Raids and Rescues

by Bryan Chick

  “Zak?”

  “Have I ever let you down, Mr. D?”

  Mr. Darby frowned and dropped his eyebrow behind his sunglasses.

  After a few seconds, a squeal emitted from the cart and the smoke stopped at once. Zak’s head emerged. He pulled off his dirty goggles, spat onto each lens, and wiped them on the cleanest spot on his T-shirt. Then he clapped his goggles back onto his face and grinned.

  “Eww,” Ella whispered into Megan’s ear. “Please don’t ever let him touch me.”

  Zak scratched a spot on his skinny rear end, then plunged his head back into the cabinet. With him out of sight, each of the scouts turned to Mr. Darby with worried looks.

  “He’s a bit unorthodox,” Mr. Darby said apologetically, “but the Teknikals are very good at what they do, I assure you.”

  “What you call ‘unorthodox,’ I call ‘smelly,’” Ella said. “And what is it that the Teknikals do, anyway?”

  “This . . .” Zak said as he held out his arm. In his hand was a tiny video camera with a dozen lens tubes the size of quarter rolls looking off in different ways. Each lens was as multicolored as the stained glass around them. Several small straps with steel buckles dangled below the camera.

  Zak smiled, revealing a silver tooth.

  Mr. Darby turned to the scouts and explained. “The Teknikals are exceptionally skilled in technology. And with the help of our magical scientists, they’ve developed ways to incorporate the Secret Zoo’s magic into their contraptions. There’s almost nothing the Teknikals can’t create.”

  Richie said, “Way . . . way . . . way cool . . .”

  Ella rolled her eyes. “Show Zak your nerd-gear, why don’t you?” When Richie reached for his shirt pocket, Ella added, “I’m kidding, you freak.”

  “It’s a camera,” Mr. Darby said, referring to what Zak was holding. “The image it produces is like nothing you’ve seen.”

  “Wow!” Richie said. “Let me see!”

  “Oh . . . you’re going to see, bro,” Zak said. “We’re all about to see.”

  Ella leaned toward Megan and said, “What’s up with the ‘bro’ thing? This guy related to everyone?”

  Megan only shrugged, and from her seat on the table, Evie chuckled.

  Noah glanced at Evie, Solana, and Zak. Three young teenagers from three different groups using magic to do extraordinary things. The Specters, the Descenders, the Teknikals. The Secret Zoo never stopped surprising.

  Mr. Darby turned to the scouts. “Shortly after Sam and the others were captured, I received a message from DeGraff. The note said so very little that it seemed only to confirm DeGraff’s whereabouts in the Secret Zoo. It was practically an invitation for the Secret Society to storm into the Creepy Critters sector. And why would DeGraff want that, if not to trick us?”

  Noah thought about this. It made sense. How many times had DeGraff had the upper hand? Just days ago, he’d fooled the Secret Society into believing Charlie Red was him, luring the Crossers into the cellar beneath Clarksville Elementary, setting the trap to capture Sam, Hannah, and Tameron.

  Mr. Darby continued, “Council immediately met to discuss a course of action. We wondered about secretly sending in an animal to survey the sector. It would have to be a Gifted, of course, so that it could understand its mission. And it would have to be small enough to stay hidden. After much deliberation, we decided on Marlo. We needed to see what he saw, and an ROR camera was our first thought.”

  “Huh?” Ella said, squinting.

  “Sorry,” Mr. Darby said. “ROR—Room of Reflections.” He gestured around him again.

  Zak lifted his arm with the camera in his open palm, and a tuft of armpit hair shot out from under the short sleeve of his shirt.

  “This morning, we strapped it onto Marlo and sent him on his way. He soon returned—safely, thank heavens. None of us have seen the footage yet.”

  After a pause, Mr. Darby looked again to Zak. “Are we ready?”

  Zak wiped a smudge off his reflective goggles with his T-shirt. “Just say the word and I’ll press go.”

  Mr. Darby looked over at the crowd. “Does anyone have concerns before we begin?” When no one spoke up, he turned again to Zak, saying, “You may . . . press go.”

  The few council members that were standing found their seats, and Solana and the scouts moved in behind them.

  Zak crouched in front of the group and, with two loud clicks, fixed the camera onto a floor mount, the only item Noah could see in the room that wasn’t made of glass. The lenses began to roll and shift, each independent of the others, like eyes of chameleons.

  “Scouts,” Mr. Darby said, “I almost forgot—try not to stare into the lenses.”

  The floor mount began to swivel left and right. A beam of light shot from a lens into the air, struck the stained glass above, and instead of passing through, bounced back in dozens of directions, reflecting color all around. Light streamed out from a second lens and hit a new spot along the ceiling in the same way. A third beam rose. Then a fourth, a fifth—more and more until all the lenses were casting light.

  Noah looked down at himself. His body seemed a canvas for colors to collect upon. His clothes went from purple to green to blue. A blur of different hues moved across Podgy and the prairie dogs, who’d gathered to one side.

  The camera began to spin on the floor mount. The bright beams began to spread and blend into one another.

  Soft popping noises came from all around.

  “Speakers,” Zak explained. He pointed above his head. “Tiny things—they’re mounted all around. The camera’s equipped with several mics. Marlo . . . he picked up every sound when he was in there.”

  The noise of a steady wind began to fill the room, and something to the left of the scouts began to take shape—leafy limbs and brown bark. To the scouts’ right, more trees appeared. What remained of the glass ceiling became a canopy of leaves outlined in patches of blue sky. A sophisticated, virtual world was closing in around them in perfect 3-D. In the glass floor, tree branches appeared above a distant city street, and animals seemed to stroll past—lions, bears, and ostriches. A group of giraffes were reaching their long necks to snack on leaves.

  The virtual world dipped and turned. Marlo swerved through a batch of koalas nestled in the tree limbs, and then barely missed crashing into a sloth, which dangled upside down, its curved claws wrapped around a branch.

  “I’m going to puke!” Richie said.

  “Then point your mouth away from me!” Ella answered.

  As the virtual world tilted, Noah reached out to brace himself before remembering he wasn’t actually moving. City places came into view: the Secret Metr-APE-olis, Platypus Playground, and a giant fountain with beady streams of water standing hundreds of feet high. The kingfisher swerved to avoid a balcony, and then flew down a narrow alley, birds scattering. He streamed through a cloud of hummingbirds, then through a cloud of mist. As he soared past the glass walls of Butterfly Nets, one side of the Room of Reflections seemed to crowd with butterflies, and Noah almost believed he could reach out and touch their papery wings.

  Ella half shouted over the sound of the wind, “Beats IMAX, huh?” and Noah turned to see she was holding on to the chair in front of her.

  “Don’t barf, don’t barf, don’t barf,” Richie softly chanted.

  The Secret Creepy Critters came into view. The center of the building, the Creepy Core, rose as high as ten stories before ending at a concrete dome. Dozens of wings reached out in all directions, snaking between trees and other structures like the tentacles of a stone octopus. Dead ivy covered the walls and the grass around the sector had wilted and turned black.

  “See the ground?” Mr. Darby asked. Noah turned to the voice and found Mr. Darby and the rest of the Secret Council seeming to fly through the treetops. “The Shadowist has caused that. His existence is like a disease.”

  Marlo swooped down toward the entrance, where two Descenders that Noah didn’t recognize stood guard. An insta
nt later, the kingfisher plunged between two velvet curtains, gated into the sector, and cast the entire Room of Reflections into absolute darkness.

  Richie shrieked.

  Mr. Darby’s voice rose in the dark: “Richie? I trust all is well, yes?”

  “And I’m trusting no one got barfed on,” Ella cut in.

  “I’m okay,” Richie answered. “My bad—sorry.”

  “Can anyone see anything?” a woman from the Secret Council asked.

  A chorus of no’s came.

  “Shh!” someone said—Noah thought it had been Solana. “You guys hear that?”

  Everyone became deathly quiet. In the recorded world, a low, rumbling growl sounded—the unmistakable noise of a sasquatch. A second growl came. Then a third, a fourth.

  Noah peered into the blackness all around him and couldn’t see a thing—not the faintest suggestion of light. “Did we lose video?”

  “Negative,” Zak answered. “System’s still live, bro. We’re seeing exactly what Marlo saw.”

  As the growls faded, it was obvious that Marlo was flying down the corridor, away from the velvet curtains. A dimly lit passage appeared as Marlo turned in the virtual world, and above an open doorway, a sign read, “Bugs-A-Bunch.” The Creepy Critters exhibit in the Clarksville Zoo had a corridor with the same name—the one Marlo was now entering was its magical counterpart.

  Walls of broken aquariums were covered in a writhing mass of spiders, millipedes, and cockroaches. Some were fighting; others were chomping on fallen prey. Cobwebs and cocoons dangled from the ceiling.

  A sasquatch sat against one wall. Hunched over its knees, it seemed to be waiting. Countless insects had their long legs and segmented bodies tangled in its mangy fur.

  “Okay . . .” Ella said, her voice quivering a bit, “this movie we’re watching? Yeah, it just went to PG-13 really fast.”

  Marlo flew past the sasquatch undetected, came to a three-way intersection, and turned down a new corridor. At another intersection, Marlo turned at an open door with a sign reading, “Fish Foyer.” Most of the aquariums were still intact and filled with fish, but a few were broken, their dark holes surrounded by pointed pieces of glass, looking like the gaping mouths of monsters.

  A sasquatch sat on the floor, its back against the wall. It seemed to be waiting, just like the other.

  “How come that thing doesn’t see Marlo?” someone from the Secret Council asked.

  Mr. Darby answered, “Marlo’s blending in with the flying insects.”

  This made sense to Noah. At least half of the insects were as big or bigger than the tiny kingfisher, even with the camera on his back.

  As Marlo made a turn into a new corridor, a cockroach flew straight toward a camera lens, and in the Room of Reflections, it grew and grew until its stringy antennae became the size of tree trunks. It banged off the lens and everyone shrieked, including the Secret Council, who also ducked down in their chairs, arms raised around their heads. Once it was obvious what had happened, sighs of relief sounded and people eased back up in their seats.

  In a squeaky voice, Richie said, “New underpants, please.”

  A sign read, “Legless Lane” as Marlo made a turn. Swells of snakes slithered across the floor and one another. To Noah, they looked like a spill of giant spaghetti noodles.

  “Oh . . . Emm . . . Gee,” Ella said. Dozens of cobras had reared up into the air, their hooded necks spread out.

  When Legless Lane came to an end, Marlo quickly found a perch in an area that looked like a massive cavity within a mountain. A few thin waterfalls trickled down from the heights, splashing into murky streams. Occasional aquariums were set in the rocky walls. Much larger than the ones in the corridors, these might have once contained alligators, crocodiles, and komodo dragons. But now their glass walls were broken.

  “The Creepy Core,” Mr. Darby said.

  Spiders and millipedes and other unnameable bugs were crawling around on the mostly open floor.

  Marlo suddenly fluttered a few feet over to a new perch. Beside him was a tarantula—or what had once been a tarantula, anyway. Now it was twice its normal size: its legs as large as a small king crab’s; its body as plump as a peach; its oversized eyes like a cluster of black marbles.

  “Is that a spider?” Ella asked. “If you haven’t noticed, it’s the size of a poodle.”

  The tarantula lunged at Marlo, who flew safely into the air. As the spider came down, it struggled to cling to the rocky wall and then tumbled over a ledge.

  Members of the Secret Council turned to one another, nervous conversations breaking out.

  “What?” Noah asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  It was Mr. Darby who answered. “That tarantula . . . it was poisoned by DeGraff. It was turned into . . . something . . . by his dark magic, like the sasquatches.”

  “And how many others have been?” a woman from the Secret Council asked.

  Mr. Darby stayed silent, as if afraid to guess.

  Noah looked down at the animals on the floor and felt goose bumps rise along his arms. The body of a particular snake went on and on. Noah counted ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet, more. Was it a python? Or was it a smaller snake made monstrous by the Shadowist?

  Marlo darted over to a large pit surrounded by glass walls and capped by a glass ceiling. The space in the ground contained a few small trees, a trickling waterfall, a shallow pool, and a dirt floor with patches of long, sickly grass.

  “The Croc Crater,” Megan said, and Noah realized they were looking at the magical counterpart to the crocodile exhibit in the Clarksville Zoo.

  Marlo landed on top of the glass roof beside an air vent. Deep in the pit were Tank and the three Descenders. The Secret Council gasped and sat up in their seats.

  “There!” Mr. Darby called out in case anyone hadn’t noticed. “You see!”

  Marlo was frightened into the air by a sudden swarm of monstrous hornets, and he flew to a nearby spot on a freestanding rock covered with cave crickets. Here he had another view into the pit. He chirped once, twice, trying in vain to get the attention of his friends.

  Tank slumped against one wall, his bald head spotted with grime. Hannah sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her legs wrapped in her arms. Sam and Tameron seemed to be asleep on the dirt floor. Their faces were gaunt.

  In the Room of Reflections, Solana stepped toward the image of her friends. “Why don’t they break out?” she asked. “Why don’t they climb a tree and smash the glass or something?”

  “They can’t,” Mr. Darby said. “Not without their Descender gear—you know that. The glass is too strong.” He moved to a spot near Solana and pointed down into the pit, where one wall wasn’t visible from Marlo’s position. “The only way in or out is through a locked door on this side, the side we can’t see.”

  “Are you sure?” Solana asked.

  Mr. Darby nodded. “I’m almost certain. In the Clarksville Zoo, the Croc Crater has a similar door. When I first designed it—”

  Mr. Darby stopped abruptly. Noah rewound the old man’s words in his head and let them play a second time. Had Mr. Darby designed the zoo?

  Evie and the other Secret Cityzens were staring curiously at Mr. Darby.

  Mr. Darby said, “I . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he suddenly diverted his attention to the virtual world, where Marlo had flown back to the ceiling of the glass enclosure. He pointed a shaky finger into the pit and said, “There! You see the door!”

  Everyone turned their attention back to the video.

  Megan said, “How do we—”

  The virtual world began to whirl. Forgetting it wasn’t real, Noah reached out and braced himself on a chair. Marlo, who had been tumbling through the air, flew straight again, stabilizing the camera.

  “Behind us!” someone from the Secret Council called out.

  Everyone turned around to see the image of a sasquatch, its wicked stare locked on them. In the virtual world, the beast seemed four times its
already enormous size. Apparently it had just taken a swing at Marlo, knocking him off his perch.

  Marlo turned back the way he had come. The sasquatch swiped at him a second time and missed, flying insects becoming entangled in the fur of his arm. As Marlo flew off, the sasquatch chased after him, crunching across bugs. A snake bit into its heel and was dragged along, its body whipping left and right.

  Noah glanced to one side and saw a large window looking into a room. A man was standing inside, staring out at the commotion while holding a key chain attached to a string. Red hair, big freckles, lanky limbs—Charlie Red. As Marlo flew off, Noah noticed two doors on either side of the window; the left one went into Charlie’s room, and the right was marked “Lower Level.”

  Marlo flew down Legless Lane and veered into a new corridor. Back in Fish Foyer, the sasquatch on guard lunged for him and barely missed. Noah glanced back to see the beast slam into the opposite wall, breaking glass. Water burst into the air. Seconds later, the beast pulled itself from the cavity it had made, fish flopping at its feet. It spotted Marlo, then joined the other sasquatch in the chase.

  “Two sasquatches now!” someone from the council announced.

  “Yes,” Mr. Darby answered in a flat tone. “There will be others.”

  Marlo turned down a bug-filled corridor, and a third sasquatch dropped from an opening in the ceiling to join the pursuit.

  “I can’t take this!” Richie declared.

  Noah turned to see that his friend had pulled down the ribbed cuff of his cap, blinding himself and reminding Noah of how a frightened turtle ducks its head into its shell.

  Marlo flew down a new corridor, then another. He veered through openings in the green, ropey vines that dangled from the ceiling, mosquitoes and flies showering across his body. As he headed down a particularly dark hall, the point of light at the end of it seemed to be narrowing.

  Noah squinted into Marlo’s world. “What’s happening?”

  Marlo picked up speed. As the walls whizzed by, Noah realized the passage at the end of the hall was closing.

  “A trap,” Mr. Darby said.

  Marlo neared the end of the corridor, and the watchers saw how a steel wall was being lowered from the ceiling. The opening was reduced to four feet, three feet, two feet. Marlo dipped down and flew near the floor, his wings brushing the backs of the insects there. Seconds before the gap closed, he plunged through, and steel clattered and clanked as at least one sasquatch crashed into the wall.