* * *
One morning in June the kids woke up for training to find that everything had changed. During the night, Conrad had taken away the training mats and workstations and replaced them with a large table in the center of the floor. In front of the table stood a whiteboard and several huge monitors. The size of the new monitors elicited low whistles from Ahmed and Nalen, who appreciated the ever-growing number of electronic toys that were appearing daily, thanks to Conrad, who had hacked into a trust fund still in his name and used his sizable inheritance to fund their burgeoning hardware needs.
“Training is over,” Conrad announced, turning on the monitors. “You’re ready.”
A jolt of excitement rippled through the air.
“This morning we prep; this afternoon will be our first mission.”
When Conrad explained that their first mission entailed helping the Lowland County Feed Store locate a lost kitten, an audible groan arose from the group.
“Why waste our time on a stupid kitten?” complained Kimber. “We’ve got better things to do.”
“The difficulty is not in the mission itself,” Conrad explained to the disgruntled faces, “but in concealing that we have any involvement with it or, in fact, that we were ever even there. No one can ever see us. No one can know what we are doing. No one must know what we are capable of. We must be silent, work quickly, and then disappear.”
“I could find a lost kitten if I was blind,” Smitty complained.
“Let’s get to work.” Conrad turned to the monitors, flicking up real images of the terrain around the feed store and pictures of the lost kitten in question. He drew maps on the whiteboard and assigned tasks to teams so that at precisely half past one that afternoon the main street of Lowland County was the epicenter of something quite extraordinary. It was extraordinary because absolutely no one who happened to be walking the street or visiting the few stores was in the bit least aware of what was taking place.
First a single cloud, perhaps drifting a tad bit lower than normal, began hovering here and there above the street. Next, a boy with braces on his teeth climbed a tall oak tree and perched on an upper branch. This didn’t catch anyone’s attention and they certainly didn’t notice the way he was scanning the area, his eyes squinting. No one felt a strong breeze whipping from place to place, and they certainly didn’t see the girl who was running so fast that she created the breeze.
It was completely outside the imaginations of anyone in Lowland County, or anywhere else for that matter, to conceive of the idea that there was a flying girl hidden inside the cloud and that she was looking for a kitten. It was equally inconceivable that the boy in the tree had X-ray vision and that he was using it to direct the movements of a girl who could run at the speed of light. Of course, Lily’s arrival at the feed store did raise a few eyebrows—there wasn’t many a nine-year-old girl with an elegant silk green dress loitering in the dusty place on a normal weekday. But Lily settled herself in a corner quietly and soon no one gave her a second thought, even though she seemed to be looking at the pipes in a strange way. Never in a million years did they think that she was telekinetically moving another girl, who had shrunk down to the size of a tennis ball, through the pipes in search of a lost kitten who might have been stuck.
By two o’clock Smitty’s X-ray vision had uncovered the kitten’s location—she was stuck inside a small cavern at the side of a hill. Daisy moved in on the target without incident and removed several boulders without compromising the stability of the cavern. Jasper came next and made short work of healing the kitten’s broken paw and damaged eardrum. Lily had just enough time to slip from the doors of the feed store as Myrtle deposited the kitten on the steps in plain view of Mr. Waynewright.
“Well, would you look at that? If it’s not my little Meow,” said Mr. Waynewright, scooping up the small ball of fluff. “I’d done gone and given you up for lost. But here you is. How’d you like a nice bowl of milk?”
Meow liked her bowl of milk very, very much, and that night there was a rip-roaring celebration at the McCloud farm. Despite the fact that the kids claimed the mission was entirely beneath them, when it was completed they felt an amazing amount of pride and an explosive sense of optimism.
* * *
Soon thereafter it got to the point where everyday miracles became the norm and folks in Lowland County started thinking of themselves as the luckiest people in the whole country. And the truth was, they were.
When a terrible drought hit and farmers couldn’t keep their crops alive for anything, Lowland County got a full season of rain and crops that grew higher and better than any year before. Did anyone in Lowland County realize that Ahmed and Nalen Mustafa, adept weather changers, were responsible? You bet they didn’t.
Or, just before the July Fourth barbecue, a truck full of high school kids got stuck on the old stone bridge over the river and it looked as though the bridge was going to collapse right then and there. But just as calamity was about to strike, it didn’t, and everyone slept soundly in their beds that night. Not only that, but when the bridge was checked the next day it was stronger than the day it was first built. Could anyone in Lowland County have guessed that it was Lily who telekinetically lifted the car off the bridge in just such a way that it appeared to be rolling of its own accord, or that Smitty had used his X-ray vision to report the crack to the foundations of the bridge, or that Daisy had used her super strength to shore it up with new rocks and concrete? Of course no one thought to think that, because to imagine such a complicated and impossible set of circumstances would be completely insane.
And once the kids had whetted their appetites in Lowland County, their hunger began to grow. Small miracles and happy accidents turned into major relief efforts. The bigger the scale and more complex the job, the more Conrad worked overtime to keep a handle on every single tiny little detail. And he liked the challenge of it. It was a task worthy of his ridiculous abilities. He wasn’t the only one—they all got good. They worked as a team and they figured out how to do things better, faster, cleaner.
As the summer days passed and fall took hold it seemed as though nothing could stop them and nothing could ever go wrong. They were on a roll and the sky was the limit.
CHAPTER
12
A whisper swept across the nation, through playgrounds and parks, toy stores, Girl Scout meetings, during Little League practice and soccer tryouts. One kid would lean in to another and in a voice hardly audible would tell what they knew or heard: just snippets—never more than that.
Because the truth was that no one knew much, but everyone was hungry to hear more. Some kids were more hungry than others; they had to know now, wanted to know everything. They searched and listened and waited impatiently.
They called themselves “the Seekers.”
On a farm outside of San Francisco, Bella Lovely charged home from her art class with a dirty piece of paper the size of an eraser clutched in her hand. She got to her computer, feverishly praying she was in time: twice before she’d been too late. Her fingers shook so much that she had to type the address in four times before she finally got it right.
www.LookToTheSky.org
Bella gasped as a simple Web site, consisting of a single page, filled her computer screen. Success! She ate the small piece of paper and read her screen quickly, her lips moving to form the words but careful not to let any sound escape.
Beware—this information is dangerous.
If you are reading this it is because you have heard and want to become part of what is happening. There are a lot of rumors and stories, but not all of them are true. We will tell you the whole story and the whole truth and then you can decide for yourself.
There is a girl who can fly. We have seen her.
There are others like her and they have started to affect change and help. They do this silently.
They cover their tracks so that no one will find them. They are very, very smart.
They are led by
a boy who knows everything—
Suddenly sparks flew off her computer and her screen went black. Bella screamed and jolted backward. She was not scared, but disappointed. She had been so close—everything she had wanted to know had been right in front of her.
She leaned back in her chair, allowing her knobby eleven-year-old knees to kick back and forth while she considered what had just happened. These whispers she was hearing were awakening something inside of Bella, something she couldn’t quite place her finger on. Sometimes she felt like she could almost remember, but in the next moment it was gone, like a shadow following you but always out of sight. The more she discovered the more she needed to know. What she wanted to find out exactly she couldn’t precisely place a name on, but the feeling of that discovery was undeniable, the longing was palpable, and the need burned inside her.
As the wiring in her computer softly sizzled, her resolve found new strength. Tomorrow she would see what else she could find out. Maybe next week or next month there would be a better lead. Bella wasn’t going to give up. Not now, not ever.…
CHAPTER
13
At the start of the school year that autumn the number of new students at the Lowland County Schoolhouse swelled by an unprecedented amount. Betty McCloud had to do some fancy footwork to explain why she had such a bevy of foreign children suddenly living on the farm, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by the watchful eye of Millie Mae Miller.
“Don’t know what them McClouds is up to,” Millie Mae sniffed to her sewing circle. “Got youngens comin’ out of the woodwork from heaven knows where, doing heaven knows what. Something’s goin’ on is all I’m saying. I don’t know what but it’s something. I for one am keeping my eye on ’em, I’ll tell you that much!”
Conrad was more than aware that despite his best efforts the activities at the farm were not completely covert. He was also keenly sensitive to the fact that they couldn’t afford to have their base of operations threatened by whistle-blowing neighbors, and he therefore strategically determined that the best way to squelch gossip was by hiding in plain sight: namely, in school. Like it or not (and the kids definitely did not like it) Conrad had Betty enroll every single one of them in school and then made sure they arrived on time and ready to learn. As Conrad predicted, the folks in Lowland County grew slightly less suspicious, while not particularly friendly, when they saw that they were just normal kids. The fact that they weren’t normal kids, not normal by a long shot, was a detail that required Conrad’s constant attention.
On the first day of school Lily had to abandon her silk dresses and wear a serviceable cotton gingham. This was tantamount to death as far as Lily was concerned.
“It itches. I can’t stop scratching,” she complained, her face going red and her hands pulling at the material as though it were on fire.
They were trudging down the road to the schoolhouse and even though it was a perfectly pleasant morning the looks on the kids’ faces would have convinced any unknowing onlooker that they were on a death march. Lily happened to be the most passionate and vocal, but if the others weren’t voicing their unhappiness, they were loudly thinking it.
“Lily, none of the kids in Lowland County are flouncing about in silk dresses from Paris,” Conrad explained. Again. “We have to fit in.”
“Ugh. How does anyone wear this? It’s torture!” Lily fussed.
When they arrived at the schoolyard things did not improve. Rory Ray Miller and the rest of the Lowland County kids stopped what they were doing and stood staring at them. In the schoolroom it was a new teacher’s first day, and without any prior information to prepare him for how to deal with this strange and divided community, he assigned seating. Thankfully Piper was placed next to Violet, but Conrad was forced to share a desk with Rory Ray Miller, a situation neither was happy with.
One of the unexpected consequences of starting school again was that the new teacher immediately saw that Piper was exceptional. Unfortunately it wasn’t the sort of exceptionality she was accustomed to.
Piper had never been one for math—everyone knew that. Unlike their other teacher, who hadn’t paid much attention to anything, Mr. Finley was fresh out of teacher’s college and up on all the newest learning methods and testing assessments, which he was eager to employ. He discovered at once that Piper’s faculties for numbers and mathematics was more than just limited; Piper was unable to recite any of her multiplication tables, had difficulty with long division of even the most rudimentary kind, and couldn’t make heads or tails of decimals or fractions.
“Ugh, my brain hurts when I look at these,” Piper complained. “It’s like they’re angry ants on the page.”
“I’m sorry to say,” Mr. Finley told her, “that you have dyscalculia.”
Somehow Mr. Finley did not seem in the least bit sorry, but quite pleased with himself. He was, just as he suspected, a great teacher, and his ability to diagnose Piper McCloud’s learning disability was, in his opinion, further proof of this. Without delay he promptly sent a very clinical note home to Betty and Joe McCloud detailing Piper’s condition. Needless to say, Betty was fit to be tied.
“There’ll be no more gallivanting for you ’less you sits yourself down and learns your lessons.” Betty waved the spoon she was using to stir the soup at Piper.
It was Piper’s turn to be appalled. “But Ma…”
“There’ll be no buts.” Betty had planted herself firmly and there was no budging her. “Flying is all well and good but schoolwork comes first. And if you don’t learn these math lessons like Mr. Finley says, then these goings-on about this farm will stop once and for all.”
With that last comment Betty had Conrad’s full attention too. Conrad had long suspected that Piper’s mathematical sense was not normal but had never felt the need to place a label on it. As it was, they had an urgent situation that very evening to attend to and Conrad couldn’t do without Piper’s flying.
“I can help, Piper,” Conrad offered Betty. “I’ll make sure she catches up.”
Betty eyed Conrad. “She don’t need you doing her lessons for her. Ain’t no way that’ll teach her anything.”
“No, ma’am,” Conrad agreed. “She needs teaching. I can help do that.”
Betty sniffed suspiciously. “Well, see that you do, or mark my words, all you youngens can stay put.”
True to his word, Conrad immediately got to it. A mine had collapsed in Tennessee, and while they worked through the night saving the miners Piper had more than flying to worry about.
“There were thirty miners down in the shaft to begin with, isn’t that right, Smitty?” Conrad asked over the comm.
“That’s right,” Smitty grunted, trudging through dirt to get a better view of the terrain.
“So, Piper, we’ve rescued half of them; how many are left?”
Piper was flying a miner up through the center of a rock that Daisy had busted through. The miner was a heavy guy and unconscious. To make matters worse it was pouring with rain, she was tired, and it was late. “Uh, I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” Conrad pressed. “We started with thirty and now half are safe. What is thirty divided by two?”
“Ten?”
“You’re guessing. Picture the numbers in your mind.”
“My mind doesn’t like the numbers, Conrad,” Piper huffed. The guy she was lugging up to the surface was 210 pounds easy.
“What number multiplied by two equals thirty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do.”
Piper reached the surface and the miner’s eyes fluttered open. “You’re going to be okay,” she told him.
“Piper, I mean it, answer the question. What is thirty divided by two?”
“Fifteen,” the miner whispered to her.
Piper smiled. “It’s fifteen,” she repeated.
“I heard that,” Conrad said.
While salvaging a plane from the Pacific Ocean, Piper practiced her multiplication
tables, and as they rescued a pod of beached whales in San Francisco Bay, she worked through word problems.
“I don’t get it,” she fussed. “If he picks an apple every mile and walks ten miles why doesn’t he have ten apples?”
Piper got out of Jasper’s way as he placed his healing hands on the whale she was attending to. Daisy was using her super strength to move the whales into the water and Nalen and Ahmed were causing the tide to rise to make the job easier.
“Because he started with an apple, Piper.” Conrad manipulated his sensors and spoke into the comm. “Myrtle and Smitty, I have an incoming pedestrian on the west side of the beach.”
“Copy that, I have a visual,” came Smitty’s response.
“Maybe it’s the apples that are confusing me,” Piper said pathetically. “Can he have something else besides apples?”
“Go home, Piper,” Conrad said. “We’re almost done here and it’ll give you more time to finish up your homework before you go to sleep.”
Piper was relieved. With school and their rescue efforts she had more than enough on her plate. “See y’all back at the farm.” Piper flew away for home.
Daisy, Jasper, and Lily guided the last whale into the water. The team stood together watching them swim away as Conrad monitored their progress with sonar.
“They’ll clear the bay in thirty minutes,” Conrad reported. “Well done, team. Pack up, move out.”
Five minutes later the beach was empty, with no evidence that they had ever been there. As Conrad surveyed the scene one last time he noticed a strange red pebble in the sand. Leaning down, he picked it up and held it between his fingers, watching the way the moonlight made it shimmer and glow. Although he had an encyclopedic knowledge of geology, this specimen was like none he had ever seen before. Strangely enough, he’d found two others just like it in the last three weeks: one by the entrance to the collapsed coal mine and the other near a bomb site. Wrapping his fingers tightly around the stone, he held it in his fist and disappeared into the night.