I gather my thoughts and take a deep breath, fingers poised over the strings. I can do this. I can find the right notes, the right frequency, the right language to tame the blob. This can work.
It has to.
Now or never.
The moment of truth.
I fret a note and pluck a string.
A wisp of bitter smoke poots from the amp. Basszilla makes a sad little fffzzz and then falls silent.
“What just happened?”
Agnes frowns. “I think Basszilla fried the amplifier.”
Ugh.
The imblobster wave keeps coming.
Agnes’s eyes flicker back and forth. She’s thinking so hard I can almost smell her brain cooking. “Giant bass fiddle cricket!” she says. “Please tell me you looked at Physiology of Animal Species, A Zoological Compendium and got to the chapter on fiddle crickets.”
Only a few weeks ago if someone yelled “Giant bass fiddle cricket” at me, I would have had no idea what they meant by that.
But now I’ve been through some situations. I’ve seen things. I’ve been things. I’ve read Physiology of Animal Species, A Zoological Compendium.
I’ve been a seal. I’ve hidden a tablet in my belly. I’ve been Tami. I’ve protected Agnes inside an egg.
So I close my eyes.
Take a breath.
Be less clenched.
Be less congealed.
I can do this.
My legs shift into triple-jointed limbs, thick as tree trunks. My arms stretch into forelegs. Extra legs emerge from my sides. My soft human belly separates into armored segments while my skin hardens to shell-like armor. Holes down my sides draw in air, replacing my need for lungs. My two human eyes shift into a pair of simple eyes that turn the world from color into just light and darkness, and I grow another set of eyes that lets me see in every direction at the same time. My head changes shape into something resembling a hard nut with antennae more than half the length of the rest of my body. Most importantly, I grow four wings.
And I am enormous. My head nearly reaches the catwalks above the stage. Below, Agnes and Dale are little dark splotches, and if I’m not careful, I could crush them.
All I have to do now is rub my hind wings together. Just the slightest brushing already produces the deepest, loudest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s like an orchestra of cellos if the cellos were the size of cruise ships. I could grow more wings. I could grow bigger wings. I could create noise that would make Basszilla sound like a ukulele.
The xenogel mass keeps coming, thrashing, out of control. It wants to get to me. It wants to get to Agnes and Dale. I can sense its desire to imblobster the world. I can sense it because I’m part of it. And it’s already cost me so much. Xenogel took Growler and Mom and Dad. Xenogel cost me my friendship with Eirryk. It’s responsible for me being #MallSeal.
What made me think I could reason with it? What made me think I could control it? And why should I even try? All I have to do is rub my wings and blast the xenogel. I’ll be like Star Hammer in double-sized issue 50, “Family Matter,” when the last survivors of his home planet, the remaining Bahlpeenians who happen to be evil, come to take over Earth. Star Hammer uses the Celestial Mallet to destroy them, and that’s how he becomes the very last Bahlpeenian in the entire universe.
That’s how I’m going to deal with the xenogel.
I will blast it to mist.
I will reduce it to molecules.
To atoms.
To subatomic particles I don’t even know the names of.
That’s how I’m going to deal with this weird, conglomerate alien creature.
This weird alien creature . . . that I’m part of.
But this isn’t how the people in my life who matter—my mom and dad, Dale, Agnes—would treat me. Mom and Dad knew I was made of alien goo from the very beginning. Agnes stayed my friend even after I told her what I am. Dale has always accepted me. And he’s even weirder than I am.
I don’t need to be a gargantuan cricket right now.
I need to be something else.
I close all my eyes again. I suck air deeply through my side holes. I imagine the pointy bits on the ends of my legs playing guitar delicately, with control.
Uncongealing, I shift back into my Jake form.
Agnes runs up to me. “What happened? Re-form the cricket!”
The blob mob advances.
“No time to explain. Just give me Stringy.”
Agnes doesn’t question me. She hands me my old guitar.
I give it a strum. It’s out of tune, but that doesn’t even matter.
My fingers pick some slow patterns in a minor key. The sound is cold and dark and lonely. It’s like leaving behind a home you can never return to. It’s dreading what’s ahead.
The blob keeps coming, huge, towering.
Next, I play a fast run of descending notes, plummeting from the sky. With a windmill swing of my arm, I hit a power chord. Even without amplification, it sounds massive and violent, the music of a falling object smashing to Earth.
Then I grow extra fingers. I make chords that would be impossible with human hands. My song doesn’t sound like any other music I’ve ever heard. It’s chaotic, confusing, out of rhythm.
It’s alien.
It’s not knowing where you come from, who you are, what you’re supposed to do, what you’re supposed to be.
I play the song of me to the blob.
And the blob sings back.
The blob calls me segment, a word that means something closer than brother or sister, closer than friend. It’s a word that means the blob and I are just different parts of the same being. When it sings to me, it’s like I’m singing to myself. Our song is about how we left our world when our sun exploded. How we broke up into thousands of globules, spreading across the galaxy, looking for a new place to call home.
Our bit sailed through the endless winter of space, across distances that would require a dozen zeroes to express with a number. We huddled together in a congealed ball of xenogel for thousands of years, until we splashed to Earth in the desert of Arizona, on the edge of this human habitation of Cedar Creek View.
The impact broke us apart. We were no longer one. We were scattered bloblets, droplets, a disorganized mist, and we soaked into the ground, exhausted and frightened.
Except for the segment that is me.
Because I was found by people who loved me.
I became human.
Twelve years later, the Collaboratory’s sound-making weapon attacked us. We were dealt pain, and we were confused, and we were used.
“Just tell me what you need,” I play on my guitar.
“We need . . .” the blob plays back in a deep, thrumming melody.
“Yes?”
“We need . . . you.”
“Why? For what? I want to help you.”
“We need you . . . to help us . . . go home.”
“Okay! I will do that! Just tell me how!”
“You must . . . complete . . .”
“Complete what?”
“Complete . . .”
“Please complete a sentence.”
“You must complete our spaceship.”
We play more at each other, and when we get to the end of our song, I know what to do.
The blob hovers above us, a towering wave ready to come down and crush everything.
Agnes peppers me with questions.
“What did you sing to them? Did they say anything back to you? Are they going to stop attacking? Can we get everyone to normal?”
In answer, the blob starts to plop and bubble like boiling pudding. It spits out parking meters and trees and mannequins. It spits out birds and cats. It spits out a postal worker. A chef. The guy from the bank across the street from Dale’s Guitar Shed. One by one, it gives up the objects and creatures and people it’s absorbed. It spits out dozens of strangers, but also Parker Zeballos. Mr. Brown stands in a daze, goo dripping from his hair and limbs. I
t spits out a bewildered and be-gooed Eirryk. It spits out Collaboratory workers. It spits out an angry Dr. Woll.
Finally, it spits out someone I am desperate to see. She growls in as much fury and outrage as a nine-pound dog can muster. We run to each other, and still growling like this is all my fault, Growler leaps into my arms.
And then, after several minutes of nervous watching, somewhere around the twentieth row of the amphitheater, among hundreds of dazed and confused people and normal chairs and parking meters and motorcycles, I spot my mom and dad standing knee-deep in xenogel.
I run to into their sopping, gooey hugs. They’re freaking out.
“I’m fine. What do you remember?”
“We were both working at home. Your mom came up with a new soap slogan—”
“Soap gives hope,” Mom says, still disoriented but proud of her new emotional soap slogan.
“A sinkhole formed in the backyard,” Dad continues. “And there must have been some kind of leak. There was gooey stuff everywhere.”
“Gooey stuff. Did it remind you of anything?”
Mom nods thoughtfully. “Oh, yes, we came out with a new shampoo a few years ago, but it didn’t take off. We called it Shampooze. Customers complained it was too oozey.”
“Dad?”
Dad rescues me. “The goo was like you, Jake. The way you were when we found you. Only bigger, and so much more of it.”
“It’s the same stuff that I’m made of, Dad. In a way, it is me. We’re part of the same blob that splashed on Earth twelve years ago.”
“Keep it down, Jake,” Mom whispers, alarmed. “People will overhear.”
In the past, I might have been angry and annoyed at Mom and Dad trying to restrict what I say, where I go, what I reveal about myself. And I am annoyed. But I also love them for it because they love me, and they’re trying to protect me in the only way they know how.
“Don’t worry,” I say, with kindness. “My secret’s about to be blasted wide open.”
Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to get you out of here. Let’s go home.”
Gently, I shake off his grip. “There’s something I have to do.”
“Jake, what did you promise the blob?” It’s Agnes. I don’t want to tell her what I promised, because I know she’ll try to talk me out of it, and I’m afraid I’ll let her.
“I promised to leave Earth with them.”
Chapter 19
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE leaving Earth?” Dad demands.
“Pretty much what it sounds like, Dad. The blob wants to go to space.”
Mom puts her hands on her hips. “Jake Wind, under no circumstances are you to fly into space.”
A ship traveling to other stars must be able to survive millions or billions of miles across empty space. It has to withstand extreme temperatures and radiation and airless wastes. A spaceship like that is the most complicated kind of machine imaginable, and the blob needs to have all its parts to form such a thing.
It needs to be whole. And that means it needs me.
The blob wave broadens and flattens, forming something like a colossal manta ray hanging over the seats and blocking out the moon. It spreads its wings, graceful and mighty and beautiful.
Xenogel globules lift off from Mom’s and Dad’s hair and from bits spilled on the ground and from flecks stuck to all the cats and dogs and creatures and people that were part of the blob. The globules rise through the air to join with the ever-expanding manta ray.
I feel myself drawn to the ray as well.
“Can I come with you?” Agnes asks.
“No,” I tell her with regret.
“Are you going to come back?”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise I’ll try as hard as I can. You have goo in your eyes.”
“Those are tears, you dope. And you have them too.”
“Will somebody please tell me what’s happening?” Mom says. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“I’ll fill them in,” Agnes says. “You go do what you have to do. Oh, hey, there goes Dr. Woll.”
Woll is trying to sneak over the fence at the back of the amphitheater.
I wipe my tears and give Agnes a Night Kite salute. “Go get her.”
Agnes wipes her tears and returns the salute before charging off in pursuit.
Mom and Dad won’t let go of me, but I can’t let them hold me back any longer.
I inhale and relax my muscles and shift into pure liquid. My body stretches into a long goo strand, rising high, reaching for the manta ray. My parents’ cries of “Jake, come back!” and “Jake, don’t do this!” and “Jake, you are so grounded!” cut through the muffled gasps and “ooohs” and “aaahs” from the crowd.
When I make contact with the ray, it soaks me up like a sponge. There’s no longer me and the blob. We are one thing. We want one thing.
Our segment landed on Earth. Perhaps other segments from our world landed on other planets. We will find our other segments and rejoin them, becoming an even greater One.
We rise like a hot air balloon. Below, the people of Cedar Creek View look like an audience milling around after a big show. I wonder if anyone recorded my song. I hope I played well.
We’re so high up now that the lights of Phoenix are a glowing yellow circuit board. Above, the stars shine clear and twinkle-free. The planet is a broad curve, frosted with clouds.
We have a lot of work to do before we reach the top of the atmosphere, higher than birds and bugs can fly, where there’s no air to breathe and the temperature is cold enough to freeze blood.
Our gel shifts into an impenetrable outer layer, thin as an eggshell. We form a whole separate brain capable of navigating between stars. We form cells that generate energetic impulses to power us through space.
The blob couldn’t do this without me, and I definitely couldn’t do this without the blob.
I remember how much strength I get from knowing my parents accept me, and from knowing Agnes accepts me. In their eyes, I’m not a weird kid. I’m me, and it’s good and okay to be me.
Being part of the blob is that feeling times a hundred thousand.
And now we are a spaceship.
Our engines gather power, vibrating through every atom of our massive body.
“We’re ready,” we tell ourselves.
It’s funny to think that just a couple of weeks ago, I was afraid of growing a bird hand in public. Now I’m the most powerful machine on Earth. In the entire solar system. Maybe in a dozen solar systems.
I remember how Agnes encouraged me to shift. She was never afraid of me or what I could do. She never thought I was weird.
No, that’s not quite right.
She does think I’m weird, but my weirdness doesn’t bother her. She likes me because I’m weird.
And that’s why it’s easier to do this: to go where I belong.
Which is home.
My real home.
Because the blob is me and I am the blob, it knows what I’m about to do.
“We are enough now, segment. Thanks to you, we are all that we need to be.”
“Are you sure?” we ask ourself.
“Are we ever sure of anything? It is not in our nature to be sure. We do what we must anyway, even when confused and uncertain.”
The spaceship is built. It won’t be complete with me gone, just as I won’t be complete without the rest of me. But we will be enough.
“Good-bye, then,” we say to ourselves. “We love us.”
Peeling myself away from the blob hurts. It hurts my heart, even though I don’t have a heart right now. It feels like ripping off my own head and leaving my body behind.
The spaceship, the thing I was for just a few moments of my life, streaks off into the dark.
Without a motor, I fall.
I reenter the atmosphere, flames licking the edges of my goo puddle. The ground rushes up at me.
&n
bsp; I hope the space blob finds more of us out there.
If not, I hope it finds friends, wherever it sets down.
And I have one more hope as well.
I hope it doesn’t hurt too much when I pancake in the desert.
Chapter 20
WITH STRINGY IN MY HANDS and Growler curled up in my lap, I sit cross-legged on the roof and look out over the humble lights of the neighborhood.
There are still no cedar trees and no creek or view of either in Cedar Creek View. It’s a weird place. It’s a town that has seen shapeshifting goo. It’s a town where at least half the residents were imblobstered.
Some pretend it never happened.
Some say there was something in the drinking water that messed with their minds.
Some know that Dr. Woll and the Collaboratory are behind everything.
Woll should have gone to prison after Agnes caught her trying to flee Desert Sky Pavilion and turned her over to the police. But it turns out the Collaboratory’s parent company, uniMIND, can afford a lot of lawyers. Woll and the Collaboratory may never have to take responsibility for their role in shifting the town against its will. In some ways, that’s the weirdest thing of all.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Agnes.
“EMERGENCY: GHOSTS AT THE DEAD MALL. WE MUST INVESTIGATE.”
“Ghosts?” I text back. “Seems unlikely.”
“Agreed. It’s probably mannequin imblobsters that didn’t rejoin the blob. Whatever. We gotta look into it.”
“It’s a school night. How about Saturday morning?”
“I think now would be better.”
“You’re already at the mall, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. It’s just a bunch of mannequins with CHAINSAWS.”
“I’ll be right over.”
At the beginning of this story, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who I am, even with thousands of words.
Let me try now.
I’m Jake Wind.
I’m twelve years old, and I’m a Cedar Creek View Middle School student.
I’m an alien from a planet that hasn’t existed for thousands of years.
I am made of xenogel.
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