Bite-Sized Magic

  Sage was poking around a set of metal file cabinets in the perimeter of the room. He’d pulled out a pair of firm white gloves dotted with patches of metal at the joints. The gloves stretched to encompass the wearer’s entire forearm, and the word MASTER was emblazoned across the arm in bold black letters.

  “What’s this?” he said, then reached to shut the drawer—when suddenly there was a bright spark of light. “Ow!” Sage tumbled backward. “That file cabinet shocked me!”

  “It is just a little static electricity,” said Mr. Mechanico. “Nothing to worry about, Ambassador. It always happens when we do a lightning harvest.”

  “Erm, yes.” Sage patted his own chest. “Ambassador. That is me.” He gave a throaty laugh, tucked the gloves into a pocket, then dragged his feet as he walked toward his siblings. He gleefully reached toward Rose and put his finger an inch away from her arm. A bright-blue ribbon of electricity arced from Sage’s finger to Rose’s shoulder.

  “Ow!” she cried, backing away. “Cut that out!”

  “Lighten up, hermana. I mean, Schwester,” said Ty, remembering to stay as German as possible. “It’s just static electricity.”

  Sage rubbed his feet on the blue industrial carpet, then aimed his electric finger in Ty’s direction. A tiny bolt of lightning zapped from his finger and landed inside the forest of Ty’s spiked hair.

  “Ow!” Ty cried, falling to the ground. “Watch the hair!”

  Sage cackled like a young wizard, rubbed his feet again, and aimed his electrified finger in the direction of Mr. Mechanico and the other mechanical octopi. Mr. Mechanico saw what was happening just as the bolt of light arced from Sage’s finger.

  “No!” Mr. Mechanico said sternly. “Not while we’re gathering the lightning. It generates a dangerous level of electricity—”

  But it was too late.

  The ribbon of blue electricity crackled from Sage’s finger to the circle of robots, enwrapping Mr. Mechanico like a bright-blue net, then leaping off in a series of arcs to each of the other five.

  “Stop!” Mr. Mechanico cried, his voice getting higher and higher. “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” until it was just a tiny squeak.

  The six robots fell gently backward, still holding the red mason jars, and landed on the floor in a pile of twisted, smoking metal. They let out a loud, collective hiss—like a teapot just taken off the stove.

  “Sage!” Rose cried. “You broke the robots!”

  “Whoops. I guess I did. But wait!” he gasped. “Not necessarily!”

  Sage dug the strange white gloves out of his pocket. “Maybe these control the robots!”

  He slipped one of the gloves over his arms and moved his hands slowly in an upward motion, as if he were a conductor preparing for the downbeat of a symphony. “Rise from the dead!” he intoned in a creepy voice. “Rise up, my robotic army!”

  Sage moved his arms in wild circles, but the robots just continued to smoke and crackle, frayed wires exploding from their tentacles like bones from a broken arm.

  “Doesn’t seem to be working, bro,” Ty said.

  “So they don’t do anything at all,” Sage said. He peeled off the gloves, wadded them into a ball, and stuffed them into the side pocket of his shorts.

  Suddenly, there came an urgent knock from the other side of the door. “Mr. Mechanico?” shouted a voice. Rose recognized the Southern drawl as that of Mr. Butter. “Did you let open the donut hole portal?”

  Rose and her brothers froze, staring at the bolted laboratory door.

  Mr. Butter pounded harder. “Mr. Mechanico!” he insisted. “Why did you lock this door? You know you’re not supposed to do that!”

  “We have to get out of here,” whispered Rose.

  “But we didn’t find any Capsules of Time!” Ty said, panicked. “Isn’t that why we came here?”

  “Yes, but it’s too late,” said Rose. “We have to leave. Now.”

  “How?” asked Sage. “The only way out is the door. The one that Mr. Butter is pounding on.”

  “Not the only way,” said Rose with a determined grimace.

  She pushed the button on the main control board labeled DEFENESTRATION PORTAL, and, as she’d hoped, the large panoramic window that spanned the front of the room, like the dashboard of a starship, parted down the middle. A cold, wet wind blew into the room, chasing away the stink of electricity from the burned-out robots.

  Rose handed each of her brothers a red mason jar that held what looked like a chipmunk.

  “What are these?” said Sage.

  “Soaring Squirrels,” Rose answered, gingerly scooping her own Soaring Squirrel from the jar and heading toward the window.

  “Wait, hermana,” said Ty. “You want us to jump out that window and fly on the wings of this little rodent? It’s the size of a deck of playing cards! Flying squirrels don’t meet FAA regulations, last time I checked. They’re not licensed,” he added, patting the pocket with his driver’s license.

  “They’re not flying squirrels,” said Rose, “they’re soaring squirrels. There’s a big difference. I think you’ll find that the wingspan of these little guys is bigger than you’d guess.”

  Mr. Butter rammed into the door, possibly with his shoulder. “Mr. Mechanico!” he screamed. “What on earth is going on?”

  “There’s no time,” said Rose, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “You guys have to trust me. Mom told me about this one time when she and Dad were in the Amazon, and they had to climb a tree to escape an anaconda, and they hitched a ride with some Soaring Squirrels. I have to admit I always thought they’d be a little bigger, but it doesn’t matter. Right now they’re our only option.”

  “Okay, hermana,” Ty said. “Whatever you say.”

  Sage nodded in agreement.

  The three of them swung their legs over the ledge and sat on it. Rose’s heart pounded as she contemplated the danger of leaping out the window of a six-story building holding nothing but a tiny ball of fur. She couldn’t even see the ground, it was so far away. As the rain soaked her hair and pelted her face, she began to wonder whether this actually was a good plan after all. She wasn’t going to get them all killed—was she?

  “How do we use these things?” Sage asked, holding his squirrel so tightly that only its tiny alarmed head was visible. It chirruped. “Where do we hold on?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. She opened her hands and the squirrel stretched itself like a person awakening from a long nap. Around its neck was a thick ruffle of loose fur. Rose tugged at it and the squirrel didn’t seem to mind at all. She dug her fingers into the fur and it chirruped and seemed to nod. “The neck ruffle,” she said.

  Suddenly, the tiny Soaring Squirrel unfurled its forelegs. They seemed to go on and on, and with a loud fwap they unfurled into a pair of giant wings—as white and as wide as the sail of a pirate ship. The squirrel took to the air, Rose astride its tiny back, her knees snug against the base of the wings. Rain lashed her face, but she didn’t mind, because she was flying.

  “Yaaaaaah!” she cried, holding on for dear life as the squirrel glided gently over the dark, wet expanse of the Mostess compound. She was cold and wet but right now she didn’t care—she was flying.

  Rose glanced behind her and saw Ty and Sage soaring through the air, as well.

  “Woohoo!” Sage cried. “I want to bring this little guy home!”

  “Ahhhh!” Ty wailed. “I want to GO home!”

  Rose noticed her squirrel wandering in the direction of the electric fence to her right, so she tugged on the left side of the ruffle, and the squirrel banked and veered in the opposite direction.

  “Follow me!” Rose shouted back to her brothers.

  Even through the rain, the signs on each of the boxy gray warehouses were easy to read from the air. Rose steered toward the building labeled TEST KITCHEN.

  Gradually, Rose’s Soaring Squirrel lost altitude and slowly coasted to the pavement between the buildings, Ty and Sage sinking to the ground right behind he
r. It was still raining, but now they were all so soaked that a little more water hardly mattered.

  As soon as her squirrel landed, Rose hopped off its back, and, freed from her weight, the squirrel gently flapped its massive wings and rose up into the air again.

  “Thank you,” Rose said quietly to it, but she couldn’t tell from its tiny face whether it heard or understood her, and then it was beating its wings toward the distant electric fence. Soon it was just a darker piece of shadow in the rainy night.

  Ty’s squirrel followed close behind it, and Sage’s would have flown off, too, if only Sage hadn’t been clinging so fervently to its neck ruff.

  “No!” he cried, wiping water off his forehead. “Don’t go! You’d be the most amazing pet in the universe! You could give me rides to school!”

  The squirrel opened its tiny jowls and hissed at Sage, and as it did, its mouth grew larger, and its fangs bigger and more menacing. Sage let go in a hurry. Then the squirrel shrank back to its normal size, chirruped happily, flapped its wings, and soared away.

  Ty patted his brother on his wet head. “If you love something, bro, you’ve got to set it free. Otherwise it will bite your hand off.”

  Sage shivered and watched the squirrel disappear. “We could have had so much fun together!”

  “We could have rescued our parents and gotten out of here,” Ty said.

  “I don’t think so. My squirrel could barely carry me, let alone me and Great-Gramps Balthazar,” Sage asked, shivering and turning toward the door. “Anyway, it’s cold out here. I’m pretty sure I have hypothermia.”

  Inside the test kitchen, Rose threw on an extra chef’s jacket.

  She and her brothers were still damp from the rain, but it was time to work until Mr. Butter returned. She was tired and everyone was hungry, but there was no time to do anything except bake the antidote to the Dinky Doodle Donuts.

  Only—apparently, none of the other bakers felt the same amount of pressure that she did.

  “Hello?” she said, but the bakers, still under the zombie influence of the Dinky Doodle Donuts, paid her no mind. Gus and Jacques had put them to work, and the Scottish Fold cat and the brown field mouse sat on one of the prep tables in their own miniature lawn chairs, drinking little glasses of iced tea. Gene was fanning them with cookie sheets, while Melanie and Felanie rubbed their furry feet. Ning and Jasmine massaged their scalps, while Marge read out loud from a novel called Twilight.

  “Nice, you two,” Rose said to Gus and Jacques. “Making these poor zombified bakers into your personal servants. I would expect this from you, Gus—but, Jacques?”

  Jacques stretched his pink paws behind his head and heaved a relaxed sigh. “What can I say? I have a taste for the finer things.”

  Ty whispered in Rose’s ear, “Do you have to cure the bakers just yet? I have this knot in my back and I think those blonde twins could really help me out.”

  “No way, Ty!” Rose scowled. “I’m curing them right this minute! Once I figure out how.”

  Rose plowed through the Apocrypha searching for an anti-zombification recipe that didn’t involve the elusive Capsules of Time. Meanwhile, Ty beckoned Melanie and Felanie away from the cat and mouse and bade them rub the knot in his back.

  “As you wish,” they said in a flat monotone.

  “Thank you so much, ladies,” he said. “This means the world. I’ve been so tense lately.”

  Sage gave his older brother a look of disgust as he unloaded two dozen preserved donut holes from his khaki shorts. He popped one into his mouth, then set the rest on a cookie sheet on one of the prep tables. “Ugh, I can’t eat another one of these,” he said. “I’m too full. Bakers. Pop to my voice! Get rid of these, please.”

  Immediately, Melanie and Felanie stopped rubbing Ty’s shoulder and ambled over to the prep table with the rest of the bakers, who were haphazardly shoving the donuts holes into their mouths.

  “Don’t make them eat those!” Rose said, but it was too late. The bakers had plowed through the pile of black-and-white donut holes, tossing them into their mouths as if their gullets were garbage disposals. “It’s not fair, Sage. They can’t help themselves. They don’t know they’re eating nasty old donut holes. They’re zombies.”

  “Who’s a zombie?” Marge asked, shaking her head. She smacked her lips a few times. “I need a glass of milk.”

  “I didn’t give you permission to stop rubbing my feet,” Gus said to Ning. “Pop to my voice! I need a refill on my drink.”

  “Refill it yourself!” said Ning, indignant.

  “Jasmine,” Rose cried, “pop to my voice! Do ten jumping jacks!”

  “Why should I?” said the woman, blinking and rubbing her eyes like she had just woken up from a very long nap, as color seemed to seep back into her cheeks. “Pop yourself!”

  Marge chuckled, clearly her regular non-zombie self. Rose threw her arms around the Head Baker’s chubby shoulders. “You’re back!”

  “Where did I go?” Marge asked.

  “You were a zombie,” said Rose. “You did whatever we told you to do. You read Twilight to a cat!”

  Marge sighed. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I don’t understand!” Rose said to her brothers. “What cured them?”

  “It was me,” Sage said proudly. “I fed them the old donut holes, and they were miraculously cured. Looks like I have the magic touch.”

  “Sage, I love you,” Rose said, “but no. There must have been something in those donut holes.”

  “These old things?” said Marge, tossing another donut hole into her mouth.

  Rose stared at Marge, then burst out, “Of course! Those OLD things! The donut holes are Capsules of Time. They’re preserved bits of the past.” They may have been dried up and tasteless, but thanks to all the preservatives in them, the donut holes had a wonderful magic all their own—each was a sugared, tiny bit of a sweet yesterday.

  “Lucky I had the good sense to bring some along with me in my pocket,” said Sage.

  At that moment, the sirens wailed and the red corner lights flashed. Rose glanced at the clock on the wall. It was after eleven p.m. “Butter’s back,” said Rose, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of the entire day from the tips of her fingers to her toes. “Bakers, you know the drill. Just act like brainless zombies and do everything I say. Got it?”

  Marge blanked out her face. “Yes, master,” she said.

  “. . . and then, the donuts rolled down the ramp and engulfed all of my guests!” Mr. Butter ranted, pacing back and forth on the linoleum floor of the test kitchen. He hadn’t quieted down since barging out of the elevator in an explosion of anxious energy. “The entire International Society of the Rolling Pin was overtaken in a donut hole flash flood!” Flecks of donut dotted his tuxedo and the top of his bald head.

  “That’s . . . horrible,” Rose said carefully.

  “And you know nothing about this?” Mr. Butter said, pausing to squint down at her. “Why are you so damp?”

  “Sweat, sir,” Rose said, wishing she’d toweled off from the rain. “I’ve been in here baking and working up a storm all evening.”

  “I see,” he said. “I’ve come here because I can think of only one person on the Mostess compound who would do such nefarious things. Releasing a room full of old donut holes onto a distinguished group of Society members? Destroying my most-trusted aide, Mr. Mechanico? Only one person is so clever, so sly, so . . . independent. That person is you, Rosemary Bliss.” He extended one long finger and squeegeed some water off her head. “Sweat, eh?”

  “Someone broke Mr. Mechanico?” Rose asked, feigning incredulity.

  “Yes!” Mr. Butter wailed. “That robot was a dear friend. He reminded me of my mother. They were both . . . cold. Metallic.” Mr. Butter’s glasses began to fog. “I found him comforting.”

  “Maybe he can be fixed,” said Rose.

  “Perhaps.” Mr. Butter shrugged sadly. “I don’t even know what happened to him!”

&n
bsp; “Well, I have some good news!” Rose said. “I’ve perfected the Dinky Donuts recipe! Right, bakers?”

  The six bakers stood in a line like toy soldiers and nodded yes, their eyes glazed and shiny like a freshly coated Dinky Donut.

  “That is wonderful, yes,” said Mr. Butter, distracted. He turned to Mr. Kerr. “See? It wasn’t her. Rose is loyal. She’s been here all evening. Because she knows that if she had anything at all to do with tonight’s fiasco, that would mean the end of her beloved family.” He cracked his knuckles. “You do understand that, don’t you, Rose?”

  “Of course,” said Rose, smiling stiffly.

  “This means that we have an intruder on this compound, one who may still be at large,” said Mr. Butter. “Mr. Kerr? You will find this intruder and squash him, yes?”

  “Like a bug.” Mr. Kerr brushed donut crumbs from his velour jumpsuit.

  Suddenly, there was a clatter of metal from the Bakers’ Quarters, where Ty and Sage were hiding with Gus and Jacques. The room quieted completely.

  “Who’s back there?” asked Mr. Kerr.

  No no no, Rose thought. He’s going to find Ty and Sage!

  But then Gus skidded out from behind the door, stopping on the floor in front of Mr. Kerr and licking his paw.

  “It’s just Rose’s filthy cat,” said Mr. Butter. “Mangy creature. Shoo! Shoo, I say!”

  Gus shot past them and hid underneath one of the prep tables. Mr. Butter shook his head. “First mice and now cats. We’re going to have to have the exterminator come through here. I hate small things.” He suddenly smiled at Rose. “Except for you, Rosemary Bliss. You are small, but we won’t have you exterminated—or your cat, as long as he behaves.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Rose said, the smile still frozen on her face.

  “Carry on, here.” Mr. Butter glanced at the clock. “I’d recommend getting some sleep. You’ll need it if you’re to keep to schedule.”

  “We have two more days,” Rose said, “and that should be enough time to—”

  But Mr. Butter shook his head. “I’m afraid I had to make some changes. It is true, you have only two recipes left to perfect: King Things and Dinkies, but now you have only one day to finish them. They must be done by the end of the day tomorrow, if you please, before this mysterious saboteur is able to cause any more mayhem here at Mostess.”