by Matt London
Buzzard Kid slapped the back of Crab Boy’s shell, which was covered in engraved swirls and gentle peaks. “Open up, Gregory. Let’s get the scanners running.”
“I hate when you do that, Buzz.”
Gregory grumbled as he crouched down on his hands and knees so that Buzz could pop open a compartment on the back of his shell. It revealed a laptop computer and a small satellite dish. The dish spun in a lazy circle, and when Buzz opened the computer, Benjamin used his telescopic vision to examine the screen. It looked like radar of the area. Little red dots represented the life signatures of his three enemies.
He knew what they were after. Benjamin opened the small storage compartment on his left thigh and reached inside. He caressed the Ultimate Continent Ownership Form with his hand.
“I can’t figure out what these little dots mean,” Buzz growled.
“Bring it over here,” Gregory said. Buzz removed the laptop from his shell and brought it to the bespectacled boy. Gregory examined the data. “Okay, Buzz, look at this. These little dots are us. Three members of Aniarmament, three life signatures. There’s you and me next to each other. And that one off away from the others must be Kitty.”
The girl with the cheetah legs was standing a foot behind them. “What are you talking about? I’m right here.”
The boys looked over at her, then back at the screen. “Hmm . . .” Gregory squinted. “Oh, I see. This large dot is actually two conjoined dots, representing Buzz and my combined signatures.”
“Then who is that fourth dot?” Buzz asked.
WARNING. HOSTILE ACTION DETECTED. INITIATE EVASION PROTOCOL.
Alarms quite literally went off inside Benjamin’s head. But before he could react, a robotic claw at the end of a long metal arm emerged from a flap in Gregory’s cyber shell. It shot across the glade and burst through the leafy panel covering Benjamin’s cave. The claw grasped him around the throat and ripped him through the leaves.
Twigs snapped. The panel broke with a crack. The claw dragged Benjamin into the clearing. Benjamin grabbed the metal arm. With an intense burst of strength, he tore the claw off him.
“Ow! Ow!” Gregory wailed, retracting the claw into his shell.
Buzz and Kitty tensed their cybernetic enhancements and tackled Benjamin.
RELEASE DEFENSIVE MEASURES. COUNTER-ATTACK. INCREASE TORQUE.
Benjamin extended his fists and rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, swiveling around his waist. His outstretched arms acted like a tornado, knocking Buzz away. Kitty leaped onto Benjamin’s back, but the robot boy grabbed her and threw her against Gregory’s shell. There was a loud dong as she struck the shell, and Kitty and Gregory rolled across the ground.
“How dare Viola send such weaklings against me!?” Benjamin let out a digitized growl. “Are you the best Mastercorp has to offer? How amusing!”
“She’s the boss. We’re going to do as she asks.” Buzz wiped blood from his nose.
“I am the ruler of this continent,” Benjamin said. “Me. I am your king. Your nightmare. You cannot defeat me.”
“We’re not here to defeat you,” Gregory groaned, flopping, his face in the dirt with his big shell weighing him down. “We’re here to get you to join us. We want you on our team.”
“That’s right,” Buzz said, slowly approaching Benjamin. “Mastercorp needs you. You know about the Lane city, right? Scifun? We need to destroy it. And Winterpole too. Mastercorp wants us to take them out, with your ownership form, and with your great power.”
“Don’t you remember all the good times you had working for Mastercorp?” Kitty asked. “Betraying Winterpole as a double agent?”
ANALYZING PROBABILITIES. CALCULATING OUTCOMES. EVALUATING COMBATANT SKILL SETS.
The robotic words burned in Benjamin’s head. “Mastercorp left me to die in the ruins of New Miami!”
“But you didn’t die, did you?” Buzz flapped his metal wings. “And now look at you. Look how powerful you are. Just like us.”
“You’re right,” Benjamin said as he flexed his metal hand. “I am strong, thanks to Mastercorp’s actions. I will join you brats, but I will be your leader. The leader of the Brat Brigade.”
Buzz, Kitty, and Gregory knelt before Benjamin.
“As long as you serve Mastercorp, we are your loyal brats,” Buzz said.
Benjamin nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent. And our first task will be to use the UCOF and seize control of the eighth continent!”
ATOP A HILL ALONG THE SOUTHERN COAST OF THE EIGHTH CONTINENT, PAST THE WESTERN EDGE OF Scifun, a humble stone marker emerged from the tall grass, facing the sea. Evie took a deep breath when she saw the stone.
They could have flown the Roost to the hill in just a few minutes, but Evie wanted to walk. It was a sunny and breezy day, and the ocean made such lovely noises as it danced across the beach.
Rick walked at Evie’s side, and Sprout joined them. 2-Tor took up the rear, his metal joints squeaking as he followed the children. The eight-foot-tall mechanical crow had been quiet since he and Evie escaped from the Mastercorp dreadnought. Evie suspected he missed Didi, Vesuvia’s tutor and fellow robo-bird. The two had formed a close bond. Evie couldn’t even remember the last time he had administered a quiz.
“Hey, 2-Tor,” Evie said. “How come you never quiz us any more? Algebra! Evie has twice as many continents as Rick. Rick has three continents, plus an unknown number of continents—let’s call it X continents. If Evie has eight continents, then what is the unknown number?”
“X equals one!” Rick said breathlessly as he reached the top of the grassy hill.
“I was asking 2-Tor,” Evie said.
“Oh, Miss Evelyn,” 2-Tor said admiringly. “It defragments my internal drives to see you demonstrate such a strong comprehension of mathematics.”
Evie smiled, glad to brighten her robot friend’s mood. “Of course, you silly bird. After everything we’ve been through, it shouldn’t be a surprise that something you said rubbed off on me.”
Sprout tipped back his cowboy hat and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “I don’t get it. If Evie has eight continents, then how can Rick have continents too? Are there more than eight continents? And how do you ‘have’ continents in the first place? I reckon Evie ain’t telling us the whole story.”
“Yee-haw! I always tell the truth.” Evie leaped onto Sprout’s back. He took off like a rocket, and soon they joined Rick on top of the hill. They collapsed onto the grass in a fit of giggles. As 2-Tor joined them on the summit, Evie noticed the sad expression on Rick’s face. She followed his eyes to the stone marker facing the sea.
DOCTOR EVAN GRANT
Inventor
Mentor
Friend
Evie’s heart twisted up in a knot. She had not been prepared for her return to Doctor Grant’s memorial to be so emotional, but it didn’t surprise her. Doctor Grant had been a giving teacher to Rick and Evie and their father. He sacrificed himself to save Evie’s life and made the eighth continent a reality.
Rick stared at his feet. “We haven’t been up here much lately. Things have been so busy in Scifun.”
Evie put her arm around his shoulders. “I know. I feel bad, but I think he would be happy that we’re busy.”
“Do not feel sorrow, children,” 2-Tor soothed them. “The doctor has not been totally alone.”
“Rrrrowl!” A lanky orange cat slinked around the side of the stone memorial. He purred loudly at the sight of Rick and Evie.
“Niels Bohr!” Evie ran to the cat and scooped him up in her arms. The cat nuzzled her cheek and dug his claws into her shirt. Evie winced. Cats had weird ways of showing affection.
Evie carried him over to the others. When 2-Tor reached out a wing tip to pet the cat’s fur, Niels Bohr pounced onto 2-Tor’s shoulder and climbed onto the robo-bird’s beak. The cat let his tail and p
aws dangle off the sides, considering the beak an acceptable place to sleep.
“I say, children, this is most uncomfortable.” 2-Tor’s voice was muffled thanks to the cat napping on his beak. Niels Bohr meowed irritably, as if he considered it quite rude for 2-Tor to disturb him.
Evie suppressed a giggle. Niels Bohr had been living out here by the memorial ever since the garbage patch had become the eighth continent. Every few days someone would spot him padding around the settlement looking for food. Mostly he stayed close to his former owner. He must have been happy to see his old friends.
“All right,” Sprout said, looking around the group. “So we found the tiger cat. ‘My friend from Copenhagen,’ as y’all were saying. Now what?”
“Good question,” Evie answered. “How is a cat supposed to help us figure out how to re-create the Eden Compound?”
Niels Bohr purred lazily. His whiskers twitched into a little cat smile, almost as if he knew the answer.
Rick scratched his chin. “I’m not sure how he’s going to help us, but I believe the note Doctor Grant left behind has to be a clue.”
Evie sighed. “Even if Niels Bohr did know Doctor Grant’s secrets, how could he tell us? He’s just a cat.”
Niels Bohr meowed aggressively, as if he took great offense at being called “just a cat.”
“Maybe there’s a secret message hidden in his collar,” Rick offered.
Evie looked through the fur on Niels Bohr’s neck, but he wasn’t wearing a collar. She gave him a pat on the head. “Come on, little guy. Give us a hint.”
The cat hopped off 2-Tor’s beak. “My word!” The robot moaned. Niels Bohr curled up at Evie’s feet, showing off the silky fur and dark stripes along his back. He rubbed back and forth across Evie’s legs until his fur was ruffled in such a way that you could see down to the mottled skin underneath. Evie squinted at it. There were markings on Niels Bohr’s skin, markings she had never seen before. She supposed she had never really looked that closely. The markings looked almost like . . .
“Hey, Rick, check this out!” Evie spread the fur apart. Rick and Sprout crowded over the cat. “What is this, like a tattoo?”
“It’s writing,” Rick said. “See? That’s a letter ‘A.’ But I can’t read it. The fur is too thick.”
“Who would tattoo a cat?” Sprout asked, puzzled.
“I don’t know,” Evie said. “But it seems like a good way to hide a secret message.”
“So how do we read it?” Rick asked.
“We’ll have to shave his fur, I guess,” Evie said. “Then it’ll be clear to read the message.”
Niels Bohr meowed in displeasure.
“I mean, come on!” Evie offered the boys a weak grin. “How hard could it be to shave a cat?”
Bottles of soap and jars of face cream clattered to the floor as Niels Bohr scrambled across the shelf in Evie’s mother’s bathroom. Half-coated in shaving cream, Niels Bohr meowed hysterically, leaping from the shelf to the sink, the sink to the tile floor.
“He’s squirmier than a worm in an apple!” Sprout observed. The cat twisted and writhed on the tiles, trying to kick the shaving cream off his fur with a paw.
Rick laughed. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“My word!” 2-Tor wailed. “What will Missus Lane say?”
Evie looked down at the razor and can of shaving cream in her hands. They’d been at this for two hours since returning to the Lane family’s private apartment in Spire One, and they were no closer to reading the secret message tattooed on Niels Bohr’s skin. Mom was going to throw a fit when she saw what a mess they had made.
Niels Bohr hissed at the pile of shaving cream he had kicked onto the floor.
“I told you the cream was a bad idea,” Rick said. “Maybe we should try the clippers again.” He switched on the electric clippers in his hand. They buzzed loudly. The sound sent the tiger cat into another tizzy. He jumped five feet into the air and landed in the empty bathtub.
“Please, Niels Bohr!” Evie begged. “We need your help. I know it’s unpleasant, but we really need to read that message. You’re our only hope at stopping Mastercorp. We need to know what Doctor Grant left for us. We can’t do it without you.”
At his former owner’s name, Niels Bohr poked his head over the edge of the tub. He squinted at Evie, folded back his ears, and said “Rrrowl!”
“Please . . .” Evie stepped closer. When the cat didn’t move, she set down the razor and shaving cream and petted the cat’s head. “Help us.”
Niels Bohr purred and nuzzled her hand, and then he walked in a tight circle on the floor of the tub and laid down, exposing the patch of his back where the tattoo was. Evie waved Rick over, and as the buzzing clippers came closer, Niels Bohr covered his face with his front paws.
A few furry moments later, Evie was cradling a skinny, hairless tiger cat in her arms, and Rick was scooping vast quantities of fur into a canvas sack for repurposing. The cat watched mournfully as the fur disappeared.
“Don’t worry, little guy.” Evie gave Niels Bohr a soothing hug. “It’ll grow back.
They crowded around the cat and examined the markings on his skin. There were two lines of text. Sprout tried to decipher the first line. “Colon-Slash-Slash . . . What does this mean?”
“Looks like a uniform resource locator,” Rick said.
“A URL?” Evie examined the text. “Like for a website?”
Rick pulled out his pocket tablet and typed in the address. White text on a plain black background appeared. ENTER PASSWORD, it said.
“Maybe this is the code,” Evie said, pointing at the second line of the tattoo. It looked like a random string of letters, numbers, and symbols, but maybe it wasn’t so random.
Rick typed it in and then the screen changed. The glow of the screen illuminated the children’s faces. Niels Bohr meowed in surprise. Evie couldn’t believe what she saw.
DIANA CLIPPED HER OFFICIAL WINTERPOLE ICE CLEATS ONTO THE SOLES OF HER SHOES AND stepped out of the hover-shuttle onto the north coast of the eighth continent. She wished she could have stayed in Scifun to help her friends stave off Mastercorp’s advances on the island. But Winterpole had a great deal of work to do, and the Winterpole outpost was where she was needed most.
A troop of guards in iceberg helmets tromped across the frozen ground. Most of the base was comprised of the network of winding tunnels beneath them, but the launchpad for all airborne missions was up on the surface, and those vehicles had to be guarded.
Agents Barry and Larry slipped and slid over to the elevator tube that would take them down to the base’s main chamber underground. Diana stayed close to Mister Snow, who walked with purpose to the communications relay on the western end of the frozen launchpad. Unlike Barry and Larry, Mister Snow had remembered his ice cleats.
He waved her over to the satellite dish where the communications agent was printing a list of messages from a mechanical typewriter. Mister Snow tore off the first several messages for examination.
Diana found it funny that she and Mister Snow had done so much work together the past six months. When she first began training as a junior agent, she had thought Mister Snow was totally the bad guy, but ever since she had convinced him to forge an alliance with the Lanes, they had transformed this base into the most productive Winterpole outpost on the planet. After Benjamin Nagg had been exposed as a double agent secretly working for Mastercorp, Snow had appointed Diana as Special Agent in Charge of Modernization and Efficiency, which was a fancy way of saying that she helped the base avoid unnecessary paperwork and loosened some of the absurd, restrictive rules for which Winterpole was famous. The end result: agents on the eighth continent worked less and accomplished more.
Mister Snow glanced up from the typed messages and shook his head at her. “This is very bad news.”
“We work for Winterpol
e. It’s always bad news.” Diana gave him a reassuring smile. “What’s wrong now?”
“Your mother is coming.”
“My . . . mother?”
Diana felt as if a black hole large enough to swallow the sun had opened under her feet and consumed her.
Mrs. Maple was Winterpole’s senior agent in charge of enforcement, one of the highest-ranking officers in the entire organization. If she was coming to the eighth continent, something was not only very wrong; it meant something had to be enforced.
The roar of a hundred hover engines struck Diana’s ears. She looked to the sky and saw a vast fleet of Winterpole airships coming in for a landing.
“Well, they don’t waste any time, do they?” Diana sighed. This was not going to be good.
The lead hovership, the largest of the armada, was bluish white and shaped like an enormous icicle. The engines flared and the ship plummeted toward the surface like it was going to pierce the ground. The ship pulled up at the last second and slid to a stop only meters from where Diana and Mister Snow stood.
A metal hatch opened in the side of the icicle and Diana’s mother emerged. Her Winterpole uniform was so sharply tailored, laundered so crisply, it looked like her clothes were frozen. Her hair was perfectly straight and cut at a severe angle, like axe blades along her jaw. With keen blue eyes she studied the structures that dotted the launchpad, the elevator tubes, and the Winterpole agents patrolling the area.
Behind her, a silver dome exited the giant icicle. The four big wheels under the dome were wrapped in snow chains. Helmeted agents steered the dome toward the largest elevator tube.
“We’re moving the Director’s isolation chamber to the sub-levels of this compound. Mister Snow, effective immediately, you are relieved of command. Hello, Diana.”
It was almost too much information for Diana to process all at once. What was the Director of Winterpole doing here, and why was he hiding inside a silver dome? Weird. And now Mister Snow wasn’t in charge of the outpost?
