by Wendy Mass
“Stay calm, Archie,” Pockets says in my ear. “If you can, switch on the glasses so I can see what you’re seeing.”
As soon as I make a move to lift my arm, the guy spins me around to face him. He is dressed in tight-fitting black clothes with a badge sewn onto the sleeve that says B.U.R.P. When he sees my face, his overly large green eyes (with no eyelids that I can spot!) widen in surprise. He quickly lets go of me and backs away. “Forgive me,” he says. “I thought you were back at the spaceship napping after working so late last night. If you don’t mind my asking, why are you wearing those strange clothes?”
“Er… um… huh?” I am not proud of them, but these are the only words I can come up with. I take this moment of confusion to turn on the glasses, though. The lenses flicker, and I know Pockets can see what I’m seeing now.
“He’s a high-ranking B.U.R.P. agent!” Pockets says into my earpiece. “A big shot in the organization. He must think you are one of the other leaders’ kids! Don’t correct him.”
“We should get you back up there,” the man says. “We have the big meeting soon.” He looks around. “How about I grab the plant now and be done with it? We don’t really need to wait for the scientists to come down here.”
He steps toward the trees. Uh-oh!
“Tell him to wait!” Pockets shouts in my ear. “Tell him the plant is very fragile and you need an expert to handle it correctly! He can’t find out that you have it already!”
I try to sound very commanding as I relay Pockets’s commands. The B.U.R.P. agent grumbles a bit but steps back.
“Okay, then,” I say. “Gotta go. See ya.” I turn away, but he reaches out to stop me.
“I know you like your fresh air,” he says, “but we must stay on schedule.” He taps his watch. “Plus, you know it isn’t safe out here with all the wild dogs.”
It’s weird that he doesn’t blink.
“Archie, it’s Dad,” my father’s voice says in my ear. “Pockets gave me an earpiece, too. He says this could be our only chance to get on a B.U.R.P. spaceship and learn their plans. You can use the force field, and of course we can be on board in less than a minute if you need us. Pockets already sprayed Camo-It-Now on the taxi and jammed B.U.R.P.’s radar so they won’t know we’re here.” He lowers his voice and says, “Archie, this is a big deal, and if you’re not ready for it, just say so. Honestly, I’m not ready for it, but I’m trying to be brave for the both of us.”
I sort of want to cry, but I also really want to see inside a spaceship. I take a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
The agent nods, assuming I’m speaking to him. He leads me toward a circle of white chalk a few feet away from us. The pouch with the plant in it bounces against my leg. I hope the Camo-It-Now doesn’t wear off!
“After you,” he says, motioning for me to step inside the circle. This seems like a very odd thing to do. Is a net going to spring up from the ground and trap me? I risk a quick glance up at the sky. I don’t see the B.U.R.P. ship. Just a few puffy clouds. Maybe it’s invisible, like the taxi.
“Go on,” Pockets urges in my ear. Then, as though he knew what I’d been thinking, he adds, “It will be fine. I promise. Their ship is cloaked, too. No doubt for a quick mission like this, they only brought a small one. You’ll look around for a few minutes, and then we’ll come get you.”
The agent gives me a gentle nudge toward the circle. The nudge, combined with the fact that I can now see a large pack of enormous black-and-gray dogs circling the base of the mountain, is enough to land me in the circle. The second both feet are inside, I feel a tingling that spreads up my body. For a moment I’m worried that whatever they’re doing to me, it’s going to cause my feet to stick to the ground, and those dogs seem like good climbers! They look more like wolves than dogs—not that a city kid like me has ever seen a real wolf. Still, they definitely don’t look like they want to play fetch.
But it turns out that they are NOT trying to stick my feet to the ground. In fact, it’s more like the exact opposite. With a whoosh, my feet lift off the ground, and I’m zooming up into the sky, right toward the largest, puffiest cloud! My hair whips around my head, and I quickly grab for my space map so it doesn’t fly away. I hope that pouch is clipped on tight! I look down. The agent is zooming up below me. He looks bored, as though he does this every day.
I’m about to tell Pockets to rescue me RIGHT NOW and forget about the plan, when I suddenly shoot into the cloud. I’M IN A CLOUD! It is pretty much what you’d expect a cloud to be like—cold and wet and white. I tilt my head back and look up, which may have been a mistake, because now I know I’m heading right toward a huge metal object with GALACTIC painted across the bottom. All I can think to do is fling my arms over my head.
A few seconds later, a round hole appears in the bottom of the ship and I’m sucked inside. The floor instantly seals beneath me. Going from zooming to standing throws me off balance, and I stumble backward, trying to catch my breath.
It’s a good thing I moved, because the hole in the floor is back! The agent appears beside me—or, I should say, his head appears. The rest of him follows quickly behind. The floor closes up beneath him. He pats down his hair and adjusts his shirt.
“Well, that was something!” Dad’s awed voice comes through my earpiece. “Pockets lent me the glasses. I felt like I was right there with you in that cloud! Gotta get me a pair of those!”
Now that I’m not terrified anymore, I realize it really WAS pretty cool!
“Come,” the agent says. “You need to get back to your rooms. You can’t very well show up to the meeting wearing that.”
I’m a little insulted on behalf of my clothes, but I let his comment go.
The agent leads me through a series of long, narrow hallways lined with doors on one side and windows on the other. The windows show mostly a view of the cloud that hides the ship, but every once in a while I catch a glimpse of the sky and the mountainside. Pockets must have been wrong—this isn’t a small ship. It’s huge!
I don’t see the taxi anywhere, which I know is how it’s supposed to be. Then I remember I CAN see it. Well, the inside of it, at least! I can use the glasses! The agent has begun talking into a communication device on his wrist, so I slow down to widen the gap between us, then flick the switch.
And suddenly it’s like I’m right there! Pockets must have taken the glasses back, because I can see Dad in the driver’s seat, tapping his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel. I want to shout, but I force myself to whisper. “Dad! I can see you!”
Dad jolts upright, his hand reaching for his earpiece. “Hey, Archie!” He reaches over to Pockets, and I can tell he’s ruffling the fur on top of his head. I try not to laugh. Dad always used to ruffle my hair when I was little. Okay, sometimes he still does.
“Hey,” Pockets grumbles. “Ask next time!”
Dad ignores him. “Son, I’m very proud of you. You’re being very brave.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I whisper.
“We’ll be right here with you,” he says.
Then Pockets chimes in with, “Try to explore as much of the ship as you can. I’m recording what you’re seeing through your lenses.”
I’m about to suggest hiding instead of exploring, when Pockets adds, “You’d better switch back now.”
Dad gives a wave and I reluctantly turn the view back to the ship. It’s a good thing I didn’t wait much longer, because the agent has just stopped in front of a large wooden door and is waiting for me to catch up.
The door is much fancier than any we’ve passed so far. I don’t see a doorknob or keyhole anywhere, though. The agent presses a nearly invisible button beside the door, and a keypad appears. He steps aside and gestures for me to use it. I look back at him blankly. He shakes his head. “Forgive me, but you’d forget your own birthday if it wasn’t written down on one of those lists of yours,” he says, punching in a series of numbers. The door slides into the wall with a nearly silent swoosh. “I will see you dow
n in the laboratory in twenty minutes,” he says, then turns and strides back in the direction we came from.
I stand in the hallway for a minute, not sure if I should go in or stay here. Voices headed my way from the end of the hallway make my decision for me. I jump into the room. The door swooshes closed behind me, plunging me into total darkness.
Why did I agree to this again?
Chapter Seven:
On Board the Mother Ship
I feel around the wall until I find a switch, but I don’t turn the light on yet. What if the person whose room I’m in is waiting to jump out at me? Or the agent was tricking me and I’m actually in a jail cell? “Anytime now,” Pockets nudges through the earpiece. Boy, he sure can be bossy, even long-distance!
I take a deep breath and flick the switch. The room lights up, and it’s hands down the fanciest room I’ve ever seen outside of the movies or a magazine. Like five-star-hotel fancy. Like millionaire-movie-star fancy, with thick white carpets and gold statues and colorful paintings and shiny marble floors and tall columns with flowers and fruit bowls and glass cases filled with stuff I can’t even identify from here. This one room is bigger than our whole apartment. Whoever that guard thinks my parents are, they must be very powerful and important people.
“Wow,” Pockets says with a whistle.
“I know!” I reply. I rest my space map by the door and take a few steps into the main part of the room. Up close, I can see that each glass case is filled with something weirder than the next. One has a sign with the words: THE LAST BOOGLER FISH. A large bowl of water sits inside the case. Swimming around the bowl is a tiny purple fish with long, floppy, bunny-like ears. I didn’t even know fish had ears. “Hmm,” Pockets says. “The boogler fish has been considered extinct for five years.”
I move on to the next case. This one contains only a thin silver vase with a pink-and-white-striped flower sticking out. The sign reads: THE LAST LILANDRA FLOWER. A quick glance at the other cases tells me that each item—a leather-bound book, a metal coin, an animal horn—is the last of its kind.
“I guess we know why B.U.R.P. wanted the plant,” I tell Pockets. “Whoever lives here definitely likes to collect rare things.”
“That’s actually a relief,” Pockets says. “Now at least we know B.U.R.P. wasn’t after the plant as part of some sinister plot they were cooking up.”
“Good! Then can you guys come pick me up now?”
“Soon,” Pockets says. “You don’t appear to be in any danger, so would you mind taking a closer look around? See if you can find anything with the collector’s name on it.”
“Fine,” I grumble. “But after this I want a raise.”
“You’re not even getting paid,” Pockets points out.
“Then how about when I get back, you’ll agree to come watch me play baseball?”
“Deal,” he says. “Now go snoop around his desk. Try to find that list the agent mentioned.”
I head toward a wide wooden desk piled high with papers. I spot a few computers and some gadgets that look a lot like ones I’ve seen Pockets use. “Hey,” I say, picking up a force field pen. It says PROPERTY OF THE ISF down the side! I pat my back pocket. Mine’s still there.
“I knew it!” Pockets says. “B.U.R.P.’s been stealing our technology! That’s how they always manage to stay one step ahead of us!”
I lift up the top sheet of paper and am about to peek at it, when I hear a low, wheezy sort of rumble. I freeze. It’s quiet for few seconds, then I hear it again. It almost sounds like…
“Snoring!” Pockets, Dad, and I exclaim at the same time. I turn away from the desk, shoving the piece of paper into my pocket.
Behind me is the outline of a door. It blends into the wall so well I wouldn’t have spotted it if not for the snoring coming from behind it. I tiptoe past the door, but I must have stepped too close, because it whooshes open! Hasn’t B.U.R.P. heard of doorknobs?!
The only light in the room is coming from glowing numbers projected on the wall, but I can still make out a few things. The huge bed in the center of the room is hard to miss, as is the boy-shaped lump under the blanket. At the bottom of the bed lies a small black cat. The boy-shaped lump is gently snoring. The cat-shaped lump is staring at me suspiciously with his greenish-gold cat eyes.
In my ear Pockets says, “Can you walk closer to the wall? I think it’s a clock. I want to see how much time we have until he wakes up for the meeting at the laboratory.”
“I’d really rather not,” I whisper back. The cat is now sitting up, tilting his head at me. Something about the way he moves is familiar, but I don’t have time to think about that now. The son of a clearly very important B.U.R.P. agent is about to wake up!
Two things happen at once. The cat lets out a loud meow right in my face as the numbers on the wall begin counting down: 59… 58… 57… 56…
Something’s going to happen in less than a minute! I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be here when it does!
“We have to get to that meeting before he does!” Pockets says.
I’m more concerned with getting out of the room before he wakes up. I turn to run, but the cat springs up off the bed and jumps right at me!
I scramble backward and wind up directly at the foot of the bed. A beam of light suddenly shoots out from the wall and sweeps across my face. “Alarm off,” a mechanical voice says.
The numbers on the wall disappear.
Oops! Someone is going to miss his meeting!
I run out of the room without looking back. Unfortunately, the cat has followed me out. I bend down to usher him back into the room before the boy wakes up and finds his cat gone. The cat won’t budge. He just sits there, purring at me. I pick him up and move away from the door, which finally whooshes closed behind me.
“Is that…?” Pockets begins. “It can’t be.… Is it?”
I squint at the cat. He really DOES seem familiar. At the sound of Pockets’s voice in my earpiece, the cat squirms his way up my arm and nuzzles my ear! I gasp. “Pockets! This is the cat from the castle on Tri-Dark! The one who followed you around the castle on our last mission!”
“Yes, I believe it is,” Pockets says. “And that means the boy in the bed is the same one who escaped from us!”
“You’d better not come on the ship or you might wind up his pet again!”
“Very funny,” Pockets says.
The last time Pockets and I had seen this cat was in a castle on a planet far away from here. A boy whose face was hidden by the hood of his black cloak was feeding him and a bunch of other cats. The boy had taken a liking to Pockets, but Pockets was able to escape. I guess this other cat decided to stick around.
“What’s important right now is that we get to that meeting,” Pockets says. “We have to find the laboratory.”
I grab my space map from where I’d left it by the front door. I pull it out of the tube and unroll it on the floor.
As I’d hoped, the whole floor plan of the B.U.R.P. ship rises into the air above my map. The ship is much bigger that I would have suspected, filled with rooms labeled with big words like CAFETERIA, MEDICAL BAY, LABORATORY, CONTROL ROOM, DOCKING BAY, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, and WEAPONS STORAGE, and many labeled PRIVATE, KEEP OUT.
Pockets gasps. “Archie! This isn’t just any B.U.R.P. ship you’re on. This is the mother ship! The head of their whole fleet! Only the mother ship would have all those rooms!”
I try not to think of what any of that means and instead focus on finding the laboratory. “This is where I have to go,” I tell Pockets, pointing to a room two flights down.
“Hurry,” Pockets says. “The meeting is about to start. Whatever it’s about is obviously important.”
I quickly shove my map back into the case and at the last second remember I spotted a closet while searching for the light switch earlier. I rush over and root through the coats until I find what I’m looking for.
First, I tie the black cloak around my shoulders. Then I flip the ho
od up so it hangs over my face the same way the boy wore it when we spotted him on Tri-Dark.
I turn to face the full-length mirror inside the closet. “How do I look?” I ask Pockets.
“Like a fake vampire about to go trick-or-treating,” he replies.
I peek out from under the hood. Hmm, he may be right. Still, just because that one B.U.R.P. agent might think all little boys look alike, it’ll be safer to cover up. I don’t know what happens to spies on the B.U.R.P. mother ship, and I don’t want to find out.
Chapter Eight:
Woof!
With the help of my space map and my vampire costume, I make it to the meeting without anyone stopping me. It might be my imagination, but whenever one of the crew passes by, it almost feels like they’re bowing their heads at me. Then they rush off without making eye contact. It must be the cape. I’m pretty sure at home it wouldn’t get the same reaction! People would think I was trying to be a superhero. Guess all planets are different!
The laboratory looks like a more high-tech version of the science class in my elementary school, with tall tables and beakers and Bunsen burners. This one also has lots of computer equipment, cameras, lasers, and aliens. The B.U.R.P. aliens look mostly human, but with slight differences—larger eyes and heads, wider shoulders, and a little more hair than you’d normally see on arms and legs. But no one has three eyes or purple skin or scales or feathers, so I blend in well enough… for about five seconds, that is. That’s when every single person in the room turns to face me. I cringe while I wait for them to ask who I am and what I’m doing here, but no one does. Instead, a woman with long red hair and a white lab coat steps forward. A label on her coat reads HEAD SCIENTIST, B.U.R.P.
“Sir,” she says, “the team we sent to the surface to gather the canisantha will return in a moment. I will add it to the mixture and we can begin the experiment.” She pauses, then asks, “Where is the black cat?”