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I grabbed it and spun back toward the clearing. Shaking, I pulled out the blowpipe. My hands were sweaty. As I reached for a dart, the weapon slipped out of my hand. It clattered onto a rock. Behind me the monkey screeched in surprise.
From the dense jungle, a rifle emerged, pointing directly at my face.
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“YEAAAGHHH!”
Torquin’s roar blotted out all sound. He leaped from the brush into the clearing, about twenty yards to my right.
The four soldiers wheeled around. Torquin landed full body on the one who’d found me, squashing the guy to the ground. Behind him, another Massa soldier was trying to take aim at Torquin, but the two bodies were too close. Instead he raised his rifle high and brought it down on Torquin’s head. Hard. It hit with a solid thud.
Aly ran toward Torquin to help, but the assailant backed away, the weapon still in his hand.
Its barrel was now bent, forming the shape of Torquin’s skull.
Torquin stood, scratching his head in puzzlement. Then, grabbing the rifle, he flung it against a tree, with its owner still holding tight. The guy folded without a whimper.
“Two down,” Torquin grunted.
As the other two men maneuvered in the confusion, I snatched up the blowpipe, jammed a dart down the tube, and blew. It sailed into the clearing, nearly hitting Aly and Cass along the way.
Eeee! chided the monkey, holding out another dart.
The men couldn’t seem to decide where to point their rifles, at Torquin or me. I aimed carefully, firing once again. Cass and Aly dove to the ground, out of the way. But my shot sailed true this time, catching one Massa in the side of the neck.
EEEEEE! The monkey was jumping up and down now.
“My feeling exactly,” I said.
The monkey began gesturing frantically into the trees. I turned to see the remaining commando on his knees, lifting his rifle.
I ducked behind a bush, reaching for a dart. But I had used the last one. The monkey was grabbing my shoulder, leapfrogging over my head. “Hey!” I shouted.
Crrrack!
I flinched as the creature’s body jolted backward. It hit me in the face, knocking me to the ground. As I fell, a warm liquid oozed downward onto my neck.
I turned to see Torquin pummeling the last attacker with his massive fists. Cass and Aly were screaming, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“Little man, are you okay?” came Fiddle’s voice.
I blinked the blood from my eye. Fiddle was kneeling over me, cradling my head in his hand. “F-fine,” I said, spraying his face with red dots. “I thought you were going without us.”
“I was, until Gigantor got ahold of me,” he replied. “Dude, you totally rocked the Massa. I am impressed.”
“It wasn’t just me,” I said, sitting up.
Above, the setting sun had cast the sky orange. The waning light illuminated the small body of the monkey, lying in a twisted position on its back.
* * *
I watched Torquin quickly dig a hole with a bayonet. As he lowered the monkey’s body into it, distant shouts and explosions filtered through the thick jungle. The sky was darkening, which would only be to our advantage. By my calculation, the battle for the island had been under way for hours. We had little time and less hope of defeating the Massa. But in that moment all I could think about was the bravery of the little creature.
I felt a tear drop from my cheek onto the dirt. Aly looked at me with concern and put a hand on my shoulder.
“He took one for me,” I said with a shrug. “He didn’t deserve this.”
Aly nodded. As we rushed to cover the hole with soil, Torquin softly murmured, “Good-bye, Wilbur.”
“That’s the monkey’s name—Wilbur?” Cass asked.
Torquin wiped at his cheek with a huge hand.
“Guess he really meant something to you,” Aly said.
Torquin shook his head. “Humid today, is all.”
With a rustle of leaves, another commando emerged from the bush. It took a moment to recognize it was Fiddle, dressed in a Massa outfit he’d taken from an unconscious soldier. “I suggest we all suit up, guys. No time to lose.”
I turned. The four Massa officers were tied to trees at the edge of the clearing, their uniforms piled at their feet. “Four Massa, five us,” Torquin said. “I get uniform later.”
“Better hope they make them in plus sizes,” Fiddle said. “Now, hurry. And take the weapons, in case these guys wake up and break free.”
Leaving the gravesite, we each grabbed an outfit and put it on. The guys were all big, so the garb fit loosely over our own clothes.
Cass rolled up the cuffs of his baggy pants, pulled his belt as tight as it went, and grabbed a commando rifle. As Aly picked up another rifle and strapped it over her thin shoulders, her whole body sagged.
Fiddle gave her a dubious look. “You guys are a bigger danger to yourselves than the Massa are.”
“Try us,” Aly said.
“Follow me,” Cass said, stepping to the edge of the clearing. As we fell in behind, dodging our way around vines and trees, the jungle seemed to grow darker by the second. Under the helmet I was sweating like crazy. The noise from the compound had subsided, which meant the battle was winding down. What would we see? My heartbeat quickened with a mixture of hope and dread.
My rifle clanked heavily against my side, but that was nothing compared to the swarm of mosquitoes around my ankles. “Get away!” I said through gritted teeth, bending to swat at the cloud of tiny bugs.
I stopped in midslap at the sight of a flat rock, nearly as big as a manhole cover. On it was a carving of a fierce griffin, a half eagle, half lion. I bent down to examine it. I’d seen it before—back when I’d first tried to escape from the KI.
“Hm,” Torquin said, looming up behind me. He picked up the rock and scowled at the carving. “Griffin. Pah!”
The burning smell grew stronger. Through the branches now, I could see the winking lights of the compound. Distant voices shouted. From our left came the sound of painful, pitiful groans. Cries for help.
I looked at the others. They had all heard it, too. We changed direction, moving closer. I knew where we were now—just behind our dormitory.
We crouched behind thick brush. Not ten feet in front of us was a scraggly field, where a guard moved slowly back and forth, smoking a cigarette. “They’re using our dorm as a prison,” Aly whispered.
“At least they’re keeping KI people alive,” Fiddle said.
A pinpoint of light shot through the air. Before I could react, the stub of a lit cigarette hit the side of my face.
“Gggghhh—”
Torquin’s beefy hand closed around my mouth, cutting off an outcry. My cheek stung, and his fingers only made it worse.
The guard stopped in his tracks. He came closer to the jungle’s edge. Toward us. I held my breath. His eyes scanned the bushes as he shone a flashlight. From the dorm came a sudden clatter and the muffled voice of a KI captive: “Emergency! Yo, Massa lunkheads—Fritz is having a seizure! Somebody get him his medication!”
Fritz. The mechanic who had been part of my KI training.
But the guard ignored the voice. The beam was coming closer. It would discover my face first. I crouched lower, pressing my hands against the rocky ground. Torquin was to my right. He turned to me and mouthed the words “talk to him.” He gestured to my uniform.
I had almost forgotten. We were dressed like them. But what was I supposed to say?
“I see you …” the guard said, stepping closer.
Torquin glared. Taking a deep breath, I stood. “Of course you did!” I said, pointing to the welt on my cheek. “I … fell.”
Lame, lame, lame, Jack!
A smile grew across the guard’s face. He raised his rifle. “Nice outfit, kid. I know who you are,” he said. “And your face is going to look a lot worse if you don’t tell me where your little friends are.”
He lifted his rifle high over his head. I stepped back, shaking.
A dull gray blur shot across my line of sight. It connected with the Massa’s face with a sickening thud. Silently, he and his rifle fell to the ground.
The griffin rock was resting by his head.
“Now,” Torquin said, stepping triumphantly out of the woods, “we have fifth uniform.”
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“HOW DO I look?” Torquin walked stiffly toward us, wearing the fallen Massa’s garb. The pants had ripped at the seams, his arms dangled out of the too-short sleeves, and his belly protruded from an unbuttoned shirt.
“Like a bear in samajap,” Cass replied. “Too bad it’s getting dark. We could kill them with laughter.”
Aly and I were poised at the edge of the jungle. Fiddle had raced into the dorm, which was now unguarded. Around us, the compound was in utter chaos. The place may have been a great research institute, but it wasn’t built to withstand an assault.
A piercing alarm made us jump. Seconds later, Fiddle raced out the back door of the dorm. Behind him swarmed a group of bedraggled KI people. Two of them were holding Fritz the mechanic by his legs and shoulders. As they disappeared into the jungle to our left, Fiddle gestured toward the escapees. “All of you!” he urged. “Get to MO twenty-one, now!”
“Is Fritz okay?” I asked.
“Diabetic,” Fiddle explained, as KI prisoners streamed out of the dorm. “Needs an insulin injection. Fortunately, there are plenty of medical doctors among the KI. We have a couple of hidden shelters on the island. MO twenty-one is near Mount Onyx. There’ll be insulin in the emergency supplies there.”
I could barely recognize some of the KI staff. Brutus, the head chef, had been beaten badly, his face swollen and red. He had to be helped by two others. Hiro, the martial-arts trainer, was walking with a crutch. They looked toward us, weary and bewildered, as if we were a dream.
Fiddle urged them on, then gathered Torquin, Cass, Aly, and me close. We could hear Massa reinforcements clattering in at the front of the building. “We don’t have much time before the goons figure out what just happened. I’ll stay here and get as many KI people to safety as I can. You guys get to work finding Bhegad’s EP assignment. Aly, you know where to go?”
“Building D,” Aly said.
Fiddle nodded. “Right. The systems control center. But I warn you, the info is encrypted beyond belief.”
“Depends on your definition of belief,” Aly said with a small grin.
“Radio me when you find him.” Fiddle fished a walkie-talkie from his pocket and threw it to me. “The uniforms will give you some cover. Be sure you find those Loculi. Bhegad will know where they are. Do you understand this? Good. I can meet you back at the plane. Where is it?”
“Enigma Cove,” Torquin said.
With a nod, Fiddle disappeared in the direction of the dorm. Cass, Aly, Torquin, and I bolted. We followed the perimeter of the campus toward Building D. I was scared out of my mind. The Massa knew our faces. In the light, we were toast. And the baggy uniforms didn’t help. But the gathering darkness might help us pass for Massa commandos.
As the alarm blared all over the compound, the chaos seemed to multiply in the quadrangle. Officers were screaming at subordinates, commandos were shoving KI staff toward the dorm. No one seemed to care about four more running people.
We crouched behind the squat, square building and peered into the window. Exactly two Massa were in there, pounding on keyboards. “Skeleton crew,” Cass commented.
Torquin stood, gesturing us to follow. He circled the building and strolled through the building’s front door, which had been blasted open. “I help, fellow Massa?” he boomed.
The two men turned. One of them nearly spit out his coffee. “Whoa, nice uniform! What have you been eating, dude?”
Torquin grabbed them by their collars, lifted them out of their seats, and butted their heads together. “Pound cake,” he said.
Aly slid into a seat in front of a console. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Code flashed across the screen at impossible speed.
“You can actually read that?” I said.
“Shhh …” The scrolling stopped, and the screen filled with random letters and symbols. “Okay, there it is … House of Wenders, sublevel seven. That’s Bhegad’s EP.”
“That’s the underground lab, where they made Shelley the Loculus shell,” Cass exclaimed.
“Where do you read that, Aly?” I asked, staring at the gobbledygook.
“It’s in hexadecimal notation,” she said. “Those combinations each represent letters and characters.”
I stared at her. “You scare me.”
“Actually, I scare me, too.” She turned from the screen, a concerned look on her face. “I wouldn’t have been able to read that even a week ago. Hurray for G7W. Now let’s see if we can scare the Massa …” Swinging around back to the keyboard, she said, “They will have access to our trackers now, right? So before we get Bhegad, why don’t I just zap the KI’s tracking machine—along with some other choice equipment … hee-hee …”
“We can’t just run across the courtyard to the House of Wenders,” Cass said. “There are tons of Massa. Dark or not, someone will recognize us, just like that guard did.”
“Go the long way,” Torquin suggested.
“On it.” Aly’s fingers were a blur. “Overloading the Comestibule circuits … disabling the breakers … should cause a small explosion there. Okay. On the count of three, the lights should go out everywhere except the House of Wenders. The Massa goons who aren’t heading to the dorm will be drawn to the explosion in the Comestibule, buying us some space and time.”
“Wait. What if someone is actually in the kitchen?” I asked.
Torquin looked skeptical. “The long way is better.”
Aly sighed. “I figure that the kitchen-cafeteria is the one place people won’t be during a Massa attack. Let’s hope I’m right. Ready? One … three!”
She leaped from the seat. A distant blast rocked the earth. I staggered and fell to the floor. “I thought you said a small explosion!”
“There goes five fifty-pound sacks of chocolate chips,” Cass said mournfully.
