by Wesley King
Jonah looked around as they slowly crept down the hall. It was still silent.
“So what happened to Ben?”
Martin hesitated. “He only had his mom. I guess his dad was gone already. His mom worked in a factory. They didn’t have a lot of money, I guess. Well, one day she got killed in an accident, when Ben was twelve. They came to get him, and they took him to the orphanage kicking and screaming and refusing to go. His grandparents were long dead. He ran away again and again and wouldn’t let anyone adopt him or even speak to him. They put him in juvenile detention when he was thirteen. Finally got out a year later, but he just stayed at the orphanage, and they had nowhere to put him. He thinks he got picked to join the ISR because he has no one left to care about.”
“So why does he hate me?” Jonah asked.
Martin met his eyes. “Because you do. Think about it: He’s been seeing other kids with their families for years, and thinking how lucky they are. Coming here was his chance to be lucky. To be special. He thinks that you’re taking that away from him.”
Jonah looked away, his stomach twisting. It made sense. Suddenly Ben didn’t seem like such a bully. Just a boy who wanted to be special.
“And what about you?” Jonah asked quietly.
Martin grinned. “I think being special has nothing to do with where you came from.”
They soon reached the metal grate that Jonah and Alex had climbed into the first time they’d come to the Haunted Passage, when the Shrieker had almost gotten them. While they were hunkered inside, Jonah had noticed that the small, dusty air duct kept going behind him. He hadn’t mentioned it then because he was afraid Alex would want to explore it, but Jonah guessed that those air ducts might run through the entire ship. If he was right, then that was their best chance to make it to the Unknown Zone alive. Jonah bent down and pulled the metal grate off.
“We’re going to crawl in there, aren’t we?” Martin asked miserably.
“Yep,” Jonah said. “After you.”
Martin made a face and then crawled into the air duct. Jonah followed him in, pulling the grate shut behind him. It clanged back into place.
Martin looked back. “Sorry you have my keister in your face.”
“Just start crawling,” Jonah replied.
Martin nodded and began crawling down the air duct. “This is pretty clever. Were you an adventurer back home?”
“Not really,” Jonah said, grimacing at the dust beneath his hands. “You?”
“Sort of,” Martin said. “I did a lot of sneaking.”
Martin stopped as another duct opened up beside them, running left, along the Haunted Passage. The duct was dark and dusty and smelled like stale mothballs, and it disappeared into the shadows in the distance.
“That’s the one we want,” Jonah said.
“You sure about this?” Martin asked.
“No,” Jonah said. “But I don’t have any better ideas.”
“Rats,” Martin grumbled.
Jonah assumed that was another fake swear word. It reminded him of something as they started crawling again. “Does Whiskerface live in these air ducts?”
“I don’t know,” Martin said. “If he does, I hope he’s the only rat in here. Most rats aren’t as nice as Whiskerface. I think he thinks he’s a cat. He even purrs. Kind of.”
“Do you know a lot of rats?” Jonah asked.
Martin glanced back. “I did.”
As they crawled along the duct, they soon passed another one on their left that looked like it ran back out and connected with the Haunted Passage. Jonah guessed that they were crawling through a main supply duct and they would find lots of little outlets back to the hallway as they went, where the recycled air filtered back to the main areas.
“How are we going to know when we get to the Unknown Zone?” Martin asked.
“I have no idea,” Jonah replied. “I assume it will be completely dark and full of shrieking and laughter.”
“Oh,” Martin said.
They kept crawling. The main supply duct was only about two feet high and two feet wide, and Jonah was feeling a little cramped. It didn’t help that Martin kept kicking up dust that billowed into his face. He was starting to feel like a rat himself.
“What’s your job on the ship?” Jonah asked.
“When I’m not in the brig, hall guard,” he said.
“Are you good with a bonker?”
“Not really,” Martin replied. “You?”
“I don’t think so.”
Martin glanced back. “Then we better not run into the Shrieker. I’d like to know a few more moves, like Alex—”
“Shh,” Jonah said suddenly. “Listen.”
They both stopped. There were voices coming from the Haunted Passage. Human voices. Jonah and Martin exchanged a look.
“Get to the next grate,” Jonah whispered.
Quickly crawling down the duct until they came to another opening, they crept up to the metal grate. The voices were growing louder. They didn’t sound like Space Raiders.
“—running around everywhere. Going to mess something up, I’ll tell you that much. Second one I’ve locked up today. And I still haven’t heard from Grouter.”
Jonah and Martin exchanged a look.
“The crew,” Martin mouthed.
Jonah crawled forward to try to get a look. He could only really see silhouettes through the grate, but he could see the shapes of two grown men walking toward them.
“Gonna fill up the brig soon,” a second man said, his voice gruff and deep. “Have to make a second one.”
“Or shoot ’em into space,” the first replied, chuckling. His voice was raspy and higher pitched. “Think the captain will agree?”
The second man laughed. “Doubt it. Rules are rules. Don’t want to lose the contract.”
The men were past now, walking farther down the Haunted Passage, toward Death Alley. Jonah hoped the guards would hear them coming and hide.
“Well, if they keep getting in my way, I’m gonna keep locking ’em up,” the first man said. “And they won’t like it in there with Leppy. I’ll tell you that much.”
“Who would?” the second man said. “I wish we could catch the shouter. That’s the one I want.”
The first man snorted. “You’ll never catch ’im. Been trying for two years.”
Their voices were getting fainter. Jonah strained to listen.
“Let’s get back,” the first man said. “We need to find Grouter.”
Jonah just caught the name Grouter, and then it went silent.
He glanced at Martin. “We better get back. I think we know what happened to our adventurers.”
• • •
Jonah thought about the conversation as they crawled back down the air duct. Who was Grouter? And Leppy? And why was Captain White Shark and his crew taking Space Raiders? Something strange was going on in this ship, and he wanted to know what it was.
Martin had plenty of theories.
“Captain White Shark is evil,” Martin explained. “He owns the ship, but he hates Space Raiders. Earth just hired him to take us to the Dark Zone. Maybe he works with the Entirely Evil Things.” He paused. “This could all be a trap.”
“But weren’t there other Space Raiders before us?” Jonah asked.
“Yep,” Martin said. “We’re the seventh batch. The first six batches are already fighting the war somewhere in the Dark Zone. We haven’t won yet, but I bet that will change when we get there. Me and you are going to bonk them right out of the galaxy.”
Jonah thought about that. He wondered if the others would accept him as a real Space Raider now. He hoped so. He still wanted to go home, but the commander had made it clear that the Squirrel wouldn’t go back to Earth until the mission was done. If that was the case, it would be nice if everyone stopped staring at him like they wanted to hit him with a bonker.
He led Martin back into the Haunted Passage and carefully closed the metal grate behind them. He didn’t want the
crew or the Shrieker to know about their secret tunnel.
“Isn’t it strange that only the blue door has a control panel?” Martin asked. “None of these other doors have them, or any of the ones in Sector Three.”
“Most things are strange on the Squirrel.”
They were approaching the scratched blue door, which they’d left open. Jonah had wanted to close it to cover their tracks, but he figured the Space Raiders might want to investigate the room further and didn’t want to risk closing it and losing the evidence if it didn’t open again.
“Think they’ll give us an extra food bar as a reward?” Martin asked, walking ahead. “I mean, we deserve it. We just journeyed into the Wild Zones and did some pretty good spying. Whiskerface has got to be getting hungry—”
They were just a few feet from the blue door when Jonah saw it: a pale shadow in the doorway. Someone was waiting for them.
“Look out!” he shouted.
But he was too late. A pair of large, hairy hands reached out from the doorway and grabbed Martin’s collar. A barrel-chested man with a thick brown beard stepped out, holding a squirming, wriggling Martin. A second man with a thin, weasellike face and a cruel smile emerged behind him.
“Save yourself!” Martin shouted.
Jonah sprinted back down the Haunted Passage as the second man tried to grab him, and he heard heavy footsteps chasing after him. Jonah ran as fast as he could, not daring to look back.
“Leave him!” the other man shouted. “He’ll come back eventually.”
The footsteps stopped, and Jonah just kept running until he finally spotted the air duct and scrambled inside. He closed the grate behind him and sat there, trembling.
What was he going to do now?
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
* * *
JONAH SAT THERE FOR WHAT felt like hours, thinking about what to do next. He had three major problems. One was that those two crew members could still very well be waiting for him in the blue-door room. The second was that even if he could sneak by, he would be returning to Sector Three without Martin the Marvelous. Considering he had already been labeled a possible spy and traitor, he guessed that returning without his companion would not go over well.
And the final and most important problem was that he couldn’t just leave Martin behind. Martin had come along to help Jonah, and now he was in the clutches of the crew. And since Jonah now knew that they were keeping their prisoners in a brig, he wasn’t sure he could stand to say “may they raid in peace” and then go on as if the missing Space Raiders had never been there. No. As much as Jonah wanted to go back and the mere thought of anything else made his stomach turn, he had no choice.
He had to save Martin.
Jonah perched himself on all fours and started crawling through the air duct.
He thought back to Alex’s map. The Haunted Passage and Squirrel Street were on the bottommost level of the Squirrel. There were five levels in all, with the top one being Captain White Shark and his crew’s realm. That’s where he needed to go.
Jonah looked down in disgust as the dust billowed around his hands. It was thick and dry, and at certain points his fingers hit areas where it was an inch thick. He just wrinkled his nose and kept crawling. Jonah soon reached the spot where he and Martin had overheard the discussion about someone named Grouter and the missing kids. This time he kept going.
But Jonah soon ran into a problem. About twenty feet ahead, the air duct suddenly veered straight upward and disappeared into the shadows. There was no way to climb it. Jonah sighed. He would have to venture back into the Haunted Passage.
Turning around in the cramped air duct proved difficult. He slid his legs up the vertical shaft and then slowly rolled onto his stomach. He felt his cheek brush against the dusty metal floor and tried not to think about what Alex had told him about the dead human skin cells. Clambering onto all fours, Jonah crawled back to the nearest air grate and cautiously popped it open. Even the faint scraping noise of detaching metal echoed through the ominous corridor. He took a quick look both ways, put the grate down, and climbed out.
The Haunted Passage looked much the same as it did farther down the ship. The walls were still gray and rusted and lined with doors, the floor was still worn down and stained with grease, and the ceiling panels still flickered with a pale, eerie light. But the groaning, moaning sounds of the Squirrel’s engines were far louder, and Jonah knew he must be getting close to the Unknown Zone: the home of the Shrieker.
His stomach did another little flop.
Jonah spotted more grates up ahead. While he was out here, he figured he might as well investigate.
He slowly walked down the Haunted Passage, inspecting the walls and doors and listening very carefully for shrieks and manic laughter. The doors were all very similar. Most were gray, while a few were red and one was even yellow. He did notice with interest and a bit of alarm that a few of them had scratches in the metal. Not as long or deep as the blue door, but definitely scratches. The creatures had been here, too.
He was just about to start looking for another grate when he noticed one gray door with a very small difference: a little symbol carved into the bottom corner. It said SP.
He knelt down to have a closer look. This symbol had been carved with a knife or tool; it hadn’t chewed into the metal like the claw marks. A human had put the symbol here.
Jonah stood up and tried the door, expecting it to be locked. To his surprise, it slid right open, not even catching and straining like Jonah’s door in Sector Three.
This one had been oiled.
A few light panels flickered on as he opened the door, and Jonah quickly stepped inside and shut the door. He didn’t want any crew members stumbling upon him. Once it was firmly shut, he turned around and had a good look at the room.
It was a cafeteria with tables and chairs and a counter and a sink, but it was also completely littered with toys. Some sort of playhouse stood in the corner, a little pink house with white shutters and fake grass and plants bordering the doorway. Someone had even drawn a smiling yellow sun on the wall behind the house—barely visible against the dull gray metal—and white fluffy clouds around it. Jonah saw stuffed animals and dolls scattered on the floor and sitting up on the tables with teacups and plates of plastic food. But that wasn’t all.
Empty glasses were lined up on the counter beside the sink, along with a few stacks of food bars. A garbage bin sat on the floor, full of silver wrappers. On one of the cupboards, someone had written home sweet home in a pink marker.
Then it hit him.
SP. The space princess. This used to be her playroom.
Jonah went to the counter to get himself a food bar and a glass of water. He figured now might be a good time for a break, since he was about to try to rescue captured Space Raiders from an evil captain and his crew and all. So he sat down, pulled his journal out of his pocket, and started writing.
Dear Mom and Dad and Mara,
I am currently trapped in the Haunted Passage, and my companion was just abducted by an evil space crew member. I have now decided to go rescue him and the rest of the captured Space Raiders. You’re probably thinking that Jonah the baby would never do these things, but I seem to be more heroic in space. Probably because I have no choice. This place is full of evil things, and there’s no time to be cowardly.
I think I had too much space sadness to ask this before, but did you know they were taking me? Did they ask you? Did you want to get rid of me? I hope you didn’t, though the more time I spend in space, the more I realize how bad it was that I left my clothes on the floor and always forgot to take out the garbage and called Mara ugly.
And now I just thought of something. If you did want to give me up, then I am an orphan, and that’s why the Space Raiders chose me. Maybe I belong here after all. Now I’m getting space sadness again.
Jonah sat back for a moment, staring down at the page. This was a disturbing thought. But he decided he couldn’
t end on a bad note. It wasn’t very formal.
Never mind. I will just assume you didn’t know and are sad, since if you are reading this letter I’ve probably been eaten and I’ll never know anyway. And so I just wanted to say I love you and I’m sorry for the bad things I did and I know I am very lucky. You were a very good family.
I just wasn’t always a very good boy.
Sincerely,
Jonah
Jonah closed the journal and took a last bite of his food bar. He grimaced.
He thought about what he’d written. His parents couldn’t have given him up, could they? His mother had kissed him on the forehead the very morning Jonah was abducted, right before she went to work. Unless it was a good-bye kiss. Did she usually kiss his forehead? Yes, but she had also stroked his hair. Was she saying good-bye before they took him? It was impossible to be sure.
He tried to think back to the last time he’d seen his father.
His father was sitting on the couch, reading something on his tablet. He was wearing his brown housecoat and matching slippers, and his thinning salt-and-pepper hair was still slicked back from work. Jonah was watching the projector—he remembered that. But what were his father’s last words to him? Jonah’s eyes widened.
“Turn that down,” his father had said, not even lifting his eyes from the tablet.
Those were his last words to Jonah. Had he annoyed his father so much that he gave him up? Why hadn’t he just turned it down without being asked? He knew his father didn’t like it that loud. Jonah started putting the pieces together. He’d annoyed his father, and after he’d gone to bed, his father had convinced his mother to give him up. She had argued, maybe, but ultimately agreed and then kissed him good-bye, knowing full well that the Incredible Space Raiders would snatch him up that very afternoon. It was a stretch, but yet here he was, sitting on a spaceship.
He was busy remembering all the other bad things he’d done when he noticed the empty glass sitting beside him on the table. A silver wrapper from a food bar lay beside it, surrounded by crumbs.
But much more important, there was also a little spill of water under the glass.