Game of Flames

by Robin Wasserman

  “Gabriel!” Piper said sternly. “That’s rude.”

  “What? How is that rude? Maybe on his planet two heads is the latest trend.”

  Carly giggled.

  “Ignore him,” Dash told Chris. “But…ah, now that you mention it…what does the real you look like?” In movies, aliens were always disguising themselves as humans with high-tech camouflage technology. Or brain-distortion fields. Or disguises made out of human skin.

  Dash tried not to think about that last one.

  “This is the real me,” Chris said. “My people look just like your people on the outside. Our planets share certain key atmospheric and mineralogical features that enabled parallel evolution. This is it. No antenna, no third eye, no two heads. I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “Of course not,” Dash said. He couldn’t stop staring at Chris. It was suddenly starting to dawn on him: this was a being from another planet. An alien. Dash had been so focused on Chris’s lies, and the question of whether he could be trusted, that he’d forgotten to be amazed.

  Chris was from another planet. Dash’s big-brained crewmate was an extraterrestrial.

  And when he thought about it, that might be pretty much the coolest thing that had ever happened in his entire life. Which was saying a lot, given everything that had happened lately.

  “You could have just told us,” Dash said. “You should have. Especially when you knew what we were going to face down on Meta Prime. You let us go in blind.”

  “Why would he tell us the truth?” Gabriel said sarcastically. “So much simpler to just pretend to be a creepy alien overlord named Lord Garquin and make up a whole elaborate fake story to get us where we needed to go. Or was that just more of you having fun?”

  “I’ll admit, the temptation to take up Lord Garquin’s role again was somewhat irresistible,” Chris said, and if Dash didn’t know better, he’d think Chris was blushing. “You said it yourself, this is the best game in the galaxy.”

  “Yeah, that part where we almost got creamed by Cain was especially fun,” Gabriel muttered.

  “But it was also the best way to guide you safely through the planet’s obstacles without raising too many complicated questions,” Chris said, sounding more sure of himself this time. “I thought it was my best option.”

  “That’s what bothers me,” Gabriel said. “You thought lying was your best option then. What about now?” From the beginning, he’d been the most suspicious of Chris, ready to mutiny when the strange older boy first appeared on his ship. “You say you designed this ship—this whole mission. And here you are, risking your life alongside the rest of us. Supposedly. Why would you do that if you’re not even human? What do you care about saving the Earth?”

  “It’s true that Earth is not my original home,” Chris said. “But I have adopted it as my own. Shawn Phillips is my family. You, all of you, are my friends. The success of this mission matters as much to me as it does to you, because your world is also my world. Does it matter whether we come from the same species? You have confided in me, and I should have done the same in you. I made a mistake—but doesn’t that make me more human, not less? Though I can’t prove to you that I speak the truth, I will do everything I can to earn your trust back. Right now, in this moment, all I can do is ask you to have a little faith. Believe me. For all our sakes.”

  It was a pretty speech. But could they afford to be swayed by pretty speeches?

  Piper rubbed the smooth surface of her air chair. She’d started to wonder: If Chris was responsible for all the alien technology on the Cloud Leopard, did that mean he had also designed the air chair? If she had Chris to thank for that…well, didn’t she owe him one?

  Carly remembered how Chris hadn’t judged her for being afraid of the unknown. How could she judge him? Maybe even Chris was sometimes afraid.

  Dash hated that Chris had lied to them. But in a way, Dash was lying too, about his age. And if he had his reasons, maybe so did Chris.

  “I apologize again for keeping this from you,” Chris said. “I made a mistake. You should have known from the beginning.”

  It was the first time he’d actually said that he was sorry—that he’d flat-out admitted he was wrong.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re officially forgiven,” Carly said.

  “You’re still part of Team Alpha,” Piper said.

  “Part of the family,” Dash agreed.

  They all turned to Gabriel.

  “What?” he said.

  “Don’t you have something you want to say to Chris?” Carly prompted him.

  Gabriel scowled hard—then broke into a grin. “Oh, what, that whole alien thing? We still talking about that?” He swatted the topic away. “Forgiven and forgotten.”

  Carly clapped her hands together, hard. “Then it’s agreed. We make this a fresh start. An honest start. No one else on the ship is an alien, right?” She looked from one crew member to the other.

  Dash grinned and shook his head. So did Piper.

  Gabriel paused. “Well, now that you mention it…”

  “I’m not counting visitors from Planet Annoying,” Carly countered.

  “Oh, in that case, one hundred percent human here.”

  “So can we agree?” Piper asked the crew. “Honesty, from here on out? From everyone?”

  “Agreed,” Gabriel said. Carly closed her eyes for a moment, like she was making a silent promise to herself, and then echoed him.

  “I will do my best not to lie to you again,” Chris said.

  Dash said nothing. He didn’t know what he could say. How was he supposed to promise total honesty, when he was keeping such a huge secret?

  He hated lying, but he also knew what would happen if he told the truth. The crew would always be worrying about him. Watching for signs that he was weakening, that the trip was taking its toll. He didn’t want that. He was their leader.

  He had to be strong.

  But he also had to be trustworthy.

  “You guys, I—” Dash stopped when they all turned to look at him. He cleared his throat. “I, uh, there’s maybe something I—”

  The insistent beep of an incoming transmission stopped him.

  “It’s Earth!” Carly cried, bringing their mission commander’s image up on the screen. Dash swallowed a sigh of relief. He would still tell them the truth. When they were done talking to Commander Phillips.

  Maybe.

  “I’ve been trying to get through to you for days,” Phillips said. Communicating over such large distances was always dicey. Even when he got through, his voice was clouded with static and his image froze every few seconds. Still, it was better than nothing. “If all’s going according to schedule I assume by now you’ve made it to Meta Prime and I look forward to hearing…” His voice trailed off, as he eyed each of them in turn. His gaze settled longest on Chris. “I see,” he said. “You told them the truth about where you came from.”

  “They figured it out,” Chris said.

  Phillips shook his head ruefully. “Of course they did. They’re the four most capable kids on the planet. I should have known they’d sniff out the truth.”

  “You should have just told us,” Dash said. “From the beginning. Instead of lying to us.”

  “I have never lied to you,” Phillips said indignantly. “Are there things I haven’t told you? Yes. Because it’s not time for you to know them. I’m the adult here. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  Now Dash was the one getting indignant, and he could tell he wasn’t alone.

  “You’re the adult, but we’re the ones flying the ship,” he said. He couldn’t believe he had to explain this to Commander Phillips again. “We’re the ones risking our lives. Traveling across the galaxy on the mission you charged us with, because you thought we could handle it. So you’re telling me we’re grown up enough to handle saving the Earth, but when it comes to what we should and shouldn’t know, we’re just kids?”

  “It doesn’t sound great wh
en you put it like that,” Phillips said, “but…yes.”

  “Is that how your father thinks too?” Dash asked.

  Shawn flinched. “What does my father have to do with anything?”

  Dash didn’t know what to say—none of them did. Was it possible that for the first time, they actually knew something that Phillips didn’t? Serious as the situation was, Dash had a hard time holding back a smile. This felt pretty good. “You should probably ask him that yourself,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t worry,” Dash said, and set his smile free. “We’ll tell you when we decide you need to know.” Dash knew he’d have to fill the commander in eventually—the Omega mission was too important to keep secret, as was Ike Phillips’s involvement. But there was no hurry. He could tell, from the overly serious looks Piper, Gabriel, and Carly had fixed on their faces, that the others were enjoying it just as much.

  Dash glanced at Chris, wondering if the alien’s loyalties to Shawn Phillips would win out over his loyalties to the crew. But Chris said nothing.

  “This isn’t a joke, Dash. If there’s something I need to know, you need to tell me.” Phillips was using his sternest “I’m in charge” voice. And he was in charge—but he was also billions of miles away. What was he going to do…ground them?

  “Exactly,” Dash said. “And if you do need to know, we’ll tell you.”

  Gabriel snorted. Piper had a hand over her mouth, and Carly’s shoulders were shaking with suppressed giggles.

  Phillips’s face had turned red, and Dash worried he was pushing his luck. “This transmission could cut out at any minute,” he said. “And you still haven’t briefed us on our next planet.”

  Commander Phillips treated their planetary excursions like military missions, briefing them on each new destination only once they’d finished with the last one.

  “I think that’s the most important thing now,” Dash said. “Don’t you?”

  Phillips took a deep breath and composed himself. Dash knew that he cared more about this mission than anything else. He wasn’t going to let anything risk it, especially his own temper. When he spoke again, he sounded utterly calm, as if nothing had happened.

  “You’ll be traveling at Gamma Speed for ninety-one days, until you reach the planet Aqua Gen. Located in the Tarantula Nebula, it orbits a G-type star, much like the Earth’s sun,” he said, and continued on with a long list of details about the planet’s atmosphere and ground conditions. “I’m sending a data packet along with this transmission,” he concluded. “It should contain everything you need to know.”

  Everything you think we need to know, Dash thought. But he only nodded.

  The crew all passed along messages for Phillips to give to their friends and families. All except Chris, of course. He never had any messages for Phillips, and now they understood why.

  “And now?” Phillips said.

  “Now what?” Dash asked innocently.

  Phillips gave him a look that Dash recognized. It was the same look his mother gave him when he mouthed off one too many times and got sent to his room without dessert. “You’ve had your fun, Dash. You’ve made your point. You all have. Can you please tell me what in the world is going on up there? And what it has to do with my father?” His voice twisted harshly on the word.

  It wasn’t exactly an apology, but Dash suspected it was the best they were going to get.

  “Well, to start with, you’ll never believe what happened when we exited Gamma Speed….”

  As Dash walked Phillips through everything that had happened with the Light Blade and everything they knew about the Omega mission, Phillips’s face turned to stone.

  “I’ll look into this and get back to you,” he said tersely when Dash was done. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  Doubt it, Dash thought. But he simply nodded and said, “Yes, sir. We look forward to hearing it.”

  The transmission shut off. Dash wondered if his friends were thinking the same thing he was: That the Omega mission was a pretty huge thing for Phillips to be clueless about. Especially when his own father was the one in charge. What else didn’t the commander know? Add that to all the things Phillips refused to tell them, and it left a whole lot of unanswered questions and potential surprises still to come.

  Anything could happen out here, and only one thing was for sure: they would have to face it on their own.

  The Light Blade bounced and shuddered through Gamma Speed. The floor tilted. The lights flickered. The walls stretched and bulged. At times, it seemed like reality itself was fraying at the seams. Anna didn’t know any more about Gamma Speed than the rest of her crew, but she knew enough about physics to know how it didn’t work. Physics said that nothing could travel faster than light. But the Light Blade was crossing hundreds of light-years by the day. Which meant it couldn’t be traveling through normal space. Anna pictured the needle-nosed ship spearing its way through dimensions. Or maybe the engine somehow folded space-time, as if it were a piece of paper. Fold it in half and smash any two distant points together. For all she knew, the ship flew on fairy dust and magic beans.

  But whatever the engine was designed to do, it didn’t quite do it. Anna was pretty sure the walls weren’t supposed to swell and the floors weren’t supposed to sway. She suspected that the crew wasn’t supposed to feel woozy for months on end. Sometimes, in Gamma Speed, it felt like her body was being stretched out across the galaxy like a rubber band. She waited for it to snap.

  Anna counted the cracks in her dorm room ceiling, trying to fall asleep. She couldn’t get used to this room, just like she couldn’t get used to Siena’s breathing in the bunk bed below. They weren’t allowed to put up any decorations, so the room was simply a blank cube. Empty walls, empty surfaces. No pictures of their families. Nothing to make this place feel like hers.

  And, of course, it wasn’t hers.

  It was Ike Phillips’s.

  It was Colin’s.

  She bet it wasn’t like this on the Cloud Leopard. She bet Dash didn’t sit around worrying about what would happen if the engine failed in the middle of their journey. If they would be trapped between dimensions or be crushed into galactic dust. Did he even know how close he’d come to being incinerated? Anna had gone out of her way to save him, and he hadn’t even bothered to say thank you.

  Anna would never let anyone guess it, but she worried about everything. Whether her team would listen to her. Whether Colin would ever stop bossing her around.

  Most of all she worried about what would happen if they lost the Cloud Leopard’s energy trail. It was like following a trail of breadcrumbs, and everyone knew how that turned out. If the Cloud Leopard got too far ahead—or if Dash found a way to ditch them, to gobble up the trail—the Light Blade would be stranded in distant space.

  No way forward.

  No way back.

  —

  Ravi and Niko stared at their screens with glazed eyes. Ravi smothered a yawn. Niko stretched his legs, which were starting to cramp. They’d been sitting in the library for hours, memorizing ship diagnostics and running through simulated malfunctions.

  Ravi’s stomach rumbled loudly.

  “Tell me about it,” Niko said softly. “I’m starving too.”

  “Then let’s just sneak out of here and grab some food,” Ravi suggested. “Five minutes. No one will know we’re gone.”

  “Colin will know,” Niko said.

  “That guy is driving me nuts. We’ve been working and training nonstop. Doesn’t he know humans like a break every once in a while?”

  Colin had the Omega team on a strict schedule. He dictated when they got up (early), what they ate (flavorless but “nutritional” gruel), and what they did all day: train, study, train some more.

  “We do need to learn all this stuff,” Niko pointed out. “It’ll help us with the mission.”

  Ravi gritted his teeth and got back to work. Niko didn’t get it, how it felt like the walls were closing in
on him. Because Niko, at least, had escaped down to the planet for a few hours. While Ravi was stuck up on the ship—stuck with Colin.

  “You’re not actually going to do it, right?” he’d asked as the Alpha kids had struggled to solve Lord Cain’s riddle while the walls closed in on them. “You’re just messing with them.”

  “Am I?” Colin had asked, with a smile so creepy Ravi shuddered just thinking about it.

  “Let’s just finish this,” Niko said now. “The sooner we do, the sooner we can eat.”

  “That’s not much to look forward to,” Ravi said, thinking of the bowl of disgusting slop he’d had for lunch. “I miss French fries.”

  “And ice cream,” Niko agreed. “Man, I could do with a triple-scoop sundae right about now.”

  A voice boomed from the speakers built into their screens. Colin’s voice. “That doesn’t sound like working. Focus!”

  Niko and Ravi groaned.

  Then they did as they were told.

  —

  Siena studied the math problem, scribbling equations in the margin of the page. Puzzling over whether to integrate. Whether the matrices were orthogonal. Whether, if she calculated the eigenvector of A, she could solve for B and x.

  She wasn’t trying to solve the problem because Chris had told her to or because it would help on her mission.

  She was doing math for fun.

  It was weird, she knew that. But so what?

  Siena knew the others were a little homesick. Back on Earth, she never quite fit in. She liked it better up here, in the dark of space. She liked the quiet. She liked the way priorities were so clear. They had a mission, and the mission was all that mattered. Life was like a math problem. It made sense.

  Mostly.

  In math, mostly wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t mostly understand a principle. You couldn’t mostly derive a solution.

  Siena thought that was true in life too.

  So it bothered her that she didn’t completely understand Ike Phillips’s motives.

  That she didn’t completely trust Anna to lead the team.