Chapter Thirteen

Some people have been wondering when Rex will be fed. Don't worry; I haven't forgotten his hunger, and he will be fed sometime in the next few chapters.

The intruder must still be moving, Tessa thought, because there was no other explanation for not catching up with them yet. She kept moving, head moving, eyes scanning the area the way she'd been taught.

###

Tessa had been going round the house clockwise, the same way as the intruder, so Mary went round anticlockwise, rounders bat gripped firmly in her shaking hand. She was scared – more scared than she wanted to admit to herself, and she knew several things could go wrong. Not for the first time, it struck her how large the house really was. She realized that she had only a vague idea of what she was doing, but she hoped it would be enough. After all, Tessa had told her more detailed plans generally went out the window in situations like this.

She felt Tessa's owl necklace against her collarbone. Would Tessa think she was being too rash? She doubted it – she had thought everything through, and she had her goggles and bat. All the same, she wasn't sure.

###

Rex halted suddenly when the human girl he had seen before rounded the corner in front of him. In one hand she carried a club or bat of some sort, and her eyes were obscured by a pair of sturdy-looking black goggles with what seemed to be opaque lenses.

More disturbing than that was the fact that she appeared to be looking directly at him. Of course, that was impossible, but she certainly looked as if she was, if she even had eyes. She wasn't looking at him, Rex decided. He was invisible.

The girl seemed to be heading straight for him, though, so, heart thudding, he carefully moved to the side to avoid her walking into him. She seemed, to his bemusement, to falter, make as if to move, so he would once again be in her way, then think better of it and carry on her original course. His brain started whirring. She couldn't see him... could she? It seemed impossible at first thought, but she was wearing weird goggles. Who knew what she could see? But then, if she could see him, why wasn't she freaking out? It made no sense.

All the same, Rex was on edge, which was why, when the girl, now parallel to him, suddenly swung her bat at him, so fast he barely had time to see the blow coming, he was ready. He turned and shot away. He would probably have made it out, too, if his path hadn't been blocked by someone else.

###

Tessa had just turned the corner when what seemed through her bulky goggles to be a blur of blue crashed straight into her. Blue. That meant somewhere around twenty-two degrees Celsius, or seventy-one-point-six to roughly seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit, a roughly normal gecko temperature, give or take a degree or two. This was why Tessa liked her goggles. They were colour, so, unlike Boo's 'travel pair', which only saw in shades of orange, you could make a better estimate to the actual temperature.

Tessa just had time to think all this before the intruder recovered from their shock, and darted to their right. Tessa's training finally kicked in, and she threw herself on top of them. There was a brief scuffle, and then it was over.

###

Rex stopped struggling; there was no point. Everything had stopped making sense: The human had special goggles that allowed her to see through his disguise, and a monster – what was another monster doing here? – with a bulky, headset type thing that let her see him, had tackled him to the ground. What's more, the monster and the human seemed to be working together. Rex just couldn't compute it, so he stopped trying.

###

Mary wandered over to find Tessa cuffing all six of the monsters limbs together in pairs. She didn't know where Tessa had got the cuffs from, but she could guess.

"Need any help?" she asked.

Tessa shook her head. "Nah, I got this." She turned back to the lizard, who had given up camouflage, Mary realized as she pushed her goggles up. He – if he was a he – was orange in colour, although the tip of his single frond was a little redder than the rest of his body. He didn't look very old to her.

###

Roughly fifteen minutes later, they were all inside. The boy – who's name, they discovered, was Rex – had agreed not to resist, and was now sitting in one of Tessa's armchairs. All eyes were on him, apart from Scarlett's. Scarlett was watching the cameras and fuming. This was both her and Tessa's fault, Mary decided.

It was after Rex had agreed to cooperate, and they had all been heading inside. Scarlett had been waiting at the door, fuming. Tessa had halted, confused.

"What?"

Scarlett had narrowed her eyes, all ten of them. "Isn't there something you should be telling Mary?"

"Oh." Tessa had turned to Mary. "Thanks for your help back there, I really needed it."

Scarlett had looked incredulous. "You're actually encouraging her to put herself in danger? You're whole mission is to keep her safe!"

"And that's what I'm doing! I'm keeping her safe in the long run. She needs to know how to look after herself, and that's what I've been teaching her to do."

"That is not your job! Your job is to keep her out of danger, not encourage her to dive head-first into it!"

"Well, it's not your job to tell me what to do! You just watch the camera feed."

"You know what? Fine! You're right, it isn't my job, so I can't get blamed for it. I'll be upstairs watching the feed, and when Garrastazu finds out how irresponsible you are, I can say that it had nothing to do with me!"

Scarlett had then swung round and stormed up the stairs, and that brought them to where they were now, sitting in an awkward silence.

Tessa spoke first. "So, talk. What are you doing here?"

Rex shifted uneasily. "It's complicated."

"So start talking."

###

One full explanation later, Tessa was looking thoughtful. Mary looked faintly incredulous.

"You cannot be serious." she muttered. "Why is everything related to Randall? How likely is that?"

"Statistics mean nothing to the individual." Tessa said. "As unlikely as this situation is, that doesn't mean Rex was lying." She turned to Rex. "Unless you were lying, of course."

"Why would I?" Rex said miserably.

###

An hour later, Rex was sprawled over a bed in a smallish room. The curtains had blackout linings, and the window didn't open. The door was locked. The other three obviously still didn't trust him, even if they had accepted his story for now.

From another room in the house, he could hear the human girl playing her instrument – a piccolo trumpet. She was pretty decent, Rex had to admit. The reason he knew it was her was because he could hear the other two arguing in the room opposite his.

"You want to send him back? Are you crazy? That'll just make things worse! He'll be bullied!"

"And your plan is for him to stay here, is it? Tessa, he'll just be a drain on resources, and he'll jeopardise the mission."

"If you're so worried about jeopardising the mission, what about everything he now knows?"

"That's nothing to do with us. We hand him over to Garrastazu, she consults people higher up, and they make a judgment on what to do, not us! This is not your decision to make! Do you seriously think he'll be better off here, in the human world?"

The shouting continued, and Rex shifted positions. He still hadn't eaten, and he was starving.

###

Randall slipped, invisible, through the crowd towards the door. This was it; after several days of searching, he had located the building. This was his only chance for help.