Project Chimera

by Lisa McMann

  “Show her how sharp the scales are,” suggested Charlie.

  Mac went to tap the “Under Construction” screen like he’d done before. But this time he hit a different spot on the screen. Instead of the scales pushing out slightly like they’d done before, something totally new and shocking happened: his metallic fingers morphed into thick long claws with sharp points, and more claws extended from his feet.

  “Oh my gosh!” shrieked Charlie.

  “What?” Mac shouted, sounding delighted and freaked out at the same time.

  Maria jumped back. “Your hands!” she cried.

  Mac looked at the spikes that had taken the place of his fingers, and the girls examined him too. His new fingerclaws were rock hard and they curved slightly.

  “Wow!” said Maria. “Those’ll hurt in a fight.”

  Mac smiled. “You think?” He turned his wrists to view the claws from all angles. “They look sharp.”

  “I bet you can dig and climb with those things,” said Charlie. “And fight, too, of course.”

  “Yes!” said Mac. He ran to the wall to tap it. It left a scratch. “Oops,” he said. They looked around the hallway to see if there was anything he could try to climb, but there was nothing that he could attempt without destroying it.

  “We’ll have to find a place to test that out so you can train,” said Maria.

  Just then Charlie’s mom poked her head into the hallway and did a double take at the sight of Mac and Maria. “My goodness!” she exclaimed. “Look at you two!” She came out and started toward them. “I was just about to give you the ten-minute warning—it’s almost time to get Mac home. But let me see you! Come on—twirl!”

  Maria and Mac laughed and Charlie shook her head, embarrassed. But the two slowly turned around, then showed Mrs. Wilde the new features they’d discovered.

  “This is really impressive,” Mrs. Wilde said. “Both of you. I could hear some banging around out here. How has training gone?”

  “Great!” said Maria. “Dr. Sharma was right about the enhanced features. I’ll be even tougher now.”

  Mrs. Wilde smiled. “Good. I’m going to pack up. Do you have enough time to change back to yourself now, Maria? Or do you want to wait until we get to our house?”

  “I’ll try now,” Maria said.

  “You should practice more so you get faster at it,” suggested Mac.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” said Maria.

  Mrs. Wilde gave her a thumbs-up and retreated to the office. Maria looked exhausted and sweaty, but she was smiling. When she clicked off the Turbo Mode, her arms, legs, and tail shrank back to their normal sizes immediately, which was a relief to Charlie and the others.

  While Maria sat quietly to try to make the fur and tail go away, Mac swiftly changed back and grabbed his iPad. “I’ll bet I can figure out this animal now that I’ve seen those claws,” he said excitedly. “I already have an idea of what it might be from a video I saw one time—I just can’t remember what it’s called. . . .” He typed in the search bar.

  Charlie left them alone and went inside to where her mother was, near the surveillance laptop, jotting down a few notes in the log book. “Any word from Dr. Sharma or Dad?”

  “Not today.” Mrs. Wilde’s eyes looked red-rimmed from staring at the screens for hours. “Dr. Gray hasn’t left them alone for the night yet—they’re still in the lab. He’s working them really hard.” She sounded worried. “I was really hoping they’d be back in there for the night by now so we could see if they had a chance to tell us anything.”

  “It’s all right, though,” said Charlie, “isn’t it? Because we can watch the video tomorrow.”

  “True. I just . . .” She looked wistfully at the screen with the ladybug cam stationed outside the lab window. It showed the scientists at their stations with a few soldiers around. “I just miss your dad. And I was hoping maybe he’d have a chance to at least give me a sign . . . or something.”

  Charlie felt a wave of emotion come over her. Even though her dad was there on the screen, right across the street, she missed him, too. She hugged her mom, then reached out and began massaging her shoulders.

  “Oh, honey, that’s sweet of you,” said Mrs. Wilde. “Thank you.” After a minute they gathered up their things and met Mac and Maria in the hallway.

  “Pangolin!” shouted Mac. He jumped to his feet. “Yesss! Oh man, this is so much better than an armadillo. What a relief!”

  Charlie, Maria, and Mrs. Wilde crowded around Mac’s iPad to see what a pangolin looked like, and Mac played a short video for them as they waited for the elevator. It showed the animal curled in a ball and a lion trying unsuccessfully to eat it.

  “That is so cool!” said Maria, and the others agreed.

  The group headed to the car, with Maria and Mac in the backseat chattering excitedly about their new powers and the things they needed to practice, and Charlie and her mom in the front, being quiet together.

  On Tuesday morning Mrs. Wilde decided she needed a break. “How about I drop you off at the movies this morning?” she asked the girls at breakfast. “I have to run some errands—it’ll be fun to act like a normal person again, won’t it? We can head over to home base after that.”

  “Yes!” said Charlie. She turned to Maria. “Maybe we can see a suspenseful one that triggers your monkey power, like we did a few weeks ago, to try to get my bracelet to activate. That’ll give you a chance to practice changing back. With the scientists all being held hostage, who knows how long it’ll be before they can work on a solution to your DNA problem. So you might as well try to get better at changing.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maria, looking alarmed by the idea at first. “What if someone sees me?”

  “We’ll be in the dark,” Charlie said. “And you can scrunch down in the seat and keep your scarf on.”

  After thinking it over, Maria nodded. “Actually, that’s a great idea.”

  They picked up Mac and told him the plan. Mrs. Wilde dropped off the three kids at the ten o’clock matinee, and Maria picked the scariest movie for them to go see.

  As expected, throughout the movie at the most stressful parts, Maria changed into a weremonkey. The first time, Charlie and Mac tried to help her calm down enough so that she was able to change back, but their whispers were unappreciated by others in the audience. After that, whenever it happened, Maria waved them off. And by the end of the movie, at the last superscary moment when she changed into a weremonkey again, Maria was able to change back before the lights came on, which felt like record time.

  When they were walking to the lobby after the show, Maria said she’d missed some important parts of the movie, but it was totally worth it to have had the practice changing. She was feeling better about it. “Maybe next time I can work on not getting scared at all so I don’t change.”

  “But you need to change if you ever have to fight the soldiers,” Mac pointed out.

  “Oh, trust me,” Maria said. “If those soldiers come after us again, I’ll be scared enough not to be able to stop it. Besides, I can turn it on if I need it. I just can’t turn it off.”

  Just then they ran into Vanessa from the soccer team coming into the theater with a few other kids from school, which jolted them back to their old familiar world. It felt strange.

  “I miss soccer already,” Vanessa said to Maria and Charlie. “I was thinking we could get the team together and kick the ball around this Saturday. Are you feeling better, Maria?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine now,” said Maria. “That sounds great.”

  Mac looked bored and pulled out his phone.

  “Kelly’s on vacation somewhere, right? When does she get home?” asked Vanessa.

  “Friday morning,” said Maria. “I’m sure she’ll want to join us.”

  “Definitely,” said Charlie. She knew if Kelly was stuck with her mother in a place she didn’t like for a week, she’d be raring to take her anger out on a soccer ball.

  “Cool,” said V
anessa. “Let’s say eleven o’clock on the school field.”

  “I can’t make it at eleven,” said Maria. “Mac and I have plans. How about three o’clock?” Mac, typing on his phone, glanced at Maria and smiled. Charlie remembered they always went to the morning matinee on Saturdays.

  The group agreed on another time, and then Vanessa and her friends continued on to their movie. Maria, Mac, and Charlie saw Mrs. Wilde pull up to the curb outside the theater and headed out into the warm sunshine. “How was it?”

  “It was dark and scary,” said Charlie. “I forgot how warm and sunny it is here in the real world.”

  “Back in Chicago,” Mrs. Wilde said, “we’d be out of our minds to get a beautiful day like this on spring break. And here we have them almost every day.”

  “Get used to it,” said Mac. “Just don’t forget how nice it is now when we hit a hundred and eighteen in July.”

  “Did you ever try frying an egg on the sidewalk when it gets that hot?” asked Charlie. “Or is that just a big joke?”

  “Oh, we’ve all tried it,” said Maria. “It makes a mess on the sidewalk. It’s better to use a black cast-iron skillet and set it on a flat surface. It works in, like, an hour when it’s that hot.”

  “Yeah,” said Mac. “The black skillet draws more heat in. It works.”

  Mrs. Wilde laughed. “That’s fascinating. It makes sense, though. Gotta love science.”

  “Don’t forget to put some salt on it or it tastes really gross when it’s done,” said Maria.

  They grabbed lunch, sitting outside on the restaurant’s patio, talking quietly about the devices and their powers. Maria wondered aloud about how Kelly was doing. “Do you think we can show her what we can do with our bracelets when she gets home? Or is that too risky?”

  “It might make her feel bad that hers didn’t work,” Mac pointed out.

  “That reminds me—Dr. Sharma never had a chance to look for it,” Maria mused. “It’s probably buried deep in a landfill by now.”

  Talking about searching for the bracelet reminded Charlie that she had never found the Talos Global papers. “I never found the envelope either,” said Charlie glumly. “I searched everywhere.”

  “Maybe Kelly has them both,” joked Mac, and they all laughed.

  Maria fake-punched him. “I’d almost believe you, but she didn’t mention a word about it to me when we FaceTimed the other day. If she’s as bored as she says she is, and she actually had the device, you’d think she’d at least mess around with it.”

  Charlie wrinkled up her nose. She wouldn’t put it past Kelly to have secretly held on to the bracelet. But she kept that to herself.

  “When is Andy coming home?” she asked her mom.

  “They’re thinking Saturday, according to Andy’s latest text message.”

  “That’s nice for him to have a friend like that to spend the week with,” said Maria. “My stepbrothers are gone for the rest of the week, too. They went up to the Grand Canyon with their mom.”

  “I haven’t been anywhere fun yet,” Charlie lamented.

  “We’ll take a trip as a family this summer after this mess is over,” said Mrs. Wilde. “I think we’re all going to need a vacation by then.”

  Charlie smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  Feeling refreshed, Charlie’s mom paid the bill and the foursome headed for home base to see if anything new was happening.

  CHAPTER 26

  Exterminated

  Mac was on a mission. He went straight to the cameras and zoomed in on the laboratory scene. “I am going to get the roach in there today,” he said, determined.

  Mega stood guard at the door. Charlie’s dad, Dr. Sharma, and Dr. Goldstein, who was apparently able to stand now, were working at their usual stations near one another. Some of the remaining stations were occupied by Zed, Prowl, and a soldier none of them had seen before.

  “Who’s that guy?” asked Maria, pointing.

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wilde. “He showed up for the first time the other day. I can’t tell what animal he’s been fused with—he’s just been working in the lab. It appears Gray has put soldiers on the job of creating the shells and clasps for new devices. Maybe so they’ll be ready for when the scientists finish putting together the inner mechanisms.” She narrowed her eyes and glanced at the roach cam screen in the hallway, which showed Dr. Gray walking to the lab. “Watch closely now—see what Charles does,” she said. “Here comes Gray.”

  Back on the ladybug monitor Mega moved aside and opened the door. At her first movement Charlie’s dad smoothly slid what he was working on to a compartment below the counter and pulled out a different project that seemed identical—at least through the blurry, superzoomed camera lens.

  “What is he doing?” asked Charlie. “It seems like he’s working on something on the sly.”

  Mrs. Wilde clenched her fists together and sat forward. “That’s the way, honey,” she whispered. “I think so too. He’s got to be plotting something!”

  “Cool,” breathed Mac and Maria together. Their eyes were glued to the screen.

  Dr. Gray approached the biologists. He seemed almost happy to be chatting with them, and they all responded in kind, like they had done in Dr. Gray’s office. They even laughed together at one particular moment.

  It was almost horrifying for Charlie to watch her dad behave that way with the man who had abducted him and was keeping him captive. “Why do they keep acting like that?” Charlie asked. It made her stomach hurt. “I wish we could hear them.”

  “Me too,” said Mac. “This is tricky, though.” He bit his lip and made a face as the lab door closed tightly again without giving him a chance to sneak the roach inside.

  “I’m sure Dr. Sharma has had a chance to tell Jack and your father at least a little about what we’re doing here,” said Mrs. Wilde. “So they’re playing along until we can help get them out of there. Gray thinks they’re on board with him, despite their initial reluctance.” She paused, then glanced at the visitors. “That’s all just a wild guess, of course,” she said. “Trying to fill in the gaps in the story so I don’t go crazy wondering.”

  “That reminds me,” said Charlie. “We need to watch last night’s footage on the dragonfly.”

  “Can we do that in a bit?” asked Mac as he checked to make sure the laptop speaker volume was turned up.

  “Sure, if you think you’ve got an opportunity to move the roach,” said Mrs. Wilde.

  Mac switched the big-screen camera to the hallway roach, who sat in the shadowy corner of a doorway across from the lab. He made it look right and left. Seeing the hallway was clear, he practiced the moves he’d worked on before to warm up his fingers. “It’s risky with all those big feet stomping around by the door,” said Mac. “But I think I can do it. Especially since Mega is guarding the lab today—she’s not as quick as Cyke.”

  “I agree you should go for it—the roach cam isn’t doing us much good in the hallway.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mrs. Dr. Wilde.” Mac glanced at the others, who were crowded around him at the controls, and poked his elbows out a little to create space as he prepared to get to work. Maria and Charlie took a half step back and kept their eyes on Dr. Gray, trying to read his movements.

  Mac guided the roach across the width of the hallway to wait just outside the lab door. “I’m going to hug the wall and see if we can get the roach to sneak around the doorjamb.”

  “This is kind of like a video game,” said Maria. “You totally got this.”

  “It’s actually the highlight of my technological career,” said Mac in all earnestness.

  They watched the smaller laboratory screen, waiting for Dr. Gray to leave. When he went to the door, Mac called for silence.

  Through the roach they could see and hear the door to the lab open. Mac tensed up, then swiftly guided it around the doorjamb, keeping it as flush to the wall as he could. Mega sidestepped so Dr. Gray could get by, nearly brushing against the roach, bu
t Mac gunned the controls. “Come on,” he muttered. The onlookers tensed too. The roach moved more slowly along the baseboard of the lab than anyone was hoping for, but Mac got it safely past Mega’s big feet and was trying to get it to a shadowy corner before anyone saw it.

  But then it caught Prowl’s eye. He watched it, mesmerized, and crept toward it.

  “Oh no,” Charlie cried out, pointing to the ladybug cam. “Look out for Prowl—he’s like Fat Princess going after it!”

  Mac slammed the roach to a stop, cringed, and waited. “Here’s hoping Prowl is enough of a cat that he’ll get bored and forget about it.”

  “I’m pretty sure he won’t,” said Charlie. “Oh, this is awful!” She and the others couldn’t peel their eyes off the screen. Soon Prowl appeared in the roach camera, coming straight for it.

  Mac muttered under his breath, then gunned the roach forward once more, but the game was on. Prowl batted at it, sending it skittering across the floor.

  “Nooo!” cried Maria, Mac, and Charlie in unison. Mrs. Wilde gripped the back of Mac’s chair until her knuckles turned white.

  They could hear some commotion in the lab through the roach’s microphone. Did Dr. Sharma see what was happening? Charlie tore her eyes away from the roach cam to check the ladybug’s view of things. There she saw Dr. Sharma standing, watching in horror, unable to do anything to stop it. In desperation the biologist called, “Prowl! Can you help me over here?”

  But the soldier ignored her. He ripped off his goggles and mask, crept forward, and pounced. Then he batted the roach around a few times and flipped it into the air. He opened his mouth, revealing larger than normal incisors, and swallowed the bug camera whole.

  Everyone stared, dumbstruck.

  Dr. Sharma looked stricken and turned silently back to her station.

  “My goodness,” whispered Mrs. Wilde. “Did you see that?”