Chapter 5: Light out of Darkness
High above the Earth, Pink Vicious sat upon her great pink throne. Over her head was a huge skylight above which the planet, enormous and perfectly still, hung perpetually as it shifted through its daily phases of light and shadow. A black strip glossy with sunlight, like an enormous ribbon, stretched up toward the Earth and disappeared in the distance.
Pink Vicious did indeed have a space station situated at geostationary orbit, but that was not where she kept her headquarters: her headquarters were at the space elevator’s far end, in the counterweight, where the g-force was the same as on the surface of the Earth. It gave her a small thrill to know that nothing anchored her except that thin expanse of ribbon, and that if it ever broke, she would go hurtling into the outer darkness.
She had a full day ahead of her. The first order of business was to torture a prisoner. After that came snack time. Then nap time. Then time to develop her plans for world conquest.
A girl hung before her with chains around her wrists. This was someone Pink had known when she was still Pinkalicious—before she finally saw the light.
“Do you still think pink is for babies, Tiffany?” Pink sneered. She pressed a button on her throne, and Tiffany groaned.
“No! No, Pinkalicious, please!” Tiffany writhed and kicked as Pink’s automated torture device slowly rolled toward her on its heavy wheels.
“Pinkalicious is gone!” Pink shouted. “I am Pink Vicious! And I’m going to tickle you pink!”
A robotic arm holding a feather extended from the torture machine, and it swiftly and silently attacked Tiffany’s bare feet.
Tiffany screamed.
“Pink is perfect!” Pink roared. “Pink is powerful! Say it!”
Tiffany slumped when the machine released her. With sweat dripping from her face, she gasped for breath.
“Say it!” Pink hissed.
“Pink … pink is perfect,” Tiffany mumbled. “Pink is powerful.”
Her chains rattled as she went slack.
Pink Vicious sat back, grinned, and pressed another button. With a loud clank, the chains hauled Tiffany through a portal in the floor, down to the prison chamber. After she disappeared, the portal silently closed.
Now for snacks. Torture always gave Pink Vicious an appetite. A short, stubby robot holding a tray over its head rolled up to her throne. From it, she took her favorite food, a pink cupcake: this one was strawberry topped with bubblegum frosting coated in rainbow sprinkles.
On the floor at her feet, her baby brother Peter played with his blocks. While munching a cookie, he stacked the blocks together into a precarious tower.
Wiping pink frosting from her lips, Pink Vicious leaned her cheek on one hand. “I need you to make me more robots, Peter,” she said. “Our army is not quite large enough to conquer the Earth.”
Peter scowled. “In a minute. I want to see how high I can stack it before it falls.”
“Now, Peter!”
Peter crossed his arms and pouted. “You’ve been so mean lately! Even worse than when you lost your sweet tooth!”
Pink scowled.
Across the room, her two chief minions sat on the floor, back to back. Both were seven years old. One was a redheaded girl with her frizzy hair held back by a plastic band. She wasn’t snacking; instead, she held a musty, leather-bound book almost as big as she was, and her bright blue eyes pored greedily over its contents. This was a book of forbidden magic the girl had received from her grandmother.
The other girl had dark haired cropped severely at her neck. She was holding a small ball of cheese in her hands.
Pink finished her cupcake, sat up straight, tapped a button on one armrest, and stared into a console that rose out of the floor in front of her. She watched a static-filled video recording for half a minute before she said, “I did not think the Keplerians would be much of a threat, but I admit I am concerned about this … this ‘Fancy Nancy.’”
The dark-haired girl with the cheese looked up. “My sister’s name is Nancy,” she said, “and she’s a real pain in the kazoo. Is Fancy Nancy a pain in the kazoo, too?”
“She’s certainly a pain in my kazoo,” Pink replied. “Do you think you can take care of it for me, Ivy and Bean?”
Ivy, the red-haired girl with the book, smiled placidly. “I may have just the spell,” she whispered.
Bean pulled on the piece of string hidden in the red wax on her cheese. This was her favorite snack—low-fat Belladoona cheese in a just-for-you serving size. She didn’t care for the cheese itself, which was nearly tasteless, but the wax now, that was something else. She pulled the wax from the cheese, threw the cheese away, and squished the wax in her hands to warm it. After a few seconds, she stretched it out and stuck it in one ear to make it look as if her brains were dribbling out.
“What are we gonna do, Ivy?” Bean asked. “Are we gonna make her dance forever, like we almost did to my sister that one time?”
“No,” Ivy said as she ran a hand over the cover of her grimoire, “I have another spell in mind. A much more terrible spell. A spell for special occasions—and for special enemies.”
Pink leaned back in her throne and smiled. “I can’t wait to see it,” she whispered as she interlaced her fingers.
Ivy licked her lips. “If I destroy Fancy Nancy, milady, will you finally give me a part of your power?”
Pink’s grin grew wider. “Of course, Ivy. Whatever you want.”
“I want to be a witch,” Ivy said.
“And you will be.”
“Whatever we do,” said Bean as she flopped onto her back and kicked her feet, “let’s just do something. I’m getting bored.” She picked up her dusty old fedora from the floor and spun it in her hands. “Ivy wants to be a witch, but I wanna be a detective like Al Seven, from the movie. He sits in his car and thinks a lot, and he walks alone down alleys, and dames break his heart. He even gets to drink and smoke cigarettes and use rude words, which my mom says is really bad. I wanna be like that.”
“Do my bidding,” Pink Vicious cooed, “and you can have anything, Bean. Anything.”
“They have a detective with them,” said Ivy as she tapped her fingers on the frayed edges of the parchment in her grimoire. “Cam Jansen. I saw her on the news once. They say she remembers everything she sees, and she’s solved thirty-three mysteries. We didn’t even solve one, Bean, if you remember—we never did find out who tied that rope to the chimney.”
“Yeah,” said Bean as she tossed her hat in the air and let it drop back into her hands. She sounded a little sullen, so Ivy reached over and gave her shoulder a pat.
“Destroy Fancy Nancy,” said Pink, “and Cam Jansen is yours, my gift to you.”
Bean and Ivy gave each other an uneasy glance.
“She’s a big kid,” Bean muttered. “A fifth-grader. She might pick on us, like Crummy Matt does.”
“I will see to it that you can do with her whatever you like,” Pink replied. “Learn her detective secrets, play with her, kill her—whatever pleases you. Just destroy Fancy Nancy. That’s all I ask.”
It was a strange dream. Nancy watched Lionel, her second-best friend, as he put on one of his magic shows. He pulled a rabbit from a silk top hat and a coin from a little girl’s ear, and then flowers sprouted from his wand. His audience clapped, and he bowed deeply, over and over again. Lionel was such a goofball. His soft, curly blond hair bobbed as he bent at the waist.
Then they were playing checkers in Nancy’s room. Lionel and Nancy always played checkers on Tuesdays. Nancy had got the idea from some Beverly Cleary books, in which Beezus played checkers once a week with Henry Huggins.
But then, in her dream, Lionel reached out and took her hand. It surprised her, but then she was suddenly, terribly, indescribably happy.
She woke up. She was in a strange place again, for the fifth time in a row. Her eyes opened on high, impossibly high trees, their big fanlike leaves spreading out and waving overhead as streams of golden sunlight pierced through. She could hear birds cawing and calling, birds she didn’t recognize. Insects chirped. Just as she was on the train, she was hot and covered in sweat. The air was thick.
And she could still feel a hand in hers. She looked down to see her right hand enclosed by another hand with a big, glowing ring on it.
Judy Moody. Of course.
Nancy snatched her hand away.
“Hey, you’re awake,” Judy said.
Nancy groaned, sat up, and rubbed her forehead. “Why do I keep waking up to you?”
“Dunno. Cuz everyone should see something beautiful when waking up?”
Nancy didn’t have a retort for that, so she changed the subject. “Where are we?”
“The rainforest!” Judy whispered, waving her arms. “It’s wicked-awesome and double rare!” She slapped her neck suddenly. “And buggy.” She tugged her collar. “And hot. Still, it’s the rainforest!”
Nancy nodded. “Where is everyone else?”
“Come see.” Judy pulled Nancy to her feet and yanked on her arm, leading her through the brush. Nancy had always supposed that anyone traveling through the rainforest had to struggle through vines and bushes and hack his way with a machete, like in old adventure movies. But the shrubs and ferns here were quite low, and the huge trees were widely spaced. It was actually easy to walk.
“You should see some of the woods in Virginia,” Judy said, as if reading her mind. “We got these vines—Virginia creepers. You can trip on ’em, and—”
“Is there poison ivy?” Nancy asked, glancing around worriedly. “I’m practically an expert on poison ivy, but—”
“You mean here? No. But they got other bad stuff.”
“Why isn’t there more brush?”
“Elephants,” Judy chattered. “They got elephants. Elephants eat the plants and keep the underbrush low and stuff. But they’re endangered because bad people want their ivory, so some places are getting too overgrown.”
Still dragging Nancy by the hand, she pointed to one of the trees, a massive, thick pillar with wide buttresses jutting from its base. “That’s a gaboon,” she said. “They cut it down for wood a lot. It can grow a hundred and thirty feet tall! There are over a thousand plants in this forest that don’t grow anywhere else on the whole planet! And there are probably bunches of ’em we don’t even know about yet! An’ I’m gonna find ’em and—”
“Cure ucky diseases,” Nancy said. “You already told me.”
“Yeah. At least I will if all the good plants don’t die from global warming first. That’s probably why it’s so hot here.” She slapped her neck again. “Mosquitos—”
“Maybe you’ll learn how to cure diseases with mosquito bites,” said Nancy. She winced at a sting and slapped her own neck.
“Maybe we’ll get diseases instead,” Judy replied as her mood ring suddenly turned dark. “I think they have malaria here. Normally, we’d take medicines to make sure we don’t get it, but we didn’t bring any—”
Nancy swallowed. She didn’t quite know what malaria was, but she knew it was awful.
She started and yanked her hand from Judy’s when Cam rose from behind a patch of ferns and waved. Judy and Nancy quickly walked toward her. Judy was nimble, but Nancy kept tripping over roots.
“Where’s Amelia?” Judy asked as she drew near.
Cam pointed upward. “She’s the only one of us who can climb these big trees. I hope she’ll be able to see the space elevator from here. Then we’ll know which way to go.”
“How did we get here?” Nancy asked, panting as she pulled her sneaker from between two thick roots and limping to Judy’s side. “The last thing I remember—”
“You keep blacking out,” Judy said.
“You can’t see it from here because of the forest,” said Cam, “but there’s a new volcanic vent about five miles to the west. It’s billowing smoke. And it shot us out. Junie B. pulled you clear and carried you here.”
“Five miles?”
Cam nodded. “The hike wasn’t all that bad. We’re getting stronger.”
Nancy looked down at her hands and flexed them. They didn’t look any different. She didn’t feel any stronger.
There was rustling by the base of a nearby tree. Nancy looked over to see Junie B. sitting there, her glasses smeared with dirt and crooked on her face. She was holding her hands out, resting palms-up on her knees. Coating her hands was something black, like tar.
Nancy stepped closer. “Junie B.? You saved me? You—”
“How do you feel, Junie B.?” Cam asked.
Junie B. shrugged, and a small, wistful smile formed on her mouth. “They don’t hurt no more,” she said. “But they don’t really feel like anything.”
As Nancy drew closer, she saw that it wasn’t tar on Junie B.’s hands. She was burned. Covering her hands was black, charred skin. In a few places, the unburned flesh peeked out underneath, and it was an angry red.
Nancy gasped and put a hand over her mouth.
Judy sadly shook her head. “I wanna be a doctor, but … I don’t know how to treat that.”
More rustling, this time in a low bush full of red flowers. Mouse stepped out and licked a paw. “It will heal—if she gets enough energy. The nanoprobes will see to that. If she were still an ordinary human, the scarring would be permanent, but—”
“What happened?” Nancy muttered.
Cam stepped to Junie B.’s side and crouched down. She extended her hand, and Nancy gasped when a strange device, like a cell phone but with little antennas sticking out all over it, rose out of Cam’s palm. Cam ran the device up and down Junie B.’s arms.
As Cam did this, she talked. “The lava threw us about five hundred feet from the vent. The outside of the capsule was still white-hot when Junie B. opened the emergency hatch. She threw us all clear and then climbed out herself.”
“And she carried me like that?”
Cam nodded. “There wasn’t any other choice. We had to get away from the lava flow. She was the only one who could carry you all this way, even burned.”
Cam rose to her feet, and the weird machine sank back into her hand, leaving no trace of itself behind. “I’ve got a complete medical readout,” she said to Judy. “You want it?”
Judy just crossed her arms and scowled. “No thanks. So are you a robot now, or what?”
Cam’s mouth twitched. “The proper term is cyborg.”
That was a fancy word, but Nancy wasn’t happy to learn it.
A moment later, Amelia skittered down out of the tree. Nancy gasped: Amelia crawled along the tree trunk on her toes and fingertips, head pointed down, like an insect. When she was about ten feet from the ground, she let go and tumbled head over heels through the air. After landing lithely on her feet like a cat, she brushed bark and sap from her hands and wiped them on her apron.
“Report,” Cam said.
“I hope not,” Amelia replied. “I was never all that good at writing reports.”
Cam smiled thinly. “I mean, tell us what you saw.”
Amelia put a finger to her chin. “Let’s see … leaves, branches, twigs, bugs—”
Cam took a deep breath, though her stony face remained impassive. “Amelia, did you make it to the top of the—?”
“I couldn’t make it all the way to the top,” Amelia said. “The branches up there were too small to support me.”
“How close did you get? Like, five feet from the top?”
Amelia lifted one leg and wiggled her patent leather pump. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hold a foot up there to measure.”
Nancy giggled, but Judy groaned. Mouse scowled and vigorously licked a paw.
Nancy considered herself an expert at explaining words and concepts, so she cleared her throat and said slowly, “Amelia, we just want to know, while you were close to the top of the tree, did you look around?”
Amelia blinked. “Look around what?” There were a lot of branches in my way, and I did have to look around those sometimes, or I couldn’t have seen where I was going.”
Judy rolled her eyes. Nancy frowned and tapped her chin.
Finally stepped out from under a spreading fern, walked to Junie B., and sniffed her hands. Then she turned to Amelia and said, “Amelia Bedelia, dear, they’re just trying to find out if you saw the space elevator. It should have looked like a black line stretching from the ground into the sky.”
Amelia’s face brightened. “Ah! Yes, I saw it!”
Cam raised her eyebrows. “Great. Which way?”
Amelia frowned and shook her head. “Way?”
“Which way is the elevator?” Cam asked.
“Up and down. Vertical.”
“But which direction?”
“I just said. Up and down.”
“Yes, but—”
“Amelia Bedelia,” said Finally with a small, patient smile, “she means, which direction would we have to walk to get to it?”
“Oh!” Amelia raised a hand in the air, frowned, and then scratched her head. “I don’t know.”
Judy slammed her forehead into a tree trunk. Her ring was once again pitch black.
Even Finally’s patient smile slipped. Her left eye twitched. “You don’t know?”
Amelia shrugged and pointed at Cam. “She just told me to climb the tree and see if I could see the space elevator. And I did climb the tree, and I did see the space elevator.”
The twitching in Finally’s eye grew more violent. Mouse gave her a sidelong glance and continued licking her paw.
“Amelia,” said Finally, now with a slight edge in her voice, “climb the tree again. Look at the space elevator again. This time, pay attention to which direction we would have to walk to get to the space elevator. Then climb back down and tell us that direction. Would you do that, sweetheart?”
Amelia replied with a wide grin and a jaunty salute. Then, like an insect, she happily scrambled straight up the tree.
Fifteen minutes later, the children and their two animal companions were marching through the trees. The walk was reasonably easy, except Nancy continued to stumble over roots and stones. Whenever she was about to fall, Judy Moody’s strong, firm hands always reached out and steadied her.
It was incredibly irritating.
Nancy was not exactly inactive, but neither was she athletically gifted. She was the slowest runner in her class as well as the worst player on the third-grade soccer team, and she was permanently stuck playing rocks or trees whenever there was a ballet recital. She loved exploring, but most of her previous adventures had taken place in her back yard with her little sister and her friend Bree. She had never before spent a day hiking through a bug-infested tropical forest in muggy air and scorching heat, and after only an hour, she was exhausted.
The sun pierced straight down through the leaves, which told Nancy it was noon. Her clothes were thoroughly soaked, and as she trudged behind the others, she could actually see steam rising from them as their sweat evaporated in the heat. A cloud of mosquitos hovered over them perpetually. Although the others didn’t look nearly as tired as Nancy felt, they were all constantly swatting at the bugs. Everyone looked miserable—but none as much as Judy, who wore a deep scowl, and whose mood ring was still black.
Clouds moved in. The sunlight overhead quickly faded and the air grew slightly more bearable. But then rain poured down through the leaves, making a steady, staccato pattering sound on the ferns and the forest floor.
Nancy’s tutu flopped around her hips, limp. She bunched up the chiffon in her hands and squeezed the water out: it ran milky white with the dissolved salt from her sweat.
At least the rain cooled her down.
Thunder cracked overhead, and her teeth chattered. “Sacré bleu,” Nancy muttered.
From the front of the line, Cam, with her bright red hair plastered against her forehead and hanging in her eyes, commented, “You’re not supposed to be under a tree during a thunderstorm, but I guess there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Judy grumbled, and the black stone on her ring pulsed. “Sheesh, nobody ever told me the rainforest was this rainy.”
For the last half hour, they had walked along a steep hillside. Now that it was raining, water poured in rivulets down the slope, forming countless small waterfalls. The water soon filled Nancy’s shoes, and she wished she’d chosen sandals instead of sneakers.
In second grade, Nancy and Bree had formed an explorer’s club, though they more recently changed it to a sleuthing club. It didn’t feel right to be exploring exotic locales without Bree, and if Nancy told Bree about it, she might very well be mad, as Bree tended to get upset when Nancy did anything without her.
Nancy sighed. If anything, it should be Bree, not Nancy, on this adventure. After all, she was a fast runner, a great soccer player, and even a talented tap-dancer. She was better suited to this kind of thing.
Of course, on the other hand, Bree fainted at the sight of blood. Nancy didn’t have Bree’s athletic prowess, but she had slightly more grit.
Cam lithely scrambled over a tangle of thickly knotted roots uniting two of the stately trees. She pushed aside several fronds to reveal a breathtaking scene. The other kids gathered around and gasped.
“Ooh la la,” Nancy whispered.
“Rare,” said Judy.
“Wowee wow wow!” shouted Junie B.
They had reached the edge of a cliff. Overhead, gray clouds pulsed and swirled in the wind. Here and there, shafts of golden sunlight pierced through and touched the waving, rustling leaves of the forest canopy, making them glitter like emeralds. In a heavy wind, the branches of the vast trees bobbed and waved like a storm-tossed sea. Now that the rain had tamped down the hot, heavy air, the moist scents of the forest met Nancy’s nose: the sweet and pungent smell of sap, the sharp sting of dung, the heady perfume of flowers. It smelled clean, wholesome, alive.
But most spectacular of all was the clearing at the base of the cliff, a broad, heavily trampled patch thick with grass but largely devoid of trees. Next to a frothing stream, a herd of a dozen elephants slowly browsed. One of them pulled a huge clump of foliage into its mouth and ponderously chewed. Another raised its trunk and trumpeted—a long, lonely, sonorous bellow that echoed through the storm.
As if in reply to the elephant’s call, a blue-white streak of lightning crackled across the sky overhead. Thunder boomed as if the heavens were tearing themselves apart.
Judy leaned over Cam’s shoulder, her mouth half open and her blue eyes greedily taking in the panorama. Nancy wasn’t quite sure if the streams coursing down Judy’s face were tears or rain. Her ring lightened, swirling with a combination of sky and midnight blue.
Only one thing marred this dreamlike scene: in the distance, at the edge of the green horizon where the trees grew hazy and blended with the stormy sky, a stark, black line, as if someone had drawn in the air with a straightedge and a thick charcoal pencil, stretched up into the sky, right up through the clouds. Lightning crackled around the black band, flashing again and again, leaving reddish afterimages in Nancy’s eyes.
“There it is,” said Finally as she stepped to Nancy’s side and sniffed the air, “the beanstalk.”
“I’ve planted beans,” said Amelia. “And they never grew like that.”
Finally chuckled wearily. “A beanstalk is another name for a space elevator, Amelia. The name comes from the fairy tale about the boy whose magic bean grew a stalk that stretched right into the sky.”
“And at the top were giants,” Nancy whispered. In her mind’s eye, she could see the robot seizing her sister. It was burned in her memory: she could see it clearly, as clearly as if she were Cam.
Her hand slid into her pocket and closed around the Emeraldlicious she had taken from the doomed train.
She muttered, “Magic beans …”
Cam, her face unreadable, glanced at her. Nancy felt a knot tightened in her stomach as she remembered that Cam’s cold, clear eyes were effortlessly memorizing every tiny detail of her face.
But then a voice came from behind: “Magic? Did she say magic?”
Another voice: “I think she did.”
The kids whirled around. Judy pointed her ring, and Junie B., in spite of her burns, clenched her fists.
Standing behind them were two little kids, probably seven years old, leaning on each other, back to back. One had shaggy black hair that stopped above her shoulders, and sitting on her head was a floppy fedora that was too big for her, and which was now soaked with rain. The other girl had fluffy, frizzy red hair that was curly and unruly just like Nancy’s.
“I have magic,” the red-haired girl said. “So I guess that’s my cue.”
“And she said bean,” said the black-haired girl. “That’s my name, so that’s my cue.”
Mouse wound her way around Judy’s legs. “Watch out, girls,” she hissed. “Those are Pink’s lieutenants!”
“Ivy and Bean,” snarled Finally, “what are you doing here?”
Ivy slid an arm around Bean and leaned her head on her shoulder. “I think that’s our line, talking dog.”
“Yeah,” said Bean. “What she said.”
“We can be here if we want!” Judy yelled as she kept her ring pointed at Ivy’s face. “It’s a free country!”
Ivy frowned. “No it’s not.”
“Oh … yeah. Well, hey, it’s my first time outside America, so—”
“I got an idea,” said Bean as she petted Ivy’s frizzy but increasingly damp hair, “maybe we could, like, make it free. Like, have a protest or something.”
Ivy nodded.
Judy’s face brightened. “Hey … yeah! I once had a Boston tea party at my house to protest chores and not enough allowance! We threw teabags into the bathtub!”
Bean giggled.
Ivy rubbed her chin. “You used liquids? That sounds like a powerful spell—”
“My mom got really mad, but she and Dad did let me have a bigger allowance and a later bedtime.”
Ivy nodded. “The spell worked. Of course.”
Judy frowned for a few seconds, but then her face brightened. “Maybe—”
“Now!” Ivy shouted.
She raised her hands and, in a flash of light, a blue sphere appeared before her, like a giant, glowing soap bubble. Hovering in the center of the sphere was a thick, leather-bound book full of crinkly paper, the kind of book that appeared in old, scary movies. The pages flipped by themselves as Ivy chanted, “Liga hostibus meis, et dabo eos sicut paulo flere puellae!”
Some strange energy crackled in the air and set Nancy’s teeth on edge. She raised her hand and shouted, “Habille-moi dans des vêtements de fantaisie!”
Light enveloped her. She floated from the ground and in a moment had transformed.
“That’s her!” Bean shouted. “It’s Fancy Nancy!”
With an inarticulate yell, Junie B. jumped. She leapt ten feet, landed in front of Bean, and with her burned, bleeding hand clenched, delivered a right hook to Bean’s jaw. It made a sickening crunch.
Bean yelped, and her head twisted, but she didn’t fall. As Junie B. aimed a left jab, Bean caught her fist and swung her through the air. Squealing, Junie B. flew almost two stories up and struck the trunk of a gaboon with a loud whack. Then she tumbled gracelessly to the forest floor and lay stunned.
Bean rubbed her jaw and spat out a bit of blood.
“She’s as strong as Junie B.!” Cam shouted.
“Roar!” yelled Judy. A burst of black energy shot from her ring, but it struck the hovering blue bubble and dissipated.
Nancy pointed her wand, but not before Ivy’s spell activated. Lightning crackled out of the floating book, hit Cam full in the chest, and sent her careening over the edge of the cliff.
“Cam!” Nancy screamed.
Amelia jumped off the cliff as well. As she went, she twisted in the air and extended her right hand. As if from nowhere, whizzing shuriken flew from her palm. Three of them embedded in trees and two bounced from Ivy’s blue bubble, but one struck Bean in the shoulder and stuck there, like a giant thorn. Bean snarled and fell to one knee. Blood mixed with the rain as it ran down her arm.
“Épée de paillettes!” Nancy cried. A sword blade of clear crystal grew out of the end of her wand until it was three feet long. With a graceful yet powerful grand jeté, Nancy leapt with the sword raised overhead and landed in front of Ivy, at the same time bringing the blade down against the glowing blue bubble. Nancy felt a shock of electricity in her fingertips, and then the bubble split in half. With a whoosh, the blade descended through the book, ripping it apart and scattering its yellow pages across the forest floor.
“My book!” Ivy shouted, reeling back. “She ruined my book!”
Teeth clenched, Bean yanked the throwing star from her shoulder. She tossed it clumsily at Nancy, but Nancy easily parried it with the tip of her sword, sending it tumbling among the ferns.
Nancy thrust, but Bean made a half turn and a jump, boldly sliding her shoulder blades along the flat of Nancy’s sword to deflect. At the same time, she extended a fist and struck Nancy in the throat.
Gasping for air and with sparks of light dancing in her eyes, Nancy hit the ground. She waved the sword wildly to keep Bean from diving in for the kill.
“My book!” Ivy screamed, her face flushed. “My book! My book!”
Bean left Nancy where she lay and snatched up several of the book’s soggy pages while Ivy, sobbing, gathered together the two halves of its cover. Once they’d picked up most of the grimoire’s remains, Bean wrapped her arms around Ivy’s shoulders. Ivy blubbered with her face buried in Bean’s chest.
Bean glared accusingly at Nancy and shook her head. “Dames,” she said. “You just can’t trust ’em.”
With that, the two of them disappeared in a pink flash.
Judy helped Junie B. to her feet. The first-grader staggered, punch-drunk, with her glasses wildly askew, but she didn’t appear seriously harmed.
Trembling, Nancy arose, stepped to the edge of the cliff, and looked down. Raindrops pattered on her tutu. The elephants still browsed near the stream.
With a vapid but genial grin, Amelia’s rain-streaked face appeared above the cliff edge. A moment later, she scrambled all the way up with a limp Cam over her left shoulder. Cam was breathing raggedly, and she was unconscious—but she was alive. Relief flooded Nancy’s chest.
They laid Cam out on the muddy ground and gathered around her. Finally looked from her to Junie B. and sighed. “We haven’t even reached the beanstalk, and already two of our members are injured.”
“What will happen to Cam?” Nancy asked, kneeling beside her. Her blade slowly melted back into her wand. Her arms felt weak: the sword spell had rapidly drained her power.
“Her nanoprobes will repair her,” Mouse replied. “But until that happens, we’ll have to carry her.”
Judy scowled and brushed some of her shaggy, soaked hair out of her eyes. She gave Nancy a small grin and said, “Well, at least it wasn’t you who blacked out this time.”
