. . .
“It’s Mom’s idea, really,” Tom says. “She said, ‘you know, you don’t have to die just because some people think your existence is evil.’ And I thought, ‘wow. That should totally be our Code.’”
Edmund gives a little grin.
“Exactly so,” he says.
“Wow,” says Jane. She tilts her head. She looks off into the distance. “That is a good motto.”
“Do you —” says Linus. “I mean, you, I mean, do you kill and eat people?”
. . .
“Do you —” says Linus. “I mean, you, I mean, do you kill and eat people?”
It’s the wrong question. What he meant to say is are you also somebody who is going to destroy the world? He has just been filling his head with erroneous notions about Jane ever since she arrived at the house at Doom Lane.
Jane shakes her head. “I made a pancake,” she says. “It was going to destroy the world. But then it didn’t.”
“See?” says Tom.
“I don’t think it would do any harm to let her in,” says Edmund. “Who makes one pancake can make another.”
“Maybe,” says Tom. He chews on his lip. “Or, she could be a Doom Team Auxiliary!”
Mouser —
The Doom Team’s current Auxiliary, a certain tortoiseshell cat of talent —
mews.
. . .
“This is so 1800s,” says Jane, picking up the cat and cuddling him.
“It’s not just because you’re a girl,” Tom patronizes. “It’s just, there are things that you can’t understand without actually being a world-ending threat. Plus, we don’t want to spend all our Doom Team meetings discussing makeup and clothing.”
“Unless,” starts Linus.
“Zip it,” Tom says.
Linus gives Jane an apologetic grin.
“Which is not to say,” clarifies Edmund, “that we think that girl stuff is inherently boring, so much as that it’s a narrow interest.”
“Whatever,” says Jane.
“You could be our renegade alchemist,” offers Tom.
Jane looks at him.
“I mean, that’s a girl’s spot,” Tom says, “but it’s still aces for fighting science villains. They’ll never expect a spot of sudden alchemy!”
“Or you could keep the minutes!” says Linus.
He’s very excited about the possibility of having someone else to keep the minutes, particularly since there is a strict “no recording the minutes of Doom Team meetings as gothic poetry” rule.
Jane pulls a face — hers, I mean, not Linus’ — and Linus’ own face falls.
. . .
“Anyway,” says Tom, “we mostly have science adventures and the like. Traveling through time and space and all that rot. There’s an undersea kingdom I’ve been hoping to get my teeth into, but the math — hey, you any good at math?”
Jane shakes her head.
“You sure?” says Tom, with the surprising egalitarianism of a whiz-bang engineer who really wishes there were someone around who could help check through his equations for potentially fatal errors now and then.
“I was home-Skolled,” says Jane.
“Oh,” says Tom. “Rotten luck.”
. . .
Tom hops to his feet.
“Anyway,” he says, and gestures around. “This is our meeting room. It’s also the dining room, so we can’t have our meetings during dinner or Mom is certain to find out. That’s our tree-house — oh, you can’t see it, I guess —”
Jane squints at him.
“And upstairs are the bedrooms. I was going to show you ’em last night but you never came up to bed?”
“I was glowering,” says Jane.
“Capital,” says Tom. “Well, let’s take a look now.”
Jane tags along as the Doom Team shows her the House on Doom Lane. She is not entirely sure what to make of her new situation.
“I can see the tree-house,” she says, as she looks out a window.
“Ah,” says Tom. “Well, yeah, from this angle.”
She squints.
. . .
“Seriously,” Jane says, and she turns to him. His expression is unexpectedly full of hope and vulnerability, though it clears back to cockiness before she finishes her turn. That momentary glimpse makes her hesitate, but she finishes her thought anyway. “I don’t know what to think about all this.”
“Well,” Tom says, “Let’s have a scientific adventure or two, and you can think about it. Just don’t get kidnapped all the time. I can’t stand gels who’re always getting kidnapped. It’s bad enough with Linus.”
The black dog stares at him. The black dog pants. Tom throws his shoe at it.
“Fine,” says Jane.
She takes a deep breath. She lets it out.
“Sign me up.”
. . .
In the end, though, it isn’t fighting the vegetable-men of the out-world or their harrowing journey to the center of the paper serpent that brings her and the Doom Team closer together. It isn’t accidentally crashing their rocket ship on one occasion or saving it from Tom accidentally crashing it on another.
It’s the look on Tom’s face when they get back home, after that last adventure, and find that Amelia is gone; that she’s left a note:
Dear children,
I have left to pursue renegade alchemy in hopes of becoming immortal.
Please honor your dear uncle Bertram as you would me.
Amelia.
. . .
Tom’s strong for Linus, of course; he comforts the antichrist, puts him to bed, sees Edmund off to home and wolf, and then he turns —
“Oh, Tom,” says Jane, and she holds him as he sinks to the ground and blinks, twice more than any human eyes could blink, to hold back his desperate, lost tears.
– 9 –
Bertram administers Tom, Jane, and Linus’ trust fund. He administers it right into the ground.
“It’s like watching Jane pilot a rocket ship,” Tom says, in awe.
Jane hits him on the arm.
. . .
Unfortunately there’s nothing they can do about it. They have to just watch and play with cat’s cradles as Bertram invests half their money in aluminum turtle siding (“your turtle-people have never looked so fresh!”) and withdraws the rest. They can’t say a word as he fills two great bags with money and hefts one in each hand.
He’s got a hostage.
. . .
“I’ll make a call,” says Bertram, metallically, “once I’m in the air. You understand. They’ll let Linus go.”
“Of course, sir,” says Tom.
He gives Bertram his best insincere smile.
“No hard feelings,” Bertram says.
“Gold is a soft metal, sir,” says Tom. His grin widens. His teeth are pearly white.
Bertram nods. He turns to go.
He walks out.
He closes the door.
“That wicked rotter,” Tom snarls, dropping his cat’s cradle. “Jane!”
. . .
Jane’s already in motion. She’s ducking past the security guard. She’s in the bank vault. She’s rifling among the deposit boxes for the grenades the Doom Team always keeps there just in case of trouble at the bank.
“Oi!” says the security guard. He starts to chase Jane. Tom knocks him down, shoves a sedative-laced dog biscuit in his mouth, pivots, and runs outside. He’s just in time to see Bertram’s limousine squeal off down the street.
“Damnation,” says Tom. “Rocket ship. Rocket ship. Where do I have a rocket ship?”
His eye settles on the statue of a mounted Wellington on a pedestal in front of the bank.
“Aces,” says science adventurer, Tom.
. . .
Tom begins to scramble up the bronze and granite. He pushes a button on his watch. The Duke of Wellington leans forward, merges into the horse, and spreads his cape to form wings and a cockpit. The horse’s legs sink down into the pedestal and the word “WELLINGTON” begins to glow with an orange-ish light.
You can arrange this sort of thing when you’re a time-traveling science adventurer.
The metal statue arches forwards. The whole pedestal is becoming a ship. Tom flips up Wellington’s cape and climbs inside it. He revs the engine loud.
. . .
“Grenade,” says Jane, scattering diamonds, Weimar currency, dinosaur teeth, and highly dangerous nanotechnology all over the floor of the bank deposit vault. “Grenade. Grenades!”
The bank receptionist, who has just worked herself up to the notion that she can probably take on a single under-aged girl-shaped entity even without a security guard’s help and burst into the deposit room hears that, shrieks, and resolves on the instant to give her two weeks’ notice.
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