It had no face, not really. Just a hint of one, like a little kid’s scribbles inside a circle. The rest of it didn’t even seem to have arms or legs, although in some shadowy fold of its body, I saw the flash of my knife.
The dark figure strode toward me, and I tensed, waiting for that sharpest of blades to go through me. I flinched as the knife lifted, but it stopped and seemed to hover in thin air. Around the handle I saw the shadowy suggestion of a hand. A hand with only four fingers, strangely splayed like a pincer.
“The knife man,” I said.
“Mr. Nobody,” he replied. “Take it.”
Gratefully I took the knife back into my hand.
“We’ve got to be quick,” he said.
He grabbed hold of me and pulled. I had to run to keep up. I realized we were not in the queen’s nest outside my house—not the nest with the baby. This one was huge, like a cathedral of little empty cells, row after row, higher and higher. We were in the massive attic nest.
“Where are they all?” I asked. “The wasps?”
“Getting ready to carry their baby inside. And move yours out.”
We were rushing along narrow ridges, leaping over small canyons of cells. I didn’t know where we were going.
“But . . . where am I . . . my body really?”
“In the bathtub, unconscious and dying.”
“But I’m not dead yet.” It was as much a demand as a question.
“You’re still alive.”
We ran on through the maze of the nest. He seemed to know where he was going.
“But how are you here?” I called after him. “Are you . . .”
“Alive? No. I move in people’s dreams mostly. I have to choose who can see me. Hurry now.”
I thought of him on my front lawn, the knife guy with his big scary blade, but our neighbor hadn’t even seen him. None of them had. Only us. An unsettling thought suddenly came to me.
“That wasn’t you, all these years, at the end of my bed?” I asked.
“No. That was only your imagination.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I only come to warn people, if I can.”
“About the wasps?”
I could see more of a shape to him now as he ran, shoulders, arms, legs.
“Yes.”
“But who are you really?” I asked.
“Just Mr. Nobody. I was replaced.”
I staggered after him, stunned. “It . . . it happened to you?”
“Many years ago.”
A wasp suddenly lunged toward us. My knife flashed out and cut the creature into twitching halves.
“I’m not alive,” said Mr. Nobody. “Scarcely was. The wasps can disperse me. I can’t fight them. I can only give you the knife. And show you the way.”
“You mean the way out?”
We’d reached the outer wall of the vast nest, and I could see a bright narrow tunnel boring through the rafters of our house.
I suddenly realized where we were. “This goes into the other nest, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What do we need to do?”
“The nest can’t function without its queen.”
“And what about Theo?”
“To save him you will have to kill the queen.”
“Me?”
“It has to be you. I’m nothing.”
He was crawling on all fours into the tunnel. I followed. We arrived at a small ledge, the spot I’d become so familiar with after all my visits. Light shafted up from the narrow hole at the bottom of the nest. Hanging from its stalk was the upside-down baby, blinking and wailing. At the top of the nest a small team of wasps was frantically chewing away at the stalk. Taut from the baby’s weight, it slowly started to fray.
And beneath the baby was a vast swarm of wasps, as dense as a thundercloud, landing all over it, their wings churning to take its weight.
Suddenly the queen was hovering before us, her stinger cocked high. Her long antennae snaked out and grazed me and Mr. Nobody.
“Oh, not you again,” she said dismissively to Mr. Nobody. “Honestly, some people do hold a grudge. Ladies! Over here, please!”
Wasps boiled up through the nest and instantly coated Mr. Nobody.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop!”
With my knife I slashed at them. Bodies fell everywhere, but there were too many, a thousand spots of pale light—and I remembered that dream, the very first night I’d seen the wasps and thought they were angels. There had been a dark shape in the beginning of that dream, and I’d assumed it was my nightmare, but really it’d been only Mr. Nobody come to warn me, and the wasps had obliterated him, just like they were doing now, until his shadow was gone entirely. The writhing mass of wasps dispersed suddenly, as if instructed.
Only the queen remained, hovering before me, a long antenna just touching the top of my head, the rest of her well beyond my reach. I swiped at her antenna, and each time she deftly lifted it higher, returning it only to speak to me.
“Oh, do put down the knife,” she said. “Stop being silly! Look. We’re just going to carry the baby in now.”
It was impossible not to look. The hole at the bottom of the nest was dilating, letting more wasps fly inside to clamber over the baby’s head and shoulders and arms. They would carry him right down out of the nest, through the open window, and into the empty crib.
“There’s nothing you can do,” the queen said. “You’re dying, Steven. In a few seconds you’ll be just another Mr. Nobody!”
“I’m not dead yet,” I whispered.
She cocked her head. “You’re right; you’re not.”
And in a single swift movement, she swiveled in midair and plunged her stinger into me. It went right through my chest, right through my heart and out between my shoulder blades.
“There you go,” she said. “That should do it.”
I felt the venom seeping in, and everything else out: my air, my thoughts, my strength. I was aware of a distant thumping, getting slower and slower.
My body started to jerk, and I dimly realized that the queen was trying to twitch me off her stinger.
“Get off!” she said peevishly. “Stop being difficult!”
I wasn’t doing it on purpose. My legs had buckled and I’d fallen to my knees, dragging the queen closer to me.
“Come along now! Off you get!”
Fainter and more irregular, my faraway heart seemed to thump out a final message: Go ahead . . . and die . . . go . . . a-head . . . aaaaand—
I thought, Theo.
I thought, Get a grip.
With what seemed like incredible slowness, I lifted the knife high and plunged it into the queen’s back. I held on tight as she shrieked and flew up into the air, taking me with her, still impaled on her stinger.
She tilted and thrashed, trying to throw me off. Her wings battered my head. I held on, one hand on the knife, the other clutching a long hind leg. We flew past the baby’s arm. I did not know where my strength came from. With a great wrench I dragged myself higher up onto her back, feeling her stinger snap clean off her abdomen, still lodged inside me.
One of her long antennae came poking back, prodding, trying to find me, trying to find out what exactly was happening to her body.
“Get off!” she screamed.
I grabbed hold of her antenna, yanked it toward me, and wrapped it round and round my wrist. I felt her fury and terror, like an electric current, through that antenna. It all came coursing out of her in a stream of the foulest language I’d ever heard. It was like beholding her for the first time.
I pulled the knife from her body, plunged it in again fast, higher up, and dragged myself toward her head.
“Don’t hurt my baby!” she begged.
“I’d never do anything to hurt my baby!” I yelled, and I sank the knife into her neck and sawed and sawed until her head came away and fell. Tangled in her antenna, I fell with it.
I heard one last great heart thump in my head, and
then nothing as I plunged down through the nest. I saw the worker wasps swirling chaotically. Leaderless, they whirled away from the cracking stalk, swirling away from the baby they were supposed to be carrying.
The baby started to fall, and I fell alongside its perfect face, down toward the dilating hole in the nest and into the light.
WITH A GASP I OPENED MY EYES, AND THERE were Mr. Nobodys all around me, powerful looming shadows. One of them had huge flat hands held high above me and was chanting like a holy man raising someone from the dead.
“Steven!” I heard someone shout, and then again, “Steve! Steve!”
I felt my heart surge, and it almost swallowed me with blackness again. I blinked and gasped and looked around in terror at all the shadows. They were beginning to have faces now, and bright yellow-and-orange suits, and the one closest to me was taking off his huge flat hands, which were metal paddles.
I was shirtless, shivering.
“He’s in rhythm,” someone said.
“Let’s get him to the ER,” another voice said.
“Oh, Steven!” came a more familiar voice.
“Get that stretcher over here!”
“There’s wasps in the house!” I croaked.
“Take hold of the drip. Let’s move him.”
“It’s all right,” someone said to me. “We’ve taken care of that.”
“The baby,” I said. “Theo.”
“Baby’s fine. You saved his life. The baby’s just fine.”
And then I must’ve slept again, because when I woke up, I was someplace different, and I felt calmer, and there were only Mom and Dad beside me. Mom was holding the baby.
I came home the next day. There were still a couple of news vans outside, and reporters tried to talk to us as we walked to the front door, but Dad told them no.
I knew what had happened. They’d told me at the hospital.
The emergency operator I’d called had actually sent a cruiser around to our house, and the two officers had knocked on the door but hadn’t seen anything weird. They’d been about to leave, when the dispatcher had gotten another call, an anonymous one this time, saying there were wasps swarming around the house.
“Was it the knife guy who called them?” I’d asked.
“Why would it be the knife guy?” Dad had said.
“I just thought . . . I heard his bell when I was inside the bathroom.”
The police had taken another look around back, and this time they’d seen a huge swarm outside the upstairs bathroom window. They’d called the fire department right away; they’d never seen anything like it.
The firefighters arrived and were getting their helmets on just as Mom arrived back home. She told them the baby and I were inside, and she let them in. They found me unconscious in the bathtub, hunched over the baby, wasps all around me. But almost instantly the wasps flew away, out the broken window.
The baby had been stung only twice. It was amazing, they said. That with all those thousands of wasps, the baby was stung only twice.
I was in real trouble, though. I was all swollen, and my throat was starting to close up, and the paramedics jabbed me full of adrenaline and anti-histamines, but my heart stopped anyway.
They got out their de-fib paddles and jolted me back to life.
I was dead for twenty-five seconds.
On Saturday morning Theo had his heart operation. I was still pretty swollen up and freaky-looking, but I wanted to go with Dad and Nicole that evening to see him. There were lots of tubes in him. He looked so small. But the doctors said it had gone really well, and he was strong.
“He’ll make a full recovery,” the surgeon told us all. “He’ll be here only a couple more days.”
“And after that we go home and everything goes back to normal,” Nicole said cheerfully.
I saw Dad look at Mom, and I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking, The heart is just one problem, but there are lots of others. Maybe he was thinking, Things will never be normal. Maybe, like me, he was thinking we’d never know what was going to happen next week or month or year, but no one really did anyway.
Dad said, “Yeah, it’ll be good to get home, won’t it?”
“And there’s no such thing as normal anyway,” I said.
Surprised, Dad’s eyes met mine. He gave a tired smile and nodded.
The exterminator came by again a couple of days after Theo’s operation, just to make sure there were no other signs of infestation.
Last Friday, his team had spent a solid day shoveling the evacuated nest out of our attic. It had filled fifty garbage bags. They’d also sprayed down the timbers with some kind of chemical to make sure no other wasps would try to build there.
“Odd-looking things,” the exterminator said during his second visit, when he came down from his final check in the crawl space. In his cupped hand he held a few dead pale wasps.
“Have you ever seen that kind before?” I asked.
He was an older man, said he’d been in the business his whole life. He frowned like he’d tasted something nasty, and gave a grunt. “Maybe just once. A long time ago.”
I followed him outside as he checked the exterior. The nest above Theo’s room had been blasted off the wall with a fire hose. It still lay in crumpled pieces on the ground.
“Now, this is very strange,” he said. “See this? You look inside—no cells. The queen didn’t lay any eggs in this one. It’s just an empty shell. Nothing.”
After he left, I picked through the pieces of the nest. I stared hard. There was no sign that a baby had ever grown against those sodden walls. I was about to let the last shard drop, when something caught my eye. A little glint. I looked more closely. Caught in the fibrous weave was a tiny pale rectangle with rounded edges—the smallest, most perfect fingernail I’d ever seen. When I pulled it out, it felt just like wet paper, ready to tear. I dug a little hole in the ground and buried it.
That night in bed I was more tired than I’d ever been.
I tried to do my two lists, but I knew I’d never make it through both.
So I said: “I’m grateful for all the things on this first list.”
And I said: “I want everyone on this second list to be okay. And Mr. Nobody, too. And especially Theo.”
Before sleep took me, I thought I heard the sound of Mr. Nobody’s handbell, and I knew we’d never see him again. I heard Theo murmuring, and Mom talking to him gently as she fed him a bottle.
I pulled the covers over my head and went to sleep in my nest.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
KENNETH OPPEL is the author of the Silverwing Trilogy, which has sold over a million copies worldwide, and Airborn, which was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and won the Governor General’s Award for children’s literature. He is also the author of Half Brother, This Dark Endeavour, Such Wicked Intent, and The Boundless. Born on Vancouver Island, he now resides in Toronto with his wife and children. Visit him at kennethoppel.ca.
JON KLASSEN is the author-illustrator of I Want My Hat Back, a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book, and This Is Not My Hat, winner of the Caldecott Medal. He is also the illustrator of Extra Yarn, written by Mac Barnett, which won a Caldecott Honor. Originally from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Jon Klassen now lives in Los Angeles.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at harpercollins.ca.
BOOKS BY KENNETH OPPEL
The Boundless
The Airborn Trilogy
Airborn
Skybreaker
Starclimber
The Silverwing Trilogy
Silverwing
Sunwing
Firewing
Darkwing
The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein
This Dark Endeavour
Such Wicked Intent
Half Brother
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY LUCY RUTH CUMMINS
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY JON KLASSEN
COPYRIGHT
THE
NEST
Text copyright © 2015 by Firewing Productions Inc.
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Jon Klassen.
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First Canadian edition
EPub Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9781443438643
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request
ISBN 978-1-44343-862-9 (HC)
RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
The Nest Page 10
