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the top floor
he saw that the roof was sprouting with twitching antennae and swivelling satellite dishes and he began to feel a heavy pulsing in his temples, like he did whenever a storm was gathering. Frankie
approached the windows and squinted through the dark glass. At first he thought he had stumbled across another security office. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of TV monitors flickered on the high walls.
But there were no security guards. Instead, stern-looking men and women, each wearing a large set of headphones, were watching the screens through narrowed eyes and pushing buttons on an enormous
control panel. It was an enormous computer laboratory but far more high-tech than anything he had ever seen. Frankie strained his eyes to try to make sense of the rapidly-moving images on the
screens.
    One thing was for sure, these images had not been filmed by security cameras. The monitors displayed scenes that looked as if they had been taken from family movies or photo albums. There were
holidays, birthday parties and days at the beach but there were also more everyday images. There was a child with grazed knees being comforted by his dad, and another in which two small girls were
reading comics and rolling around in fits of giggles. All of these scenes seemed to give off a warm, magical glow. But the people in the headphones didn’t seem to notice. They just rewound
and replayed the tapes, squinting at the children on the monitors as if they were tadpoles in a jar. But some of the monitors showed other things. Things that made Frankie gulp with sadness or
sweat with fright. There were scenes of a small boy being told off for something he hadn’t done, and a sequence in which a girl wandered across a park at twilight, lost and howling with
terror.
    Then, all of a sudden, Frankie saw something that shook him rigid. On one screen, there for everyone to see, was a ten-year-old boy sitting alone on a bench as the other children played together
at the end of the playground. Frankie felt as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs. His head was pounding and he felt the same swilling, soupy feeling in his stomach that he had felt the
night before. He lurched away from the glass and staggered down the fire escape as fast as he could.
    He found Alphonsine rummaging headfirst in a huge bin, tossing promising-looking scraps to Colette.
    ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Frankie. ‘Quickly.’
    ‘What is it?’ said Alphonsine, pulling a bit of cabbage out of her hair. ‘What did you find out?’
    Frankie took a deep breath. ‘I think I know what’s wrong with my Mechanimal.’

 

    Neet Banerjee sat on her own on the bus back from Marvella’s. Since she’d come back to school her old friends Millie and Miranda weren’t talking to her. They
had said that if she wanted to stay in their
Best Friends Forever Club
then she’d have to stop hanging out with that loser Frankie, at which point Neet had told them that she
didn’t give a monkeynut about their club, and that was the end of that. She didn’t regret it for a second, but all the same it was horrid to be left out.
    To cheer herself up, Neet rummaged through the loot in her goody-bag. There was an
I Love Marvella’s
T-shirt and an
I Love Marvella’s
badge, but best of all there
was a Gadget the Rabbit schoolbag that she had picked out especially for Frankie. It had a pair of shiny rabbit ears sticking out of the top and a billion different pockets to keep all your gadgets
and gizmos in. As Neet was inspecting the different zips and flaps she suddenly saw something that didn’t look like it was supposed to be there. Sticking out of one of the inside pockets was
a slip of creased paper. Neet pulled it out and carefully unfolded it. It was a message. Neet smoothed out the creases so that she could see it clearly. The words were written in a large spidery
scrawl as if the writer had been in a terrible hurry. Suddenly, she drew a sharp gasp. She knew