. . .
A letter arrives. Jane opens the mailbox. She takes out the letter. She reads it. She reads it again. She reads it a third time.
Then she folds it back up and she tucks it into her pocket.
In the back yard of the house on Doom Lane there is a great tree. In that tree there is a tree-house. Before that tree-house there is a sign. It is carved into the wood, richly and carefully made, with painted red letters against burnt-black wood:
“Tom’s Secret Treehouse — Invisible to Girls!”
Jane chews on her lip for a while. Then she shrugs. She climbs up the ladder. She joins the rest of the Doom Team.
Tom is dumbstruck.
“Jane,” Tom says. “How — what —”
“I used my sense of smell and hearing to deduce its location,” Jane proposes.
“. . . I guess you can come in, then,” Tom admits.
“It’s a good thing, too,” Jane says. “I have an important letter — from Uncle Bertram!”
Tom sees the letter. He grabs for it. Jane grabs it first and holds it against her chest.
“It is addressed to me,” Jane says.
“But how?”
Jane displays it with a flourish. “Using letters!”
“. . . I think you meant to say, ‘but why?’” Linus, who will be Mr. Enemy, suggests.
. . .
“That is in fact what I meant to ask,” concedes Tom.
“It is not just an ordinary letter,” says Jane. “It is a confession!”
“What could Bertram possibly have left to confess?” Edmund asks.
“Apparently,” says Jane, “Maria, our lovable space princess assassin nanny, is under orders to murder us all if Bertram has not forwarded a complete payment to certain interests by —”
She checks her watch.
“. . . Thirty-seven seconds ago.”
Linus reaches over to Mouser, who had treed himself several hours ago and accordingly become an impromptu part of the meeting of the Doom Team. He picks up the cat. He puts the cat on his lap. He strokes it.
“Oh, Mouser,” whispers Linus. “Place not your trust in humanity. It will betray you every time.”
“It explains further,” didacts Jane, “that originally he bankrupted us because he didn’t want them to kill —”
She looks apologetic.
“Well, three of us,” she says, and Linus’ lips tighten. “But then he decided that he’d really rather spend the money on fun times and fast women — I think he must mean cars — but he had pangs of guilt anyway. So he had to write this letter explaining how it was all our fault.”
“Really,” says Edmund Gulley.
“Truly,” answers Jane.
. . .
“Apparently, we have brought this on ourselves by being unlovable scamps who won’t even steal priceless paintings from the future in order to help our half-metallic uncle pay his debts,” Jane explains.
Tom frowns.
“It was against Doom Team policy,” he says.
“I’m not complaining!” says Jane.
Tom makes a face.
“I’m really not,” Jane confirms.
“It wouldn’t matter,” says Linus gloomily. “You know he’d have just killed us off to get rid of the witnesses. Or stranded us in time.”
. . .
Tom pulls out a marvelous hand-held computing device. He calls up the data on space princess assassins. He reads it out to the Team (and its auxiliaries.)
“MARIA SOUVANTE–,” he reads out, which is trickier than it might sound. “Princess of the Fan Hoeng space people. They’re aliens,” he asides.
Edmund pats him on the arm.
. . .
“Apparently several million years ago,” Tom says, “the Fan Hoeng’s clan of royal assassins realized that instead of killing for the King, they could cut the middleman and deliver the savings to their people by being the King. Ever since then, all the contenders for the Fan Hoeng throne must spend at least ten years on one of their space empire’s client planets killing for money or politics in order to demonstrate that they have what it takes to be a King.”
“Or Queen,” Jane says.
“Well, yes,” says Tom. “I mean, since she’s a girl and all.”
He shrugs.
“Maria Souvante’s considered one of the most talented space princess assassins of her generation (footnote),” Tom says, returning to his reading, “but she’ll always give her target one . . . slim . . . chance to survive!”
“That’s our target, then,” says Edmund, snapping his fingers. “That . . . slim . . . chance!”
He high-5s Jane, who does not really think this is worth high-5ing over but is not going to just leave him hanging over it.
. . .
“What’s the footnote?” Linus asks.
“Huh?” says Tom, powering down his marvelous handheld computing device. Its screen becomes a mirror.
“You said ‘(footnote.)’”
“Oh,” says Tom. He reflects. “Probably just something about how deadly she is. I don’t know. I can’t get the footnotes to work on a touchscreen properly.”
“It’s weird,” says Linus, after a while.
“What is?”
“To have loved the one who will kill us. To have laughed with her; sung with her; danced with her; played with her. To have thought: here is a space woman, a princess-assassin who of all the princess-assassins in the world will look at me and will not judge. And then —”
Linus trails off.
“And then this.”
There is a crunch of an alien footstep on the lawn below.
. . .
There is a crunch of an alien footstep on the lawn below.
Jane leans over the railing.
She looks down.
“It’s Maria,” she says. “She’s in deadly battle armor!”
“That’s a corset,” says Linus.
“Have you ever worn one? They’re death on wheels!”
“More importantly,” says Tom, who has joined them in looking down, “why hasn’t she found us? Is it the sign? Because it would, I admit, be awesome if that worked on some girls.”
“No,” says Jane.
“No?” says Edmund.
“Mew,” says Mouser.
Shut up, Mouser. You are not adding to this conversation!
“Mew,” says Mouser, thoughtfully, again.
. . .
“She’s not blinded to us,” says Jane. “Look at those neck somatics! She’s trying desperately not to look up no matter how loud our hasty, whispered conversation gets!”
“That’s true,” says Tom. “Look at her twitch when I say her name!”
“You didn’t say her name,” Edmund notes.
“Maria,” says Tom, “I mean.”
“Wow,” says Jane.
“That’s a twitch.”
“And another one,” says Linus excitedly. “Should we tease her more?”
“No!” says Jane. “Do not tease the space princess assassin trying not to notice your stealthy antichrist presence!”
“Stop yelling about it, Jane!” yells Tom.
She head-butts him. He pulls her hair. They fall out of the tree-house and land with a thump just as Maria fortuitously turns around and begins to patrol away.
“Ow,” mutters Jane.
“Oi!” yells Edmund. “You two all right?”
The tip of a space rifle protrudes from Maria’s umbrella. She points it vaguely upwards. She fires two shots. With a crack one of the stars in the distant sky goes out.
Edmund shuts up.
“But where,” wonders Linus, “did the other shot go?”
. . .
Maria is gritting her teeth. She is trembling.
“Shush, Linus,” says Edmund.
“Aha!” realizes Maria loudly. “I am hallucinating the presence of the children.”
She grins with a game determination, as if to make this so. She looks around. She looks past them. One eye twitches.
“It is certainly not that they are actually right here and squabbling killably,” she announces loudly. “That would be too suicidal! No. They are scheming elsewhere. That is why I must quickly go inside and get back to my work — that is to say, destroying the secrets of the Marvelous Immortality Elixir!”
She scans Tom and Jane to make sure they’re all right, carefully applies a band-aid to Jane’s bleeding elbow, (“Imaginarily!” she declares,) and tromps back inside.
“Do you think she noticed us?” whispers Tom.
“Just shut up,” sighs Jane.
. . .
Edmund is down on the ground beside them now. He helps Jane and Tom up. “That must be our slender chance,” he says. “Narrow as a thread. Desperate as a chain. Complete a marvelous immortality elixir and become Taoist deities — or else we die!”
Jane stares at him.
Linus drops down to the ground. He loses his balance and steadies himself against the broad back of his black dog. It pants.
Jane blinks.
The dog is gone.
. . .
“Can I even become a Taoist deity?” the antichrist wonders.
“You’re thirteen,” Tom confirms. “That’s old enough for religious observances!”
Linus squints at him. Then he laughs.
. . .
“It’s not so easy to make a Taoist immortality elixir,” says Jane.
“True,” Tom concedes. He frowns. “Mom never managed it, you know.”
“. . . It may be more difficult for renegades?” Jane offers.
“All alchemists are renegades,” Tom says. “That’s why this is an age of science!”
“Well,” says Jane, “though, I mean, it can’t be impossible. I mean, just asking a bunch of kids to make a Taoist immortality elixir from scratch isn’t a slim chance — that’s no chance at all! Unless there’s a trick we’ve missed.”
“Let’s sneak into the house and follow Maria around,” suggests Tom. “Maybe she’ll accidentally lead us right to the formula!”
One smoking hole in the door of the house later, Tom abandons this proposal.
Crouched behind a rosebush in the garden, he sighs.
“That did not work well.”
. . .
“Maybe she already told us,” says Linus.
“Seriously?” says Tom.
“She sang,” says Edmund, softly, “of raindrops on flowers and the whiskers of kittens.”
“She did,” says Jane, declining to recite any more of the song in a low, thoughtful voice owing to potential copyright considerations.
“Brown paper packages,” says Linus, as if picking up on her unstated thoughts —
“Like the brown paper packages in Amelia’s study!” says Jane.
“That song,” says Tom. “That whole movie. It’s not just the delightful musical stylings of a woman desperately trying to escape incarceration at the hands of nuns and Nazis — it’s a grim prognostication of the Fan Hoeng princess that was to come!”
“No wonder Alhazred Smithee insisted they strike his name from the writers’ credits,” whispers Linus.
“And the ingredients!” Jane says. “The song! The list of things!”
Together, they say: “A recipe!”
. . .
“Well,” says Maria. She pushes open the door. She walks out. Her umbrella is hanging upside down from her hand so she can click it on the cobblestones with each step. “You may have found my secret, children, but you’ll never live to become immortal.”
She levels the gun at them. Jane throws Mouser at her.
“Glargh!” says the space princess assassin. She catches the cat. “Jane!”
It is bad to throw a cat at an assassin.
Oh, Jane!
It is bad.
Let us all meditate on that as Maria desperately tries to soothe the traumatized feline without dropping her terrifying space umbrella.
Let us all try to learn a lesson from that, lest we fall someday into error.
It’s good to meditate on these things.
It’ll give the kids a chance to run!
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