by Greg James
“What is this obsession with capes around here? That’s, like, the fourth time today I’ve heard someone talk about them, and I haven’t seen a single person wearing one.”
“Wearing a cape? What do you think this is, Halloween school? Not the capes you wear. Capes you have. You know—your Capability. What is yours anyway? By the sound of it you’re like me, but without the umbrella.”
“Like you?”
“Yes, you know, you’re a skimmer, right? Or do you prefer the official name? ‘Terrain circumvention.’”
“Now you’re just making sounds, and I have no idea what they are,” said Murph, resting his forehead against the wall again. “Just humor me for a minute. When you say ‘Capability,’ do you mean, like, a skill? Because I’m pretty good at Minecraft—will that do?”
Mary laughed sarcastically. Then, when she saw the worried look on Murph’s face, she took on a puzzled expression herself.
“Your Capability is your power, Murph.”
“What, like a . . . superpower?”
“Well, nobody’s called it that for, like, thirty years. But yeah, if you want to go retro”—she adopted a fake movie-trailer voice—“a superpower. You saw Timothy, didn’t you?”
“Um, yeah. So what’s his power . . . sorry, his Cape? Is he the Amazing Red-Faced Boy? Shame the TV broke before he got a chance to show us what other colors he can turn.”
This time Mary didn’t laugh.
“The TV didn’t break; he made that happen. Timothy’s got tele-tech: he can control electrical stuff. Or he will be able to when he’s trained properly.”
Murph’s brain was working overtime. “And I suppose Nellie can change the color of her hair and shut windows on demand?”
“No!” Mary actually stamped her foot. “That would be silly.”
“Thank goodness, because this whole thing was really starting to get freaky.”
“She can control storm clouds.”
“Right. Obviously. So, what’s the next lesson? Climbing buildings and shooting webs out of my wrist?”
“No, actually it’s double math.”
“Moon math or normal-person math?”
“Just math, Murph,” sniffed Mary, before turning away from him and disappearing into the girls’ bathroom. “This is still a school, you know. Not much good being able to fly if you can’t add, is it?”
Fly . . . ? Murph thought back to his mom’s conversation with Mr. Souperman the previous week. Everything was becoming clear, but not in a good way. It was like unfogging the car windshield only to discover you were about to drive off a cliff. Holy guacamole, he thought to himself, suddenly not looking forward to tomorrow’s Capability Training lesson one little bit . . .
These people think I can actually fly.
* * *
For years now, Murph and his mom had had an agreement. No, more than an agreement: a pact. She wasn’t allowed to ask the question. You know the one: the mom question. The one to which there is only one possible answer.
The question is this: “Soooo,” (and the mom can drag this word out for several seconds) “how was school?”
The time-honored answer is, “Um, okay, I suppose,” but it must be delivered within 0.25 seconds, so it usually sounds more like “murkyspose.” Murph had made his mom agree, on threat of sulks, not to ask the question any more.
So, that evening, after picking a silent Murph up from The School, driving him home in silence, and eating silent sausage, wordless mashed potatoes, and taciturn beans, Murph’s mom simply sat there with her eyebrows raised and waited for Murph to give her the verdict.
Andy was sleeping over at a friend’s house, which should have made things a bit easier, but each line Murph rehearsed in his head seemed worse than the last. Where on earth should he start?
So, you know this new school? Well, turns out it’s a special, secret school for kids with superpowers. Weird, eh? Anyway, I haven’t got any powers so the first lesson tomorrow’s going to be a bit of a challenge . . .
So, I made friends with someone who can fly . . .
Mom, I really need to ask you about girls. Is it normal for them to conjure thunderstorms out of thin air . . . ?
So, instead, Murph stayed silent. And his mom gazed at him with an encouraging expression on her face that looked as if it might crumble into pieces at any moment. Only it didn’t.
Murph looked back at his mom and managed to force a small smile. He was remembering the advice she always gave him when things felt unmanageable. Problems don’t go away on their own, she would tell him. But problems are cowards and bullies, and they only take advantage if they think they can win. Face them. Look them in the eye. Show them you’re not scared. If you show them you’re not scared of them, they’ll run away.
And so, with those words in mind, at school the next morning Murph summoned every ounce of courage he had in his body, including the small amount usually stored in his toes, and said the words before he could give himself a chance to back out.
“I am not, in fact,” he declared in a loud, confident voice, “able to fly.”
It was the beginning of the daily Capability Training lesson, and Murph had decided to face his problems head-on. Mr. Flash had called him to the front of the class, and before the instructor had time to clear the chairs away, Murph had stopped him with a raised hand and told the whole class that he had something to share.
It wasn’t going over well.
“What on earth are you doing at this school, then?” sputtered Mr. Flash, his head going so red it looked like a tomato with a mustache stuck on the front. Murph took a deep breath. It was time to come clean.
“I have literally no idea,” he said in a quiet but firm voice. “I have made friends with a girl who, apparently, can fly. She is sitting next to another girl who can control storm clouds. Timothy here”—he gestured at Timothy, who was looking at him as if he were a small and not especially attractive caterpillar—“can make electronics fry, and she . . . she . . . ,” Murph continued, pointing at a curly-haired young lady in the second row. “Actually, I have no idea what she can do.”
“I’m Hilda, and I can summon two tiny horses,” she said nervously.
“Right, Hilda here is a . . . is a horse, um, a tiny horse summoner. I, on the other hand, am just a normal kid.”
Mr. Flash really did look as if he was about to pop. He appeared to be speechless, which made him, if anything, even more like an actual tomato. Suddenly he seemed almost to vanish as he activated his own Capability—incredible speed. He flashed to the back of the classroom and peered at Murph from a distance. Then papers blew from desks as he raced back to the front so that they were practically standing nose to nose.
“A NORMAL KID?” he bellowed at the top of his voice.
The class erupted into shrieks of delighted laughter. One or two of Timothy’s friends started chanting, and it quickly caught on: “Normal kid! Normal kid! Normal kid!”
“SILENCE!” roared Mr. Flash, zipping around the class like a red-tipped tornado, trying to restore order. But he’d lost control, and he wasn’t the only one.
As he’d explained to his students on day one, it takes concentration to keep your Capability in check. And concentration had gone right out the window. With a tinkling, neighing sound, two tiny white horses materialized out of thin air and galloped across the desktops. The replacement TV, which was standing in the corner, exploded, and a huge clap of thunder sounded outside. A tallish boy in a blue top on the other side of the class room emitted a small noise like a balloon being let go, and his head inflated to four times its normal size.
Amid the chaos, the chanting continued. But gradually the words seemed to get jumbled up, and before long it sounded as if the class was chanting something else. The name, in fact, that Murph Cooper was to be known by from that day onward . . .
“Kid normal, kid normal, KID NORMAL!”
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Souperman was looking stressed. He’d just been given some
very disturbing news. “No powers . . . at all?” he wondered, furrowing his brow.
“No, sir, none whatsoever,” replied Mr. Flash. The CT teacher was standing in front of Mr. Souperman’s desk with his legs apart and his hands behind his back. “I thought he was joking at first, but it’s true. Kid Normal, they’ve started calling him. Teasing him.”
The headmaster thought back to his conversation with Murph’s mom in the street outside The School at the end of the previous week and realized that he’d made a rather stupid error—but he hadn’t come to be in charge of a top-secret school by owning up to his mistakes.
“Well . . .” He gazed out the window, pretending to ponder. “There’s obviously been a screw-up somewhere along the line, hasn’t there?”
The headmaster turned back to face Mr. Flash, thinking fast and considering his options. What would happen if he admitted he’d enrolled a non-super child in his school by accident? He’d be fired before he could say, “Whoops, I stupidly admitted a non-super kid to my super school because of a misunderstanding over the word ‘fly.’”
On the other hand, what would happen if Murph was allowed to stay? What would it be like for The School? What would it be like for Murph?
Like most leaders throughout history at one point or another, Mr. Souperman was hoping desperately that someone else would solve the problem for him.
“What do you think I should do, Mr. Flash?” he mused fake-casually.
To Mr. Flash, the answer was as plain as the bushy mustache on his face.
“Kick ’im out!” he said meanly. “We’ve never had a kid with no Capability at this school. It would be a travesty. A kid without a Cape is like a swan . . .” He paused, trying to work out what the most important part of a swan was.
“Yes, Mr. Flash . . . ?” said Mr. Souperman.
“Like a swan,” Mr. Flash concluded decisively, unable to think of anything a swan had. “A swan. Never had a swan in The School either. You’d kick it out, wouldn’t you?”
Mr. Souperman rolled his eyes and turned to look out the window again, unable to shake the image of Mr. Flash booting a swan out of The School gates. Strangely entertaining though it was, this pleasing mental picture was not helping him make a decision, so he turned back around and adopted his most dramatic face as Mr. Flash continued to plead with him: “No one without a Cape has ever been allowed to have anything to do with this school.”
The headmaster stopped him there. “Well, there has been one, of course,” he said.
“Oh, him? He doesn’t count,” spat Mr. Flash.
Mr. Souperman needed time to think. “Well, thanks for your input, Mr. Flash. I’ll decide what to do in due time.” And with that he sat down, wondering desperately how he could kick Murph out of The School now, without it becoming obvious that he’d made a gigantic error by allowing him to come there in the first place.
Mr. Flash made a cross hrummph noise, looking for all the world as though he was about to go and find a swan to kick. Then, abruptly, he seemed to blur and vanish as his Cape activated once again. Moving so fast that the human eye was unable to track him, he left the room like a blast of angry wind and was hrummph-ing in his own classroom at the other end of the building within seconds. Mr. Souperman, who had superhuman strength but perhaps only average human intelligence, didn’t even notice that Mr. Flash had stolen a cookie on his way out.
6
Nektar’s Genesis
SIX MONTHS EARLIER . . .
If you are reading this story out loud, at this point please make a noise with your mouth that indicates we are traveling back in time six months.
Louder.
Louder . . .
Now do a sort of swooshy noise. Now quack like a duck. Now make a noise like a seal being run over by a combine harvester.
Ha ha, we can make you do anything!
Clive Meeke, the most brilliant young researcher at Ribbon Robotics, sat in his laboratory with his head in his hands. Outside, night was falling, and the yellowish glow of a streetlight shining through the blinds cast striped shadows across the back of his lab coat. The room was silent except for a blatting, buzzing noise that came from a large glass jar surrounded by wires and electrical circuits attached to it with black rubber pads.
Without warning, the door burst open.
“Well, Meeke?” purred the tall woman silhouetted in the doorway. “You promised me results by six o’clock. It’s now quarter to seven.”
With time-telling like that, you could really see how this woman had risen to the very top of her profession. For this was Arabella Ribbon, head of the entire company. She flicked back her hair, stunning a passing fly.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Ribbon,” stammered the young man, struggling to his feet. “I calculated all the variables time and time again, but the sequencer just won’t read them.”
“You promised me that you could use the DNA of insects to create a new, more efficient kind of robot brain,” hissed Arabella, conveniently summing up what was going on. “And I’ve paid you very well for more than a year now. I want results! I don’t care if you have to stay here all night. If I don’t see some progress when I come into this office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, you’re fired!”
“Yes, yes, of course, Miss Ribbon, thank you,” said Meeke, cringing. The door slammed and he slumped back into his chair.
After a few minutes he turned and tapped a few keys on an old-fashioned computer. Green numbers scrolled upward on the screen, and Meeke narrowed his eyes. He rolled his chair over to the glass jar and peered inside. A single wasp was climbing up the side, fluttering its wings weakly.
“Why can’t I read you?” muttered Meeke. “What are you hiding from me? What goes on inside that insect brain?”
Suddenly a thought struck him, and he stood up abruptly. “If the sequencer can’t read your wasp mind, I wonder . . . can it read any brain waves at all?” he murmured. He detached two of the pads from the outside of the glass jar and clamped them to his own temples. The wasp buzzed angrily at the disturbance.
Meeke flicked a switch on the wall, and a low hum started up. He turned back to the computer and typed in a few numbers.
The screen went blank, and then a single word appeared:
SEQUENCING . . .
But for a long time, nothing else happened.
“Let’s increase the power, shall we?” mused Meeke, tapping in a few more numbers, then, after another minute, a few more. The humming increased in volume, and the buzzing of the wasp grew more frantic.
“Still nothing,” snapped the scientist, adjusting the rubber pads on his head and tapping more buttons. “Maximum power!”
The hum became a scream, which mingled with the frenzied drumming of the wasp’s wings. The electrical circuits attached to the glass jar glowed orange, and Clive Meeke shrieked in pain. There was a sharp crack, a bright flash, and all the lights in the building went out.
Now there was no sound. The glow of the streetlight fell on an empty desk, illuminating nothing but a slowly spinning plume of smoke as it rose from the burned husk of a wasp in the shattered remains of the glass jar.
Arabella Ribbon once again displayed her excellent clock-reading skills by bossing her way through the door of Meeke’s laboratory at exactly nine o’clock the following morning. She was greeted by three things.
First, the lingering scent of burned wasp, which is one of the worst smells, right up there with egg sandwiches and pee on a hot barbecue. Second, the sight of millions of dollars worth of electronic and computing equipment that had been broken and smashed into pieces, then mashed together into what could only be described as a nest. It filled the space between the work bench and the window, which still had the blinds drawn across it.
And in the middle of that nest was sitting the third thing to greet her. It was wearing the tattered remains of Clive Meeke’s white lab coat.
But this couldn’t possibly be the young robotics engineer she’d been looking forward to h
aving a really good shout at. Meeke had been cowardly and craven. This person was sitting with his back to her, calmly humming—or more like buzzing—an eerie little tune.
“Meeke?” she said nervously.
“Don’t look so nervous,” drawled the thing in the nest. “I promised you results, and I think this is really going to blow . . . your . . . mind.”
“What do you mean, ‘look nervous’?” said Arabella, straightening her back and remembering just who was the boss around there. “You can’t even see me.”
“Oh, but I can see you, Bella. In fact my vision has improved ALL AROUND.”
The man spun sharply in his chair, knocking over a conical flask and smashing it to pieces, which added to the drama. As he slowly rose to his feet, Arabella gasped. Whereas Clive Meeke had two weedy-looking brown eyes, this . . . creature had two enormous bulging insect eyes. She could see her increasingly pale face reflected in them many times over.
“What are you doing, Meeke?” she shrieked as he advanced on her.
“Meeke? Meeke? Clive Meeke is no more! He’s . . . flown the hive, you might say.”
“Isn’t it bees that live in a hive? You look more like a wasp,” said Arabella.
“Silence!” roared the wasp. “You may have been queen around here, but it’s time this swarm had a new leader.”
“Again, I think that’s bees . . . ,” began Arabella, but it was too late. The creature reached out toward her and she saw with horror a sharp, glittering stinger protruding from the inside of each wrist.
He lunged at her before she had time to think about escaping, the stings thrusting out farther with venom dripping from the tips. Luckily for us, Arabella Ribbon’s scream of pure terror was cut short abruptly as the paragraph ended.
We now ask you to fast-forward six months. If you’re reading this story out loud, we would like you to indicate this by making a fast-forwarding sound. To perform this accurately, you must do the following: open the nearest window and shout at the top of your voice, “I AM THE PRINCE OF THE POODLE PARLOR!”