The little girl stood up and grabbed her hand. Slipping and sliding, blindly trying to find her way back to the front door, Nicola managed to drag her out of the mass of bubbles and back into the clearing.
She turned to see the rest of the Space Brigade emerging from the school. Sean had a child sitting happily astride his shoulders, while Shimlara, being the tallest, had managed to scoop up two at once. Apart from being covered in bubbles, so they all looked like miniature snowmen, the children seemed perfectly happy.
"Oh! Oh! My darlings! My sweeties!" The preschool teacher tried to hug them all at once.
There were still voices coming from inside the preschool, so Nicola and the others brushed the bubbles from their eyes and ran straight back in to pull out more children.
This time Nicola found a little boy humming happily to himself in the corner.
"I'm staying here," he told Nicola. "These bubbles are beautiful!"
"No, you're not," said Nicola firmly, grabbing him by the elbow and pulling him outside.
"How many are still in there?" asked Greta, grunting with relief as she deposited a rather plump child at the teacher's feet.
The teacher looked confused.
"Oh, I'm not sure. Let me see, we're still missing dear little Sebastian, aren't we? Oh, no we're not--here he is! Yes, Sebastian, I'm sure we'll find your violin. Have you glorious people come across Sebastian's violin by any chance?"
"That's not important right now!" Greta was exasperated. "We need to know how many more children we need to save!"
"Yes, yes, of course you do," said the teacher. "Children are far more important than violins! It's just that I can't seem to count the children! They're like marbles, rolling this way and that."
Greta sighed and wiped a layer of bubbly froth from her face. "Right!" she cried like an army officer. "All children line up in front of me now!" The children jumped and immediately ran to obey her orders.
Greta counted them efficiently. "Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Nineteen! So that means we're still missing one child, right?"
"Yes," said the teacher. "I definitely have twenty children in my class because that's how many strawberry frosted cupcakes I make on strawberry frosted cupcake day!"
The Space Brigade renewed their efforts--running back into the preschool, slipping and sliding, tearing their fingernails, and grazing their knees as they searched through the bubbles for the last missing child.
After ten minutes, just when Nicola was beginning to feel quite frantic, the teacher suddenly cried, "Oh, I forgot Jerry Sweet!" The Space Brigade went back outside.
"Jerry Sweet!" said the teacher happily. "I always make him an extra strawberry frosted cupcake because he loves them so much, so I let you have two, don't I, Jerry?"
The fat-cheeked little boy whom Greta had saved nodded and licked his lips solemnly.
"So that means I must have nineteen children in my class, not twenty!" said the teacher. "Goodness, what a lot of complex mathematics I'm doing today!"
"So we've definitely got everyone?" double-checked Nicola.
"Yes," said the teacher. "Yes, you do! You're heroes!"
"What's that?" Tyler lifted his head. Nicola couldn't hear a thing. Tyler seemed to have developed superhuman hearing.
And then she heard a pounding of footsteps coming their way like a great herd of elephants.
"Is it Volcomanian soldiers already?" asked Sean.
The teacher looked terrified. "Oh, quick, quick, we must hide, get back under the bubbles, darlings!"
At that moment, a crowd of people poured into the clearing and the teacher's face broke into a smile.
"It's not soldiers!" she said happily. "It's the parents!"
CHAPTER 21
The parents were half-crazed with fear. They stumbled and tripped and shouted. When they saw their children, they grabbed them in suffocating embraces and repeated their names over and over.