by Sophie Bell
This mutant mutiny only caused Develon to shriek and spew more as she summoned up yet another team of MutAnts to replace the one that had just meandered away.
Weirdness, Iris mused. Could this get any more messed up?
And that’s when she felt the gnawing on her ankle.
“Gah!” Violet dreadlocks spinning like swings on a carnival ride, Iris whipped her head around and scrambled to her feet in almost the same instant. The MutAnt that had been hunting her all along rushed forward to meet her face-to-face, perching up on two legs, tilting its triangular head down, and reaching out at her with four wriggling arms.
“Eww, eww, eww!” Iris squealed, powering up as fast as possible. The MutAnt grasped for her glittering wings. Iris batted the four spurred claws away. And, prickly as burrs, they got stuck in her ropey purple curls.
“Quadruple eww!” Iris wailed through gritted teeth, violently ick-facing. “And quadruple ow!” As the MutAnt tussled to free its four entangled claws, it kept pulling her hair! To block its salivating jaws, she crossed her hands in front of her face and beamed out ultraviolet rays at random. Guarding herself like a boxer, she pondered her predicament:
I have GOT to get away from this monster bug! she thought. But I can’t walk blindly backward and risk falling into the blades! She was already worried she might lose her balance just wobbling there, smacking aside the ant’s grabby arms, which only seemed to get more and more entwined in her dreads. Isn’t it enough that it’s so dangerous being a superhero? she asked no one but herself, flailing at the creature as if they were in some silly schoolyard slap-off. Does it have to be so RIDICULOUS, too?
Squaring her shoulders, Iris tried to compose herself. Fists up, she stared at the MutAnt straight on, the stiff shell of its head sniveling toward her. With a jab of her right hand, she punched a blast of intense ultraviolet heat at its face, incinerating one antenna and searing a hole in its helmet. The smoking exoskeleton smelled sickeningly like burnt rubber. The ant screeched and teetered to one side, but still it wouldn’t let go of her hair. It can’t! Iris realized with shock. Out of the corners of her eyes, she could see that its claws were wrapped up in her knotted ringlets like flies in a violet spiderweb.
She raised her left hand, but before she could release another beam, fleshy teeth pinched her skin. The ant had sunk its jaws around her wrist like a damp, dull razor-edged bracelet.
Iris screamed in spite of herself, struggling with her free hand to scald the MutAnt’s pinchers, wincing at the pain whenever she fried her own skin by accident. With just two legs and only one antenna, the MutAnt was quick but clumsy, skipping over the beams of the Bleau-Fryer, dragging Iris through the air like a chew toy.
It’s going to bite my hand off! She began to panic as the frantic ant flung her over an open vent and slammed her down onto another metal beam. Every yank at her hair felt as painful as the first. Within the chaos, she fought for a moment of calm. “OhmV,” she breathed shakily and tried to assess the situation.
It came to her clear as crystal. Iris knew what she had to do. Like Scarlet before her, Iris soooo didn’t want to do it. But just as Scarlet cherished her freckles, Iris valued her hand too much to feed it to a mutant.
Hair, she figured, can always grow back.
Narrowing the solar power streaming from her palm into a pencil-thin laser, Iris aimed at the middle of the MutAnt’s forehead. At the same time, she focused her ultraviolet eyebeams into a pair of sleek scissors.
Sorry, curls, she found herself apologizing to her neglected tresses as—one, two, three, four—she snipped off the locks the MutAnt had clawed into.
She was almost loose. She just had to save her left hand.
The MutAnt seized and thrashed, trying to throw off the four natty clumps of Iris’s shorn hair. But the severed strands, rather than unraveling, seemed to twist into chains. Instead of freeing the creature’s four claws, the cut tendrils bound them up tight as a mummy. Still the MutAnt held fast to Iris’s wrist, wrenching her back and forth. Iris jerked around like a marionette, stumbling to stay on the metal beams, straining to sear off the monster’s mandibles without giving herself sixth-degree burns.
It happened all at once. With a savage thrust of its damaged head, the MutAnt swung her up, out, and high over the blades just as, at last, Iris sliced off its jaws with a solar knife of violet-hot heat. And just as, too soon, the turbines started grinding again.
“Oh!” Iris cried, her wrist throbbing with fresh pain as the MutAnt’s pinchers tumbled away, exposing her raw skin to the cool air. She was vaguely aware that, beneath her, the bug had toppled into the blades. But there was no victory in the defeat. She was already beyond that.
Out of the frying pan and into the Bleau-Fryer. Iris stared from above at the mocking silver fangs of the machine and wondered why she always thought up such terrible jokes at the unfunniest times.
Feeling the suction increase, feeling the arc of her toss peak and her body begin to fall as if in slow motion toward the humongous fan that was beginning to rotate below her, Iris realized she was flying backward again. But now the wind wasn’t buffeting her like a wave. It was drawing her down like water in a drain. If this moment seemed infinite, it was only because she was sure it would be her last.
With her good hand still scorching, she tore the plasma locket off the strap around her neck. With her hurt hand she managed to shoot out a tremulous rainbow. She couldn’t be sure she’d struck the center vent. As she sent the round pendant rolling down the middle green beam like a ball in a pinball machine, she could only hope.
Hit or miss, the plasma was on its pathway. Now Iris worked desperately to open her robotic hummingbird wings. But her hands were too hot on the control panel. She melted the click wheel wherever she touched it.
The wings probably weren’t strong enough to withstand this pull anyway, she tried to console herself as she braced for impact.
Swish! She heard the blades lop off the ends of her longest remaining dreadlocks. Krunk! She heard them butcher the vitanium-crystal scales of her wingtips. She closed her eyes and sent out a final wish to the cosmos, that Opaline and Candace, Scarlet and Cheri and Darth, would stay strong and sparkle on without her. And then . . .
“Gotcha!”
An embrace.
The soft voice was barely detectable over the buzz of the Bleau-Fryer’s engines. Later, when she reflected back on it, Iris wondered if she had even heard it at all. If Sebastian had even said it. Maybe he’d only thought it, and she’d just sensed it, inside her head.
But in the moment, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he had caught her, and was zooming her away on his hoverboard.
“OMV, Sebastian!” Iris cried, throwing her arms around his neck. “You could have gotten sucked into the blades, too! We both could have been puréed!”
“Yeah.” He shrugged it off as they soared out of the vortex’s reach. “But I tricked out my board. Now it’s turbo-charged! Those Black Swan dudes hooked me up with some sick equipment at that evil lab place!”
Iris lifted her head from his shoulder, a pattern of purple question marks breaking out all over her face. “Oh no, wait,” she stammered. “You’re not . . . ?” She thought she’d just been rescued. Maybe she’d just been captured.
“A spy for BeauTek?” Sebastian said with a laugh. “Nah!” He gave her a quick peck on the forehead. “Like I told you, Iris: I just wanna skate!”
The Pink and The Black
“IT’S A MARVELOUS NIGHT FOR A MOON-FLIGHT!” Cheri said in a singsong voice as she soared above the river on flittering fuchsia wings.
A fantabulous nite! Darth agreed, peeking out from his papoose and snuffling the air. Although he did not really like heights, and he was not a huge fan of water, either, he trusted Cheri. So he tried to enjoy the view.
Were it not for her official mission to foil Projekt
BeauTekification, Cheri would have loved to go for a scenic fly. Alas. It was as if the Statue of SynchroniCity had opened a velvet rope to the deep-blue, star-spangled sky. Flickering with aubergine and indigo filaments, her big plasma orb beckoned.
“Darth, look!” Cheri fanned a hand out toward the effulgent beacon. “Her colors are just like ours! And the plasma Candace took from her orb is going to catalyze those nasty spores! Lady SynchroniCity is on the side of the Ultra Violets—yay!” She clapped her hands together, and the whoosh of her closing wings pushed her up even higher.
Cheri felt so buoyant, in fact, that she could almost forget she was floating over a harbor clogged with bubbling toxic sludge just waiting to be heat-activated by a weaponized blow dryer. For a lark, she swooped down on her wings and (yes) glid parallel to the water, like geometricians and swans sometimes do.
Swans, she pondered, scanning the muddy banks and reed beds of the river. So many shadows skulked in the dark. As she flew past, she thought she heard them whispering, and a frisson of fear shot through her for the first time that night. Breaking from her precisely equidistant trajectory, she surged upward in a folium-of-Descartes algebraic curve.
“Which is defined by the equation x cubed + y cubed - 3axy = 0·,” Cheri said out loud into thin air to no one but Darth. “BTdubs.” Something about the exactness of math helped calm her nerves. Math was straightforward and solid. Not shadowy.
Darth, however, was more interested in math in action. He tugged on a strap of her robotic wings. Again! he pleaded.
“You liked that loop-de-loop, did you?” Cheri teased, softly kneading the little skunk’s silky ears—that always helped calm her nerves, too. “Maybe you’re getting over your fear of heights!”
Rohlerkohster! Darth answered, holding tight to the sides of his papoose as Cheri plunged and circled to one side, then the other, tying an imaginary bow in the night sky.
“I wonder if Scarlet and Iris are having as much fun as we are,” she said, hovering upright within the hazy nimbus of the statue’s orb like a hummingbird to a flame. She noticed what looked like a square of duct tape on its otherwise flawless surface. “And I wonder what Opaline’s up to.” From out on the river, Cheri couldn’t see much of what was going down at the construction site. Lines of MutAnts, lockstepping in their grass skirts? Lots of them. Way more than the twenty Scarlet had estimated. But that was it. She couldn’t make out any of the other Ultra Violets.
Iriz iz dropping dat bomb, Darth reminded her.
“So she iz.” Cheri gazed again at the Statue of SynchroniCity’s pulsing nerves of plasma. “Though the pendant is not so much a bomb as a . . . change agent . . .”
She trailed off. As she thought about the other three girls on the ground with the monster construction crew, she grew serious. Giving Darth a scratch under the chin, she said, “We’d better shake the Whoseewhatsit, right?”
Shake watz yr mama gave u, Darth replied with a giggle.
“Our mamas had nothing to do with the Lilac Attack!” Cheri giggled back. “They probably think Projekt BeauTekification is a good thing.” She rolled her eyes. “Like everyone else in Sync City. Duh.”
Dur, Darth seconded that emotion.
Just then, the first rush of hot air belched out over the harbor. As it warmed the glut of spores burbling on the river’s surface, they throbbed with a sinister glow.
“Uh-oh!” Fluttering in neutral, Cheri unlatched the thermos from her belt and twisted the cap to the SPRINKLE setting. “Now what was it Scarlet said again?” she muttered, flexing her fingers. “Um, veronimo!”
With Darth keeping watch, Cheri scudded parallel again over the sludge, shaking out the Whoseewhatsit like a crop duster. Candace’s warning had been right on: A little went a long way, spreading rapid as a rumor over the grellowy surface, staining it purple in concentric circles. And whenever the solution first touched the bloated particles, small violet watermelons exploded off the water, then disintegrated into powdery lilac-gray smoke.
“Pretty!” Cheri cooed at the chemical reaction. “Now when the plasmafied heat blast hits this stuff, it will be completely harmless!” But while she continued on, Darth spotted something odd. Darting through the muck behind them, a dim shadow was mimicking Cheri’s every move. Its blackness blocked the next drop of Whoseewhatsit.
Iz dat a shark on a surfsbord? Darth asked, alarmed. Iz it a swamp monster?!
No, Cheri answered grimly, holstering the thermos and U-turning in midair to confront the threat head-on, it’s—
A squirt of water caught her right in the eye.
Iz da Black Swanz! Darth exclaimed.
Don’t I know it! Cheri seethed, blinking to clear her sight (and hoping the shot hadn’t messed up her hot pink warpaint). Big Red Bristow had ducked back under the cover of his black umbrella, but there’d been no mistaking his tuft of carrot-red hair.
Furious, Cheri dropped down and flew directly at the darkness. Reaching it, she could see that the two spies, with erratic slaps and splashes, were pedaling a paddleboat. A big, black, swan-shaped paddleboat. Lil’ Freckles steered in the front seat. Big Red pumped from the back. And both boys brandished Super Soakers.
If only Scarlet were here! Cheri fumed. Nobody but nobody could beat Scarlet in a Super Soaker shoot-out.
Diz wil haf to do insted. Darth burrowed snout-down into his papoose, stuck his butt out the top, and sprayed a gassy stream of bleu cheese–bellybutton whiff the boys’ way.
“Urgh!” Big Red spluttered, scrambling to fan it back with his black umbrella. Lil’ Freckles began to cough.
“A Black Swan paddleboat, boys?” Cheri taunted, placing one hand on the bird’s broad plastic beak as she floated before them. “How adorable! What did you do, steal it from the petting zoo?”
“We decided,” Agent Jack “Lil’ Freckles” Baxter replied, pinching his nostrils and narrowing his glare, “To reclaim. The name!” He punched the dashboard of the swan-mobile for effect, then drew back his fist in pain.
“Yeah!” Agent Sidney “Big Red” Bristow covered for his cringing partner. “Black Swans don’t just have to be doofy ballerinas! They can be cool spies, too!”
“By accepting. The label,” Agent Jack argued in that tough, terse way of his, “We take back. Its power.”
“Well, how very enlightened of you!” Cheri sassed, rolling her eyes again—not that they could really tell in the dark. The spies actually had a point. But Cheri hated to admit it. She gave the tip of Darth’s tail a tiny tug. Again, please? she requested.
Darth happily complied, dousing the Black Swans with a second dose of bleu cheese–bellybutton. The stench was so vom-provoking, even Cheri had to cover her nose.
“What the V, Cheri?” Big Red raged as a queasy Lil’ Freckles ducked his head between his knees to breathe.
“Don’t you boys ‘what the V’ me!” Cheri retorted, startled that Agent Bristow had dared to address her by name. “You don’t get to say ‘what the V’! Only we do!”
“It’s. A Free. Alphabet.”
Lil’ Freckles’s knees muffled his response, but Cheri still heard it. Hovering above the toxic Joan River at midnight, debating vocabulary with the spy boys in a swan-shaped paddleboat, she didn’t miss the ridiculousness of the situation. And we were having such a delightful evening! she thought. Aggravated, she gave her magenta waves a toss and Darth’s tail another tiny tug.
He pooted out a third cheesy stink grenade.
“Stop it already!” Big Red wailed, his eyes watering. “That stank is gonna make me ralph!”
“Get used to it”—Cheri paused to buff her nails against her shoulder—“because it will take days to wash off.” Wishing once again that Scarlet were there with her, she gave the plastic beak of the swan-mobile a shove. If it had been Scarlet doing the shoving, the flimsy craft would have spun in so many circles that it would have caused a w
hirlpool. Cheri’s push just rocked the paddleboat back and forth a bit. But with the added bonus of Darth’s funky bouquet, even that seemed to make the boys seasick. Although Cheri could only see the back of Jack’s salt-and-pepper head heaving between his knees, she imagined he must have been pretty green around the gills.
He haz gills like mootant, too? Darth asked, twisting right-side-up in his papoose again.
No, no, Cheri explained, that’s just another way of saying he’s feeling ill.
Darth arched a skeptical eyebrow at his beloved Ultra Violet. Keeping up with her expressions could be challenging, especially since Human was not his first language.
Cheri checked the time on her smartphone, then joggled the thermos. She still had a little bit of Whoseewhatsit to shake out. As the swan-mobile swayed to a stop, she decided to try reasoning with the nauseated duo. “Seriously, you dodos, just what do you think you’re doing blocking my Whoseewhatsit?”
“Protecting his mother’s investment, that’s what,” Big Red answered feebly. By now he was as pukish as his partner.
“And I suppose you do everything your mother tells you?” Cheri needled Lil’ Freckles. “Even if it means zombotomizing an entire city? Or blowing up an innocent Gazebra!”
“She can be. Very. Demanding,” Agent Jack groaned.
To Cheri, that answer fell as short as Lil’ Freckles himself. She tut-tutted in disgust. Darth tsk-tsked right along with her. Yes, she still believed in love, and she’d wanted to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. But she also believed her besties deserved the best. Scarlet was the strongest UV. She couldn’t hang with a boy who was so weak. Too weak to stand up to his bossypantsuit mom!