Trapped in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, teenager Rachel Zilber escaped the horror by writing about the adventures of Princess Anya of Mars... and was transported into her own make-believe world, along with Katie, a girl from the future. No sooner did our heroines defeat the dastardly King Ares III of Mars and help the good princess ascend to the Sandstone Throne, an adventure recounted in Seven Against Mars, than they must face an even more dangerous enemy: Da Mayor of Venus "Beppo" Bellissini, a cruel tyrant who has kidnapped Katie's sister Sonya! Can they save her and avert the insidious threat this sinister new villain poses to the fragile fabric of the reality they have created?
Those jerks from Venus were going to be good and sorry they’d kidnapped Sonya Goldberg-Webb. Sonya herself had told them so, several times an hour, for the past three weeks, ever since they’d grabbed her on the way home from school on Mars and stuffed her in this rocketship. That meant, by rough reckoning, and even allowing time off for sleeping and eating, she had told them so more than three thousand times. But far from getting tired of it, she was enjoying it more and more all the time.
She loved watching the face of the tall kidnapper, the one she called Fatso because he had a slight paunch, bunch up and freeze as if his jaw muscles were developing a cramp from being clamped down so hard and so often, while his nostrils flared out so wide they looked like garden hoses. She loved even more making the short kidnapper, the one she called Spazzo, jump about a mile by reminding him suddenly just how sorry he was going to be, right when he was least expecting it. |
