by Shannon Hale
“I won’t stay long.”
I followed the main street till I couldn’t hear the squeaking park swings anymore. Lights flickered on and off in a diner. I peered through the plate-glass window. The place was packed. Most people were in the kitchen, cooking and eating, some overflowing to the counter, the booths. They smacked their lips over apples and oatmeal, licked the backs of spoons, dipped their fingers into jars of peanut butter. No one talked.
I opened the diner doors and a little bell tinkled. Everyone looked over. No one stopped eating. A petite black woman in an apron approached, half of a hamburger in her hand, her lips outlined in mustard. I saw no obvious mark of a ghost inside, but there was a wrongness in her eyes.
“So … do I just sit anywhere?” I asked.
She looked at some of the other people, thoughtful for longer than was comfortable, before directing me to a seat. Away from the windows. Close to a back door.
I talked myself out of nerves. I believed these were regular flesh-and-blood people, even if pink alien ghosts might be stuck inside them, controlling their brains.
Everyone was still chewing and staring. I pointed to a man who was munching a hot dog slathered in peanut butter and said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Then I noticed a boy of ten or so, the youngest in the place, though his eyes didn’t look young. He kept them trained on me, unblinking, as he shoveled spoonfuls of chocolate cake into his mouth.
No arms, no cake, I thought. And I laughed at that inane joke for the first time, because suddenly its unfunniness made sense. Here I was in a ghost town with a little boy who should be in school or with his parents somewhere, but he was probably possessed by an alien poltergeist, eating enough cake to kill a horse, and I was freaking Supergirl with no idea how to shake that ghost out of him.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
The kid watched me but just kept eating.
“Are you still in there?” I whispered. “The kid part, the human part. If the ghost comes out, will you be you again?”
He swallowed. He took another bite.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to help you.”
The door behind me opened with a clank. A white plastic suit of armor in a headless humanoid form was zooming toward me. It was so fast, I’d only managed to get to my feet when a limb-part struck my chest, clawing at my skin through my shirt. But in the fraction of a second before I could bring my arm down on the limb or kick the plastic robot away from me, it zapped back on its own. The people looked at me, their wrong eyes getting wronger.
Someone growled.
The man with the hot dog leaped at me, a steak knife in his hand. I backhanded him midstride, and he hit a wall.
He wiped his forehead, his hand red with blood. I felt swoony. Besides their alien stowaways, these were real people who could get hurt. By me.
I started for the door. The growling intensified and a dozen of them seized my head, neck, arms, pulling, stabbing at me with knives and forks. I tried to shake them off before someone could pull out my already-too-short hair, but they kept coming, howling with frustration.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
I stumbled toward the door, pushing them off as gently as I could, shooting flat havoc pellets with a light touch to knock them back. Maybe among them was that old man’s daughter and grandson.
I pushed the last one away and ran out the door and down the street. Howell had the helicopter blades rotating when I jumped in, and we took off.
I was breathing hard.
“Don’t fly straight back to HAL,” I said. “If their ship is watching—”
A bright, silent beam sliced through half our helicopter, taking off the tail end. We tilted, spun, and fell.
Chapter 45
I grabbed Howell and Wilder and jumped out of the remains of the helicopter, kicking it away from us in midair. A second beam flashed and there wasn’t much of the helicopter left to hit the ground.
I spun in the air, and my heels clicked together. Had I just set my impact boots to “hop”? I clicked again and hoped they were back on “impact.” We were tearing toward the ground in full belly flop position. I kicked my legs, struggling to arrive feetfirst. I hit the ground on my toes, impact boots taking the fall with a jarring that rattled my teeth. Howell and Wilder grunted.
Keeping an arm around their middles, I ran a few paces and clicked my heels, switching the boots to “hop,” and took off in huge bounds that left my stomach behind and made my passengers groan. We were easy targets in the open. I made for the cover of trees and switched “hop” off.
A white beam chased us, severing tree branches and hissing through overgrowth. I zigged. I zagged. One beam got close enough to singe my eyebrows.
Wilder was slipping free. I considered dropping him but instead threw him over my shoulder. I could feel his belly slamming against me as I ran.
“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” he said, which sort of sounded like “Ow, ow, ow” through his gag. Crybaby.
The canopy sizzled and disappeared, fragments of leaves raining on our heads. I veered a quick left where the trees were denser. Trees disappeared behind me, random potshots from above wiping out groves in near-silent sputters. I veered left again, and this time the firing stayed right. A couple of kilometers later I felt safe enough to stop, dumping my cargo on the forest floor.
Howell’s curly hair was tamed by sweat, limp over her ears. Her cheek was bright red from knocking against my shoulder. Wilder’s eyes were wide, his face red and shiny. I could see what was coming. I released his havoc gag. He leaned over and dry heaved.
“Bouncy ride?” I said.
I grew a thin havoc blade from one finger and sliced through the bands on his ankles and wrists. He crawled away, collapsing in the dirt.
“Well,” said Howell. “Well.” She pushed damp hair out of her face and stared straight ahead. “Well.”
My stomach growled.
“Wish we could order a pizza,” I said.
From behind the tree, I could hear Wilder groan as if he couldn’t bear the thought of food.
“Mmm, pizza,” I said louder. “Greasy, cheesy pizza, with spicy sausage and crispy pepperoni and black olives as big as beetles.”
“You’re cruel,” he said in a raspy voice.
“I learned from the best.”
I didn’t actually need a pizza. To decrease my meal dependency, I’d designed concentrated carbon pellets. They looked like rough diamonds, clear as crystals and slightly yellowish. I swallowed them whole, and my amped-up stomach slowly digested them. But I still needed water. I sucked one of my camelbacks dry and stood, anxious to keep moving.
“The diner in town was full of real people who seemed to be possessed by ghostmen,” I said. “A plastic robot, kinda like a mini Stormtrooper, came in clicking and clacking. It stuck something on my chest and flew back as if I’d zapped it, as if …”
Wilder sat up, looking at me. My thoughts started spinning.
“That’s how the ghostmen get into people,” I said. “The ghosts are inside those little robot suits. They leave their ship, find a person, stick that probe in the person’s chest, and the ghost transfers from the suit into the body. But it didn’t work with me.”
Wilder tapped his chest.
“Yeah,” I said. “Token firewall. I’m safe, though no one else is.”
Anxiety gnawed at my bones. Go. Fight. Stop the ghostmen. NOW! I couldn’t hear any more puffs of disintegrating trees. Was the spacecraft gone or waiting for me to emerge from the trees before firing again?
“I’m going to go scout out the situation.”
“You’re leaving us?” Howell tried to stand, but her legs were too shaky. She sat down hard, a lock of damp hair flopping over her forehead.
“Maybe I can take one of those blasts, but you can’t. Are you worried about being alone with my attempted murderer?”
“Naw,” she said.
I shook my head.
I wa
s just starting to run off when Wilder shouted my name. I turned back and then wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like responding like a dog to the sound of his voice.
“You might want to armor up,” he said.
I hadn’t worn havoc armor since getting the brute token back. It seemed superfluous. So no thanks, Wilder, I didn’t armor up.
At least, not until I was out of sight.
I ran through the forest and stayed under the cover of trees while bounding back toward the town, following my GPS. It took an hour but eventually I saw some “people.”
It was just too random, a group wandering through the trees, silent and gorging themselves on food. Chocolate bars, sodas, sandwiches, carrots.
“Hi there,” I said.
They stopped. They looked at me. And kept chewing.
“Nice day, isn’t it?”
The nearest one spoke. “You’re the one we couldn’t pin?” His Texan accent was thick, but the inflection was awkward, emphasizing insignificant words. However the ghosts possessed those bodies, they must have had full access to their hosts’ brains—language, memories, sensations. They could speak like humans, but they didn’t get it exactly right.
“Sure,” I said, guessing “pin” meant “insert ghost alien into a human by means of mini-troopers.” I didn’t recognize them from the diner, so the ghosts must be able to transmit information to one another. Telepathically? Or via phone? “You guys planning to stay long on my planet?”
“As long as we can, thank you kindly.” He reached for another handful of nuts.
“You’re pretty fond of nuts?”
“Of course. But apples …” His eyes rolled up as he thought of it. “Hot damn, ma’am.”
“So … you’re hijacking human bodies in order to eat apples.”
He shrugged.
“You’re destroying people, taking away lives.”
“Now, now, all we take is your shell.”
“But what if the flesh of our bodies is the extent of our matter? What if you take our bodies and there’s nothing left?”
He seemed to have never considered the possibility. “Why would such a creature matter at all?”
“You’ve gotta learn to value the small things. So if I destroy this body you’ve hijacked, the rest of you—the real part of you—”
“Never ends. If I lose this body, I just claim another.” He smiled, and his wrong eyes looked that much wronger. “Let us live out the lives of these bodies. We’re gentler on them now that we’ve learned how to keep them alive. It could be years before we move on to claim new ones, and generations for us to use up all the bodies. You’re immune to the pinning. You’ve got no reason to oppose us, okay?”
Two mini-troopers came whizzing through the trees. They were built of white plastic but had no head or leg parts, hovering over the ground and moving as fast as a car on the highway. The torso part was about the size of a small child, and three arms circled the torso, each tipped with different attachments. I didn’t wait to see what they could do. I formed havoc bullets between my fingers and shot the white suits.
With a puff of vapor and a shriek like a braking train, the suits fell over. Amorphous shapes bled out of the holes and rose up like head-sized blobs of pink-tinted smoke. In a second, the ghosts were out of sight in the sky.
The guy was staring hard at me. “You’ve had communication with the … star lickers?”
Did he mean the token-makers?
“There is only one of you,” he said, pointing to my chest. “You killed the other four?”
“No! I didn’t mean to. I—”
I shut my mouth. I’d thought I was getting all this great info, but this ghost-faced killer was playing me. That’s why the ship hadn’t taken a pot shot.
A battalion of mini-troopers came through the trees. I shot havoc bullets. They screeched and dropped, pink transparents flowing free. The ghosts rose, falling up instead of down, the same speed as Jacques’s token had that night in the cave. Were the ghosts immune to gravity, just like the tokens? I leaped for the nearest rising pink blob, swiping my hand through, feeling nothing but a slight chill. My touch didn’t deter it. The ghost kept going up into the sky, then suddenly disappeared.
Almost as if it’d been sucked into something. The idea felt right. Maybe the ship was up there, hovering to catch ghostmen freed of their suits.
I shot sharp havoc discs in the direction the ghost had gone. Their blue trails stopped and the discs disappeared, slicing, I assumed, into the ship alongside the ghosts. But after the last ghost was safely inside, my line of discs stopped disappearing. The ship had moved.
I started to run just as a flash exploded behind me. The ship was shooting at me again. I jumped, catching the edge of the master blast. The havoc armor on my left side was smoking.
I made for the nearest possessed person, thinking that the ship wouldn’t fire on its own, but there was a second flash, and I leaped again. I hit the ground hard and screamed out. My back stung as if Jack Havoc had struck me a hundred blows. Behind me, the master blast had left a crater and a heap of charred bodies. Those had been human beings. Now there were twenty corpses on the ground, and twenty rosy ghosts rising in the air.
The only way to find the ship was to see a ghostman enter it.
I kept running, a moving target, but kept my eyes on the ghosts. The first one disappeared—drawn into the ship. I aimed at that spot, shooting chunks of havoc shaped like cut pipes. My ammo disappeared into the sky. And for barely an instant, I saw something kind of twinkle, a huge shape. The last of the twenty ghosts entered the ship, and the shape zipped away.
I felt the air move at its departure. It was massive. And fast. I doubted my shots had seriously damaged something that large, but I was grateful it had retreated.
I fell on my knees, knocked over by the pain. That blast had blasted the fight out of me. The ship might return any second, but I couldn’t seem to move.
Chapter 46
Resting my head on my arm, I breathed, trying to get control over the pain. I had to move. Now, Maisie.
Humming the Star Wars theme to encourage myself, I wobbled onto my feet. Sometimes a girl’s gotta provide her own trumpet-heavy heroic soundtrack.
One of the empty white suits had escaped the ship’s blast. I picked it up and hobbled back into the trees toward Howell and Wilder.
A little nervous, I felt my back. Chunks of armor fell off in my hand, mixed with pieces of my shirt. No blood at least. I wondered what my back would look like if I hadn’t taken Wilder’s advice and armored up. Or if I’d have a back at all. Still, no need for him to know he’d been right. I peeled off the remaining armor as I went. When I reached my neck, a crispy hunk of hair came free.
As if I’d had hair left to lose. There would be a pixie cut in my future.
I found Howell and Wilder, and we walked through the woods into the night. Howell did not want to be carried again, and my blasted back was grateful. I spent the walk thinking. If shooting at the ship from a distance was enough to wreck it and solve the alien problem, the fireteam would need only one token.
By midnight we reached a spot I felt was safely far away and called Dragon. He picked us up in a black SUV wafting the scent of french fries.
My mouth watered. “Did you pick up dinner?”
He pointed to the exhaust. “You’re smelling the biodiesel. Mm-mmm, good enough to eat.”
“Any word on my mom?” I asked, knowing the answer was no or Dragon would have said something immediately. But I couldn’t help asking.
He shook his head. “Next time you all do something like this, don’t you dare leave me behind.”
“The president and vice president never travel together in Air Force One,” Howell mumbled. “Either you or I should always survive …”
Her knees bent, and Dragon rushed forward to catch her. He picked her up and put her in the front seat, tucking a blanket around her arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed before that she was shivering. It wou
ld be cold out for someone without tokens.
I almost looked at Wilder to see if he was shivering too but stopped myself. As soon as I started caring about him in any way, I could be vulnerable to his lies and manipulation.
I spent the ride inspecting the mini-trooper suit. The shell was definitely a polymer. I cut it open with a havoc knife.
The polymer shell was completely filled with stiff white gunk, almost like a malt ball inside its chocolate coating.
Nougat, I named it in my head.
The suit must create specific atmospheric conditions for the ghosts. Perhaps the ghostmen couldn’t stay put in emptiness. Perhaps they must inhabit and move through solid substance, just as humans can move only through gaseous or liquid environments.
I dug through the white nougaty stuff, searching for anything different, and discovered a polymer sphere in the center. I cracked open the sphere. It housed what had to be a computer and power source, its parts also made up of plastics. So what did that tell me about them? And how I could boot them all off my planet?
I felt like I was in a room with the lights off, and I could almost make out the details—but not quite. I wished I could talk it through with Wilder, then hated myself for the wish.
Dragon hit the first drive-through to get Howell something hot to drink and tossed me a few bags of food. Despite the carbon nuggets slowly digesting in my stomach, I still craved real food. I handed one bag to Wilder, because a robot would.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t talk to me,” I said.
Sharing the back bench with Wilder felt as intimate as a mattress. I could hear his breathing, smell the long walk emanating from his skin.
I leaned forward to talk to Dragon and Howell in the front seats. “How is it possible that gravity won’t hold the tokens? Even a single water molecule isn’t light enough to escape Earth’s gravity.”
“Well … there’s dark energy,” said Dragon.
Howell sipped her drink, still shivering. “Yes, that mysterious stuff that repels gravity. We’ve wondered if the tokens are linked somehow to dark energy.”