Copyright © 2019 by Disney Book Group
Designed by Jamie Alloy
Cover art © 2019 by Chi Birmingham
Lettering © 2019 by Risa Rodil
Cover design by Jamie Alloy
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address
Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-368-00234-9
Visit www.DisneyBooks.com
For Troy and Blake, the original Gooseys
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Two: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Three: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Four: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Five: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Six: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Seven: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Eight: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Nine: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Ten: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Eleven: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Twelve: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Thirteen: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Fourteen: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Fifteen: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Sixteen: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Seventeen: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Eighteen: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Nineteen: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Twenty: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Twenty-one: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Twenty-two: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Twenty-three: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Twenty-four: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Twenty-five: Figerella Jammeslot
Chapter Twenty-six: Kyler Centaurus
Chapter Twenty-seven: Figerella Jammeslot
Acknowledgments
About the Author
It’s not common knowledge or anything, but stealing a spaceship is way easier than it should be. So easy that an innocent kid could do it by accident.
I would know because I was that kid.
And it was an accident. Mostly.
It all started on my family’s cruiser, the USS Whirlwind. We were on our way home from another trip to Nana’s planet, taking the same boring route as always, the one without a single nebula or comet, or even any asteroids, to watch through the observatory. Just straight back to Earth in a pitch-black wormhole. Never mind that the Fasti Sun Festival was happening a short hop away. Nooooo, we couldn’t spare a few extra days for a once-in-a-lifetime display of man-made stars. That would have been too educational for a family more interested in Astroturf than astrophysics.
But I’m getting off track.
The day it all went down, my mom had her head buried in the gravity drive, tweaking the settings because that was what she did for a living as an engineer. On the other side of the pilothouse, my dad was muttering funny non-swears like slime-sucking donkey lover at his tablet while he organized the next anti–Niatrix Corporation protest. As in Quasar Niatrix, the planet flipper. Quasar’s company fixed up worlds in other solar systems and sold property to people like my nana, who couldn’t afford to live on Earth because of the redonk taxes. Quasar was superrich, with a billboard-worthy face and eleventy dozen charities that helped folks settle on new planets. I imagine he was no saint, but I couldn’t deny the man knew how to run a business. A lot of folks thought that was what Earth needed, to be run like a company instead of governed by the United Nations. I wasn’t sure about that, but Quasar had offered to absorb Earth into his private corporation and pay every citizen dividends…as in free money! I guess my dad was allergic to cash, because he’d been protesting for people to vote no on letting Quasar be the CEO of Earth. That was all my dad did anymore: come home from his nonprofit job and spend all night plotting Quasar’s downfall. My father hated Quasar so much that his right eye twitched—actually twitched—every time he heard Quasar’s name, which was a lot because the dude practically owned the galaxy. Anyway, my point is that my dad was too blinded by his rage-colored glasses to notice what my four brothers were about to do to me in the next room.
Give me a NWARF: a Noogie Wedgie ARmpit Fart.
(It’s a thing, look it up. They added it to the slang dictionary.)
And as usual, I didn’t do anything to deserve it. I was minding my own business, kicked back on the sofa, watching a virtual-reality simulation of the Fasti Sun Festival—because, really, man-made stars!—when a set of fists pounded on the door.
“Hey, open up, dork,” shouted Duke, my oldest and jerkiest brother.
“Yeah, let us in,” called another voice. It sounded like one of the twins, but I couldn’t tell whether it was Devin or Rylan. Since they’d turned fourteen and their voices had started cracking, they sounded exactly the same—like a moose in a blender. “We need a fifth man for laser hockey.”
“Well…” added the other twin. “We need a man, but we’ll settle for you, Ky.”
A round of chuckles broke out. I heard my kid brother, Bonner, say, “Nice one.”
“Butt-kisser,” I muttered under my breath. And to think Bonner used to look up to me. For a while there, he’d even copied the way I made my bunk every morning, tucking in the corners to create a tight, crisp edge. That was before he’d sprouted four inches over the summer and decided sports and girls were cooler than tidiness and science. Now that he’d joined forces with my other brothers, I had to look up to him—literally—while he helped them terrorize me.
At least I’d remembered to lock the living-room door this time.
With a sigh, I turned up the simulator volume. A canned roar of applause surrounded me as a hologram of my personal hero, Dr. Sally Nesbit, appeared on a hover stage that coasted high above the festival grounds. I clapped along with the crowd until Dr. Nesbit raised one slender brown hand, and the crowd fell silent in admiration. Dr. Nesbit was a pioneer in the field of celestology, the science of creating new solar systems. Last year I’d won an essay competition on why celestology was the wave of the future, and as a reward, Dr. Nesbit had called me—on my own personal comm!—to congratulate me. That call was the highlight of my life. Not only had she grown the first artificial star, she’d invented terraforming, too, making dead planets livable. With Earth so overcrowded, I couldn’t imagine anything more important than creating new worlds. Dr. Nesbit was a legend. I didn’t just want to meet her. I wanted to be her.
I’d settle for meeting her, though.
She would be at the Fasti Sun Festival—the real one—in two days’ time. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could convince my parents to take me there. My mom loved science; she was the one who’d signed me up for my first physics camp when I was five. There had to be a way to sway her.
But how?
Fists pounded on the door again.
“Ugh,” I groaned, pausing the simulation. “Take a hint and go away!”
“Come out of your cave, loser,” Duke shouted. “We can’t play with four people. We need five to make a team.”
“That’s not my problem,” I told him…mostly because there was a closed door between us. Duke could make an elephant feel small, but he couldn’t break through two inches of solid steel. At least I didn’t think so.
“Not cool, bro,” Bonner hollered. “Why you gotta be like that?”
Before I could think of a good comeback, I heard a series of beeps echoing from the keypad, a
nd I froze. The twins were overriding the lock. A moment later, the door slid into the wall with a hiss, and all four of my brothers strolled into the room, slow and easy, like sharks circling their prey.
Duke shook his head at me. “You should’ve come peacefully, Ky. Now you have to pay for ditching your team.”
“Yeah, there’s no I in team,” Bonner said with his arms folded. The little traitor.
“No,” I told him. “But there’s a u in bug off.”
Bonner jutted his pimply chin at Dr. Nesbit’s frozen hologram. “Laser hockey’s more important than some lame sim. Bros before shows, man.”
“It’s not a show.” I switched off the sim before Bonner could make fun of my obsession with celestology. It stung more, coming from him. Maybe because he was the closest I’d come to having an ally in this family. “It’s a playback of last year’s Fasti Sun Festival.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Bonner said. “We’re sick of you locking us out.”
“Or trying to lock us out.” Rylan smirked. “There’s not a switch on this ship that we can’t hack.”
His twin, Devin, nodded in agreement. “You’d think Ky would’ve learned by now. Kind of slow for a genius, isn’t he?”
“True,” Rylan said. Then he glanced at his bare wrist. “Hey, random question. Anyone know what time it is?”
“Oh, I think I know what time it is,” Duke said with a smile I didn’t like at all.
“Me too.” Devin licked an index finger and held it up as if testing the wind. “Judging by the angle of the breeze and the position of the nearest sun, I’d say it’s…NWARF time!”
I leaped off the sofa. “No!”
Duke pounded a fist into his opposite palm. “Yes.”
I bolted for the exit, but I wasn’t fast enough. Duke caught me in a headlock under his smelly armpit and told me, “Don’t fight it. You know there’s no use.”
“Gross!” I yelled, trying to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose. Duke seriously needed to use his water rations for a shower. I pushed against him, but there was no escaping his quarterback arm. “Knock it off,” I told him, still struggling. “You didn’t let Ricky Sheiver beat me up at school, so why is it okay for you to—”
“That’s because Ricky Sheiver is a little butt-chinned punk,” Duke interrupted. “Ricky doesn’t get to mess with my kid brother.” An evil chuckle shook Duke’s chest. “Only I get to mess with my kid brother.”
“Mooooom!” I hollered, right before Duke clapped a palm over my mouth and forced me to inhale through my nostrils.
Oh man, the stank.
If I thought that was bad, it was nothing compared with the moment Bonner stuck his butt in my face and ripped one. Bonner had exactly one superpower, and it was converting food into toxic gas.
“Quit whining, dork,” he told me, squeezing out another SBD (Silent But Deadly). Emphasis on the deadly. I’m not lying when I say that Bonner’s farts could gag a maggot.
“Yeah, take it like a man,” added Rylan while he scrubbed his knuckles over my scalp. Then Devin said, “We’re putting hair on your chest,” and he yanked my underwear so far up my crack that I tasted cotton.
That was when I snapped.
I bit the fleshy area between Duke’s thumb and pointer finger—hard. He screeched like a howler monkey and let go of my neck, which allowed me to snap back my head and clock Devin in the face. Next I made a fist and aimed for Rylan’s shoulder, but before I could land a punch, my feet drifted up from the floor, and I windmilled my arms for balance as the ceiling rushed toward me.
Gasping, I braced for impact.
We were about to crash.
Okay, never mind.
We didn’t crash. My mom just turned off the ship’s gravity drive to break up our fight. (You see, there’s no gravity in space, so without a special gadget drawing us to the floor, we would float around all the time. And it’s a lot harder to throw punches when we’re drifting in midair.) Mom disabled the gravity every once in a while, but it was a total mind freak and always made me feel like I was free-falling to my death.
In the air above the living room, random objects floated past my head: sofa cushions, shoes, dirty socks, bagged snacks, an Encyclopedia Universica volume, and the sim projector I’d been watching when my brothers had attacked me. I waved aside a dusty sock and reached for a fixed object to hold on to, some way to right myself, but all I could do was drift upside down and wait for my mom to appear on the scene and ground me into next year. Because no matter what my brothers did, they always made sure the blame landed on yours truly.
Brothers are the worst.
My mom sailed into the living room like a blond torpedo. She narrowed her eyes, glaring first at the other blonds in the room and then at me. Of all five kids, I was the only one who didn’t resemble our parents. Duke, Rylan, Bonner, and Devin looked so similar that you could barely pick them out of a lineup. They were jocks with Mom’s light hair and Dad’s chocolate-brown eyes and tanned skin. I was the oddball of the family, with dark hair and light eyes that could pass for blue or gray. Plus, I was super-pale, like full-on pasty, with orange freckles that blended together on my cheeks to form blotches resembling radiation scars. That was why my brothers liked telling everyone I was adopted from a group of radioactive mutants called Wanderers.
Did I mention that brothers are the worst?
Mom’s gaze jumped from one kid to the next until she noticed the red blood droplets floating out from Devin’s nose. Then her cheeks darkened, and I swear I saw steam escape from her ears. Mom hated it when we fought. It was the only thing that really flipped her switch.
“What the cuss is going on here?” she demanded.
Four index fingers pointed at me.
“It was Ky,” said Bonner.
Rylan rubbed the shoulder I hadn’t hit. “He slugged me for no reason.”
“Well, he head-butted me!” Devin said in a nasally tone. He was floating sideways, one hand cupped over his face. “I think my nose is broken!”
Good, I thought. But I knew better than to say it out loud.
“The little jerk bit me!” Duke cradled his palm to his chest. “Actually bit me, right on the tendon!” Duke weakly tried to make a fist, playing up his injury to milk sympathy from our mom. For such a big guy, he could be a total wuss sometimes. “I can’t grip a ball now. Scouts are coming to Friday night’s game…Astro League scouts!” He glared at me while his nostrils flared. “If I lose my scholarship because of you, I swear I’ll—”
He cut off as the ship entered Earth’s gravitational field, and we slowly drifted down until our feet made contact with the steely floor. In the living room—and in every room beyond—the clutter that had risen into the air now pelted down like hailstones. As soon as my boots hit metal, I scurried behind my mom. I didn’t want to act like a baby or anything, but Duke had some serious murder in his eyes, and I sort of enjoyed being, you know, alive.
“You guys can dish it out,” I told my brothers, especially Duke, “but you can’t take it. Remember that the next time you think you’re so tough.”
“Kyler,” Mom ground out through her teeth. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Why do you always have to…Why can’t you just…” She sputtered for a while, until she sighed and said, “I don’t even know what to do with you anymore.”
Something in Mom’s words made my ribs feel heavy. I had disappointed her. More than usual, I mean. And why hadn’t she asked for my side of the story? Most of the time she at least pretended to give me a chance before she brought down the hammer of justice. My eyes started to prickle, but I couldn’t cry in front of my brothers. So to stop the tears, I doubled down on my anger and blurted the first thing that jumped off my tongue.
“Maybe you don’t know what to do with me because I don’t belong here! I’ve never belonged here! I hate this family!”
Everyone drew a gasp, and the room went silent. No one moved or blinked. I saw my brothers trading sid
eways glances, but they seemed to have stopped breathing. Bonner was the first to unfreeze his face. He made a little circle with his lips as if to say Oooooh, Ky’s gonna get it!
My mom’s voice turned flat in a way that sent my stomach dipping into my shorts—which were still lodged in my butt crack, by the way. “Go help your father dock the ship,” she said to my brothers while using her eyes to tell me to stay put. Her gaze was so misty that I could only stand it for a moment before I had to look down at my boots. “And make sure you send him in when he’s done.”
I knew what that meant: Just wait until your father hears about this. And thanks to the protest, my dad was already wearing his rage-colored glasses.
Bonner was right. I was so gonna get it.
You know that sick, tingly sensation that spreads down your legs when you realize you’re busted? Or maybe you feel it in your spine. Whatever. That part doesn’t matter. The point is everyone has an uh-oh feeling, and mine went into hyperdrive the instant my dad walked into the living room and found it looking like a crime scene.
I knew my brothers had already told him their warped version of the truth, because Dad was grinding his teeth, something he started doing a few months ago when the anti-Niatrix protests started. Aside from Dad’s right eye twitching, his grinding teeth was a surefire sign that he was about to blow his top.
I grinned to break the ice. “Keep doing that and you’ll crack a molar, Dad.”
He didn’t smile. Neither did my mom. Tough crowd, my parents.
“Aw, come on.” I spread my arms wide. “I was just defending myself.”
Dad raised an eyebrow. “That’s not how I heard it from your brothers.”
“Well, duh,” I said. “Obviously, they lied.”
“Really?” he asked. “Funny thing about bruises and bloody noses: They don’t lie. But there’s not a scratch on you. Makes me wonder what you were defending yourself from.”
My mom flung her hand in the air and yelled, “Kyler, we don’t use our fists to settle arguments. Especially with your brothers. You know that!”
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