Tiffany and McKenna were in the midst of a heated argument as more girls disappeared into the portal.
“I’m sorry!” McKenna cried, though somewhat sleepily.
“How do you lose a machine that opens a door to other Earths?” Tiffany shouted. “Do you think these things grow on trees?”
“Where did you get that one?” Matilda asked.
“Don’t you worry about where I got it, newbie!” Tiffany said. “Just get through the portal!”
Matilda and Kylie did as they were told. In a flash the camp was gone and they were tumbling into a humid rain forest. Ancient trees soared overhead, while a gurgling stream slipped over a stone riverbed. Insects as big as Matilda’s fist buzzed around the girls’ heads.
“Um, I think there’s supposed to be treasure,” Jeannie complained. “Whose idea was it to let Shauna use the glove?”
“Harsh! The scanner said there’s a temple in this forest with a huge stockpile of gold,” Shauna said defensively.
“Pair up and spread out,” Tiffany said. “The temple has to be close by.”
“I’ll go with Lilly,” Matilda said. She could tell Kylie was a little hurt, but when major landmarks were vanishing from Washington, D.C., you had to have priorities.
Lilly seemed just as put out, but Matilda ignored it. She looped her arm through the girl’s and marched her into the brush.
“I thought we could use the time to get to know each other,” Matilda said.
“Whatever,” Lilly said.
“So, Lilly, tell me about yourself,” Matilda said.
“What do you care? Are you spying on me?”
“Of—of course not,” Matilda stammered.
“Everyone on this squad is the same—two-faced. I hate how we all gang up on each other, and I’m sure anything I tell you will just get used against me when Queen Tiffany decides to dole out her favors.”
“I promise I’m not out to get you,” Matilda said. “Just making conversation.”
“You’re actually interested?”
Matilda nodded. “Sure.”
“You first then. Tell me something about yourself that you don’t want anyone to know. You spill and I’ll spill,” Lilly said, swatting at a rather large jungle beetle.
“I have six brothers.”
“Wow, it must have been very painful to tell me that,” Lilly said.
“OK. OK!” Matilda said. She didn’t want to tell this stranger her deep, dark secrets, but if it would get her to open up … “My parents are going to get a divorce and I cry at night sometimes hoping they will get back together.”
“They won’t,” Lilly said flatly. “My parents are divorced, too. They even tried to get back together. It’s just not going to happen.”
“Is that why you’re angry?”
Lilly took a step back. “You think I’m angry?”
Matilda nodded.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” Lilly said.
Matilda knew from Gerdie’s file that her parents were divorced. Could Lilly be the Mathlete? Did she have sisters? Did she ever live in Arlington?
Just then, something brown and hairy leaped down from the trees above their heads. It was a chimpanzee, but not like any she had seen in a zoo. This one was wearing a strange harness that covered his chest, legs, and arms. He was also carrying a bushel of bananas under one of his stringy arms. He eyed the cheerleaders carefully, and then, much to Matilda’s shock, he tapped his nose and said, “Flinch here. I have found two of the invaders.”
He quickly peeled a handful of bananas and shoved them into his mouth. As he chewed, his harness began to glow. He pounded on his chest and shouted, “I am mighty!”
Matilda peered closely at the creature. This chimpanzee was Flinch—a very hairy version, but Flinch nonetheless. There was Flinch’s harness, and the sugar, and the chimp was even shouting his catchphrase. And he wasn’t alone. Soon, a cute yellow monkey no bigger than a house cat swung through the trees by its tail. By the way it was scratching its arms and legs, Matilda guessed it was this world’s Ruby Peet. An orangutan leaped from tree to tree as if its feet and hands were covered in glue—obviously Duncan. Rushing up behind them was a baboon Jackson Jones, with a bright red nose, blue face, and enormous robotic appendages coming from its mouth. But the most startling was the razorback gorilla that flew overhead with the help of two tiny inhalers.
The animals stepped into their fighting stances and surrounded the girls.
“Stay where you are,” the little yellow monkey commanded. “We’re waiting for your machine to recharge and then you and the rest of you moronic girls are going back to where you belong.”
Lilly cringed. “Talking monkeys!”
The gorilla pounded her chest and bared her fangs. “Some of us are apes!” she said, clearly insulted.
“Run!” Lilly cried, hurling herself into the overgrown jungle.
“Wait!” Matilda shouted, but Lilly was already gone. Matilda chased after her, swatting at branches and leaves. Roots sprang up on the path and snakes slithered out of her way. It seemed as if the whole jungle had risen up to torment her, but she eventually caught up with Lilly just as they plowed into Tiffany and McKenna.
“What is wrong with you nutcases?” Tiffany said.
“Monkeys are attacking!” Lilly cried.
“She’s gone crazy,” McKenna said. “I have to post about her breakdown!”
Just then the razorback flew overhead, propelled by two rocket-fueled inhalers. The rest of the furry team followed, causing Tiffany and McKenna to join in Lilly’s panic. The three of them ran off, once again abandoning Matilda.
Matilda stood up, brushed herself off, and shouted up into the trees. “You want to talk, I’m right here, but make it quick. We’ve got less than ten minutes before the portal opens and we have to leave!”
The gorilla slammed down hard in front of her, and the other creatures swung into view. The tiny yellow one leaped onto the gorilla’s shoulder and cleared her throat.
“Humans that talk,” the monkey said.
“Fascinating,” the baboon said.
“I’ve never been this close to a human,” the chimpanzee Flinch said. “She’s quite stinky.”
The orangutan stepped forward and eyed her closely. “The talking must be some trick she picked up. She’s mimicking us. The one at the zoo does tricks, too.”
The baboon Duncan fell from a tree and landed on his feet. “I don’t think it’s a trick. She appears to be intelligent.”
“You do realize I’m standing right here and can hear every word you say,” Matilda grumbled.
“I’d hardly call her intelligent,” a voice said from above, and then another creature landed at her feet. This one looked almost catlike, with a long striped tail. Matilda knew they were called lemurs—at least on her Earth. It peered into her face curiously.
“Not as smart as you, Mathlete, but still bright for her species,” the baboon said.
“Wait! You’re the Mathlete?” Matilda said to the lemur. “I mean, you’re this world’s Mathlete? I’m not from here.”
“Clearly,” the monkey Ruby said.
“But I’m one of you, I mean, I’m part of NERDS, but on my Earth. Wow, this is really hard to explain. My name is Matilda Choi. They call me Wheezer.”
“No way!” The razorback gorilla sneered and then circled her, eyeing her up and down. “There is no way I would be a cheerleader! Not on any planet.”
It was then that Matilda noticed the gorilla had a unibrow.
The lemur hopped up onto a branch. “We understand you are from somewhere else. Do you understand your visit here is destroying the multiverse?”
“You’re experiencing it here, too?”
“We’ve had some tearing in the fabric of reality. Things have been slipping into our world. If it hadn’t been for MISFIT, we would have no idea what was happening. I presume you are working with them?”
“MISFIT?”
“The Multiverse and Inte
rdimensional Special Forces Intelligence Team,” the orangutan said. “They’re a version of NERDS from Earth 1. They fight crimes across the multiverse.”
Matilda was bewildered. “Well, we could use their help. We’re trying to stop this on our own. Did they tell you that the human version of Mathlete is responsible for all this chaos?”
“Harrumph,” the lemur said.
“Garrrrughhggaaa,” the chimpanzee Flinch said, overcome by the sugar in the bananas. He turned the knob on his harness. “What are you doing to stop her?”
“I have to find her first. We don’t know what she looks like,” Matilda said, then turned to the lemur. “Listen, I know this is a bit of a long shot, but if you can tell me anything about yourself that might help me identify my Gerdie, it could help. You are obviously very different, but I’m desperate!”
The lemur shook her head.
Suddenly, there was a loud hum. Matilda knew exactly what it was. The bridge device had activated.
“You need to get to the portal,” the orangutan said, echoing her thoughts.
“Fix this problem, human,” the lemur said. “Your world is not the only one at stake.”
Before Matilda left, she turned once more to her primate self. The gorilla eyed her right back. Then Matilda ran into the forest toward the device’s noise. She found the rest of the squad climbing down the stairs of what looked like an ancient Mayan pyramid. The five-story hand-crafted stone structure rose high above the jungle floor, and she spotted a small ceremonial room at its top. By the looks of the heavy sacks the girls were carrying down its steps, that’s where the treasure was stored.
“Glad to see the monkeys didn’t eat you,” Lilly said.
Matilda nodded. “Me, too.”
“You can forget about running up there and getting any of the gold. The portal is open. You blew it running around like a freak in the jungle,” Tiffany said, walking past her toward the glowing silver ball.
“H82BU,”Mckenna said.
Matilda pretended to be disappointed. In the last twenty-four hours she had nearly been killed by pirates, had nearly been eaten by a great white shark, and had come face-to-face with a gorilla version of herself. The crazy level had been turned up to ten! But all of these run-ins would be much preferable to what she had to do next. If she wanted to find Gerdie, she was going to have to do something drastic, and just the thought of it made her cringe.
Screwball’s feet were bound together and his arms were wrapped in a straitjacket. The heavy chain tied around his chest was equipped with fifteen industrial-strength padlocks that would require a blowtorch to cut. He had a mask over his face to prevent him from biting, and he was strapped to a wheelchair. The asylum staff had taken these precautions since he was being visited by someone whose name had appeared on a list he’d made entitled “10 People I Want to Watch Die.” The list read:
1. Duncan Dewey
2. Jackson Jones
3. Julio Escala
4. Rubu Peet
5. Agent Alexander Brand
6. The smug man on the Food Network who bakes extreme cakes
7. The dog whisperer
8. Santa Claus, for a lifetime of disappointments
9. Matidla Choi
10. To be decided but probably someone I really hate
With Matilda sitting directly across from him, he realized it had been a stupid list to make, especially with his new plan in full swing. Now he had to turn on the charm, which is not easy when you are tied up like a wild animal.
“Old friend! So nice of you to come visit me in the loony bin,” he said. His guard unfastened the padlocks chaining Screwball’s hands together and ran the chains down to the floor and through two steel pins mounted there. Then he snapped the locks shut. “I hope you’ll excuse my outfit. It appears the hospital staff thinks I’m dangerous.” He leaned forward as far as the chains would allow. “I know. Silly, huh?”
He laughed in hopes that she would join him, but she sat there stone-faced.
“I’m here because … I need your help,” Matilda said. She winced as she said the words.
Screwball couldn’t help himself. He let loose his all-new, all-sinister laugh. It started out slow but soon rose to a headache-inducing whine. He laughed so hard his stomach hurt. If he hadn’t been chained to the chair, he might have rolled up in a ball and guffawed all day. From the sour look on Matilda’s face and her clenched fists, he could see he had finally perfected it. So much for playing the nice guy.
Matilda cleared her throat. “We want to know everything you know about—”
“Gertrude Baker?” Screwball said.
Her face fell, and he broke into another round of wicked giggles. “Or, as we used to call her, Mathlete. Brilliant girl. Her skills with numbers were even superior to mine after she got her upgrades. Seems the nanobytes allowed her to process information much faster than a normal human brain—I was quite envious. She and I were new recruits together, you know, but she wasn’t around long. Her family moved to Ohio.”
“Then you know what she’s built?” Matilda asked.
Heathcliff chuckled. “I should. I helped her.”
He watched her face grow red with rage. “That machine is threatening the world!”
“Oh, is it becoming a nuisance?” Screwball said in a baby voice. “I’m soooo sowwy, but I’m afwaid it’s going to get much, much worse.”
“Play games with me and I will fly you up ten thousand feet and let go!”
Screwball winced. He wasn’t sure if it was a threat or a promise. Matilda had always been unpredictable. “There’s no need to resort to violence. Ask yourself, why would I help someone build a machine that allows you to visit the multiverse? Is it just to create problems? Cause a few power outages?”
“You’re rambling, Heathcliff. I’m powering up my inhalers right now!”
Without warning, he felt his blood boil. He lunged forward, chains rattling. “My name is not Heathcliff!”
“Sorry, Choppers,” Matilda said.
“Wrong!”
“Right, so what was it? Oh yeah—Simon.”
He snarled. “I’ve cast off that name as well for a more appropriate moniker. You may call me Screwball! Isn’t that hilarious? You see! I’m in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. I’m completely cuckoo! You get it, right? Right?”
“I don’t care if you call yourself John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!” Matilda said. “Tell me what you’ve done!”
Screwball took a deep breath and sat back down. “Wheezer, relax. If I have learned anything from my stay in here it’s that you need to just chill out.”
“Every second we sit in here the bridge device is making things worse outside,” she said.
“But you’ve got it all wrong, agent. Gerdie’s machine doesn’t build a bridge to other worlds. It pushes the worlds apart. That’s what’s causing all the troubles.”
“Can everyone in the world just for one moment pretend that I am not a supergenius,” Matilda said, slamming her fist on the table.
“Touchy, touchy. By now I’m sure you’ve heard that there are billions, maybe even trillions, of Earths that exist in their own dimensions. What you probably don’t know is that all these Earths exist in the exact same place in those dimensions. It’s called the universal constant—Earth’s location is the only place that is the same in every dimension. When Gerdie turns on her machine, it shoves the Earths around, knocking them out of the constant, and when that happens it stretches the multiverse and sometimes even tears it, creating a hole from our world to another. That’s what’s causing all the crazy phenomena, Wheezer. Her machine is making Swiss cheese out of our dimension.”
“So if we find the machine and never turn it on again, everything will go back to normal?” Matilda asked.
“Nope,” Screwball said, he smiled behind his mask. “The first time Gerdie turned on her machine, she pushed our world hopelessly out of alignment. It’s floating outside the constant. The more times she
uses it, the worse it gets, but even if you never turned it on again, the holes would still be there. In fact, they’ll probably just get bigger.”
Matilda was silent. He could see her trying to understand what he had said.
“Which will destroy the world,” he added helpfully.
“Yeah, I kind of figured that out,” Matilda said. “How do we stop this?”
Screwball rubbed his hands together eagerly. His scheme was working exactly as planned. “You can’t. Only I can. You have to release me from this hospital.”
“Yeah, right!” Matilda cried. “I’m not letting your crazy behind out of here. You’ll just try to take over the world again.”
“Matilda! I am shocked. Can’t you see I’m a changed person?”
Matilda eyed him disapprovingly.
Screwball laughed. “OK, fine. Busted! But I’m your only hope. I can build a machine that will put our universe back where it belongs. It’s your choice.”
Matilda tapped her nose to activate her comlink. “Have you been listening?”
Screwball watched her, listening to what he guessed was a lively argument.
“He can’t be trusted!” she said, then frowned. She tapped her nose once more to turn off the communication device.
“We have a deal,” she said. “You’ll be under twenty-four-hour surveillance and in the custody of the team. You will get to work on this new machine, but know this—if you try to pull any shenanigans, I will drop you in a volcano.”
“I consider myself warned,” he said, though he couldn’t help but grin. His plan was working—but then again, he was a genius. Of course it was working! “Oh, and Matilda, I do have a few demands. Nothing a secret society of spies should have a problem acquiring …”
Attention, Lesser Beings,
It has come to my attention that you require my help. Let me start by saying … Ha!
I knew this day would come. Double ha!
But there will be enough time to gloat later (trust me, it will occur). There is work to be done! To get started, I have compiled this list of demands. I’ve taken the liberty of putting them into two categories: Deal Breakers and Wish List. As you can imagine, Deal Breakers are must-haves; the others I would enjoy, and obtaining them would go a long way toward your continued survival when I inevitably take over this planet.