maybe I could stop worrying about bird hands and mall seals. And I could discover exactly what Woll’s up to. I’m being offered a free ride to the house of secrets.
But maybe it’d only be a one-way ride. I still don’t know what the Collaboratory wants with me. But I know they kept the news about the death of my home planet from me.
“I don’t think I can come back,” I tell the twins.
They cock their heads to the side like confused dogs.
“Words are stiff,” Dairy says. “Maybe we misunderstood.”
“No, you didn’t. I can’t come back. You talk about helping me, but Dr. Woll—”
“—our monkey,” Gravy interrupts.
“I can’t trust your monkey. So I’m not going to regurgitate to the Collaboratory. I should never have gone in the first place.”
Dairy smiles, not quite an ear-to-ear grin, but close enough. “What is the name of your noisy beast?”
The question comes from out of the blue.
“My dog?”
“Is your dog the hairy one that hates many things?”
“Her name is Growler. And she doesn’t hate me.”
“Growler,” Dairy says.
“Growler,” Gravy agrees.
Dairy winks. “See you soon, Cake.”
After dinner I step onto the window ledge with Growler in the crook of my arm. Up the paloverde tree, steady on the rain gutter, and onto the roof I go.
Streetlights mark the boundaries of Cedar Creek View. In the darkness on the edge of town lurks the dead mall. My eyes lift from street level to the night sky. I can’t see the Crab Nebula without Agnes’s binoculars, but I know where it is now. Ever since Agnes told me my home planet was gone, burned to a crisp by an exploding star thousands of years ago, I haven’t stopped looking up.
With my face pressed into Growler’s pungent scruff, I watch the silent stars twinkle.
Something occurs to me. Growler has not growled. Not since I got home from school. Not while I hauled her up to the roof. Not a single time.
“Are you sick, girl?”
She looks at me but doesn’t growl.
Maybe she’s got a stomachache. I gently prod her tummy. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t make a noise.
One by one, I take each of her legs and extend them to see if she’s in pain. I inspect her paws and rub a finger over the pads.
No reaction.
No growl.
She looks like Growler.
She feels like Growler.
But I know my dog.
This is not Growler.
Chapter 15
THE TWINS IMBLOBSTERED MY DOG. They practically told me they were going to do it.
Okay.
If they want me back at the Collaboratory so bad, they’re going to get what they wish for.
I’m going to shift into a sledgehammer and break down their doors.
I’m going to shift into a bulldozer and smash through their walls.
I’m going to crush anyone who gets in my way.
Nobody messes with my dog.
Agnes spends about two hundred minutes on the phone trying to talk me out of it.
The only thing that makes me listen to her is Star Hammer Annual #6.
“Remember what happened when Professor Brainpan abducted Nails the Star Horse?”
I do remember. It was a trap, and Brainpan imprisoned Star Hammer in a subatomic condenser field.
“And all Woll needs to trap you is a bucket with a tight lid.”
Agnes is right, and I hate it.
“We’ll make them turn Growler back to normal tomorrow,” she promises. “Try to sleep. I have a feeling tomorrow’s going to be a big action scene.”
I spend most of the night on the roof, glaring toward the dead mall. I don’t have my guitar. I don’t have my dog. The only thing that keeps me company is my worry and rage.
Agnes and I meet before class the next day. She has a plan. It’s pretty simple. We’re going to ditch school.
We walk right up to the chain link fence bordering the administration offices. Agnes points in the opposite direction and hollers, “OH MY GOD IS THAT A DEAD BODY?”
While everyone’s distracted trying to spot a corpse, we scramble over the fence and run away to the little park three blocks from school. There’s no one here but us, a couple of people doing yoga on the grass, and a couple of dads pushing a little kid on the swings. It’s a very pleasant scene.
I don’t like it.
“Any of them could be an imblobster,” I warn Agnes as she leads us to some bushes. “Anyone anywhere could be an imblobster.”
Behind the bushes lie a pair of bikes. There’s Agnes’s and . . .
“That’s my bike. You stole my bike?”
“I relocated it for your convenience.”
“It was in the garage. And locked.”
“I know. You didn’t make it easy on me, thanks very much.”
“I apologize that I didn’t make it easier to steal my bike?”
“I forgive you. C’mon, it’s a long ride to the dead mall.”
From our surveillance point across the street, the mall looks harmless. Elderly people go in and out of the Tumbleweed Diner. A few people head into the mall itself. But overall, the dead mall is dead.
Agnes goes over the infiltration plan with me.
Unlike ditching school, it’s complicated. It involves me doing things I’m not sure I can do. It involves air shafts. It involves rope. It’s a whole heist.
“There,” she says, watching a van exit the parking lot. It’s white and unmarked.
“Is it Tami and Leonard?”
“It’s their van, at least.”
She takes a little metal box with a red knob from her backpack: the Hum-o-Tron. I refused it the first time she tried to give it to me, but this time I take it, along with a clunky pair of modified headphones. This is going to be the hardest shift I’ve ever done on purpose, and I need help.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks.
“Absolutely.”
“You don’t have to. I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to do. I can find us another way.”
“Thanks, Agnes. That means a lot to me. But it’s a good plan.”
“Okay, then.”
She affixes the headphones over my ears. They’re a bit crampy. Next, she plugs the headphones into the box and then turns the red knob a little.
I hear a bit of Hum and give her a thumbs-up.
She turns the knob a little more.
Gradually, a deep vibration fills my head. The roots of my teeth ache. The little fleshy punching bag in the back of my throat shivers.
I take a deep breath and give her another thumbs-up.
She turns the knob some more.
Now it feels like a real Hum. Like I’m a tuning fork. Like I contain earthquakes. My bones scream with a searing ache.
I let the Hum travel through me and stop thinking of my body as a mass of solid matter but instead as specks of material—hair, skin, muscle, bone. The specks have to loosen, become as liquid as my blood. Less like ice. More like water.
The pain starts to fade. I feel like I’m letting out a long-held breath.
Mu
scles form beneath my surface.
My bones stretch.
My insides move and change.
My hair lengthens.
Calluses form on my knuckles.
Some parts shrink. Other parts swell.
Standing tall, I look down at Agnes.
“Did I do it?” My voice is different. Lower. I don’t sound like me.
Agnes doesn’t say anything.
“Did I mess it up? Do I have a parrot mouth? Tell me!” I feel my face. I don’t detect a beak.
“You shifted perfectly,” Agnes says finally. “You’re amazing.”
I do feel pretty amazing, I have to admit.
“Well, your box helped.”
“It’s true. I am also amazing. Do you remember the plan? And the backup plan? And the backup to the backup plan? Maybe I should come up with a backup to the backup to the backup plan.”
“That would be too many plans. I’d forget some of them.”
There’s nothing left to do, so I set off to the crosswalk.
“Hey,” Agnes calls after me. “You can count on me.”
I turn and smile at her with Tami’s mouth.
Once I’m at the department store entrance, I punch in the password Agnes got from Woll’s tablet. I’m not gassed or electrocuted or mobbed by security guards, so I guess step one of the plan is going okay.
I lean toward the camera with my right eye open wide.
“Retinal scan fail,” says a fuzzy voice from a speaker somewhere. “Try again.”
“I think it’s broken,” I say.
“Everything seems to be working from here.”
“Obviously not, or I’d be on my way to the break room right now to microwave my burrito.”
I hold a wrapped burrito up to the camera. It’s a butterscotch burrito for authenticity. Another thing Agnes thought of.
“Okay, sorry, Tami.”
The lock buzzes. I step into the dark space with the empty clothes racks and creepy naked mannequins. The escalator delivers me into bright light and clacking computer keys. A few people walk past me without looking up. Someone says, “Hi, Tami,” but keeps on going.
I’ve done it. I’m in the Collaboratory.
This was the easy part.
I don’t know where to begin, so I just start wandering, poking my head into rooms, peeking into windowed offices, looking for something, anything, that will help me return my dog to her regular, obnoxious self instead of the silent thing I left locked in the bathroom (with food and water and air-conditioning because I’m not a monster).
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