The Genius Factor: How to Capture an Invisible Cat

by Paul Tobin

  “Look out!” Nate screamed.

  I wouldn’t have believed a giant cat could move so fast.

  At one moment he was facing the opposite direction, and then in the next he twisted and pounced and his paw was coming right for me, swinging like an engine of destruction, like a wrecking ball with claws.

  I held up my spatula in defense.

  You can guess about how well that was going to work.

  Luckily, Bosper was looking out for me, and just before Proton swatted me out of the air, Bosper hit the cat in the face with the rest of the peanut butter, thunking it off one of Proton’s oh-so-giant eyes. Proton’s paw changed direction but still came so close that the wind sent me pinwheeling out of control, heading for the street. I was able to pull myself out of the dive at the last second, scraping my shoulder along the pavement and zooming back into the air just in time to notice that Proton was giving me a look I’ve seen a thousand times before. It’s that look that cats give to bothersome insects, to mice, to lights from laser pointers, and to anything else they have determined to stalk.

  I said, “Not. Good.”

  Proton leaped for me. I zoomed up and to one side and his paw swooshed through the air just underneath me. Then the other paw slashed through the air right above me. Then his momentum carried him into me so that I was, in effect, hit by a three-story building, which no one in the history of the world has advised as a reasonable course of action. Luckily in this case it was a soft and furry building, but the impact still slammed me down to the street, and I skidded along the pavement for a few yards before coming to a rest.

  I said, “Ow.”

  Saying “Ow” almost took up the rest of my life, because Proton pounced so quickly that if I hadn’t triggered my rocket belt immediately after landing, the incoming paw would have absolutely flattened me. As it was, I did trigger the rocket belt, and I did zoom away just as the monster’s paw slammed down onto the pavement, which not only cracked the street but also created a concussive blast that made me lose control of the rocket belt, so that instead of soaring majestically into the skies I slammed straight into the side of a dispenser for the Polt Pigeon, our free weekly newspaper, to which I once wrote a letter talking about how much I love cats. I decided I would be writing a rebuttal. Bouncing off the vending machine, I tumbled into a parked car before coming to a stop. The car’s alarm started going off.

  “Oh, you, shut up,” I told it, then zoomed away because I suddenly sensed and smelled an oncoming wave of peanut butter, meaning there was a monster cat leaping for me, yet again. I remembered how long cats will chase after anything (mice, butterflies, unfortunate sixth graders) and prepared myself for a long, desperate, and horrifying chase.

  And it was a long chase. The rocket belt had been damaged in my fall, and I couldn’t achieve any great height. Well, I could go almost seventy feet in the air, and I’ll admit that if I’d been questioned even an hour earlier, I would’ve said that zooming seventy feet through the air with a rocket belt definitely counted as achieving a great height.

  Except …

  Seventy feet is still well within the range of a giant cat’s leap.

  Therefore, it was not a great height.

  This meant that I was whooshing through the city streets, trying to stay ahead of Proton, who for his part simply refused to be distracted by anything else, even when he was skidding out on cars (crunch!) or getting tangled in electrical wires, which did no more than make a quick zzzowwntt! noise during an impressive flash of light and then make Proton’s hairs stand on end, which would have been adorable if he’d been a kitten rather than the monstrous Delphine-Cooper-murder-machine that he was.

  His claws were slicing past me. Only a foot or two away.

  I was scrambling through the air, hoping to gain any distance between us.

  “Mwwwr!” I heard the giant cat snarl.

  Another swipe of its claws.

  “Hisssss!” I heard from the giant cat, so close that Proton’s teeth snapped shut, just where I’d been.

  And then another swipe of the claws.

  “Delphine!” I heard. “Delphine Cooper!” That got my attention. Could Proton talk now? That would be just great. The cat could taunt me, too, in addition to eating me.

  But it wasn’t Proton calling out to me. It was six men on the street. Six men, and also one woman with long silky red hair, all of them nonchalantly standing next to three black cars, the same cars that had followed us at great speed from the grocery store. The men were wearing sunglasses and dressed in finely tailored red suits with embroidered pockets of the same crest I’d seen on Nate’s refrigerator, the one with the world in the cup. The woman was in a black dress with red highlights on the sleeves.

  I’d seen her picture. On Nate’s phone.

  It was Luria Pevermore.

  Meaning she was the chemist for the Red Death Tea Society. The one who makes all their teas and, according to Nate, is more than mildly evil, and is in fact entirely evil.

  And the man who’d called out to me was Jakob Maculte, the leader of the Red Death Tea Society, the most nefarious man in the world, a man responsible for a list of horrors that was probably a hundred pages long and included taunting me with cake outside the mall.

  Maculte wasn’t wearing sunglasses like the other men, and neither was Luria, so I could see how intently they were staring at me. Not so different from the look of a cat getting ready to pounce.

  “That’s the one,” Luria said. There was a short pause, and then they all looked to Maculte, and he nodded. Then everyone had a drink of tea, as if it were a choreographed dance, except there wasn’t any music, just the evil.

  Have I mentioned the evil? There was some evil. It was that skin-tingling-cold-spot-on-the-back-of-your-neck eerie feeling you get from certain people, as if they were hiding monsters within them. Which, in a way, they were.

  They were the Red Death Tea Society.

  I was considering saying something very mean to them, because I wasn’t in a very good mood, what with being on the verge of death and all that, but just as I opened my mouth to give my opinion of their red suits, they all took out weapons.

  Guns.

  Strange guns made of … glass?

  I was flying just past them, and I could hear one of them talking about how they might as well just get it over with, and then they were aiming at me, focused on me, and I screeched and willed myself to fly even faster, beginning a series of evasive maneuvers designed to dodge any incoming fire, and unfortunately also designed to make me a bit dizzy.

  So, with their first shot, they missed me, which in retrospect wasn’t all that surprising, since they weren’t shooting at me, anyway.

  They shot a building.

  There was a noise like tweeooowwn and then there was a small wire running from the building to the tip of the gun. I had about a tenth of a second to wonder about that, and then there were more shots, tweeooowwn tweeooowwn, and there were a couple more wires running from the buildings to the guns. And then there was a full flurry of shots sounding out, seemingly hundreds of shots, and then wires were everywhere, wires that would whoosh away from the barrels of the guns to attach to the streets, to cars, to parking meters and streetlights, stretching between buildings and so on, until suddenly there was a deep mesh of wires running all over the street like some sort of spider’s web. If you think about it, you might decide it would be very difficult to fly a rocket belt through a spider’s web, and it wouldn’t take you very long before you decided it wasn’t something you should do, or wanted to do, but the fact of the matter is that I didn’t have any time to think about it before I hit the first of the wires.

  I bounced off it.

  Into another wire.

  And I bounced off that wire, and then another one, and another, bouncing around like a ball in a pinball game, swatted this way and that, meanwhile yelling “piffle” with almost every painful impact, and also yelling, “Oh, you cheaters!” with a couple of impacts. For the
last impact, the one where I fell heavily onto the street, I only said, “Gufff !” which is the sound of a sixth-grade girl flying a rocket belt into the pavement.

  There was a note on the street.

  It was one of Nate’s notes, with his incredibly elaborate handwriting. It said “Delphine” on it, with an exclamation mark. And it said “Important” on it, with another exclamation mark. The red-suited members of the Red Death Tea Society were getting closer and closer, strolling through the various wires, stepping over some of them, ducking under others, and they were getting too close for comfort, meaning that I was quite uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure if I could read the note before they reached me, and I had a feeling that when they reached me, they would not be waiting patiently for me to read the note or shaking my hand in order to compliment my amazing skills with a rocket belt. I had to do something.

  “Umm, tea break?” I said.

  “We just had a tea break,” the nearest man said. He was huge. Like, almost seven feet tall. Built like a football player. He was wearing a teacup around his neck on a chain. He had a full beard and the type of grinning grimace one normally sees on sharks, if you’re the type of person who feeds raw meat to sharks.

  “Well,” I said. “Can’t have another tea break, then. That’s just too much tea.” I was using reverse psychology on them. If it failed, I planned on using screaming.

  But it worked.

  “Too much tea?” the man said. “You can’t have too much tea.” And then the group started arguing about tea, about whether they should have another tea break, and if so (they were already getting out their teacups), what type they should have. I would have felt a lot better about distracting them if they didn’t almost immediately (and unanimously) decide on a tea called Murder, which does not sound delicious and probably isn’t sold in stores.

  But, at least I had time to read the note.

  It said:

  Delphine. Did they use the wire guns? I hate those things. Bosper likes them, though. He says the wires are chewy and that they smell like bubble gum. But we can talk about that later. You’re in horrible danger right now, and so I should get to the point. I’m truly sorry about the way I ramble. My mind can be hard to focus sometimes. Oh, I’m doing it again. Sorry. By now, you’re probably being attacked by the members of the Red Death Tea Society, and you must have distracted them somehow in order to have time to read this note. Good. But, they really are quite murderous, so you probably don’t have long, and you should blow the whistle.

  “What whistle?” I said, because there wasn’t a whistle. And there wasn’t anything more to the note, either. Just a red dot with “the whistle” written on it.

  “Is that where you were supposed to tape the whistle?” I said, talking to the note. “Like, maybe you were supposed to put some glue there, or some wax, and then stick the whistle there?” As much as I like Nate, the two of us needed to have a long conversation about proper communication. Liz and I always know what the other one is thinking, and I can guarantee that if Liz had left me a note saying that I needed to blow a whistle, there would be a whistle. Nate’s mind, however, was completely beyond me. As much as I admired him, as much as I was amazed by him, his thoughts were too bizarre to understand.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see that the assassins were packing away their tea sets, licking their lips, and tidying up the tea packets and napkins, throwing them away in the trash. Luria was spraying some sort of mist on the trash can, and it simply … melted. Into a goopy puddle. There was an overpowering smell like a menthol cough drop, and a cracking sizzle in the air. The others made sure to stay clear of the mist—all but Maculte, who was either more reckless or more confident, gleefully talking about how Nate would be devastated when I was gone.

  Gone?

  That did not sound good.

  I activated the rocket belt, but I immediately ran into some of the wires and fell back to the street. A bit hard. Then I tried running, but the Red Death Tea Society members were fanning out, cutting off my escape routes, and Maculte was now holding what looked to be a cell phone covered with electricity. He tested it by pointing it at a crashed motorcycle, and the whole thing dissolved into nothing but ash and glowing cinders.

  “Piffle,” I said.

  The motorcycle was gone.

  Gone.

  Like I would be.

  Willing to try anything, I brought the paper to my lips and blew on the spot that said “whistle.” Unfortunately, it did not make a whistling sound; it made a flappa-thurptt sound, which is less impressive. It occurred to me that I could try whistling myself, which is harder to do than you might think when you’re desperately running all over a street, jumping over some wires, ducking under others, and tripping on a few of them. Finally, though, rolling away from the huge man in the red suit, then kicking Luria in the shins when she grabbed my hair, I managed to whistle.

  But nothing happened.

  “Piffle!” I said. “What am I supposed to do?” I was looking at the note in my hands, and in particular that red dot that said “the whistle,” and I became a little angry (quite a bit angry, to be honest), and I jabbed at it with my finger.

  Instantly, the paper came alive in my hands, folding itself one way, then another, doing all sorts of weird gymnastics until suddenly the paper was a whistle.

  An origami whistle.

  “Nate,” I whispered. “I am so going to punch you so hard later. Couldn’t you just tell me that the red dot was a button, that the paper was a whistle?”

  I put the whistle to my lips, and I blew.

  The sound from the whistle was a shrill screeeeee noise that was instantly answered from above. There was a bird in the skies. No … wait. It wasn’t a bird. It was a robot. A robot gull.

  It was Sir William.

  Sir William dived down through the air at a remarkable speed, swooping left and right and doing barrel rolls, all the while his wings cutting through the wires, slicing them apart, destroying the web where I was trapped.

  I was free.

  “Rocket belt!” I said, flying up into the air. I am going to claim that it was a complete accident that I kicked the large man in the face on the way up, giving him a rocket-belt-assisted flying karate kick, because it is not considered nice to kick people.

  “Nice!” I said, when I kicked him, and then I was in the air.

  “Stop!” Maculte yelled. And I did stop, but only once I was well up into the air, out of their range. A flock of pigeons flapped away from the ledges of a nearby building, confused by my intrusion into their world.

  “You can’t get away,” Maculte said.

  “But that’s what I’m doing,” I told him. “I’m getting away. This is pretty much the textbook definition of ‘getting away.’ ”

  “For now,” Maculte conceded. “But this was just a preliminary strike, Delphine. Today was merely an experiment to gauge your intelligence, which I must say I found lacking.”

  “Piffle,” I said. “I outsmarted you.”

  “No. You merely lived through the test. I already have the next plan in mind. We’ll soon see how resourceful you are, and if your luck holds when I bring the full resources of the Red Death Tea Society against you.” His voice was low. Rumbling. It was the sort of voice I used to be afraid would come from my closet in the middle of the night, after a monster had swung open the door.

  “So, run along for now,” he said. “But know this: we will win in the end. Nathan Bannister can’t stand against us, not alone. It’s as foolish as a puddle attacking the ocean.”

  “Nate’s not alone,” I said. “He has me. And Bosper.”

  “A girl and a talking dog,” he said. “Your forces are formidable.” He turned to the others and laughed. They laughed along with him. Even Luria.

  “He’s only going to get smarter, you know,” I told them. “Nate’s already smarter than all of you put together, and his intelligence is just going to grow, and—”

  “One man cannot stand again
st the many!” Maculte yelled. “We are thousands! He is one! If he wants to survive, if you want to survive, your only hope is to join us!”

  He said a lot of other crazy things, getting madder and madder, until he was fully ranting like some of the people you see on street corners, the ones whose minds have been unhinged for some reason. My brother Steve always laughs at people like that, but I feel sorry for them. I didn’t feel sorry for Maculte, though, because he was talking about world conquest, and the destruction of cities, and how “inferior minds” should welcome being enslaved, serving their betters, and how if Nate’s foolish experiments didn’t destroy him then the Red Death Tea Society would certainly do the job, and he kept threatening me, and the pigeons were landing on the ledges again, now staring down at Luria and the men in the red suits, listening to them, and I could see in their eyes that even the pigeons were smart enough to know evil when they saw it.

  Maculte was so angry. So very, very angry.

  All of them. All the members of the Red Death Tea Society were so very angry, staring up at me.

  Which is why they forgot about Proton.

  I suppose, in their defense, they weren’t wearing the special goggles Nate had made, the ones that allowed me to see Proton. To the assassins, the cat was invisible.

  One giant paw came down on their middle car. It crunched.

  Proton skidded a bit, trying to find traction, and was obviously quite irritated by this new development. He swatted the other two cars aside, and the members of the Red Death Tea Society went scrambling away, running for their lives and frantically trying to find someplace to hide, which is not that easy to do when you’re wearing a bright red suit.