12
“There’s nothing else we can do for the colonists,” Jaden said thirty minutes later.
Benjamin was using the rover to clean off the solar panels, but they wouldn’t be able to start charging again until the sun came up. Jaden wasn’t even sure the panels would make enough power to get communication back before the colonists came out of the hab at lunchtime the next day.
“We can find out who sabotaged both our teams,” Barrett said. “We —”
“It isn’t sand!” Kaylee announced, interrupting Barrett as she hurried into the S.M.A.R.T.S. control center.
“What is it?” Caleb asked. He and the others crowded around her.
Kaylee set a baggie full of something on the back table. “It might be couscous,” she said. “I think it’s definitely some kind of grain.”
Grain! Jaden thought. He had a flash of memory from their conversation with Robin. “Anyone know what quinoa looks like?” he asked.
“I do,” Brooke said as she stepped forward and studied the substance. “And that’s it!”
“I don’t get it. Quinoa on the solar panels — and only on the ones that belong to the S.M.A.R.T.S. and the Mads,” said Sonja, crossing her arms. “This can’t be part of the simulation. But why would Mr. Pegg lie?”
Caleb thought for a second. “Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on, either. He probably lied so that the reporters and investors wouldn’t think the Mars colony is dangerous.”
“Hold on. What’s quinoa?” Barrett demanded.
“Like Kaylee said, it’s a kind of grain,” Jaden answered. “A locally grown grain.” He looked over at Caleb. “You feel like walking around outside? Nothing else we can do here.”
“Sure,” Caleb replied. Once they were out in the hall, he grinned and added, “If by walking around outside you mean getting proof that the Earth Firsters have been sabotaging us.”
They came up to the elevator, and when Jaden pushed the button, the doors opened immediately. Barrett burst in just before they shut again.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “But it seems like you two know something. I’m not letting you out of my sight until I figure out what.”
Jaden tried not to groan. Barrett always yelled first and thought later. He was the anti-Sherlock, but there was no way to get rid of him now.
“We think maybe the Earth Firsters are behind the sabotage,” Jaden explained. “They could want to make the Mars Commission look bad in front of the reporters and possible investors.”
“One of them, this girl Robin, had a thing of Cheez Crunchies in her bag,” Caleb added as the elevator doors opened on the ground floor. “And we found out they eat a lot of quinoa. But we don’t have any proof they did anything yet.”
“Unacceptable! I’ll get a confession,” Barrett promised. He led the way outside. “Just show me which one she is.”
The Earth Firsters were back to marching around with their signs and yelling their slogans. Jaden spotted Robin right away, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Barrett that.
“Hey! Hey, you guys!” a girl called.
Robin’s sister, Lark, was running toward them. “Can I borrow a cell phone? Just for a few minutes. Pleasepleaseplease. Please!” She looked over her shoulder, then ducked behind the boys. Caleb was sure she was trying to hide from her sister.
“I’ll let you use mine if you answer a couple questions for us,” Jaden said.
Lark held out her hand. Jaden put his cell in her palm.
“Is that Robin?” Barrett demanded.
Jaden was silent for a moment, staring at Lark as she pulled up the game on his phone. “No. Forget about finding Robin,” he told Barrett. “I just realized she didn’t do it — nobody from Earth First did.”
“How do you figure?” Caleb asked.
Jaden glanced at Lark. “Can’t you play your game on a laptop?” he asked.
“As if I’d be let near one of those,” Lark said, not taking her eyes off the little screen. “No one in Earth First has a computer.”
A light bulb turned on in Caleb’s brain. “No cells phones, no computers, no way to send the fake emails. The Earth Firsters can’t be behind the sabotage.”
“And we already agreed neither of our teams did it,” Barrett said, crossing his arms. “So who’s the perp?”
* * *
When Jaden, Caleb, and Barrett returned to S.M.A.R.T.S. Mission Control, it was empty.
“They must have gone up to the suite,” Jaden said. “Without a way to communicate with the colonists, there’s nothing to do in here.”
The three boys took the elevator up to the top floor. As they expected, they found the rest of the S.M.A.R.T.S. kids there — and everyone from the Mad Scientists’ control center!
“We’re reading some of Kaylee’s blog, since there’s nothing we can do for the colonists right now,” Sonja told them, like it was normal to be hanging out with the rival team.
“Kaylee didn’t come up with you?” Caleb asked, looking around.
“She said she was going to tell the other reporters about the quinoa,” Amanda, one of the Mads who’d been extra friendly on the bus, answered. “I think she wanted to gloat. She got the story before all the adults.”
“Her blog is really popular,” Sonja commented. “She got more than four-hundred thousand hits today! People are really into the Mars Commission project. Some think it’s awesome. Some think it’ll be a disaster. But they all want more info on the simulation, and Kaylee’s been blasting new content onto her site.”
“Well, she has been filming constantly,” Antonio reminded them.
“She also gets stuff up fast. She had the quinoa post up an hour ago. And just before that, she posted about how Mr. Pegg lied when he said the power outage was part of the simulation. Really he had no idea what happened,” Sonja continued.
“She had a post up about our competition almost as soon as we got here,” Caroline, the Mads girl who loved bad jokes as much as Jaden, added. “And she wrote about the sabotage and how the Mads and the S.M.A.R.T.S. were blaming each other. Tons of people commented on those.”
“Wait. You said she had the quinoa post up an hour ago?” Jaden asked. His Spidey senses were really tingling now.
“Yeah,” Sonja said. She checked the blog. “At 4:02 p.m.”
“Does anyone remember what time we sent the rover out to check the panels?” Jaden asked.
Barrett pulled the picture taken by the Mads’ rover out of his pocket and checked the time stamp. “Our rover checked our panels at 4:16.”
“So Kaylee put up a post about the quinoa more than fourteen minutes before she supposedly went out to check the solar panels,” Jaden said.
Caleb could practically feel the neurons in his brain light up. “So unless she can time travel, that means she’s the one who put the quinoa on the panels! This whole time she’s been creating stories to put on her blog so she’d get more readers!”
“A new post just went up,” Sonja announced. “It’s about how the Earth Firsters are sabotaging the simulation.”
“That makes the story even better,” Jaden commented. “And it makes Kaylee look really smart. She solved the mystery.”
“I can’t believe it,” Finn, another of the Mads’ kids, said. “She actually got us to believe we were sabotaging each other.”
“She was with us when Mr. Pegg brought us into the building. She saw how much Samuel hated the sound of cracking knuckles and how Barrett did it to bug him,” Jaden pointed out. “So when she emailed from the fake account, she told Zoe to crack her knuckles.”
“Let’s go get her!” Barrett exclaimed.
“Let’s go get proof,” Jaden said. “And I have an idea on how to do it. We need to find Lark.”
“That should be easy,” Caleb said. “Just go outside and wave a cell phone around.”
* * *
“Got it!” Lark called. She trotted toward the bench outside the Mars Commission building where Caleb, Jaden, and Barrett were waiting for her.
Finding Lark had been just as easy as Caleb had predicted. Jaden had offered her a deal — if she could convince Kaylee to loan Lark her cell phone for five minutes, Jaden would let the girl use his phone until they went home. He was sure she’d be able to do it. He’d seen her begging in action.
“Trade you!” Lark said, eyes sparkling.
Jaden gave her his phone, and he took Kaylee’s. “We’ll give it back,” he said, but Lark had wandered off, already playing her game. Jaden hit the email icon on Kaylee’s phone. “Good. She’s still logged on.”
“You’re going to read her email?” Caleb asked.
Jaden hesitated. “I just want to see if she set up that fake Mars Commission email account. I’m not going to read any personal stuff.”
“I’ll do it!” Barrett said, snatching the phone. A few seconds later, he grinned. “Oh, yeah. Here’s a receipt for the domain name marscommisssion.com — with the extra s.”
“And once she had the domain name, she could set up email accounts with the fake address,” Caleb said.
Barrett rubbed his hands together. “I can’t wait to tell that blogger that we caught her. I’ll be like, ‘In your face, Kaylee!’ Let’s go!”
“Actually, there are a few other people we should tell first,” Jaden said, smiling. “I think it’s time for the other reporters covering the simulation to get a scoop of their own.”