For a while now I've wanted to write about the kids protesting Itex in Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. I played a little loose with canon, mainly with experiments still being in the buildings. Otherwise I tried to stay within the world set up by the books.
In the car, Stacia had her notebook out and was scribbling madly.
"Okay, how about this one?" she said. "By-Half? No way. Humanity is here to stay. Is that too cheesy?"
"It's better than rhyming 'the time has come' and 'claim our home,'" said Kyler without looking up from his comic book.
"I wasn't asking you," said Stacia. She reached forward into the passenger seat and nudged Brynn's shoulder. "Hey, fearless leader. Your pest infestation keeps talking to me. Are you gonna help me out with these chants?"
Brynn glanced up from the map and looked around the car. Behind her little brother Kyler and her best friend Stacia, behind the back seat full of drink coolers, the dusty road seemed to stretch out forever. They had passed the fields full of orange trees long ago, and now they seemed almost to crawl over an endless field dotted with palmettos and pines.
Her mom didn't take her eyes off the road once. Her face was grim and drawn, as it had been ever since she'd seen The Blog.
They were on their way to save humanity. Aaand her mom had to drive them. She was pretty sure BigBoyBlue up in Washington wasn't having his mom drive him.
Stacia poked her. "Brynn. The chaaants."
"I'm trying to find the Itexicon building." She scanned the empty fields and then sat up straight, noticing a small dirt side road. "Mom. Mom, Mom! Turn here!"
Her mom swerved. In the back, Stacia and Kyler yelped, and the sodas in the coolers clanked.
Brynn pressed her forehead against the window, peering out. Clouds of dust rose all around them and they could hear pebbles pinging off the sides of the car.
They finally pulled up outside a huge white building, surrounded by high iron gates. There was a little guardhouse out front. The whole place seemed deserted. Mom kept her foot on the brake.
"Do they have a bathroom?" asked Kyler.
"Where is everybody?" Stacia asked, more on point. She had whisked out her camcorder, but looked disappointed at the prospect of having nothing to film.
"It is very early," Mom reminded them, and then looked at Brynn. "This is really the place? Where they experimented on those angel kids who were at the football game?"
(She had believed that Fang's blog was an elaborate prank. Until she saw the kids flying at the football game on national TV. She said they looked like they were homeless. And scared.)
Without a word, Brynn pointed at the sign reading Itexicon: American Headquarters.
The parking lot was also within the locked gates. There were only a few cars parked inside. Mom pulled over just off the road, joining a handful of other cars and a few dusty bicycles.
Outside the fence, there were white tents set up to shield people from the already glaring sun. A handful of kids were already holding signs that said things like Kids Matter and We Want Our Planet Back and, on one huge sign, Stop Itex Human Exparimentaton, beginning in huge spaced out letters and dwindling until it was almost impossible to read. A cluster of girls giggled around a ten-foot-long banner with Fang's face on it. One old lady with a massive pair of sunglasses—the only adult in attendance so far—sat off to the side in a folding chair, tanning.
Brynn sighed, gathered her folder, and slid out. Stacia promptly joined her, adjusting her homemade "Save the Planet" pin and doing her best to look official.
A scruffy, dark-skinned boy, also with a folder, ran over to them. "Hey, I'm Omar."
Stacia seized his hand and shook it. "I'm thegirlwiththemojo, but my name's actually Stacia. And this is BrynnNarnia."
Brynn smiled and gave a little wave.
"Oh, good," he said in relief. "Finally someone else who knows what's going on. I had to confiscate fireworks. Fireworks, people. It's too early in the morning for this."
"What is going on?" Brynn's mom joined them, giving the signs a slightly worried look. "Are your parents here?"
"No," said Omar casually. "Trey's grandma brought a bunch of us in a bus, then Marie over there has a driver's license."
"We brought water and soda," said Brynn.
"Excellent." He rubbed his hands together. "Hydration, hydration."
Three hours later, the crowd wound almost all the way around the building. Brynn had not seen this coming. She'd spoken to a few dozen kids online, but it seemed like they'd all brought friends. Someone had set up speakers that pulsed with music. Cars lined both sides of the dirt road, stretching far into the distance, and Brynn's mom had run off to try to organize them into parking spaces.
The Itex building remained silent. Every now and then a face looked out through the windows of the building, but otherwise there was no sign the workers even noticed the protest going on outside.
"Hey!" Brynn cried, when another girl bumped into her in the crowd. Kids were pressed up against the fence, shaking their signs and booing. Rocks sailed over the fence, landing in the manicured grass.
Brynn grabbed a rock from a ten-year-old's hand and threw it down. "Knock it off, okay?"
She bumped into Stacia, who was beaming. She was conducting a group in matching T-shirts, bellowing, "Save the Flock! Stop the School! Using kids just isn't cool!"
There were grown-ups too, parents with standing with their kids, college students waving signs, women screaming, "Give back our children!"
Brynn finally made it to the big tent, where Omar was fishing out the last soda cans from the cooler. He handed them to a couple of kids, who ran off immediately. Others stood around, talking loudly to each other and munching on snacks.
"They're throwing rocks into the parking lot," Brynn said. "They can't do that!"
"I don't see why not," snapped Omar, rubbing sweat from his forehead. "Those people in there are evil."
Flustered, Brynn began to stammer. "There are little kids out there. What if someone gets hurt?"
"Brynn. Brynn! There you are." Stacia ran into the tent, followed by a woman with a microphone and a man carrying a large camera. "They wanna talk to the people who organized the protests."
The reporter stared at Brynn and Omar. "You set this up?"
Brynn nodded and Omar said, "Uh, yeah."
"How old are you?"
Brynn was fourteen, Omar thirteen.
"You did this on your own?" said the reporter.
They nodded.
"Wow," said the reporter. "Wow. How about that. Okay, um, how did you get put in charge of organizing this protest?"
Brynn shrugged. "We volunteered on Fang's blog."
Omar added, "We mostly just assigned people to bring stuff like water and tents, and we made sure people had directions and were able to carpool."
"I also did that," Stacia put in.
"So you're all fans of Fang's blog."
"Oh yeah," said Stacia. She grinned into the camera. "Hi, Fang! I'm thegirlwiththemojo from Venice Beach and you're welcome to drop by anytime."
"When did you realize Fang's blog was not fictional?"
"I knew for a while," Omar said proudly, and started rambling about conspiracy theories and New York restaurants and Disney World.
"Have you heard yet about the events in the Netherlands?"
Omar paused. "No?"
"What happened there?" Brynn asked. For some reason she didn't quite want to know.
"Protestors were throwing Molotov cocktails. The facility is burning."
"What about the experiments inside?" asked Stacia.
The reporter just looked at them.
Breathing hard, Brynn darted out of the tent, ignoring Stacia's cry of "Wait!" She grabbed the cooler, stepped on top of it, and screamed "Hey!"
The busy crowd didn't pay much attention. Brynn looked around, sweat trickling down her forehead.
"Do you want this?" asked Kyler, holding up a megaphone.
"Where'd you get that?"
He shrugged and she grabbed it and held it to her mouth. "HEY!"
That got people's attention.
"People need to stop throwing things," she bellowed. "Saving the world doesn't mean hurting people. You know who thinks that? The School."
A few kids booed.
"Yeah, whatever," said Brynn. "Over in the Neth—the Netherlands, you know what just happened? They've got protestors over there too, and they just set fire to an Itex building."
This time a cheer went up.
"No, not good! Not cool! People in there are going to die! Kids like the Flock are going to die!"
Silence.
"Oh," said Kyler, right next to her.
She looked around. Her adrenaline was wearing off and she was all too aware that she was standing in front of a huge audience, perched on a water cooler looking like a lunatic in baggy shorts and Crocs. And the reporter people were filming. Oh God.
Her mother was watching her with a proud smile.
"No more violence," Brynn said. "We're better than them."
She was about to hop off the cooler when she heard clapping. People were applauding. Flushing bright red to her ears, she crawled down, only to meet Stacia.
"That was really cool," said Stacia.
And then Omar crashed into them, nearly bouncing up and down in his excitement. "The police are here!"
"What?!"
Fortunately, they did not get arrested. The police were here for someone else.
The sirens on the police cars kept whooping and flashing red and blue as the policemen made their way through the crowd. They herded people back from the gate and yelled through a loudspeaker, "Open up!"
Protestors cheered. A few faces appeared in the windows of the building. Brynn squeezed through the tangle of people, trying to get closer to the fence for a better view. Stacia followed her.
She heard the fence open and a new surge of cheering. The police had to break down the door to get inside. During the long wait, more squad cars pulled up. Ambulance sirens joined the noise. The reporters were doing their best to get good shots of the crowd as the T-shirt group started to sing.
The cheers were louder than ever when the police marched out men and women in white labcoats and handcuffs. One man struggled wildly and had to be pushed to the ground; others trudged along, their heads down.
It would have been easy to scream and boo, to throw rocks or crushed cans. One woman nearby actually held a rock in her hand, clenching it as if thinking about throwing. But the kids in the crowd just watched the scientists in disgust. Brynn had a private sigh of relief.
But everyone got very quiet when the paramedics brought out the stretchers. Brynn craned her neck to get a better view. The bodies there were covered with white sheets, and two of them were very small.
"What's going on?" a small child asked. "What are those?"
A teenaged girl covered her mouth and sobbed softly.
A policeman stepped through the doors with a little girl in his arms. Painfully thin, skin covered in green scales, she wore a baggy white smock. Her long tail brushed the ground.
She looked at the crowd of protesters and they looked back at her. Next to Brynn, an older man sucked in his breath, looking disturbed. Kids scrambled to see, pressing close to the line. Brynn stood on tiptoe, trying to get a better look at the girl. The policeman was saying something to her, but her eyes were terrified, her body stiff.
One of the kids whooped excitedly.
Then the kids' cheers exploded in a roar that rolled over the vast crowd. The noise throbbed in Brynn's chest, lifting her up. Stacia found her and grabbed her hands and they jumped up and down, shouting along with everyone else, shouting for joy.
That was the big picture on all the news sites – that image of the policeman halfway down the steps with the scaled girl in his arms, as her eyes opened wider and wider in the very beginning of understanding.