Hiroko was alone in the security office when Tesla came in.
“Where’s Berg?” Tesla asked.
“He left fifteen minutes ago,” Hiroko said. “He went on and on about how many pounds he can bench press and his all-protein diet, and then he looked at the clock and said something about it being ‘show time’ and took off. Any sign of the police?”
“They’re not coming.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain on the way to the Hall of Genius,” Tesla said. She pointed at the gadget glove spread out on the desk nearby. “And don’t forget to bring that.”
When Tesla and Hiroko popped through the hidden door behind Einstein’s blackboard, they found Carstairs and Uncle Newt consulting over the little UV bulb while Nick pulled the dye packs out of the markers. (Uncle Newt had changed back into his normal clothes, but for some reason Carstairs left on his owl costume, leaving him looking like a man-bird from the neck down.) Silas was at the far end of the Hall of Genius, gazing out at the gala.
“Glovey!” he said, taking a step toward Hiroko.
“What’s Ms. Mavis up to now?” Nick barked at him.
Crestfallen, Silas turned away and looked back out into the atrium.
“She’s still thanking donors,” he said. “I think she’s going to wrap it up soon, though. The crowd’s starting to get pretty antsy.”
“Keep an eye on ’em!” Nick ordered. He turned to his sister and lowered his voice. “I thought I should keep him away from Glovey. I didn’t want him to try to grab it and—”
“Gimme!” Uncle Newt said, grabbing the gadget glove from Hiroko.
“Well, hello to you, too!” Hiroko groused.
“Sorry! No time for pleasantries! Emergency! Alacrity! Fast, fast, fast!”
Uncle Newt rushed over to his toolbox and immediately began tinkering with the glove. Tesla, Carstairs, and Hiroko crowded around to peer over his shoulders, taking turns annoying him with suggestions and corrections as he hurriedly hooked up the ultraviolet LED to a battery and attached them to the glove. Nick, meanwhile, started squeezing ink from the highligher markers into some water-filled plastic bags. (He’d retrieved the bags from the garbage can in the staff lunchroom while his sister was off getting the glove.)
“Ms. Mavis is finally done talking,” Silas reported after a few minutes.
“She’s leading everybody into the Something NEW under the Sun exhibit,” he said a couple minutes after that.
“I hear a lot of oohing and ahhhing,” he said a couple more minutes after that.
“Now there’s applause,” he said a minute after that.
“They’re all coming out again,” he said less than a minute after that.
“Ms. Mavis is leading them this way,” he said thirty seconds after that.
“She’s past the dinosaurs,” he said twenty seconds after that.
“She’s almost to the big brain,” he said ten seconds after that.
“They’re here!” he said five seconds after that.
And he was running away from the entrance when he said it.
“Good,” Uncle Newt said. “I’m done.”
Tesla snatched up the gadget glove, Nick grabbed the plastic bags, and they both started herding Silas and Carstairs toward the back exit.
“Go, go, go!” Tesla barked.
And off they went, went, went.
“Oh. What a pleasant surprise,” Katherine Mavis said a moment later as she led the crowd into the exhibit. For a split second, the look on her face made it plain the surprise wasn’t really pleasant at all. “Here we have two of the geniuses behind our Hall of Genius—Dr. Newton Holt and Dr. Hiroko Sakurai. Uh, is everything ready?”
Uncle Newt smiled.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
Nick, Tesla, Silas, and Carstairs weaved their way through the corridors until they reached the side service entrance to the museum’s atrium. It was the same spot from which the kids and Uncle Newt had first spied on the reopening gala, only now the lobby was nearly deserted. All the guests had crowded into the Hall of Genius. The only people left in sight were waiters gathering up abandoned plates and glasses and two of the Coolicious McBrainys, one tall and one small, trying to entertain a bored-looking bartender with some extremely sloppy breakdancing. And, on the far side of the lobby, two guards stationed outside the Something NEW under the Sun exhibit.
Tesla nodded at the guards—and the entrance just beyond them.
“There’s the target,” she said. “We’ve got to get closer so we’re ready when the moment comes.”
Nick handed her one of the water-filled bags and then gave another to Silas.
“You’d better wait here,” he said to Carstairs. He looked down at the man’s feather-covered body. “You’d probably be a bit conspicuous.”
“Sorry. I’d be conspicuous if I took the costume off, too. My clothes are soaked,” Carstairs said sheepishly. “Be careful out there.”
“Don’t worry,” Silas said. He reached out to take the gadget glove from Tesla. “Nobody’s going to mess with us while I’ve got—hey!”
Before Silas could get the glove, Tesla had given it to Nick.
Silas was great for sitting on people, but for what lay ahead she trusted her brother more.
“Sorry, Silas. We did another round of rock, paper, scissors while you were on lookout duty,” she lied. “I played for you and lost.”
“Awww! What did you start with?”
“Uh, um … paper.”
“Well, that was your mistake right there!” Silas cried. “Rock! Always start with rock!”
Silas watched miserably as Nick pulled on the glove and tested the new UV light.
The LED lit up with a pale purple glow.
“All right,” Nick said. He knew this was the moment when his sister would usually say something bold and rousing like “Let’s do this thing” or “Time to catch some bad guys.” But all he could think of was “Let’s go get DeMarco,” so that’s what he said.
And that was enough. Tesla and Silas nodded, and together the three of them started walking toward the Something NEW under the Sun exhibit. They tried to look nonchalant as they crossed the atrium, but that turned out to be hard to do when you’re walking fast with a bag of ink-stained water clutched behind your back.
Tesla gazed in mock wonder at the dinosaurs.
Nick pretended to appreciate the museum’s architecture.
Silas started whistling.
“Stop it,” Tesla hissed.
“We’re trying not to be noticed, Silas,” Nick grated out.
“Okay, geez, sorry,” Silas grumbled. “Maybe if I was wearing Glovey I wouldn’t be so nervous.”
He threw Nick a hopeful look.
Nick went back to admiring the architecture.
“Oh, great,” Tesla muttered a moment later.
“What?” said Nick.
“Check out the guy on the right.”
They were close enough to the guards now to see their faces. And their muscles. Which, in one guard’s case, were so big and bulging that they looked like a bunch of watermelons stuffed into a blue uniform.
“Berg,” Nick sighed. “What do you think he’ll do when he notices us?”
But before Tesla could give Nick an answer, Berg did.
“Hey,” he said, turning their way with a scowl. “What are you still doing here? The party’s for invited guests and Learnasium employees only.”
“Well…,” Tesla said.
And that was as far as she got.
A cacophonous chorus of shrill, screeching voices burst from the Hall of Genius, followed seconds later by the sound of screaming and stampeding feet. There was a distant crash of breaking glass and the whirr and clatter of machinery running so fast that it was starting to fly apart. Every light in the museum began to flicker.
“It’s happening again,” Tesla said. “Just like we thought it would.”
Nick nodded. “Robo-geddon, r
ound 2. Right on schedule.”
“Cool!” said Silas.
Elegant partygoers in tuxes and gowns began streaming out of the Hall of Genius, shrieking.
“Something’s going on over there!” Berg noted astutely.
Two guards ran out of the Something NEW exhibit. “What’s happening?” one of them asked Berg.
“That!” Berg said, pointing at the frantic crowd across the atrium. “Come on!”
All four guards ran off toward the Hall of Genius.
Before they were even halfway there, the lights went out completely, plunging the entire museum into utter darkness.
The racket kicked up by the Hall of Genius’s haywire animatronics instantly ended, but the screams grew louder, and there was a thud and a grunted “Oof!”
“I think I just ran into a dinosaur,” Berg groaned.
Silas started to laugh.
Nick and Tesla shushed him.
“Listen,” Nick whispered.
A familiar swishing sound was growing louder. Closer. Then it began to fade away.
“Now,” Tesla said.
She brought around her bag of inky water and hurled it at the entrance to the solar power exhibit. Or at least she hoped she was hurling it toward the exhibit. It was impossible to tell how accurate her aim was in the dark. But she’d lined up her shot before the lights went out, and she heard it go splat in what sounded like the right spot. A few seconds later there were two more splooshes—Nick’s and Silas’s bags bursting nearby.
After that, they heard no sound except for a few panicked cries and shouts, and then another loud “Oof!” from Berg. Then the sw-sw-swishing returned, growing louder before quickly fading away.
And the lights came back on.
“Ow!” said absolutely everybody in the museum, simultaneously pressing their hands to their faces to block the sudden light.
After some rubbing and blinking, everyone’s eyes readjusted.
And that’s when the complaining started.
“I’ve never been so frightened in my life!” a woman said.
“Einstein’s head hit me right in the face!” said a man.
“That was Charles Darwin,” someone pointed out.
“Whatever! I didn’t come here to play dodge ball with a bunch of body parts!” the man shot back.
“We should sue!” said about a dozen people to their spouses.
“I told you this would happen,” said Ellen Wharton- Wheeler. The tall, stern curator was standing next to an ashen-faced Katherine Mavis. “You turned my museum into a funhouse, and now it’s ruined.”
The two women were just outside the Hall of Genius. Mojo Jones and Ruffin, the museum’s rumpled chief of security, stood beside them, both looking like they knew they should be doing something but were too stunned to figure out what.
Katherine Mavis cleared her throat and pasted a thin, tremulous smile onto her face.
“That’s what they call ‘technical difficulties,’ friends!” she said cheerily to the unhappy mob around her. “Just one of the little setbacks you have to expect when you’re as extreme as the X-Treme Learnasium! Let’s take a minute to catch our breath and then we can continue the tour with our new space exhibit. I can assure you, there won’t be any more surprises like that!” But before she could continue trying to calm the crowd, a new voice interrupted her.
“Ladies and gentlemen: your attention, please!” the voice boomed. “A young man may be in danger, and if we’re going to help him, then everyone needs to stay exactly where they are!”
It was Tesla. She’d climbed atop the giant brain near the Hall of Genius and was standing on it, looking down at the crowd with her arms outstretched.
“Hey! Get offa that!” Ruffin barked at her.
“I will in just a minute, sir. But first I have some work for you. If you want to check on whatever you’ve got on loan from Solanow over there”—Tesla waggled her thumb at the Something NEW under the Sun exhibit—“I think you’ll find that it’s gone.”
Ruffin rolled his eyes. “You still think there’s some kind of supervillain running around here plotting and kidnapping people?”
“Yes,” Tesla said. “What just happened in the Hall of Genius was no accident. It was a diversion. And it worked.”
Tesla turned to look pointedly at Berg and the other security guards, who’d been slowly creeping toward the brain with the obvious intention of pulling her off of it.
Ruffin’s eyes widened when he saw them.
“What are you doing over here?” he snapped.
“Well, there was all the screaming and the yelling and stuff,” Berg said. “And now there’s a kid standing on our brain.”
“So who’s watching the microwave transmitter and the rectenna?” Ruffin asked.
Berg looked around at the other guards. The other guards looked back at Berg.
“Oh. Uh, nobody, I guess.”
“Get back there, you—!”
Then Ruffin suddenly seemed to remember that he was being watched by a few hundred well-dressed spectators. He swallowed whatever word was going to follow “you” and lowered his voice.
“Please be so good as to check the exhibit for me, Donald,” he said instead.
“You got it, Chief!”
Berg saluted and lumbered off as quickly as his thick, squat legs could carry him.
“Watch out for the water!” Tesla called after him.
Berg ignored her.
“What water?” Ruffin asked.
“Whoa!” Berg hollered as he went slipping and sliding through the puddle in front of the solar power exhibit.
“That water,” Tesla said. “It’s got fluorescent ink in it.”
“Florescent ink?”
“This day just gets weirder and weirder,” Mojo Jones said, putting a hand to his head.
“Will someone please tell me why we’re standing around listening to a fifth grader?” Wharton-Wheeler sneered.
“Seventh grader, in the fall,” Tesla told her coldly. “And here comes your answer.”
Berg came pounding back out of the solar power exhibit.
“The—!” he started to say.
And then he went skidding through the puddle again, only managing to remain upright thanks to a vigorous flapping of his overdeveloped arms.
“The kid’s right!” he said once he’d regained his balance. “The equipment from Solanow—it’s gone!”
A gasp rose from the crowd.
Ruffin looked like he was about to explode. Mavis looked like she was about to faint.
“Don’t worry,” Tesla told them. “The thieves didn’t get far.”
“How do you know?” Mavis asked, her voice hoarse, her eyes hollow.
“Because they’re right here,” Nick said.
He was approaching the Hall of Genius hunched over, with his right hand pointed down. The UV LED on the gadget glove was shining, lighting up tracks that glowed a ghostly purple-blue on the smooth museum floor.
Silas followed a few steps behind him, looking profoundly jealous.
“The ink was so that we could follow whoever went into that exhibit when the lights went out,” Nick said. “The trail leads here, though I think that’s probably obvious by now.”
Aglow on the ground were two sets of footprints.
Big, clunky footprints, which split in front into three sharp points.
The footprints of oversized birds.
Nick stopped in front of the two Coolicious McBrainys, one towering, one tiny, who were standing together at the edge of the crowd. Their feathery bellies seemed more swollen than before, as if each one was about to lay a big batch of eggs.
“Who?” the bigger owl hooted. “Us?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “You.”
The Cooliciouses looked at each other and then spun on their taloned heels and took off running.
“Stop those owls!” Nick cried as the Coolicious McBrainys tried to scamper away across the atrium.
The mus
eum’s V.I.P. guests seemed too hypnotized by the bizarre scenario to do anything. They’d come to eat appetizers and hobnob, not to chase runaway mascots.
Silas, on the other hand, was ready to leap into action.
“Oh, yeah!” he bellowed. “Time for me to do my thing!”
He took off after the owls and threw himself onto the taller one’s back. The owl just kept running with Silas draped over his shoulders like a backpack.
Then Berg flew in from the side and flung himself on both of them.
“Gently!” Tesla yelled at him. “They’ve still got the thingamajig and the whatchamacallit!”
“You heard the young lady!” Ruffin yelled. “Gently!”
By now the other guards had joined the chase, and they quickly caught up to the smaller Coolicious, latched on, and smoothly but firmly turned the bird around.
Berg, meanwhile, had managed to twist one of the giant Cooliciouses’s wings behind its broad back.
“Give it up, punk, or you’ll never fly again,” he snarled.
“Ha! Good one!” said Silas, who’d slid off the owl’s back and was now wrapped around its waist.
The big Coolicious finally stopped trying to run away.
“All right, all right!” it squawked. “Not so hard! That hurts!”
Berg (with unnecessary but eager help from Silas) marched the owl back to the middle of the atrium to stand, sullen and slump shouldered, beside the other smaller Coolicious.
“Unzip their outfits, and I think you’ll find what you’re looking for,” Nick said.
The guards looked at Ruffin.
“You might as well do what he says,” he told them. “These kids are on a roll.”
The guards leaned in close to the owls, hunting through their dark feathers until they found the zippers hidden beneath their beaks.
There was a ziiiiiiiip, then another, and suddenly it was obvious why the Coolicious costumes were bulging so much at the belly.
Stuffed inside each suit was a bulky piece of equipment. One had a short row of black panels attached to a jutting cylinder the size of a can of tennis balls. The other was a single broad, flat, plastic board with a cable running out the back that ended in a plain, old-fashioned electrical plug.
“Eww,” Berg said, grimacing, as he pulled the board out of the big Coolicious’s suit. “It’s all slimy.”
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