Anatopsis by Chris Abouzeid

Author:Chris Abouzeid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group

But the next day was Thursday, always the busiest day of the week in the laboratories. And Sandborn was in a foul mood, growling and barking and gnashing his teeth about someone or something that had been breaking into the Testing Floor at night and killing test subjects.

“Sandborn cut him! Sandborn split him in half!” the troll shouted, nearly decapitating Barnaby with a large knife he had been waving about all morning. Barnaby thought it best to teleshift at once back to the laboratory.

“Split in half?” Uno said when Barnaby returned to his workbench. “You don’t suppose Old Wax Face is coming here now to get his midnight snacks, do you?”

Barnaby did not know and did not want to think about it. All he wanted was to get his hammer back. “We’ll try later, when Sandborn goes to lunch,” he whispered to Uno.

Sandborn did not go to lunch, however. And the R&D Bees kept Barnaby so busy that he almost forgot about the hammer.

By midafternoon, his head ached again. He glanced up from his bench and saw the cleaning woman, Isak, entering Dr. Zivvini’s office. She came every day, always with the same grim, purposeful expression on her face, her eyes hammocked with weariness.

She nodded to Barnaby as she wheeled her cart into Dr. Zivvini’s office, and he waved. He sometimes caught her staring at him, through the glass, and once, when he had asked her if she was all right, she had smiled. But it was the smallest, saddest smile Barnaby had ever seen.

“What about her?” Uno whispered, getting to his feet. “Do you think she has it?”

“The hammer?” Barnaby asked.

“No, my water dish. Of course I mean the hammer,” Uno said. “She took that card, remember? I’m sure she’d pocket your hammer.”

“She’s only a mortal, Uno—”

“No, she’s not. I can smell power in her every time she goes by. I can feel it. She must be a slag or something—probably a spy for the Queen, or Mrs. Tamburlane, or your father. See? She’s snooping through the waste bins right now.”

Isak was only emptying the waste bins into her cart, as she always did. If she is a spy, Barnaby thought, she’s a very bad one. Whatever’s in that waste bin can’t be as valuable as what’s on Dr. Zivvini’s desk.

And she had not given the desk so much as a glance.

He returned to the sniffer he was building. He had five more to do, and his last trip to the Testing Floor had left him shaking and nauseated. He had no energy for Uno’s intrigues.

“I think we should follow her,” Uno said as Isak departed.

“Leave her alone,” Barnaby said. “She’s not a spy.”

“That’s what you said about the bats at Georges Castle. Then suddenly your father was blasting your door off the hinges, and poor Alexander was in the dungeons.”

Barnaby frowned. He did not like to think about that. “All right—the bats really were spies. But I’ve got five more of these blasted things to build, and I don’t have the energy to worry about every suspicious person who glances our way.

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