Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

Though the slapping rain hurt Molly’s eyes, she kept them open. This was exactly what to be thinking about now, Molly realized. For these moments in the air might be the very last moments of their lives. Molly’s eyes filled with tears as she saw the people in her life who she loved. Her tears were washed off her cheeks by the howling wind. She thought of Rocky and wondered whether she would ever see him again. She remembered how she’d been dreading lessons and wishing for some adventure last time she’d been with him. How she would love to be doing math homework now!

Then her mind turned to all the people she hadn’t seen for a long time. Not Rocky and Ojas, Lucy, Primo, and Forest, but people from her past, the other orphanage children who were now in Los Angeles. She thought about Mrs. Trinklebury, the kind old lady who had, years before, found Molly in a box on a doorstep and saved her. She wished a giant Moon’s Marshmallow box would suddenly appear and scoop her and Petula out of the sky. Molly shut her eyes and held Petula close to her. And she wished. As her parachute was buffeted and she was swung violently underneath it like a human pendulum, she wished. She wished and wished with all her heart that everything would be all right.

And then the rain began to subside. Moonlight slipped through a crack in the clouds, and Molly saw that the storm was above her now. The worst of the storm was over.

She glanced down. There was one very bright spot on the land below. But Molly had no idea how far below her that bright spot was. Nor could she imagine why one spot was so bright when all the rest of the land was so dark. Then Molly realized. The plane they had been in must have nosedived. And the brightness below was fire—fire from its explosive crash. She hoped Malcolm hadn’t gone down with the plane. She glanced at the altimeter on her harness.

10,000 FEET, it read. Molly didn’t know how long it would take for her parachute to drop through ten thousand feet of air, but she suspected it wouldn’t be long. So, reaching for her coordinate compass on her harness’s left strap, she clicked on its tiny light and tried to work out which direction she should be heading. The compass indicated that southwest, and the spring of the Coca River, were straight in front of her. She assumed that she was going in almost the right direction. She reached for the toggles on her parachute. They were, as Micky had said they would be, above her ears, hanging down from the parachute’s canopy strings. Molly pulled on the left-hand toggle to try to start moving westward.

Above her, the canopy sagged a little as she redirected it, and the parachute turned. Molly checked the compass. Its arrow flickered and altered. The altimeter now read 7,000 FEET. Molly hoped the wind was strong enough to get her to where she wanted to go, but not so fast that it would push her past the spring of the Coca River.

Lightning lit the sky again, and now Molly saw the land below, a vast, inhospitable jungle. With every flash of light, she searched the skies for the others. They must be out there somewhere, she thought, but she couldn’t see them. Trying not to think about how alone she and Petula were, Molly concentrated on steering herself down.

The closer she got to the ground, the faster she seemed to be coming down, and the warmer the air felt. The rain forest was huge and mighty and packed full of trees. Molly really didn’t want to land in one. Glad for the lightning now, she looked for a clearing. Spotting one, Molly turned her parachute so that the rain was hitting her in the face, and she shot toward it. Then she loosened the fastenings on Petula’s bag and took off her pet’s mask. She took off her own, too, and breathed in the clean, warm air.

“Hold tight, Petula. This is going to be over soon!” she shouted.

Molly held her legs together as Malcolm had instructed, and she made them as bendy as she could, not knowing what sort of surface she was going to encounter.

Closer, closer the land came. Rushing up at her. And then, there was impact. And with the impact came coldness.

It took Molly a few seconds to realize why everything was suddenly so cold. She had landed in water—in fast-flowing water. Wet and cold as she was from the icy air thousands of feet above, she hardly felt it. A panic gripped her. What kind of water had she fallen into? she wondered. Desperately, she tried to keep her head above the torrential stream. And then she began to worry about Petula, who, she realized, must be half drowning in her bag. As the river tossed and threw her about, Molly did her best to lift up Petula, still in her bag, to make sure that she didn’t drown.