Brainboy and the Deathmaster Read online

  Once everyone was showered and dressed, they headed up to the dining hall, where Hedderly served them a delicious meal of salmon steaks and curlicue pasta mixed with broccoli spears. After that, most of them went up to E, to the AquaFilm. But much as Darryl liked the idea of floating around the prehistoric world in one of the movie pods, he was so exhausted that he could barely drag himself back to room eight.

  18

  Not once during the blurry month of orientation had Darryl been tempted to fool around with his remote control, but that night the sight of it gave him a second wind. He changed into pajamas, brushed his teeth, snuggled into the wonderful bed, and after scrolling through the movie choices picked one he’d never heard of called Meteor Fiends. He got about halfway through it before conking out.

  “Rise and shine, friend and colleague. …”

  Darryl’s very first waking thought was of G-17. Maybe this would be the day he would stabilize it and become more famous than Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and Christopher Columbus rolled into one! He jumped out of bed and washed his face and picked out a red jumpsuit, the color Mario had worn yesterday when everyone applauded him. On his way to breakfast he paused to check out the trophy case.

  “Morning, Darryl.”

  Nina Rizniak stepped out from the shadows beyond the case, her jumpsuit the same robin’s-egg blue as her slightly magnified eyes.

  “See Mario’s new trophy?” he said, pointing at a Mario-shaped figurine.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” she said, not even glancing at the case. “Yesterday morning you gave me a weird look when you heard my name. How come?”

  “I’m not really sure. It seemed familiar, somehow. Your face, too.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Seattle. You?”

  “Oregon. Down near Eugene.”

  “It’s like … it’s as if I know you from somewhere. But I can’t remember where. My memory’s a little …”

  His whole past life seemed fuzzy and faraway. Looking back on it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. In fact, the people and events of his past seemed less real than the characters in Meteor Fiends. But he did his best to concentrate on Nina. She said he’d beaten her two out of three times at StarMaster. He’d played that on the laptop at the shelter. …

  “Do you have a brother named Boris?”

  Nina’s face turned white as chalk. “You know Boris?”

  “He stole my GameMaster.”

  “Where?”

  “A children’s shelter in Seattle.”

  “When?”

  “Let me think. Gosh, it’s hard to say. In July? What is it now?”

  “The middle of August.”

  Oddly enough, he hadn’t given a thought to what time of year it was—maybe because Paradise Lab had no windows. Would he have to go back to school in September?

  “Boy, you really lose track of time in here, even though we’re trying to conquer it.”

  “How was he?” Nina asked, her face still bloodless.

  “Boris? I don’t know. He took off out the window like a bird.”

  A smile bloomed on Nina’s face, turning her quite pretty. “What do you expect, he’s a Flying Rizniak. What did he say?”

  “I think he showed me your picture.”

  “He did!”

  “I think … he’s looking for you. All over. Funny. And here you are.”

  A couple of magnified tears slipped out of her magnified eyes. She took off her glasses and wiped her face with a sleeve. “What else did he say?” she asked.

  “I think he said you were good at GameMaster.”

  “Yeah, my friend Sue Ann had one.”

  Mario and Ruthie came out of doors farther down the corridor and headed for the dining hall. “We better get to breakfast,” he said.

  “Will you do me one favor?” Nina whispered, grabbing his sleeve.

  “What?”

  “Don’t take your vitamin.”

  “Why not? They’re MasterPills.”

  “Don’t take it. Just today. Okay? Pretend to, but slip it in your pocket.”

  “But that’s the first thing you learn in orientation. A vitamin every morning gives you the added edge that might just make the difference.”

  “I know, I know. But … if you don’t take it, I’ll be your friend.”

  With that Nina headed for the dining hall. Darryl followed and took chair number eight, and soon Hedderly brought out a platter of sunny-side-up eggs. Then came a dish of link sausages, and finally a basket of cranberry muffins.

  “To conquering Time!” Ruthie said, lifting her glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice.

  “Conquering Time!” the rest of them echoed.

  They all reached for their pale-blue vitamins and popped them into their mouths and washed them down—all except Nina, who palmed her pill, and Darryl, who accidently dropped his. Nina ducked under the table and snatched it up. She lost her glasses in the process. Darryl grabbed those.

  “Trade you,” he whispered.

  She shook her head. He turned to complain to Ruthie, but just at that moment Ruthie swiveled in her chair and cried shrilly:

  “Hedderly! Some jam!”

  Darryl swallowed his complaint and set Nina’s glasses by her place mat, figuring it wouldn’t kill him to miss his vitamin once.

  19

  After his mother left for work that morni, BJ rode up Twenty-third Street to Roanoke, where he locked his bike to the trunk of a skinny dogwood tree and joined a pair of nuns at the bus stop. The nuns wanted to know all about his school. He described Garfield but didn’t mention that he was first in his class, as he would have before Darryl had taken him down a few pegs.

  When the Bellevue bus pulled up and the friendly nuns didn’t get on along with him, it seemed a bad sign. But he stuck to his plan. As soon as the bus had crossed the Evergreen Point floating bridge to the east side of the lake, he pushed the yellow strip, and the driver took the Hunt’s Point exit. BJ got off and walked north, up Hunt’s Point Road.

  Most of the houses he passed were as big as the shelter, and by the time a high stucco wall loomed up on his right, he was wondering if maybe he should have worn something better than baggy jeans and a T-shirt. He stopped at a driveway blocked by what looked like a toll gate. A mustachioed man in a dark-red uniform emerged from a small guardhouse.

  “Is this Keith Masterly’s house?” BJ asked.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the guard said doubtfully.

  “No, I was—”

  “The Masterlys don’t like gawkers.”

  With that, the guard went back into the guardhouse and shut the door. BJ stepped up and knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” the man said, opening the door partway.

  “I just wanted to know if Darryl Kirby’s here, sir,” BJ said.

  The guard stroked his impressive mustache as he consulted a clipboard. “No Kirbys with appointments today.”

  “I don’t mean with an appointment. I mean living here.”

  “I only deal with appointments. Now don’t make me have to ask you to leave again.”

  The guard shut the door in his face, leaving BJ no choice but to turn and slouch back up the road. Once he was out of sight of the guardhouse, he shinnied up a cedar growing by the stucco wall. But the top of the wall was encrusted with glinting shards of broken glass.

  On the trudge back up Hunt’s Point Road he figured he must have been right about the bad sign. Having to wait almost an hour for a bus back to Seattle didn’t change his mind about this, nor did finding the seat of his bicycle covered with bird droppings. He rode home without sitting down, cleaned the seat, wolfed down a couple of ham sandwiches, then hopped back on his bike and rode to the shelter.

  Ms. Grimsley was just coming out of her office as he walked into the front hall.

  “Back again, Mr. Walker?”

  “I just wanted to say hi to Boris, ma’am.”

  “Well, he was down fo
r lunch, but I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Could I check his room?”

  “I suppose.”

  He climbed the two flights and found Boris asleep on the bed nearer the window.

  “Catching up on your Z’s?”

  Boris leaped up, hands in karate position. BJ laughed and plunked down on the other bed.

  “Where’d you get the new threads?”

  Instead of filthy jeans and a sleeveless sweatshirt Boris had on a pair of khakis and a clean gingham shirt.

  “Found ‘em in a suitcase under the bed,” Boris said. “What’s happening?”

  “I just wasted the whole day.”

  As BJ described his fool’s errand across the lake, Boris opened the window, sat on the sill, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his sock, and lit up.

  “Why’d you go over to Keith Masterly’s house?” he asked, blowing smoke into the madrona.

  “Guess who gave Grimface her fancy new car.”

  “Masterly?”

  “Bingo.”

  BJ explained his theory of Darryl’s adoption.

  “Call up and ask, why don’t you?” Boris said.

  “Famous people like Masterly don’t have listed numbers. But I’ve been thinking about what you said about your sister being a whiz at GameMaster, too. Maybe he adopted them both or something. I mean, you guys were at a Masterly shelter, too, right?”

  “But how could he know they’re so smart?”

  BJ pointed at the laptop. “Did they have those in Portland?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe he’s got them wired up to his house or something.”

  Boris took a thoughtful drag. “Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look,” he said, blowing smoke sideways out of his mouth. “How could we find out?”

  “I was thinking about that on the bus back across the floating bridge. The property’s on the lake. Maybe we could get at it from the water.”

  “You got a boat?”

  “Yeah, we got a hundred-foot yacht with six masts.”

  “Okay, okay. You a good swimmer?”

  “Not that good. Lake Washington’s miles across. But … you know where the Seattle Yacht Club is? Just below the University? You can see it from the bridge.”

  “Where all them boats is parked?”

  “Yeah. I figure we could borrow one.”

  “We?”

  “Oh. So it was a lie, what you said about hot-wiring your dad’s car?”

  “That was no lie! I can hot-wire anything.”

  “Can you bust out of this place and be at the Yacht Club at noon tomorrow?”

  “I can bust out of anywhere,” Boris said, flicking his cigarette butt into the tree.

  20

  After lunch on his second day with the team, Darryl decided it would be a good idea to see how G-17 interacted with DNA, so he asked Snoodles to prepare him a slide containing both. Today, though, he felt a little embarrassed at having a stooped old man do things for him, so he followed Snoodles into Chem and watched closely so next time he could prepare the slide himself. And back in Bio, when Snoodles slipped the new slide into place in the microscope, Darryl said:

  “Thanks a lot, Snoodles.”

  “Why, you’re m-m-most welcome, young s-s-sir,” Snoodles said, blinking in surprise.

  Mr. Masterly wasn’t around that day, so there were no interruptions, and Darryl spent the whole afternoon session studying the interaction of G-17 and DNA. The DNA seemed to glow at first, as if invigorated, but eventually the outer branches of the G-17 broke off, and the glow died.

  Later, up on E, Darryl put on a gym suit instead of a swim suit and went to the gymnastics area. Abs showed him how to rosin his hands, then lifted him to the rings. But as soon as Darryl started swinging, he was seized with panic.

  Nina, who was on the pommel horse, saw him land on his butt. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, blushing. “I decided I felt more like swimming.”

  He ducked into the locker room, changed into his trunks, and spent the rest of the exercise period swimming laps.

  After another delicious dinner—filet mignon and scalloped potatoes and string beans mixed with little pearl onions—he again skipped the movie in favor of bed. But like the night before, the sight of the remote perked him up. Instead of fast-forwarding to where he’d left off Meteor Fiends, he decided to catch a bit of the beginning to remind himself of the story, and it soon dawned on him that he hardly remembered it at all. He hadn’t even realized it was a spoof! He must have been truly zonked last night to have taken it seriously. The meteor fiends were funny, not scary, and the way they talked—sort of like chipmunks—got him giggling.

  But he soon stopped. Sitting there surrounded by his six satiny pillows, with twelve hundred movies and ten times that many songs at his fingertips, he began to feel lonely. Maybe it was because the movie was a comedy: laughing wasn’t so much fun by yourself. Still, it was odd, for he hadn’t felt lonely once since arriving here at Paradise, even though he’d spent more time by himself than ever before in his life.

  He switched from Meteor Fiends to Star Voyager. But instead of getting swept up in the action, he thought of how it was BJ’s favorite movie, too. BJ and Mrs. Walker … why hadn’t he thought of them before? Or had he? Yes, he’d thought of them—but only as dim figures, like people he’d gone to kindergarten with or something. But now he could see BJ perfectly, in his droopy jeans and oversized T-shirt, and Mrs. Walker, with all her chins and jiggly arms and warm smile. She’d been so generous, feeding him and calling him “honey” and letting him sleep over. It had been a month since he’d seen them. Did they suppose he was dead? That he’d found a family he liked better and forgotten them?

  He flicked off Star Voyager and stared disconsolately at the blank screen. He supposed he had found a new family of sorts, and had forgotten them. He’d never even thought of calling them. According to Mr. Masterly, Paradise Lab was in Washington State, so the call might not even be long distance, but it had never occurred to him to pick up a phone. He didn’t know their number, but they were bound to be listed.

  Come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed any phones around Paradise. His room was fitted out with many luxuries, but he was pretty sure there was no telephone. He slipped out of bed and conducted a thorough search, even going through the drawers in the dressing room. No phone. No phone jack, either.

  He changed out of his pajamas and put on a black jumpsuit and black jelly shoes and slipped out into the corridor.

  “Night, Darryl,” said Suki, who was just heading into room five.

  “Have you seen a phone, Suki?” he asked.

  “Nope. Sleep well.”

  She went into her room. Darryl walked down the corridor and checked the dining hall. Hedderly had cleared the dinner dishes and sponged off the table. No sign of a phone in there.

  When he stepped into the elevator, Darryl felt queasy, and as soon as the door opened to E, he hustled out. Abs was in the weightlifting area, polishing the silver weights on the bench-press machine.

  “Do you know where I could find a phone, Abs?”

  Abs just grinned at him, shaking his head. Darryl walked past the pool and the deserted basketball court and the track and passed under the AquaFilm archway. The house lights were down, and the skin of the tank flickered with images of a prehistoric world. No sign of a phone.

  He took the emergency stairs down to L and searched every nook and cranny except Snoodles’s room. There were powerful computers, and state-of-the-art microscopes, and accelerators for subatomic particles, and X-ray defractors, and a chest full of diamonds—but no telephone. He flicked on one of the computers, thinking he might be able to email Mrs. Walker at the library. There was no Internet access.

  As he peered around the deserted octagon, his breathing turned shallow. How could he have been so ungrateful after all BJ had done for him? Starting out with saving him from the switchblade of that crazy kid in the shelter. …r />
  Boris Rizniak. By an amazing coincidence, Boris’s sister was here in Paradise. She’d said if he didn’t take the vitamin, she would be his friend. He’d had every intention of taking it: dropping it had been an accident.

  Instead of waking poor Snoodles, Darryl took the stairs back up to S and went down the rosily lit corridor. He got no answer when he knocked on the door to room seven. Was Nina already asleep? Or up watching the AquaFilm?

  “Night, Darryl.”

  Billy O’Connor, down the corridor, was about to go into room three.

  “Is the movie over, Billy?”

  “Just ended. Time for bed. Tomorrow may be the great day!”

  Billy disappeared into his room. Darryl tried Nina’s door. It opened. There were no locks in Paradise.

  Her room looked identical to his. It appeared to be deserted.

  “Nina?”

  He rounded the foot of the bed. As he approached the far wall, a panel slid open, revealing a dressing room just like his.

  “Nina?”

  Where could she be? He went back down the corridor and, taking a deep breath, stepped into the elevator. His heart quickened as he pressed the top button, the one with the keyhole in it. Nothing happened.

  Evidently there was one lock in Paradise.