The Secret of Zoom (24 page)

The guards were back inside, but not for long. Christina made a last dash for the relative safety of the pickup truck and collapsed behind it, her breath uneven.

There were no gunnysacks left. So Taft had made five trips, up and down—and now he would come back for her. She hoped he would understand why she hadn't brought Danny.

She scanned the back of the pickup truck. Would Lenny notice that some of the food had been taken? Maybe she should rearrange the boxes. Quickly, she scrambled up—and saw the bottle of cough medicine still there, front and center.

She snatched it up and tucked it inside her waistband with the braids. No harm done. She'd bring it down with her.
Christina quietly moved some full boxes to the fore and hid the empties behind them, glancing over her shoulder now and then to see if Taft had returned.

He should have come back by now. How long did it take him to unload one sack? She scroonched on her stomach to the lip of the cone and hung over the edge. Yes, there was Taft, already flying up, the plane glowing a beautiful blue . . .

She blinked. That wasn't right.

The plane struggled higher and took on a greenish tint.

Christina cupped her hands around her mouth. “You're running out of zoom! Use the spare canister!” She glanced back over her shoulder. Had anyone heard? She hoped the sound had all gone downward.

She looked back into the cavern and saw Taft still ascending, his face upturned, the plane now greenish gold.

“What did you say?” he called, his voice anxious.

“The spare—” Christina began, and then clapped her hands over her mouth. No! He couldn't refuel midflight—the plane was far too wobbly. If the zoom spilled, it would explode when it hit the ground. And her mother and Leo were down there.

The plane turned golden. Suddenly Christina saw that Taft would never make it. He needed what zoom was left to make a safe landing—if he could do it at all. It would take less fuel to go down than to keep rising.

She still had her mother's cough medicine. She pulled it out along with her braids—yes, she could rubber-band the hair around the bottle to cushion it.

“Catch!” she cried, and dropped the bottle.

Taft caught it with both hands and pulled it to his chest. He looked up at her as the plane turned a bright pumpkin color.

Christina could read his face like a headline. He understood what was happening. But he couldn't make himself abandon her.

“You've got to!” cried Christina. “Go down now, or you'll crash!”

Taft cast her one last anguished look. The plane began to descend, faster, faster.

Christina clenched her hands, her fingernails biting into her palms, and waited tensely for the sound of smashing metal. But all was quiet.

She looked down. Far, far below, there was a faint glow of pinky rose—and then it winked out.

Taft was safe. And she was on her own.

 

There was a crunch of boots behind the pickup. Christina, startled, shoved herself quickly away from the lip of the cone.

It was a little more force than she needed. The cone was steep and the pebbles loose, and she was skidding, sliding, making far too much noise. She scrabbled to a stop at last and opened her eyes. There, inches from her nose, was a pair of polished black boots.

Christina's heart jackknifed like a fish leaping. She sucked air as a ham-sized fist gripped her arm and hauled her upright.

“And what have we here?” Lenny Loompski bent over Christina, his face shadowed. “Is this one of my happy orphans who loves me?”

Christina pressed a hand to her heart, whose beat had steadied to a taut, fearful pounding. She looked up at the man's dark, broad face.

He didn't recognize her with her dirty face and short hair, but she recognized him. This was the man who had imprisoned her mother, jailed her father, enslaved a hundred orphans, and driven his own uncle insane. She could not think of anyone she despised more.

“Yes,” she said through her teeth.

“And what were you doing way up here, all by yourself?” Lenny's eyes darted suspiciously to the truck.

“Er . . .” Christina thought fast. “I was practicing my song. I didn't want anyone to hear it until it was ready. It was a Happy Orphan kind of song,” she added in a burst of inspiration.

Lenny Loompski's face relaxed into a smile. “Really? A song for me? A new one?”

Christina nodded. She was pretty sure Lenny Loompski hadn't heard verse two of Taft's vomit and bomb-it song. But she thought she had better change a few words.

Lenny's sure to win the Karsnicky
Since he's smart, it won't be tricky
Yes, it's clear, it is not murky
Lenny's not a big fat turkey . . .

She sang it slightly off-key. Lenny didn't seem to notice.

“Marvelous, marvelous! You'll have to sing that one for our visitor tonight. And make sure you sing your very best.” He
pointed down past the sleeping orphans to the terraced mines, open to the sky. From this angle, Christina could see what she had never noticed before—a blackened hole in a rock wall, the height and width of a man. The top seemed to have been recently collapsed.

“That,” said Lenny, chuckling, “is where orphans go when they're
not
so happy. Sometimes, bad orphans don't sing their very, very best for Lenny. But if their pitch is off in the underground mine . . . well, let's just say, small loss. And the roof of the mine gets opened up a little more, so it all works out in the end, see?”

Christina looked at him in horror. She backed away.

“Bad orphans go
kaboom
, see?”

Christina turned and ran. Down the hill, toward the orphan camp—anywhere to get away from that smiling, evil man. She crashed through tall weeds, her feet kicking up everything in their path—dirt, gravel, rocks, rubber cows—

Christina stopped. She walked back a few steps and looked carefully at the ground. She bent swiftly and tucked something inside her shirt.

 

The orphans sat in the dust, all eyes fixed on Christina. She had told them very little about herself—who knew if one of them might accidentally blurt something out in front of a guard? But they seemed most interested in the fact that she wasn't an orphan.

“So . . .” Dorset traced a line in the dirt with her finger. “What's it like to have a father?”

Christina looked around the circle of children. The faces
were all different, and yet every child had the same look: unwashed, uncared-for, eyes large and hungry.

The small boy at Christina's side tugged at her sleeve. “Not a Happy Orphan Daddy,” he whispered. “The real kind.”

“Well,” Christina began, and stopped. What could she possibly say?

The orphans inched closer, leaning in to hear.

Christina tried again. “I guess . . . a real father keeps you safe.”

A soft sigh went up from each orphan throat.

“What about a mother?” asked a small girl with tangled hair and an upturned nose. “What does she do?”

Christina gazed at the girl thoughtfully and reached out a hand. “A mother does a lot of things. Like this, for one.” She pulled the girl in close and began to comb gently through the tangled hair with her fingers.

“Does she use ribbons?” asked the girl dreamily.

“Sometimes,” said Christina. “If she has them.”

“
My
mother would always have them.”

A boy in a gray undershirt stirred restlessly. “She would not.
Your
mother abandoned you.”

The girl under Christina's hands snapped straight. “Well, so did yours!”

“No,” said the boy, shaking his head. “I think maybe I was stolen.”

“Me, too!”

“That's what happened to me!”

“It did
not
, you bragger.”

A babble of voices rose in heated discussion. A guard
stepped outside the guardhouse, yawned and stretched, and began to stroll toward the orphan camp.

Dorset stood up and rattled her tin can. “Come on, it's time.”

The children scrambled to their feet, picked up their cans, and shook awake the few orphans who were still asleep. In a moment, they had formed a ragged column and begun to march off the flat sleeping area and down the terraced steps to the mines.

“Maybe when I was little, my mother was going to give me a ride in my stroller,” said the boy in the gray undershirt, hooking his can to his belt. “But then she had to go inside for something she forgot, and Lenny Loompski came along and stole me.”

The girl who had wanted ribbons looked serious. “She shouldn't have gone back inside.”

“It was just for a minute,” said the boy. “She didn't mean to.”

 

On the edge of the orphan camp, behind a stone slab on the first terrace down, Christina found Danny sitting in the dust.

She spoke softly, so as not to startle him. “Hi, Danny. My name's Christina.”

The big boy raised his face, his eyes dark brown pools of misery. “Steena?” He blinked and looked down again at his hands.

“What's that you have there?” Christina took a step closer.

Danny opened his cupped hands to reveal a stone the size of a small egg. “Rocky.” He moved his big thumb over it, back and forth, as if he were petting something very fragile.

Christina watched him for a moment. “I found something of yours,” she said. “Here.”

Danny stared at the rubber cow, unbelieving. The rock fell from his hands as he reached for the toy, his face changing from hopeless misery to delight. “Bubby!” he cried. He pressed the cow to his cheek, his neck, his chest, and turned bright eyes to Christina. “Taff gave her to me!”

“I know,” said Christina gently. “Taft is my friend, too.”

“You know Taff?” Danny gazed at her. “Is he coming to get me?”

Christina hesitated. Taft was stuck inside the mountain just as certainly as Leo and her mother were. He couldn't sing the notes needed to get the planes activated again, even if the fuel tanks were filled to overflowing with zoom.

“
We
are going to get
him
,” she said at last. “But not right this minute.”

Danny scrambled to his feet. “When?” he asked urgently.

“Soon,” said Christina, desperately hoping it was true. “Very soon.”

“H
EY!
You, there!”

Christina looked up to the rim's edge where a guard, bored and sleepy, was scratching himself.

“Get a move on!”

Danny crammed Bubby the cow into the front of his shirt and obediently shambled down the stair-stepped path to the mine's lower levels. Christina followed more slowly.

The mines were like a big rough bowl beneath an endless gray sky. The top level was fissured with cracks where the zoom had been sung out already, by children or birds. Here and there, Christina could see a blackened crevice, where perhaps the children's notes had been slightly off.

She picked up a pebble and rapped sharply at a bit of lichen on the terrace wall, flaking it off. Would it look like she was working? She had no tin can.

Just above her, amid the rocks that fenced the Starkian Ridge, something moved and ruffled. A harrier poked its
smooth feathered head above its nest, roused, and opened its yellow beak, crying a protest at being disturbed.

Below, the orphans' voices all lifted together in an imitation of the cry, and Christina could hear the clink of tin cans as they were pressed against the rock. At her fingertips, a spot of zoom that had been beneath the lichen suddenly glistened, melted, and fell in drops to the ground with a
pop! pop!

“I heard that!” shouted the guard. “Someone's wasting zoom!”

The sun bumped above the mountains, throwing instant shadows, blue-gray and sharply edged. Christina moved like a cat into the deep shade of the rock wall, glanced over her shoulder, and slipped down to the next terrace, and then the next. She couldn't afford to be noticed, if she ever wanted to rescue Taft and Leo and her mother. And she
had
to rescue them; she was the only one who even knew where they were, apart from Lenny and his guards.

But how, how? She was just one girl against an evil man who seemed to have almost everyone on his side. She didn't even know how she could rescue
herself
.

A low-lying fog had settled in the deepest level of the mine, and Christina could see the heads of the orphans moving above it, ghostly in the swirling vapor. She hurried down the last few steps and ducked into the cold and clammy mist.

Child-shaped forms moved past her like smudges in a cloud. Sound was echoed, magnified—harriers calling one to
the other, children crying out like frightened birds, metal tapping stone. Christina huddled out of the way, her back against the terrace wall. She had to think. She had to plan.

Instead, pictures of her father rose in her mind's eye.