Midnight on Strange Street, page 21
“Dad!” she screamed. “Help!”
But the silver suits weren’t dragging her and Lola away. Instead, they were moving toward the van, throwing Avery roughly inside and shutting the door with a vicious slam. Avery blinked rapidly, trying to adjust her vision.
“Lola?” she called out. “Dad? Dad!”
She was surrounded by spooled cables, lights, and packing trunks, and she could hear soft, quick breaths close by.
“Avery?” whispered Lola. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said Avery. “But we’re getting out.”
She crawled toward the door, hissing against the pain from the cuts in her hands. When she reached out, she felt nothing but cold, smooth metal. There was no handle here. They had been locked inside.
Avery heard movement at her back, but it wasn’t Lola.
“No!” she shouted. “Dad! Dad, help! There’s someone here! There’s—”
A sharp sting pressed into her neck.
Then Avery Miller’s world went dark.
Bastian was inside Dani’s head. Somehow, in the chaos, he’d managed to find her.
I’m by the boulders, he said. Have you seen Lola?
Dani darted out of the way of two running firefighters. Her clothes and hair were soaked in sweat.
I haven’t seen anyone, she thought back. And in case you hadn’t noticed, there are A LOT OF BOULDERS AROUND HERE.
Stop screaming, would you? My head’s about to explode.
Sorry, Dani thought, in as small a way as possible. Because if the Sardines could create raging fires, maybe they could make heads explode, too. At this point, who knew?
I’m at the boulders near the stop sign at Sunset Street, Bastian elaborated.
I can work with that, Dani told him. Just stay where you are.
Resolute, she ran down the road. Sunset Street was far off from Hazard Hill, and the farther away Dani got from the fire, the cooler the air became. The night was dark, but emergency vehicles illuminated her path in blue and red bursts. Dani cut off the main road to a dusty path, running hard, but careful to stay away from the edge of the steep desert cliffside. She could see Bastian now, standing by a towering cluster of boulders, his head craned toward the sky.
“Bastian!” she shouted.
He looked her way.
In that very moment, a van pulled up on the road beside Bastian. A blue van. Its back doors opened, and hands reached out, grabbing hold of Bastian’s shoulders and hauling him inside.
It happened in an instant, as Dani watched in horror.
“BASTIAN!” she screamed. “NO!”
The doors slammed shut.
Then the van sped off, screeching onto the main road. Before it disappeared into the night, Dani caught sight of the writing scrawled on its side: Gloworks, Inc.
There was a sharp snap inside Dani’s head as her connection to Bastian broke.
Where were the people in the van taking him? What did Gloworks have to do with it? If someone had found out the Sardines’ secret…what was going to happen to them? Horrible possibilities flew into Dani’s head—images of wires and machines, of tests and interviews.
Avery! Lola! Dani’s mind called out. But like before, there was no response. Wherever the others were, they were too far away, out of reach. Tears and sweat mixed on Dani’s face, and she turned a full circle, thinking wildly.
Mr. and Mrs. Gil. They had to be somewhere close by. They wouldn’t leave without their kids. The Gils could help her.
Dani ran up the dusty path she’d come down, rejoining the crowd on the street. A policeman shoved into her, distracted by a conversation with his walkie-talkie. She winced, rubbing her shoulder, and then she saw them: the silver suits. They were everywhere, swarming the base of the hill with their rod-shaped glow detectors in hand.
Dani quickly turned the other way.
“Oof.”
She’d run into someone. Someone with an opaque visor where a face should have been.
“Hey,” said a staticky voice from inside the silver suit’s helmet. “Hey. Stop right there.”
Dani didn’t hesitate. She ran.
“STOP RIGHT THERE, KID! STOP THAT GIRL!” the voice shouted after her.
Dani heard rapid footsteps behind her, but she kept running. She leapt forward, each step propelling her in a desperate sprint, until she broke from the crowd. When she reached an open space, she pulled her glowboard from her backpack and threw it down. With one swift jump and a kick of the power switch, she was skating off, down the darkening street.
The suited men were still following, but the distance between them and Dani was growing.
“Ha!” she shouted back at them. “Take that, losers!”
At that moment, the board beneath her shook, throwing her off-balance. Dani cried out, frantically righting herself. Then she saw the problem: While she’d been gloating over the suits, she’d run the board right off the road and over a steep-sloping cliff, into sheer air.
No, she just had time to think. Help.
The board, strained beyond its limits, gave one last stuttering cough of orange glow. Then Dani was plummeting down, down, down.
She shut her eyes. The fall was too far, the ground below jagged.
All for nothing, she thought. She had worked so hard, she’d beaten the Grackles, and it was ending now. What would the aliens up above have to say about that?
Dani readied herself for pain, for darkness, for some sudden end.
They didn’t come.
The wind no longer whipped at her hair. Her arms stopped flailing about. Dani opened her eyes to find that she hung suspended, only yards above the rocky ground. Slowly, her body tilted until she was standing upright in the air. Then she lowered, steadily, until her sneakers hit a soft patch of dirt. Her glowboard hovered beside her, caught by the same invisible force that had stopped her fall. It sputtered out a few coughs of glow and shut down, hitting the ground with a thump.
“What the—” Dani began. Then, “AAAH!”
Someone else was falling from the sky. Though not falling, exactly—more like floating down. A moment later, he landed beside her on a smooth stretch of rock.
“Whew!” He looked over at Dani with a nervous grin. “That was close.”
It was Zander Poxleitner.
Dani stared. “What,” she whispered. “Was. That.”
“Well,” said Zander conversationally, “you skated your glowboard off a cliff, and then I rescued you. Now we’re hiding from the bad guys, and we’re not shouting, because if we did that, they would track us down here.”
Dani continued to stare as Zander jumped from rock to rock, until his back was pressed against the cliffside. He motioned for Dani to join him, but only when she heard the crackle of walkie-talkies overhead did she understand: They needed to hide. She hurried toward Zander just as a shadowy figure looked over the cliff’s edge. The two of them stood still together, holding their breath, inches apart. A flood of light suddenly burst before them, sweeping across the rocks.
“Well?” called a voice from above.
“No sign of ’em. Send a team down to investigate, you know protocol. But if we’re going off Smith’s report, these suckers might be long gone. Levitation, teleportation, even. Tell your people to watch their backs.”
The light shone down for several more breath-stopping seconds. Then, abruptly, it cut out. Engines revved overhead, and as they did, Zander grabbed Dani’s hand.
“What do you—” she began, but stopped short at the voice in her mind that said, Just run.
It was Zander’s voice.
Zander was in her head.
Dani, too stunned to react, did as Zander asked. Carefully, they dodged around rocks until the ground smoothed out, and streetlights appeared in the distance. But Zander didn’t head toward the lights. He pulled Dani off to the side, into an opening in the cliff. She found herself in a small cave, hidden from the light of the moon. Dani couldn’t even see her own two feet.
Then there was a crunch, and Zander’s face was illuminated by a freshly cracked glow stick. He looked different in the green light.
Very different.
“Before,” Dani whispered, realization crashing on her. “Mitchell hanging upside down…that was you.”
Zander blinked at her. Then he said, “Yeah.”
“Why?” demanded Dani. “Why’d you act like I was the one who did it?”
“I dunno. Guess I figured it was your big moment, not mine.”
“But you—you—” Dani sputtered, trying hard to think.
A car engine rumbled nearby. Zander held a finger to his lips, and once again, he spoke into Dani’s mind.
I shouldn’t have left you all. I was supposed to be with the Sardines all along.
Dani stared at Zander’s green-lit face, uncomprehending. Then, slowly, she began to understand. Once, Zander had lived on Cedar Lane. Once, he’d been a Sardine. But he wasn’t just talking about the team. He wasn’t just talking about glowboarding.
The fifth person. Cautiously, Dani pushed her thought toward him. The fifth person the aliens were talking about—it’s you.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Zander said aloud. “Something happened the night of the food fight. I…can’t really describe it.”
“Let me guess,” said Dani. “You sleepwalked your way outside, and a giant blue light told you life-changing stuff. And then it got in your head, showed you memories, and told you more life-changing stuff.”
“Uh…” Zander stared at Dani. “Well, yeah. Only I don’t know exactly what the message was. It was all crackly. They just kept repeating the same two words, over and over.”
“Wait,” Dani said. “Did they tell you what day they’re coming here? When we’re supposed to meet?”
“I don’t—”
Dani wasn’t sure how she’d ended up grabbing Zander by the shoulders, but she squeezed them tight now and shook with all her might. “ZANDER POXLEITNER, WHAT TWO WORDS. WHAT DID THE MESSAGE SAY.”
“Whoa, whoa!” Zander wrenched away, looking at Dani like she’d gone crazy. Maybe she was crazy, Dani reflected. She had started to believe in aliens after all.
Another engine roared by on the road. Dani and Zander breathed in together, and after some silence, together, they breathed out.
“Okay,” whispered Zander, rubbing at his arm. “What I was going to tell you, before you resorted to violence, was that the message kept saying ‘summer solstice.’ Just that: summer solstice. But I don’t know what—”
“Holy crap,” said Dani, putting her hands to her face. “The solstice. The first day of summer. That’s today. At midnight. At Hazard Hill. All five of us. Holy, holy crap!”
“What?”
“Don’t you get it?” shouted Dani. Then she checked herself. “No, of course you don’t. None of us did. You didn’t hear the first part of the message, and we didn’t hear the last. Because we were all supposed to be together, like you said. The message was jumbled because you were missing. But now we have all the pieces, and we have to do something about it. The others are in trouble, Zander. I don’t—”
“DANIELLE HIRSCH, WHAT DID THE MESSAGE SAY.”
Dani gaped. It appeared Zander could yell as well as she could. Also, he’d called her Danielle.
She gathered her composure and said slowly, “We’re special, right? We can move stuff and talk with our minds. And these aliens from a galaxy far, far away figured that out. Actually, they’re probably the ones who gave us our powers—something about an elixir, maybe it was the incident, we don’t know for sure. But what we do know is that they don’t like the way we’ve been treated on Earth. They’re coming to ‘rescue’ us, whatever that means. And the rest of the world?” Dani brought her hands together, then pushed them away, fingers dancing. “Kapow.”
Now Zander was the one gaping. “That…can’t be right.”
“Yeah, well, there’ve been a whole lot of things going on that aren’t right. Like you talking in my head, and cafeterias exploding with food, and, I dunno, the fact that Hazard Hill is on fire.”
Zander scratched his nose. “Good point.”
Dani gave him a look. Had Zander agreed with her? And before that, had he stood up to her bully? Had he even saved her life, back on that cliffside?
Gross, Dani thought.
“What?” Zander asked.
“Huh?”
“What’s gross?”
Dani crossed her arms. She hadn’t meant for that thought to leak out. She was going to have to be careful from now on.
“You are, obviously,” she said.
Zander scowled. “Yeah, you’re welcome. Go ahead and forget that I saved you from certain death.”
“Okay, I will,” said Dani. But she was growing distracted with other thoughts.
Gloworks. The blue van that had chased her the other day, the one that had pulled Bastian off the street minutes before, was a Gloworks van. For all Dani knew, those same people had grabbed Avery and Lola, too.
The memo that Bastian had stolen from Nando—what exactly had it said? Something about Gloworks. Something about negotiations and delivery of new resource.
Dani got an awful, twisted-up feeling inside. The blue flame sputtered as she met Zander’s eyes.
“The memo,” she said.
“The what?”
“Come on,” said Dani. “We’re going to find my friends.”
NO. WHY? WHYYY?”
Zander was watching Dani from a safe distance. She really could be scary, especially at a moment like this, when her glowboard wouldn’t budge. Though the board turned on easily enough, and though Dani could hover like the star skater she was, there was no power left in the machine. It hung motionless in the air while Dani yelled, “MOVE, WOULD YOU. MOVE.”
“Uh…” Zander said, but not until he’d put several more steps between himself and Dani. “I don’t think it’s going to work anymore. Not after the cliff. All that strain zapped the glow. You’ll need a new cartridge. Or, um, with that old of a model…maybe a new board.”
“YES, I UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM,” Dani screeched. “I’M JUST VERY, VERY MAD.”
Zander glanced around, nerves tingling. He and Dani may have escaped the silver suits for now, but that hardly meant they were safe on this dark, deserted road. Still, he stood by and let Dani be angry. He would be angry, too, he figured, if it were his board. Plus, he knew how much that glowboard meant to Dani. He’d been there when she’d bought it, using two years’ worth of allowance and birthday money. She hadn’t even ridden it on the way home, but squeezed it to her chest like it was a check for a million dollars.
Zander looked at his own board, a top-of-the-line turbo model direct from Gloworks, Inc. He hadn’t paid a penny for it; Mitchell’s dad donated all the team’s gear. But he also didn’t care about it anywhere near as much as the starter model he’d first got in fifth grade.
Dani had once called Zander a sellout. Moments like this, he wondered if she was right. He wondered what she’d say if she knew about the brand-new boosters Mr. Jensen had installed on the Grackles’ boards, and how those boosters were most definitely against racing regulations. How that was how they’d made their record-breaking 2:11 time. If Dani knew all that, she’d probably yell even louder than she was yelling now.
Eventually, Dani grew quiet. She hopped off the board and turned to Zander, a strange look on her face. Like she was…unsure.
When was Dani Hirsch unsure of anything?
“Okay, genius,” she said. “What are we supposed to do? There’s no way we can walk back to my neighborhood. That would take hours. We don’t have hours.”
Zander didn’t have a plan. He wasn’t like Dani, didn’t see the point in preparation when stuff like this could happen, blowing your careful plans to smithereens. What Zander did have was a fancy glowboard and a last-minute idea that just might work. He switched on his board, and it came to life with a powerful hum. In the moonlight, its gold-painted body seemed to shine.
“Maybe you’re out of power,” he told Dani. “But you can still hitch a ride.”
He knelt, opening a compartment at the back of the board, right above the glowstream cartridge. From it, he pulled a retractable cord with a thin plastic handle on its end. He tossed the handle to Dani, who caught hold.
“Gloworks really thinks of everything, don’t they,” she muttered.
“Done this before?” Zander asked as they mounted their boards.
“What, coasting? Not…exactly.”
“Well, we could always switch places, if you want.”
Dani glowered at him. “What, you think I can’t do this?”
“Nope. Just an offer.”
“Offer denied.”
Zander didn’t know why, but suddenly he was smiling. Dani was the worst, but she was also kind of…the best. Not that he’d ever tell her so. She already hated his guts, and there was no need to make her hate him more.
“So, where are we headed?” he asked her.
Sudden energy sparked in his mind. Dani was there.
I’ll tell you on the way, she said.
Which, weirdly, made Zander smile some more.
They set off. Zander started at a slow, careful pace, glancing back every few seconds to check that Dani was okay. Her board hovered behind his, skating smoothly through the air, hitched to his power. Dani’s grip on the handle was tense at first, but as they went on, he felt the tension loosen. Then Dani was in his head, saying, Is that as fast as you can go?
Zander smirked. He’d show Dani Hirsch fast. He kicked the board to full power, and they picked up speed in an instant, zooming along the desert road. Cars began to appear, and the desolate path eventually led to buildings, sidewalks, and streets. The whole time, Dani thought out directions: Left, and right here, and stay straight awhile. The houses became more familiar, until Zander recognized their route.
Got it from here, he told Dani, and sped the rest of the way to Cedar Lane.
Hey, slow down, Dani thought minutes later as they rounded a corner. Zander glanced back, knees slightly bent, a warning to Dani that he meant to carve. She nodded once and bent her own knees, turning her body with his in precise synchronization.
