by Henry Clark
It was 4:07. Briefly, I considered trying to stay awake until 4:56. I wanted desperately to see if a door would open into Congroo and Drew would come tumbling home. And if that happened—when it happened—I wanted to see if To Repair a Chimney might restore the harvester to the way it had been before the fire.
But I decided I couldn’t stay up for either of those things. At 4:56, my phone would automatically play the Magic Bite for To Open a Door, and either Drew would come through or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, it would mean it was becoming less and less likely that he was ever going to. Repairing the harvester would be nothing compared with the loss of my friend. My hesitancy when coming back through Modesty’s fridge would have doomed him to life in a cold and hostile place.
I kept putting off thinking about that, using each upcoming Magic Minute as an excuse. When I did finally allow myself to think about it for more than a passing second, I knew it was going to hit harder than my guilt over the harvester ever did.
I went to bed and slept through the 4:56 Magic Minute. When I awoke, the door to my room was open, but nothing, not even my alarm going blippity-blippity-blip, had disturbed my sleep.
Drew was still in Congroo.
CHAPTER 24
A MIDDLE SCHOOL IN DISARRAY
I took Preffy to school with me. I couldn’t leave him in the fire tower—my dad hadn’t photographed this year’s maze yet, and chances were good that he would climb the tower before the end of the day. So I hid the sleeping bag, brushed some stray Cheerios out of the cab, looked for the spare change I had heard fall from my pocket the night before—found nothing—then took Pre along when I went to the bus stop.
The morning was chilly, so I lent him a windbreaker. It belonged to my brother, with the word SAFE in big block letters across the back, and Pre had to roll up the sleeves before it came anywhere near fitting.
“What kind of animal skin is this?” he asked, feeling the rubbery fabric.
“It’s just cloth.” I shrugged. “It’s waterproof. Rain beads up on it.”
“Scientifical textiles! Does it repel lightning?”
“It’s not Iron Man’s underwear. It’s just a raincoat.”
The school bus turned out not to be the problem I had dreaded. The driver was too busy blotting spilled coffee off her blouse to notice an extra student get on with the usual group. The kids on the bus, one of whom had worn green hair for at least a week, found Pre’s green skin unremarkable. Half of them were in the habit of painting their faces different colors in support of their favorite sports teams, and one—Celia Berringer—found Pre’s color “totally unconvincing.”
When we arrived at Disarray Middle, Pre shuffled through security with the rest of the throng, and we met up with Modesty in the lobby.
“I figured out where we can hide him,” Modesty announced, without so much as a hello or how’dja sleep? We had been texting back and forth while we rode our separate buses, working out our plan for the day. One of the hurdles was finding a place for Pre. He couldn’t attend class; even our most self-absorbed teachers would eventually notice a new face.
“Science Lab C,” said Modesty. “It’s only used Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it’s got a periodic table of elements taped inside the door’s window, so you can’t see in from the hall. It’s perfect.”
“I’m going to spend the day in a room full of science?” Pre looked as though he might start jumping up and down.
“Touch nothing,” Modesty warned a few minutes later as we slipped inside the room and Pre ran immediately to a locked glass cabinet full of jars of chemicals. A full-size human skeleton dangled from a hook next to the cabinet, wearing a fedora on its skull and a name tag saying MR. PALMERI on its clavicle.
Only eighth graders used the room. Ten slab-topped tables, each with a built-in sink and a pair of Bunsen burner gas hookups, faced a blackboard that currently had the words marine biology and a diagram of an Aqua-Lung scrawled across it. The Aqua-Lung was a cross section, with only two things labeled: SEAWATER (on the outside) and AIR (on the inside), pretty much confirming my suspicion that eighth graders, despite their attitudes, weren’t much smarter than sixth graders.
“I packed you a lunch.” Modesty plunked a brown paper bag down in front of Pre, who was barely listening, so engrossed was he in reading the titles of the books on the teacher’s desk. “The red things in the coleslaw are gummy bears.”
“Anybody comes in,” I said as Modesty and I were leaving, “tell them you’re a new student, and you came in here looking for the restroom.”
“But I don’t need—”
“I know. Just pretend.”
Modesty and I kept our phones on us, which was against school policy—normally, we were required to leave them in our lockers—but we had a Magic Minute coming up at 12:34, and we had no intention of wasting it. Modesty would be in gym class; I would be at lunch: We had both decided to use To View Things More Clearly and attempt to boost our brainpower so we could figure out how we were going to convince Elwood Davy to give up his DavyTron business.
When I got to the cafeteria at twelve thirty, I took a seat in the far corner, near a door labeled CUSTODIAL, which I made sure was unlocked. I put my phone on the bench beside me, hid it under a bag of chips, and waited as patiently as I could.
“Hey, Sap!”
I cringed as I realized I was on Mace Croyden’s side of the cafeteria. He had seen me as he was about to sit down several rows over; now he was working his way down the aisle with an overflowing tray of food, some of which I was pretty sure I’d be wearing within a minute or two. He reached the end of the aisle and started along the wall in my direction.
“I’ve got something for you!” he shouted.
My phone alarm played the Magic Bite. The CUSTODIAL door flew open, hit Mace full in the face, and knocked him and his heaping lunch tray head over heels onto the floor. The lunchroom erupted in thunderous applause. At least one teacher forgot himself and joined in.
I leaned forward and determined, as I had feared, that there was no sign of Drew or Congroo through the open doorway: only the mops, brooms, and buckets of vomit-absorbing sawdust essential to any school cafeteria. I moved the chip bag, scrolled to the Magic Bite for To View Things More Clearly, and played it.
Almost immediately, I felt my thinking grow sharper.
“Sapling!” A Mace Croyden covered in spaghetti sauce with strands of pasta dangling from his ears shoved my shoulder. Two of his cronies, Scoops Hernandez and tongue chewer Ray Chikletts, stood on either side of him. “I saw you laugh. You think that was funny?”
I hadn’t laughed; I’d had far more serious things on my mind.
“You know what you are, Sap?” Mace leaned around to get in my face. With a clarity of mind that surprised me, I reached down, flicked my phone until To Cast a Reflection came up, and stabbed it with my middle finger.
“You’re much better than I am.” Mace sneered. “I’m a gangly, pencil-necked scarecrow who shouldn’t be allowed to walk the streets! I am pus!” He pointed at himself proudly with his thumb. “I am walking diarrhea!” He held his head in place by wrapping one arm around his neck, made a fist with his other hand, and gave himself a noogie. Ray and Scoops took two steps back. “I. Am. A. Steaming. Pile. Of. Puke.” With each word, Mace slapped himself on the chest, sending drops of spaghetti sauce flying. “And don’t you forget it!”
He turned and stalked away. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see at least two contraband phones being held up, presumably filming the presentation for posterity. I looked at my own phone. The Magic Minute was over, and even though I hadn’t had time to try any additional spells, it had been one of the best minutes of my life.
“How did it go?” Modesty asked me, two periods later, when we had our first chance to meet in the hall.
“Not bad,” I said. “Although I didn’t think up anything to help us with Davy.” My sharpness of mind had faded as quickly as it had come.
“Me neither.”
Modesty shook her head. “But for a minute, I understood algebra completely. All those letters in the equations are actually numbers.”
“Really?”
“Yes! And there are ways of figuring out which letters are what numbers. And then it was gone.” Modesty waved her fingers at her head, indicating thoughts turning to vapor. “Preffy was going to try some spells he had memorized. I wonder how that went.”
A stampede of screaming middle schoolers rounded the corner, followed by a walking skeleton.
“Apparently not well,” I said.
Pre came running from behind and tackled Mr. Palmeri a few feet from where we stood. The skeleton crashed to the floor and stopped moving. A dozen terrified eighth graders had pressed themselves against the lockers on the opposite side of the hall; one—Mace Croyden—appeared to have wet his pants. Mace was not having a good day.
I grabbed the skeleton by the neck, held it up, and said, “Sapling Farms Halloween Spooktacular! Opening this Friday! Great new special effects! If you come—wear a diaper!”
The eighth graders scattered.
“Sorry about that,” said Pre, working hard to catch his breath. “At twelve thirty-four, I envisioned the final four syllables of To Cure a Numb Skull, which is a lesser-known version of To View Things More Clearly, but, as usual, I messed things up. Instead of making me think better, the spell animated Mr. Palmeri, and he started dancing on his hook, and the clicking noise drove me crazy for a couple of hours, until five minutes ago the hook broke, and he ran out the door. I’m so glad he finally wound down.” He patted the skeleton on the rib cage. “Oh, and it turns out I love cold sores with grumbly bears, and guess what? Scuba isn’t just the first two syllables of the incantation To Fold a Napkin Neatly. In your world, it stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. I learned that in a book about undersea life. Science is so wonderful. I should have been born in your world!”
We sat the skeleton on the bench where sick students usually waited to see the school nurse—I hoped it might inspire her not to be out of her office for such long periods of time—then we tucked Pre into the back row of the empty auditorium. Modesty and I finished off school’s final period—she in social studies, me in math (failing the test I hadn’t had time to study for; the letters may have been numbers, but I didn’t have a clue what those numbers might be)—then we collected Pre and made our way home.
All in all, the school day hadn’t been too bad.
I found myself wishing every day could be more like it.
CHAPTER 25
TANKED
If anyone had been standing in the parking lot of Davy’s Digital Vegetables at 10:52 that evening, they might have noticed some of the bushes along the edge of the parking lot shake and a flashlight beam or two flicker through their branches.
So we were lucky there was no one in the parking lot.
We had arrived later than planned. We had wanted to get there an hour before the agreed-upon time of eleven so we could hide and keep an eye out for anything suspicious—neither Modesty nor I fully trusted Spalding Wicket—but instead, we reached the edge of the lot only a few minutes before we were expected.
It had taken three hours for Pre to learn how to ride a bicycle.
“We have something like this in Congroo, really we do, but without the pedals and the chain thingy,” he kept assuring us, usually just before tottering sideways and falling over. I had dug my brother’s bike out of the garage for him and lowered the seat as far as it would go. “It’s one of many things we have in common with the World of Science,” he said during a break in the bike-riding lesson while he applied a bandage to his knee. “We have the wheel and arithmetic and three-ring binders and mayonnaise and other things that don’t require magic, although I will say our wheels work much better when they have seven spokes, which doesn’t seem to be the case here, but it’s another argument in favor of there being seven Magic Minutes instead of five. We really should give more thought to what the remaining two might be. This scientifical bandage is sticking to my fingers and not my knee.”
“Face it the other way,” said Modesty.
“Oh.”
Pre finally mastered the bicycle and the art of applying a self-sticking bandage, and the three of us, dressed for a chilly autumn evening, pedaled up Gernsback Ridge. Modesty and I both wore hoodies; Pre had on the SAFE windbreaker, which he seemed to have grown quite fond of. (“Safe is the final word of To Make a Sweater Cozier,” he told us.)
We departed the road about a quarter of a mile before the entrance to the DDV property, hid our bikes in the woods, and crept up on the side of the building where the Service Personnel Only entrance was. We pocketed our flashlights—Pre had been thrilled when we gave him his very own “scientifical wand”—and we crouched down and studied the place through gaps in the shrubbery.
“That’s a very empty parking lot,” I whispered. “Shouldn’t there be at least one car here? The one that brought Elwood Davy back from his trip?”
“Maybe his secret apartment has a secret garage,” Modesty whispered back. “Or maybe a helicopter dropped him off on the roof. Or he took a taxi.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. I suppose there are other possibilities.”
“That’s what makes me the great detective that I am,” Modesty said in her normal, far-from-whispering voice.
“Why, exactly, do they call you Modesty?” asked Pre. He sounded sincere. I waited for Modesty to take his head off.
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?” Modesty surprised me by saying. “It’s part of a long tradition our world has of naming girls things like Patience or Prudence or Charity or Désirée and naming boys things like Joe. From the moment we’re born, girls are expected to behave in specific ways, and while there’s nothing wrong with being patient or charitable or exercising a little caution when you’re waving a machete, my sisters and I just do what we want. I know I sound arrogant sometimes. Get over it. If you think this is the part of our adventure where I start sounding a little less braggy because of everything we’ve been through together—forget it.”
Modesty looked from me to Pre as if daring us to argue.
“I’m fine with that,” I said.
“I was only wondering if you were named after a relative,” said Pre.
A rectangle of light appeared in the side of the factory as the door marked SERVICE PERSONNEL ONLY scraped open and a man’s silhouette appeared in it. He took two steps forward, looked across the parking lot directly at the bushes where we were hiding, and called out, “Are you coming in or not?”
“So much for sneaking up,” I said.
Modesty grimaced and pushed through the shrubs. Pre and I stepped out after her.
“Where did you park your tower?” The figure in the doorway looked down the length of the parking lot, and light from the door hit the side of his face. It was Spalding Wicket. Or possibly Elwood Davy pretending to be Spalding Wicket. Or possibly a logem pretending to be Spalding Wicket pretending to be Elwood Davy. It bothered me that we didn’t have a clue.
“We gave the tower the night off,” I said. “It didn’t seem necessary.”
“But… I’ve told Elwood all about it.” Spalding sounded genuinely upset. “He’s looking forward to seeing it. He was hoping you might invite him for a ride.” He held the door open for us, and we trooped past him into a gray cinder-block corridor. “I told him it was irrefutable proof you were magical children and everything you had told me was true.”
“Why is magical a word but scientifical isn’t?” Pre asked him.
“I have no idea. Is it important?”
“No…”
“We’ll prove to Mr. Davy we’re magical when we see him,” I said, although I didn’t have much confidence in the deck of playing cards Modesty had brought. She knew only two tricks. We were hoping we’d be able to keep Davy talking until 1:23, when we’d be able to play a Magic Bite and impress him with our sorcery. Until that time, in addition to Mod
esty’s tricks, we were hoping he might be willing to play Go Fish.
“Well… I hope you don’t disappoint him. Follow me.” Spalding stepped in front and led us down the hall.
The corridor opened up into a vast room full of cylindrical metal tanks that towered from floor to ceiling. Each had a number painted on it, starting with the closest, which was number one.
“We want tank thirteen, way down at the end,” Spalding informed us. “These are the tomato-juice holding tanks. Each one stores more than one hundred thousand gallons of juice; imagine ten backyard swimming pools stacked one on top of the other.”
“That’s a lot of juice,” I said.
“It all comes in through the TJP—Tomato Juice Pipeline—which passes through three different states and eight separate processing plants north of here, where the tomatoes get juiced. Once the pumping starts, one of these tanks can go from empty to full in less than fifteen minutes.”
“Is there any time when you’re not giving a tour?” Modesty asked.
“Am I in tour mode?” Spalding faltered, then regained his stride. “I suppose I am. I have to admit, I’m a little nervous. I want this to go well. I did, after all, go to bat for you. Mr. Davy was a little tired when he got back from his trip, but I told him about the three of you, and your walking tower, and about how his DavyTrons only work because they’re draining the life out of someplace magical, and he perked up—seemed very eager to talk to you—but then he said he needed a nap. He went into his private apartment, and I haven’t seen him since. That was more than an hour ago. Ah. Here we are.”
Spalding stopped in front of a three-foot-square hatch in the side of tank number thirteen. The hatch had a wheel in the center. He twiddled a keypad next to the hatch, and the wheel turned on its own and made unlocking noises. Then the hatch swung open. He took a heavy-duty flashlight from a hook above the keypad and shone it into the tank.