The Ultra Violets Read online

  Where are those kung fu pandas when you need them? she thought in despair. Probably still back at the ballet!

  “Furi,” she commanded her smartphone as she scrambled out of the grass and onto the walkway, “release roller skate wheels.”

  “Okay,” Furi responded in her calm computer voice. “Releasing wheels now.”

  Cheri almost slipped and fell as the wheels hit the pavement. Almost. But she didn’t. As she pushed off with her back leg as hard as she could, the parabolic calculations ran across her mind like digits on a calculator.

  “Speed is more important than weight,” she muttered, realizing that her stiletto was nowhere near as heavy as an ax. And an ax would have been much better for—eww!—chopping the claws off a mutant mantis man. Which was what she was planning to do. “Speed is more important,” she told herself, “because energy is proportional to the square of velocity, but only directly proportional of mass!”

  In other words, to rescue Dogiego from the giant mantis man, she was going to have to whack that sucker beaucoup fast with her stiletto stick.

  For a lumbering monster in an overcoat, the man moved quickly. Even on roller skates, Cheri couldn’t quite catch up to him. “Violets!” she called out again, hoping Iris would hear. Wasn’t she somewhere in front of them? The mantis man was getting farther and farther ahead, smaller and smaller in the distance. Dogiego’s frightened yelps started to fade.

  Then suddenly the mutant came to a complete stop.

  Before him appeared a solid brick wall with a bright yellow UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign in the middle of it. Cheri couldn’t recall ever seeing it in the park before. But it now blocked the uptown exit. The mantis man had no way out.

  He turned to face Cheri and lifted Dogiego out from under his coat. With his hideous mandibles scissoring, he held the little dog aloft, about to devour him on the spot.

  “Violets!” Cheri screamed, skating faster and faster, raising her spiked lacrosse stick over her head. The antennae! she tried to think at Dogiego. Bite the antennae and he’ll lose his balance!

  The Chihuahua barked in response, then started to nip at the mantis man’s squirming antennae.

  Cheri tried to aim her stiletto spike at the mantis man’s claws, but Dogiego was wrastling around so much and she was skating so fast. The mutant was just a few feet in front of her now, with a brick wall right behind him. Cheri made a split second calculation and arced the lacrosse stick down low, planning to swing up just in time to bash his claws before she hit the bricks.

  But Cheri hadn’t counted in the windshield factor.

  Which made her rate of acceleration three seconds faster.

  Which made the trajectory of her swing—well, just keep reading!

  The girl swung up. Hard. And hit the mantis man right between the legs. With the spiked heel on a stick.

  “Awrk!” he squawked, dropping Dogiego and clutching in pain at his crotch.

  Run, Dogiego! Cheri thought, hoping she could send out one last message before she slammed into the bricks. She covered her head with her arms, thinking, Goodbye, nose of mine! There was no way she could decelerate in time. She braced for impact, waiting for the hurt. Any second now, she wouldn’t be one with the squirrels, like she had hoped. She would be one with a solid brick wall!

  But then she realized. The wind was still blowing through her hair. She was still rolling. She peeked out through her arms, and all she could see was the park’s uptown exit.

  “Cheri, c’mon!” she heard Iris yell. “Back this way!”

  Cheri slid to a stop and twirled around. Directly in front of her was the brick wall. She was on the other side of it. Hearing Dogiego’s yelps, she skate-stepped back toward it, until she was face-to-face with the bricks.

  She reached out to touch them, and her hand passed right through.

  “Whoa,” she breathed.

  “Cheri, are you okay?” Iris called from the other side.

  So Cheri took a deep breath. Pushed off again on her skates. And rolled right through the brick wall.

  On the other side, the mantis man lay motionless. Cheri skated past him with a shudder and up to Iris, who stood farther down the path with a panting Dogiego in her arms. She realized she was still gripping the stiletto lacrosse stick, and she passed it to Iris with an embarrassed grin, taking the Chihuahua from her.

  “Dogiego Boneata!” she said to the puppy, wagging a finger at him as he happily wagged his tail. “Never, ever run off like that again!” But what she thought was, I’m so glad you’re okay you poor little baby, kiss kiss kiss!

  And Dogiego kissed her back, licking her all over her face with love and doggie spit.

  “OMV,” she said to Iris, between doggie licks, “did you see that thing?”

  “I heard you shout the code word,” Iris said, “and I started running. And when I saw that giant bug man heading for the park exit with Dogiego under his arm . . .” Iris didn’t finish her sentence, just tugged on a strand of her hair.

  “You imagined this whole wall?” Cheri said, amazed. “It looks so real!”

  “It was hard,” Iris said. “It was like painting on air.” She looked tired, and Cheri wondered what kind of effort it must have taken.

  With a blink of Iris’s blue eyes, the brick wall disappeared, replaced once more by the pathway and park trees that had been there all along. “Let’s get out of here,” Iris said. “Let’s find Scarlet.”

  The two girls started down the path back toward the middle of the park, Iris now holding the odd lacrosse stick weapon. Cheri skated slowly beside her with the Chihuahua nestled down in the bottom of her tote bag. They were silent, each thinking about the horrible encounter. Until Dogiego began to growl again. And a sound broke into their thoughts.

  Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka . . .

  Iris spun around. The mutant mantis man loomed over her, four tarsal claws scratching out to grab her. “Cheri, get out of here!” she cried as she raised the lacrosse stick. She knew she had to stab him with the stiletto heel, but at the sight of him, so close, she froze. Iris was an artist: She appreciated beauty. And the mantis man was the ugliest thing she had ever seen! Squirmy wormy antennae; one giant compound eye with a hundred little lenses reflecting back at her; the other eye a dull human one, bloodshot and half-closed; and most hideous of all, the jagged-edge mandibles, snicker-slicing toward her.

  “Iris!” Cheri screamed. Iris seemed to awake again, and drew back her arm to thrust the lacrosse stick, but . . .

  Whomp! A dark shadow passed before her eyes, and the stab of the lacrosse stick met only air. Iris spun a full circle with the force of her jab and looked around desperately for the green-winged enemy.

  She saw him crouched on the pavement again. Scarlet was dancing circles around him, pummeling him from gut to butt with sharp fouetté kicks.

  “Did somebody call ‘Violets’?” she said, giving the creature one last soccer kick.

  The three girls stood back and watched the crumpled silhouette of the monster sail across the park and come crashing down in some trees.

  “Goal?” Cheri asked.

  “Now that,” Scarlet said, “was one ugly bugly.”

  Dogiego barked in agreement.

  Iris looked at the other two girls, then up to the sky. “I wonder if Candace was watching THAT on her spy-cam!”

  Mwah Ha?

  IN THE SPOTLIGHT OF A STREETLAMP, A TRIO OF BEEHIVED waitresses gather. Imagine them like the Oreo-striped Bride of the All-Night Diner, times three. Perhaps they’re triplets. Perchance they’re clones. This is an imaginary scene. It doesn’t have to make sense.

  Three waitresses. Beehives. Streetlamp. Doo-wop. To the tune of “Downtown.” And a-one and a-two and sing it, ladies!

  When you’re alone, and li
fe is making you homely, you can always go

  to BeauTek.

  When you’ve got worries, when your earlobes grow furry, there are creams, you know,

  at BeauTek.

  Just listen to the squeaks of mice trapped in the laboratories,

  Test bunnies and test monkeys, the skunk from the start of this story?

  BeauTek! Things will be stranger there.

  BeauTek! Mutants are changing there.

  BeauTek! Freaks will be waiting for you.

  • • •

  Opal didn’t put back her mom’s tablet computer that night after all. She kept it hidden under her pillow. Her mother was distracted all through dinner, probably worrying about where it was. But she didn’t say anything about it, so neither did Opal. As far as her mother knew, she could have lost the tablet anywhere.

  And returning it gave Opal the perfect excuse to visit BeauTek. To see for herself exactly what went on there.

  It had been capital-A Awkward at school. Supposedly, Iris, Scarlet, and Cheri had lost the Chihuahua in Chrysalis Park yesterday afternoon and there was all this drama finding him, stiletto roller skates and lacrosse sticks or something. Opal didn’t really pay attention to what they were saying. She told the girls she still wasn’t feeling well. And she wasn’t, sort of. Every time she’d dropped off to sleep the night before, a vision of one of the many Project Mute creatures shocked her back awake. If she’d turned on her bedside light, her mom might have noticed. So she just lay there in the dark, picturing all the hideous shark-toothed, sloe-toed, rat-tailed monsters and waiting for the sun to rise.

  She was tired.

  But the breeze off the Joan River was perking her up a bit. She stood on the deck of the commuter ferryboat, finally getting an up-close look at the neon yellow ex–shopping center where her mother worked. The boat docked, and she disembarked. As she started the short walk up to the entrance, the bobbing cattails seemed to be giving her glossy lipstick smiles? Opal would have blamed it on her sleepless night, but after all the photos she’d seen on her mom’s tablet, nothing surprised her.

  Past the top of the dock, she hid behind the thick trunk of a weeping willow tree and peered out through its long strands of leaves at the entrance. The MALL OF NO RETURNS sign curved above the doorway, its S hanging upside down at the end. It was too early still for the lights to be on, and the tubular fluorescent letters looked dirty, like they hadn’t been washed for years.

  Opal was considering how to sneak into the lab complex when she spotted a familiar figure waddling toward the entrance.

  “Hippowomanus!” she muttered. The mutant was broader than a big gray school bus.

  Shoulders hunched under the weight of the tablet in her backpack, Opal dashed out from the cover of the willow tree and walked a few paces behind Hippowomanus. The creature bellowed up to the security cameras, her massive jaws opening wide enough to swallow Opal whole. Opal shook in her shoes, but she stayed put, just out of range of the camera. When the doors slid open for the hippo woman, Opal ducked in behind her.

  She’d done it. She’d crashed BeauTek.

  Opal hung back, waiting until the Hippowomanus had lumbered out of sight. Then she stepped into the corridors and looked from one storefront to the next. Forever Twenty-Fun. Build-a-Girl Workshop. Cinnaubonpain. But there were no shoppers in the sterile halls of BeauTek. No grandmas resting on their walkers, no moms pushing strollers strung with shopping bags, no teenagers blabbing on their smartphones. The corridors were empty. Opal wondered where everyone was.

  She wondered where the Vi-Shush was. Because that was where she was going.

  There were so many storefronts, Opal didn’t know where to begin. Then she spotted a large sign just ahead of her, situated in front of a fountain shooting up colorful spurts of water.

  As she approached the sign, Opal could see it had all the letters of the alphabet on it, with smaller lines running beneath each letter. Directory, she read at the top of the board. She scanned to the end of the columns, finding V. And there it was, the only store listed for the letter: Victoria’s Shush.

  Victoria’s Shush, Opal sounded it out in her head. Vi-Shush. That must be it. C-3.

  She got on the up escalator. At level B, a harried man in a lab coat passed her, riding down. He was frantically text messaging and never took his eyes off his phone. Opal imagined him forgetting to step off the moving stairs and getting shredded by their metallic teeth.

  On the third story, level C, she hopped off the escalator to face the dark pink doors of the Vi-Shush. From what Opal could tell, it was the only store, er, lab, on the floor. With just the mall’s food court on the opposite side.

  Opal had thought about how she was going to get into the Vi-Shush. Whether she should have taken her mom’s employee ID badge out of her bag the night before, or whether she’d have to find a way to pass an eyeball scan or borrow someone else’s fingerprints to sneak in, like they did in sci-fi space movies. But in the end, Opal decided simple is as simple does. She’d play the daughter card.

  Opal walked straight up to the deep pink doors. And knocked.

  From behind them, as she waited, she thought she heard a monkey screech.

  She knocked again.

  “Access to the Vi-Shush is by special permission only!” came a woman’s voice from the other side. “If you have to knock, you’re not allowed in.”

  Opal stood as close as she could to the doors, pressing the side of her face against the glossy pink paint, and said, “Mom? It’s me, Opaline.”

  The doors flew open so fast, Opal nearly fell over.

  “Opal!” her mom hissed, yanking her inside and shutting the doors behind her. “What are you doing here? How did you get in? There’s a clause in a company contract I drafted that strictly forbids your being at BeauTek!”

  “Me personally?” Opal asked. Every time she thought her mom couldn’t dis her any more, she found some new and improved and insulting way.

  “No, not personally, honey!” her mother answered. “Anybody! If you don’t work for BeauTek, you’re not allowed to be here!”

  Opal shrugged. “But you work here,” she said, “and I’m your, um, offspring. Or spawn. Or whatever you call children in bioresearch-speak. So couldn’t this be like our own private Take Your Daughter to Work Day?”

  Opal’s mom sighed. “This isn’t that kind of company, honey.”

  So typical, Opal thought. She’d come all the way across the river on the ferryboat by herself to see her mom at work, and all her mother wanted was for her to leave. “Okay, fine,” Opal said sullenly. “But I thought you might need this.” She pulled the tablet computer out of her backpack and handed it to her mother.

  At last her mom’s face relaxed a little. “My tablet!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for that! Where did you find it?”

  “In my top dresser drawer,” Opal said. “In between my shirts.” It was exactly the kind of ditzoid thing her mother would do. Exactly the kind of lie she’d believe.

  “Oops,” her mother said, flustered. “I’m such a scatterbrain! I must have stacked the ironing on top of it and then . . . I’ve just been so busy . . .”

  “NBD, Mom. I know.” Opal had heard this a hundred times before. Too busy to come to the spelling bee, she’d watch it later on GoobToob. Too busy to host a birthday party, couldn’t just the two of them download a movie instead? Too busy to take her for a haircut, scissors were in bathroom.

  As her mother clicked open her tablet files and checked through them, making sure no documents had been corrupted or copied, Opal looked around the vast lab. She could see lavender leopard-spotted rabbits crunching on carrots in their cages. Plummy Rhesus monkeys riding mini stationary bikes. Ferrets whose teeth glowed in
digo in the dark. And way back in the corner, beyond the cages and cages of animals and all the barrels and beakers of chemicals, Opal thought she spied the bone-white skull and glittering citrine eye of . . .

  Skeletony?

  In an instant Opal flashed back to that night four years ago when she got drenched in Helio-goo. When the thunder clapped and the lightning cracked and the lights went out. And when, as she dragged herself off to the decontamination showers, she noticed the skeleton was gone from the FLab.

  How did Skeletony end up here?

  “Mom,” Opal asked, “what is your job exactly?”

  Her mother had been so caught up in her computer reunion that she’d almost forgotten about Opal again. She realized with alarm that her eleven-year-old daughter had a 3-D view of the Vi-Shush experiments.

  “Never mind that now,” she said, ushering Opal back toward the deep pink exit. She grabbed a lab coat off a hook on the door. “Put this on,” she said, and Opal obeyed. An ID tag hung from the front pocket. “Dr. S. Cooper,” Opal read. The hem of the lab coat hit just above her ankles. “It’s a bit big,” Opal complained, cuffing the long sleeves.

  “Shh, shh, shh, not now, honey, okay?” Opal’s mother put a finger to her lips.

  “All right, I get it already,” Opal groused, rolling her eyes at her mom’s lame charades. “Shush means shush!”

  Opal’s mom smiled weakly, then opened the pink doors a crack and peered out. “It’s almost time for the night shift,” she said, more to herself than to her daughter. Her eyes searched the empty corridor of level C as she gnawed anxiously on her lower lip. “No one should notice you.” She looked Opal in her amber brown eyes. “Just keep your head bowed, go straight down the escalators, and out the front entrance.” She flicked her wrist up to check her watch. “I’ll meet you at the ferry dock in about a half hour. Can you do that, honey? Just read your homework or something while you wait?”

  “Sure, Mom,” Opal said, shifting from one foot to the other, trying to get one last look at the rabbits and monkeys and all the way back to the light twinkling in Skeletony’s citrine eye. “No problem.”