The Lion of Mars
Page 1
More Novels by Jennifer L. Holm
The Fourteenth Goldfish
The Third Mushroom
Full of Beans
Turtle in Paradise
Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf
Eighth Grade Is Making Me Sick
Penny from Heaven
The Boston Jane series
The May Amelia books
By Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
The Evil Princess vs. the Brave Knight
Babymouse: Tales from the Locker
The Babymouse series
The Squish series
The Sunny series
My First Comics series
The Comics Squad series (with Jarrett J. Krosoczka)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Jennifer L. Holm
Cover art copyright © 2021 by Andy Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Photograph credits: this page, this page courtesy Jennifer L. Holm; this page courtesy NASA/JPL/Cornell University
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780593121818 (hc)—ISBN 9780593121825 (lib. bdg.)—ISBN 9780593376942 (int’l ed.)—ebook ISBN 9780593121832
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ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
To my cat-loving son
and his sister, whose first word was “rock.”
And, of course, to my husband, who applied to be an astronaut.
See you on Mars.
Contents
Cover
More Novels by Jennifer L. Holm
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One: Nest
Chapter Two: A Good Day
Chapter Three: Weeds
Chapter Four: Secrets and Gifts
Chapter Five: The Rules
Chapter Six: Bad Boring
Chapter Seven: Left Behind
Chapter Eight: Animals
Chapter Nine: Emergency
Chapter Ten: Algae Days
Chapter Eleven: Supply Feast
Chapter Twelve: Family Name
Chapter Thirteen: Love and Attention
Chapter Fourteen: Cake
Chapter Fifteen: Storm
Chapter Sixteen: Dust
Chapter Seventeen: Please Advise
Chapter Eighteen: Exterminate
Chapter Nineteen: Vanished
Chapter Twenty: Trapped
Chapter Twenty-one: Darkness
Chapter Twenty-two: Follow
Chapter Twenty-three: Vacation
Chapter Twenty-four: Home Again
Chapter Twenty-five: Situation Report
Chapter Twenty-six: All Is Not Well
Chapter Twenty-seven: Please Help
Chapter Twenty-eight: Mars Weeps
Chapter Twenty-nine: Pride
Author’s Note
Additional Resources to Continue the Conversation
Acknowledgments
DATE: 3.5.2091
FROM: CDR Dexter
TO: US Terrestrial Command
MESSAGE: Situation Report
The surface digi-cam at the northwest quadrant of the settlement has been destroyed. The pole supporting it was knocked over as well. It is my conclusion that this was done deliberately by a hostile actor.
Please advise.
Sai Dexter, COMMANDER
Expeditionary & Settlement Team
United States Territory, Mars
The trip to Mars was the hardest thing they’d ever experienced. That’s what the grown-ups said. The small, cramped ship. The constant fear of something going wrong. The knowledge that they could never return to Earth.
But honestly, it sounded like a cakewalk compared to sharing a bedroom with Albie.
Because he snored.
I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Albie started bunking with me. I’d tried just about everything to block the noise: earplugs, sleeping under the blanket, even a thick hat with earflaps. But none of them worked.
It was surprising because Albie was perfect. He was easygoing and did his chores without complaining. Of all us kids, he was the least likely to throw a fuss. The grown-ups trusted him, even Sai. But it turned out there was one thing Albie wasn’t good at: sleeping quietly. And I didn’t know which was worse: Albie’s snoring or Trey wanting to change rooms.
For as long as I could remember, Trey had slept in the bed across from mine. My drawings of cats and his drawings of aliens had papered the walls. Our plastic models crowded the shelves together. Then, two months ago, Trey suddenly asked to switch bedrooms. Next thing I knew, Trey was sleeping across the hall in the older kids’ room with Vera and Flossy, while Albie was snoring in mine.
And me?
I wasn’t sleeping at all.
Neither was Leo, from the looks of it. The old cat was sitting up in bed, flicking his tail in annoyance.
This room-switching thing had happened once before. Back when Trey and I were little, the grown-ups had moved us boys into one room and the girls into the other. Albie was older than me and Trey and so he was allowed to stay up later. The problem was that Albie would make a lot of noise when he came to bed, and he’d wake us up. The experiment was abandoned after a week. Now, all these years later, Albie was keeping me awake again.
Across the room from me, Albie let out a loud, waffling snort. I groaned, pulling the pillow over my head.
“Albie,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Albie!” I shouted.
He sat up abruptly, looking around the dimly lit room in confusion. Albie was tall, with broad shoulders. Darby said he would’ve made a good football player. Football was an Earth game where you threw around a ball and knocked into people. I didn’t really understand it.
“What’s wrong, Bell?” Albie asked, his hair sticking out crazily everywhere. It was always funny to see him without his Dodgers ball cap. He only took it off at bedtime.
“You’re snoring!” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought there was an emergency.”
“It is an emergency! I can’t sleep!”
“I’m so sorry, Bell,” he mumbled, and lay back down. “I promise not to snore anymo
re.”
It was hard to be angry at Albie. He was kind and gentle—a big teddy bear when it came right down to it.
A big snoring teddy bear.
“Aw, dust it,” I muttered. Albie could have the room to himself. I grabbed my blanket and left, Leo padding after me.
Not that I blamed him.
Even a cat couldn’t take Albie’s snoring.
* * *
Leo and I walked down the twisting corridor, our way lit by the cool blue light of nighttime. The light changed to mirror the time of day. In the morning, the blue would transform to a warm, bright yellow. This was supposed to help us have a sense of time because the settlement was mostly underground. It had been built in a giant lava tube—a massive, cavelike space left behind by flowing lava millions of years ago. It was the perfect prebuilt habitat, keeping us safe from the surface dangers of Mars—radiation, extreme freezing temperatures, and dust.
The interior walls were constructed from a space-tech gray rubber that curved gently, flowing from one room to the next like a smile. The rooms were round, almost bubble-like, for improved structural integrity. Sai told me he’d thrown out the old rules when he designed the settlement. Apparently, on Earth, people lived in boxy structures with hard corners.
Earth sounded sharp to me.
This corridor was a history of my childhood. There was the spot where I banged into the wall with my scooter. The scratches on the ceiling from when I’d tried to make my toy spaceship fly. (It didn’t work.) And, of course, the ruler on the wall where Meems recorded our growth with a thick black pen. She joked that as some of the first human children to grow up on Mars, we were a living experiment.
Farther down the way was a board with digi-pics of us when we’d arrived on Mars. We were much older now than the babies on the wall. Albie was seventeen, the oldest in Earth years. Then came Flossy (sixteen), Vera (fifteen), Trey (fourteen), and me (eleven).
I might have been the youngest, but at least I still knew how to have fun. Unlike the older kids, who’d become moody grumps when they turned thirteen.
Of course, in Mars years we were much younger. It takes Mars 687 days to go around the sun, so a “Mars year” is 687 days, which meant I was only five and Trey was seven.
Ahead of me, Leo stopped to sniff at something, his tail flicking in the air. When I was little, there had been a lot of cats. Bella. Mochi. Harley. Sesame. Little Cat. As the years went by, the cats died, and Leo was the only one left. But I still remembered them all.
Then Leo and I were leaving the children’s wing and passing the shared areas—the recreation room and the mess hall and kitchen—that bookended the two sleeping wings. The recreation room was illuminated by the flickering light of a digi-reel that someone had left playing.
Like the rest of the settlement, the room was painted a pale blue. It was supposed to be a soothing color that mimicked the Earth sky. There was an L-shaped couch with a loop rug woven from old clothing. Darby had created the rocking chair from plastic barrels. Everything was recycled on Mars. Even the plant that decorated the room was made from algae paper, although it was getting old and the leaves had become brittle and started to crumble.
Aside from the couch and rocking chair, there was the small plastic table we had played at when we were little. These days, it held Flossy’s sewing machine and fabric instead of our clay and crayons. Then there was the plastic display case next to the wall, which housed the rocks we children had collected over the years.
After that was the mess hall. It smelled like tonight’s supper: an algae casserole that was one of Salty Bill’s standard meals. No one was around, so I made a quick stop in the kitchen and grabbed a few ginger cookies. Salty Bill didn’t like anyone taking food when he wasn’t there, but I figured he wouldn’t miss them.
Then I was in the grown-ups’ wing. First was Meems’s room. I could find my way to it with my eyes closed; when we woke up sick at night, she was the one we went to. Past it was Salty Bill’s room. Across from it was Phinneus’s room. As I passed Eliana and Darby’s room, I could hear soft snoring. Eliana had always complained about her husband’s snoring, but I never understood what she was talking about. I sure did now.
Everyone’s rooms were dark except for Sai’s. There was light under his door, and I wondered what kept him from sleep. I left the living quarters behind and followed the corridor that led to the work areas. This part of the settlement was usually buzzing with activity during the day. But in the middle of the night, the only sound was from the air scrubbers humming softly in the background like a lullaby. I passed the exercise room, Sai’s workshop, the sick bay, various workrooms, the generator room, and, my favorite, the algae farm.
Just past the algae farm was a circular staircase. I climbed up and up and up the bouncing plastic stairs. I was a little out of breath when I finally reached the communications and observations rooms, also known as COR. It was aboveground and where we sent and received messages from Earth. The grown-ups jokingly called it the Phone Booth. The COR was the crew’s original habitat when they’d first arrived on Mars. Installed by robots, it was a simple domelike structure. There was a wide window with a sweeping view of the dusty red Martian landscape. No one spent much time here except for Sai. As commander, he sent situation reports to Earth Command. Also, he could monitor the weather better up here. It was the perfect spot to watch whirling dust devils.
I liked the echoes of the room’s previous life. Taped on the walls were colorful maps of Earth places. Pennsylvania. Alabama. Alaska. Michigan. It had been tradition for the crew to bring a map from their home state.
Then there were the plastic lockers for the crew members’ belongings. They’d decorated them with stickers and pictures. The front of Sai’s locker had a list of all the places he’d visited.
BUCKET LIST
Everest
Antarctica
Moon
Mars
Best of all, it was quiet up here. I settled on the couch under the blanket and munched on the cookies. Outside the wide window, Phobos, one of our two moons, was a glowing lump in the darkness. Above it was Earth, a bright, shining star.
I wondered if the people on Earth thought about us as much as we did about them. Even though I’d seen lots of digi-pics, I still had a hard time imagining Earth. The pool of endless water called the ocean. The places with trees called forests. And, of course, the animals. Phinneus had told me about the birds that flew through the sky and made their homes, called nests, in trees high above the ground.
As I closed my eyes with Leo curled at my feet, I felt like a bird in a quiet, safe nest—my home.
One that I never, ever wanted to leave.
I blinked my eyes open. The dome was bathed in warm pink light.
It was morning.
And there was something heavy on my chest.
“Meow!”
That something was Leo. He was sitting on me.
“Meeee-ow!” he said again, more loudly. I understood a little Cat, and that meant I’m hungry!
“I guess you want breakfast,” I said.
Satisfied that I was finally awake, he leapt off me with a swish of his tail, landing with a soft thud on the floor.
I stood up and yawned, walking over to the window. The landscape stretched out in varying shades of dusty red as far as I could see. The low-hanging sun was a small dot against a pink sky with wispy blue clouds.
Sunrise on Mars was magical.
Just beyond the window was our backyard. The swooping craters where we’d spent hours playing outside while wearing our environmental suits. The lawn chairs and barbecue grill, cobbled together from parts Darby had scavenged from old machines. The grill didn’t work, of course—there wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to light a fire. But Darby loved to pose for digi-pics next to it, wearing his environmental suit.
He was goofy like that.
Meems said the only thing missing was grass. Phinneus explained it was a plant you grew and cut and then grew again and cut. It didn’t make much sense.
Off to the side of our yard was the garage, where we stored our two rovers, and next to that was the docking station, where the robot-controlled supply ship from Earth that came every two years would connect to the settlement. I was already looking forward to the chocolate it would bring.
Something caught my eye. A blinking light was moving slowly across the horizon. It was probably a rover from one of the other countries. It was always a little scary to think how close the other settlements were to us. I sometimes wondered what they looked like, as I’d never seen them. We weren’t allowed to go past the little cemetery on the edge of our territory; it was far too dangerous.
There was a soft ringing in the distance; it was the meal chime. Salty Bill would be setting breakfast out now. After that would be morning chores, lessons, lunch, then afternoon chores, free time, supper, then evening chores, and finally bed. The next morning, we would wake up and start the same routine all over again. Sai liked to say a boring day on Mars was a good day.
“We better get moving, Leo,” I said. “Um-yums.”
It was a baby word I had used for “food.” Now I used it on Leo. He knew that word and turned toward me. But before I could take a step, it happened.
A glowing round object hurtled across the sky, a white-hot tail of light streaking behind it. It crashed far away, waves of bright light exploding around it like a halo.