“I will start at once,” Benjy said, and zipped out of the room.
“Oh, this is going to be so much fun. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
“Think of what?” Funk asked.
“Erasing my enemies. I have a feeling it will cure those pesky headaches, too.”
“Can you please tell me what is going on?” Tessa asked.
Miss Information squeezed her arm so tight it hurt. “Tessa, you and the rest of the BULLIES are going to accompany Benjy, Alex, and me into the past, where we will locate the ancestors of the kids who attacked you today. Then we will make sure that our mutual enemies were never born. The world will be mine, and there will be a nice side effect for you—today will have never happened. Without the NERDS, there would be no reason for me to have recruited you, given you superpowers, and taken you to the White House to ruin your dad’s life. All the trouble will vanish in an instant. Plus, since I will be running everything when we get back, your dad will be out of a job. You’ll get everything I promised you, Tessa. Everything! Are you in?”
Miss Information was crazy. But Tessa had just seen impossible things: kids who could fly, snot that exploded, stink that could level a house, and her own malleable face. When Miss Information said she could go back in time, Tessa believed it. Her plan might be the only thing Tessa could do to save her father.
She nodded. “I’m in.”
Miss Information turned to the rest of the team. “Each one of you has a valuable skill. Tessa’s is leadership, and I want her in charge. If you have a problem with that, I have a couple starving tigers I’d like you to meet. Any questions?”
The BULLIES frowned but said nothing.
“Hooray!” she cried. “I’m glad everyone is happy. Let’s go back in time!”
“This is the backup facility for an international spy organization?” Ruby asked, staring up at the sign for Marty Mozzarella’s restaurant. The brightly colored logo was a big, grinning mouse wearing a Rastafarian hat.
“It is,” the principal said.
Ruby was speechless. Marty Mozzarella’s was a restaurant for little kids. The food was a crime against humanity: The pizza tasted like an old man’s slipper dipped in ketchup, the french fries were as soggy as a rag at a car wash, and the chicken fingers might well have been made from the fingers of an actual chicken. Plus, next to the tables, there were fifty decibel-busting video games that shook the air with blinks, bonks, beeps, and blasts.
“My dad brought me here for pizza and games once when I was little. It was fun until he found a dirty diaper in the ball pit,” Duncan said. “I haven’t been back since.”
Matilda gagged.
“Note to self: Do not eat in this restaurant,” Jackson said.
Flinch shrugged. “Speak for yourself. This place has the best food ever.”
Heathcliff didn’t care where they were headquartered. On the ride from the Playground he had switched back and forth from tears to bitterness. Ruby understood why he was so mad, but she had bigger problems on her hands than wiping tears off the face of former agent Choppers. Aside from having to run for her life from the president of the United States and being exposed as a spy, she had disappeared from her parents’ house, after shouting that she hated all her relatives. They must have discovered she was missing by now. Her whole family would be in a panic.
Once inside the dingy restaurant, Ruby’s allergies went haywire. Her lips swelled up, her fingers got puffy, and her ears ached. Her eyes watered like faucets and her swelling ankles threatened to split her sneakers. One look around explained why. She was in a restaurant filled with a mob of sticky-faced pre-kindergartners who wiped their runny noses on their hands and then wiped their hands on anything that didn’t move. But it was the actual employees that made her suffer the most. She was allergic to minimum-wage, dead-end jobs and hopelessness. She reached into her pocket for an allergy tablet and swallowed it dry.
Most of the team squeezed into a booth with the principal while Flinch, mesmerized by the lights and sounds, decided to have a look around.
“So, as you can tell, we’ve got a few problems,” the principal said, trying to shout over a robotic Marty and his vermin friends singing the Happy Birthday song to a screaming kid.
“What about our parents?” Jackson asked.
“Yeah, they’re going to be worried when we don’t come home,” Matilda said.
“And what are we going to do to protect them? I’m sure the Secret Service will want to question them. What if they’re taken into custody to try to force us out?” Duncan asked.
“Most of your parents are aware of your secret lives. I contacted everyone’s except for Heathcliff’s and Ruby’s.”
Heathcliff groaned, then got up and stomped off.
“I should go see them,” Ruby said.
“I think that is a terrible idea,” the principal said. “Going home will put them in danger. The Secret Service will be watching your house, and the second you show up they’ll have you. Right now, the best thing you can do is let your parents believe you ran away.”
Ruby was shocked by his idea. “You want to make them worry?”
“Your parents will call the cops and report you missing and the police will show up and do an investigation. With police in the house, the Secret Service and the CIA might keep their distance. All those cops and all those family members might buy us a little time until we can finish this mission. Ruby, I know you hate this idea, but it’s the best one we’ve got right now.”
A teenager in a mouse costume approached their booth.
“Excuse me, but is he with you?” he asked, pointing toward a candy machine. Inside were mounds of chocolates and sweets with a large mechanical claw above them. Flinch had his arm trapped inside the dispenser, yet he was singing with joy. “He’s scaring the other kids.”
“Oh, but the six-foot rat bringing them food isn’t freaking them out?” Jackson asked.
“Hey, don’t say ‘rat’ in here. I’m a mouse! Do you want the health department coming down on us?”
Duncan stood up. “I’ll go get him.”
“Thank you,” the mouse said as he rushed off to take an order.
Jackson’s braces whirred nervously. “Is this place safe? If they find us, it’s only a matter of time before we’re lab rats.”
“Hey, kid!” the man in the mouse suit shouted from across the room. “Shut it!”
“Sorry,” Jackson said sheepishly.
The principal shook his head. “This restaurant is completely off the grid,” he said. “Only myself, Agent Brand, and a few former directors even know it exists. Best of all, soon it will be completely operational. We’ll have the full science team here before long.”
Ruby looked around the restaurant. She hadn’t noticed at first, but most of the cooks were scientists from the Playground. Now, instead of lab coats, they were wearing T-shirts with MARTY MOZZARELLA on the front and sliding trays of garlic knots into the ovens.
Duncan returned with Flinch, who was carrying a droopy slice of pepperoni and mushroom. “This place rules!”
Ruby turned to the principal. “What are we supposed to do in this dump?”
“This ‘dump’ is filled with massive computing power,” the principal said. He squeezed out of the booth, crossed the room, and pressed his hand on a game’s screen. A green light scanned his fingertips and then the game disappeared, replaced by an array of surveillance camera images from all over the world. “Every one of these arcade games has a hard drive with processor speeds far beyond anything we had at the Playground. The kitchen is stocked with the latest weaponry. There are surface-to-air missiles inside that robot squirrel over there.”
“So what’s the plan?” Matilda asked.
“The same as it was yesterday: Find Tessa Lipton. Only this time we’re not rescuing her. We’re bringing her to justice.”
“One suggestion!” Flinch cried, his mouth full of pizza. “Can we make this place our permanent headquarters? It’s amazing and the food is yum!”