Cloneward Bound (2 page)

Moments later, the whole complex had turned into a hundred-foot-tall column of glowing dust. Naturally, Fisher had assumed that Two had gone down with the building and, as horrible as Fisher had felt about losing Two, he also felt a guilty sense of relief. If Two was gone, it meant that his secret was safe forever.

Now, it turned out that not only was his secret
not
safe, it was running around Los Angeles, chasing after a commercial actress who formed the center of the fantasy Fisher had hastily created to try and keep Two in check. Considering how much havoc Two had caused while loose in the school, Fisher could hardly imagine what kind of damage he could inflict in one of the biggest cities on earth.

Two school weeks had passed since TechX had gone up in an ash cloud, and Fisher had ridden the waves of glory well enough until Friday, when the note appeared in his mailbox. He’d spent all weekend in his room laboratory
trying to construct a Two Tracking Unit. After a mind-numbing process of figuring out how to make it not just point at himself, he took the TTU out for a test run. Unfortunately, all it had pointed him in the direction of was an opossum, a 1992 Honda Civic, and a hot dog with peppers. Maybe if he could figure out what trace elements Two had in common with those things …

Fisher refolded the note for the four hundred and fifty-fourth time and tucked it back into his pocket. He tried to will away mental images of the
HOLLYWOOD
sign blasting into space, Two perched happily in one of the crooks of the W. Fisher turned into his science classroom and took his usual seat at the front left corner.

Every day for a year, he had walked into this room and sat down in exactly the same spot, while skinny, meek Mr. Granger had tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the class in order. Fisher had gotten to know Granger and even considered him a friend. Fisher was a genius. He had also learned, over the past few weeks, that he was a pretty good liar. This meant, he thought, that he should be a pretty good lie
detector
.

But it turned out that his biology teacher had really been a fiendish, maniacal scientist bent on destruction and conquest, and Fisher hadn’t even had a clue. It made him wonder if any of his other teachers were really supervillains. He could definitely see his English teacher, Mrs.
Weedle, fitting the bill. If Mr. Granger had been able to hide his true nature from Fisher for so long, what kind of secrets could the other people around him be hiding? He let his eyes wander around the classroom.

But as he glanced toward the door, his mind went blank, and his lungs decided to take a quick mid-inhale break.

Veronica Greenwich walked through the door trailing a blur of dawn light and silver mist—at least, that’s what it seemed like to Fisher. She saw him and smiled, and Fisher was just able to muster enough control over his face muscles to smile back.

Fisher hadn’t told anyone that Granger was actually Dr. X and had been disintegrated along with the TechX building. Who would have believed him, anyway? As far as Fisher was concerned, all that mattered was that after Mr. Granger had “mysteriously disappeared,” there had been some reshuffling of the science classes, and he was now in the same class as Veronica.

After she sat down on the other side of the room, Fisher slipped another piece of paper out of his bag and set it on his desk, then pulled out a pencil.

Increase in social acknowledgement following TechX incident over time passed since, respect among scientific peers, reputation among students helped with homework …
He scribbled in a few new variables and numbers.
Taking into account recent actions of V—
Veronica, in the equations—
a careful measure of smiling ratio should yield answer … K
.

On the far right side of the equation, the point of all Fisher’s tangled math and logic, was the letter
K
.

K:
the exact moment in time when Fisher might get his first kiss from Veronica.

K
: the idea was something so otherworldly to Fisher that the only way he could cope with it was in a form that he understood: symbols, variables, and strings of numbers. It was the way that he best understood the world. At the same time, he knew that, if it happened, the kiss itself wasn’t going to take place on graph paper. And if—when!—an opportunity for
K
should arise, he didn’t know
what
he would do. Was there a book he could read? Somebody he could ask?

His pencil worked like it had a mind of its own—and a frantic mind at that. The layers of equations scrawled along and filled out as Fisher added new variables to account for Veronica’s recent behavior toward him. At first, when he’d embraced his new hero status, she had coldly shrugged him off. But he could tell that the new result was going to yield a much smaller value for
K
. He felt his face begin to go slack as the last few results added up.

He stared down at the new value of K. He blinked once. The number had indeed decreased by almost fifty percent—to only one thousand, two hundred fourteen years, and three days. He looked back over at Veronica as she neatly wrote the date at the top of her class notes.
Maybe if I put both of us into long-term hibernation incryo-freeze pods …

“Good morning, everyone!”

Fisher was taken out of his reverie by the voice of Ms. Snapper, Mr. Granger’s replacement. She normally taught eighth-grade science, but had agreed to take over Mr. Granger’s class until further notice. Fisher quickly folded up his graph paper and slipped it into his bag.

Ms. Snapper was tall and slender, wore black, wire-frame glasses, and had dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Since she had stepped in to teach the class after Mr. Granger’s mysterious disappearance, Fisher had gotten to like her. Still, he had liked Mr. Granger, too, and look how
that
had ended up. He was going to need some more time before he could feel at ease in this class, no matter who taught it.

“I’ve got a special announcement to make,” Ms. Snapper said in a bright, cheerful voice. “You may remember Mr. Granger was planning a trip this week,” she said. “In spite of the … unfortunate circumstances,” she went on—none of the teachers seemed sure how to talk about Mr. Granger’s vanishing act—“I spoke to the administration
and we’re going to go ahead with our class trip to LA, where we’ll get the privilege of seeing a taping of the popular TV program
Strange Science
! We’ll depart midday this Friday and be back on Monday morning in time for third period.”

Several people shouted and clapped; others sighed, clearly annoyed at the prospect of giving up a weekend for anything school related. Fisher felt like he could bounce out of his seat. He’d forgotten all about the proposed trip in light of the whole clone situation. Two was in LA! Now Fisher had a way to get there. This could be his chance to find his clone … before everyone else found out about him.

As an added bonus,
Strange Science
had become a late-afternoon favorite of his since it started airing. That was largely due to its host, who went by the name Dr. Devilish. He was tall and handsome, with a commanding presence and a smooth-talking charm
—and
he was an accomplished scientist. Fisher had never seen someone who had both academic and social skills. Dr. Devilish gave him hope for his own future.

“Because this trip takes place over the weekend,” Ms. Snapper went on, “participation is strictly voluntary. So, can I get a show of interested students?”

Fisher’s hand shot up first, and others followed. Some people were murmuring excitedly about Dr. Devilish;
others were obviously looking forward to missing half of Friday and two class periods on Monday.

Then Fisher saw Veronica’s hand go up. His pulse started thudding. It was too good to be true. He quickly reached down and whipped out his graph paper. He scribbled with one hand as he kept the other up, trying to determine how going on this trip together might affect the value of
K
. Hopefully, enough to make it earlier than the year that Wompalog Middle School became an archaeological dig site.

“Ms. Snapper?” said Veronica.

“Yes … Veronica?” Ms. Snapper said, taking a moment to be sure she had her name right. “You have a question?”

“Is …” Veronica looked slightly embarrassed. “Do you think there’s any chance we might get to meet Kevin Keels?”

Fisher dropped his pencil.

“Kevin Keels …” Ms. Snapper said, her eyes turning up in thought. “Is that an actor you like?”

Fisher felt like he’d just been slapped in the face with a frozen mackerel. Kevin Keels was the latest pop sensation, a thirteen-year-old whose ballads and dance hits were slowly creeping on to every radio station nationwide, as Veronica—as well as all the other girls in the class—hurried to explain to Ms. Snapper. The only reason Fisher
knew about the pop star’s existence was that CURTIS, the artificial intelligence he’d freed from TechX that now resided in his computer, had been wailing Keels’s incredibly annoying and brain-meltingly stupid songs for the past three weeks straight. And to top it off, Kevin Keels had just finished filming a movie about his rise to fame:
Keel Me Now
.

Which was more or less the thought that went through Fisher’s head as he buried it in his hands, trying to drown out the excited chatter that filled the room.

CHAPTER 2

By the time science class ended, Fisher felt as though his heart was plastered to the soles of his shoes. Kevin Keels? Kevin Keels, whose hair actually glowed as if a helicopter with a spotlight followed him everywhere he went. Kevin Keels, who sold out arenas so big you needed an astronomical telescope to see him from the back row. Kevin Keels, who had a basketball shoe named after him
even though he didn’t play basketball
.

Kevin Keels! Really?!
Fisher fumed. His music was cheesier than a map of Wisconsin cut from a four-cheese pizza. And how could an accomplished English student like Veronica get so—
blushy
—over someone who had a hit single titled “Not Never Wouldn’t Leave You”?

He had just stepped into the hall and had started toward his next class when he was seized by a hand on his left shoulder.

As Fisher found himself spun roughly around, he
fumbled into his back pocket, preparing to defend himself with his Instant Nose Froster.

Then he saw Amanda Cantrell’s angry face and stopped mid-draw. The tiny plastic device was knocked from his hand. As it collided with a bank of lockers, the Nose Froster let out a fine plume of white spray, turning a passing sixth grader’s nasal passages into a miniature model of a glacier formation.

The girl let out something between a scream and a honk, her arms flailing as she ran toward the nearest bathroom.

“Amanda!” he cried out in surprise, choking a bit as she pinned him against the locker. “Is, uh … something wrong?”

“Something is
very
wrong,” she said, her dark hair whipping around her face like deadly vines. She freed one hand to adjust the black-rimmed glasses that her ambush had jostled out of place. The other arm was more than enough to keep Fisher pinned. Amanda was short, but she was
strong
. She was head of the debate team
and
captain of the wrestling team. “And you’re going to tell me what.”