by Shannon Hale
This was the part of my life when I should have gone robot. But I didn’t want to anymore. Even battling terror like being strangled in slow motion, I wanted to experience it. This was life, these few minutes were all that I had left. I didn’t want to die halfway down. I wanted every single second I had left. I yelled at my brain to work.
Mom and Dad, I thought.
Mom and Dad. And Luther, my best friend.
And Jonathan, I thought.
I meant Wilder, but with its last electrical fizzing, my mind called him Jonathan. The whooshing feeling, the terror of falling, the lightning in my belly, the frantic pounding of my heart—all reminded me of how I felt when I kissed him. And when I didn’t. And when I’d lost him, and when I almost had him again.
Falling in love and falling to your death feel about the same, I thought. And I almost laughed.
And still I fell.
There was a crackling sound. Heat. I’d hit the lower atmosphere now, the friction of gas molecules slowing me slightly, the speed of my passage sparking fire across my armor.
When my body splattered, would a soul—my soul—come rising out of it, like a ghostman fleeing a useless body? Would it rise up, drift through space, pause in nebulae, moving from star to star? Would I be sucked up into a God-touched place with billions of other souls? Or would I simply cease to be? Mom believed, Dad did not. I didn’t want to simply choose to believe or not believe; I wanted to know. I had no answers, and at the moment this seemed a catastrophic hole in my education.
I seemed to be falling for hours, though surely it was only two or three minutes. I let my hand drop from my eyes. I was back under a blue sky again—in a blue sky. The world was air and blueness and patches of color below.
And then I saw a road.
Until then, it hadn’t felt completely real. I was falling, I was thinking, I was sure I would die, in an abstract way. But seeing that road was like a gut punch. The ground wasn’t distant. There was a highway. The green speckle of trees. So much nearer home, so much nearer home, so much nearer … scare myself with my own … Where was I? The ship could have moved over Australia or China or anywhere. When I hit there’d be nothing to identify, no way for my parents to even know what had happened. If they were still alive.
Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad, Mom, Mom, Mami, please …
My face armor was pierced with cracks, and I tore off a piece now, sucking in any air I could, the oxygen in my cells depleted at last. My lungs battled the air, losing. I flipped myself over, my back hitting the hard rush of air.
Land charged closer. There appeared to be a huge black crater, but maybe I imagined it because black dots were rushing in from the side. When all the black dots converged, I knew I’d lose consciousness. I didn’t want to fall asleep. Desperate for every moment. Black dots. White lines. Green speckles. Patches of color. Indistinct becoming distinct.
An object was moving toward me, fast, coming up at an angle. Imagined? I was barely conscious now, breathing in small hurried gasps. The rushing seemed to fill me, my ears full of air as thick as water, my chest a windsock.
An object charging at me.
You’re hallucinating. You’re crazy in your last moments. O, Mami, por favor …
I didn’t believe the thing was real until it slammed into me with the roar of a jet pack. My left shoulder and arm cracked at the impact, and the pain made me feel more alert. The jet-packed person clung to my back, falling with me, while shoving me around midair. I thought about fighting back, but what was the point? That tree down there seemed so close, I almost thought I could reach—
There was a gut-wrenching yank. It took me a moment to realize what had happened—the person in a jet pack had strapped a parachute to my back and pulled the cord, letting me go. My plummet slowed with sudden force, and the little air in my lungs was thrust out. I managed a few grateful breaths before realizing the parachute was too late—the ground was too close, and I hadn’t slowed enough.
I hit feetfirst with a crunch in my legs, the rest of my body following, slamming down into a rock pile, my havoc armor shattering. The parachute gusted away, an urgent jellyfish. I was dragged along with it. Rocks scraped my now-bare face and arms.
Release cord, I thought airily.
My head slammed into a rock. Sound and sight changed, as if I were underwater and a carnival blazed in the distance—merry-go-round music, distorted and slowed. I kept blinking but couldn’t focus my eyes. There was blood. It was mine.
I wasn’t dragging anymore. The parachute had caught on something or else the wind had stopped. But that hadn’t improved the situation.
I lay there, my whole body feeling like a rock pile. The carousel music transformed into a hard, uncomfortable rhythm, and I realized it was my own shuddering gasps.
Here’s the part where I die, I thought.
I was almost glad it had arrived at last. So much buildup.
Still I clung to consciousness as if to the ledge of a skyscraper. Even pain was better than nothing.
There would be a few more minutes of agony and then I’d slip away, and maybe I’d find out if there was some part of me that went on. My scientific soul—unquantifiable, unprovable, intangible? It wasn’t going to be a pleasant few minutes, but they were my minutes.
And then something went and spoiled it all—a loud, angry noise, like a swarm of giant insects. That kind of freaked me out, because for all that they’re the most prevalent creatures on the planet, giant ones would be enormously creepy. I tried to sit up, but things were broken inside me. I think I screamed.
The insects kept coming. I could see them now. Alien ships, I figured. Maybe I only destroyed the first wave, and now the real destruction would begin. The insects were brilliant, shooting beams of light into my eyes. I could feel cold tears leaking down my cheeks. It was one thing to linger in pain and pass away, but another to go like this, attacked by alien insects, and me broken and crippled and unable to fight back. And I’d failed after all. It wasn’t over. Mom wouldn’t be okay.
I knew it would hurt, but I tried again to get up. Again, broken bones slid, and I screamed.
“Stop that!” A hand on my forehead, the voice in my ear. “Hold still, would you?”
“Why is she—”
“Look, her tokens are gone.”
“She hit the ground without—”
“Big bugs …” I said. My jaw cracked and hurt like crazy.
“Helicopters, Maisie,” said Wilder.
He smelled metallic, electric, like ozone. His hands were ice cold. He was wearing a black helmet and something bulky on his back.
“You made an extra jet pack,” I mumbled without moving my jaw. He’d been the thing that put the parachute on my back.
“Just in case. I tried to match your design, but mine wouldn’t go as high. I wish I could’ve transferred it to you midair—”
“Shouldn’t wear it … not designed for normal people …”
“A little third-degree burn on the backs of the calves never hurt anybody,” he said.
I moaned sadly. I’d liked his calves.
“Stop trying to move,” he said.
His voice sounded wrong, false somehow. I realized he was terrified. He thought I was going to die. I couldn’t blame him.
The hands that had been checking my pupils and pulse now folded me in half, kicked me a few times, and threw me onto a stretcher. In truth they were probably very gentle, but that’s not how it felt. I screamed. I had no choice.
Someone put an IV in my arm, and it must have included some serious painkillers because the pain in my body became slick like sausages. Then I was trying to hold a handful of greasy sausages, but they kept squelching out of my hands and falling, and falling and falling into nothing. The sausages part was a dream, I’m ninety-nine percent sure. And I was glad for it. Now that I wasn’t officially dead, I wanted to stay unconscious for a long time.
Chapter 57
I woke. Mom was there. Alive. Or else we were
both dead.
“You’re not dead,” she said as if she could read my mind. And she touched my face to prove it. Her hand was warm. My face was cold. Neither of us felt like a ghost. I tried to feel relief, but I couldn’t seem to feel anything. Numbness was the new happiness.
I looked her over to see if she was different after playing host to an alien infestation. She was looking me over, I guess searching for signs of how much I’d changed since becoming the fireteam and destroying an alien ship. Her eyes seemed the same. I wondered if mine did too.
I was in a hospital. A real one, not the lab at HAL. That’s when I suspected HAL was gone.
“GT or aliens?” I asked my mom through my wired jaw. I felt barely human, casts and bandages and monitors. I remembered vaguely waking before to a doctor explaining that I had six cracked ribs, a cracked skull and jaw, a cracked pelvis, broken arm, fractures in all six leg bones and many foot bones, not to mention a ruptured spleen, crushed kidney, and punctured lung. The doctor had said I should be dead. He’d said it with a smile, as if I should be overjoyed by that news. I’d probably passed out after.
“Both,” said Mom. “GT attacked first. Howell believes the attack drew the ship’s notice away from the buses—so in one way, GT was actually useful. There were flashes of white light, and then HAL was gone.”
“Sucks …,” I said.
Mom didn’t like that word, but she didn’t correct me.
“The blast also consumed most of GT’s attacking forces. He was not among them.”
I had so many questions I wanted to ask. I blinked hard, attempting to wake up, but then couldn’t get my eyelids to open again.
“That boy with the jet pack was awfully slow to find you.”
“He got to me just in time,” I mumbled, moving nothing but my tongue and lips.
“I would have preferred his arrival a little sooner.” She lay a hand on my mummified leg.
I licked my lips, afraid to ask the next question. “Was anyone inside HAL?”
“Some …” Mom sniffed. That was as close to crying as she ever got.
“Dad?” I squeaked. “Luther?”
“They’re fine. They were on the bus with me.”
I relaxed and felt myself sinking again, darkness rising up over my head. “Laelaps?”
“Alive and slobbering.”
I tried to smile but it hurt too much. Sleep was nicer.
Chapter 58
I woke again, chased out of a dream by the image of Jacques, skinny and nearly dead under his armor.
“Mmmff,” I said, which meant, I haven’t eaten since I don’t remember when and I have to eat all the time or I’ll deplete into nothing like Jacques so whoever is nearby hurry and bring me a cheeseburger on the double if you please.
Then I remembered I was tokenless. Everything hurt, including my eyelashes and toenails.
“Mmmff yourself,” Luther said. He was sitting beside my bed reading Popular Mechanics.
“Mmmaff,” I replied, which meant, please hand me that little sponge-on-a-stick so I can wet my mouth because my tongue feels like roadkill frog three days dead.
“Good Trog,” he said, patting my head. “Nice Trog.”
“Shut up,” I managed before falling back asleep.
I dreamed about falling. I kept expecting to hit the ground but I never did. Is it possible to fall forever? That’s where the ghostmen were now, falling through space, on and on and on …
Chapter 59
Howell was beside my bed. I looked for Mom. She was reading in a chair in the corner. Well, sort of reading. Mostly watching Howell. It made me feel kind of cozy that Mom didn’t trust Howell. She was here now. Someone was looking out for me.
Then I noticed what I should have noticed immediately, which made me even more alarmed about the general health of my brain and eyes: Howell was bald. Her head looked alarmingly tiny without her bouncy frizz. I almost laughed, but there was something so pathetic about it that my throat constricted. Maybe I guessed that it meant something very bad.
“Hello, Miss Brown,” she said. “Thank you for saving the world.”
She placed a trophy on my belly. There was a little woman in gold plastic with a fist raised in the air, a stance of victory. The plaque on her pedestal read:
MAISIE DANGER BROWN
1ST PLACE
SAVING THE WORLD
In my periphery, I could see Mom roll her eyes.
“Thanks,” I croaked. “Your hair?”
Howell nodded, and no curly Afro bobbed with the motion. “I shaved it off. I’m in mourning.”
“Who?”
I thought I could take it. After all, loss was expected in a war.
But then she said, “Dragon.” “He was in HAL?” I asked.
She nodded again. Her tiny pink face scrunched up and she started to cry. Cry hard, cry like a small child cries, with uninhibited, anguished sobs.
Mom came over. She put a hand on my forehead. She cried with both of us.
Chapter 60
I slept a lot. The doctor said that was normal. My body needed all my energy to stitch back together and had little left over for consciousness.
It wasn’t until I overheard Dad talking with a doctor about my “skydiving accident” that I realized the doctors didn’t know that I’d fallen from the stratosphere. I was grateful for the lie. Explaining my defunct superpowers to the broader world sounded exhausting.
Mom and Dad practically lived with me in the hospital. Luther went back to his parents, who seemed genuinely elated by his return. I think they probably always liked him as much as they liked his sisters. They just needed a reminder.
Inez. Inez Aguilar Lugo. My mom’s real name. She seemed pained to speak the words, and yet relieved too.
She told me about being a small child, waiting for the cars to come back after another protest, another attack, and counting heads to see how many of her community had returned that time. And if her parents would be among them.
“My parents never asked me to pull a trigger. But I would have—for them, I would have done anything. And after they were killed, I tried. But mi gente stopped me. The whole community took care of me, got me a new name, set me off on a new life. The Paraguayan government grouped me with the rest of la Bandera Amarilla, and I was convicted of the murder of soldiers in abstentia, so I could never be Inez again.”
“That’s why we’ve lived as we have.”
“I hope you weren’t unhappy,” she said.
I’d pull a trigger for you, I thought. I’d live a small life for you.
“Your father and I swore we’d never bring children into a fugitive’s life. But you came anyway, la Peligrosa, and you made everything better. We would have had a dozen more of you, if we dared.”
“So … it wasn’t because of my arm?”
She looked confused. “Your arm?”
“GT said you were afraid that if you had another child, it might be like me … born without a limb.”
Mom straight up laughed. “No, la Peligrosa, it wasn’t because of your arm.”
She tilted her head and smiled, her eyes accusing me of being silly for asking such a question.
Chapter 61
After my crash landing I didn’t see Wilder.
“The FBI want him, now that they’ve arrested GT,” said Dad.
My stomach felt hollow. “Why do they want him?”
“To testify against his father. They have Wilder in protective custody.”
“When is the trial?”
“It’s not set yet.” Mom tucked a piece of my short hair back into my head bandage. “These things can take a long time, Maisie. The officer told me it’s likely he’ll be in witness protection for years, and possibly forever.”
I stared out the window. It faced the backside of another building. I miss you. I thought those words like a message, words everyone should hear sometimes. I missed him, with a clean, brilliant, sidewalk-after-the-rainstorm kind of longing. No twitch, no sick nee
d of a teammate for the thinker. I just missed him.
“Are you in pain, mi hija?”
“No,” I lied, because I didn’t want any more pain medicine. It muddied my brain.
Mom must have guessed that in fact most of my body felt as if I were caught in a combine, because she turned on the TV for me. Way better than nasty pain meds. I watched this guy show how you could live off the carcass of a camel. And then a marathon of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Nothing in the news mentioned an alien invasion, but there was plenty about the Jumper Virus. Howell was credited for discovering the cure: a simple session in a modified hyperbaric chamber killed the virus, she claimed. Her group traveled the world, curing the infected—for free in poorer nations (with plenty of media to document her philanthropy) and for a nice sum in others.
The newscaster interviewed people in a small Texas town who had all recovered.
“I don’t remember a thing,” said a busty, big-haired blonde. “Five months of my life, just wiped out. I feel fine, ’cept I gained thirty pounds. That’s not going to be a treat to lose!” She laughed.
Others could not manage to be so chipper. They spoke of family members missing or dead, their bones found rotting in the street. Of small children who were taken away, now returned, no longer recognizing their parents.
Behind one interviewee, I recognized the boy who’d been devouring chocolate cake in the diner. He was with a group of boys, jostling one another for room to get in front of the camera.
I followed the Jumper Virus story over the next few weeks, mostly because I never turned off the TV until the day my doctor released me.
“Your recovery was speedy, considering the shape you were in. Extraordinary, really,” he said, shaking his head as he left.