by Sophie Bell
“And?” Scarlet eyed the fourth cup.
“Opal’s is a mocha,” Iris said. Just then her smartphone buzzed. “That’s probably her now.” She glanced at the screen. “Uh-huh, in the lobby. I’ll go get her.”
The stimulating scents of the coffees roused Cheri again. She joined Scarlet at the table, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Yummy,” she said, breathing in the peppermint. “What’s in the box?”
“What else?” Iris tossed over her shoulder as she started down the stairs. “Pie. Apple crumble. Perfect for breakfast.”
“Speaking of which,” Cheri called after her, “by any chance did you see that cutie pie busboy Philippe at the diner? He makes me crumble!”
• • •
The very first thing Opaline noticed when she entered Club Very Ultra Violet for the very first time was her black pearl collar on Skeletony, the old FLab skeleton Scarlet had salvaged from BeauTek’s Vi-Shush laboratory back when Opal was leading the mutant troop. Cheri had won the collar in a poker game in the boys’ room at Chronic Prep back when she was plotting to zombotomize their entire class with BeauTek’s toxic perfume. The same perfume that, in powder form, was now festering in the river.
Opal sighed inside. The past, she thought, is never dead. It’s not even past.
Then she drank a deep, slow sip of her mocha latte.
“This place is viomazing, guys,” she said. The word felt clumsy on her tongue—like it belonged to a foreign language she wasn’t sure how to speak. But she tried it out anyway. Sensing the eyes of the other three Ultra Violets (and one very wary skunk) on her, she made a quick tour of the clubhouse, taking in the squishy silver beanbag, the white marshmallow sofa, the pink shag rug, and the fabulous flower-shaped window. She stopped to linger on the three sets of robotic hummingbird wings, hanging side by side just like their coats in the kindergarten closet years ago. The wings were so beautiful—and so powerful, each pair made from hundreds of shimmering, indestructible scales. The way the iridescent colors were arranged, they almost looked dip-dyed: starting off pale at the shoulder blades and then deepening at the tips. Even if she hadn’t already seen the girls wearing them when they’d flown in to come out at Synchro de Mayo, it would be easy to guess which pair belonged to which Ultra Violet.
The burgundy-gray combo is so Scarlet. Opal swallowed another sip of her latte. The shades of pink are perfect for Cheri. And the electric blue–royal purple fits Iris to a T.
Opal wanted to reach out and brush her fingertips across the wings, hear the tinkling sound they made when all the tiny discs touched. But the other girls were watching, and they would think that was weird. She resisted the urge and turned around to face them instead.
“Okay,” she said, walking back toward the table, “let’s get down to business.” For emphasis, she snapped her fingers twice. She didn’t sweep her hand in the full letter O—that would have been overkill. But she did snap slightly up high, and slightly down low. She was hoping to get some of her swagger, some of her mojo, back. By the shocked expressions on the other girls’ faces, though, she could tell she’d made a, er, fo pas.
“Too soon?” she asked meekly.
“Too soon!” the three Ultra Violets chorused back.
• • •
Hours later, the coffee cups were long empty and the apple pie long gone. Scattered across the table were smartphones and notebooks. The screen of one laptop was filled with complicated chemical equations. The screen of another featured the latest news about movie stars and boy bands—during their serious strategy session, they took the occasional well-deserved celebrity-gossip break. And on the screen of a third laptop, Darth kept pressing PLAY on a GoobToob channel and snickering to himself.
“What’s so funny?” Cheri asked, chucking him under the chin and making him chortle more.
Grumpy Skunk gif, he chittered back, pawing at the PLAY button again.
Sitting sideways in the fuzzy orange egg chair, Iris studied the blueprints on the screen of her iCanvas. “Opal, these are incredible,” she said. “I can’t believe we got them.”
Scarlet said, upside down in a handstand on the pink shag rug. Although she still had plenty of reservations about Opal joining the Ultra Violets, she had to give the girl mad props for the major intel she’d just provided on BeauTek’s plans for Gazebra Plaza. “It’s just like when they downloaded the data maps to the Death Star from R2D2 in Star Wars!” Scarlet knew that was kind of a throwback reference, but sooner or later everybody sees the original Star Wars. Thanks to her brothers, Scarlet had seen it about ten times.
On the outside, Opal kept up a cool façade. Inside, she beamed at the praise. “I remembered BeauTek had plans for the river,” she said, tracing a finger along the white veins in the black marble tabletop. “My mom and I talked about them the night after my birthday party . . .”
At the mention of the calamitous party, all four girls shifted uncomfortably. Iris kept her eyes on her tablet; Opal twisted her hands up inside her sleeves; and Scarlet decided it would be a good time to drop down and practice her Pilates plank pose. Cheri, filing her already short nails, tried to move the conversation along.
“It’s awesome that you could access BeauTek’s systems externally, Opal,” she said, her green eyes still streaming with computer codes. “It made hacking into those confidential files a breeze!”
“You’d think they’d have deleted my mother’s account by now,” Opal mumbled, even though, again, the pie was long gone. “But apparently not.”
“In a big company like BeauTek, corporate security must be a constant source of vulnerability, alas,” Cheri commented. She didn’t see Scarlet’s quizzical expression because Scarlet still had her head down in plank pose. And Cheri had her own head down, anyway, concentrating on painting her nails with a fresh coat of her favorite sparkly nail polish.
“Anything else you can remember, Opal?” Iris asked, scrolling through screens on her tablet. “Anything that might be useful?”
Clouds passed over Opal’s brown eyes as she thought back. “This might not mean much . . .” She hesitated.
“You never know,” Iris encouraged her. “What is it?”
“My mother did say”—Opal braced herself for Scarlet’s reaction—“that she thought one of the two spy boys was a double agent.”
“Ha!” Scarlet scoffed, beginning a vigorous set of push-ups. “I doubt it, seeing as we just witnessed them blow up the Gazebra!”
“I still can’t believe they tore down the Gazebra,” Iris said, shaking her tangled tresses. “Or, I mean, I can now. Now that I’ve seen these blueprints and we know BeauTek is planning to put this . . . this colossal contraption in its place!”
“Though we still don’t know who tipped us off about it,” Cheri added, using her ongoing manicure as an excuse not to make eye contact with Iris. “It could have been Sebastian who sent that text message,” she dared to say.
Iris was silent.
“He wasn’t wearing the black suit yesterday?” Cheri attempted again.
Still Iris wouldn’t touch the subject of her conflicted Graffiti Boy. With her rhinestone stylus, she tapped the screen of her tablet, then swung her legs around and stood up. “Okay, I’ve just sent you all individual instructions based on what we discussed.”
“Got it,” Opal and Cheri said together as both of their phones swooshed with the sound of an incoming message.
“And you copied in Candace on the plan, right?” Scarlet asked, completing her one hundredth push-up.
“Totes.” Iris nodded. “She texted back that she’s out now, um, having a ball?” she joked.
“Out cracking a ball,” said Cheri, “pinkies crossed.”
“I nearly cracked it this morning,” Scarlet recalled. “Purely by accident.”
Iris glanced through the massive flower window to the twilight skies beyond. “But Ca
ndace will be here with the cloudship tonight.”
“Projekt BeauTekification,” Scarlet declared, springing to her feet, “prepare for your wreckification.”
“Prepare,” Iris said, nearly smiling for real this time as Cheri held up her bottle of nail polish and rattled it like a maraca, “for the Lilac Attack.”
Pluck, Oooh!
“JUST A PINCH, THAT’S ALL YOU’LL FEEL, I PROMISE. Just a bit of plasma, that’s all I’ll take. And it’s to save the population from mind control, so it’s for a really good cause! Okay, Lady SynchroniCity? We cool?”
Candace had piloted the cloudship straight up to the face of the statue in the harbor. Lady SynchroniCity’s watermelon tourmaline eyes—clear carnation pink at the center, deep forest green around the rims, and a full four feet in diameter—gazed back benignly through the windshield at the teenius. Being (nearly) a scientist, Candace felt a tad silly talking to a statue. But only a tad. She knew that, lovely as Lady SynchroniCity was, she was still an inanimate object, molded from molten rose gold, with no more power to reply than the stainless steel swizzle sporks Candace collected as odd talismans. Yet Lady SynchroniCity was not some commonplace kitchen utensil! She was a monument. She symbolized so much—about strength and creativity and . . .
“And the fundamental connectivity of all things: That’s synchronicity!” Candace proclaimed, reminding herself of the founding principles of the city that she and the Ultra Violets were scrambling to save. Considering how important those principles were, Candace believed it was only right that she explain to the guardian statue just what she was about to do.
“So, um, namaste.” Candace brought her palms together and bowed to the statue’s hypnotic eyes. “Coddington out.” (She wasn’t sure how else to wrap up the one-way conversation.)
Candace shifted the cloudship into reverse, slowly backing away from the sculpture’s face. She stalled briefly to survey the scene. Lady SynchroniCity will have a perfect view of the action later tonight, she thought. Candace could see the curdled clumps of poison powder undulating on the surface of the water as it lapped against the riverbank. A few Projekt BeauTekification workers, in their heinous yellow hardhats and goofy hula skirts, were still scattering the stuff. Past the cove, Chrysalis Park was almost empty. Due to the recent sneeze epidemic, more and more people were staying home, afraid of catching “the flu” that suddenly seemed to be infecting the entire city. If only they knew that a foul powder is what’s really causing their achoos. Candace changed gears again. And that by Monday they’ll all have lost their minds to it—unless we catalyze the stuff in time.
Had anyone been watching that particular cloud in the Sunday evening sky, they might have done a double take when, like an aerial elevator, it shot upward in a strict vertical line. Candace reached the statue’s raised orb in a matter of seconds. Now she idled the cloudship alongside it, the aircraft’s vapors veiling the light the same way fog can obscure the moon. The orb’s constantly flickering colors still glowed purple, red, and blue through the brume. They lit up the inside of the cloudship, too. If Candace hadn’t had such a crucial mission to complete, she would have taken a moment to groove there in her own private dance club.
Actually, she did. Groove, that is. Get down with her bad self. Just for a minute! It helped to get the nervous energy out of her system before she hunkered down to the painstakingly precise gig at hand.
Candace cracked her knuckles. Buckled herself back into the pilot’s seat. And adjusted the microscopic lens she’d built into her glasses. “Let’s do this.”
With the press of a button on the dashboard, the curved windshield pane of the cockpit slid up, leaving nothing but air between Candace and the Statue of SynchroniCity’s pulsating plasmatic orb. Flicking a few more switches, she redirected the pipes of the exhaust system so that the mist the aircraft was constantly recycling didn’t waft into the cabin.
“Next”—Candace positioned her fingertips on the rubbery-smooth surface of a small trackball protruding like a pimple from the console—“comes the tricky part.”
As she began to maneuver the ball, a thin, multi-jointed extension with a thicker, multi-tooled attachment on its end unfolded from the blunt nose of the cloudship. It stretched out until, ever so slightly, it made contact with the orb’s crystal surface. That faint touch alone sent the plasma filaments into a frenzy, twitching with such spasticity that Candace shielded her eyes while her glasses automatically darkened.
Plasma orb blinking like a billboard before her, Candace tapped an application on her tablet, and the multi-tooled end of the robotic arm opened up like a lotus blossom, revealing a different implement on each metal petal. There was the screwdriver, the skeleton key, the earring-hole-puncher, the cheese knife. Candace guided the trackball again, rotating the attachment until the petal containing the laser-sharp tines of a spork was in the center position. “And drill . . .” she murmured, activating that icon on the app. The spork began to spin, carving a clean-edged disc no bigger than a pencil’s eraser out of the crystal.
“I’ve cracked the orb.” Thumbing back the trackball, Candace retracted the spork. The tiny plug of cut crystal clung magnetically to its tines. “Now to pluck the plasma.”
Despite the cool air passing through the open window, sweat began to bead across Candace’s forehead. Cautiously maneuvering the trackball, splitting her glimpses between the actual orb and the live video of it on her tablet screen, she rotated the multi-tooled attachment another few notches. “It’s just like playing Operation,” she observed aloud, making sure her next implement—a slim pair of tweezers—was expertly aligned before she inched it through the newly made hole. “Or that carnival game when you try to pick up a stuffed animal prize with a crane. Now come to mama . . .”
But the plasma filaments protested the intrusion of the tweezers even more than they had the drilling of the spork. They crackled like crazy, ricocheting around the inside of the giant crystal globe with so much vigor that Candace started to stress about its “structural integrity.” If the orb shattered . . .
Don’t even think about that! Candace commanded herself. She had a poison powder to counter-catalyze by midnight; she couldn’t be worrying about breaking historic monuments (albeit purely by accident)!
It was no easy task plucking the filaments, though. They were as slippery as a school of fish. As a bar of soap in the bathtub! Any time the tip of the remote-controlled tweezers got anywhere close, the motion-sensitive plasmatic electrodes would immediately dart to the opposite end of the orb. “Patience,” Candace grumbled after she’d failed to grab an especially elusive blue one on the third try. “Patience!” she growled on the eighth. Frustrated, she stopped, and contemplated the big, beautiful, infuriating orb before her. She took off her glasses and sponged the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her lab coat. The gesture reminded her of the kooky mayor with her ludicrous powderpuff. That strengthened Candace’s resolve.
“Please, Lady SynchroniCity,” she spoke to the statue again. “I just need a few of your plasma filaments. I’ve run a hundred different tests in the FLab over the past twenty-four hours, and the results are always the same: The only way we can detox BeauTek’s powder is with a dash of this, mixed with a sprinkling of that. ‘This’ being the plasma, ‘that’ being the, er, whatchamacallit. Or the Whoseewhatsit, to be specific. Don’t you want to help me and the Ultra Violets? Don’t you want the citizens of your city to stay sane?”
Candace closed her eyes. She massaged her temples, which had begun to throb along with the plasma strands. “OhmV,” she exhaled, hoping to ward off a headache. Then she put her glasses back on. And as her vision came into focus once more, she saw several glowing filaments wrapped around the tweezers. While it had hung motionless inside the orb, they had simply fallen into place.
“Oooh!” Candace pinched them tight before they could slip away again. “I’ve got you, my pretties!”
&n
bsp; The rest of the operation was way less vexing. She angled the tweezers back out of the eraser-sized hole and then, spraying a fast-drying polymer embedded in its base, she vacuum-sealed the entire multi-tooled apparatus inside a transparent pouch. After she’d trackballed it through the window, she manually detached the extension—which just means that she screwed it off using her hands. It was only when she was holding the polymer pouch that she realized the tiny crystal disk was inside it, too, still stuck to the swizzle spork.
“Sugarsticks,” Candace said. She wasn’t about to open up the pouch and risk setting the filaments loose inside the cloudship—she’d wait till she was back in the FLab for that. But she couldn’t leave a hole in the statue’s orb, either!
She glanced around the aircraft that she herself had custom-designed, scanning the console and cabinets and overhead compartments for a solution. Her eyes fell upon a roll of something silvery.
“It’s not perfect.” Candace frowned, picking it up and putting it on her wrist like a bracelet. “But it will have to do.”
Then, once she’d secured the polymer pouch for transport, she tore off a square of that shiny gray duct tape with her teeth. Reached out the open window of the cockpit. And slapped it across the small hole in the big orb. The filaments went frenetic all over again.
“I’ll come back and fix it right, I pinkie-swear!” Candace called to Lady SynchroniCity as she zoomed the cloudship past her serene face en route to the FLab. The teenius felt certain that the statue’s pink-and-green gaze shone with encouragement. “Just as soon as we pull off the Lilac Attack!”
Zowie
Code Name: Lilac Attack
Primary Aim: Poison Powder Plasmalytic Conversion
Objective Numero Two: Mutant Neutralization