The teleporter shuddered.
The vibrating started, and it felt jittery, like Rollerblading on a rough road. “I-I-I-I’m-m-m-m Oh-ho-ho-ho K-ay-ay-ay-ay!”
The vibrating got stronger, and the red light got redder, and the buzzing got buzzier, and the teleporter started rattling . . .
. . . and rattling . . .
. . . and rattling—
“JORDIE!”
. . . but I couldn’t answer, couldn’t talk anymore, couldn’t breathe anymore, but who needed to breathe when you were floating and floating and floating into a million pieces of nothing and nothing and nothing . . .
. . . and maybe I heard the POP, but I wasn’t sure because suddenly everything around me was light and windy and swirling and whooshing, and I was whooshing and whooshing . . .
. . . and maybe I felt myself drop down, and maybe I thought, The bounce . . .
. . . but then I was flying back up into the whoosh and the swirl, and then down I dropped . . .
Wham!
I felt myself pull into myself, tightening and tightening until I could feel my arms and legs and the hardness of something hard beneath me, and it took a second to remember to breathe.
And then I gasped and coughed and heard a small cry of surprise, and it was Professor Reese.
“Jordie!”
I tried to open my eyes and sit up, but I was woozy and wobbly like everything was still whooshing. “Uhhhh . . .” I groaned, and thought, This must be why Spike lay in the bottom of the hat with his feet sticking up in the air for so long.
“Lie still,” Professor Reese said. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”
So I lay back down and closed my eyes again. “Where are we?”
“The science museum,” Professor Reese said.
The spinning began to slow. I opened my eyes. Professor Reese was sitting on the floor next to me, her clothes wrinkled and her hair a mess, looking small and pale.
“Are you OK?” I said.
“Better. I’m better.” She smiled weakly. “And I’m remarkably happy to see you. But, Jordie, you shouldn’t have come. Teleporting is far too dangerous.”
“I had to find you!” I said. “No one else would even know how to look!”
Professor Reese nodded. “That’s true.”
I sat up slowly and looked to see if everything was attached in the right places. Both arms had elbows and wrists and all ten fingers. My knees pointed in the right direction. I could wiggle my toes. It felt like the reconfiguration instructions worked.
Professor Reese looked attached in all the right places, too, just small and tired.
“I brought a first aid kit,” I said. I looked around and saw it on the floor, the water bottle standing beside it.
“Thankfully, I’m not injured.”
“And I brought water and something for you to eat.” I pulled a granola bar out of my back pocket, but when she reached for it, her hand was shaking so badly, I unwrapped it for her.
“Thank you, Jordie. I was so happy to get the apples you sent, but that was many hours ago. . . .” She bit into the granola bar, closed her eyes, and chewed.
While Professor Reese ate, I looked around the little room—the concrete floor, the work sink, and in the center of the room, a huge set of shelves filled with dusty old equipment. There was a door on one wall, but all I could hear outside the room was a steady, loud whirring sound. “What is this place?”
“The storage room in the basement where I keep extra equipment. I was aiming for my office, of course, but those darn landing sites . . .”
“Oh. You bounced down here.”
“What?”
So I explained all about the starburst pattern of pins on the map and discovering the bounce and how Baxter being King of the Bounce helped him find the landing sites, and Professor Reese kept saying, “Goodness!” and “Oh my!” and once, “Jordie! You figured all this out yourself?” and then, “I knew there was a reason I chose you as my lab assistant!”
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in this room for three whole days. There was an overhead light but no window, so you’d just have to sit there on the hard concrete floor and try to sleep when you could. You’d be hungry, and you’d probably have to pee in the sink (that’s what I would do, because who could hold it that long?). It would be lonely and a little bit scary the first few hours, I guessed, but mostly you’d just think and think, probably about how you wished you hadn’t teleported yourself without first telling your lab assistants where you were going.
“Does anyone ever come in here?” I asked.
“Not very often, I would imagine,” Professor Reese said. “I haven’t heard anyone go by since I got here.” She pulled the cell phone we’d teleported out of her pocket. “I tried calling out on this, but it doesn’t work—though I do appreciate your sending it, dear.”
“I think it got messed up in the teleporter.”
She nodded. “Sorry about that.” She took another bite of granola bar. “The first few hours in here, I tried yelling for help, but that whirring sound outside is the ventilation system for the whole building. No one heard me. And after a while, I started feeling weak.”
“Well, I’m not tired. Maybe I can get us out,” I said. “And hopefully TJ and Baxter will be here soon to help.”
“Oh?”
“They’re coming on foot because we figured it out.”
I explained all about the microchip humming and Baxter’s ears and TJ recognizing the microchip number matching the latitude, and she kept saying “Oh my!” again, and her smile got bigger and bigger.
When I finished, she said, “Amazing!”
“I know! Cool, right?!”
“Very.”
“OK, so let’s get out of here.” I went over and checked the door, but even though the doorknob turned, the door only budged a tiny bit.
“Unfortunately, it’s padlocked from the outside.” Professor Reese finished the granola bar. “I put the padlock on myself, a couple of years ago.”
I looked around the room. There wasn’t a window, and no one could hear us yell. That just left the door—padlocked from the outside.
“Maybe I can break down the door, somehow?”
I took a few steps back.
“Be careful,
