“Lord J!” Clyde’s mom scolded. “No!”
Standing up again, Clyde felt Lord J’s breath on the back of his neck. “We’ll finish this later,” the criminal muttered.
John stopped in front of the office door. “It may or may not be in here,” he said. “It is rather unpredictable.”
“Then we will go in there, and the building will stay locked down, until it is in my hands,” Perla commanded. “Now, please, let’s go in.”
They all entered the room. It was not a huge office, but it fit all six people with plenty of space.
John stood in the middle with his arms crossed, staring at Perla.
Clyde looked at Kaia. Her eyes were wide and she was staring right at him. He tensed. Something was about to happen. He had to be ready – for anything.
The sound of the monkeys running – no, swarming – was a grating, irritating noise, like someone scraping a washboard with a plastic garden fork while grinding their teeth into a microphone and humming the Song That Never Ends. Hazel couldn’t see any of the ship as she and Pilgrim were rushed down the corridors. Monkeys ran across the ceiling, walls, and floor. As far as she could tell, there was even a layer of monkeys running on top of the layer of monkeys that ran on the architecture of the ship. All around her, fur and paws and little blinking eyes throbbed, and she felt very odd being swept along in this tide of robotic mammals.
Then, all at once, the swarm came to a halt.
“Where are we?” she asked, and then the monkeys swarmed again for a moment, creating a hole in the wall in front of her. “My shop!”
The monkeys swarmed again and Admiral Hawkings appeared in front of her.
“Admiral!” she exclaimed.
The admiral looked very intimidating. Her arms were crossed and a frown lay across her lips, quiet and tense but ready to explode into a scowl at any second.
“What is going on here?” she demanded.
A monkey hung down between Hazel and Holland.
“Bow to the emperor!” it proclaimed.
“No.” Holland’s scowl came out of hiding and slathered across her face.
“I am Emperor Tamarin,” a different monkey proclaimed, and the swarm of fur vibrated again, this time revealing a monkey wearing a crown.
“Squeak?” Holland asked, surprised. “You rotten little monkey! This is my ship! What do you think you are doing?”
“We will rule Earth!”
Holland scratched her nose. “Why Earth?”
“Because this human can take us there!”
“Can you?” Holland asked, turning to look at Hazel.
“No,” Hazel replied. “I don’t even know how I got here!”
“Lies!” Emperor Tamarin boomed. “The shop is your ship and you will take us to Earth!”
The swarm of monkeys began to hiss and howl, and Hazel flinched as the noise catapulted into her eardrums. A moment later the door to her shop was open, and the mass of fur was flowing inside.
“Hazel,” Pilgrim hissed. “Untie me!”
“Oh, right.” Hazel turned and pulled at his bindings. A moment later he was free. He ran to Holland and the two began to confer.
Hazel looked behind her, feeling a bit seasick as the walls of fur around her writhed and pulsed. She imagined this would be what it felt like to be on a very small ship on an ocean stirred up by a kraken. She hoped she never met one of those, and she hoped she found a way to escape from this surreal situation.
“Where are you going?” Holland asked suddenly.
“What?” Hazel looked down. Several monkeys had picked her up and were carrying her towards the shop. “Help!” she shouted.
Holland disappeared from her view as the monkeys carried Hazel into the shop.
“You will show us how to operate your ship,” Emperor Tamarin stated in a robotic tone.
“But I don’t know how!” Hazel protested. She was beginning to feel quite overwhelmed. It was as if she were trapped in a strange dream and couldn’t wake up. Tears began to well up in her eyes. Then she felt a hand at her elbow. It was Holland.
“It’s a computer virus,” Holland whispered in Hazel’s ear. “We’re not sure where it came from, but we’re suspecting that the alien technology that hit our ship several hundred years ago... well, you don’t care about this. We can figure it out. I’ll be right here.”
Hazel nodded.
“Tell us!” Emperor Tamarin boomed.
Crossing her arms across her chest, frowning, and taking a deep breath, Hazel yelled, “I do not know anything! Now leave me alone, you horrible robot!”
The little monkey’s face suddenly changed into a terrifying mask. He hissed, showing his sharp teeth and beady eyes which now glowed with some internal light. Then, he spun around towards his swarm of monkeys and shouted, “Explore the ship! Find the controls!”
The monkey carpet scattered in a hundred directions, causing the writhing mass of fur to vibrate at a higher speed. Hazel saw Pilgrim sneaking in around the edge of the room.
He sidled up to Hazel; the monkeys were totally focused on their task and ignored him.
“McGraff and Lieutenant Song are outside, weapons at the ready,” he whispered. “I’m not sure how much good the guns will do, though, since we don’t know what exact changes Squeak made to their physiology and programming.”
“I want them to hold their position until we have more information,” Holland decided. “Hazel, is this, in fact, a ship?”
“I don’t know. It moves around, but I’ve never been to space before! And it was always random – I never picked where it took me! It always stayed on earth, except for this one time I ended up in someplace called Pomegranate City.”
Hazel watched Holland exchange a meaningful glance with Pilgrim.
“Pomegranate City, you say? That’s where we’re from!” Pilgrim offered.
“Oh!” Hazel frowned. “Well, a man named John came in and did something in the back and then suddenly I was back on Earth again. I hadn’t gone anywhere else until now.”
“Tell me—” Holland reached out and grasped Hazel’s arms. “Did you ever imagine visiting other places?”
“Of course! All the time!” The still-loyal monkey draped around her shoulders rapidly chattered her words into Holland’s language.
“Did you get to visit any of the places you imagined?”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Oh... I did! I never noticed the connection though. I’ve been to almost every place I’ve imagined. And just yesterday I was thinking how neat it would be to go to space!”
Holland turned back to Pilgrim, as the buzzing and screeching of the monkeys got louder.
“Pilgrim, the emergency exit was in Corridor 11, right?”
“Yes, sir!”
With an intense expression, Holland turned back to Hazel. “My friend,” she said, “You need to imagine the man that came to fix your shop. Imagine talking to him, imagine his face, imagine that you need help. Do it now and don’t stop until I say otherwise.”
Nodding, Hazel closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of the monkeys around her. Nothing made sense – nothing at all! Maybe if she imagined being somewhere else it would all go away – maybe she would wake up from this intensely real madness. Maybe this time when she woke up her father would be there, and he would have a nice hot cup of coffee steaming. He would be grinning at her, all excited because he had planned a surprise trip to climb a mountain or visit the ocean or ride on a camel. Maybe this time he would take her out on a hovercraft, just like he had always promised, and then they could get coffee afterwards.
Maybe.
She heard Holland yell and the sound of the monkeys quieted.
“What do you want?” Emperor Tamarin asked angrily.
“How do you know that the trigger is inside the shop?” Holland asked. “Maybe it’s outside.”
Hazel opened an eye to see a swath of monkeys flush through the door of the shop.
“Go,” Hazel said, and t
he next moment Pilgrim had disappeared after them.
“You’re sure you don’t know how to fly the ship?” Holland asked.
“No, I have no idea,” Hazel replied. “Maybe something in the back room?”
“Why do you think that?” Emperor Tamarin demanded, flying down in front of her.
“Because the man that came to fix the shop went into the back.”
“Show us!” Emperor Tamarin demanded. “Show us now!” A path formed across the floor as the monkeys moved out of the way.
Holland nodded encouragement and Hazel began to walk forward slowly. As she neared the back room, she refocused her thoughts on the man, on the city, on the word Pomegranate...
Kaia was counting, just like John told her to, but she couldn’t focus – couldn’t keep her mind on the numbers. So she began to calculate instead; a seven-sided Door seemed impossible, but not when you added the basic principles of physics and geometry into the mix. A seven-sided Door could be an amazing piece of technology. It could be anything or do anything... or it could do nothing. What did John have up his sleeve?
Her brain froze as she felt Bad Face’s knife move against the skin of her neck. On the one hand, a scar would be cool, especially if it came with a good story. On the other hand, she tended to store very important arteries in her neck, which were generally used to power her brain, and she thought that accidentally severing one might be to the end to her very promising career. She stood very still.
They were still talking, but then Clyde looked right across the room and into her eyes. She felt bad for him so she tried to smile, to be encouraging. It must have been very hard to find out that his mother was a criminal. Then, she turned her mind back to the seven-sided Door and let it run as a background program while she considered the situation around them.
It’s one-to-one: four of them, four of us, she thought. That said, Quin might actually count as multiple people, and the strange man who talked to himself and thought pencils were magic might count as less than one. So maybe they had an advantage. If it was one-to-one, Quin could take out his immediate opponent if it weren’t Bad Face, but Bad Face could do the same if it weren’t Quin. But if Quin counted for two and Bad Face only counted for one… she began to calculate the probabilities of each side winning, trying to assign numbers to each of the obvious variables: strength, size, wits, strategy, position, creativity. It was pleasantly distracting, but a difficult thought kept brushing against the mathematical formulas rushing through her mind: who would win: us or them?
Either way, there was still a knife to her throat.
She tuned back into the conversation as Bad Face nudged her towards her office. What had they been talking about? She sighed, frustrated that she had picked that moment to tune out the world around her in favor of math and logic.
“It’s in here,” John said calmly, gesturing towards the room. “But I will have to do some calculating, to figure out where it is and bring it back.”
“What do you mean, ‘bring it back’? Doors don’t actually go anywhere! They let you go elsewhere!”
“This one goes places,” John replied. “Remember? That’s the one you wanted, right? The one that goes places?” He frowned at her, wiggling his eyebrows in a very sarcastic manner and then continued. “At least, it moves if it has a real person in it.”
“And does this one have a real person in it?”
“It does.” John nodded.
“Prepare to subdue this person as soon as the ship arrives or your intern—” Perla drew a finger across her neck.
“Of course.”
The crowd of people entered what was supposedly her office.
Kaia glanced at Quin. He was frowning. Was that a frown that meant, ‘I understand this plan and am prepared to act when the time calls for it,’ or, ‘I have no idea what the hell John is doing and this had better be a good idea or else’? She gulped and felt the metal of the blade push against her skin again. She frowned as she caught a whiff of her captor – he smelled like sweat and oil and some kind of fruity soap.
“It will just take me a minute,” John said, sitting down in a chair against one wall.
“What is that Door?” Perla pointed to the Door sitting in the middle of the room – the one that was to be Kaia’s next assignment.
“Oh, that one isn’t important,” John replied. “It’s just one that we were going to use for my students.”
“Where does it go?”
“Downtown,” John answered, shrugging. Kaia knew he was lying, but figured it was probably just to protect the Door… or maybe not the Door itself, but the secret of the Door.
Everyone in the room was looking at John, who simply sat down in the chair and closed his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Perla demanded. “Bring me the Door!”
Scowling, John opened his eyes and looked up at Perla. “Look,” he said. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure out how to bring you the Door! You didn’t exactly warn me that you were coming, now did you? You didn’t say, ‘Hey, heads up, John, have the Door ready on Tuesday because I’m coming to steal it,’ now did you? What do you expect? It’s a Door that moves around based on the person that is in it. Now, I did program in a recall – always good to have one of those – but I’m not sure how to figure out the coordinates of the Door so that we can use it. Now, if you could just get everyone to be quiet and let me think, then perhaps we can proceed!”
As soon as John finished his tirade, he straightened his tie, sat back against the wall huffily, and closed his eyes again.
Kaia tried to imagine how John would program a recall into a Door that could move about on its own. She thought about the theories and the cognitive mathematics that would play a role. In order for it to work, the Door would have to have an override for the controller’s thoughts, and, as John pointed out, he would have to know where the Door was. But maybe that wasn’t true. If the Door in this room could really go anywhere, maybe they could use it to function as a recall... maybe they could pull it back from wherever it was by using another Door!
“Uh, John?” Kaia whispered. She froze as she felt Bad Face’s knife push into her neck.
“Yes?” John said without opening his eyes.
“I have an idea,” she whispered, trying desperately not to move.
“Hush, girl!” Perla commanded.
“You do not give orders to my intern!” John retorted, jumping out of his feet and waving his hands around. “Now let her talk. Bad Face, let up on that knife.” He walked up to Kaia and looked her in the eyes. Perla nodded at Bad Face from behind John.
Kaia took a deep breath as she felt the cold pressure of the knife ease up. She swallowed and focused on John’s face.
“Maybe,” she began, “if we used the Door...”
“You are a sweet, sweet, brilliant, extraordinary genius!” he exclaimed, reaching out to shake her hand. She thought he might slip her something, like in the movies, but he didn’t. She felt oddly disappointed. “We should have found you years ago! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Yes. Yes. Okay. Here’s what we have to do. Quin, put Maxwell in the corner. Perla, please stand back.” He turned to Quin, his face beaming and giddy with excitement. “I am going to stick my head through the Door and you are going to hang onto my feet so I don’t get sucked through.”
Quin nodded and turned to Maxwell. He looked at him for a second, and then smacked his fist on the top of Maxwell’s head. Maxwell crumpled as John lay down on the floor in front of the Door.
“What is going on?” Perla demanded once again.
“We’re doing what you asked, so please shut up,” John said politely.
“You had better not be playing any games—” she began, but John cut her off.
“Yes, yes or you’ll slice my intern’s throat. We got it already! Quin?”
Quin bent down and grabbed John’s feet, as John began to crawl towards the Door. Kaia swallowed carefully, hoping that the movement wouldn’t cut her throat accidentally.
She remembered the feeling of pushing her hand through the Door, and wondered if it felt the same way when you stuck your head through slowly like that. Was it tingling and prickling? Was his skin being pulled? Did it boil his brains? Did it feel like he was going to get sucked through? What if he did get sucked through? What if Quin couldn’t stop him? What if Quin got sucked through, too? What if the Door turned into a ravenous, living creature and swallowed everyone in the room?
Kaia held her breath and glanced around. John was scooting towards the Door and everyone else was frozen, just staring at him; and then, before he had even touched the Door, everything changed.
Kaia shrieked as Quin yanked John backwards from the Door.
At the same time, a buzzing, throbbing, spinning, nausea-inducing swarm of furry little creatures materialized, crawling over every wall, corner, and flat surface. They made a scratching, gurgling noise that was quite painful – similar to a sharpened spoon being drawn over acres of fired pottery. Bad Face stepped back away from her and tripped over one of the creatures. Taking the opportunity, Kaia fled over to where Maxwell was just waking up in the corner. As she reached him, he began to laugh in an insane, crazy sort of way.
“It is as I thought,” he roared. “When you remove the power from the madman he becomes just a madman once again!” A pencil appeared in his hand and he began to wave it around. “Chaos!” he cried. “It is mine!” He rose slowly from the floor and darted forward into the melee.
“Wait!” Kaia exclaimed, but it was too late. She looked up, and suddenly her brain focused on the fact that Perla was screaming violently, while Quin stood perfectly still amid the chaos.
From her spot huddled against a wall, certain things began to stand out to her. Standing in the middle of the crowd were two women – one with long brown hair and the other with flaming red hair. The red-haired one carried one of the furry creatures around her neck. As she looked more closely, she could see that the furry creatures were, in fact, some sort of monkey… and there seemed to be hundreds of them! Where had they come from? What was happening?
The Lonely Whelk Page 16