Agent Darcy and Ninja Steve in...Mecha-Mole Mayhem!

by Grant Goodman

  “Okay, we are going to use this to get close to one of the bureau’s secret entry points,” said Steve’s dad, pushing a round, yellow button that caused a touchscreen to appear. He punched in a few numbers and letters.

  Beams of blue light came out from the tile’s edges and their feet became locked in place. The entire elevator rotated to the right, and Steve could have sworn he was looking at a beach. It rotated left and suddenly he was looking at a room full of wheels of cheese. It rotated left again, and he saw an exploding volcano on a faraway island. The elevator spun in a full rotation and then opened up.

  They were face to face with a full squad of scout mecha-moles on guard duty. So much for a secret entry point.

  “I bet I can take out more of them than you can, Jackson,” said Steve’s mom to Steve’s dad, immediately jump-kicking a scout mecha-mole out of the way.

  “Fine! If I win, we’re getting tickets to the Rude Wig Van Beef Oven concert,” he said, landing a heel kick square on the butt of a scout mecha-mole.

  “Sure thing, honey. I’ll suffer through that awful classical heavy metal music if you win. But if I win, we’re going to see Shallow Shadow rap like you’ve never heard her before,” said Steve’s mom, squaring off against another mecha-mole.

  Steve was too interested in his parents’ conversation. He forgot that he was supposed to be fighting.

  He watched as his mom threw a right punch forward and a left kick backward at the same time, keeping perfect balance like it was a dance move. Two scouts went down.

  “Incoming mail!” said Steve’s dad, rolling back and flinging a mecha-mole into the air with his foot. Steve’s mom snatched it out of the air by its feet, spun, and launched it far past all of the others.

  “That one counts as mine,” Steve’s mom said.

  “No way!”

  Steve looked over and saw Darcy smiling a faint smile. It was the kind of pure, simple smile that plays on your face when you’ve forgotten that other people might be looking at you. It was also the kind of smile that made Steve’s heart beat a little faster.

  The sounds of fighting subsided. Steve’s parents walked back into the elevator. They both claimed to have dealt with eight mecha-moles each. An even tie.

  “We didn’t discuss what would happen if we tied,” said his mom. “Let’s do both concerts, then.”

  Steve’s dad laughed. “Like, you mean, you want to go on a date…with me?”

  “You are ridiculous,” said Steve’s mom, laughing.

  “This is so embarrassing that I could die right here,” said Nora, under her breath.

  “Back to serious business,” said Steve’s dad. “We need to find another way in. This one has been discovered. Maybe there’s someone here who knows more about emergency exit routes?”

  Steve, like everyone else, turned to look at Darcy.

  “I know of one,” she said. “But you’re probably not going to like it.”

  DARCY

  The Bureau of Sneakery held its fair share of secrets. They included secret classrooms, secret training grounds, secret cafés, and secret passages. The secret cafés were a point of pride for the older students, although some of the younger students believed it was all made up for the sole purpose of making them jealous.

  An agent needed to be able to make someone feel like it was okay to reveal a secret, therefore Darcy had to learn some tricks from Evelyn. One of her successes had been in getting Evelyn to talk about the network of access passages to and from the bureau.

  It had happened during one of her hacking lessons. Darcy had compared it to traveling through a mountain in order to get to the other side. Evelyn said that it was a fair comparison, because she had done something like that once.

  “Why would you ever have the need to travel through a mountain?” Darcy had asked her.

  “I was tasked with evaluating one of the lesser-used secret paths as one of my final graduation assessments. A river runs through one of the nearby mountain systems. We built a path alongside it.”

  Darcy had learned where the mountain was. She had a good idea of where the entrance would be. She also knew that revealing it to the ninjas would be breaking one of the most basic rules of being agent.

  If she wasn’t an agent anymore, then maybe the penalty wouldn’t apply. At the same time, the echo of Commander Natalya’s words rang in her mind: “Your watch has been disabled, your boot features have been locked, and you may not set foot on any of our grounds—the girls’ or the boys’ campus—ever again. If you reveal any of our information or attempt to contact anyone in the agency, we will dispatch someone to capture you and lock you away.”

  She decided it was worth the risk.

  “If we set the coordinates for 34.R.1U4, that will get us close to the entrance,” she said, remembering what Evelyn had told her.

  Steve’s parents entered the coordinates and the elevator began to hum. Then, a spark shot out of the control panel. The machine rotated once and made a thunderous clank. Darcy looked ahead and saw her old bedroom at the bureau being devoured by flames.

  The sight made her feel like someone had squeezed the air out of her lungs. That glimpse of her bed, her cramped closet, and her desk unlocked a homesickness that almost knocked her off her feet. That all of it was aflame made it even worse.

  The elevator started spinning like a top, throwing everyone around. Darcy caught a glimpse of a sand-filled pit; snakes were crawling through it.

  “Something’s not right,” said Steve.

  “Good one, Ninja Obvious,” said Nora, who was flung against the ceiling as the elevator did a barrel roll.

  Darcy saw a whirling mass of visions: a room containing boxes of breakfast cereal stacked from floor to ceiling, a submarine cutting through emerald waters, a vast blackness filled with orange and purple stars.

  The elevator came to a halt. The control panel started smoking. The doors parted, but barely.

  Darcy pushed the doors apart and held them open. Everyone else squeaked through. She caught a big lungful of bitter smoke and nearly fell over, coughing.

  When she could breathe again, she was able to figure out where they were. Luckily, the elevator hadn’t dropped them off in the middle of the Scorched Sands or a remote island in the Blackstar Sea.

  They were standing in front of a mine.

  “This is the right place,” said Darcy.

  But the sun was out. When they had left Ninjastoria, it had been early in the night.

  “How is it daytime already?” Steve asked. “Did it take us that many hours to travel by elevator?”

  Nora got out her phone and switched it off of stealth mode so that she could check the time. Her hands started to shake as she shared her discovery.

  “It wasn’t just hours,” she said, turning the phone around for everyone to see. “It’s…it’s been a full week.”

  STEVE

  Steve couldn’t believe his ears. How could a week have already passed? What kind of elevator had they stepped into?

  Steve’s parents looked alarmed, too.

  “The transporter moves instantly through time and space,” said Steve’s mom. “When it malfunctioned, it must have moved us forward in time.”

  Steve stopped thinking about their problem, because an even bigger thought popped into his head. “You mean that we have time machines?!”

  “No,” said Steve’s dad. “The technology is only stable for moving from place to place, not time to time. When it was being developed, any attempt to purposely move forward or backward in time made the machine explode. We’re very lucky to be alive.”

  “Nora, we aren’t a thousand years in the future, are we?” asked Darcy.

  “No. The display still says the same year. Just seven days later. What if…what if we’ve lost the war?” Nora asked.

  That thought hadn’t yet occurred to Steve. It was entirely possible that Ninjastoria could have surrendered.

  Steve texted Arjun immediately. “How’s the war?”
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  Arjun replied, “Very loud. The moles haven’t won any big victories yet, but neither have we. Where have you been all week?”

  Steve texted, “Delivering supplies. It’s complicated. Be safe.”

  A wave of exhaustion passed over Steve. Maybe it was from all of the tension from the start of the war. Maybe it was from being hurled seven days into the future. He looked around and it seemed like everyone was feeling the same way.

  “We need to sleep,” said Steve’s dad. “Might as well lie down right here.”

  The ground was rocky, but Steve was able to sleep. His mom woke him and the others at noon.

  Steve examined the sign on the mine that read “Mine Your Own Business!” It looked like no one had set foot in the place for years.

  “I have good news and I have bad news about this mine,” said Darcy.

  The ninjas looked at her.

  “The good news is that we can still get to the bureau if we travel through it,” she said.

  Then, she paused.

  “What’s the bad news?” Steve asked.

  “The mine was sealed off because it had become a nesting ground for bear-wolves.”

  Steve noticed that Nora had gone pale. He figured it was from all of the spinning in the elevator. Or was it possible that his fearless sister was actually scared of something?

  Nora asked, “Is there another route?”

  Darcy touched her fingers to her chin and thought for a moment. “Even with our hoverboards, it would take at least a full day of traveling to find another access point. With the elevator broken, this is the only way to get to the bureau quickly.”

  “There’s…there’s no other way?” Nora tried again.

  “No,” said Darcy.

  Steve’s parents nodded as they stared down the entrance. A strand of rail tracks for a mine cart ran out of the mine, like a tongue sticking out of a mouth. The entrance itself was maybe ten feet high, fifteen feet wide. The walls were jagged, exposed rock, dotted with disks that glowed with a soft, blue light. Some of them were cracked, some of them were flickering like sparkbugs.

  “At the very least, bear-wolves can’t transform unless they’re exposed to moonlight,” Steve said.

  “Weird. You don’t normally remember these kinds of things,” Nora said.

  “Well, one time, right after an episode of Kung-Food, there was a show where pairs of bear-wolf trackers were chasing down bear-wolves in order to win a prize. I was too lazy to look for other shows, so I watched the whole thing,” Steve said.

  He remembered the trackers talking about the effect of moonlight, how it would turn a fearsome wolf into a fearsome bear.

  The show also had occasional interviews with biologists, most of whom weren’t quite sure why the bear-wolf had evolved the way it had. After all, there didn’t seem to be any distinct advantage to transforming into a bear when the animal was already a skilled, fearsome hunter as a wolf.

  Darcy carefully led the way on her hoverboard beside the rail tracks. Steve was half a pace behind her. There was no sign of a mine cart anywhere.

  “I guess this is as good of a hidden entrance as any,” Steve said. “How long do you think it will take to get there?”

  “A few hours, I think,” said Darcy.

  “Are you nervous about this?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to find when we get there. That’s what scares me the most.”

  “It’s going to be fine. We’re all here with you, remember?” he said.

  “But what if the mecha-moles ruined everything? What if the entire campus is in flames? Or what if my superiors are there and they see me and immediately imprison me for coming back?” she asked.

  “Forget those,” Steve said. “What if you can help reclaim the place? What if you can find out something that the mecha-moles don’t want anyone to know? What if you do a really cool jump kick?”

  “Those are much better ‘what if’ questions,” Darcy said. “I like the way you think.”

  The mine cart path split then, one path going straight ahead and the other taking a sharp right. Darcy went right and everyone followed.

  There was a howl.

  A long, high-pitched howl.

  A howl that echoed all the way down the mineshaft.

  “Bear-wolf,” muttered Steve. “I wonder if we’ll cross paths with it.”

  Darcy turned another corner and came to a screeching halt. She threw her hand to the side and caught Steve, nearly clotheslining him. The gel grip of the board kept it from flying out from under his feet.

  Standing in the middle of the tracks was a bear-wolf in wolf form. Its coat was mostly silver, although there was a fine layer of brown dust on it from being in the mine. The beast was as tall as Steve and just as wide. It was unnaturally slender, standing on limber legs that ended in three-toed claws. It had a black nose and yellow eyes that seemed to flicker. Like all bear-wolves, it had no tail, and like all bear-wolves, its mouth had two rows of sharp, tiny teeth.

  “Steve, get away from that,” Nora said, her voice quaking. “Please, get back.”

  Steve and Darcy began to inch their hoverboards backward. The wolf took small steps forward, sniffing the air and then pawing at it.

  Then, it sat down on its hind legs, pulled its head back, and let out a piercing howl.

  “I’m out of here,” Nora said, and Steve looked back just in time to see her turn and head back in the direction of the entrance. Steve’s mom went after her.

  A few more howls came from deeper in the mine. One by one, more wolves began to slink through the corridor. Their steps were impossibly smooth; they looked like silvery shadows sliding across the ground. Steve wondered if the ninjas could learn a thing or two by studying the way they moved.

  Steve and Darcy were with Steve’s father, about ten feet between them and the animals. The other wolves sat behind the leader, forming a pyramid: one wolf, two wolves, three wolves.

  “This is odd,” said Steve’s dad.

  The wolf in front stood up, pawed at the ground. The others parted to the sides and let their leader through. Now Steve thought the wolves were all looking directly at him.

  “I think they want us to follow,” Steve said.

  “That’s a big assumption,” said Darcy.

  “Yeah, Steve, they eat people like us for breakfast. Or lunch, or dinner,” said his dad.

  One of the remaining wolves gave a timid whine. The others did the same. They began to slink away, one by one. Steve thought it looked like the saddest parade.

  “Marcy, do we need to follow this path?” Steve’s dad asked.

  “Yes, this is the way,” she said.

  “Fine. I’m going first. Let’s stay on our boards in case we need to make a break for it,” said Steve’s dad.

  Steve and Darcy drifted along behind his dad. He wondered what it was about the bear-wolves that frightened Nora so much. They seemed very ninja-like: soft-stepping, respectful, and team-oriented.

  When they finally caught up with the bear-wolves, they were all pacing back and forth in front of a pile of boulders and rocks, letting out little whimpers. The pile was blocking off a side-route from the mineshaft, and Steve thought he could hear the calls of more wolves from the other side.

  Steve saw the scratch marks on the boulders and realized that the bear-wolves had been pawing at them, but there was nothing they could do to move them.

  “This seems easy enough, Dad,” Steve said.

  Just then, Nora and Steve’s mom returned. Nora stayed far, far away, her hoverboard darting back and forth. Steve’s dad explained the situation to Steve’s mom.

  “I wish we had a samurai here with us,” said Steve’s mom. “One of their earth-shake spells could turn all of these rocks into mud in an instant. Instead, I guess we’ll have to use the spell of rock and roll.”

  Steve watched as his dad crossed his arms over his chest and then swung one arm around in a sweeping circle, like the secon
d hand of a clock. His mom did the same. Then, they did some quick stepping and touched their knuckles against the rocks. The boulders at the top began to tremble, then roll back and forth, slowly working themselves free. One by one, they rolled down and hit the other side of the mineshaft.

  When the top half of pathway was opened, the bear-wolves darted through.

  “Wow, you should check this out,” said Steve’s dad.

  They all peeked over the boulder barricade.

  There was a litter of fuzzy, gray-brown bear-wolf cubs, ten of them. They were running in between the legs of the adults, barking with excitement.

  “See? I told you they wanted us to follow them,” Steve said. “Now they’re back with their cubs. Nora, there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”

  “That’s a foolish thing to say,” came a voice from farther down the tunnel. “There’s plenty to be afraid of down here.”

  DARCY

  Darcy knew that voice and she was sick of it. “Come out, Three. There’s no point in being so dramatic.”

  The man in the gray mask shrugged as he appeared.

  Darcy felt the ghost fire building up in her fingertips. She couldn’t find a good reason for it, though. None of her meetings with Three had ever led to a fight. So why was there this instinct that told her she was in terrible danger?

  Then, she saw that Steve’s parents had their weapons out, too.

  “I’ve been to the bureau. You’re not going to like it very much when you see it,” Three said.

  Darcy immediately pictured her dorm building with its windows punched out and smoke pouring through. She imagined her bed and her desk burning down into black ash.

  “Get out of here, Hiro,” Steve’s dad said to Three.

  Hiro? That was such an ordinary name.

  “I’m only here to help,” Three said.

  “Yeah, just like you helped Vanessa,” Steve’s dad said. “You ruined her and her family.”

  Darcy began to wonder what kind of shared history these two men had. She wondered if any of it might explain why he kept appearing to speak to her.