Lightning Strikes! by Zoe Quinn

Author:Zoe Quinn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Comics & Graphic Novels, Superheroes
ISBN: 9780307496515
Publisher: Yearling
Published: 2006-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

THE Zoo?

I skidded to a superhalt at the tall iron gates and saw that yes, the address given to me by Thatcher the Dispatcher was for the Sweetbriar Zoo. Weird.

The communication device on my tool belt began to whir again; I snatched it from its clip and spoke into the mouthpiece.

“Thatcher?”

“Who else?” said Thatcher. “Have you reached your destination?”

“I've reached the zoo,” I answered.

“Well done.”

“So I'm supposed to be at the zoo?”

“Yes, and there isn't time much time to spare. Move it. Go to the far west corner.”

I sped through the zoo. Luckily it was lunchtime, which meant nearly all the zoo visitors would be crowded around the penguin pool to enjoy feeding session. When I was a kid, that was always my favorite part of coming to the Sweetbriar Zoo. Unfortunately the penguins' antics rarely lasted more than half an hour, so I wouldn't have the place to myself for long.

I zoomed on.

It was a pretty little zoo, with lots of shrubs and trees planted around the grounds. The animals in their pits and cages all looked well fed, clean, and content. But wasn't this a pretty strange place for a pet cat to be stuck in a tree?

I reached the far west corner and stopped dead. Yup, there was a cat stuck in a tree.

Only it wasn't a regular domestic kitty-cat, the sort of cat you'd call the fire department to rescue.

Oh, no. This was a bigger cat than that. A much bigger cat. A tiger, to be precise. It was Cleo, one of the Sweetbriar Zoo's star attractions. She was big, beautiful, and very fierce looking.

And she wasn't alone. There was a little boy up there with her, and she was creeping along the branch toward him!

I took a second to assess the situation. For safety, the tigers lived in a deep, wide area below the main level of the zoo. The pit was planted to look like a jungle habitat, with trees and boulders and a small pool. Visitors viewed the tigers by looking down through a tall fence. The tree that the boy had climbed was a giant old oak, which grew just outside the fence around the pit.

There was a balloon caught in the high branches of the tree, so I figured that the kid, who looked about four years old, had climbed the tree to retrieve it. The problem was that the oak tree's branches had grown over the fence and reached out and over the tiger pit. The other problem was that one of the trees planted inside the pit had grown tall enough so that its uppermost braches reached the lowest branches of the overgrown tree.

Cleo must have noticed the boy and climbed the tree in the pit to reach him.

And now there they were, tiger and child, perched on a fat branch above the tiger pit, while two tiger cubs and another huge tiger—Cleo's mate, I guessed—watched from below.

I took a superleap into the tree, landing easily between the boy and the tiger with my back to the boy.

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