“There’s such a thing as a spider-woman assassin?”
“Yes! And pray you never meet her . . . Now, are you sure you can walk in all that heavy fabric?”
“Well, I couldn’t run a marathon,” Gertie said, trying to look comfortable, “but check this out, detachable bouffant sleeves with embroidered slashing, just in case I get hot!”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the black veil hood thing behind.”
“But that’s my favorite bit!”
“Well, unless you’re a widow, it’s not going to work.”
“I could be the black widow assassin!” Gertie said, “Who destroys her enemies with—”
Kolt cleared his throat. “What shoes do you have on?”
“Er, well, the giant platform clogs with pearls and lace were too much, which reminds me—that corset thing looked like a personal torture chamber, so I had Robot Rabbit Boy put it back on the racks with the clogs.”
“Gertie, we have to fit in, we must—”
“I couldn’t even stand in those shoes! They made me look like a cake decoration.”
Gertie lifted the hem of her long red overskirt to reveal the green light-up sneakers Kolt had given her when she first arrived on the island.
“But, Gertie, those sneakers are twenty-first century!”
“But they’re so comfortable.”
“The whole purpose of the Italian pianelle platform sandal is to raise the hem of your skirt above the muck of the streets.”
“I’ll tiptoe,” Gertie said. “And don’t even get me started on the corset—humans wear their skeletons on the inside, thank you very much.”
“Fine,” Kolt said. “But if we stand out, it’s your fault.”
Kolt had opted for conservative robes in light green with olive tights to match. He had also picked out thin cloth shoes—which reminded Gertie of the ones she was wearing when she washed up on Skuldark.
Then, sheepishly, from behind a stand of wigs and false beards, Robot Rabbit Boy stepped out wearing a gigantic gold coin, which hung around his neck on a chain.
Kolt rubbed his eyes. “What the . . .”
It was the first time Robot Rabbit Boy had ever dressed up for a mission. He also had a silver dagger hanging from a leather sling, a purse, and best of all—a fake mustache.
“I don’t believe this!” Kolt said. “He looks like the fifth musketeer!”
“Weren’t there only three musketeers?”
“I can’t remember, but none of them were rabbits!”
“Eggcup. Lavender. Smush,” Robot Rabbit said matter-of-factly, admiring himself in the mirror. “Strawberry dollops.”
“Fine,” Kolt said. “I give up. Wear what you want, just don’t get us killed with your strange facial hair.”
Gertie gave Robot Rabbit Boy a secret thumbs-up, and his eyes flashed neon blue.
When they entered the kitchen to pack a few snacks for the journey, one of the old volumes in the bookcase was glowing. The three Keepers rushed over and took down a massive book on the healing power of plants.
“It’s so heavy . . .” Gertie said, plonking it on the table. When she opened the pages, they found the important piece of paper they needed to return to the person called Sequoyah. It was thick, but had yellowed with age. Printed on the front in black ink were strange markings—some kind of written language that Gertie had never seen. She counted the symbols. They numbered 85.
Walking to the Time Cat, Gertie asked why fifteenth- century Italy was also called the “Renaissance.”
“It means ‘rebirth’ in French,” Kolt explained. “It was a time of great discovery and optimism, a rebirth of ideas and culture from the Roman and Greek periods.”
“Oh no! Why would anybody want to bring back the cruel Roman ways?”
“It was more their arts and knowledge, Gertie, a time of rediscovering tools like maps that had been lost after the fall of the Roman Empire. In fact—many people during the Renaissance believed the Romans had been destroyed by God for their wickedness.”
Gertie was relieved. If there was one period that sounded horrible to her—more frightening even than the age of dinosaurs—it was the Roman Empire, an epoch when people seemed to delight in being cruel.
“What was the name of the doctor the B.D.B.U. said we’re returning the vial of powder to?”
“Doctor Girolamo Fracastoro.” Kolt thought for a moment. “I’d have to check my books, but I believe he was the first person to come up with a germ theory. He wrote a long poem about it.”
“A poem about germs?”
“Yes . . . the idea that diseases are caused by tiny creatures that get inside our bodies and multiply, I suppose. But don’t get me started on parasites. . . . Anyway, people in his time thought the old chap was mad—but it turns out he was right all along!”
“I’m surprised they even had doctors back then.”
“Oh, they did, but most were bonkers by our standards, basing their remedies on superstition, folk stories, or dots they could see moving around in space. But the Venetian food isn’t bad. During the Renaissance, everything from cooking, to painting, to architecture, to music, and even dressing was taken to high levels.”
“That sounds good.”
“Don’t get too excited, it was also a period when opposites thrived, and so we will have to be careful, because despite people’s openness to new and beautiful things—they had a shocking appetite for savagery.”
“Like their ancestors in Rome,” Gertie pointed out.
* * *
‹‹ • • • ››
IT HAD STOPPED RAINING when they reached the Time Cat, but it was still clouded over. Climbing inside, Kolt described the various dangers of Renaissance:
1. Gangs of toothless robbers
2. Gangs of robbers with a few teeth
3. Gangs of robbers with excellent dental hygiene
4. Robbers with or without a gang (or teeth)
5. Condottieri (professional killers)
7. Bravoes (hired thugs)
8. Mosquitos (tiny vampires)
9. The Black Death, a horrible disease spread by the bites of fleas
10. Getting burned alive in public—which hurts, but is also embarrassing as everyone sees your underwear on fire
Once Gertie had typed in the date for their new destination, they could hear the 101 automatic watches spinning under the hood, but the Time Cat didn’t want to go. Gertie checked the fuel levels, but they had more than a quarter tank of Skuldarkian seawater.
“I don’t like this at all,” Kolt said. “I have a funny feeling the 1400s are not going to be one of my favorite historical journeys—and it’s a double return too.”
“Don’t be so superstitious! This mission might be the one that leads us to finding those lost Keepers!”
Kolt noticed the end of the newly discovered Keepers’ key sticking out of Gertie’s richly adorned black robe.
“If you have to bring it, Gertie, just keep it out of sight,” he warned her. “Don’t fall prey to Venetian pickpockets. You’re a real target in that velvet finery—I’ll be surprised if we don’t get kidnapped and held for ransom—especially with DJ Rabbit Boy,” Kolt said, pointing at the Series 7 sitting quietly on the backseat playing with his mustache.
“We’ll be all right,” Gertie reassured him, “and hopefully we’ll make some progress in the hunt for missing Keepers.”
“You never know,” Kolt said. “Let’s just hope these back-to-back missions are a cinch.”
“Mashed potato, fly.”
“Hey, that’s a new word for him!”
“What, fly?”
“He must us have heard us talking about Attercoppes!”
“Or . . .” suggested Kolt, “he’s been spending too much time clamped to the Spitfire.”
>
“Room, fly,” Robot Rabbit Boy said again, “mush, fly.”
“Well, there’ll be plenty of flies where we’re going,” Kolt remarked, “because people of the fifteenth century were not known for their bathing habits—though they excelled at torture, witchcraft, and going to the toilet outside—while it’s fair to say they completely failed at food hygiene.”
“You’re worrying too much as always. We can’t let fear get in the way of our duties,” Gertie said.
Kolt put his Keepers’ key in the small wooden box that was the actual time machine, and the Time Cat began its usual fizzing. Then after a loud pop, everything went blurry. There was a white flash, a purple sizzle of gravitons, and they found themselves in the middle of a field.
But it was not an empty field. There were people all around who saw the Time Cat appear and were coming over to investigate.
14
Bird Boy
THE DAY AFTER CAVA Calla Thrax was in his new body, the hunt began. Posters were put up that read:
MAX FRANKS
WANTED ALIVE
(BARELY ALIVE OKAY)
HUGE
REWARD
They were nailed to trees, posts, signs, even the church door. It didn’t say what his crime was, or even that Max Franks was a nine-year-old boy. But the reward was large enough to draw every cruel, grizzly, rotten-toothed mercenary for fifty miles to the small town of Morrisville.
After hammering up some posters, Shard Pinch’s crew—along with Roland Tubb and Mandy Zilch—went out themselves in search of the boy Vispoth had ordered them to capture. Of course, just killing him would have been easy, but it was not the preferred method of removal. Vispoth had calculated with high probability that if any Keeper was murdered, two or more Keepers would be selected by the B.D.B.U. to take his or her place. The more Keepers they killed, the more Keepers there would eventually be.
Max was on his way to town when he saw the posters. He couldn’t understand why the evil sheriff would have offered any reward for his capture, seeing as how he was on his way to Pinch’s office that very morning to shine his black boots. It was something he’d done for over a year. Why couldn’t Pinch have caught him then? It was a mystery Max couldn’t figure out.
But with a price on his head, Max turned around and dashed home. He snuck in the back window, then crawled under his bed where it was dark and cool. The perfect place to come up with a getaway plan.
Thinking about the posters, Max decided there was no alternative but to run away. His parents loved him, he knew that—but there was nothing they could do against a mean gang of outlaws with Max as their target. It would have taken a vicious army of trained killers to defeat the motley crew of people out searching for him. Max imagined himself being taken. The faces of his mother and father as their son was captured.
He had to flee Morrisville.
Max felt for the coffin-shaped box where he kept precious things. Behind the box was a pair of folding wings he had been building for the last six months. They were just about ready to test, and were the best thing Max had ever constructed.
This is how they came to be made. Pinch and his men liked to shoot animals for fun. Whenever Max found one of their victims, whether it was a raccoon or a squirrel, or even an eagle, he would say a little prayer to the powers of nature. Then he would find a place to bury the remains.
After seeing so many dead animals, Max became interested in how bodies actually worked. Sometimes he could see inside the wounds to sinewy flesh and white bone. He was most curious about how wings enabled flight.
At first he simply sketched what he saw. The shapes and sizes of bones—which were hollow. The kinds of feathers on different birds. Soon, he had hundreds of drawings of bones and feathers.
Then one day, he was exploring a part of the forest he’d never seen before when he looked up in a tree and saw the complete skeleton of a buzzard. It must have died from old age while sitting on a branch, Max thought. If he could weigh and study each bone, it would help him figure out the mechanics of flight.
Not owning a set of scales, Max had designed a balance system using rocks and old spoons. After weighing each piece of bone and estimating the weight of feathers, muscle, flesh, the animal’s beak, and even food in its stomach, Max filled another notebook with mathematical calculations, trying to formulate an equation for lift force. Then he started work on his own pair of wooden wings that folded in and out. He constructed them with thin tree bark that was very light but strong. Instead of feathers, he used fabric, which he cut from the cloth his parents wrapped dead bodies in.
When they were finished, Max kept the wings under his bed, folded up like two fans. He had never really tested them, as his calculations from using Newton’s Laws of Motion were not promising.
Sir Isaac Newton was one of Max’s heroes. A long time before Max was born, he had come to recognize three laws about the physical forces around us—which were sometimes known as physics.
Max knew Newton’s three laws by heart, and wanted to use them now to help him escape.
Newton’s first law was about something called inertia. Basically, as Max understood it, objects like to continue doing what they were doing—whether it’s being still, or moving in a straight line. An object that is still will keep being still until other forces act on it. The same goes for an object that is moving—it will keep moving in the same direction until a force (such as gravity) acts on it.
Newton’s second law said that the acceleration of an object depends on the object’s weight and the force applied to change its current state—or inertia. A pebble has small inertia, and so requires a small force to move it, while a boulder has a large amount of inertia, and so would need a larger force to change its original state of being still.
Newton’s third law stated that every action causes an equal and opposite reaction. So to fly, Max knew he had to generate enough force with his wings to push the air down, so that the air pushing back would be greater than his weight, thus giving him lift. But exactly how much force did he need to push the air down with?
The calculations in his notebook made flight seem impossible. He would need seven-foot wings at least. He also seemed impossibly heavy. From observation, he knew that birds had hollow bones and air sacs. According to his father, human bones were full of marrow, not air. Max also knew that his strength-to-weight ratio was very low—if he remained his current weight, he’d need massive muscles to power the wings—and that would add even more weight to his frame.
Then if by some miracle he could get in the air, Max knew gravity would be trying to pull him back to earth every moment.
But now with a price on his head, running away was probably not as effective as flying away.
Max put the artificial wings into his knapsack, then opened his coffin-shaped keepsake box to grab the strange key that had appeared in his pocket one day. Except that the key was not there. Max felt around under the bed again, but couldn’t find it.
Suddenly he heard pounding on the front door. There was no time to look for it now. As his mother’s footsteps echoed in the hall, he scrambled out of his window.
Max hiked through dense woods for most of the morning. Sneaking away had given him a head start on Pinch’s gang and probably saved his parents’ lives. He stood in the shade of a cedar tree and thought about where he would go, and what his life would be like as a boy of nine living alone in the world. He felt sure he’d see his mother and father again, but not until he was much older—a man perhaps.
He remembered the wings in his bag. With aching legs and sore feet, he felt it was time to test them out.
He had no idea where he would go if they worked, but imagined himself soaring high up in the sky like some kind of bird boy. Maybe he’d make it as far as New York City? Or across the sea to merry old England? He would be like Icarus—but obviously without the going-too-close-
to-the-sun-and-resulting-death-plunge part. Even though Newton’s laws told him flight was completely impossible, he knew he had to try it.
Max spat on his hands and pulled himself up into the tree. It was a hot day, and the air was sweet with the scent of forest. He wondered why trees didn’t start growing branches until they were a certain height, and figured that it must have been to stop animals from feasting on the young leaves. After climbing for several minutes, Max was on a thick limb. Although he wasn’t very high, it felt dangerous. His plan was to edge out to the end of the tree branch, and sort of drop into what he hoped would be a miracle of flight—like the bumblebee. All around were trees and thick bushes, which he hoped might cushion his fall if it went wrong.
Max carefully unfolded the delicate wings from his knapsack. He strapped them onto his arms using leather pieces he’d made in his father’s coffin workshop. He tied the knapsack around his chest, leaning forward to lie on the wide branch. It was warm from the sun and there was a light breeze. But then uncertainty and fear gripped him, churning his insides. He felt suddenly foolish up there in a tree wearing fake wings. Max leaned against the tree trunk and pulled out his book of notes. He would think through Newton’s laws again and go over the numbers. Perhaps there was some factor he had overlooked that would make flight possible? Some miscalculation that would mean the difference between soaring majestically over the woods, and plunging to the ground with a splat.
15
Walking Hunks of Flesh
GERTIE AND KOLT HAD landed in the middle of an open field, with trees at one end and a dirt track on the other.
“Is this Venice?” Gertie asked. “It looks more like a swamp.”
Kolt was annoyed. “The B.D.B.U. has done it again. It’s definitely not Venice, but by the looks of those cottages, we are at least in Renaissance Italy.”
“Lavender?”
“I’m really losing patience with the B.D.B.U.,” Kolt admitted. “We were supposed to be over there somewhere, on the edge of the city, not miles away in a swamp!” He pointed toward a dark, gray sky in the distance.
Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue Page 10