by Sechin Tower
There were no bells or PA announcements. The class ended just the same way it began, with the professor looking at the clock and deciding it was about time.
“Ni hao ma?” Brett said to me as I stuffed my spiral notebook into my backpack. I just looked at him blankly—he was picking this up so fast and I couldn’t even remember the basic words I had learned half an hour ago. So much for me being the smartest person he had ever met.
“What I meant to ask,” Brett explained, “is if you’re okay. You’re kind of scowling.”
I hadn’t realized I was scowling, but he was right. “I can already tell I’m going to have trouble in this class. I feel kind of stupid.”
“Any girl who builds awesome robot monsters isn’t stupid,” he said. Then he paused, and after that he added in kind of a rush: “Do you want to form a study group?”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there working my mouth like a fish’s, but no sound came out. In high school, when a boy and a girl “formed a study group,” it actually meant they were going over to each other’s apartments to make out while their parents watched TV in the front room. Maybe it meant something different in college, because I was pretty sure the sun would burn up all its atomic fuel before a guy like Brett would ask a girl like me out for a date.
“I mean,” Brett said. “Me and the guys were going to the library. You know, to practice Chinese and stuff. Would you be interested in that?”
“Um, okay,” I said. I was getting that light-headed feeling I get when I’m nervous. It felt like all the hairs on my scalp had picked up a static electrical charge. “When?”
“I dunno,” he looked at his two friends who stared blankly back at him. “How about tonight? Seven o’clock?”
“Sure, I guess,” I said, brushing some hair out of my eye.
We went our separate ways and I was so distracted that I didn’t realize until half way back to my dorm that I hadn’t asked Brett about why he had freaked out at the mention of the Mechanical Science Institute. Maybe I could ask him at our study group.
When I got back to my room, Hannah was getting ready to leave.
“I hate 10am classes, don’t you?” she said as she set out a row of makeup vials and tubes in front of her illuminated desk mirror. “It’s only three days a week, but it’s sooo early. We’re in college now. Why do we have to get up so early?”
“Hey, Hannah,” I said. “Can I ask you a question? What does it mean if a boy asks you to a study group?”
“It’s a date,” she said while applying a silky black line of eye-liner. I kept watching the reflection of her eyeball which looked as big as a grapefruit in her special mirror. “Or maybe a pre-date,” she went on. “He wants to get to know you better, but not have the pressure of actually going out. That’s what’s so cool about the study group, because you can pretend like it doesn’t mean anything even though it really does. Why—did someone ask you out?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” I flopped on my bed and looked at the ceiling. “Brett’s in my Chinese class and—”
“Brett Jenson?” she just about dropped her eyeliner and turned to study me. Those blue eyes of hers seemed even bigger now than they were in the mirror. “Are you sure you heard him right, Soap? You don’t think he might have been talking to the girl sitting behind you or something?”
I was a bit insulted by that suggestion, but I couldn’t blame her for being surprised. I was surprised, too.
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense, right? Maybe I misunderstood what he wanted.”
“That’s probably it,” Hannah carefully capped the eyeliner and set it down with an audible click on the desk. “When is your…study session?”
“Tonight,” I said. “I was having trouble with Chinese and getting seriously psyched out, so maybe he was just being nice.”
“Are you going?” she asked.
I just stared up at the ceiling. I had told him yes, but now I wasn’t so sure. I mean, who was I kidding? Sixteen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds date in high school, but college was different. How could it end in any way other than disaster?
Hannah held me in her gaze until I felt like a mouse that had been spotted by a hawk. Her smile suddenly came on as if she had flicked a switch.
“Don’t stress yourself about it,” she said, turning with a little too much casualness back towards her mirror. “What time did he say?”
“Seven,” I said.
“Seven pm,” repeated Hannah, sliding on a fresh coat of red lipstick. “That’s good to know.”
I was still so confused by the situation that I couldn’t concentrate in my next class, which was History 152: British Colonial Era. My lack of attention wasn’t helped because the class was taught by a professor with really bad posture who rambled on and on about how the industrial age paved the way for conquest. I tuned out after about five minutes and started reading the syllabus. In high school there had always been one big, fat text book we spent the whole year working our way through, but here there was a whole list of smaller books we needed to buy and the first one was due in one week. I assumed that was a typo: no one would assign an entire book in a week. Would they?
After class, I jetted over to Topsy. Maybe I wasn’t equipped to figure out Brett Jenson, but I was determined to unravel the mystery of how Nikki and Victor had vanished. When I got there, the place was abandoned, just like it had been when I left it the day before. For a couple of super science people, Nikki and Victor didn’t seem to spend much time in the lab. For all I knew, I would never see them again.
I went back upstairs and searched the dean’s residence again. This time I flipped couch cushions looking for clues, stomped on the floors in search of trapdoors, and fiddled with books on the shelves in hopes of triggering a Scooby-Doo style secret passage. Nothing. I even went outside and searched the garden and the base of the clock tower. Still nothing.
I sat down on the stairway to glower. If college was going to be this complicated, maybe I wasn’t ready for it yet. I would have caught a train home that very minute if there had been one. I missed my Dad. I missed my apartment. I missed the big city, even with all its noises and smells. At least back home there were people I could ask for advice.
Then I remembered the phone in my pocket. I pulled it out and dialed the number for the Professor. His name meant he was a teacher, so maybe he could teach me something. Besides, I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask, and I didn’t see how it could hurt.
“Sophia,” he answered the phone. “I didn’t expect you to call. I got the data for the key combination. Thank you.”
“Glad to hear it, but I have a question about something else.”
“I’m afraid I’m frightfully busy at the moment,” he said. “Make it quick?”
“You used to go here, right? I mean, you used to be in the Mechanical Science Institute, right? You said you were.”
“Yes, that’s right. Is that your question?”
“No. My question is: where’s the secret room? I know there must be one because the others are never around in the main part of Topsy.”
“Oh, you mean they haven’t told you yet?” the Professor said as though I had asked for nothing more serious than the location of the cookie jar. “Unless things have changed considerably since my day, all you have to do is go to the shower room at the top of the stairs. Go to the far corner and then count nine tiles over and nine tiles up from the far wall and you’ll find a hatch that slides back to reveal the elevator controls.”
I was stunned that it was that easy to get the answer. “Seriously?” was all I could say.
“Seriously,” said the Professor. “I must go now. I have much to prepare for tonight. I’ll see you soon.”
Chapter 15 ~ Dean
The kid with the bike had dropped the charges, so Sheriff Kidd had no choice but to let Dean go. After a mere 23 hour stay in the holding cell of the building that doubled as Bugswallow’s police station and cit
y hall, Dean was a free man.
The whole town couldn’t have been more than four blocks long, bookended on one side by the college campus and at the other end by the local grocery store. Most of the buildings in between had the scenic, turn-of-the-century brick architecture style with businesses on the ground floor and apartments or private offices on the second. There were no franchise restaurants or big-box retailers here, just local shops owned by local people, many handed down from generation to generation.
The ice-pack he had been using to fight the swelling in his nose had long since melted, so he dropped it into a trashcan about a block up from the police-station-slash-city-hall. Even the trashcans in Bugswallow were beautiful, encased in decorative stone sconces topped with cigarette sand-trays that were so smooth that there must have been a secret team of Zen monks working full-time to keep them perfectly raked. When he leaned over to spit a clot of blood into the trashcan, an old lady passing by on the street shook her head accusingly.
After cleaning himself up, Dean made it back to the university just in time to get his orientation packet before they closed up for the day. The fat manila envelope handed to him by the human resources director contained a stack of employment paperwork, and, more importantly, a big brass key that was supposed to give him full access to Topsy.
Dean slid the key deep into his pocket where he kept the letters from McKenzie. Now he could begin his investigation in earnest. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could find the mysterious egg that the Blitzkriegers were after. Had that been what McKenzie had meant when she said “what they want is in our founder’s head?” Her parting statement still haunted and confused him.
Twenty minutes later, Dean parked his big red pickup in between the only other cars in the Topsy lot, a jet-black BMW and a beat-up blue Volkswagen. For all he knew, one of those cars belonged to Soap. Then it hit him that he had never called his cousin or her father to let them know he was coming out to Bugswallow. She had no idea he would be her Dean of Students. In hindsight, he thought it was a stupid oversight, but he had been so wrapped up in his grief and his confusion during the last week that it hadn’t occurred to him to call. No point now, he thought. It’ll just have to be a fun surprise.
His duffel bag slung over his shoulder, the ex-firefighter followed the path out of the parking lot and up the broad stairs to some very melodramatic doors. He had his key out looking for a lock when the doors, as if sensing his presence, opened with a clang and swung slowly outwards under their own power.
After a brief hesitation, he entered into a hallway full of old portraits and one big statue of a little guy sitting in a big chair. Judging from the man’s mustache and center-parted hair, Dean guessed it was a statue of Edgar Allen Poe. At the far end of the hall, he saw the marble bust of a man with bushy hair and a thick mustache.
“Hello, Einstein,” he said, patting the bust as he passed.
The next room contained the most advanced science lab Dean had ever imagined. It was a large space filled with hundreds of drawers, cabinets, and cubby-holes, any one of which could have contained the mysterious egg. Still, Dean was willing to bet that what he was looking for was not out here in the open. Instead, he found the spiral staircase and ascended to the Dean of Student’s residence, where he found the door unlocked.
His new residence consisted of a spacious apartment that occupied an area of the roof at the base of the clock tower. Dean set his brass key on the kitchen table and showed himself around. The carpet and the walls were all cream colored, and the furnishings and decorations had that art deco look that made everything seem grandiose and imposing. A group of hand-carved African masks were the only ornaments on the walls of the living room. In the dining room there were some weird paintings that looked to Dean like tentacles, but when he read the little tag of paper in the lower corner he discovered that they were electron microscope scans of flower petals. Not exactly Dean’s preferred kind of art, and not what he would have expected from McKenzie, either.
McKenzie was supposed to have lived here, but he couldn’t see her anywhere in this place. Actually, it lacked the feeling of being lived-in by anyone. All the drawers and closets were empty, and the only thing in the refrigerator was a neat stack of pizza boxes.
Dean slumped on the well-padded couch. His cracked rib stung like crazy and suddenly he felt tired. The physical injuries didn’t worry him—he had recovered from all manner of cuts, sprains, and breaks in the past, and he had faith in his body’s physical process. It was the emotional wounds that left him drained.
He had known it would be a long-shot to find the egg in the apartment, especially since he didn’t even know exactly what he was looking for. Was it a big ostrich-sized thing that would hatch a dinosaur? Or a tiny bead that contained some generically enhanced insect? He didn’t know and, as he sat on the couch, he realized he didn’t care. What he had really hoped to find in that apartment was some trace of McKenzie.
Dean decided some fresh air might help. He winced as got up and pulled open the door at the back of the apartment.
The entire roof was carpeted in grass. Real, living grass, the kind that invited picnics and barefoot running. There were trees, too: mostly thin-trunked fruit trees but some were as big around as Dean’s thigh, and all of them were planted in gargantuan ceramic or wooden pots. And there were also raised beds of neat, orderly flowers and vegetables that crawled up lattices or carpeted the ground with color. The air smelled of jasmine and honeysuckle, scents he couldn’t name but which he had learned to love. It smelled of McKenzie.
Dean sat down and ran his fingers through grass. McKenzie had lived out here, and still did in every one of these trees and bushes and thorny vines.
“Hello, again,” he whispered, finally seeing her spirit all around him.
What he didn’t see was the scaly thing perched on the first terrace of the clock tower. It slipped out from behind a gargoyle statue that might have been its twin, but it was no stone carving. It crept forward on long, sinewy limbs and flexed the barbs that ran down its back as it tracked Dean’s movements with red eyes.
Chapter 16 ~ Soap
The elevator took me down, down, down, and when the doors finally slid back I found myself in a mad scientist’s wonderland. This laboratory was almost as large as the one on the ground floor of Topsy, but its low ceiling and windowless walls wouldn’t let me forget that we were deep underground. While everything upstairs was polished and shining, here it was rusty, gritty, and real. It looked like someone had vivisected a hundred cars, vacuum cleaners, and computers and spread all the pieces over dozens of metal tables. In another spot, strange vapors rose out of flasks and flowed through elaborate tracks of glass pipes and latex hoses. One wall was covered in hundreds of shelves, each lined with jars of bleached white specimens, including a centipede the size of a garden hose and a whole bunch of other stuff I couldn’t even recognize. Everything was illuminated by the full spectrum lighting in the ceiling, but there was so much stuff that long shadows connected every workbench and shelf. These shadows shifted and danced in time with the pulsing blue electrical discharges from an enormous Tesla Coil that was sealed off by a chain-link fence in a corner of the room.
There were no inner walls here, but the density of the shelves, gizmos, and tools made the place seem like there were. The first area appeared to be storage, with boxes lining the shelves. I peeked under a lid and pulled out a big pistol with six shiny silver rotating barrels and a trailing cord that looked like it supplied both ammunition and electrical power. It was surprisingly light in my hands, and when I unscrewed it I saw that it was a rail gun—a weapon that uses magnetic pulses to accelerate its projectiles to amazing speeds. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was why it had those six rotating barrels. Big machineguns sometimes need multiple barrels to prevent overheating due to friction, but a rail gun had no friction and so it simply wouldn’t heat up that way.
“Soap?!” the exclamation was paired with a metallic clatter off to my
right. I turned to see a very surprised Victor staring at me, his ice-blue eyes wide in astonishment, a tray of surgical implements on the floor at his feet.
“Oh, hi,” I said. “Hey, do you know why this rail gun has so many barrels?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see the real lab,” I said. “I was feeling kind of left out.”
Nikki entered the aisle, and when she saw me she laughed. “Oh, sugar, I figured it wouldn’t take you long to find out, but this has got to be a record.”
“Hi, Nikki. Do you know why this gun has six barrels?” I held up the pieces to show her what I meant.
“No idea,” she said. “Maybe it’s just to look cool.”
I looked down at the weapon in my hands. All those barrels did look snazzy in a Star Wars kind of way, but no engineer worth his paycheck would add so much complication to an experimental device just for the sake of appearance.
“You can’t be down here,” Victor said. “You’re not ready to see this place. You have to leave.”
“Oh, relax, Vic,” Nikki said, sweeping past him to gently take the rail gun from my hand and replace it on the shelf. “She already knows about the place, and you can’t un-know a thing.”
Victor went off grumbling about getting back to his research while Nikki gave me a brief guided tour. We didn’t get very far before my curiosity overwhelmed my listening skills.
“What’s that?” I asked about a vat of liquid that bubbled and changed colors like a kaleidoscope.
“That there’s my chameleon dye,” Nikki said. “I’m trying to get it so you can change the color of your clothes or your hair with the press of a button. Still workin’ out the bugs, I’m afraid.”
