Allie had to decide who to follow-but even before she could make a decision, the well-dressed woman was stopped by a portly teacher with a gray goatee.
“Excuse me,” he told the woman, “but you’ll have to check in at the office first.”
“Right, right,” said the woman-but then both the woman and the teacher seemed to change. The woman reached out to the wall for balance and looked around, disoriented, while the teacher suddenly looked… well… squirrelly. Then he turned and hurried off down the hallway.
Allie leaped from the tree-lot woman, and skinjacked a passing school janitor. She quickly gathered her senses, and continued down the hall, keeping a distance behind the bearded teacher. The teacher turned a corner, but when Allie caught up with him, the man was just standing there bewildered.
“Strange,” he said. “Very strange…”
Clearly Squirrel was gone, but there was no one else in the hallway he could have jumped into.
“Damn it!” said Allie, and the teacher, forgetting his confusion, looked to her, appalled.
“Watch your language, Mr. Webber,” the teacher told the janitor. “After all, this is a school.”
Meanwhile, through the wall, and in a classroom that opened to a different hallway, a somewhat squirrelly student excused himself to go to the bathroom… but his real destination was the bicycle racks.
The fourth graders were let out into the playground for recess, then, just a few minutes later, the fifth graders came racing out of the school as well, immediately commandeering the plastic starship. Mixing grades in the playground was not the usual routine, and when the principal stepped out behind the flood of fifth graders, one of the teachers on duty was quick to ask what was going on.
“I thought they could use a little bit of extra playtime,” said the principal.
This was odd, because the principal of Blue Harvest never came to the playground unless he was showing it off to prospective families, and never suggested more playtime for anybody.
The teacher looked toward the space-age climbing apparatus, which now held an overabundance of Starfleet personnel. “Do you really think this is a good idea?” she asked. “It’s so crowded-someone’s bound to get hurt with all those bodies.”
“Well,” said the principal, “it is like they say, ‘The morgue, the merrier.’”
Allie had no idea where Squirrel had gone, and so she decided to go out into the danger zone itself. Still in the body of the janitor, Allie found her way out to the playground where kids were fighting over the elaborate equipment. To her right, a teacher was having a heated discussion with a man in a suit who must have been the principal.
“Yes, you did,” said the teacher. “You said the fifth graders needed extra playtime, so you brought them out here.”
“I most certainly did not!” the principal insisted. “What would ever possess me to say such a thing? I don’t even remember coming out here.”
Then Allie noticed a boy in the middle of the playground who was not playing with the others. He was looking up. She followed his gaze to the skeletal skyscraper across the street. The construction site was filled with activity, with workers welding and hammering on almost every floor.
Allie looked down at her janitorial uniform, to remind herself who she was, then knelt down to the boy.
“What is it?” she said, in a gruff male voice. “What do you see?”
The boy never looked at her. “Nothing,” he said. “Just the building.” And then he added, “It is big, yes?”
Allie recoiled. This was Milos! He must have skinjacked the principal, and was now skinjacking this boy-but he was too absorbed in his mission to notice that the janitor had been skinjacked too. Milos then ran off into the starship, disappearing into the many tunnels.. . and the moment he did, a shadow crossed over the playground.
Allie looked up to see a load of steel beams being raised by a huge sky crane high above the construction site. Allie realized with a sinking feeling that the crane had an arc wide enough to swing out over the playground, if that’s what the crane operator-or the person controlling the crane operator-wanted to do.
“We have to get out!” said Allie. “Everyone! We have to get out of here now!”
But nobody listened. After all, the janitor had little authority over children in a school. Allie quickly leaped out of the janitor and into the teacher closest to the door, and tried to open it. The door wouldn’t budge. Then when she turned toward the side gate, which was the only other way out of the playground, she saw a kid securing it with a bicycle lock, so that no one could get out. This time something about the way he moved allowed her to see right through his disguise.
“Squirrel!” she yelled.
He looked up at her and ran. She knew she had given herself away, but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting those kids out of there. Moose must have already been in the sky crane, because as the massive load of girders rose higher and higher, the crane began a long, slow arc toward the school.
The principal called to the students, not yet realizing what was going on. “Enough playtime,” he told them. “Everyone line up by your teachers.” The kids all grumbled but immediately abandoned the starship until Milos, skinjacking a scrawny blond boy, poked his head out from one of the tunnels.
“Look, everyone! There is money in here.” Then he held out a few dollar bills. “This is why they sent us out here, to find Christmas money!” Suddenly the kids ran happily back to the starship against their principal’s orders.
“I found a dollar!” said one.
“I found five!” said another.
It was an easy trick to pull off. Allie wondered how many kids Milos had skinjacked just long enough to empty their pockets into the tunnels. They were all finding their own lunch money. Allie peeled out of the teacher and took over a girl climbing through the starship. She found Milos, and pushed him against the curved tunnel wall with a thud.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” she said.
Milos recognized her right away, and smiled. “Allie!” he said in that little-boy voice. “I thought you had sunk. So good to see you.”
She pushed him against the tunnel wall again. “This isn’t going to happen,” Allie told him. “I won’t let it.”
But Milos lost none of his composure. “You cannot stop it now. Why don’t you sit back and enjoy it. It will be quite a spectacle.”
She would have pounded him through the wall if it wouldn’t hurt that poor boy he had skinjacked.
Meanwhile the adults in the playground were beginning to realize that the sky crane across the street was being very careless with its load. “If it doesn’t change its trajectory,” said the principal, “that load of girders will be right above us. What is the crane operator thinking?”
Allie knew there was no time to lose. She leaped out of the fifth-grade girl and began the most important relay race of her life. She hurled herself to another child, then to a pedestrian on the other side of the fence. She body-surfed her way from fleshie to fleshie, until she was in the construction site, then she paused just long enough to get her bearings. She was a construction worker, and the workers around her were already looking up, wondering why the I-beam load had swung so wide.
Allie turned to leap again, determined to make it up into the crane rising above the tower’s highest floors, but she came face-to-face with Milos in the body of one of the other workers.
“Don’t forget I am better at this than you,” he said, and he grabbed her. “I taught you everything you know!”
Instantly Allie leaped into the worker behind Milos, then to his right, then to his left and back again, creating a pattern of four-moving faster and faster until she was skinjacking all four men. Then she swung at him: identical punches from four different directions, powerful enough to bring Milos to his knees.
“Not everything!” she said in four voices. Then she pulled herself together, and leaped away, leaving Milos reeling from the blows.
Allie launched into a construction worker on the second floor, then to one on the fourth, the seventh, the tenth, up and up, relaying it in leaps and bounds as if the building was a skinjacker jungle gym. It was just as she had done at the Grand Ol’ Opry so many months ago when Milos taught her to body-surf this way, swinging from fleshie to fleshie as quick as lightning. They had tied that first race, but this time Allie had to win.
Twentieth floor, twenty-third, twenty-sixth. It was hard finding construction workers now to leap to and the
