The 8th Continent (6 page)

Rick shot Evie an accusing glare.

Evie shrugged. “Maybe they're talking about someone else?”

IN EVIE'S DEFENSE, SHE REALLY HAD WANTED WHAT WAS BEST FOR THEIR DAD. THE OPPORTUNITY
to undo all his past infractions had been staring her in the face. She figured any kid in her position would have done the same. After all that business with the annoying administrator, they hadn't had any trouble walking right in. Security seemed lax. How could she have known the slightest change to Winterpole records would result in a full-blown military lockdown?

“Are you out of your mind?!” Rick screamed, frantically trying to finish collecting the data he had found on Doctor Grant. “Winterpole has rules against using a DVORAK keyboard! You didn't think there would be rules against altering their official disciplinary records?”

“Well, excuse me, Mister Perfect! I didn't realize that the Child of the Year would be so quick to let his father wither away under house arrest when the answer to all his family's problems is staring him in the face!”

Rick grabbed her by the hand and ran for the door. He fumbled for the doorknob in the dim light.

“Ow! Hey, lemme go!” Evie said.

“Gladly,” Rick said. “Does that mean I can leave you here?”

Evie was quiet. Memorizing the dictionary sounded like more fun than staying to say howdy to Winterpole security.

They burst into the hall, looking for the closest exit. Down the corridor, two guards in white jumpsuits with matching domed helmets raised what looked like blue fire extinguishers. “Hey, you kids! Freeze!”

The lead guard squeezed the handle of his weapon. Bright blue water flew toward Rick's head.

Evie grabbed her brother and tugged him out of the way. And just in time. The water hit the door and froze solid on contact, locking it with cobalt ice.

The other guard gave his companion a skeptical glance. “Really, Larry? ‘Freeze'? You spend all weekend coming up with that clever pun?”

Larry frowned, embarrassed. “Gosh, Barry. I don't know. It seemed appropriate in the moment.”

Barry shook his head in dismay. “Winterpole is never going to shake its reputation as a cold, icy, monolithic organization if we can't get past the obvious connotations associated with its name. Now, let's think of something that isn't obvious and that better represents the ideals of our esteemed employer.”

“Hurry!” Larry shouted.

Barry nodded in approval. “Not bad. ‘Hurry.' It says we are quick to respond to any violations of Winterpole statutes, and it contradicts the inaccurate assumption that we move at glacial speed.”

“No, I mean
hurry
! Those kids are getting away.”

Down the hall, Evie and Rick had used the guards' conversation to bolt around the corner.

“Oh . . .” Barry said.

Evie and Rick raced through the complex, breathing hard. The floors were waxed so smoothly that their shoes skidded a bit with each step. “I thought you said no sudden movements?” Evie taunted in between slipping and sliding.

“Yeah, I changed my mind. RUN!”

Evie didn't need to be told twice. She quickly picked up her pace, pumping her legs as fast as they would go. Rick matched his sister stride for stride. In between labored breaths he called out, “To answer your earlier question, Evie, I do want to help Dad. That's why I entered Winterpole Headquarters under false pretenses to hack into their computer database. And that's why I want to terraform the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and make the eighth continent, just like you.”

“Well, when you put it
that
way!” Evie veered around a corner and pushed down another identical hallway. The corridors all looked the same. Evie would have had an easier time finding her way in one of the world's many trash-tangled rain forests. Rick didn't seem so sure of himself, either, but her stay-at-home brother was leading the way for once, so she trusted his instincts.

They rounded another corner. Mister Snow was leaning against the wall and enjoying a moment's peace. He looked like he was savoring every bite of the iceberg lettuce wrap he was eating for lunch. (Presumably, Winterpole had penalties for eating any other kind of lettuce.) Mister Snow dropped his food when he saw the Lanes.

A door opened, and the lobby administrator skidded into the hall. “There they are! The intruders! Two hundred penalties! Stop where you are!”

The administrator ran toward Rick and Evie just as Mister Snow bent to pick up his lunch. The two grown-ups collided, stumbling on the slick, waxy floor. Their legs went out from under them, and for a brief second they looked like two graceful swimmers embracing underwater.

Then the illusion was broken, and they tumbled to the floor in a heap.

“Get them!” the administrator groaned.

Mister Snow and the administrator were piled in front of the door to the lobby, blocking the exit. Thinking fast, Evie searched for a clue on one of the doors that would allow them to escape from Winterpole Headquarters.

When nothing obvious presented itself, Evie settled for the next best thing.

“Wild guess!” she cried out loud, and pulled Rick through the nearest door.

They were in a dark closet that was so tiny they had to smoosh together to fit.

“Where's the light?” Rick asked.

“Feel around for it,” Evie instructed.

The kids ran their hands over the walls, searching for any protrusions that might have been light switches. After a few seconds, Evie's fingers wrapped around a metal handle.

“Triple-seven jackpot!” Evie said, tugging on the handle.

The handle did not operate the lights, but it did operate the trapdoor below the children's feet. They plummeted into a dark chute that twisted down into the basement of Winterpole Headquarters.

Cold air rushed past Evie's ears. Her hair flew wild. She kicked out her feet to try to slow her descent, but the walls of the chute were slippery.

“WAAAAAAAH! I'm falling!” Rick wailed. The echo of his cries chased them down the chute.

Some distance into the tunnel, they saw a small square of amber light. It grew larger as they approached, and before they could react, they flew out of the chute and tumbled several feet through the air before falling onto a soft cushion of—

“Paperwork!” Evie cheered with relief as she threw crumpled stationery into the air. “I never thought I would be so happy to see paperwork!”

But Rick wasn't paying attention. He rose, awed, and walked to the edge of the narrow platform where they'd landed. Evie followed his gaze.

They were in an underground cavern so large she couldn't see the far end of it. In the air before them, inverted rails twisted together like a clump of leftover spaghetti. Countless foot-long claws hung from the rails and flew along the tracks, so fast Evie could barely see each individual one. The claws were clamped onto punchcards, which were then circulated through hundreds of exits out the sides of the cavern.

“What is it?” Evie asked in amazement.

“It's . . . it's a computer,” Rick replied, the shock evident in his voice.

“A computer?” Evie repeated. “But computers are small. This . . . this is gi-mongous!”

“Back in the early days of information electronics, computers had to be gi-mongous, er . . . gigantic.
Gi-mongous
isn't a . . . Anyway, they used to be as big as a whole room. The only way to send data was to input it on a stack of punchcards like these. But computers never would have become what they are today if people had continued to use the punchcard system. Each card only carried a tiny bit of data. You would need fifteen thousand punchcards to represent the data in one megabyte.”

“Uh, Rick, a megabyte is, like, not even one song.”

“I know. Winterpole has been around since the 1950s, when punchcards were in use. I bet they had something in their bylaws that never let them upgrade to modern computer systems, so they're still using punchcards, but on an incredible scale. Billions and billions of punchcards.”

“That's a lot.”

“Billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and—”

“Okay, I get it.” Evie rolled her eyes.

At the other end of the balcony, a door opened. Barry and Larry squeezed through and raised their icetinguishers.

“Hurry!” Larry said.

“Good idea.” Evie grabbed her brother by the shoulder. “Let's go!”

“No, that's not what we meant!” Barry said. “You're supposed to stop. We have icetinguishers. ‘Hurry' is just our battle cry.”

“Rick, jump!” Evie nudged him toward the edge of the balcony.

“It's too high!” Rick wailed.

“Do it!”

Barry fired ice. Evie scooped up a handful of papers on the ground and threw them at the glob. The icy-blue goo hit the papers in midair, coating them. The papers fell to the floor and shattered.

“Now! Jump!” Evie said, taking Rick by the hand and vaulting off the balcony.

They grabbed onto one of the claws and were rushed along the rails, twisting through the air like flying squirrels.

“Don't let go,” Evie said.

“Can't say that I'm planning to.” Rick squeezed his eyes shut. “But, you know, if I fall, Mom is going to be so mad at you.”

Evie snorted. “You don't have to tell me that.”

The rails carried them past a row of windows that looked into Winterpole offices. Evie saw a man talking into a headset and playing golf on his desk. A lady in yoga pants was suspended upside down in a huge gyroscope, while an old bald man in a karate uniform vigorously chopped at her back with his hands.

In the last window, a girl stood talking to a woman. The woman wore a silver sash over her Winterpole uniform. Evie had never seen a sash like that before, but she assumed it was reserved for high-ranking members of the Winterpole executive board. But the Winterpole woman wasn't the one who had caught Evie's attention. It was the girl, who—in lieu of a sash—was wearing the fifth-grade uniform from the International School for Exceptional Students.

“Diana Maple?” Evie said in disbelief.

Diana Maple, best friend and henchwoman of the vile, vicious, and vindictive Vesuvia Piffle. Vesuvia was the number one reason, after saving her father, why Evie needed to start a new continent. She had to get away from wicked girls like her.

The woman and Diana turned to look at Evie and Rick as they flew past, hanging from their punchcard claw. “You?” Diana mouthed, her eyes wide.

Now Vesuvia would know they had been to Winterpole Headquarters.

Evie was sure nothing good would come of that.

THE OFFICE OF VESUVIA PIFFLE, SUPER-SECRET CEO OF THE MULTINATIONAL CONDO CORPORATION,
was on the forty-seventh floor of Condoco Tower, in the heart of Geneva's Rive Droite.

Everything in Vesuvia's office was plastic. Plastic chairs, plastic desk. The carpet was made of plastic fibers, and the pink robot cat rolling on the carpet was plastic. Even the windows, with their spectacular view of the city, were—you guessed it—plastic as a movie star's smile.

And why not? According to Vesuvia, plastic was the world's greatest material, derived from petrol, the world's greatest fuel. A diabolical sixth grader would be crazy not to drape herself in plastic and other unnatural materials. Vesuvia did. Her black dress pants were plastic. Her beloved pink jacket was squeaky plastic. Plastic clothes were great. She never got wet, and she loved how they caught the light.

She used a special hairspray of liquid plastic, which never failed to hold its shape and which made her blond curls shimmer. Sure, she got headaches sometimes, and the fumes made her quite dizzy, but that was a small price to pay for sublime hair.

“Hey, you, pipe down!” Vesuvia shrieked into the phone. Her father might be the public face of the company, but there was no doubt she was the one in charge. After all, the Condo Corporation board of directors hadn't made Vesuvia super-secret CEO for nothing. “Bradley, you listen to me, you bloated iguana. If I don't get a detailed report of what happened to the missing gallon of plasti-pulp on my desk by five p.m., I'm going to dunk you in plastic and use you as a coatrack!”

“But, Miss Piffle,” her terrified assistant said over the phone. “The shipment was for over one million gallons of PP. Surely one missing gallon isn't worth a whole report.”

“Did I ask for your life story?! Five p.m. The report, or a resignation letter.
Your choice
. Now, where are we on the New Miami Project?”

Quiet as a stealth robot, Diana Maple crept into Vesuvia's office. Diana was the only person allowed to enter Piffle's Pink Power Center without permission. Vesuvia said that this was because Diana was her best friend. But by “friend,” she meant “employee,” and by “employee,” she meant someone who did lots of work for Vesuvia but did not collect a salary or benefits.

It was worth it, though. Vesuvia had made Diana popular—something no other homely girl at ISES could claim. And it made her mother so proud to know that she was one of the cool kids. The happiness she felt knowing her mom didn't think Diana was an embarrassment was worth all the times Vesuvia made her ransom less socially endowed kids' bookbags for an extra dish of cafeteria panna cotta, or torment grown Condo Corp employees until they cried for their security blankets.

“Vesuvia! Hey, Vesuvia!” Diana whispered, wanting to get her “friend's” attention without disrupting her important business call.

Vesuvia didn't stop frothing at the mouth long enough to even look at Diana. “What do you mean, they rejected the proposal? New Miami is going to be the greatest city since Renaissance Venice. It'll be ten times better than the real Miami. A million times! There will be sea urchin kebabs for sale in the streets, and a floating arena where you can watch scuba gladiators battle sharks to the death! Juice bars where you can get a hundred-twenty-eight-ounce pink grapefruit spinach smoothie with a vitamin blast, and a double-decker ocean. Do you know what that means, Bradley? I'm going to build a platform over the ocean . . . and put an ocean on it! How freaking awesome is that? Double ocean all the way across the sky!”

Diana piped in again. “Vesuvia! There is something really important I have to tell you. It's about Rick and Evie Lane, and—”

“Local character?” Vesuvia snapped at the phone. “You keep saying those words, but what do they mean? You're telling me that the people of Nice, France, don't want me to bulldoze their boring town and put New Miami in its place? Why not? New Miami is so much cooler than that stinky town. They have a cheese shop. It's a shop where they sell
cheese
. You can buy that anywhere. Who would want to spread Gruyère on a cracker when they could be harpooning a shark while surfing on a double-decker ocean and drinking a smoothie?”

Vesuvia listened to Bradley's reply, then hurled her phone across the room. Diana ducked, and the phone struck the wall with a plastic thump. “Uh . . . Vesuvia . . .” Diana picked up the phone and scurried back to her. “I think I know how to solve your problem with New Miami.”

Vesuvia snatched the phone and shouted into it. “That may have been a good excuse for my feckless father, the quote-unquote ‘public' CEO of Condo Corp, but it won't work for me. That's why my grandmother ordered the board to appoint
me
as the real CEO, because she knows that I have the strength and the
guts
to keep all you necktie-wearing wimps from taking
no
for an answer.”

Diana had lost her patience. All Vesuvia had to do was pay attention, and her problems would be solved. “Vesuvia! Listen to me. It's important!”

Despite her shouts, Vesuvia either didn't see her standing there or had decided to totally ignore her. “Humph,” Diana sighed. She left the inner office and spoke to Vesuvia's secretary, Mrs. Lemone, a sweet old lady with colorful sweaters, whose desk was just outside the door. “Mrs. Lemone, I'm going to need the horn.”

“Of course, dear,” Mrs. Lemone said. “I know how she gets. Here you go.”

Diana reentered the inner office wielding an enormous megaphone. She switched it on and spoke into it so loudly the entire plastic room thrummed. “VESUVIA! HANG UP THE PHONE. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.”

Normally the horn would get Vesuvia's attention, but today she was in an especially foul mood.

“VESUVIA! I BROUGHT THE SWISS ARMY DRUM BAND. THEY'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE. THEY WANT YOUR AUTOGRAPH.”

“I said pink Skittles! My private jet will only have pink Skittles. They need to be the tropical kind, too. Blech. I hate this stupid mountain town I'm stuck going to school in. I miss the beach.”

Diana sighed. This called for desperate measures. “VESUVIA! THERE'S A SPIDER ON YOUR SHOULDER!”

Vesuvia screamed so loudly it knocked the megaphone out of Diana's hands. Vesuvia dropped to the ground, clawing at her shoulder and shouting, “Get it off, get it off, get it off me! I hate spiders!”

Diana ran to her friend's side to calm her down. “Hey! Hey, it's okay. It's gone. The spider is gone. Calm down.”

Vesuvia gulped lungfuls of frightened air. “I
hate
spiders.”

“I know you do,” Diana said. “Now, listen, I saw something when I was visiting my mom at work.”

“Yuck! You went to Winterpole? Do you realize how many of my incredible condo construction projects they have vetoed with their stupid bylaws? Those bureaucrats are useless.”

Diana's mom always said that Winterpole kept the world clean and organized, but it was not worth arguing with Vesuvia. It would just send her off on another tangent, after Diana had finally gotten her attention. “Earlier today, Rick and Evie Lane snuck into Winterpole Headquarters.”

“You mean I haven't gotten those nerds to flee the country yet? Yuckfest.”

“They tried to erase all the terrible crimes their father has committed from Winterpole records. And then I found this on the security cameras.”

Diana pulled out her phone and played the video she'd downloaded from Winterpole's security camera archive. It showed a grainy image of Rick and Evie racing down a hallway in Winterpole Headquarters. The audio was scratchy, but they clearly heard Rick say, “And that's why I want to terraform the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and make the eighth continent, just like you.”

“Terra-what the who now?” Vesuvia asked.

“That's what I said!” Diana replied. “So I did some research. Apparently, there's this giant island of trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Yeah, so?” Vesuvia shrugged.

Diana continued, “I think Rick and Evie are trying to turn that garbage into a new landmass, a whole continent, like Australia, but without the kangaroos.”

“Sounds like a waste of perfectly good plastic,” Vesuvia said.

“Don't you get it? If they build a continent, they'll own it. No one will be able to tell them what to do.”

Vesuvia growled, “Ooh, I want to decapitate teddy bears when people tell me what to do.”

“Exactly! And with all that extra land, you could finally build New Miami—and you could do it without having to kick people out of their homes or needing to tear up existing environments or being forced to—” Diana stopped herself. She saw that Vesuvia's eyes had glazed over. “You could even build a
triple
-decker ocean.”

Vesuvia bubbled with excitement. “I could create the most prettiest, perfect plastic place on the planet, and I would be that place's princess. Diana, alert the Piffle Pink Patrol and tell Daddy I won't be coming to dinner. I want that continent!”