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Chapter 1: Fancy and Moody
When nine-year-old Nancy Clancy stepped out the door to visit a neighbor on a Friday afternoon, she wasn’t expecting to be attacked by a giant robot.
Nancy had just come home from third grade, but after dropping off her schoolbooks on the dining room table, she headed out again to see Mrs. DeVine, who had invited her for tea. Mrs. DeVine was a severe-looking but kindly old matron who lived in the fanciest house in the neighborhood: She had a front gate of cast iron entwined with roses, and a yard full of flowers. Her house brimmed with the most interesting things: brocaded drapes that hung to the floor, cushions of silk, divans nestled in bay windows, cabinets loaded with eggshell china, paintings of dignified but mysterious gentlemen, and elegant porcelain dolls too delicate to touch.
Many children might be afraid of a house so full of breakables—or intimidated by Mrs. DeVine herself, who stood tall and straight and dignified, with a severe, downturned mouth and a head piled high with white hair. For as long as she could remember, however, Nancy had been taken with Mrs. DeVine and fascinated with her ornate and treasure-filled home; the other houses up and down the street were all white and boxy and nearly indistinguishable, and all had neatly trimmed but unadorned yards. Only Mrs. DeVine’s house stood out—beautiful and old-fashioned—and Nancy loved it.
Nancy loved everything fancy. She always had, and she was determined that she always would.
Nancy was still in the clothes she had worn to school, which today consisted of a white dress adorned with four flounces of cotton decorated with embroidered strawberries. A pink boa and a string of plastic pearls enwrapped her neck. On her wrists, she wore six bangles. She wore her reddish hair, which grew in tight ringlets, in a pile atop her head—in imitation of Mrs. DeVine.
Today, Nancy had decorated her thick hair with four butterfly hairclips, three bow-shaped barrettes encrusted with fake rubies, a plastic tiara studded with fake diamonds, and a hairband with fuzzy antennae like a butterfly’s.
This outfit was plain by Nancy’s standards, but she had to, as her mother put it, “tone it down” when she went to school.
Today, Nancy led by the hand her little sister JoJo, who was still in preschool. Just a week ago, the two of them had spent a night at Mrs. DeVine’s house while their parents were out of town. Although JoJo didn’t share Nancy’s obsession with fanciness or her fascination with Mrs. DeVine, she loved to tag along after her sister.
Nancy and JoJo held hands and skipped along the sidewalk, trying to avoid the cracks. Nancy was idly wondering what kind of tea Mrs. DeVine would serve today when a metal monster dropped out of the sky: With a deafening crunch, it landed fifty yards away in the middle of the street. One of its huge, squarish feet cracked the asphalt, and the other crushed a Buick, the car alarm of which sent up a futile wail as its roof caved in. The robot’s head was a squat dome, silver in color, jutting up from its blockish torso. The robot turned a gigantic, glowing red eye directly on Nancy and released a low, ominous hum.
Nancy was too shocked to speak or cry out, but she had the presence of mind to seize the lingering baby fat on one arm and give it a hard pinch, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. JoJo, however, released a frightened scream, turned, and ran.
Perhaps, like a vicious dog, the robot interpreted flight as a signal to attack. With shocking speed, it lurched forward and thrust out a thick arm. A claw shot out on a long stalk, seized JoJo around the waist, and yanked her into the air.
Now Nancy found her voice: “JoJo!” she screamed.
The robot stepped forward, kicking aside the crushed Buick as if it were an empty tin can. The car slid across the street, rode up onto the curb, and knocked over a fire hydrant, which spewed water high into the air. The water plummeted down like hard rain, and Nancy was soon soaked.
She almost ran herself but couldn’t bear to leave her sister, who shrieked and flailed in the monster’s grip. Unable to do anything else, Nancy yelled, “Let her go! Let her go, you … you beast!”
She prided herself on a vocabulary considerably larger than that of the average nine-year-old, but words now failed her.
Still holding JoJo in its clutches, the robot raised its free arm. From its wrist extended a broad tube with a gaping hole on its end, a hole that pointed directly at Nancy. Somewhere in the back of Nancy’s brain, some still-functioning part of her mind identified this as a weapon, and it told her, Move!
She still didn’t run, but she did jump sideways and smack into a white picket fence. The blow stunned her and dropped her to the ground, but it also saved her life: A heavy slug blasted from the robot’s cannon and passed overhead, close enough to take one of the wire antennae off her hairband. The slug hit the sidewalk just behind her, unleashing a burst of concrete chips that knocked her forward onto her face.
Her nose was bloody, and her head blazed with pain. Fear and horror rose out of her stomach and overwhelmed her, but she had enough sense left to realize that, in another second, she would be dead.
Her life flashed before her eyes. It was short—and an inordinate amount of it involved playing dress-up.
Someone yelled, “Nancy!”
For a moment, Nancy thought it was her mother, but it was actually Mrs. DeVine, who grabbed her hands and yanked her to her feet. Nancy was terrified, mostly because Mrs. DeVine was in a gray tracksuit with white running shoes, an outfit more drab than anything Nancy had ever before seen her wear.
“Nancy!” Mrs. DeVine yelled again.
Nancy blinked twice, tried hard to clear her head, and then screamed, “My sister!”
Mrs. DeVine picked Nancy up and ran—and she ran faster than Nancy would have imagined she could. She bolted through the cast-iron gate entwined with roses and up the steps of her Queen-Anne house. She kicked in the front door and shot through the living room, sitting room, and dining room, right into the kitchen.
A girl stood there, a girl a few years older than Nancy, with bright red hair hanging to her shoulders. This girl wore a blue windbreaker and threadbare jeans, the cuffs of which she’d rolled up around her ankles and held in place with rubber bands. What struck Nancy most of all, however, were the girl’s eyes—cold and blue and keen. They bored into Nancy. They were like a hawk’s eyes, eyes that missed nothing.
“Cam,” Mrs. DeVine said quickly, “get a picture—and then get out!”
The girl, her face sober and unreadable, merely nodded. She bounded to the front door, looked out at the menacing robot, and then bounded back.
Nancy couldn’t imagine how the girl could take a picture when she didn’t have a camera, but she didn’t have time to think about it: Mrs. DeVine reached behind the refrigerator and pulled a lever on the wall. With a hum, the floor opened beneath their feet, and then they dropped into darkness, as if they were plummeting down a pitch-black waterslide.
The slide deposited them in a cart such as miners use in the movies. Cam landed beside them. With a screech and a buzz, a motor revved up, and then the cart zipped down a track through a rough-cut tunnel of stone. A few buzzing yellow lights overhead lit their way.
Mrs. DeVine lifted a radio to her mouth. “Blow the tunnel,” she said.
From behind came a deafening boom, and the cart lurched precariously on the track. Nancy’s teeth ached. A cloud of gray dust followed them as they barreled onward into empty blackness.
Nancy found her voice again. “My sister!” she screamed. “My sister!” She tried to crawl out of Mrs. DeVine’s grasp, tried to jump out of the back of the cart.
Mrs. DeVine held her tightly but grunted when one of Nancy’s shoes connected with her thigh.
“Judy,” said Mrs. DeVine sharply, “deal with this!”
There was another girl in the cart with them, one Nancy hadn’t noticed before: She was about Nancy’s age, but where Nancy was short and chubby with round cheeks and thick legs, this girl was tall and lanky. She too had bright red hair, but hers was wild and shaggy, as if she hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. Her face held a deep frown, but her hands held a bottle and a white kerchief. She poured some clear, pungent liquid into the kerchief and then clamped it over Nancy’s mouth.
“Nappy time,” said Judy.
Everything went black.
Nancy awoke with a headache that hurt so much, it made her cry. But that wasn’t the only thing that made her cry: the memory of her poor sister rushed in like a tidal wave and drowned her in grief.
She lay on something hard and cold, and tears ran down her face.
“You’re awake,” said a voice—a girl’s voice. Nancy turned her head to see the one Mrs. DeVine had called Judy. She had on what looked like black pajama pants decorated with orange tiger stripes, and above that she wore a grungy green T-shirt that proclaimed in faded letters, “I ATE A SHARK.” Over that, she had carelessly thrown a white lab coat, in the pockets of which she kept her hands. She slouched.
Nancy tried to speak, but her mouth was painfully dry.
“Here,” Judy said. She turned to a counter, picked up a glass of water and two pills, and turned back again. “Take two of these, and call me in the morning.”
Nancy slid her tongue around until she found enough saliva to speak. “I … I can’t take things from strangers—”
Judy shrugged. “It’s your headache.”
The headache was like a succession of hammer blows. After a moment’s hesitation, Nancy took the pills and gulped the water.
Judy poured another glass from a nearby sink. After Nancy drank it, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think.
“Where am I?” she finally asked.
“Don’t know,” Judy replied. “I don’t know much more than you. One of their underground bases, I guess. They’ve got several.”
“Who are you?”
“Name’s Judy Moody. Yours?”
“Nancy Clancy.”
They were silent for a moment, but then they both burst into subdued giggles—though laughing made Nancy’s headache worse.
With a groan, she sat up. She was on a metal table, so she dangled her legs over the side. “Are you supposed to be a doctor or something?”
“Or something,” Judy answered. “I’m gonna be a doctor, y’know, after I grow up—just like Elizabeth Blackwell. I’m gonna find medicines in the rainforest and cure ucky diseases. And what are you supposed to be?”
“Huh?” Nancy felt her head and realized that she still had her tiara, her hairclips, and most of her hairband.
“I’m just Nancy,” she said, “but I like to be posh—that’s fancy for, well, for fancy.” She lowered her voice, glanced left and right, and added confidentially, “But sometimes I’m a super sleuth.”
Judy chuckled. “Like DeVine’s freakshow, Cam?”
“Cam?”
“Yeah, you met her, right? Solved thirty-three crimes, or something like that.”
Nancy blinked, and her mouth fell open. “I only solved one!”
Judy shrugged. “That’s good, though. I’ve done a bit of detecting too.” She pulled a hand from a pocket and jerked a thumb at herself. “I saved a police dog once. And I stopped some jewel thieves, probably. And I rescued a penguin.”
“And you ate a shark.”
“Yeah, I did.” Judy laughed.
Judy’s clothes were decidedly plain, but Nancy now saw that Judy had one piece of jewelry: On her left hand, she wore a huge ring. It was plastic but painted to look like a silver snake entwining a gigantic, oval stone. The stone was bluish-green, the color of a placid sea, and Nancy almost thought it glowed faintly—or maybe it merely captured the room’s dim light.
Nancy swallowed a lump. She loved jewelry. Costume or real, it didn’t matter. “May I see your ring?” she asked.
Judy looked pleased, and before Nancy’s bewildered eyes, the ring brightened to a light blue, like the sky at midday.
Nancy’s mouth fell open again.
“It’s a mood ring, natch,” said Judy with a cocky grin. “It tells me what mood I’m in. Here, try it out: Just stick it on and wait a few seconds.”
She slipped off the ring and handed it over. Nancy slid it on and watched. Slowly, the ring changed, first to black and then to a bright, pleasant yellow, the color of honey.
Judy nodded. “You’re nervous. No surprise, I guess.”
“It’s marvelous,” Nancy whispered. “I’ll have to get one myself when I … I … oh no …”
She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. For a moment, she had forgotten about JoJo, about the monster that might even now be attacking her home and terrorizing her mom and dad. That forgetfulness struck her with a stab of guilt, like the twist of a knife.
Judy put a hand on her shoulder and gave her an awkward pat.
“My sister!” Nancy sobbed. “That thing! It took my—”
“I know,” Judy said quietly. “I know. They took my brother too.”
Nancy stopped crying. She looked up into Judy’s scowling eyes but couldn’t quite read what she saw there.
“C’mon,” Judy said. “Let’s go meet the others.”
They stepped into a broad room with gunmetal-gray walls. On one side stood a bank of computer screens and blinking lights, like something out of the science-fiction shows Nancy’s dad watched on TV. A ring-shaped light glowed in a ceiling two stories overhead. It was depressingly drab, but in the center of the room, Mrs. DeVine, as calm and severe as ever, poured tea from a painted pot into six eggshell cups.
Cam, her freckled face stoically blank, sat in a chair near the computers. There were two other girls in the room as well: another redhead, Nancy’s age, sat against a wall with her hands in her lap. Even skinnier than Judy, she wore a pretty yellow summer dress above bicycle shorts and worn-out sneakers. On her face was a cheerful but vapid grin. She was almost Cam’s opposite—where Cam’s glittering eyes were keen and hawkish, this girl’s eyes were dull and empty.
Next to her, wiggling on her chair and kicking her bare feet, was a little girl in a stained yellow T-shirt and shorts. She looked to be about six. Her messy chestnut hair hung straight to her shoulders, and over her bright blue eyes, she wore a pair of glasses in purple frames.
Nancy’s best friend Bree also had glasses, though she only wore them when she was reading. When she first got them, Nancy was so jealous that she started reading in the dark in the hopes that she would need glasses too. But Bree’s glasses were elegant, cat-rimmed and half-framed, whereas this little girl’s glasses were huge and thick and perched awkwardly on her button nose.
The little girl prattled as she swung her skinny legs. While she poured tea, Mrs. DeVine occasionally nodded and went, “mm hmm,” a sound adults made when they weren’t quite listening but were pretending to.
“My first boyfriend was Ricardo,” the girl was saying, “because he smiled at me in class. Only too bad for me cuz I catched him chasing other girls, so I pushed him down and sitted on his legs, but he didn’t chase me no more, so after that we were just regular. I hated that meanie Jim, though, cuz he was a big meanie-mean pants … but he gived me a super-mushy valentime one time, so I winked at him real pretty. He said he was only mean cuz he didn’t want nobody to know he liked girls. Then we were friends. I liked Warren lots and lots because he was so handsome, just like a movie star, but he was a crybaby, and he was Richie Lucille’s boyfriend anyway.”
She paused a few seconds before adding, “The end.”
“Mm hmm,” said Mrs. DeVine as she poured tea. “Sounds like you had quite the love-life in kindergarten.”
The girl with the vapid grin looked up and blinked. “I love life,” she said. “Who doesn’t?”
Nancy adored stories of amour—that was a fancy, French way of saying love—and ordinarily would have enjoyed hearing a first-grader babble about her pretend boyfriends. Right now, however, she wasn’t in the mood, and she still had Judy’s mood ring to prove it: the ring had turned a deep, dark black, and Nancy could easily guess that meant she was miserable.
Mrs. DeVine looked up and smiled. “Ah, Nancy, you’re awake. You’re just in time for tea, dear.” She lowered her eyes and added under her breath, “Five redheads. Oh my land—”
Judy grinned and elbowed Nancy. “This is one of the perks, I guess. My parents would never let me drink tea.”
Nancy trembled as she tried to imagine a life without tea. She couldn’t do it.
She swayed on her feet. “Mrs. DeVine …?”
Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know what she wanted to say, but she couldn’t have said it anyway because a thick lump formed in her throat.
“You’re looking peaky, dear,” Mrs. DeVine said, “but that’s nothing a little chamomile won’t fix.” She set down her teapot, placed a cozy over it, and swept a hand around the room. “Welcome to our headquarters. Everyone, this is Nancy Clancy. I’ve been observing her, and I believe she can bear the primary solution. Nancy, let me introduce you: You’ve already met Judy Moody and Jennifer Jansen—”
“You can call me Cam,” said Cam, her voice as emotionless as her face.
“Your name is Jennifer?” Nancy asked. “I thought Cam was short for Cammie.”
“It’s short for Camera,” Cam replied, but she left that cryptic remark unexplained.
Mrs. DeVine gestured to the wiggly little girl with the purple glasses. “This is Junie Jones—”
“B,” the girl said, sticking out her lip and crossing her arms. “You forgot my B.”
“Ah, yes, of course. I meant Junie B. Jones—”
“What’s the B stand for?” Nancy asked.
Junie B. scowled. “Beatrice,” she muttered.
“Ooh, how fancy!” Nancy exclaimed. “I don’t have a middle name, but I sometimes write it as ‘Nancy M. Clancy’ just because it looks so elegant. Do you like your B because it’s elegant?”
“No,” Junie B. replied. “I just like B and that’s all.”
Finally, Mrs. DeVine swept a hand toward the girl with the vapid grin. “And this is Amelia—Amelia Bedelia.”
Amelia waved.
With a hiss, a tiny door opened in the far wall, and a dog walked in. It was Jewel, the dog Nancy had often seen peeking out of Mrs. DeVine’s purse.
“Looks like the entire group is assembled,” Jewel said in a growly voice.
Nancy’s mouth fell open for the third time that day. “You … you can talk!” she shouted.
A quick glance told her none of the other girls were surprised. So they had met Jewel already.
“Come and sit down, Nancy, dear,” said Mrs. DeVine. “We have much to discuss, and your tea is getting cold.”
Nancy’s legs felt like rubber. They wobbled as she stepped forward, so Judy put an arm around her waist and held her up. Nancy replied with a quick, grateful smile.
A lopsided grin formed on Cam’s mouth, and her sharp eyes glittered. “Looks like even grouchy Judy can be nice when she has someone she can treat like a patient, hm?”
“Shut up,” Judy snapped. “I’m practicing cuz I’m gonna be a doctor when I grow up. What are you gonna be, a human hard drive?”
Cam shrugged and chuckled quietly.
With a few swift, nimble jumps, Jewel made it onto a chair and then to the top of the table. She lapped from a teacup briefly before she said, “Cam, you best plug in. We need to get started.”
Judy gently pushed Nancy down into a seat and then sat beside her. Nancy stared at the yellowish-brown tea in her cup, which displayed her reflection. She saw puffy red eyes and a childish pout. Her hair, normally kept in a relatively neat mound of ringlets, stuck out in several directions. She looked a frightful mess and was suddenly self-conscious.
Cam reached toward the computer bank, picked up what looked like a heavy set of headphones, and set it on her head.
Mrs. DeVine sat down Nancy’s other side and said, “That device Cam is holding can read signals from the hippocampus—do you know what that is, Nancy?”
Nancy shook her head. Normally, she loved learning new words, but now she wasn’t in the mood. “Is it like a hippopotamus?”
Mrs. DeVine smiled. “No, but good guess. It’s part of the brain, and it has to do with memory. Cam here has an unusual hippocampus.”
Cam closed her eyes, and her formerly unreadable face looked serene, as if she were in a deep trance. “Click,” she whispered.
Click? She really was like a machine.
On one of the screens, an image formed: It was the street in front of Nancy’s house, viewed from Mrs. DeVine’s front yard. The image was blurry and weirdly distorted, as if taken with a fisheye lens. Nonetheless, Nancy could see the cast-iron gate and the flowerbeds—and towering over the street was that terrible robot with little JoJo in its clutches.
Nancy tried to reach for her teacup, but her trembling fingers knocked it over instead, and a brown stain swiftly spread across the tablecloth.
Mrs. DeVine ignored the spill. “The technology isn’t perfect,” she said.
“Yeah,” Cam added, her eyes still closed. “It’s a lot clearer in my head than it ever is on the screen. See that sign in the yard across the street?”
“It’s just a blue blur,” Jewel answered.
“I can read it,” said Cam. “‘Vote Headly for Mayor.’”
“Is this what you meant,” Nancy asked, “when you said you wanted her to take a picture?”
“Cam has a photographic memory,” answered Mrs. DeVine, “which means she can remember exactly what she sees in all its detail. What we’re seeing now is what she saw from my doorway.”
“Click,” Cam said, and the picture changed. Now it showed a street Nancy didn’t recognize, and there were buildings in strange shapes with little round windows under charming gables. In the distance, she could make out the Eiffel Tower, so that told her this was Paris. She felt a brief pang of longing—she had always wanted to visit the City of Lights—but then she felt a pang of fear, for another huge robot stood in the street: It was punching its fist through a roof, sending shingles high into the air.
“This is from last week,” said Mrs. DeVine. “They’ve been attacking all over the world, and covering it up has drained our resources.”
“Perhaps we should go ahead and let the public know,” Jewel said after she again lapped at her cup. “We can’t keep this a secret forever, especially if Pink keeps attacking prominent places in broad daylight. We can’t afford to have our agents spending all their time creating false memories and bribing the press.”
“We can’t go public until the girls are implanted and trained,” Mrs. DeVine replied. “It’s too risky.”
“Click,” said Cam, and the view changed to one of a smashed, burned-out house. A fire crackled in one corner of the picture. The yard was a trampled mess of mud. In the background was another monstrous robot, but it was walking away, and it had a little boy clenched in its metal fist.
“Three days ago,” said Mrs. DeVine, “in Virginia.”
Judy hung her head.
“This is horrid,” cried Nancy, “which means bad—especially bad! Can’t we do something to stop them?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Mrs. DeVine replied. She rose from the table, walked to a wall, and punched a button hidden there. After a loud beep and a long hiss, a panel opened, revealing five hypodermic needles. They glistened in the cold light.
The lump reappeared in Nancy’s throat. She hated getting shots.
Judy perked up. She slipped a hand into Nancy’s; Nancy at first thought it was for comfort but then realized that Judy was sliding the mood ring off her finger. Judy stuck the ring on her own hand, and the color changed from black to bright purple.
Nancy leaned on the table. She was too distraught to care either that she had her elbows in the spilt tea or that putting elbows on a table was bad manners.
So all Judy cared about was doctor stuff. She didn’t care about Nancy’s little sister. Maybe she didn’t even care about her own brother. All she cared about was giving out pills and playing with needles.
Suddenly, Nancy felt an intense dislike for Judy Moody.
It was an uncomfortable, alien feeling: Normally, Nancy liked almost everybody. But she detested Judy—yes, detested was the word—and though she felt a faint, uneasy guilt, she had no desire to make the detestation go away.
Judy looked eager and Cam looked emotionless, but Amelia and Junie B. both scooted away from the needles with fear on their faces.
“What are those?” Amelia asked. Her voice quavered.
“They contain nanoprobes,” Mrs. DeVine replied. “Do any of you know that word?”
They all shook their heads, all except Cam.
“It’s a fancy word for very small robots,” said Mrs. DeVine.
“Robots?” Nancy jumped out of her seat and slammed her hands onto the table, making the eggshell china bounce.
“These are good robots,” said Mrs. DeVine soothingly.
“They’d have to be really small robots to fit in there,” Amelia said, rubbing her chin.
“Are we sure we have the right children?” Jewel asked. “I agree Nancy and Cam are matches, but we need to be certain before we expend anything on the others. We only have five solutions, after all.”
“The other agents—”
“Are not infallible,” Jewel snapped.
“I agree,” said a strange, high voice. The tiny door opened again, and in stepped a frazzled, gray-and-black cat with unkempt fur.
Judy jumped out of her chair. “Mouse!” she cried.
The cat dipped its head. “Hello, Judy.”
“You talk too?” Judy shouted.
“Of course.” Mouse sat back on her haunches and licked a paw as she asked wryly, “Want me to make you some toast to go with that tea?”
Judy, with a sudden scowl, slammed her fists into the table and turned her back on everyone. She had her arms crossed, but Nancy could see her left hand—and her ring had turned black.
Mouse chuckled. “Judy’s in one of her famous moods.”
“Agent Parallax,” said Jewel, “or Mouse, as you’re now called—why are you here? What do you have to report?”
“Judy’s ready for implantation,” Mouse said, pausing momentarily in her licking, “but I recommend we reject Amelia. She’s damaged.”
Amelia leapt to her feet and patted herself all over. “Where?” she asked. “Where am I damaged? How bad is it? Do I need a repairman? Is it as bad as my old bike?”
Mouse’s eyes twinkled. She looked decidedly smug, and Nancy felt another twinge of intense dislike.
“I have scars,” Amelia added, heedless of the stares she was getting. “I got this little one on my chin, see? That’s from when I wrecked my bike. And I got this one on my arm.” She pulled up a sleeve. “That’s from another time I wrecked my bike. And there’s this one on my leg.” She pointed down at a swirl-shaped scar between her sock and her bicycle shorts. “That’s from the other time I wrecked my bike—”
“That’s nothing. Check this out,” Judy announced, shrugging off her lab coat and rolling up one shirtsleeve. “This is from when I fell while chasing the ice-cream truck. I kinda like it cuz it’s shaped like a pizza.”
Junie B. snorted and Amelia giggled, but Nancy shuddered in disgust; she didn’t have many scars, and she didn’t want them: If she did have them, she certainly wouldn’t show them off.
Another animal walked in. This one was a large, shaggy dog of uncertain breed.
“Finally!” cried Amelia. She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck.
“I vouch for Amelia,” Finally said. “She’s ready for implantation.”
“Hmm,” said Mouse, tilting her head and giving Finally a sidelong glance, “not letting your emotions get in the way of your judgment, are you, Agent Apsides?”
“And what about you, Agent Parallax?” Finally replied. “Is your affection for your emotionally volatile charge clouding your judgment?”
“Not as much as your affection for your autistic charge is clouding yours.”
Mrs. DeVine cleared her throat. “Stop it, both of you. I accept Amelia’s candidacy—and that puts an end to it.”
“We only have one chance at this,” Jewel muttered. “The nanoprobes will not be able to make her condition go away.”
“I said drop it. Motherboard indicates that she’s a match. We’ll trust its judgment when we can’t trust our own.” Mrs. DeVine pulled out the tray of needles. “Judy, I assume you’ll want to do the honors?”
Judy stared at the needles, but she no longer looked excited. Her eyebrows came together in a scowl. “Where—?”
“It’s intramuscular,” Mrs. DeVine replied. “In the hip, like an EpiPen. Nancy’s is the red one; we’ll start with her.”
Nancy jumped up, and her chair clattered as it fell. At the same time, Junie B. shrieked, and her feet slapped against the cold metal floor as she sprinted to the closed door and pounded on it.
“It will all be over in a moment,” Mrs. DeVine said over the sound of Junie B.’s wailing.
“Do me first,” Cam suggested from her seat, “so the younger kids can see—”
“I’m afraid not,” Mrs. DeVine replied. “Yours, Cam, is going to be particularly … intense.”
Face still impassive, Cam nodded.
Judy swallowed and, hand trembling, picked up the needle marked with a red band. She cleared her throat before she turned to Nancy and said, “Um, you’re just gonna feel a little pinch—”
Nancy ran to Junie B. and threw her arms around her.
Junie B. trembled; she was as small as JoJo, and Nancy’s mind went back to last Saturday night when she and her sister stayed at Mrs. DeVine’s house. Nancy had wrapped her arms around JoJo to comfort her and help her sleep, but that seemed so long ago now, another life in another world when Mrs. DeVine was just a kindly widow doting on the neighborhood children and not some monster battling evil machines.
Nancy could never go back to her simpler life now. She clutched Junie B. to her chest and released one loud, painful, wracking sob.
“Judy,” she pleaded, “don’t do this! Please! Why are you helping them?”
Judy loomed over her with the needle raised. Judy’s face was in shadow, but the needle’s tip caught the cold light and glittered like a star.
“I’m sorry,” Judy mumbled as the ring on her finger turned a deep, dark blue like the sky in the east at sunset, “but I want my brother back.”
She jammed the needle into Nancy’s leg, and Nancy screamed.
It was more of a punch than a pinch, and the pain quickly spread, leaping in waves. She was on fire. Her skin turned red and hot, her eyes swelled shut, and she choked on her tongue. She hit the cold floor and writhed, dragging her curled fingers across her clothes.
Junie B. screamed.
Nancy heard fabric rip, and then she heard incoherent shouts. Judy was on top of her, tearing open her dress and trying to give her CPR, but Mrs. DeVine grabbed Judy’s collar and yanked her off. Desperate, mad, unable to breathe, Nancy reached up with curled fingers and tried to claw out Judy’s eyes.
Then her vision swam with gray spots, and all she could hear was a loud, long whine like the sound of a malfunctioning machine.
Gray, she thought, how I hate gray.
With everything else, that thought faded. Swiftly and silently, the gray spots grew together and turned to black.
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