by Paul Tobin
There were three teacups on the sidewalk, up against the building. Somebody had left them there.
Apparently Nate was frightened of litter.
It is unsightly, and people really should clean up after themselves, but I couldn’t understand why Nate looked so entirely unsettled.
He took a few calming breaths, and then he had his smile back.
We started walking again, and I forgot about the teacups. I didn’t think they were any big thing.
But I would find out I was wrong in only ten more steps when we reached the car.
Nate took a deep breath and said, “Delphine, I’ve been thinking I should probably mention death. And tea. Death and tea.”
I said, “What?” I put a lot of questions into that one simple word.
Nate had grown distracted after seeing the teacups, mumbling about statistics and shuffling along, tripping over his own feet, which wasn’t like him at all.
Nate explained, “You probably know that tea is a drink made by combining hot water and tea leaves. Death, as you also probably know, is what can happen when you fight giant cats, or when an international criminal organization decides you’re too dangerous to their taking-over-the-world plans and resolves to have you eliminated. There are many other causes of death, but those are the two we should probably focus on for today.”
That explained nothing. “What?” I said again, in a bit of a daze.
Nate went on. “Tea and death. But not just any tea and not just any death. I’m specifically talking about the Red Death Tea Society.”
I repeated, “What?” I was on a roll.
Nate got into the car and opened my door. I got inside and immediately put on my seat belt.
He said, “Have you heard of them? Probably not, because the Red Death Tea Society is very secretive and has some rather foul methods of ensuring its agents never spill its secrets. I’ll give you a hint of the penalty in such cases: they do not give tea to the traitors. They give them the other thing.”
I said, “The other thing? So, not tea but—oh. I see.” I checked my seat belt. It seemed important. Before I met Nate I’d never heard of such things as the Red Death Tea Society. Really, the direst organization that had ever entered my life was my Cake vs. Pie debating society, where I’m hardly ever thinking about murder. In fact, I’m not thinking about murder at all.
Nate said, “Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but this thing with Susan not going shopping on a Saturday is too much of a statistical anomaly. Someone is clearly interfering with the parameters of this experiment.”
“And you think it’s these Red Death guys?” I checked my seat belt. It was still on. Nate talking about being paranoid had made me paranoid.
Nate said, “It’s one possibility. A very high possibility. And, well, you saw the teacups. The point is, the Red Death Tea Society does exist, and while their tea is, without question, excellent … they are even more excellent at doing the death thing. They’ve already asked me to join their ranks several times, but of course I’ve refused. I’m charting a high probability that they will soon try to … get rid of me.”
“Get rid of you?” I said. “That sounds bad.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Is your seat belt on?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nate said.
“Good.”
“Agreed. It’s definitely for the best, since, for all we know, Sir Jakob Maculte—the twenty-seventh lord of Mayberry Castle and the leader of the Red Death Tea Society—is right now writing my name on a piece of ancient parchment, sliding it inside a leather envelope, sealing it with a combination of wax, tea leaves, and a pinprick of his own blood, and then handing it to an assistant with orders to deliver it to an extremely talented group of assassins.”
“That sounds dramatic.”
“It’s the way they work. Drama is basically their thing. And tea, of course.”
“So, how many of these guys are out there? Ten? Twenty?”
“Ah. No. More like a few thousand. Men and women of all ages. Maculte, their leader, has a mind nearly the equal of mine.”
“Nearly?”
“Technically speaking, he might be smarter than me, but his inventions aren’t … inventive. He lacks spark, spirit, whimsy.”
“Hmm,” I said, thinking that Nate might sometimes be too whimsical. We were, after all, on the trail of a whimsically giant cat.
“And Luria Pevermore is second in command,” Nate said. “This is her.” He showed me a picture on his phone. She was maybe in her late twenties. Her hair was a darker red than mine, but while mine tends to curl, hers was silky and straight and down to her shoulders. She had green eyes, high cheekbones, a few freckles. She was wearing a dress and smiling at the camera with a wide mouth, although the smile was the opposite of friendly. Even though she was beautiful, she mostly looked like someone who enjoyed squishing flies.
“Luria is an incredible chemist,” Nate said. “She’s in charge of making all the teas the Red Death Tea Society drinks. She also makes other things.”
“Other things?” I asked. Nate had made it sound ominous.
“Yes,” Nate said. “Other things. And if that sounded ominous, it should have, because Luria makes such things as a potion that erases your memory, and one that turns your arms into charcoal-flavored pudding, and one that makes you disappear.”
“An invisibility potion?” I asked. “That’s kind of neat.”
“I didn’t mean invisibility,” Nate said. His voice had gone even more super-ominous, though also a bit squeaky. “I meant you disappear. Entirely. Forever. You’re just … gone.”
“Piffle,” I said. “I don’t like Luria. What’s this Maculte guy look like? You have him on your phone?”
“Yes,” Nate said. “I took a picture of him once when he was trying to trigger a new ice age. It’s a better photo than the one from when he was trying to change Polt’s water supply into a mind-control serum, because the lightning flashes ruined that one. I wish the photo I took during the time Maculte was trying to replace my mom and dad with robots would have turned out better, but it was too dark in the volcano when—”
“How many times have you fought this guy?” I asked.
“Only three times,” Nate said, bringing up the photo on his phone.
“Oh,” I said. Three times? That wasn’t quite as bad as I’d been fearing. Although of course three tries at destroying the world, or destroying Polt, or at least destroying Nate, that was three times too—
“Wait,” Nate said, handing me his phone. “Did you mean how many times I’ve fought the Red Death Tea Society? Because that would be twenty-seven times. But I’ve only met Maculte three times, and that last time in that volcano he was wearing a full asbestos suit to protect him from the heat, so there wasn’t much of a reason to take a photo, although the glow from the lava was dramatic and—”
“Arrkk!” I said. It was a scream.
“What’s wrong?”
“Piffle,” I said. It was a growl.
“Delphine?”
“This is Maculte?” I said, looking at the image on Nate’s phone, which was of a man wearing a black suit with red trim, a man who was possibly in his fifties, a man with sunken cheeks, a gaunt appearance, a teacup in one hand, gray hair, and heavy eyebrows. He was not, however, carrying a cake, like he had been when I saw him outside the mall.
“Yes,” Nate said. “That’s Maculte. Why?”
“I saw him. At the mall.” I was checking my seat belt again. I wanted more seat belts. I wanted all the seat belts.
“Oooo,” Nate said. “He must be investigating you. Seeing if you’re a threat.”
“I don’t really feel like a threat. I feel like going home and hiding under the bed. How long do you think he’s been spying on me?”
“Hard to tell. The Red Death Tea Society has thousands of spies. It’s always difficult to tell who might be working for them, other than how they all have a tattoo of a tea leaf on their … well, let’s
say their buttock regions.”
“They tattoo tea leaves on their butts?”
“They do. Incidentally, have you seen anyone with a tea leaf tattooed on their butt?”
“I have not,” I said. “But I haven’t really been looking.”
We drove along in silence for a while, heading toward wherever Nate had hidden the next of the six messages. I was wondering where that might be. I was wondering quite a few things, honestly. For instance, as the blocks of office buildings turned into the quaint homes of Polt suburbia, I looked at the people on the sidewalks, wondering if any of them was an assassin for a secret society intent on taking over the world. I glared at a few of them, just in case.
“Are you okay?” Nate asked, after a bit. “You’re unusually quiet. I have charts of how often you speak, and you’re in the upper ninety-eighth percentile for conversation.”
“I’m fine. It’s just a lot to take in.”
“And you’re angry, too.”
“I am?” I hadn’t known I was mad, but now that Nate mentioned it, I certainly was. The Red Death Tea Society sounded like a big bunch of bullies, and I don’t like bullies. I suppose no one does.
“Statistically speaking, you’re probably mad,” Nate said. “That’s because you have red hair. It’s beautiful red hair, but, yes, that means you have an eager temper.”
“Red-haired people get mad more often?”
“No. Not really. I was just joking with you, because I thought you might be getting nervous after finding out about a death cult.”
I wasn’t sure what to say here, so I adjusted my seat belt.
“Yes,” he said. “It made me tense when I first found out, too. What helps me, though, is to think about how, somewhere out there in the world, there’s a tattoo artist who spends his entire day doing nothing except tattooing tea leaves on the butt of every new agent.” He looked over to me and smiled. I tried to smile back.
A block went by.
And another.
Finally, I said, “All day long. Tattoo after tattoo. Butt after butt. That’s ridiculous.”
“It is!” Nate said. And he started to laugh, and I started to laugh along with him.
But I kept my seat belt on.
It was a good thing I kept my seat belt on.
We’d only gone two blocks when Nate said, “Hmm.” I didn’t pay much attention to this at first, because Nate is pretty much always mumbling. Sometimes he’s just saying numbers. But then, just a bit farther on, he said it again.
“Hmm,” he said. He was looking out the window.
And then, “Hmm,” he said. He was looking forward, down the street.
A half block farther, he rolled down his window, sniffed, and said, “Hmm.”
And then, in the next block we drove past Lieber’s Kite Store and I was thinking of telling Nate about how they can make kites with your picture on them, and how Liz Morris and I made kites of ourselves in fighting poses and then tried to have a kite fight, but the wind near Coover Lake was so strong that we were mostly just digging our kites out of the sand where they’d crashed. But before I could say anything, Nate’s attention was suddenly riveted on the sidewalk, where I could see nothing of any particular notice except a couple of discarded cups that were blowing along in the breeze.
And Nate said, “Hmm.”
That doesn’t sound very dire, but it was the way he said it. It wasn’t a “hmm” of “perhaps I shouldn’t have eaten an extra burrito” but rather a “hmm” of “I’m suspecting something catastrophic is going to happen, such as an imminent attack by an unsavory organization of tea-drinking assassins.” You’ll have to take my word for it that there’s a particular way of saying “hmm” that sounds just like that.
Still, nothing happened. We continued driving. All the while, Nate checked the side mirrors, the rearview mirror, and also some interesting digital readouts on the car’s dashboard, which mostly looked like we were driving a time-traveling warp-drive-capable spaceship rather than a mostly-average-but-interestingly-painted car. There were so many readouts that they partially overlapped, and they all had numbers and some of them had pulsing dots and some of them were views of the car from various angles, seen from afar, like little movies of us driving down the street. I asked Nate about those and he explained that he was tapping into security cameras and satellites to film the surrounding area, to make sure we were safe.
“And, are we safe?” I asked.
“Hmm,” he said.
“That’s not really an answer,” I said. “That’s the sort of thing my dad says to my mom when he doesn’t want to answer. Or, to be fair, when Mom doesn’t want to answer something that Dad—”
“Hmm,” Nate said, interrupting me, staring out his window. We were stopped at a red light, and Nate was looking out the window to the corner, obviously concerned. I didn’t see anything to be concerned about. Just a newspaper dispenser and two people standing next to it, waiting for the light to change. One of them was a young woman wearing headphones, jogging in place. The other was an older man with a full beard, talking on a cell phone, having a drink from a Styrofoam cup.
“What’s the problem?” I asked Nate, though of course I was beginning to suspect.
“Check out the olfactory dial,” Nate said. He tapped on the dashboard, where one of the dials was displaying a running line of numbers. Just … numbers. And I couldn’t even see them very well because there was a dinosaur sticker over part of it.
“Sorry,” Nate said. “I like dinosaurs.”
“Duh,” I said. I would not trust a person who didn’t like dinosaurs.
Nate said, “And I forget that most people can’t read numbers. This readout shows the scent of Dà Hóng Páo.”
“And that is … ?”
“It means ‘big red robe.’ ”
“You know what you’re doing? You’re not making sense. Go ahead and give it another try.”
“Dà Hóng Páo is an incredibly expensive type of tea. Like, tens of thousands of dollars per ounce. The statistical chance of someone simply standing on a street corner, drinking it, like that bearded man by the newspaper dispenser is doing, is—”
“Less than zero, I’d say.”
“Well, no. You can’t have a statistical chance less than zero. That would violate mathematical probability from the almost never to the almost surely fixed positive—”
“Nate. I was making a point, not a math problem.”
“Oh. Well, then, my point is that we are almost certainly about to be attacked by the Red Death Tea Society.”
“I am not in favor of that.”
“I didn’t think you would be. I calculated the probability was …” He paused here, smiled, and then said, “… less than zero. Ha! See, I can make math jokes, too. Although, again, it’s not mathematically possible to have a chance less than zero because—”
“Ahhhh!” I said, partially in exasperation with Nate, but mostly because of what happened next. A manhole cover whooshed about twenty feet in the air, where it floated in place while two men shot out of the hole as if they’d been fired from a moderately powerful cannon. One of them landed on the hood of our car. The second man landed right next to my window, and he immediately slapped some sort of peculiar machinery on the glass. It looked like a metallic octopus with robotic tentacles and an interior eye, staring in at me through the window.
“Huh?” I said. “Octopus?” I would have calculated my chances of suddenly facing a metallic octopus at … well, pretty low.
“Delphine Cooper,” the octopus on my window said. The voice sounded like a robot’s, which makes sense, being it was a robot octopus and all that.
“Hello?” I said.
“Don’t listen to it!” Nate said. The man who had landed on our car hood had slapped another mechanical octopus on the windshield, right in front of Nate. “It’s going to try to hypnotize you!”
“It is?” I said, and it was at that moment that the arms of the octopus, or the tentacles
, or whatever you’re supposed to call them, began to circle around its body. Just … spinning around. Around and around. I couldn’t look away. It was fascinating. My mind felt fuzzy. Not warm fuzzy. But numb fuzzy.
“Tell me what you know!” the octopus said. It was awfully demanding for an octopus. I’d always pictured them as nicer. What’s there to be angry about when you have eight arms? You could certainly get a lot of things done.
“Don’t let it hypnotize you!” I heard Nate say, but his voice was distant. Muted and muddled. It sounded like when I take a bath and sink beneath the water. Even though I can still hear voices out in the hall or the television in the living room or the music coming from Steve’s room, it sounds like all the noises are a hundred miles away and all I can really hear is the beating of my blood in my ears.
“Delphine?” I heard. It was the mechanical voice this time. I could hear it easily. “Tell me what you know.” For some reason, this seemed like the most sensible thing to do, having a sociable talk with a robot octopus that was spinning its arms. So, I told it what I know.
“I know that friends are important,” I said. “And that it’s okay to be frightened of things if you don’t let your fear stop you. And I know music makes me feel better, and that boys will always pretend they let you beat them in a race. I know that Steve has never found where I hid his favorite shoes after he told me I couldn’t hang out with him and his friends anymore because I’m a girl. I know that I sometimes stay up all night, wondering what people think of me, wondering if I say the wrong things, wondering if I dress or act too weird, and wondering why I care about all these things so much. I know that—”
“Science,” the octopus said. “I meant that you need to tell me what you know about science. All else is meaningless.”
“I know that everything else isn’t meaningless, because it’s just as important to live as it is to know. But, moving on, I’m not particularly good at math. That’s a science, right? I also know that robots are cool. They’re science. Is space a science? Dinosaurs? I know that Nate’s dog talks, and if that’s science, that’s amazing. Are cakes and pies science? There’s probably a scientific reason why some people prefer pie to cake. A strange mutation. It’s unnatural.”
