The Secret of Zoom

by Lynne Jonell

  “But it says A . . . B . . . C,” Danny said. “I can read it, Taff.”

  Taft narrowed his eyes until his lashes looked like a fringe. “Danny,” he warned.

  Danny’s hand went guiltily to his jacket pocket. “You said I could hide things, Taff.”

  “I said you could hide the rubber cow. Show me what else you have.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Danny pulled out his hand. On his palm lay a test tube, unbroken, with a black stopper at one end.

  “Throw it here,” said Taft in a terrible voice. “Danny, Danny, what if you’d cut yourself again and I wasn’t there to help you?”

  “I’m sorry, Taff,” said Danny, and his eyes welled up with tears. “I just wanted to practice my A—”

  Christina yanked at Taft’s elbow. “Someone’s coming!” she hissed.

  Taft ducked back into the weeds. “Don’t tell anyone I was here, Danny!” he said urgently. “Just wait for me and I’ll get you free!”

  Danny nodded, mumbling something that sounded to Christina like “truck” and “free,” and then lifted his bucket as the girl named Dorset approached.

  “What’s the matter, Danny?” She held out her hand to help him clamber down from the boulder. “The boss wants to know why you aren’t working. We can never play with the toys, you know.”

  “I know,” said Danny. He smiled at her. “I’ll start now. But first I got to throw something.”

  He wiped his eyes and turned. “I sure hope somebody finds this who knows their A . . . B . . . C . . . ,” he said loudly, and threw the test tube across the water in a high, turning arc.

  Christina went hunting for the test tube as soon as Dorset had gone back inside.

  “What’s the point?” asked Taft, watching Danny in the distance as he scrubbed a heap of small plastic toys and laid them in a cardboard box. “It’s just an old test tube. I can’t believe those scientists dumped them in the stream. You’d think they’d know better.”

  “But Danny said it had an ABC on it. What’s that about? I wonder.” Christina, who had followed the test tube’s flight with her eyes, reached under a clump of bushes and felt around.

  “Don’t scientists label their test tubes on the outside, so they know what chemicals are on the inside? There were probably other letters on it, too, but those are the only ones Danny knows.” Taft rummaged in the lunch sack.

  “Save some for Danny,” said Christina over her shoulder. “We can toss him a couple of sandwiches when he comes to get his next bucket of water.”

  “Okay,” said Taft, his mouth already full. “Hey, maybe that tunnel of Leo Loompski’s would be a good place for Danny and me. If I could get work with somebody in town, I could earn enough for food.”

  Christina’s hand closed on something smooth and narrow. “There were some workmen who fixed our roof,” she said. “Gus and Jake. Maybe they could use a helper. They kept saying they were too fat to get into the narrow places.”

  “Well, I’m skinny enough,” said Taft, who had finished one sandwich and was digging in the sack again. “Isn’t there any pie in this lunch?”

  Christina did not answer.

  Taft crawled through the undergrowth to where she was. “Here. Have a sandwich.”

  Christina sat motionless, looking at something in her hand.

  “Did you find Danny’s ABC?”

  Christina turned. She let the test tube and its black rubber stopper fall into her lap, and released the edges of a piece of paper. It curled up, as if it had been tightly rolled for a very long time.

  Taft took the paper and flattened it on the ground. He saw at once Danny’s capital A-B-C, written in a slanting, clear script. But there were other letters, too. The A was followed by dnoid, the B by eth, the C by hristina. And in between those words were other words, words like trapped and cave-in and help, that made Taft stare and swallow hard.

  “It’s a message from my mother,” said Christina, in a voice that cracked.

  “HEY! Wait up, will you?” Taft, panting, followed in Christina’s wake, the lunch sack bumping at his side.

  But Christina continued running up the mountain. She kept the stream on her left as she leapt over rocks and springy tussocks of moss and up slopes dappled with sun and thick with the scent of pine. She had to run, she couldn’t slow down; she was so full of emotion that she felt if she didn’t move, she would scream.

  The creek passed under a bridge on the mountain road, doubled on itself in a long, curving loop, and narrowed. Christina took a shortcut through the water, hopping from stone to stone, and landed on the other side with a satisfying thud. Behind her, muttering under his breath, Taft jumped onto the first stone and slipped.

  There was a splash and a muffled cry. Christina looked back as Taft struggled out of the stream, soaking wet.

  She was out of breath, anyway—and she had a stitch in her side. Christina sank down, scattering pinecones, her hand to her middle. Taft threw himself damply to the ground and lay there, catching his breath.

  “Listen,” he said at last, wringing water from his shirt-sleeves. “That note from your mom. It had to be written a long time ago. You can’t help her now.”

  Christina curled up her knees and pressed her chin on her arms.

  “She probably wrote a bunch of those messages when she was first trapped in the mountain,” Taft went on. “But most of the test tubes broke, and the paper inside was ruined. And they all ended up in the same place—buried in the crud from the stream. That doesn’t mean she’s alive now.”

  Of course her mother was dead. Christina knew that. But what she hadn’t known was how Beth Adnoid had died. Not in a laboratory explosion, as she had been told. But trapped in a cave on the mountain somewhere. And Lenny Loompski had lied about it.

  “But how did the test tubes get in the stream?” Christina looked at the rushing water. If she followed it long enough, would she come to the blocked cave?

  “Here.” Taft handed her a sandwich wrapped in plastic. “It’s only a little soggy.”

  Christina shook her head. She couldn’t eat. “Let’s just go.”

  They went, but at a slower pace. And when at last they came to the first great boulders at the base of the Starkian Ridge, they saw where the stream came from. Out of a wall of solid rock, much higher than their heads, water poured through a narrow crack. Above it, the crags reared up, gray and steep, and beyond was nothing but blue sky and a high, soaring bird.

  Christina felt a great tiredness as she gazed up at the dark wet stone of the cliff, oddly streaked with pink and green. She slipped her hand inside her pocket and felt for the test tube with its rubber stopper, and the small, hard circle of her mother’s ring.

  Taft pointed to the water where it rushed from the crack. “A little tube could make it out of there,” he said. “Not a person, though.”

  There was an ache in Christina’s throat, as if it had been wrapped with a too-tight bandage. She thought of her mother trapped inside the mountain, hopefully floating message after message in carefully sealed test tubes until at last her food ran out. She would have had water from the stream, of course . . . how long did it take to starve to death? Christina wondered dully.

  She had run too far, too fast; her legs were trembling beneath her. She sank to the ground, leaned back against the trunk of a large tree, and closed her eyes.

  The bark was rough and scaly through her sweatshirt, and the sharp smell of pine filled her nose. Nearby an insect buzzed, and in the distance she could hear the faint cry of a harrier. It was a thin, lonesome sound.

  Taft shaded his eyes against the sun. “If the garbage truck really takes the kids up the mountain to break rocks, then they’re up there right now. If we could just get to them—”

  “There’s no point trying to climb the cliff. It’s way too steep.” Christina picked up one of the smaller gray rocks that littered the ground and traced its pink and green streaks with her finger. Was this the same kind of stone that was in her mother’s
ring? It looked like it.

  “The road goes to the top, probably. We could find it and follow it.”

  “Sure, but where is the road? It’s a long time since we passed the bridge.” Christina tucked the streaked rock into her sweatshirt pocket, for a souvenir. Her fingers touched her mother’s ring and she pulled it out, trying it on, but it was too big even for her thumb.

  Well, it could go into the test tube for safekeeping. She didn’t want to lose it.

  Taft squinted upward at the tallest pine, its sturdy limbs well spaced around the main trunk. “I could climb that tree and get high enough to see the road, I bet.”

  “I’m coming, too,” said Christina. She had always wanted to climb a tree, but the ones in her yard had no low branches.

  Climbing a pine was easy, though. Christina reached and grasped and pulled herself up after Taft, setting her feet on branches one after another—it was just like the ladder to the attic. The breeze pulled fine, pale wisps of hair from her braids that tickled her nose and got into her mouth. She blew them off her face and went on climbing, her hands sticky with sap.

  When she was even with the waterfall’s source, she paused. Yes, the crack was far too narrow for a person. It was barely big enough for a small fish. But now that she was in the tree, she could see a shimmer of moving water farther away, in a deeper cleft. Was there more to the stream, then, higher up?

  The pine swayed under the combined weight of two children as Christina resumed her climb and the wind picked up. There was more sun now, and they were above the tops of some surrounding trees. Christina wedged herself near Taft, twisted in her perch, and searched the landscape below. There was the town of Dorf—easy to identify, with its patchwork of colored roofs set in the bend of the river. Halfway up the mountain, she could see the square yellow brick of the orphanage and an occasional glint where the light reflected off the electrified fence.

  “There’s the road.” Taft pointed to a thinning line of birches. “And those buildings way over there must be Loompski Labs.”

  Christina wished she had brought her binoculars. She could see the rooftop of her own house, but it was surprisingly distant. They had come a long way. It was good the trip back would be all downhill—

  Crieeee—eeee!

  Taft jerked, startled, and Christina almost lost her grip on the tree. A Starkian harrier, soaring silently on an updraft of warm air, had flown close without their noticing. Suddenly it screamed, plunged, and disappeared below.

  Christina wrapped her arms tightly around the trunk and pressed against the warm bark. Too warm, especially next to her stomach, it was almost hot—

  She yanked the gray rock from her sweatshirt pocket. It was as hot as a just-boiled egg, and in the instant before she dropped it, she saw that the pink and green streaks had intensified in color—the streaks were shimmering, they were liquid with color—

  They were liquid. The rock slipped from Christina’s hand. She looked, incredulous, at her palm, glistening now with drops of pink and green.

  The rock hissed downward and hit the ground a second and a half later with a flare of orange and a small sharp explosion that shook the tree.

  Taft’s eyes met hers in disbelief. “How did that happen?”

  Christina stared at the wisp of smoke rising from the ground. “I don’t know! It was hot—you saw it, the streaks were melted—”

  “That doesn’t even make sense!”

  “I know, I know! And look, my skin isn’t burned at all—”

  She looked at her hand. The drops weren’t liquid anymore, either. They had cooled and solidified into a sort of gel—no, more like soft plastic—and the colors were dimming, too. She looked at the thin viscous streaks on her palm, utterly mystified.

  A harrier screamed, farther away than the first, giving its long, drawn-out cry. Christina, still looking at her hand, gasped aloud. The streaks grew warmer, brighter; they quivered and turned gel-like. Then, as she watched, they cooled again, turning dull and solid once more.

  The harrier’s cry had melted the rock.

  “Unbelievable . . . ,” Taft breathed. “Let’s get another one and see if it will do it again! You go on down first—you’re below me—”

  Christina shifted her foot and then stopped. Could she imitate the cry? She thought back, remembering the pitch. It sounded like—yes, a high G-sharp, falling to an F-natural. Maybe that was perfect pitch—just knowing what the notes were, without an instrument playing along?

  “Go on,” said Taft impatiently.

  “Wait, I want to try something.” Christina opened her mouth and gave a high, shrill cry, G-sharp, trailing off to an F. She looked at the pink and green streaks. They seemed a little brighter, but otherwise there was no change.

  She frowned. Then her expression lightened as a harrier, seemingly attracted by her call, approached with deep, long wing beats.

  Slightly above her, Taft grinned, his eyes alert.

  Christina put her hand up so she could watch the streaks and the bird at the same time, and repeated the harrier’s call. Her hand tingled slightly but did not grow warm.

  Crieeee—eeee! The slender dark bird opened its yellow beak, fixed her with a fierce black eye, and screeched.

  Christina ducked as it flew overhead. Her palm was suddenly warm and trembling with liquid color. She held it flat to cool and tried to think.

  “Wow.” Taft reached down a finger to touch the green streak, yelped, and pulled it back. “It’s hot!”

  “I told you,” said Christina absently, staring at her hand. Her pitch had been correct. But there was something more to the harrier’s cry, something she couldn’t identify. What were the words her father had used—harmonics? Overtones?

  Harmony she had studied before. That was when two or more different notes sounded good together. She couldn’t remember ever learning about overtones.

  But there had been something different about the harrier’s call. Something more than just the pure notes, a quality that shaded the pitch into something sharp and piercing and forlorn.

  “Crieeee—eeee!” Christina tried the sound again, looking at her palm to see if the streaks softened. They didn’t.

  “Let’s climb down,” said Taft. “I know where the road is now.”

  Christina nodded, and as she began her descent, she practiced the call of the harriers, experimenting. But nothing worked.

  Then suddenly, as she began another attempt, a branch snapped and she lost her balance.

  Her harrier cry was loud with sudden panic. She flung out her hands, but the branches slid by, slipping through her grasp while pine needles lashed her cheek. She banged an elbow, a knee—she hooked her legs over anything they touched—felt branches give, break, then finally hold. She grabbed with both arms for the solid wood of the trunk and clung there, dizzy and trembling.

  It was a long way down. Christina shut her eyes, feeling sick, unable to answer Taft’s worried calls from above. She tried to calm her breathing, slow the frightened patter of her heart.

  Her palm was warm where she had scraped it. No, it was hot, it was burning—

  Christina looked at her right hand, glowing again with melted rock, dripping now onto the ground beneath, drops popping when they landed, like a string of firecrackers. And suddenly she knew what quality her harrier’s cry had been lacking when she’d practiced in the tree, what had been missing until the moment that she fell.

  It was the overtone of fear.

  “SO that’s why Lenny Loompski wants orphans who can sing.” Taft pushed through the undergrowth and ducked under a low-hanging branch. “He wants kids who can make the streaky stuff melt out of the rock.”

  “But why? What’s it good for?” Christina followed, hoping that he hadn’t gotten turned around. They had left the stream far behind, and if they didn’t come upon the forest road soon, they’d be lost. And hungry, too—the sack with what was left of their lunch had been forgotten under the pine trees.

  Taft shrugged. �
�It’s good for explosions, at least.”

  “I bet that’s what they call zoom. My dad said zoomstones were dangerous to work with.” Christina snagged her sleeve on a sharp twig and yanked it away. “But I still don’t see what good it is, unless Lenny Loompski wants to make bombs—” She stopped, aghast.

  “It wouldn’t have to be bombs. Stuff that explodes like that—they can turn it into energy. Fuel. And that’s worth a lot.” Taft surged ahead. “Look, there’s the road!”

  Christina caught up with him on the forest track and swung into step, her feet scuffing up a fine tan dust. “Hey, that’s it! Remember what my father said last night? He said Lenny wanted to turn Loompski Labs into a factory for cheap fuel.”

  “So singing like a hyena kept me out of the fuel factory—and Danny, too.” Taft grinned. “Danny would copy me so well, he’d sound like two hyenas.”

  Christina cocked her head, listening. “Hide!” she urged, tugging at Taft’s elbow as the rumbling sound of an engine grew louder.

  They ducked down into the undergrowth at the side of the road and waited as the garbage truck with the happy faces chugged past on its way down from the ridge, belching black smoke and leaving a fog of dust in its wake.

  Christina looked up as Taft leapt to his feet. Where was he going? The ridge was in the other direction.

  She ran to catch up to Taft, who was following the garbage truck down the mountain at a fast trot. He turned, his features blurred by the dust that still hung in the air. “I forgot—to remind Danny—to sing off-key,” he jerked out as he ran. “And that truck—is going to the orphanage—I’ll bet you anything.”

  “You can’t beat a truck,” Christina protested, but Taft only increased his speed. Resignedly, she followed on weary legs. At least they were going downhill.

  By the time they arrived at the orphanage, exhausted, the selection was almost complete. Christina crept through a stand of ferns to crouch beside Taft, and saw to her relief that Danny was not standing in the line of kids waiting to scramble in the hopper.

  She stretched out flat, breathing in the rich, musty odors of earth and decomposing leaves. She didn’t care if Taft wanted to go back up to the ridge after this—she wasn’t going. She was tired, and she wanted her supper. At the thought, her stomach growled. She looked around; the afternoon shadows were growing long. What time was it? She had to get back before she was called for dinner, or someone would go to her room and discover she was missing.