The Secret of Zoom

by Lynne Jonell

  Christina lay in a heap, breathing hard. She had almost blown herself up.

  Her hand was bleeding, too. But things could have been worse. She was safe, and she had her mother’s message, and—

  And the plane was rolling. She had forgotten to set the brakes.

  She lunged, she grabbed, but she was too late. The plane tipped for a long, agonizing moment at the corner of the ledge and then fell, hurtling nose first down the mountainside with a shriek of twisting metal and a rending crash.

  Christina sat hunched on the ledge in the pale, cold light of a quarter moon. For some bizarre reason, the dancing chickens from Chickie-Go Math came to her mind, with their signs that read GOOD EFFORT! and NICE TRY!

  She stared out into nothingness. It didn’t matter in the least how hard she had tried or how good her efforts had been. She had failed. And if she were the crying sort, now would be the perfect time to burst into tears.

  Her father was in jail.

  Her only friend had been captured.

  A horrible man wanted to turn her into one of his orphan slaves.

  And to top it all off, she was soaking wet, bleeding, and stranded on the side of a cliff—plus she had just watched the coolest kid-sized plane in the world roll over the edge and vanish forever.

  Shivering, Christina picked shards of glass out of her palm and tried to think of something good about her situation.

  Well, she had her mother’s message. Of course, the moon didn’t give enough light to read it by.

  On the other hand, she did have perfect pitch and a canister full of zoom.

  Carefully, delicately, Christina unscrewed the canister’s lid all the way. She flattened out the crumpled, blotted paper with her good hand and opened her mouth to sing a high G-sharp.

  But instead, she found herself singing her mother’s lullaby.

  Someday you may find yourself lost and far from home . . .

  The canister of zoom glowed beautifully pink as Christina reached the high G-sharp and held it. She smoothed the message with a trembling hand—and almost cried aloud in disappointment. The message was blotted on every line with her blood.

  A word here and there was readable. Danny’s ABC, for one—she could make a guess at Adnoid, Beth, Christina—but besides that, just a few more random words, senseless without the other words around them. About the only thing that wasn’t defaced with a red smear was the date, in the upper right-hand corner . . .

  The date.

  Christina blinked twice and read the clear script again.

  The year was this year. The date was last week.

  Her mother was still alive!

  HER mother was still alive, and trapped in the mountain. She might be on the other side of the rock wall, right now.

  Christina’s mouth went dry. She stared wildly at the blood-soaked message. Only a few days ago, her mother had touched this very paper. Only a few days ago, Beth Adnoid had been thinking of her daughter—she had written Christina’s name.

  Christina pressed the note to her chest. She was getting blood all over her shirt, but she didn’t care. The thought of her mother, alive, so close, filled her with an ache so acute she almost couldn’t breathe.

  Words drifted through her head, accompanied by a haunting tune. Never fear, Mother’s near, though just out of sight . . .

  She swallowed hard and shook herself. She had to get a grip. Her mother needed rescuing, and now.

  But how to start? What to do?

  Christina gazed at the sheer cliff with its translucent streaks of zoom, still faintly shining from the note she had sung.

  She put her face up close to the rock. The fine tracery of pink and green webbed over the surface like a veil. The color was fading, dying away as she watched.

  She sang a G-sharp, exactly on pitch. The thin veins of zoom brightened, and strengthened in hue. They were mere threads, not pencil-thick strands of zoom as she had seen before, but there was something different in the rock behind them. The rock surrounding the zoom did not stay dark, but seemed to blush in wide swaths of muted color.

  It was almost as if, somewhere deeper inside the rock, there was a strong, broad vein of zoom lying hidden.

  How deep did it go? Could she melt it and just walk right in?

  But there was a layer of stone over it. How could the zoom respond to the vibrations of her pitch, with all that rock in the way?

  Christina looked at the mountain before her. Leo Loompski had said that thoughts had vibrations. Would it help if she could somehow focus her thoughts while she sang?

  She shook her head, setting the helmet’s tubes swinging. Of course Leo had figured out a way to make it work for the plane, but that didn’t mean it would work without inner mechanisms and the—

  The helmet. The plane was gone, but she still had the helmet.

  She touched the long flexible tubes hanging down; she looked at the couplings on the ends, and suddenly felt like a fool. What did she think she was going to do—plug them into the mountain?

  She felt a sudden urge to laugh hysterically. Of course it wouldn’t work. How dumb, how ridiculous, how absolutely stupid, it was as stupid as dancing chickens, as stupid as math.

  Christina paced three steps in one direction and three steps back, grazing her knuckles against the rock as she turned. She sucked on her hand where it had started to bleed again and put her back against the cliff wall. All right, what else, then? What other options did she have?

  She stared blankly into the dark. Nothing came to mind.

  Below the cliff, pine boughs shifted uneasily in the night breeze, making a lost, forlorn sound. Christina’s wet clothes stuck clammily to her skin, and she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering as the wind picked up.

  The thought of Nanny suddenly filled her mind: Nanny, large and huggable, running a hot bath, tucking her into a warm bed piled high with quilts . . .

  Christina felt like slapping herself. What was she doing, thinking about warm quilts when her mother was trapped inside a mountain, needing her?

  She clenched her hands together and shut her eyes in concentration. She needed a great idea, and she needed it now.

  After a moment, she found she was thinking of blueberry pie and dry clothes.

  Christina felt a slow flush spread from her neck to her cheeks, and she slid down to sit with her face buried in her arms. Of course she couldn’t think of a great idea. She wasn’t used to real problems, in a real world. She was used to being babied and taken care of and kept safe behind a fence.

  Not like the kids she watched through her telescope, who figured out things on their own all the time—new rules for games, stunts on their skateboards, how to find their way in the dark on Halloween.

  Not like Taft, who had learned math in spite of poor teachers and hardly any school and had taken care of Danny besides.

  Not like her mother, who was trapped but had still sent message after message, never giving up hope. Now it was Christina’s turn to do what she could. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be nothing at all.

  Christina tried very hard not to cry. She was mostly successful. After a while she wiped her nose and looked up.

  The night sky was salted with stars. Somewhere in that bright scattering was a star that had once shone through her nursery window, a star her mother had put in a song. There was no way to tell which one it was, but it was still shining on her, that much was certain.

  A lovely thought. Completely useless at the moment, of course. But it gave her a little spark of courage.

  Was her first idea worth trying? Plugging a helmet into a mountain sounded like the brainless idea of a very stupid person, but then she had thought she was stupid at math, too, and Taft had shown her that wasn’t true.

  And even the dancing chickens, annoying as they were, had never held signs in their beaks that said WAY TO GIVE UP! and HOORAY, YOU QUIT!

  Christina gazed past her knees, thinking. The pine tops spread out below the cliff like a restless dark
sea, and far beyond, down in the valley, she could see the winking lights of Dorf, like a bowl of fallen stars.

  Okay, so maybe she could try her idea.

  But could she use the power of zoom if she didn’t first believe it would work? She couldn’t be sure that her song would work through solid rock, or that she could rescue Taft or her mother or the other orphans, or that she could even save herself.

  She blinked up at the stars, considering this. And then her little spark of courage flared into a tiny bit of hope.

  She could act as if she believed it. She could begin by doing the first thing, and she could go on to the next. And maybe, if she kept on going, the belief, or the focused thought, or whatever it was she needed, would come to her. At any rate, she didn’t intend to fail for lack of trying.

  She looked at the stone wall, now completely dark again. Step by step, Taft had said when he taught her math. All right, then. What did she know for sure?

  Well, she knew that zoom worked. It was mysterious, but it worked all the same.

  She looked at the dangling tubes. The zoom had been drawn up from the fuel tank, through the tube, and into the helmet, where it had been as close to her brain as was possible. Then the zoom had gone back down the other tube and back into the plane.

  The mountain had no fuel chambers, no internal switches, no delicate mechanisms. It was crude, raw—just rock and zoom and nothing else. If the helmet was going to work, the tubes had to go straight into the zoom.

  Christina sang a soft, high G-sharp, and scanned the surface of the rock as the threads of zoom grew luminous. Was there any place where the threads seemed to be a little thicker? Could she just shove the tube in somewhere? The couplings would have to come off first.

  Christina pulled out the jackknife from her pocket and cut off the ends of the tubes with two sharp motions. The couplings went flying. One hit the canister of zoom with a small ting.

  She looked at the canister thoughtfully. Yes, that might work. It would be just like the plane, only simpler.

  Christina’s hands trembled slightly, whether from cold or excitement she didn’t know. She dangled the helmet’s left tube into the canister’s gelling zoom. She pressed the open end of the right tube against the rock wall, a quarter inch into the thickest spot of zoom she could find. And then she began to sing.

  A high G-sharp pierced the air, clear and pure, and the zoom began to gleam and soften. Beneath the surface of the stone, thick veins of pink and green started to glow, faint at first and then with more intensity. The liquid from the canister moved slowly up the tube like a milk shake through a straw; it coiled heavily through the helmet and then through the other tube and into the mountain.

  The threads of zoom opened up, melted, began to stream down the rock face in a shining skein. Christina pushed the right tube farther in, took a fast breath, and sustained the tone. She focused her thoughts the best she could, on the melting zoom, on the zoom deep within the rock, on what she hoped was on the other side—her mother.

  And with that thought came a wave of longing so sharp, so strong, it filled her mind just as the sound of the G-sharp filled her ears, and she shut her eyes and tipped back her head and sang with every ounce of air in her lungs, with all the power and passion and belief that she had.

  The mountain trembled beneath her. There was a series of abrupt noises, like pistol shots, and Christina opened her eyes to see bits of the rock flaking away, and the green and pink glowing liquid pouring out, flooding out, it was a river of zoom—

  CRACK. The cliff split. The gap widened, lengthened, spread down and across, opened under her feet. The rock crumbled beneath her.

  She fell into darkness.

  SHE was screaming, she was sliding, she was moving with terrible speed down a glowing, brightly colored vein of zoom. It threaded her into the roots of the mountain like a sock through a winding laundry chute and dumped her out at last on a sandy floor, where she rolled and bumped and skidded and finally rammed into something extremely hard. Her head promptly snapped sideways and bashed itself just above her left ear, and everything went black.

  Sometime later she opened her eyes.

  The face over her was wrinkled, with a faded blue gaze and a kindly, befuddled smile. Above the bushy eyebrows was a nimbus of white hair, and below the dumpling chin was a dirty white lab coat and a name badge.

  Christina blinked twice and the name came into wavering focus.

  “Have we met?” asked Leo Loompski.

  Christina felt the lump under her hair and thought that she must have banged her head pretty hard.

  And then another figure came into view, silhouetted by a lantern that hung behind. Christina heard a sudden intake of breath and then a thin arm reached swiftly back and unhooked the lantern, raising it high.

  Leo Loompski turned with evident relief. “There you are, my dear. Is this little girl someone we know? I seem to have forgotten her name.”

  Christina, flat on her back, looked up and saw a woman’s face.

  It was a familiar face, one Christina had seen before. It was older now, and pale and unwell looking, but the eyes were just like the photographs, and the hair was still the color of honey.

  “Mom?” whispered Christina. She swallowed past the pressure in her throat and struggled up onto her elbows. “I got your message.”

  For a long time, all Christina’s mother did was hug her daughter and cry. But at last they began to talk and share bits and pieces of their lives.

  “I thought of you every single day,” said Beth Adnoid. She wiped her eyes, coughing, and dropped a kiss on the top of Christina’s head. “How old you were, what your interests might be, what made you laugh. Some days, it was all that kept me going.”

  Christina leaned against her mother’s side. She pressed her cheek into the hollow formed between shoulder and collarbone, and listened to the quiet wheeze of her mother breathing in and out. It was odd to suddenly have a mother after all these years, but Christina was sure she could get used to it. Something inside her was deeply contented in a way she couldn’t remember ever being before.

  She looked up at the ceiling of the vast cavern. She didn’t feel quite as closed in and claustrophobic as she had in the other tunnel, but maybe that was because this cave was huge and vaulted like a cathedral. High, high above was an opening, and through it poured the light of the moon.

  Around the edges of the cavern hung shaded lanterns, turned down low for the night. Equipment, stacks of papers, counters full of test tubes—all reminded Christina of the cave she and Taft had explored, and indeed this was part of the same system. Her mother had shown her the other side of the cave-in that had buried half of Leo Loompski’s secret laboratory.

  “There was some kind of explosion aboveground. Lenny had been working up there—who knows, he might have caused the explosion himself—and the rock slide cut off our way out. There was no food, but luckily there was an underground stream that gave us fresh water. You can imagine how thankful we were on the third day when we heard Lenny Loompski shouting to us through the hole in the roof.”

  Christina looked up. Moonlight streamed through the hole in a shaft of pure light, pooling on the floor of the cave. Her mother followed her gaze.

  “That’s where I stand every night and sing,” she said, nodding at the moonlit sand.

  “A lullaby,” said Christina slowly. “To the tune of ‘Largo,’ from the New World Symphony. I saw the sheet music in the scrapbook you started.”

  “Did you?” Beth Adnoid gave her a fond smile. “I knew you couldn’t hear me—not really—but all the same, I would sing as strongly as I could, straight up at that opening. I liked to think that the breeze would carry the tune to your window.”

  So that was how the orphans had learned it.

  Christina found it hard to speak. Her overwhelming weariness combined with powerful emotion made her feel as if she were a very small child again. She pressed her face against her mother and shut her eyes. Her mothe
r was so warm.

  “Now where was I? Oh, yes—Lennard Loompski. Well, I don’t know what he was doing aboveground those three days—”

  “He was blowing up your other laboratory and telling everyone you had been in it,” said Christina, her voice muffled.

  “No doubt.” Beth Adnoid coughed, turning her face away. “But of course we didn’t know that. He lowered a basket to us with food and said he would bring rescuers and lifting equipment and get us out. He told me to send up my wedding ring—it would give Wilfer something to hold on to, he said—and then we waited.”

  “And waited,” said Christina, guiltily passing over the subject of the wedding ring.

  “Yes. From time to time he’d bring more food and more excuses. And then he started to lower supplies so that we could work. Discover the secret of zoom, he said. Learn to control its power, write up the results of our research, give him a paper he could submit for the Karsnicky Medal, and he would make us rich. As if we cared about that!” she added scornfully.

  “So what did you do instead?” Christina twisted a braid around her finger.

  “I kept working on exactly what Lenny wanted me to. But I wasn’t doing it for him. I was trying to discover how to use it myself. With a dependable power source, I could have figured out a way to get out of here. And even without it, I tried and tried. But Lenny always managed to thwart my attempts. And we came near to blowing ourselves up a few times, too.”

  Christina chewed on the end of her braid. Something wasn’t making sense. “But I thought that Leo Loompski had already figured out how zoom worked,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you? Weren’t you working together?”

  Her mother shook her head. “I’m afraid the cave-in unsettled Leo’s mind. And living here for years has only made it worse. He keeps saying he’s discovered how to make it work, but he can’t actually do it. It’s sad to watch him, but if I try to argue, he just gets agitated. I’ve found it’s best to give him the materials he asks for and let him go his own way.”