Upbeats

  Chapter Ten

  The moment the last bell rang, I was out of there.

  I raced home, ran in, showed my face, ran back out, grabbed my bike and cycled like mad for the woods.

  I live in one of the neat suburbs, in a double storey house with a vast backyard and a fair sized front lawn that I mow every second Saturday.

  Rockwell City is fairly big but it’s known as one of the most isolated cities. At the heart of Rockwell, there are tall buildings housing offices, banks and whatever. There’s an underground shopping area, too, that spans the entire area underneath the city.

  But as you head in any direction away from the tight cluster of slick buildings and offices, you come to either apartments; cheap and expensive, Downtown and Uptown, run down and pristine, or suburbs; usually tidy houses, vaguely identical, in rows, or the beach, if you go west, and if you head away from the suburbs, east, north or south, you’ll come to the country outskirts; farms, barns and woods. It’s completely different to the city, but it’s still considered a part of Rockwell.

  Robyn lives in the country outskirts, in a small double story house with creaky floorboards, a fireplace, shuttered windows and a front porch, surrounded by woods.

  She’s not too far from my neighbourhood but it’s still quite a way to pedal.

  When I got to her house, the others were already there. They must have come straight there after school.

  They stood in a casual semi-circle in Robyn’s front yard, which had a wide range of wild flowers growing happily.

  "Well, is everyone here?" I asked, trying to make sure I wasn’t forgetting someone again.

  "Not Smithy," Brooke said. I chose to ignore her tone.

  "He’ll show up," I assured, glancing at Robyn, who seemed determined not to let go of her faith in Smithy. "I know he will."

  "You’re right, I will," Smithy said, firmly.

  I spun around and looked up, to see him casually hanging out in a tree.

  "Would you stop that ‘sneaking up behind someone and answering their questions’ thing?" Ned said, sternly. "You can really make a person a nervous wreck with your whole disappearing and reappearing act."

  "Yeah, well, I meant to explain it to you before that food fight broke out," Smithy said, sounding a tad defensive. "Listen: just watch and see for yourselves. But blink and you’ll miss it."

  I was about to enquire as to what it was we were to watch for when Smithy disappeared. Like a magician, with a cloud of transparent, pale blue mist left in his tracks. One second there, next second, gone.

  "Over here," Smithy called. He was standing on Robyn’s roof. We looked up but by the time we all saw him there, he did it again, in the, bad expression, blink of an eye.

  "Here," he said, standing in our midst.

  "But how did you . . ?" Robyn looked from the roof back to where Smithy was currently standing. "Huh . . .?"

  "It’s called teleport," Smithy explained, "one moment I’m here, the next, I’m gone. I’m the ultimate escape artist."

  I nodded, impressed. Everyone’s powers seemed ten times more interesting than my own. "I can definitely see that one coming in handy. Can you transport passengers?"

  Smithy shrugged. "I’ve never tried it, but, yeah, I guess so . . . it should work on the same principle."

  "Impressive," System said, waddling up to us in his usual skunk-resembling form. "Teleport is a useful power to possess."

  "Well, now that we’re all here, let’s get a move on," Robyn said, walking fearlessly into the woods she knew so well. We all followed her.

  Trees towered above us, their leaves a mixture of brown, mustard, yellow, orange and red. Snatches of grey clouds blocking the blue sky and the suns light could be seen through gaps in the tree tops. Twigs and dried leafs crunched under our feet as we trekked behind our guide, Robyn. She made it look so easy, just strolling through the woods. A fallen tree branch, no problem, she just skipped over it. We all stumbled on it like sacks of potatoes with wheels for legs by getting our jeans caught on one of the jutting out twigs.

  A tight cluster of trees? Nothing to it, she just slipped in sideways. Robyn wasn’t skinny but she was petite. The rest of us? I scrapped my arms and back through the material of my jacket on the bark and when I got through the trees, I had a damp, muddy black mark on the back of my jacket. I suppose I could have used my power to just go through it but so far I had only used my power once.

  A low branch?

  Robyn ducked and now the rest of us have bruises on our foreheads.

  Robyn knew every square inch of the forest. She was familiar with every tree that had fallen, every branch, what it looked like, how low it was, when to duck and when to jump over . . . and she was thus able to guide her way through the terrain using the natural landmarks mapped out only in her mind.

  It’s impossible to travel in a straight path through a forest. If a tree doesn’t set you off, a boulder or a pile of logs will. So either you have to have an incredible sense of direction, a compass, be able to tell the directions using the sun or stars or you have to have a Robyn, who just knows her destination and a thousand ways on how to get to it.

  "Here we are," she announced as we came to a clearing, at least a kilometre or more in the woods away from her house.

  The cave was really a huge rock formation with a hollow alcove set in a distance above the ground, with a ledge jutting out like a balcony.

  It was at least two metres off the ground. "Uh, Robyn?" Ned said. "How are we going to get up there? It completely slipped my mind to bring a ladder and as much as we could just get Rubber Band here to stretch into a ladder," he jerked his thumb in Brooke’s direction, "I doubt she will do so willingly and without a great deal of mumbling."

  Brooke scowled at the name Ned had bestowed upon her. She hoped it wouldn’t stick.

  Robyn strode up to the cave and grabbed hold of a smooth, hand-size lump of rock protruding out of the base of the cave. "Don’t any of you know how to rock climb?"

  We watched as she swung herself up and grabbed more handholds, placed her feet carefully and firmly and eventually managed to hoist herself up onto the balcony. She stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. "Nothing to it!" she called down.

  She had made it look easy again, I knew it, but there wasn’t much else we could do.

  "Shouldn’t be so hard," I said as I bravely leapt to the challenge. I felt for the handholds and footholds Robyn had used, grabbed some and tried to yank myself up.

  Scrap that.

  It’s fairly difficult.

  I tried to pull myself up but all I ended up doing was hurting my hands and falling backwards onto the mat of leafs.

  My fingers stung, horribly.

  "That’s not as easy as I thought it would be," I said. But I tried again. I got back up and launched at the rock without giving myself time to recover from my first attempt.

  This time, I was able to do it. I don’t know if it was speed or my mind taking over, but I drove myself up and before I could think of my aching hands, I was standing up beside Robyn.

  She gave me a pat on the back. "You did great, Luke," she said, proudly.

  Ned climbed up like I did, failing at first but succeeding on the next attempt. System changed to Kevin and did it, realizing he just couldn’t do it as a skunk, and he didn’t know what a bird looked like. But he was still not used to his long human arms and strong human legs. He didn’t know how to control them. He was used to tiny limbs. He kept falling over and over again. Brooke could see this wasn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

  "System, go back to skunk form," she instructed as she approached the cave, stretched her arms up, grabbed hold of the ledge and pulled herself up, effortlessly. Once she was up, she lowered her arms, held onto System and pulled him up.

  Smithy simply teleported onto the balcony.

  "Alright, now that we’re all here," I said, somewhere in the back of my mind vowing to take rock climbing lessons if this was to become a regular ha
ppening. "What do we do to stop Gemini?"