Beetle Blast Read Online Free Page B

just in case.
    She looked at the rats again, while she waited. They were still not eating the cake. Rats, though, were very intelligent. Maybe they’d smelled something and decided not to take the risk. Not that being very intelligent always helped you through life, reflected Petty, with a sigh.
She
was superintelligent. But she had still gotten tricked by her old friend, Victor Crouch, when they worked together in the government’s top secret underground labs.
    If Victor hadn’t stolen her work and burnt out her memory so he could not be caught, she wouldn’t be sitting here now, worrying about Josh and Danny. She would have carried on with developing the REPTOSWITCH spray, as well as the BUGSWITCH spray. She would be the most famous scientist in the world.
    â€œStill—
Victor
isn’t the most famous scientist in the world either, is he?” muttered Petty to herself, with a smile. “No, Victor! You messed up! What you didn’t know was that I always suspected someone would try to steal my work. So I faked all my paper codes and put the
real
codes into my cubes. My wonderful cubes!”
    But Petty frowned now. She had all the BUGSWITCH cubes, and she could make her sprays using the code hidden inside them. But the REPTOSWITCH code was not yet complete. She had only five cubes, each with a beautiful hologram of a reptile twinkling in its glass center. Josh and Danny had not yet found the sixth. With parts of her memory burnt out, Petty just could not remember where she’d hidden the cubes. Josh and Danny had managed to find most of them. But without the last one, she would never be able to make any REPTOSWITCH spray.
    â€œOooooh!” Petty slapped her forehead. “Why did you have to get your memory burnt out, you fool?” she hissed at herself.
    A man standing in the bush behind her scratched his chin with a pointed black fingernail. He grinned to himself before moving silently back to the pond dippers in the learning room. Josh flew into the wildlife center learning room, aghast at the amount of noise his wings were making. They were whirring and buzzing, the way beetles’ wings often do. He just had to hope that it wasn’t very loud to human ears. The last thing he needed was for some fascinated Wild Thing to spot him and try to catch him.
    He could see his fellow Wild Things dotted around the room. Huge lumps of colorful human, ambling about and making a lot of noise. Good! The noise would hopefully disguise the sound his wings were making. The pond dippers had all come back into the learning room now. They had put their jars in a row along an orange shelf, ready to be inspected. Poppy’s grandfather was already peering into them. He was holding a notebook and pencil and tapping against the jars with one peculiar pointed black fingernail. Josh flew high over his head. He wished the old man would move away so he could inspect the jars for signs of Danny.

    Then Poppy ran up to her grandfather and grabbed his hand. The old man turned away. Josh flew down to the jars and began to work his way along them all. Most of them had lots of weeds, a couple of water snails, and not much else. Most of the pond creatures were way too quick to get caught by pond dippers. The third jar, with the pink string on it, had a bone-crunchingly ugly face peering out of it through a drift of green weeds. A dragonfly nymph. It saw Josh peering in at it. It mouthed “Watchoo lookin’ at?” Josh was just about to move on when another face suddenly bloomed through the weed. A great diving beetle.
    â€œJosh! Is that you?!” mouthed the beetle. Josh could just about hear Danny’s voice behind the glass.
    â€œYes! It’s me!” he called back. “Danny! You’ve got to get out of there!”

    â€œ
Tell
me about it!” yelled Danny. “It’s no fun being stuck in here with nymphy boy!”
    â€œHey! Is youz dissin’ me?” demanded