Out of This World

by Chris Wooding

  “Oh, sure,” Mazzy scoffed. “A kid guarded by androids, with some of the nastiest Hunters in the Nexus after him. You must be very ordinary.”

  “They were my … my parents,” Jack said, feeling terribly sad all of a sudden. Even one of Dad’s ambushes would be better than this.

  Boston, Dunk, and Mazzy exchanged glances. Then they burst out laughing.

  “Nice try, Gradius Clench,” said Boston. He mimed a crying face, rubbing his cheeks with his knuckles. “Boo-hoo, my parents!”

  “My name is Jack,” said Jack, his voice becoming hard. “Not … Grodius Clutch or whatever.”

  Boston rolled his eyes. “Mazzy? Show him?”

  Mazzy slipped on a pair of goggles that looked like camera lenses. From her eyes, she projected a picture into the empty air, hovering in front of her. Jack stared as he saw himself there, beneath large red letters that spelled out WANTED FOR SABOTAGE, THEFT, AND TREASON.

  Dunk whistled. “Treason. That’s a big one.”

  “That’s not me!” Jack cried. “I’m an American citizen! The most treasonous thing I ever did was switch channels during the Super Bowl!”

  “It sure looks like you, though,” said Boston.

  “It’s not me! I’m me!”

  Boston held up his hand. “We get it, Gradius. You’re in deep cover. You’ve been pretending to be a schoolboy for so long, you’ve started to believe your own story. Maybe you’re lying low to escape your enemies. Maybe you mean to infiltrate some evil organization. Very cool. But can we drop it now?”

  “I AM NOT GRANTIUS CLUNGE! ” Jack screamed.

  “GRADIUS CLENCH!” Boston yelled back. “AND YES YOU ARE!”

  “No, he’s not,” said Ilara airily.

  Jack pointed at her, as if to say: See?

  “I looked into his mind while we were escaping. He’s not Gradius Clench.”

  Boston seemed lost. “But …” He indicated the image hovering in the air, and then Jack.

  “I know he looks like him. Exactly like him. But it’s not him,” said Ilara. “Memories don’t lie. He’s lived his whole life on Earth. He actually thought those androids were his parents. Also, he has a foul habit of leaving his toenail clippings on the floor.”

  “Hey!” Jack cried.

  “Why didn’t you say?” Boston asked Ilara.

  Ilara smirked. “I thought it would be amusing to watch you flail around for a while. It turns out it’s quite boring.”

  Mazzy, who had taken off her goggles, gave Ilara a nasty glare. “You know, your superiority complex can get kind of grating.”

  “Wait, I can prove it!” said Boston. He hurried out of the room and came back holding Jack’s sketchbook, which had been in his backpack when he was captured.

  “That’s mine!” said Jack, rather pointlessly. He tried to get up to grab it, but Dunk shoved him back down again.

  Boston flipped through the pages, showing them pictures. “Look! This is Gallia. Arcturus Prime. And this one is a Mechanic!” He brandished the sketchbook triumphantly at Ilara. “If he’s never left Earth, how come he’s been drawing things from all over the Nexus? Things he’s never seen?”

  “What’s that?” asked Ilara, peering closer.

  The page had fallen open at the last sketch Jack had done, of the enormous fiery bird flying through space. “How am I supposed to know?” Boston said.

  Jack was amazed. “Are you saying … these pictures in my head … they’re real?”

  “Of course they’re real,” Mazzy said.

  “Nevertheless,” said Ilara, “he’s not Gradius Clench.”

  “Who is this guy Globius Crutch?”

  “GRADIUS CLENCH!” they all yelled at him together.

  “All right,” said Jack, slightly hurt. “No need to shout.”

  “Gradius Clench is a spy,” said Mazzy. “They say he’s the best in the business. He might only be a kid like us, but these past few years he’s put a lot of noses out of joint. Powerful people. Nobody’s sure who he works for, or if he works for anyone at all. Nobody’s really sure what he’s up to. But a lot of people want to get their hands on him.”

  “Do I look like a spy?” Jack asked.

  “No,” said Mazzy. “Which is exactly how I would expect a spy to look.”

  “You sent a distress signal!” Boston accused him. “Why did you do that?”

  Jack was about to protest that he didn’t send any kind of signal, but then he remembered the devices in the attic that Thomas had fiddled with. He remembered the beam of green light, shooting into the sky. “That was a distress signal?”

  “Well, it was an alert of some kind, but we couldn’t decode it,” said Mazzy. “Hard-core encryption. We were still deciding whether to investigate when a bunch of Hunters turned up through the rift gate. I hacked their comms, and they were talking about claiming a bounty on Gradius Clench. So we thought—”

  “We thought we’d get you first,” said Boston, sulking a little now. “And after all that effort, turns out you’re not even him.” He brightened suddenly. “Hey, we could still pass him off as Gradius, sell him for the bounty, anyway?”

  He looked around at his crew for support. Nobody gave him any.

  “If he’s not Gradius Clench, then he’s innocent of whatever they want him for,” said Mazzy. “Can’t sell out an innocent person. Who knows what they’d do to him.”

  Boston looked like he was trying to think of some argument that might convince them that it would be okay. He didn’t manage it.

  “Great,” he said, sagging. “So now we have the world’s most useless hostage.”

  “We could put him back?” Mazzy suggested.

  “I ain’t going back to Earth,” Dunk muttered. “You in a hurry to get decontaminated again?”

  Mazzy eyed the decontamination chamber nervously.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Boston. “The rift to Earth is closed now. No telling when it’ll open. Might be that the Hunters got trapped on Earth, or maybe they got into the rift gate in time. Either way, we can’t go back. And I’m not sure our hostage here has much to go back to, anyway.”

  That struck Jack hard. Boston was right. Everything was gone. If he went home, he’d be an orphan, and with no relatives or even any real friends, his prospects were bleak indeed. As much as his parents had been strange and disconnected, he missed them now. They had provided a life for him, at least. They had … guarded him.

  His whole world had been ripped out from underneath him, and everything afterward had happened so fast that he’d hardly had time to make sense of it. He wondered whether he should be freaking out more about being chased by killer aliens, or being kidnapped from Earth through a hole in the sky.

  But, try as he might, he couldn’t dig up the panic he expected to feel. He wasn’t particularly eager to go back to Earth. What was happening to him now felt more natural and right than his life back at home had been. He thought about the pictures in his sketchbook and wondered if, on some level, he’d always been ready for this.

  But how did that make any sense? How did he know?

  Boston sighed. “Toss him in with the other one. We’ll figure out what to do with them later.”

  Dunk hauled Jack to his feet and began marching him out the door. “Wait! Wait!” Jack cried, but Dunk’s strength was incredible; it was like trying to resist a mountain. “What do you mean, the other one?”

  “Caught him sniffing around the Epsilon,” Boston said as he was dragged away. “Didn’t have time for Ilara to blank his mind, so he had to come, too. Hey, you might have something in common. You’re both from Earth. Won’t find many more like you around!”

  “What’s his name? What’s his name?” Jack cried, but Dunk had already pulled him out of earshot and was towing him down a corridor, muttering something about union rates and indentured labor. He palmed a door lock, and the door slid aside with a hiss, revealing a small cell beyond.

  “In you go,” said Dunk, lobbing him inside. The door clo
sed behind Jack before he could get back on his feet.

  “Jack?” said an eager, quivering voice in the gloom. “Jack, is that you?”

  Jack turned slowly. He knew that voice. Suddenly he remembered the bike he’d seen in the forest.

  Of all the people to be stranded with, not him!

  “Jack!” cried Thomas, his pudgy face lighting up like the sunrise.

  “Home, sweet home,” said Boston sarcastically as he stepped off the loading ramp of the Epsilon and into the bustling airdock.

  Jack and Thomas followed him, with the rest of the crew keeping a close eye on them. When they got to the foot of the ramp, they stood there and gawked.

  It was like they’d stepped into a science fiction movie. Several dozen aircraft of all makes and sizes surrounded them, and none of them was anything like they’d ever seen on Earth. There were some that looked like crouched beetles, some that were thin like needles, and some that were so blocky and enormous that Jack wondered how they could fly. One looked as if it had been grown from seeds rather than built by hand. Walking between them were flight crews, passengers, dock officials. Only some of them looked human. The rest were very obviously not.

  “Aliens!” Thomas breathed.

  “This is Gallia, and you’re from Earth,” said Ilara at his shoulder. “You’re the aliens now.”

  The airdock stood on a circular platform projecting out of an endless green sea. A huge yellow sun was rising over the horizon, peering through bands of clouds, setting them alight. A flock of strange seabirds winged overhead, calling in shrill voices. The airdock was attached by a bridge to a gleaming city of silver and steel that rose out of the ocean, towering above them, its spires scratching the sky.

  This is Gallia, Jack thought in amazement.

  He’d had a little time to think on the journey here, though not much, and Thomas’s babbling hadn’t made it easier to organize his feelings. Of all the people he could have ended up with, it had to be him, didn’t it? But as much as Thomas got on his nerves, he had to admit there was some comfort in a familiar face. Any port in a storm.

  He’d expected Thomas—sickly, sniffling, pudgy Thomas—to be panicked and blubbering at the idea of being kidnapped. Thomas had surprised him with his resilience; in fact, he seemed more excited than scared about the whole thing. Judging by his behavior to date, he had a hard time grappling with consequences, and the idea that they might be in real danger had probably not occurred to him yet.

  As for Jack, he felt it best to bide his time for now, until he could get a better idea of what was going on. It wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter, anyway.

  Keep your eyes and ears open, said Dad in his head. Be ready to act when the time comes.

  Another spike of grief pierced him. He bit his lip. It bothered him that he cared. He shouldn’t care. They were androids! Imposters! Whoever they were, they had lied to him all this time. Now that he’d digested that fact, it made him angry.

  And there was something else he’d thought of, something that made him angry and dizzy and lost all at once.

  If the people he thought were his parents were really androids, what had happened to his real parents?

  “Sure you don’t just want to leave the Earthers behind?” Dunk said. He was pulling a wheeled metal container the size of a dumpster behind him.

  “I don’t like leaving them on the Epsilon by themselves. No telling what they’ll get up to. Anyway, you’ll behave, won’t you, boys?” Boston held up his hand, revealing a metal bracelet with a button on it.

  Jack and Thomas nodded sullenly. Both of them had thin metal collars around their necks, capable of delivering painful shocks to the nervous system. Boston had already demonstrated how painful they could get, even though he hadn’t really needed to. Jack suspected he was still miffed about kidnapping the wrong person.

  “Remember, you’ve got nowhere else to go,” he told them. “Come on. I’ve got some business to see to. After that, we’ll work out what to do with you.”

  “Here comes the inspector,” Mazzy murmured.

  A uniformed man with no chin and a haircut you could set your watch to came striding across the dock. He stopped before them and eyed the container that Dunk was hauling.

  “What do you have in there, then?” he asked.

  Ilara stepped forward, her cat eyes intense, half a smile on her lips. “You don’t want to look in there, Inspector,” she told him calmly.

  “Of course not!” said the inspector. “Why would I want to look in there? Off you go, now.” He waved them past toward the bridge.

  Thomas stared at Ilara in awe. “Did you just do a Jedi mind trick on him?” he gasped.

  Ilara rolled her eyes and sighed.

  They crossed over the narrow bridge toward the city, shining in the beautiful sunrise. Jack looked out across the sea, and his chest swelled with the air of this alien world. He was filled with wonder. It’s just how I imagined it, he thought. But how is that possible?

  “Pretty planet, isn’t it?” said Boston, following his eyes. “It’s not pretty where we’re going.”

  Gallia only shone on the surface. Up there, Boston told them, the rich lived in wonderful, elegant floating cities and wanted for nothing. For everyone else, there was the Underneath.

  They took an elevator at the end of the bridge, down into the depths of the sea. Through the windows they could see out into the water that surrounded them. At first they watched reflective whales and colorful tentacled things propelling themselves through the sunlit water, but the sea became dark as they went deeper. Then there was only blackness, where luminous, nasty-looking things lurked, and they caught glimpses of huge creatures with too many teeth.

  Thomas gabbled all the way down. He was desperate to tell the story of how he had come to be here, even though Jack had already heard it and the rest hadn’t asked.

  “I thought there was something funny about that Jodie girl. I mean, she must have done something to you, right, Jack? Like, some kind of mind control. Otherwise you wouldn’t have let her talk to me like that.”

  Jack made a vague noise that could have meant anything. He was only half listening, anyway. The idea that he might have real parents somewhere had been growing in his mind, and he was beginning to get an idea of how he might start looking for them.

  Keep your eyes and ears open, said the voice in his head again. Be ready to act when the time comes.

  Shut UP, Jack thought resentfully. You’re not my dad.

  “Anyway, so I followed Jack and saw which direction he was going,” Thomas told the others, “but I didn’t have enough evidence to act on my suspicions, so I went back to the school, because I hadn’t gotten my stuff out of my locker for the weekend yet. That was when I heard the commotion, and I found … Guess what I found?”

  He waited for someone to ask him. Finally Mazzy stirred and took the bait. “What did you find?”

  “Jodie Ellis! Someone found her unconscious in the girls’ bathroom. They pulled her out, but they couldn’t wake her up. It was like she’d been drugged or something.”

  “She was lucky. The Changeling doesn’t usually leave its victims alive,” said Boston.

  “Probably didn’t like the idea of getting Earth blood everywhere,” Mazzy offered. “That stuff’s swarming with infections.”

  “I knew I had to save Jack!” said Thomas, waving his hands around to get everyone’s attention back on him. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I figured it was something to do with government agents or something, so I jumped on my bike and headed off after him. I got into the forest and I heard laser guns firing or whatever, and I thought I’d better get off the path and into the trees so I could sneak up on them.” He paused to take a blast on his inhaler. “Then I got a little lost and couldn’t find my way back to the path.”

  “Yeah, excellent attempt at a rescue,” said Jack dryly. “Thanks for that.”

  Thomas beamed. “You’re welcome,” he said, completely miss
ing the sarcasm. “Anyway, I wandered for a while and ended up in a clearing, just in time to see you three appear from thin air!” He motioned at Boston, Mazzy, and Dunk. “I guess the Epsilon was invisible and you stepped off it.”

  “Right,” said Mazzy. “And then you made this weird noise of surprise like a strangled guinea pig, and Boston jumped out of his skin and shot you with his blaster.”

  “I thought he might be the Changeling!” Boston protested weakly.

  “Lucky it was on stun, that’s all I can say.”

  “Yes … lucky,” said Jack. “So why did you bring him on board?”

  Boston shrugged. “Well, he’d already seen us, and we couldn’t have witnesses. We weren’t supposed to be on Earth at all. We were going to get Ilara to wipe the memory of us away, and then we could let him go, but things got hot after that and we never got the chance.”

  “Erasing memories is a delicate operation,” Ilara said. “It takes time.”

  “So I got to go into space!” Thomas cried.

  Boston motioned at the black depths around them. “Does this look like space?” he asked.

  “A bit,” Thomas said, shrugging. “It’s dark, anyway.”

  “Nobody goes into space,” said Mazzy. “It’s a waste of time. Space is too big to get anywhere worthwhile before you die of old age. Even if you went at the speed of light, it’d take forever. And it’s impossible to travel at the speed of light.”

  “Er, that’s why they have warp speed?” said Thomas, snickering. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Mazzy pinched the bridge of her nose to fend off an impending stress headache. “This is not Star Trek,” she said.

  “Hyperspace, then!”

  “Or Star Wars.”

  “So how did we end up on Gallia?” Jack asked.

  “Through a rift gate,” said Boston.

  “Through a who’s that now?” Thomas said.

  “Rift gate,” said Mazzy. “See, eleventy crillion years ago or whenever, some ancient race we call the Elders figured out that traveling through space was a dud move. So they sent twelve of these rift gates to various planets out across the galaxy. Maybe it took them a million years to get where they were going, maybe longer, but when they got there, they set themselves up automatically, and—bam!—A to B in an instant.”