Dangerous

by Shannon Hale

  “Who’s in the helicopter?”

  “Pilot.” Wilder’s expression stiffened.

  “And he’s going to just let me get in the helicopter and fly us to our private clubhouse?”

  “Maisie’s going to pilot from now on so we can go it alone,” Wilder said.

  I was?

  “Oh, I forgot a slushie machine for Mi-sun! Sorry, Mi-sun, I’ll order that too. Anything else you want, Ruth? Like a deep fryer? We could make doughnuts.”

  Ruth stared at the helicopter as if trying to see past the glass to the pilot’s face. She rubbed her arms and looked into the sky.

  “Those guys aren’t going to let me just come back. I did some stuff. Not going to let me, not going to—”

  “We need you, Ruth. You’re part of the team. You won’t be safe without us.”

  “No, you won’t be safe! I should be in charge. I’m strong!”

  “You are,” he agreed. “You’re strong, Ruth. You and I—we won’t let anyone hurt our team.”

  “Wait …” Ruth’s suspicious squint turned on Wilder. “Are you lying to me?”

  Her face lengthened with a profound sadness, and then fire filled her eyes. She stalked toward Wilder. She was fast. Wilder didn’t give any command, but Jacques stepped forward anyway, blocking her with his armored self. Ruth shoved him aside. Mi-sun squelched a little scream, scrambled for a pipe chunk from the bag, and shot it at Ruth. A flash of blue and Ruth was shoved back through the air, hitting the ground and rolling backward.

  No way to come back from that, I thought, my stomach tightening.

  Wilder must have thought the same because he said, low and fierce, “Run.”

  Chapter 16

  He didn’t wait, turning and making for the helicopter. I could hear thuds behind us. Ruth was running too.

  “Get us out of here!” Wilder shouted to the pilot.

  I took four strides for every thud I heard. She was close. The helicopter was closer. I got there just after Wilder and hauled myself in, Jacques shoving his way in behind me. Mi-sun had only grabbed the door when the helicopter started to lift. Jacques and I held her wrists, pulling her up.

  Below us, Ruth jumped. I watched her rise, leaping impossibly high, her arm outstretched.

  We’re going to die, I realized with a strange calm. She’s going to grab the foot of the helicopter and pull us down and slam us into the ground and we’ll explode into a huge flaming ball, and Jacques is the only one who will survive the explosion until Ruthless gets her hands on him, cracks his armor, and breaks his neck.

  But the pilot jerked the helicopter to the side, and Ruth managed only to swipe it with her fingertips before falling back. The vehicle tumbled. The four of us weren’t seat-belted, and we rolled to the other side, thankfully away from the open door. The pilot pulled us higher just as Ruth hurled a rock, barely missing us.

  Wilder had a megaphone, and he shouted out the door.

  “You stupid brute, we’re going to hunt you down and cut that token out of your chest and give it to someone smarter, and you’re not strong enough to stop all four of us!”

  She screamed something. Jacques stared at Wilder as if he’d morphed into a giant cockroach.

  “Smooth,” I said. “That talked her right down.”

  “I’m trying to get her to chase us,” said Wilder. “If she goes off and hides, it’ll be impossible to stop her before she does more damage. We’ve got to capture her now.”

  “She’ll go home,” I said. “She’ll kill her sister.”

  “She’s chasing,” said Mi-sun.

  I leaned over to look down. Ruth didn’t run so much as bound, her powerful legs thrusting her forward in huge, arcing strides.

  Wilder scanned the horizon. “We need to keep her away from populated areas, and we need something heavy to slow her down.”

  I pointed to the harbor. “There’s the water.”

  “Howell,” he spoke to his headset, “there’s a ship out there, looks like a cargo vessel. Can you clear the people off?”

  And just like that, she could.

  Our pilot flew us toward the water, skirting the city. A few minutes into our flight, Ruth started to slow.

  “She doesn’t seem as excited to kill us as she was a few minutes ago,” I said.

  “Swoop us back around,” Wilder told the pilot. “Blue, pelt her with some screws.”

  A handful of screws screamed from Mi-sun’s hands like buckshot. That would have ripped another person apart but only knocked Ruth off her feet. Once she gained them, she was after us.

  Near the water’s edge, Wilder employed the megaphone again. “Nice running, lard bottom, but you can’t run on water.”

  She dived in.

  We got to the ship ahead of her. I could see a couple of motor-boats carrying away the crew. Wilder asked our pilot to drop us on the upper deck and then leave. “No need to give her another target.”

  The ship was eerie in its vacancy. Wilder had me inspect the anchor and a crane used to lift cargo pallets.

  Working with technology was instinct to me, in the way that, once you know how to read, you don’t sound out words anymore. You just see and know. I examined the clunky thing, hefted my toolkit off the back of my robot suit, and got to work—faster, stronger, quicker, better.

  I didn’t have much time. The white splashes Ruth made while swimming were getting closer.

  Wilder was talking to Mi-sun and Jacques. “We can’t let her knock holes in the ship and sink it. We need to lure her up here, make her want to kill us.”

  “You’re freaking me out, man,” said Jacques.

  “Jacques, you’re going to have to get close to her.”

  Jacques was patting himself all over, as if testing for weakness in his armor. “I can take a couple of her hits, but—”

  “We’ll dunk her. When she comes back up, she’ll be easier to cuff.”

  “And then what? It’d be safer just to kill her,” said Jacques, but I didn’t think he meant it. His hands were twitchy, eyes wide, too afraid to think straight.

  “No one could kill Ruthless,” said Wilder. “All we can do is slow her down until Howell gets here with the cuffs.”

  “She won’t fall for it,” I said. “Who would climb up here to fight us when it’s so clearly a trap?”

  “Ruthless,” Wilder said, staring at the water. “She feels indestructible. It makes her careless. Besides, if she really wants to break free from this team, she’ll want me dead.”

  I knew what he meant. It’d be no easy task for any of us to run away from the living thinker.

  Wilder positioned us around the ship while he stayed on the bow as the bait. I tried to imagine what would happen if he died. I wiped my palm on my jeans. At least my Fido hand didn’t sweat.

  The white splashes kept coming closer.

  On Wilder’s cue, Mi-sun shot a pipe. It hit Ruth’s forehead, dunking her under. She came back up and swam closer to the boat. Mi-sun hit her again. Ruth was furious. She was too easy a target in the water, where she couldn’t move as fast. She could have gone underwater and punched through the boat. But Wilder had guessed right—Ruth wanted to get her hands on us. On him. She started to climb the anchor chain.

  “Go away!” Wilder shouted. “Leave us alone!”

  He sounded desperate. Man, he really could act.

  Ruth leaped from the top of the chain onto the deck, and Wilder scrambled back so fast, no way it was acting. If she touched him, she would kill him. And we’d be next.

  The four of us worked fast. Mi-sun struck Ruth from behind, knocking her over a length of anchor chain while I maneuvered the crane to lift the anchor and drop it on Ruth. Several tons of steel anchor held her down for a moment. Then the crane picked up the chain, crossing it around her.

  Wilder had Mi-sun distract Ruth with pelted screws while Jacques sealed Ruth to the chain with havoc bands. She thrashed, and I worried she would break free before we had a chance to dunk her.

  I pu
lled the chain up, dangling Ruth and the anchor. She screamed in anger. I had the crane release its cargo, and while Ruth fell, Mi-sun shot a large pipe at Ruth’s chest. The force knocked Ruth-and-anchor over the water before they slammed down. The chain sped after her underwater, meter after meter, clanking angrily as it unwound from its massive spool.

  The clicking stopped. Surely Ruth was wrestling with her bonds in the depths. She could hold her breath for twenty minutes and had enough strength to either break the havoc bonds or swim with an anchor strapped to her back. I didn’t see how this trick would stop her.

  “Howell’s on her way,” Wilder said.

  Hopefully Ruth’s underwater struggle would tire her enough that we could get the cuffs on her. And then, fingers crossed, those temporary restraints would hold her till I could design and build a Ruthless-proof prison.

  I imagined Ruth hitting the bottom of the ocean and in a fury pushing back up. Like a torpedo. Coming straight for us.

  I backed away from the railing. So did Jacques.

  “She’s going to be one bleeping mad hornet,” said Jacques.

  I had a sudden thought. “She took the scuba course, right? She knows about the bends?”

  The bends—decompression sickness. What happens when you go deep underwater, then come up too fast. The deeper you are in water, the higher the pressure, and the gas molecules in your body compress. But then as you come up, all those little bubbles of nitrogen expand again. Rising too fast, the nitrogen molecules act like little bombs. To avoid the bends, scuba divers take decompression stops on ascent and wait while the nitrogen naturally seeps out of their bodies.

  Wilder was staring at bubbles starting to form in the water. “She’s coming up fast.”

  “The bends can’t kill her, right?” I said. “I mean, her skin and bones are strong, her muscles dense. Surely her veins and organs have toughened up too.”

  Actually, Ruth with the bends seemed like a great idea. If she was in a little pain, she might be too weak to immediately kill us. But perhaps our oxygen-enriched cells prevented the bends altogether. After all, dolphins and whales don’t suffer from decompression sickness.

  The bubbles thickened to a hard boil. Jacques was adding layers to his havoc skin and cramming down an energy bar. Mi-sun was gripping handfuls of screws. I jumped into the seat of the crane, my sweaty palm slipping on the controls.

  There was a white explosion, and Ruth nearly cleared the surface before splashing down. Waves slapped against the side of the ship. Bubbles flicked the surface like a swarm of insects. Ruth lay floating on her back.

  Chapter 17

  “Maisie, get her in!” Wilder called.

  I steered the crane into the water and picked up Ruth in a vice grip that would have broken a normal person’s bones. I let the robot arm drop her onto the boat’s deck. Her groans were constant, unaffected by the fall. Maybe she wouldn’t need restraints after all. Maybe she needed a doctor.

  Howell’s incoming helicopter churned the air above us. If we took her back to HAL, we’d put everyone there in jeopardy of a crushed skull when she recovered. I couldn’t think of a solution. Hopefully Wilder had.

  Jacques approached Ruth, but he stepped back when she started coughing and clutching herself, her back arching. She seemed unaware of anything but her own pain.

  “Wilder,” I started, “I don’t think—”

  Ruth gasped, gagged, and her loud breathing stopped.

  Jacques and I bolted forward, but Wilder pulled us away.

  “Don’t touch her. Everyone stay back.”

  No.

  My instincts that taught me how to breathe, how to stand, how to be, also said to trust Wilder. Every nanite-enhanced cell of me was bound to him. But my brain said when someone is dying, you help. We’d all certified in CPR at astronaut boot camp. I could help, so I should.

  Everything seemed to stop—the wind, the motion of the boat, the cells dividing in my body.

  I met eyes with Mi-sun and Jacques. If we were the ones who fell, if our hearts stopped, would Wilder let us die too? A kind of understanding ran between the three of us, a plan that didn’t include Wilder, and that felt strange and dangerous but right.

  I made for Ruth, and it took Wilder a fraction of a second to realize what I was doing. He darted for me, but Jacques and Mi-sun stopped him. That simple action, two people putting themselves in the way of another, felt like an earthquake.

  The team is broken, I thought, and then I tried not to think, dropping to my knees beside Ruth and releasing my arms from the robot suit.

  “What are you doing?” Wilder yelled, struggling against Jacques. “Let me go!”

  Ruth’s skin was cold from the ocean water and felt rubbery to my fingers. No pulse. I tilted her head back to clear her airway and began chest compressions, Fido on the bottom so I didn’t crush my left hand with my cyborg strength.

  “Maisie, don’t touch her.”

  “I have to try,” I said. He was wrong, but at least he cared enough to worry about what Ruth would do to me if she came to.

  Suddenly I was yanked back. I struggled out of Wilder’s grip, Jacques and Mi-sun grabbed him again, and I returned to Ruth.

  My Fido hand wasn’t as pressure-sensitive as my left hand, so I switched, my left hand over her heart. I was concentrating so hard on making sure Fido didn’t push my human hand too hard that I didn’t notice at first. The different sensation on my palm. The extraordinary cold.

  I didn’t notice until the pain.

  I heard my scream before I felt it. I pushed away and my back hit the deck. My head ached with the fall before all other sensation was swallowed in the agony I’d felt on Midway Station. Ruth’s token had entered my palm.

  I knew that once the pain shot up my arm and flared in my chest it would ease. I clung to that promise during those few seconds that seemed hours, a path of agonizing fire, bitterest cold, pain like muscles torn in half, bones crushed to bits. There was an explosion near my heart like an electric blackout—no sight, no breath, no hearing, nothing but white-hot pain. I wanted to die. If I’d been able to move, I would have done anything, anything to end the pain …

  I became aware again.

  My breath was hitting my lungs in slow, hard gasps, my forehead prickling with sweat. I was looking up into a sky a shockingly calm blue. Wilder was kneeling beside me, his arms around me. He was saying, “Maisie, Maisie, what did you do …?”

  He touched my palm. He touched the mark on my chest.

  “You have Ruth’s token,” he whispered. He shut his eyes, hard, as if squinting against a glaring headache.

  I sat up, pushed away, backed away, looking at him, at Ruth’s body, at Jacques shiny in his armor, at the helicopter landing on the upper deck, as if everything was part of a swarm of bees I should swat. Ruth had died. Her heart stopped, the nanites swooped back into the token, the token released and was drawn into my palm.

  Howell leaped out of her helicopter and ran toward us. “Ruth?”

  “Dead,” said Jacques, stripping off his armor like an orange peel and tossing it onto the deck. “We were just trying to capture her. Bleep, bleep, bleep.”

  “Don’t mess this up, Maisie,” said Wilder. “Don’t freak out. Take deep breaths.”

  I took deep breaths, but I was definitely starting to freak out. Ruth was dead. And part of my brain was dimming. I had become accustomed to the sharpened thought, the way I could look at things and understand what was beneath them, like having X-ray vision for machines. Now it was as if I’d lost the prescription glasses I hadn’t realized I’d been wearing. The ship’s robot arm, the helicopter, my Fido arm and robot suit—I could see their outsides but I could barely imagine their insides.

  I looked at my chest. There was the bright-brown double swoop of Ruth’s brute token. My techno token was paler, washed out beneath it.

  My insides rumbled. It was like hunger pains but not localized to my stomach. I was starving everywhere.

  Wilder was
looking at me as if I were an escaped grizzly bear. “Hungry?”

  I nodded. Really hungry. I wanted a steak. I wanted a cow.

  Wilder shouted to Jacques, and he tossed a few energy bars on the deck. I ate them without breathing, gulped down a couple liters of water Howell offered, and said, “The techno token is dying.”

  “Dying?” Howell’s eyes widened.

  “I guess the brute token is burying it.” I stared at Fido, flexing my fingers, twisting my wrist. “It’s almost gone.”

  Wilder shouted something in Russian that sounded like a curse, tore off his headset, and threw it onto the deck. “The newest token must trump the oldest. Maisie, why’d you have to do it?”

  His words were getting harder to hear over the pounding of my heart, the sweeping breaths in my lungs. Men were sliding Ruth’s body into a long white bag.

  I sobbed, remnants of an energy bar flying out of my mouth. “Did we … did we just murder her?” My eyes and nose were wet and running, sobs wracking my chest. “Am I going to turn into her now? Am I going to hurt people and end up anchored to the bottom of the ocean?”

  “Maisie …” Wilder held up calming hands.

  That was all he could say, no promises.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no …” I started to back away. Heartbeats ravaged my chest, and even though I knew I could hold my breath for twenty minutes, I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. I ripped off the robot suit and clawed at my own skin as if I could cast that off too. I wanted to peel away everything, every part of me. I dug my fingernails into my arm and couldn’t make a mark.

  Wilder was speaking again, his hands in taming-the-wild-beast attitude. I could hear him making noise, but his words just scratched at me, not entering my brain. Men were carrying Ruth’s body bag to the helicopter. The wind struck at me like Mi-sun’s buckshot. I felt trapped on every side—Wilder and Howell, this strange, empty ship, Ruth’s body. My own body was hardening, tightening, unfamiliar. I was clutched in the fist of a giant.