“Go take a walk around the block. Get some fresh air.” She held out some money. “And pick up a pizza for dinner on your way back.”
Jaime took the folded bills. He hadn’t told her what had happened on the train, hadn’t told her that if he and Tess and Theo hadn’t been able to save one another, he’d be just another picture on the wall.
“What?” said Mima. “Why do you have that strange look on your face?”
“Just hungry.”
She waved her hand. “What else is new? Get two pizzas.”
Outside, the sun was just setting, which meant it was late, after eight o’clock in the evening. The sky was so wild with purples and pinks and oranges that even New Yorkers couldn’t help but stop and look up. High above, the white belly of a solarship floated past. He wondered what the people on the ship saw when they looked down, all the people skittering around the streets like tiny little Rollers. After walking awhile, Jaime sat on a bench in Riverside Park. He pulled his sketchbook from a pocket and sketched—not the river in front of him or the dazzling sky and the solarship above, but Tess on top of a train, head thrown back, roaring like a liger. Tess didn’t have any superpowers—she was as skinny as a chicken wing—but Mima always said that you could never tell how strong a person was just by looking at them, especially girls skinny as chicken wings. Mima said that when she was just a teenager, skinny as a chicken wing, she’d knocked out the front teeth of a boy who’d tried to kiss her after she told him no.
He was just wondering if he should give Tess a pair of wings when the lamps in the park went on. Or one lamp went on. The rest stayed dark. Which was weird. Weirder when he saw the buildings across the water and saw only a smattering of lights over there, too.
But the city had had brownouts before, especially in summer. Anyway, it was too dark to keep sketching. He tucked the book in his pocket and made his way over to Mima’s favorite pizza joint, Dangerous Pie, and ordered two pizzas with everything. He sat down to wait. While he was playing Angry Bots on his phone, a large man charged into the pizza shop and ordered a pie with a quarter cheese and tomato sauce, a quarter no cheese or tomato sauce, and half pineapple and peppers. He paid, turned around.
“Jaime!”
“Hey, Mr. Moran. How are you?”
“I’ve been apartment hunting all day. How do I look?”
He looked like a ham with under-eye bags. “Fine?” said Jaime.
“I look terrible. We all look terrible.”
The pizza man said, “Maybe some of the lights will go out uptown, then. We won’t be able to see you all looking so terrible.”
“That’s not funny. Why would I want a brownout? Out-of-control machines aren’t a joke.”
“What do you mean, out-of-control machines?” said Jaime.
“A Morningstarr Machine was caught on video in a bunch of different power stations messing with the circuits,” Mr. Moran said. “It was all over FaceSpace. They haven’t caught it yet.”
The pizza man was shaking his head. “I saw that video. It looked fake. And that ain’t no Morningstarr Machine.”
“Of course it was!” said Mr. Moran, growing even pinker.
“Morningstarr Machines don’t break. And anyway, they didn’t make a machine that looked like that.”
“That looked like what?” said Jaime.
“Butterfly,” said the pizza man. “My kid has the complete Lego collection of Morningstarr Machines. You got your Rollers, you got your SqueeGees, you got your anteaters, your caterpillars and dragonflies. Oh, and Lancelots, too, but those don’t really count. Anyway, they didn’t make a butterfly.”
“I don’t care what kind of toys your kid has!” Mr. Moran shouted. “That butterfly is a Morningstarr Machine. It has to be.”
“I’m just saying, I know those machines, and that screwy machine ain’t one of them.”
“What else would it be, then, huh? Huh, tell me that!” said Mr. Moran.
The pizza man scratched his big belly. “Okay, okay. Maybe you want to sit down.”
“Why should I sit down?!”
“Because you look like your head’s going to pop like a balloon.”
“MY HEAD IS FINE! WHY IS EVERYONE ALWAYS BURSTING INTO HYSTERICS?”
The pizza man plopped two boxes on the counter. “Pies are ready, kid. Get out while you can.”
“WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?”
“Thanks,” Jaime said. He grabbed the pies. They smelled delicious, but his mind wasn’t on his stomach. His mind was on the “butterfly” that was flying around turning off the lights.
But turning off the lights for what?
Turning off the lights for who?
When Jaime got home, he and Mima did something they never did: ate dinner in front of the TV. They watched the amateur videos of a fluttery silver object so blurry you could barely identify it, and listened to witnesses and reporters:
“Look, I’m telling you, that thing attached itself to one of those there circuit breakers and zapped it. Lights haven’t been right since.”
“It was only a matter of time for those machines to go kablooey. Darnell Slant knows. Out with the old, in with the new, am I right?”
“The machine seems have rewired the system somehow, because some lights work, some don’t.”
“It’s a conundrum for city workers and for authorities, too, who are trying to figure out who or what is behind this sabotage, if it is sabotage. But officials say they expect to have full power restored by tomorrow morning.”
Mima put a slice of half-eaten pizza back on her plate. “This is a strange story. A strange story for a stranger city.”
Maybe not so strange, Jaime thought. What if the moth wasn’t sabotaging the lights? What if it was trying to send a message with the lights? But what kind of message? Morse code? No, then the lights would have to blink on and off. Maybe not a message. Maybe a picture or a pattern.
A pattern like . . . a map?
But then how would they see the whole of the map? From his vantage point, Jaime could only see a few lights here and there in the buildings closest to him. They’d have to plot the map light by light on a computer or on paper, and there were hundreds of lights. That would take forever. They could climb the tallest building in New York City, but even that might not be high enough to see the whole of the city, might not show them all the lights at once.
Then he remembered the white belly of the solarship he’d seen earlier, floating gently across the clouds, and he knew what they’d have to do.
“Fly,” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Mima. “If I was going to make a machine to mess with this city, I would not make a butterfly. I would make a wasp.” She nodded to herself. “Yes. Something that stings.”
Later that night, while Mima was washing the dishes, Jaime whispered into his phone: “You guys know anyone with a solarship?”
There was a long silence on the other end, and then Theo said: “I think we might.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tess
“Uncle Edgar!” said Tess loudly. “What are you doing here? Look, Dad, it’s Uncle Edgar!”