“I am sorry to bother you at such an early hour, but I have an important update. It appears a stowaway has found her way onto the Station. Yes, I’m sure. Thanks to that slippery little Ebvarienne wretch, no less. We should have offed her long ago, when we got rid of her parents. Yes, I know I cannot change the past …
“What’s that? The stowaway? Ah. I suspected something when the trisk was activated. It was. Yesterday. Quite concerning indeed. When I reviewed the video footage, my suspicions were confirmed. I know. We cannot allow Eryna to reestablish contact with Ignatia. I understand. It would compromise everything. We are finally so close to achieving our goals. I agree.
“Yes, I do believe the council will reverse their vote. Oh, please. The Earthlings are no threat whatsoever. A nuisance, yes. But a threat? Not at all. I thought to exterminate them early on, just to simplify matters, but that didn’t work out as I planned. These so-called cadets are likely to doom themselves. Oh, yes. They are positively predisposed to disaster. It comes quite naturally to them, in fact. They’re not cut out for life in the multiverse. Hahaha. I know. It’s hilarious. They don’t stand a chance.
“No, Finto has not made contact with us. No, he never returned. What a coward. But I am sure our associate is dealing with him.
“What’s that? Ah, I see. Mhmm. The triskaidecagon? I have already swapped out Dim2’s with a fake and destroyed the original. I did indeed. Last night. As soon as I identified the Klapprothi stowaway. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate your praise.
“This morning when the Earthlings play their little music, nothing will happen. The fake trisk will not activate. Ignatia will see that the initial transmission was merely a glitch. Nothing to concern the council over.
“Then, of course, the council will see how terribly useless the humans are. Yes, I will enjoy that part very much. Following a rousing and eloquent speech made by me, the council will surely proceed with an expedited vote to compactify Earth. Oh, yes. Not to worry. I will make sure everything goes according to plan.”
56
STATION LIMINUS
Isaiah and Tessa fell nearly twenty feet. Thankfully, a huge pile of hay, and not dung, broke their fall. And thankfully, they had fallen into the cow’s enclosure this time, and not some voracious spacebeast’s pen.
“Are you guys okay?” Dev asked, sticking his head out of the opening.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Isaiah said, rubbing his elbow. “Just bruised I think. How about you, Tessa?”
“I’m okay,” she said, standing up and dusting off her copper tunic.
It was still early, so the Menagerie was unstaffed. But any minute, the techs and vets would be coming in for morning feedings and health checks.
“We have to get out of here,” Isaiah said. The friendly cow sauntered over and licked his face.
“I know,” Tessa agreed, scratching the cow gently behind the ears. Sure enough, the tag on its ear was from Miss Mary’s Dairy. The coincidence was strange, but Tessa remembered what Duna had said about fate. Maybe all of this was happening for a reason.
She peered around the pen. She lifted a bar on the door and helped Isaiah exit the enclosure without setting the cow loose. “You stay here,” she told the animal, rubbing its nose.
“Now what?” Isaiah asked. “There’s no way we can climb back into the ceiling ducts now.”
Tessa looked up at their friends, whose worried faces were gathered inside the opening. “We’ll take the main corridor and meet you at the lab,” Tessa said.
“Bring our instruments, okay?” Isaiah added.
“You got it.” Lewis flashed a thumbs-up.
“Do you know which way to go?” Tessa asked Isaiah once they were in the Menagerie’s main exhibit area.
“Not exactly. But there’s one of those interactive holo-maps.” He pointed.
They crossed the room and looked at the map, trying to get their bearings. They had just charted a fairly direct route to the sound lab when a loud voice shouted, “Stop! You there!”
They wheeled around to see a khaki-clad creature keeper wielding a gun-shaped contraption. “What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Trying to steal the colossadon hatchlings, are you?”
“Hatchlings?” Isaiah said. So that was why she was ramming the wall and howling. Her babies were on the other side.
“They nearly went extinct thanks to smugglers and poachers like you!” the keeper yelled, moving closer.
“We’re not smugglers,” Tessa said. “Believe me, if we wanted a pet, we wouldn’t choose one of those. We weren’t—” Before Tessa could explain, the creature keeper fired his tranquilizer.
Blat! Blat!
“Tessa! Run!” Isaiah yelled.
The darts whizzed through the air. The first one missed, but the second pierced the fabric of Tessa’s copper leggings and lodged deep into her thigh. The potent stundrug began coursing through her veins almost immediately. She swayed. Her bones turned to jelly, her mind to mush. She stumbled to the left, to the right, to the left again. Isaiah reached out to catch her. They both crashed into the holomap.
“Guards!” The creature keeper called for reinforcements. He lunged for Isaiah and pinned him to the ground.
Tessa’s vision was a blur of color and light. She dragged herself to her feet, but the drug was too strong. Her eyelids fluttered. The control console beeped as Tessa’s limp hand dragged across the interactive floor plan. Blue walls turned red, orange walls turned white. Clicking sounds echoed through the Menagerie as cages and pens unlocked.
Tessa crumpled to the floor. Everything went dark.
57
EARTH
“I cannot apprehend or arrest Dr. Scopes,” Mayor Hawthorne said into the phone as she stepped through tall, damp grass.
“You must!” Dr. Khatri said, his voice urgent. “She is a criminal. A fake. Professor McGillum and I found proof in her office.”
The mayor paused beside the old Greene silo. “No, Dr. Khatri, please. What I mean is I cannot arrest her because she’s … gone.”
“What? Did you say gone?” Dr. Khatri rubbed a finger in his ear. Surely he had heard the mayor incorrectly. Sometimes service was patchy out in the agricultural areas of the city.
“I’m so sorry,” Mayor Hawthorne said. “My daughter and I just arrived at the MegaAg field. Gil Greene and Ray Harkis are here. They saw her jump into the portal.”
Dr. Khatri couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “She fell through the portal?”
“She didn’t fall. Ray says she jumped, intentionally.”
He strode across the office. “Tell me, what condition is the portal in?”
The mayor paused. “The portal is gone, too. It closed up in her wake.” She turned on the camera and held up her phone so that Dr. Khatri could see the field and the silo. There was no sign of the gaping hole or flashing quantum lightning.
“That was our only hope,” he muttered miserably. “How will we ever reach the children now?”
58
STATION LIMINUS
“Where are your fellow Earthlings?” Ignatia inquired impatiently. The delegates were gathered inside the auditory lab, ready to experience the power of the cadets’ so-called music.
Maeve, Dev, and Lewis fidgeted uncomfortably on the small stage at the front of the room.
“They’ll be here any minute,” Maeve replied, forcing a smile. Tessa and Isaiah were supposed to come directly to the auditory lab, but time was ticking by with no sign of them.
“Did you enjoy your breakfast?” Shro asked expectantly from his seat in the front row.
Something about his tone made Lewis uneasy. For once, he was glad he hadn’t eaten anything. None of them had. There hadn’t been enough time.
“Very much,” Maeve lied, not missing a beat. She gave her stomach a pat for emphasis.
Ignatia rapped a bony knuckle on the table. “Enough small talk. We don’t have infinite time at our disposal. You will begin without the others,” she comma
nded. The delegates took their seats.
“We can’t,” Maeve said, stalling. “We’re an ensemble. A team.”
“You’ll play fine as a trio, I’m sure. Show my esteemed peers how you activated this.” She held the triskaidecagon in the air. It was glowing a fainter shade of turquoise than yesterday, but it was still impressive. The delegates gasped.
“What should we do?” Dev whimpered, his stage fright rearing its ugly head. His breath was shallow, his chest tight, his shirt damp with perspiration.
Maeve bit her lip. “The show must go on …” She counted them in.
Dev lifted the saxophone to his quivering lips, and—
BLERRRGGHHH!!!
“What in the multiverse … ?” Ignatia covered her ears.
Dev looked down, bewildered. Had that noise really come from his regular old brass sax? He fixed his grip and tried again. Five … six … seven … eight …
BLERRRGGHHH!!! GAARROOMFFF!!!
It sounded almost like an elephant trumpeting.
“Let me try again,” Dev said, his hands shaking.
“You got this.” Lewis nudged his shoulder.
Before Dev could play another note, the floor rumbled.
“This feels like a quiver,” Lewis said, steadying himself.
GAARROOMFFF!!! Through the large glass observation window, the kids and delegates watched a three-tusked megaphante plow through the hall, with a stampede of purple oryx galloping at its heels.
An alarm wailed.
“Breach! Breach!” the Station’s central AI announced through the speaker system. “Creature breach reported from the Menagerie.”
“Yes, I can see that. How many specimen enclosures were compromised?” Ignatia demanded, pressing a small button on her wristlet.
“Seventeen,” the AI replied.
“But surely not the—”
The colossadon’s mighty roar shook the walls of the sound lab, leaving a spidery crack in the glass observation window.
The color drained from Ignatia’s horns. Havoc erupted as delegates scrambled out of their chairs, trying to flee.
“Calm down! Everyone, stay put! You are safer in here than out there. Shro! Lock down the room. Stay calm!”
Blat! Blat! Blat! Tranquilizers fired as creature keepers pursued the runaway animals. The colossadon roared again, whipping her spiked tail. The keepers scattered and ducked. She thundered toward Gate Hall, seeking an escape route, with four small hatchlings clinging to the fur of her underbelly.
A screeching pack of rakoomas darted past the window next.
Ignatia pressed her wristlet again. “Connect me with the Menagerie manager. At once!”
A second later, a gray-skinned man appeared as a holovid, floating in the center of the room.
“Yes, Your Eminence?” he said over the din of squeaking, hissing, and buzzing.
“Precisely what transpired at your post?” Ignatia barked.
“We discovered a pair of humanoids, who we believe to be smugglers, meddling with the Menagerie’s enclosure controls. The creature keeper on duty subdued the thieves, but not before they caused significant damage.”
“Was anyone injured?” Ignatia asked.
“Affirmative,” the holovid said. “Lino, our habitat specialist, was bitten by a hungry crark. A second staffer was stung by a swarm of calypso wasps.”
“Where are the smugglers now?” Ignatia asked.
“They’re being held in custody,” the holovid answered.
“Show them to me!” Ignatia ordered. Her horns flared a furious shade of scarlet.
A second holovid image appeared. Isaiah and Tessa were slumped over, tethered to chairs with electromagnetic shackles, their heads lolling, delirious from the lingering effects of the stundrug.
Maeve was appalled. “They’re not smugglers! They’re our friends! What did you do to them?”
“Your Eminence, please,” Duna said. “I’m sure this is a misunderstanding.”
“We didn’t mean to cause so much trouble, I promise,” Dev pleaded.
“That’s becoming a common refrain with you Earthlings,” Ignatia snapped. “Disruption and destruction follow you everywhere, it seems.”
“What a pity. We had such high hopes for your kind,” Shro said, pouting.
“This is all wrong!” Dev shouted. “We were only in the Menagerie because someone stole our instruments and we went looking for them.”
“And yet you found them, I see. Where exactly were they hidden?” Shro pressed, unperturbed by the chaos just beyond the lab’s walls.
Dev shot Lewis a look. They couldn’t rat Kor out. Even though she had caused this mess. Virri was with her now. If the MAC found Kor, they’d find Virri, too.
“We, uh, found them, in, um …”
Quirg snarled. “Just as I suspected. They are incapable of being truthful. It was a mistake to bring them here! Look what they’ve done to our beautiful Station! I can only image the state of the Gates, probably trampled by the megaphantes.”
“Please,” Maeve said. “Let us explain …”
“Silence!” Ignatia narrowed her violet eyes. “You three are complicit in this crime.” She hammered her fist on the table. “Guards, seize them!”
59
EARTH
Zoey couldn’t believe her mother had agreed to let her go to the Gwen Research Center at the crack of dawn and help search for a portal into the multiverse. If her sister wasn’t actually trapped somewhere in another dimension, it would have been the coolest mother-daughter outing ever. But Tessa was in trouble, and so were some of Zoey’s closest friends. She would do whatever it took to help them. First, though, they needed to make a quick stop at home.
Zoey scaled the stairs two at a time. The morning had turned cold and rainy, and she had gotten soaked in the field near Miss Mary’s Dairy. She ran to her room to change into some dry clothes and to grab Isaiah’s journal, just in case it might come in handy. As soon as she opened the door, she stubbed her toe. Hard.
“Ouch!” She hopped up and down until the pain subsided. What had she bumped into? That’s when she saw it: the tuba case. She had been so distracted by pizza and interdimensional text messages during the night that she had completely forgotten about it. She unlatched the case and it fell open, revealing a long metal tube with dozens of buttons and rings running up and down its length. It looked like a souped-up grenade launcher.
Nolan was right: It definitely wasn’t his tuba, or any tuba for that matter. Where had Gage found such a thing? She didn’t dare touch the instrument, or machine, or whatever it was, so she carefully closed the case and flipped it over. On the bottom, a small silver-and-blue sticker said: Property of NASA. She figured she had better return it. And luckily, she and her mom were heading there now.
60
STATION LIMINUS
“Where are we? Where are our friends?” Tessa murmured blearily. Her questions echoed off the walls of the cell. She was still dizzy and her muscles felt weak, but her head was finally clearing.
Isaiah’s eyelids fluttered. “Uncle Ming?” he mumbled. “Is that you?”
“Isaiah,” Tessa said. “It’s me, Tessa. Wake up!”
He wiped a dribble of drool from his chin and looked around. “What’s going on?”
“They locked us up. We need to get out of here and find the others.”
A single light bulb flickered from a wire overhead. Impenetrable concrete walls loomed on four sides, wrapped with sharp strands of barbed wire that not even Virri could scale without tearing her hands and feet to shreds.
Isaiah tried to stand up, but the shackles held firm, zapping his ankles with electric shocks.
“We’re stuck,” he said. “There’s no way out.”
There was a faint knock on the door. It creaked open. Tessa looked up, terrified that their moment of reckoning had come. She reached over and grabbed Isaiah’s arm. She squeezed tightly, unable to speak.
“Room service!” a voice called.
<
br /> Tessa and Isaiah exchanged confused glances.
A member of the catering staff appeared, wearing a navy-blue uniform and a funny silver hat. She pushed a refreshment cart into the cell.
Tessa gawked. Her brows knit together. “Dr. Scopes?” she said, incredulous. “Is that you?”
“No way.” Isaiah hunched over despondently. “Must be a doppelgänger.”
“Shhh! It is me,” Dr. Scopes said in a conspiring whisper. “Come. We need to hurry.” She crossed the room and used a special tool to unlock the shackles.
“How did you get here?” Tessa asked, stretching out her sore limbs.
“I’ve been working with Dr. Khatri and your mother, Mayor Hawthorne, to locate another portal. We found one. And just in time, it seems.”
“Is Dev’s dad here, too?” Isaiah asked.
“No, he stayed back on Earth to help coordinate our return journey. We don’t have much time. Where are the others?”
“We don’t know,” Tessa said.
Dr. Scopes’s eye twitched. “Okay. I will figure something out.” She dabbed her eyelid with her finger, fixing her smudgy eye shadow. Isaiah stared at her. Her whole face looked blurry and melty. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it; there were more important things to worry about.
Dr. Scopes leaned over and parted the blue velvet curtain that ran around the huge refreshment cart. “Get in. You must stay out of sight. Be silent and still.”
“Great. Another small space,” Tessa mumbled as she climbed into the cart. At least it smelled like freshly baked cinnamon rolls and thornmelon tarts instead of colossadon dung.
Isaiah followed, tucking his knees under his chin. Dr. Scopes closed the curtain and wheeled the cart out of the cell.
Once safely stashed in the darkness, Tessa messaged Zoey with her smartwatch. Dr. Scopes had come to their rescue!
Mission Multiverse Page 22
