Jane Blonde: Spy in the Sky Read online

  Janey stroked his head. ‘I’m sure it will come back when you’re well enough to go through the Wower again,’ she told him, and he rubbed his head against her hand. It was a much quieter kitty that had come home, and he only wanted to be around G-Mamma, Janey or Maddy. Or, of course, his beloved master, who had still not returned after two whole days.

  Gina paced the lab, peering into her SPIV every few minutes and dropping it despondently each time. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ she asked for the hundredth time that day.

  ‘Let me go and look for him.’ But Janey already knew the answer – her mum hadn’t wanted to let her out of her sight since the briefing session where Boz had failed to show.

  ‘No, you stay here. I’d like you to help me tick off the Spylabs,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve been to so many of them, it would really help me if you could go through them with me.’

  Janey sighed quietly, then tipped Trouble gently off her knee towards the door and went to her mum’s aid. ‘Florida, in the back of the villas,’ she said. ‘Eagle and Peregrine have done that one. The black lab at Cape Canaveral had already been dealt with. Then there’s Antarctica, labs for SPI and for Copernicus – Alfie and Tish are there doing those right now.’ She felt a twinge of annoyance. It should have been Al Halo and Blonde, the former ace team.

  Her mother moved around the globe, putting stickers over the sites that had been SPInamited or SPIroscoped out of existence. ‘The one on Copernicus’s planet – G-Mamma and Bert are covering that,’ she said. ‘Where else? Aren’t there any others?’

  ‘Solfari Lands, Sol’s Lols – all destroyed,’ said Janey wearily. ‘Mum, can’t I just—’

  ‘I want you here, Janey, out of harm’s way!’ Her mum grabbed the SPIV again and threw it back down in despair. ‘And James. Where is he?’

  ‘In his bedroom.’ Ever since the black-lab experience, James had spent an awful lot of time lying on his bed, staring morosely out of the window. He wasn’t allowed to walk to the zoo on his own any more, and he wasn’t taking it well.

  ‘Go and get him,’ said her mum. ‘I’ve got something you can both do close to home.’

  Curious, Janey dragged James reluctantly up to the lab, where her mother was pulling something out of a drawer. ‘This should be enough,’ she said, handing Janey a bag of white powder, two wires – one red and one blue and a cheap digital watch from the petrol station.

  ‘What is it?’ Janey thought she had seen it before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  ‘Powdered SPInamite. The plastic bag it’s in is actually an expanding membrane – Spy Film. It fills the room to the very corners, so the explosion is contained and nothing outside the room will be harmed, apart from a tiny bit of short-term memory loss if you’re too close when it goes off. Isn’t your dad clever?’ Janey’s mum smiled sadly.

  ‘So,’ said Janey, hardly daring to believe it, ‘are we going to be allowed to take out a Spylab?’

  ‘It’s quite a special one,’ replied her mother. ‘You might want to take out some of the most personal belongings first.’

  And she led them downstairs to the back door.

  ‘G-Mamma’s garage,’ said Janey. ‘Makes sense. But she’s not going to be happy.’

  ‘That’s why we’re doing it now. Here are the instructions – poke the wires through the Spy Film and out of the back of the watch, set the timer . . . and off you go. Give yourself plenty of time to get out.’

  Janey nodded. ‘Come on, Sable. Let’s do it.’

  As their mother disappeared back up the stairs, Janey and James ran to the garage. It seemed terribly sad to be blowing up the glamorous little lab that G-Mamma had created for herself, but in spite of that, Janey couldn’t help feeling rather pleased. They were being trusted with something important, instead of being protected into a state of complete boredom.

  James was already through the door, so Janey followed him with the SPInamite powder in its bag of Spy Film, trying to read the instructions at the same time. She found James leaning over the fat old tyre that was all that remained of the original garage, looking puzzled. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  She’d startled him. James jumped, then pointed at the tyre. Only then did Janey realize what was inside. ‘Oh! Poor Trouble,’ she said. The Spycat had the front of his body draped over the rubber of the tyre, while his back end dangled in the hole. ‘It must make his bottom more comfortable. Let’s take that outside.’

  Between them they dragged the enormous tyre out on to the lawn, complete with cat. Then Janey took a few minutes to look round the lab, seeing which of G-Mamma’s personal belongings she should save. There was far too much make-up to put aside, so Janey picked out G-Mamma’s favourite Mermaid Magic eyeshadow and grabbed a packet of doughnut holes from the fridge. These she stashed outside the garage door, with G-Mamma’s black wellington boots – the very boots G-Mamma had been wearing when Janey first met her outside the school gates.

  Janey sighed. It felt like the end of something special, and when she saw her mum run out of G-Mamma’s back door and into their own house, she knew that something else was afoot. She didn’t have to wait long – just a few seconds later there was the same dull bawump sound that had accompanied the explosion at the Hallidays’, and a vast cloud of glittery dust billowed out of the upstairs window of G-Mamma’s old Spylab, next to Janey’s room. It was gone.

  It was all Janey could do not to cry, but James was looking at her with such terrible concern in his eyes that she pulled herself together. ‘Blonde, you’ve got a job to do,’ she told herself sternly. ‘You ready, Sable?’

  With one last longing look at the tyre, as if he would much prefer to join Trouble in there, James nodded and headed back through the garage door. Janey took a quick look around outside – nobody there – and followed him.

  It really was a shame, she decided, that she couldn’t be in the room to see what happened when the SPInamite was detonated. It might have been rather fun to see the Spy Film expand to cover every wall, the floor, the ceiling, and then watch everything within it get obliterated. Like blowing something up inside a balloon, she thought.

  ‘Blue wire, Jamie . . . I mean, Sable,’ she said as she fed the red one through the Spy Film as the instructions directed. ‘Then we take off the back of the watch – thank you – and put the wires in it like that.’

  The parcel sat on the table between them like a small sack of flour. It looked so harmless. And yet so . . . familiar. Well, of course it was, she told herself. There was a diagram right there on the paper in her hand.

  Janey set the watch to count down for thirty seconds and smiled reassuringly at James, who was already backing towards the door. ‘It’s OK. Go on, I’m coming too,’ she said. She bent down to the bag to check that the watch was set, then ran outside.

  The door banged shut behind her, and her head was suddenly filled with the image of a skylight. Or rather, of bursting through a skylight and of James being dragged under the entry tubes by the gorilla, getting sucked up the cylinder before the explosion, as if he had been . . . evacuated to safety? But that didn’t make sense. The gorilla was a Copernicus henchman. Why would it have rescued Jamie?

  She stopped in the middle of the lawn, covering her ears as her own watch counted down: Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .

  Tick. That had been what the other flour bag thing had been doing. Tick. Her father’s watch. Tick.

  And just as the garage expanded briefly as if it was blowing out its cheeks and then settled back down again, Janey stumbled to her knees and howled, ‘Nooooo!’

  The gorilla’s blue eyes. Her father’s watch. The gorilla screaming, ‘Ouuuuut.’ ‘Get out, Janey,’ he would have said if he could. If he’d had the time.

  Because it hadn’t been a gorilla. It was her father. She’d delayed his escape from the bomb he’d been investigating, because he was making sure she and James were safe. Boz Brilliance Brown had exploded, along with the black Spylab. And she, Jane Blonde, had as good as
killed him.

  But the memories surged briefly and then receded, so only a kernel of understanding remained in her head. She’d have to pass it on. Whatever was left. She had to tell the SPIs.

  For the best part of a week, they took it in turns to plough through the debris at Sunny Jim’s all day and night, but their frantic search brought up nothing apart from a couple of thick black hairs.

  ‘He must have escaped,’ insisted Janey’s mum, scrabbling through the rubble with her bare hands.

  Janey fought back a sob. ‘He can’t have. You’ve seen what those enclosed bombs are like. He was stuck, right here, because I was too stupid to realize what was going on.’

  Mrs Halliday called over from the area where the entry tubes had been. For the last half-hour she and Alfie had been combing the area for signs that Boz could have got out. ‘Nothing here, I’m afraid. Janey, are you absolutely sure it was him?’

  ‘It could have been one of those gorilla henchmen,’ Alfie said hopefully.

  But Janey shook her head, miserable to the core. Now that she’d remembered the panicked expression in the blue eyes, she had no doubts. Why her father had turned into a gorilla, she didn’t know, but she could see now that for the last few weeks he’d been getting steadily more hairy, more gruff and hunched over, and just more . . . ape-like. One of his strange experiments, she supposed.

  She looked over at James, remembering that he had become a boy instead of a monkey through the R-Evolution process. He had been getting ever more distressed since Janey’s short-term memory of the bomb blast had been restored, seeming to think that it was his fault that Boz had been stuck in the laboratory. ‘No,’ insisted Janey repeatedly. ‘It was me. I was the one who suggesting going over there, the one who didn’t recognize him. It’s my fault.’

  She had never felt so utterly bereft in all her life. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she whispered. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Her mum stood up and dropped the hairs she had found into a plastic bag. ‘Alfie, would you take these and check them out in the Spyl— . . . oh.’

  Jean Brown sank to her knees, looking ready to cry, and G-Mamma, who had been foraging nearby, patted her clumsily on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Gina B.,’ she said kindly, her own eyes swimming with tears. ‘I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. I’ll get these analysed somewhere.’

  And suddenly Janey had had enough. ‘Where? Where can you do that, G-Mamma? We’ve destroyed them all. All the labs. Even this one which had a person in it. He’s dead! We can’t do anything else. He’s just dead.’

  And with everyone staring at her, either in sympathy or in horror at what she’d said, she fled from the bomb scene with a sob, and didn’t stop running until she’d made her way across to the massive building site where James had been held captive. She clambered up to the cage at the top of Jamie’s crane. Alone. She could be alone there. Huddled in the corner, Janey curled up with her head on her knees and bawled. Everything had gone wrong. Being back together as a family hadn’t worked – Jamie was miserable all the time, her father was missing-presumed-dead, and her mum was the most unhappy she had ever been in Janey’s whole life. At least when Jean hadn’t known that Boz was alive and that she had a spy identity, she’d been content with her cleaning business and their life together. Their little life. Just Janey and Jean.

  There was a scuffling sound outside the cage. It was James, his head cocked on one side, hardly even breathless from swinging from the nearest crane on a long hook, not knowing whether to approach. Janey spread her arms out and he jumped in his strange, slightly loping fashion, straight to her side. He already knew what it felt like to be separated from family. He understood.

  Janey took him by the shoulders. ‘Jamie, tell me honestly,’ she said, her voice cracking a little, ‘do you like being human?’

  The little boy looked at her anxiously, then slowly shook his head.

  ‘Do you wish you were still a chimp, like Belle?’

  With a slightly shifty expression as if he didn’t want to be found out, James stared sorrowfully into her face and then nodded. But then he pointed to himself, to his heart, and then to Janey.

  Her eyes filled up again. ‘I know. I love you too. But we’ve messed everything up, haven’t we? We should have just left things the way they were.’ After a few moments of tearful hugging, the pair slid down the crane into the crater, Jamie scuttling with all the dexterity of the monkey he had been, while Janey kept her SuSPInder to hand, just in case. They bypassed the reservoir and made their way out beyond the school.

  Suddenly Janey grabbed James’s hand. ‘Hey, we’re going past Solfari Lands. Let’s go and see Belle,’ she said on impulse. The joy in James’s face was enough to make her smile, even in such sad circumstances. ‘On three, we’ll Fleet-foot over the fence. It’s late now – nobody will see us. Ready? One, two . . .’

  On ‘Three!’ they both sailed up in the air, still holding hands, and vaulted the high wire fence with ease. It was dusk, and the animals were getting restless, noisier. Only the elephants seemed unusually quiet. Janey could hear Belle’s familiar chattering from her cage some way behind the Elephant Enclosure. She pointed in Belle’s direction and smiled at James. He would want to see her on his own. With a grateful hug, he scampered away.

  Janey turned around slowly in the twilight, listening to all the amplified animal sounds on her SPI-Pod. Lions roared and little monkeys gibbered, sounding so close that Janey whipped around to check it wasn’t one of Copernicus’s apes. But then she heard another sound – a harsh caw, like the call of an enormous crow. For a moment her heart raced, but then she heard something much more friendly. ‘G’day, ya great ugly bird. Brought you some food, so don’t you go biting my hand off.’

  ‘Thanks, Berty-Bert,’ she heard G-Mamma say.

  ‘Not you, ya daft sheila. The ptera.’

  Despite her misery, Janey grinned. SPI might be collapsing, her whole family falling apart, but G-Mamma would never change. Turning down her SPI-Pod, she ran to the Amphibian House and zapped down to what used to be the Spylab.

  It had been transformed pretty quickly into a vast pterodactyl cage. The enormous dino-bird sat on a perch the size of a tree trunk across one end, while Bert tossed skinned rabbits through the bars. ‘There you go, you big chuck.’ From her position flat out on a bench, G-Mamma peered at Janey from under a couple of cucumber slices. ‘Just trying to reduced the swelling,’ she explained. ‘I’ve cried so much my eyes are like golf balls.’

  ‘So you think Dad’s dead too?’ said Janey, the lump in her throat suddenly growing again.

  ‘Who knows, Blondette? He’s surprised us before, and I don’t doubt he’ll surprise us again.’ G-Mamma sighed. ‘In the meantime though, your mother will take over SPI. I’ll be out on my beautiful little ear.’

  ‘Why?’ said Janey.

  ‘Because she hates me!’

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’

  G-Mamma shuddered. ‘Well, she’s totally jealous then. I was your father’s right-hand woman for a decade when she didn’t even know he was alive. Now she’s taken over all my duties. At least I still have my music.’

  Janey covered up her smile. ‘Oh, yes – your video. I bet you didn’t have time to shoot it in the end.’

  Bert chuckled. ‘You haven’t even shown Blonde?’

  ‘My art is personal!’ snapped G-Mamma.

  ‘G-Mamma! Did you make a video? Oh, please!’ said Janey. ‘I need cheering up. Please show me.’

  G-Mamma looked torn for a fraction of a second, but she was obviously dying to show someone. Quick as a flash, she pulled a personal DVD player out of her bag, dusted the sugar off it and projected the image on to the ptera-cage wall. There was a bit of jagged film and then suddenly, as the music started, the lights came up on a familiar scene.

  ‘And . . . action!’ whispered G-Mamma, reliving every second.

  ‘That’s Sunny Jim’s Swims!’ Janey gasped at the film as G-Mamma, gl
orious in shimmering silk, emerged from the toddler pool looking tragic and then swayed like a belly dancer over to the picnic area. ‘That’s why there were all those lights! And why you didn’t admit you were there.’

  ‘Shh!’ G-Mamma pointed at the screen. ‘The song’s starting.’

  And Janey watched, stunned, as G-Mamma wafted among the picnic tables, half singing, half rapping, jumping from one table to another like a gymnast, and street-dancing like a star. Only a SPI would know that she had Fleet-feet on, and that the Wower had created the hypnotic glow around her. . . .

  ‘You were always on a pedest-al

  But you are only mort-al

  The boss of me no more

  Since you threw me out the door . . .’

  The Screen-G-Mamma rapped on in a mournful fashion, gazing soulfully into the camera.

  Janey gasped. ‘Is this about . . . my dad?’ ‘No,’ said G-Mamma with a disdainful snort, but Bert laughed, suggesting otherwise. Suddenly there were two G-Mammas, then three, then a whole army of hip-hopping G-Mammas.

  Janey gasped again. ‘You used the SPI-clone!’ ‘Nah – computer graphics,’ said Bert with a grin. ‘But you hate computers!’ Bert nodded. ‘Young Halo gave me a hand.’ ‘Alfie?’ So that was what he’d been up to all summer. No wonder he hadn’t been pestering her for missions and things to do. ‘Why wasn’t I—’

  ‘Quiet, it’s the chorus,’ shrieked G-Mamma, mimicking the glamorous rap star on the screen. She broke into song.

  ‘I was all you were needing; now my heart, it’s all bleeding . . .

  Dripping on to the floor; I can’t take any more.

  And I am what I am, want to know where I stand;

  So I’m telling you now, I’m taking things . . .’

  The screen G-Mammas dropped their chins and glared into the camera . . .

  ‘Into my own hands.’