by Sophie Bell
And Thirdly: Black Swan Butt-Kicking
“That seems about right,” Candace said, distractedly spinning the cuff of duct tape on her wrist while surveying the pie chart Cheri had calculated and Iris had designed. The teenius had been too busy to bother taking the roll off in the FLab; she’d been in such a rush there, dealing with the filaments. And then she’d had to jet straight over to CVUV to pick up the girls. By now she’d all but forgotten about her unusual new bangle.
On the illustration that beamed from one of the smaller screens inside the cabin of the cloudship, the three goals of the mission were split into three unequal pieces. The main aim, poison powder conversion, got the biggest slice—half the pie. Iris had aptly shaded it an unappetizing greenish yellow. Objective numero two, neutralizing the mutants, took up a third of the circle. Instead of making that wedge just one color, Iris had digitally sketched a warped portrait of Catfish Face inside it. The sight caused Scarlet to break out in a cold sweat. She’d yet to tell anyone about her Jack nightmare—it was only a bad dream, so what would be the point? But the depiction of the whiskered fish-face gave her flashbacks.
The remaining piece of the pie was filled with a feather pattern. Black on black, of course.
“The only thing I’d maybe change”—Scarlet stared up at the infographic—“is to make the slice of kick butt bigger.”
“A bigger butt?” Cheri weighed the options. “It is the smallest portion of our plan, but I suppose we could always prorate it.”
No one else had any idea what that meant. Not even Candace.
The erstwhile babysitter spun back around in the pilot’s seat and shifted the cloud into FLY. Slowly she floated the aircraft off the clubhouse’s rooftop and into the windstream. “How goes the rest of final prep back there?” she called, glancing up in her rearview mirror.
“Aces,” Iris said somberly. The captured filaments, now contained in a quartz pendant about the size of a ping-pong ball, bathed her downturned face in ever-changing shades. She was standing over a foldout table like a war general in the field, a scroll of violet-colored wax paper rolled out in front of her. “These purple-prints that we drafted, based on the original blueprints we hacked from BeauTek, diagram the central ventilation chute on this so-called Bleau-Fryer contraption. All I have to do is . . .”
As Iris recited her part in Operation Lilac Attack, Opal looked over at her with a mixture of shock and awe. Considering all the day’s work, maybe Iris couldn’t find a moment to comb out the tangles in her hair from the Tom’s Diner coffee jaunt that morning. But Opal suspected that, no, Iris just didn’t care. And between morning and night, the knots had gotten infinitely more complicated, vining into thick, ropelike dreadlocks. Opal could swear that the lavender rat’s nest had grown a full foot longer since their latte-fueled strategy session. Add to that Iris’s electric-purple hummingbird wings, hanging from her shoulders like a glittering cape. The radiant plasma pendant strung around her neck. Oh, and the face paint. Escalating from simple eyeliner, Iris had gone and slapped a broad band of black across her eyes, decorating it with dots and swirls of neon violet. Lit from below by the ever-flickering filaments, the effect was absolutely fearsome. And ultra fabulous.
“Like a Maori warrior!” Candace had exclaimed when she’d first come down into the clubhouse with the plasmatic pendant she’d forged, while Cheri and Scarlet had both clamored, “Ooh, do me, too! Do me!”
And so Iris had, painting a blazing red bar to frame Scarlet’s steel-gray eyes and embellishing it with black, then painting a hot pink swath on Cheri and highlighting it with bright green.
“C’mon, Opaline, you’re next,” Iris had said, just an hour or so ago in Club Very. It wasn’t a question. Iris had dipped a brush into a pot of face paint, tapping off the excess on the rim. Opal had closed her eyes and clutched her sleeves. And now—she gingerly touched her cheek—she had a day-glo orange band across her face, accented with curlicues of pure white.
“Approaching Ground Gazebra!” Candace announced from the cockpit. “How’s that primer coming along, Cher?”
“Très bien, I think!” Cheri called back cheerily, aiming a squeeze bottle over a large thermos of sloshing violet liquid that Scarlet was holding out at arm’s length. “I’ve just got to add the Whoseewhatsit!”
“Remember, only a few drops!” Candace called back. “Because that Whoseewhatsit is—”
Before Candace could finish her warning, a blazing purple flame the size of an exploded watermelon burst up from the flask. “Hey, whatseewhosit?!” Scarlet protested as Cheri muttered “Oopsie!” and checked the chemical equation on her smartphone again—since what she’d squirted out was easily a dollop.
“Opal?” Candace asked, turning to look over her shoulder, turning the controls as she did so, and nearly sending the cloud-ship into a tailspin. “Ready for some superpowered action on the side of the good guys—or good girls, anatomically speaking?”
Just then they hit a patch of turbulence. Opal’s stomach dropped along with the aircraft, and she gripped the armrests of her seat so tight her knuckles went as white as the warpaint on her face. “Yup!” she gulped through gritted teeth. She was flying around in a cloud, surrounded by three old friends who now looked like glam-rock kabuki robots. The mutants, she thought, will be much less intimidating.
“Here we are now,” Candace said, coasting the cloudship to a stop. She flipped a few switches on the dashboard, and the entire cabin lit up with monitors. All four girls eyed the live feed, filmed by the MAUVe drone and beamed back to the cloudship’s control panels via satellite. It was weird to see on-screen, in close-up, what was happening on the ground directly below them—like how it’s weird when people in the front row at a concert watch the whole show through their camera phones.
“Ground Gazebra.” Scarlet shook her head, the ends of her black bangs sweeping across the swath of red warpaint. “It’s a crying shame.”
“Seriously,” Cheri agreed, screwing the lid onto the thermos. “Good thing our makeup masks are waterproof.”
By now the Gazebra was long gone, save for the stack of splintered black-and-white timbers still off to one side. Huge mobile floodlights illuminated the pit where the pavilion had been. Despite it being almost midnight, the site buzzed with activity. An entire crew of mutants, all outfitted in their luau uniforms, swarmed in and out of the crater like ants at a picnic. In fact . . .
“They are ants,” Opal uttered, getting out of her seat. “All of them!”
“Ants on steroids,” Scarlet snarled, sizing up her opponents.
“An ant brigade.” A shiver ran all the way from the top of Cheri’s head to the tip of Darth’s tail. “Eww.”
The four girls ick-faced at the realization, and Scarlet instinctively covered the freckles on her cheeks. Objective numero two had been a mere bullet point on their battle plan. But now it was real. Itchingly, twitchingly, skin-scratchingly real.
“No sight of the Black Swans, though,” Cheri noted.
“Probably past their bedtimes,” Scarlet said with a smirk, although a small part of her was relieved. Have no fear, she was totally down with Black Swan Butt-Kicking. She could teach an online course on Kicking Black Swan Butt. If the essay topic on her English exam was “Describe in No More than 200 Words How to Butt-Kick a Black Swan,” she would get an easy A+. That didn’t mean she still didn’t feel mixed up about the maddening Agent Baxter, who had both saved her life and bombed the Gazebra right before her eyes.
Plus, she had this little problem of a giant ant infestation to deal with. She could do without the distraction that was Jack.
Suddenly Iris pointed her rhinestone stylus at the far corner of the largest screen in the cabin. “Ultra Violets, there it is,” she said, her pale blue eyes widening within the band of black paint. “The evil machine. The Bleau-Fryer.”
The four girls fell silent. Twiddling at the
control panel, Candace locked the cursor onto the apparatus, then zoomed in, increasing the size of the image umpteenfold. At the same time, on her iCanvas, Iris pulled up the matching digital files to the purple-print schematics she’d laid out on the table. With another tap on her tablet, the diagram overlapped the real-time image on the monitor, blinking a violet outline of the ventilation system Iris had identified. It moved along with the actual machine, which a team of MutAnts was hauling toward the gaping hole left behind by the Gazebra.
The hulking contraption was mostly circular in shape, like a giant tire knocked on its side. Or perhaps the world’s biggest pie. Wide, curved vents opened on a diagonal across the top, this latticed metal crust exposing not a sweet fruity filling but the sharp-edged blades of the fans beneath. The back end of the circle jutted out in a cumbersome square. A tube extended from the front and narrowed into a nozzle at the end. Alongside the diagram, a description ran down the screen:
Bleau-Fryer: a motorized, ionized, pathogen-dispersal system with a box engine encased in a rear compartment; rotating turbines located in the central, circular cavity; and a barrel averaging ten feet in diameter and twenty feet in length projecting from the front. By combining heat and wind, the machine catalyzes condensed chemical agents, simultaneously transmuting and distributing the active ingredients. Copyright © BeauTek Industries.
“So”—Iris tapped her rhinestone stylus against the palm of her hand—“a ginormous heat blast is supposed to activate the mind-control agent in the crazy powder.”
“And a ginormous wind blast is going to spread it through Sync City,” continued Opal.
“It’s basically just a stadium-sized blow dryer, isn’t it?” Cheri concluded, absentmindedly smoothing back her sleek berry-red waves. Darth, peeking out from his papoose, did the same, passing a paw through the fur on top of his head so that the very beginnings of his purple stripes stood up like a tiny Mohawk.
“How darling!” Cheri cooed, beaming down at him. “Now Darth looks like a warrior, too! The most adorable warrior ever!”
With all of Sync City precious minutes away from being blanketed by brainwashing powder, it was not the best time to be fawning over a cute skunk, but the girls all paused to admire Darth’s faux-hawk. Cheri would have given him a kiss on the head, except that would have crushed his updo.
“RiRi, that reminds me,” she chanced, because Iris’s hot-messedness had been bothering her all day. “I have the perfect detangling spray, if you want to brush out your—”
“Not now.” Iris and Candace actually said it together: Iris with blunt determination, Candace with more urgency. “Countdown to Lilac Attack, UVs,” the teenius stated. “You three got your wings on? Opal, ready for drop-off?”
Before she even knew what she was doing, Opal reached out and grabbed Iris’s hand. Iris was surprised, but she didn’t pull away. “No,” Iris said. “We do it like this.” And she held out her pinkie finger. “Shazam,” she said solemnly, colored shadows from the pendant’s filaments flitting across her face.
“Ka-pow!” Jittering with nervous energy, Scarlet touched pinkies with a lot more enthusiasm.
“Wait, what’s my ironic superhero word again?” Cheri wondered, joining the huddle.
Darth squeaked something up to her.
“Oh, right! Blammo!” She giggled, anxiously nibbling on her manicured thumbnail. “I spaced for a second. What’s yours, Opal?”
Opaline was the last to pile on to the pinkie swear. When she did, an ultraviolet mini-blast of lightning bolts and rainbows flared up from their fingertips. She blurted out the first word that came to mind.
“Zowie?” she ventured, blinking at the pink-, red-, and black-masked eyes of the other three.
“We’ll work on it,” Iris said with a smile and a shrug as the girls broke out of the clutch. And Candace opened the hatch.
Pluck, Eww!
OF COURSE, IF YOU ARE GOING TO INFILTRATE A late-night construction site where an evil cosmeceutical company is in the process of firing up a behemothic blow dryer, it helps to be invisible. Or at least camouflaged.
“This will only last a few minutes,” Iris cautioned, tugging on one of her ratty purple dreadlocks as she changed first Cheri, then Scarlet, into sort of see-through versions of themselves, with just their bands of pink and red warpaint, their glowing hair, and their robotic wings a bit more noticeable. “Mostly long enough to get us down to the ground undetected. So we’ve got to, um . . .”
“Bust a move?” Scarlet suggested, circling in a spontaneous Harlem shake perilously close to the open hatch in the back of the cloudship.
“Yes, be fast.” Turning her pinkie on herself and zigzagging it from head to toe as if she were spritzing on perfume, Iris was last to fade. But the ping-pong plasma pendant hanging at the hollow of her neck still shone bright. “The Bleau-Fryer coordinates are on all our phones. We go in—”
“You hit the machine,” Scarlet parroted, the wind from the hatch fanning her now-aubergine ponytail above her head. “I hold off the MutAnt assault.”
“And Darth and I are on powder patrol,” Cheri finished, checking again that the thermos of liquefied Whoseewhatsit was sealed tight and secured to her belt. And then checking a pocket mirror to see that her lip gloss hadn’t smeared. “But Scar, are you sure you’ll be okay? That looked like an awful lot of mutants . . .”
“No worries!” Scarlet said with forced bravado. “I mean, there can’t be more than, what, twenty of them? Piece of cake!”
“Or easy as pie?” Iris said, making an effort to kid around the way she usually did during a mission. “And by then, Opal should be on the ground, too, to help you deal.”
“Right, Opal?” Scarlet hollered across the cabin. She felt pretty confident that Opal was on board with the Lilac Attack. But she wouldn’t know for sure till they were in the thick of it.
The only one without wings, Opal had strapped herself back into her seat to keep from being sucked out of the cloudship’s hatch and into the actual clouds. In her hands she nervously twirled one of Candace’s swizzle sporks, which she couldn’t remember picking up. Between the rushing wind and the whirr of the cloudship’s engines, she had hardly heard a word Scarlet had said. She could barely even see her! All she knew was that a pair of steely gray eyes framed by a band of red and streamers of burgundy-black hair seemed to be glaring at her. Opal just nodded, hoping that was the right response.
“Then let’s blow this popsicle stand!” Scarlet bellowed.
“What popsicle stand?” Cheri shouted back, getting more stressed. “I don’t remember a popsicle stand being part of the plan!”
“No, that’s what they say in movies when they’re going to blow stuff up!” Scarlet yelled over the drone of the engines.
This was news to Cheri, since they rarely blew things up in rom-coms.
Candace called back to all of them over the cloudship’s intercom: “Ultra Violets, let’s save the movie trivia for later, okay? Now are we ready to—”
Before the teenius completed the question, Iris had turned up the speed on her wings. Raised her arms out to the sides. Given the other three girls a wobbly smile. And wordlessly tipped backward into the sky.
Opal knew Iris was wearing the robotic wings. She screamed anyway, it was so sudden.
“Veronimo!” Scarlet whooped, both fists raised high, cannon-balling out after Iris.
Her wings vibrating, Cheri—sensitive to Darth’s dislike of heights and the thermos of Whoseeswhatsit at her hip—made a much more graceful exit from the hatch.
Which Candace then closed up after her.
The girls flitted off in three different directions. Between the darkness of night and their near invisibility, even they had trouble seeing each other. After freefalling backward out of the cloudship, Iris closed her eyes and let herself drop, feeling the wind like water, surging against her shoulder
s and streaming through the hundreds of tiny vitanium-crystal scales of her wings. It was only for a second or three, but for Iris the moment felt infinite.
Opening her eyes again, she wrapped her wings across her body and flipped around to right herself, then gradually glid (still how it’s spelled) down over the Bleau-Fryer. The busy MutAnts became clearer the closer she got, festering around the machinery, sometimes on two feet, sometimes on all six to crawl under it. Iris noticed that their hideous tropical shirts had—eww—four sleeves for four arms.
She landed lightly on top of the machine, just where the barrel branched off from the round central compartment, and hunched into a crouch. Slowing her wings to FLUTTER speed, she stopped to listen. She couldn’t see Develon Louder yet, but she could hear her.
“Is it plugged in yet?” the president of BeauTek barked. “No?! Well, GET PLUGGING!”
“Skritch-skrutch-skreet-sznock-sznick!” The sound circled around the cavity of the construction pit: the sound of giant ants scissoring their pinchers in agreement with Develon, their boss.
Keeping low, Iris began to make her way toward the middle of the Bleau-Fryer, cautiously hopscotching from one metal strip to the next. Her fluttering wings lifted her a little with each leap. In the gaps between, the chiseled edges of giant fan blades flashed as the floodlights bounced off them. Out of the corner of her eye, Iris spied a wisp of red wafting down. Her first thought was that it might be Scarlet, off in the distance. But as the crimson tuft drifted closer, she realized it was just a frilly fluffula leaf. Momentarily mesmerized by it, Iris squatted down again and watched as the delicate leaf descended, light as a feather. It landed briefly on the same metal beam, right by Iris’s feet. Then a whisper of wind blew it away again, into the open vent just to her side. And the instant the leaf touched the top of the fan, it split clean in half, guillotined by the static, razor-sharp blade.