Zeke Bartholomew by Jason Pinter Page B

and stretched, but it’s back.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œNow we need to get the heck out of here, find Ragnarok and Le Carré, and stop SirEebro before it brainwashes every kid on the planet.”
    â€œSo you’re okay?” I asked, amazed that someone who’d just been buried under hundreds of pounds of rubble could still be such a pain in the butt.
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. I pointed at her arm. “Not bad. Won’t need surgery. Long as I can take the pain, it won’t hold me back. And, yes, before you ask, I can take the pain.”
    â€œI wasn’t going to ask,” I said. “Okay, yes, I was.”
    â€œIs there any way we could get back up through the entrance?”
    â€œNo way,” I said. “Ragnarok blew the ladder to smithereens. No way we can climb back up.”
    â€œWhat about the other doors down here? Any chance we could get through them?”
    â€œFar as I know, they’re all locked. The only one that isn’t is…the GeekDen. Come on!”
    The GeekDen might have been far enough away from the blast that it might still be standing. I cautiously stepped through the destroyed brick and rubble, finding my way through the sewers to our hideout. The whole tunnel looked like a bomb had hit it. Ragnarok wasn’t kidding with those fire grenades. It was a miracle we were still alive.
    â€œIt’s up there,” I said. “It’s right over…here. Oh, no.”
    The door to the GeekDen had been blown in. It was in three pieces. And inside, all of my gadgets, all of my hard work, it looked like someone had, well, thrown a fire grenade inside.
    â€œMy stuff,” I said. I went around the bombed-out room, surveying the damage. There was not a single item that hadn’t been affected in the blast. My vegetable grinder-upper. Vaporized. I’d invented it as a kid when I didn’t want to shovel broccoli into my mouth. You simply inserted a vegetable into it, and it ground the produce into a powder so fine that it could be sprinkled on the rug undetected, for either a vacuum cleaner or family pet to Hoover up.
    My automatic textbook reader. For the days when my eyes were just too tired to read thousand-page textbooks. I invented the device to place on a given page, and a robotic voice would read the chapter to you. Saved me from getting Coke-bottle glasses by the age of eight.
    And my proudest invention, the HoloZeke. Using light refractions, mirrors, and video footage, once installed in my room it gave off the illusion that I was sitting at my desk, studying, when in fact I was elsewhere, likely in the GeekDen, inventing more amazing gadgets. I always left my bedroom door open a crack so that my dad could peek in, see the HoloZeke, and think I was studying. But in reality I was in another world.
    My world. And now that world was destroyed.
    â€œEverything I worked so hard on,” I said, surveying the destruction. I felt like someone had ripped out my heart, spat on it, and laughed at it. I turned to Sparrow. The look on her face was pure apathy.
    She shrugged.
    â€œDoesn’t matter anyway. It was mostly junk.”
    â€œJunk?” I said, shouting. “This was my life’s work!”
    â€œAnd now it’s a pile of trash,” she said. “And we’re stuck in here.”
    I couldn’t even speak, I was so mad. How could she not understand? How could she be so cold?
    â€œListen, Zeke, I get that you’re upset. But the fact is, we wouldn’t be in this mess if not for your little den of geeks or whatever. You can sit here and cry over frayed wires. I’m going to figure out how to get us out of here.”
    â€œRight. Just like you figured out how to fix your broken ComLet. Oh, right, sorry. That was me .”
    â€œYou’ll make a great DVD repairman someday,” Sparrow said. “See you on the outside.”
    She walked away, cradling her injured arm.
    There was