Chapter 24
The Plummet with Podgy

Noah heard tapping on his window and sat up with a jerk. He threw his legs over the bed and glanced at the clock: 1:16 A.M.

The tapping came again.

“Marlo?” said Noah, thinking that the messenger bird was responsible for the noise. He dashed across the room and threw open the drapes, expecting to find the blue bird. But what he instead discovered shocked him into taking two steps back. Filling most of the window was a penguin—an enormous emperor penguin, its flippers pressed against its sides, its bill tipped upward, its webbed feet flattening the limp remains of Noah’s mother’s summer flowers. Podgy.

Noah threw open the window, allowing the cold night air to invade the room.

“What’s wrong?”

Podgy spun around in the flower box, his flat feet slinging snowy dirt across the floor of the room, and presented his back to Noah. He wanted Noah to climb on.

Noah gasped. “Podgy, there’s no way! My parents—”

The penguin jumped and brought his feet down hard, shaking the box and rattling the shutters. His point was obvious. Noah was needed, and there was no time to waste.

Noah had a vision of his mother walking into his room several hours from now to find his bed empty and his window open. This would surely force him to tell his parents about the Secret Zoo. What would that mean to the Secret Society? To the safety of the world?

Podgy jumped once more, shaking the box and rattling the siding.

“This is crazy!” Noah went to his bedroom door and softly closed it. He stripped off his pajamas, then grabbed yesterday’s wad of clothes off the floor and climbed into them. “Man, I hope you know what you’re doing.” He put on a jacket, shoes, and his red hunting cap. Fully dressed, he walked back to the window and considered how to climb onto Podgy. There was no way the flower box would hold his weight and Podgy’s at the same time.

“How about I meet you at the front door?”

Podgy began to rock in place, his webbed feet crushing flower stems and leaving penguin tracks in the dirt. After a few seconds of this, he wagged his flippers up and down.

Noah had spent enough time with Podgy to know what he wanted, which was for Noah to jump onto his back, hurling them both out of the flower box and into the air.

“You got to be kidding me,” Noah muttered as he backed all the way to the far wall. He stared at Podgy and the open window across the room and became certain that this wasn’t a good idea.

“Here goes,” Noah said.

Without another thought, he took off running. He jumped out the window, wrapping his arms around Podgy and knocking the two of them forward. Flowerbed dirt spilled everywhere as they dropped toward the ground, Podgy wagging his flippers. A second before they crashed, Podgy flew out of the fall and swept across the yard, his stomach again brushing the snowy grass. Noah lay stretched across his back, his legs dangling behind the penguin, his feet skipping over the ground.

With a swift upward turn, Podgy rose three feet, five feet, eight feet, more. As he soared near Fort Scout, two figures came into view: Megan and Sam. They leaned out the window, marveling at the sight of Noah and Podgy. Noah wondered what his sister was doing in Fort Scout, then dismissed his concern. Surely Megan had the greater question: Why was Noah flying across their yard on a penguin in the middle of the night?

Podgy looped around the big oak, swerving over and under the longer branches. As he returned to the front, Noah again spotted his sister leaning out the window, her jaw hanging open, her pigtails sticking out. Points of moonlight shone in the otherwise dark lenses of her glasses. Podgy veered away from the tree and cut across the yard, heading for the concrete wall.

Noah had once believed this wall merely divided his neighborhood from an ordinary zoo. Now he understood much more. The wall divided two worlds, Noah’s and another, a place where animals walked beside humans in a city built upon the trees. Filled with majesty, promise, and peril, this other world was known as the Secret Zoo.

As Podgy soared over the wall, Noah braced himself for anything.