Upbeats

  Chapter Nine

  Gloop of the day, quiche, egg salad, various homemade sandwiches, meat pies, mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup . . . anything that would have been consumed (or thrown out the window when eyes were turned) was being flung across the vast cafeteria. The floor was covered in a mat of colourful mush in minutes. Kids yelled, shrieked and cried with delight as they jumped up on tables and launched their lunches at schoolmates. A few kids, like Lewis Jacobs who would be dead if he came home messed up, ducked under tables, knowing his life depended on it.

  "Whoa, cool, I’ve wanted to start one of these for years!" Ned cried with glee as he climbed onto the table and fired Smithy’s food at one of the school bullies who probably started the fight, as I suspected.

  "Take that, Jefferson!" Ned yelled. Maybe his indestructibility was going to his head.

  I yanked Ned down under the table where the rest of us had taken refuge.

  "Ned," I hissed. "You’ve already gotten yourself into Brooke’s bad books. Do you really want to get into Jefferson’s?"

  Ned shrugged. "It’s a food fight, Luke. No rules, no boundaries and no mercy. The strong will be defeated by the weak, if it comes to it."

  Robyn crawled to me on hands and knees. "Who started this one?"

  I shook my head as a grenade of salad landed where I had been two seconds ago. "I don’t know. Probably some bored kid. I don’t know: it’s not like I can see through stuff, I can only go through stuff."

  "Molecular Density control," someone to my left said.

  "Huh?" I said, turning around. Some kid had crawled under the tables to our spot. I couldn’t figure out who he was, his face was covered with a mixture of black cherry yogurt, quiche Lorraine and cement-resembling gloop.

  "Molecular Density control," he said again, excitedly. "Going through stuff, as you described it. I so hoped someone would get that one. You can make your molecules so sparse that they can go through solid objects . . ."

  "Excuse me, who are you?" I asked, hoping I hadn’t ended up sharing shelter under a cafeteria table with a psychotic maniac.

  The kid tilted his head like a cat and frowned. "Don’t you recognize . . . oh, of course." The kid wiped his messy face with his sleeve.

  "Kevin?" Brooke whispered.

  He nodded. "I believe I accidentally started this ‘food fight,’" he said.

  "What . . .? How did you do that?" Ned asked, astonished.

  "I did not mean to," Kevin said. "I was just following the lead of everyone else, picking up a tray, receiving some ‘nourishing’ substance, when someone bumped me from behind. Without thinking, I threw my hands up . . . while still holding the tray."

  "Well, at least lunch isn’t going to be dull," I said.

  "How did you find us?" Ned enquired.

  "I followed the bus as it left the zoo," Kevin said. "It came to this school, so I decided to try and find you four."

  "There’s five of us . . ." Robyn said. But she looked around her and couldn’t spot Smithy anywhere. She shrugged. "He probably ducked under a different table . . . or he can turn invisible . . . or shrink . . ."

  "I didn’t have any of those Amepips," System said, obviously doubtful that Smithy’s intention was to avoid the food fight.

  "He probably just didn’t want to get into this whole mess, or he crawled under a different table, like Robyn said," I said, reasonably. I didn’t want people to distrust Smithy. Even though I knew nothing about him, it was no reason not to trust him. "Anyway, what does it matter?"

  Everyone sort of shrugged and let it slide.

  I turned to Kevin. "System, we’ve all found out what powers we have . . . now what? How do we stop this Gemini guy? I mean, do we intercept some kind of coded message and stop his evil schemes like in the movies or what? Could we even do that?"

  Ned looked at me with half closed eyes. "Really, Luke, really? Even I know that sentence sounded dumb."

  I opened my mouth to try and redeem myself but Kevin got there first.

  "No, it’s actually a good point. Gemini has extensive alien technology at his grasp. And he needs to contact his customers via some kind of communication system. Thing is, no human technology can intercept the messages: it’s far too primitive for that."

  "Thanks," Brooke said, sarcastically.

  "Er . . . sure," Kevin looked confused. He spoke an awful lot like a normal Earth teenager, but his understanding of our speech patterns was still minimal.

  "So . . . what do we do?" Robyn asked.

  Kevin nodded, back on track. "Yes, well, I would really like to train your powers so that they will be at top performance but . . . I haven’t got anything to accomplish that. Training powers, especially ones that are not your own, requires instruments. Ones that were destroyed in the crash of my ship."

  "Can’t you train us by telling us to, say, walk through walls a hundred times, do a thousand stretches and make that bench move?" Ned asked.

  Kevin shook his head. "No, I cannot do it that way. It requires more than that, I’m afraid. You can already do all that, I suppose. But . . . because you’re young, and the power transfer wasn’t done as it should have been, your powers will have to develop as you grow. You’ll find that, as you mature, your powers will be more reliable, they will come to you quicker, become second nature and may improve to points where they can achieve far more than the powers you have now."

  "Big words, yet again," Ned commented.

  I peeked my head over the edge of the table. Kids were still engrossed in flinging their lunches at their fellow classmates. Enemies were being made, bread was being wasted, memories were being created, teachers, lunch ladies and Janitor Joe were going ballistic . . .