“OWW!” MARLO CRIED as her head hit the inside of her sleeping cabinet. She felt around the dark metal catacomb frantically with her hands.
“I’m … I’m …,” she said, hyperventilating.
Her drawer was yanked open.
“Totally irritating,” Lyon said, yawning, over the foot of Marlo’s filing cabinet.
Marlo sat up on her elbows. “I was in the infirmary,” she murmured. “But then I was also in this weird, depressing place where I was really old—and so were you, Lyon—and I was supposed to sentence my mother and brother to death.”
“Maybe you were going to bore them to death,” Lyon said.
Marlo climbed down the chain ladder dangling from her cabinet.
“It was like a dream … but it wasn’t,” Marlo muttered as she and the girls were prodded out into the hallway by the feisty, freshly hatched mayfly demons.
Frances smiled at Marlo through her curtain of fuchsia hair.
“What?” Marlo said, sort of smiling back but not quite sure why.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
Most every girl, except for Lyon, was giving Marlo a shy, envious smile.
“I … kinda sort of … remember something about … a dance …,” Marlo said, absentmindedly touching her mouth as if hoping to seize a memory that had evaporated from her lips.
The girls were herded out by the sulfur water coolers to wait for the Sylla-Bus. Marlo spotted Virgil leaning against the elevator door, asleep. She walked over to him.
“Hey … Virgil … wake up.”
Virgil’s eyes fluttered open. “Marlo!” he said, his smile crinkling the freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“What’s going on?” Marlo replied as Virgil rose to his feet.
“I was waiting for you,” he mumbled. “You must have got past me when I fell asleep. I mean, I tried to get down to the infirmary after it happened, but Angelo rushed you into the elevator with Dr. Curie and he let the door close on me even though I totally know that he saw me running for it.” Virgil pointed over Marlo’s shoulder.
Angelo was jogging laps around the eighteenth floor. The sweat on his dark, smooth skin made him look like a well-oiled machine. Lyon sidled up to Marlo, giving Angelo a fingertip wave. Angelo replied with a brilliant blue wink.
The Sylla-Bus pulled up, with Kali waving the children aboard with her massive blue arms.
“He only kissed you to make me jealous, you know,” Lyon whispered out of the side of her mouth.
That’s right! Marlo thought with a gasp as the memory of Angelo’s kiss left her weak in the knees. I totally fainted at the dance! But why? I don’t even really like Angelo … or do I?
Milton awoke and, this time, there was no doubt where he was. He was in a gloomy concrete cell with a grimy foam rubber mat.
“A jail,” he muttered in a voice ravaged by time. “The ministry’s secret military base in Iceland.” The floor rumbled beneath him in steady, rolling waves. “In the Hekla volcano …”
Milton clutched the Pace Taker surgically embedded in his chest. It ticked slowly and deliberately, as if it were gradually dying down, like a windup toy whose spring was getting looser and looser.
The cell had tiny scratches notched on the wall that, judging from Milton’s torn fingernails, he had been clawing himself for the last decade: a long, grim, tedious decade, by the looks of it, laid out in 3,650 tally marks, give or take a leap year.
There was a tray by the thick metal door with a bowl of watery soup and a half-eaten bar of compressed seaweed. A small portal at the bottom of the door slid open and a pair of gloved hands swiftly removed the tray.
“Not too hungry, no?” a deep voice said from the other side of the door. “I wouldn’t have much of an appetite on my last day either.…”
“Last day?” Milton replied weakly.
The guard snorted.
“Oui, you misérable traitor! The day that time stops for you and your fellow jokers: the enemies of the state!”
The cell trembled like the inside of a large, concrete Chihuahua.
“So I’m here … in Hekla,” he muttered, trying to speak the thoughts in his head since his brain felt slow and fuzzy. “Just where that note that fell from the sky told me to be. And, since the guard mentioned some other ‘jokers,’ the ministry must have captured HAHAHA: thanks to me turning them in.”
Milton cradled his head in his age-spotted hands and saw his reflection staring back at him in the shiny floor tiles. Though he looked like a living cadaver, his eyes sparkled inside their sockets.
“I’m still me,” Milton said with a weary, bedraggled wonder. “Inside. Eleven years old going on eighty-one. I can do this … whatever ‘this’ is.”
The cell door creaked open. The guard had a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and wore blinking blinders like Dr. Einstein back in Precocia. He trained his William club at Milton’s face.
“It’s time for your journey to the Duat, where you will meet Osiris, the god of death,” the guard said, his pupils squeezed into black pinpoints.
“The journey to the Duat?” Milton replied.
“Oui … that sounds a lot better than ‘I’m taking you to be thrown into the volcano.’ ”
Milton swallowed as the guard nudged the William club into Milton’s back, leading him down the hall for his date with certain death.
Lucky’s pink eyes were dull and lifeless, like bubble gum after it had been chewed all day. He paced in sluggish circles in his cage.
“What’s wrong with Lucky?” Marlo called out from the Sylla-Bus as it crept slowly toward Dr. Skinner.
“Lucky?” the gaunt man with the tortoiseshell glasses replied.
Marlo sighed. “Bueller,” she said reluctantly.
“Oh yes,” Dr. Skinner said as he peered into Lucky’s cage. “An obstinate creature. Most resistant to the conditioning process … as are another puzzling group of subjects.”
He removed the sheet covering a terrarium filled with the large, corkscrew-shaped white worms that Marlo had seen in the Undermines.
“These specimens, for instance, are also impervious to basic behavioral modification.…”
He scooped out one of the grater-skinned creatures from the terrarium and placed it in a bed of rock.
“They’re also as scratchy as all get-out,” he mumbled, rubbing his hand.
The worm began to dig an intricate spiral groove in the rock.
“The specimen, despite a constant diet of negative reinforcement, continues to plow a very specific design, unlike any of the other specimens. No matter what I do to it, the creature bores its own unique pattern with an unshakeable tenacity—”
“Now back to, um … Bueller,” Marlo interrupted.
The Sylla-Bus rattled past Dr. Skinner. The doctor adjusted his thick glasses.
“As I was saying, I am trying to transform the subject into a passive, useful creature that responds to commands.”
Dr. Skinner withdrew a sleek mobile device from the inside of his lab coat.
“Commands?” Marlo said with a snicker of doubt. “Lucky—Bueller—doesn’t do commands.”
“I admit it will take a little work,” the doctor said with a nervous tick of the mouth as he pulled up his Conditioning app.
Inside Lucky’s cage, a grainy image of Milton appeared while a boy’s filthy sock tumbled from a chute. Lucky’s eyes sparkled briefly as he sniffed the sock. The fuzzy white ferret stood on his haunches to better take in the picture of his master. Dr. Skinner tapped his Conditioning app. Lucky squealed and twitched with wrenching spasms of pain.
“Lucky!” Marlo shrieked as the Sylla-Bus turned the corner. “What are you doing to him?” She struggled to free herself from the restraining bar but it wouldn’t budge.
Up ahead was Dr. Einstein standing in front of a projector screen.
“Guten morgen, children, and willkommen to Advanced PowerPoint,” the most brilliant man in history said, his wide, vacant eyes glittering with the flashing red, blue, and yellow LCDs of his electric blinders.
I’ve got to get out of this bus thing, Marlo fumed. Dr. Demento’s torturing Lucky! Milton’s either really sick or being held hostage down in the infirmary, and if something happens to his pet ferret, he’ll never forgive me.…
“PowerPoint is a corporate tool that lines up creative thinking before a firing squad and assassinates it vith meaningless bullet points,” Dr. Einstein said as the blinking lights of his platinum blinders began to falter.
A slide of two intersecting circles appeared on the screen behind the teacher. The left circle was marked DIS REALITY; the right circle was marked DAT REALITY, with the letter “Q” in the middle.
Napoléon, marching from the copy machine, stopped suddenly. He cocked his eyebrow at Dr. Einstein as if he were cocking the hammer of a pistol.
“Now using this Venn diagram, invented by Dr. Venn Diagram,” Dr. Einstein continued, “I vill vainly attempt to illustrate the thinking behind my theoretical Q-Bomb, or Bomb-bmoB, that can transmit matter from one dimension to another.…”
Napoléon pulled out his silver mobile device from his inside breast pocket.
“I’ll teach zhat teacher to actually teach,” the liter-sized vice principal groused as he jabbed the touch screen.
“It vorks like this,” Dr. Einstein said before an electrical storm of flashing lights shrunk both his pupils and his free will into tiny, dull pinpoints.
As her teacher started to sway and drool, Marlo noticed Napoléon slip his mind control gizmo back into his pocket and storm away.
It’s the same kind as that psycho Skinner’s.… That gives me an idea.
Marlo glanced over at Myung-Dae next to her, scribbling notes with his electric gyroscopic pen. Without warning, she grabbed his arm and wedged it tight beneath the restraining bar.
“Hey!” the boy exclaimed.
“Dr. Einstein!” Marlo shouted. “Myung-Dae has a question! I mean, a real doozy, don’t you, Myung-Dae?”
Myung-Dae began to sweat and tremble. Suddenly, in one herculean sweep of his overdeveloped right arm, he raised his hand and broke the restraining bar.
Marlo bolted off the Sylla-Bus and ran around the corner to Dr. Skinner.
“What is going on?” the teacher shouted.
Marlo knocked over a terrarium full of dazed white mice. The mice, tasting freedom with their twitching whiskers, scurried in every direction. Marlo scooped up a handful of rodents and stumbled toward the paralyzed teacher.
“Dr. Skinner!” she shouted. “You have mice all over you!”
The doctor screamed a high-pitched lady scream. “Where?”
Marlo brushed Dr. Skinner’s lab coat, stealing his mobile device and filling his pockets full of mice.
“Everywhere!” Marlo replied. “I’ll go get help!”
Marlo tore across the coffee-stained carpet. Vice Principal Napoléon was marching back to his palatial boardroom in tyrannical baby steps.
“Vee-Pee-Wee!” Marlo called out.
Napoléon whizzed about angrily as Marlo staggered to him, panting. She clutched his shoulder with feigned exhaustion. “There’s a situation.”
“A situation?”
“Yes,” Marlo said, slyly sliding her hand inside his coat, “a set of circumstances that one finds oneself—”
“I KNOW WHAT A SITUATION IS!” the vice principal said, shrugging her off.
“Then you know about all the wild lab animals,” Marlo said.
“Quoi?” Napoléon screamed.
“Let me show you,” Marlo said as she darted down the hall ahead of the vice principal. As she ran, she patted her pocket.
I switched Napoléon’s evil Game Boy with Skinner’s. Now I’ll do the same thing in reverse.
Mice were scurrying across the floor. Dr. Skinner looked like he was dancing the Rodent Rumba.
“Your lab coat!” Marlo shrieked as she ran toward the panicked teacher. “It’s covered with mice!”
“They’re on me?”
Dr. Skinner ripped off his white lab coat and threw it to the floor. Marlo grabbed it and slipped Napoléon’s mind control device inside.
She walked back to the Sylla-Bus and sat next to Frances. They watched as Dr. Skinner, Napoléon, and Kali tried to corral the mice.
Chaos, Marlo thought, panting, as the adults hopped around like squealing idiots. That’s what this place needs. And that’s how I can get to the infirmary and spring Milton loose from whatever sicko thing these crusty old creeps have going on down there.…
The seemingly endless concrete tunnel curved gently out of sight as Milton and the guard walked onward through the Hekla ministry complex. Exposed air duct pipes ran along the eight-foot-tall ceiling while, on the left-hand wall, a long rectangular window looked out across the jagged Icelandic mountainside. Just below the window protruded the petulant rim of the Hekla volcano. A great smoke-colored column pierced the center of the volcano, climbing up to meet the billowing gray Widow’s Veil. The chimney-like structure rippled and swayed, as if it were composed of thick, churning soot.
They arrived at a set of closed steel doors. The guard pressed his fingertips to an access panel, and the doors opened. The emotionless man shoved Milton into an elevator, buckled himself against the wall, then punched a button. The elevator plummeted, and Milton crumpled to the floor.
It stopped suddenly. The doors opened to an enormous pointy-roofed room, cast in a sinister red glow from a glass wall, and lined with banks of high-tech equipment. The guard dragged Milton across the complex.
It’s like the inside of a pyramid, Milton thought, designed as if someone had put ancient Egyptian and Napoléonic era French decor in a blender, switched it to frappe, and splashed it across every surface.
Ministry police in charcoal-gray uniforms stood cradling William clubs by the rails of the balconies above. Milton and the guard stopped in front of a tall gilded door.
The door whooshed open, disappearing into the top of the door’s ornate frame like a guillotine in reverse.
Beyond was a chamber carved out of volcanic rock, illuminated by a suspended chandelier flaunting burning wax candles. Fur rugs covered the black brick floor, leading to the back of a solid gold throne.
“You may leave,” a strange voice, like two voices wrapped together with silk, ordered.
The guard bowed stiffly and left the room.
That voice, Milton thought. It’s familiar yet totally weird. Almost like two people talking at the same time.
The throne swiveled until Milton was face to face with the reason why he was here in the first place.
An elegant, effeminate man with smooth, butterscotch skin and long dark hair studied Milton with a knowing smirk. He was small and lean, with fine white teeth, a slightly curved nose, and mismatched eyes. One was gray-blue while the other gleamed a dark, bottomless brown.
“Bonjour,” the man said in a voice as incongruous as his eyes. “We are Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette. So nice to see you again.”
“We?” Milton croaked.
“The royal ‘we’ as in me,” Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette said in a deeper, snootier voice while turning to show Milton his profile: that of a young Napoléon. “And me,” he continued in a higher voice that tumbled off his tongue like sunbaked satin, presenting Milton with the other side of his face.
“Cleopatra?” Milton gasped. “And Napoléon!”
“Oui … it is we,” Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette said with a cryptic smile.
The emperor pulled a gold stopwatch from his gray velvet waistcoat. A bright beam of laser light radiated from its base, settling on a tiny barcode on Milton’s Pace Taker. The emperor jabbed the button with his thumb. Milton fell to the floor, clutching his chest.
“And ‘we’ wanted to zhank you, Monsieur Fauster. Personally …”
Milton’s Pace Taker had stopped ticking, as had his heart.
“Before your time runs out …”