The Lion of Mars

by Jennifer L. Holm

Up ahead, there was a round pod of a habitat. A red-white-and-blue flag fluttered from a pole.

  “Let’s get closer,” Vera said.

  I looked at Trey and shook my head, mouthing, “No.” I could tell he didn’t think this was a good idea, either.

  “Uh, we’re not allowed to visit other countries,” Trey said.

  “We aren’t allowed to take the rover, either, but here we are,” Vera replied.

  Vera pulled the rover alongside the habitat, so that we could look in the hexagon-shaped windows. But there were no lights on.

  “Where is everyone?” Vera asked.

  “Probably underground,” Trey said.

  “That’s too bad. I really wanted to see a French person,” Vera said.

  We had never seen anyone from the foreign territories in real life.

  “Well, I really wanted to see the scarves,” Flossy said, disappointed.

  I took a deep breath, staring out my window. Now that we weren’t moving, I was starting to feel a little better.

  That is, until I saw the person in the environmental suit walking toward us. They were carrying something long and metal with a curved end, which looked like a weapon.

  “Uh,” I said. My mouth couldn’t seem to work right.

  “Do you think they look like us?” Trey asked.

  “Of course they do,” Vera said.

  “How do you know?” Trey asked.

  “I’ve seen digi-pics.”

  “Except they wear cute scarves,” Flossy added.

  Another person in an enviro suit joined the first one and had a long metal thing, too. That person turned and shook their metal thing at our rover.

  “They look just like that!” I shouted, pointing out my window.

  Trey gasped. The people shuffle-hopped toward us, gesturing angrily and waving their weapons.

  “They don’t seem very friendly,” Trey said.

  “I think we should go,” Flossy said. “Now!”

  “Right,” Vera said, fumbling with the controls.

  “It’s in park!” Flossy said. “Put it in drive!”

  “I’m trying!” Vera cried.

  “Hurry,” I urged. “They’re coming!”

  It wasn’t fast enough, because they had already reached the rover and were banging on my window. I looked into the face glaring at me from behind the helmet. It was a man, and he looked angry. Fear rushed through me.

  “Move! Let me do it!” Flossy yelled, leaning over and knocking Vera’s hand away. She shifted the gear into reverse.

  Suddenly, we were driving backward, the French people chasing us. Then Vera turned sharply, and we were driving forward, away from the French settlement.

  I looked anxiously behind us until the figures were just specks on the horizon.

  And then, finally, nothing at all.

  * * *

  The inside of the rover was quiet as it bumped along. No one was talking or laughing. All the excitement had escaped, like air draining from a balloon. I couldn’t stop shaking. All I could think was that we had broken another rule:

  No contact with foreign countries, ever.

  Was having them chase us technically considered contact? It wasn’t like we’d talked with them or been invited over for supper.

  “What was that thing they were waving at us?” Flossy asked.

  “Some kind of weapon,” Vera said.

  “Maybe a sword? Like from Earth ancient times?” Trey suggested.

  I looked out the window and down at the steep sand dune cliff we were driving on top of. I took a deep breath. But it didn’t help, because I couldn’t shake the fear anymore. It clung to me like a second skin.

  “I want to go home,” I blurted out.

  “You do?” Trey asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and he must have seen the fear in my eyes.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding slowly.

  “No way!” Vera said. “We came all this way. Besides, we’re close to the crash site.”

  “I think we should take a vote,” Flossy said. “I vote we go home.”

  “Me too,” Trey said.

  “Me three,” I said.

  Vera turned to look back at us. There was a furious expression on her face. “This isn’t fair!”

  “We took a vote, Vera,” Flossy said.

  “Well, I’m the one driving, and I say—”

  But she never finished her sentence. The next thing I knew, we were rolling over and my helmet smacked the window hard and everything turned black. When I opened my eyes, the rover was on its side and everyone was yelling and all I could do was gasp because of the pain in my shoulder. It felt like it was on fire.

  “You drove right over the edge, Vera!” Flossy said.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Vera shrieked. Her voice seemed even louder in my helmet.

  “Are you hurt, Bell?” Trey asked in a panicky voice.

  I tried to say something, but when I moved, sharp pain arced through my shoulder, and I screamed.

  “Bell’s hurt!” Trey shouted.

  “Everyone stay calm, just stay calm!” Flossy said. “Shouting won’t help anything.”

  “I am calm!” he snapped at her.

  Flossy turned to look at me. “Where does it hurt, Bell?”

  “My shoulder,” I said with a whimper. “Get me out!”

  “The harness hurts?” Trey asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Hold on!” he said.

  Trey undid his harness and scrambled over, looking at mine. He unlatched it, and my body fell toward the ground, hitting the side of the rover. I yelped in pain.

  “Are you okay, Bell?” Vera asked.

  “What do you think?” I huffed.

  “We need to call for help now!” Trey said.

  “Well, unless someone happened to steal a digi-comm, we’re out of luck,” Flossy said. Only the grown-ups had digi-comm devices.

  We all looked at Vera. She was the sneakiest one of us.

  “I didn’t take one!” she said, throwing up her hands.

  Of all the times for Vera to be good.

  “Aw, dust it,” I whispered.

  “Should we try and walk home?” Vera asked. “We have air canisters.”

  “We’re too far away,” Flossy said, studying the GPS. “We don’t have enough air to make it back.”

  “Bell’s injured! He’ll never make it,” Trey said, and I shot him a grateful look.

  “Besides, it’s safer to stay here,” Flossy added. “We still have pressurization and heat.”

  “For how long?” Vera asked.

  “I don’t know, Vera,” Flossy said.

  “But—”

  “Vera, just stop!” Flossy hissed in a low voice. “You’re scaring Bell.”

  Which was true.

  I tried to get into a comfortable position. Every time I moved, it hurt. Finally, I closed my eyes. I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up, it was dark outside.

  “What time is it?” I asked groggily.

  “Nineteen hundred hours,” Trey said.

  We’d missed supper. I wondered what Salty Bill had cooked. I could really go for something warm right now. Like his famous algae biscuits.

  “Do you think they’ve figured out we’re gone?” I asked.

  “They might not have noticed we missed afternoon chores. But supper? I’m sure everyone knows something’s up by now,” Flossy said.

  She sounded confident, but for some reason it didn’t make me feel better. How were they ever going to find us?

  “Yeah,” Trey agreed. “You know how Sai is. He’s probably stomping around looking for us right now.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Vera said in a small voice.

  Flos
sy’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

  “Uh, I may have reset the light timers in the settlement.”

  Trey’s mouth dropped open.

  “And all the digi-clocks,” Vera added.

  “Why?” Flossy asked.

  “To give us a few extra hours to explore,” Vera said. To be honest, I was kind of impressed. Only Vera could think of something devious like that.

  “So you mean they don’t even know we’re missing yet?” Trey asked.

  “Probably not,” Vera said. “I reset everything by two hours.”

  We sat there looking at one another.

  “Oh no,” Vera said.

  “What?” I asked.

  She grimaced. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  * * *

  Now I knew what the grown-ups meant about being stuck on the spaceship. It had only been a few hours, and this was pure torture. The first thing I planned to do when I got home was never leave again.

  Not to mention, it was boring. And not good boring. It was bad boring.

  Good boring was predictable—like doing chores at the same time every day. It was no fun, but you knew what was expected. Bad boring was being bored and having absolutely no idea what was going to happen. Not knowing was scary—scarier than aliens or even French people.

  “It stinks in here, and I’m hungry!” Vera said.

  Well, at least one thing was predictable. You could always count on Vera to complain.

  “I can’t do anything about that,” Flossy said.

  “Well, I can,” she said.

  Vera lifted up a silver backpack. I recognized it. There were emergency packs in every rover, stocked with the basics—medical supplies, water, meal bars, glow sticks.

  “Hey!” Flossy said. “Don’t eat those yet!”

  “Why not?” Vera asked.

  “Because we don’t know when we’re going to be rescued. We should save it for an emergency!”

  “This is an emergency!” Vera snapped.

  “How hungry can you be anyway? You had lunch!” Trey complained.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” she said.

  Vera opened the backpack and shuffled through it. She picked up a meal bar.

  “Vera,” Flossy said in a low voice.

  Vera stared at the meal bar for a long moment and sighed.

  “Fine,” she said.

  Then she put it back and zipped the bag shut.

  * * *

  I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t get comfortable. Every time I moved, pain streaked through my shoulder. And my head was pounding.

  “My head hurts,” I whispered.

  Trey’s eyes snapped to me. “Where?”

  “Everywhere,” I said.

  “I think he’s dehydrated,” Flossy said. “You should drink some water, Bell.”

  “But I thought we were saving it for an emergency?” Vera asked.

  “Like Flossy said, you should drink some water,” Trey said in a firm voice.

  Flossy pulled out a pouch of water, broke a straw into it, and handed it to me. I looked at it, wondering how much water we had left. How long could we last with that small backpack of provisions—a few energy bars and pouches of water? What would happen when they ran out?

  “Are we going to die here?” I asked.

  “Of course not!” Flossy said.

  “But we’ll run out of food in no time! What will we eat?”

  “We could always eat you,” Trey said.

  I frowned at him.

  “Well,” Vera said, “I did it.”

  “Did what?” Trey asked.

  “I peed in my suit,” Vera announced.

  “You did what?” Flossy asked.

  “It just happened,” Vera said, and snorted.

  Flossy burst into peals of laughter. I would’ve laughed, too, except it hurt too much.

  But Trey wasn’t laughing.

  “This isn’t funny,” he bit out.

  “I know,” Vera said. “I’m the one in the suit.”

  But I could tell he was getting angry from the tone of his voice.

  “We wouldn’t be stuck here if it wasn’t for you!” Trey groused. “You should’ve let Flossy drive! She wouldn’t have driven us into a sand dune!”

  As their voices filled the rover, I closed my eyes. The grown-ups had been right all along. Mars was dangerous. If we got out of this alive, I would never, ever break a rule again.

  Then something banged hard against the rover, and Flossy screamed.

  Sai’s stern face stared at us from the inside of his helmet. Past the dune, I could see the lights of the Yellow Submarine. Eliana was at the wheel.

  “They found us!” I cried.

  “Sai!” Trey shouted.

  “See! I told you!” Flossy said.

  “If I’d known, I would have held it in,” Vera muttered.

  After quickly assessing my injury, Sai helped me into the Yellow Submarine. Everyone else piled in after me.

  The rover was quiet as we headed for home.

  “I don’t know what you children were thinking,” Sai said in a horribly calm voice. It was somehow worse that he wasn’t shouting at us.

  “We didn’t mean to—” Trey began.

  Sai cut him off. “You didn’t mean to steal the rover?”

  Trey flinched.

  “How did you find us?” Vera asked.

  “There’s a tracking device on all the rovers,” Eliana explained.

  “We put them on after Lissa died in a rover accident,” Sai added.

  “She did?” Flossy asked, shocked. “I didn’t know that.”

  It was news to me, too.

  In fact, the only thing I knew about Lissa was that she had been a nanny. But dying in a rover accident? That was one secret the grown-ups had actually managed to keep on Mars.

  “Well, now you know,” Sai said. “If we hadn’t found you, you could have died in one, too.”

  No one said anything after that.

  * * *

  “You’ve fractured your clavicle,” Meems told me, studying the handheld X-ray device. “That’s your collarbone.”

  I was lying on the examination table in the small medical bay. The room had all sorts of diagnostic equipment and cabinets with medical supplies. It smelled of antiseptic cleanser and was my least favorite part of the settlement. Nothing good ever happened here. This was where you got shots and had cavities filled.

  “And I’m concerned you may have a concussion, too,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means your brains got rattled around. I will be waking you up every few hours tonight to make sure you’re okay,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night for both of us.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “All right, I need to put a sling on your arm to keep it immobilized. It’s going to hurt a little.”

  A little? By the time she was finished, I was panting from the pain.

  “How is your pain level from one to ten?” she asked me. “With ten being the worst.”

  “One hundred!”

  She opened a cabinet and surveyed a shelf. “Hmm. I probably should’ve ordered more painkillers for the supply ship.”

  The door opened and Phinneus walked in, fear crossing his face when he saw me.

  “How bad?” he demanded.

  “A fractured collarbone. Maybe a concussion,” Meems said.

  Phinneus put his hands on my cheeks. He looked like he’d been crying; his eyes were red and puffy.

  “I swear, you took five years off my life,” he scolded.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. I seemed to be saying that a lot.

  “What were you doing?”

  “
We just wanted to see the alien ship.”

  “There is no alien ship,” he said. He added softly, “And you could’ve died.” I’d never heard him sound more disappointed in me.

  “Sai said Lissa died in a rover accident. What happened?”

  Meems and Phinneus exchanged a long look. It was like they were having an entire conversation without saying a word. Finally, Phinneus sat down with a groan.

  “You’re having pain again?” Meems asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Do you want something for it?”

  Phinneus waved her off. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “You’re so stubborn,” Meems said, shaking her head.

  “Not as stubborn as some,” he said, turning to me. “All right. Where to begin?”

  Phinneus smoothed his hands over the top of his cane.

  “You know that during the early years of the settlement, we collaborated with the other countries?” he asked me.

  I nodded. Everyone knew that.

  “It was very collegial. The railway was a joint project between all the countries. It was an incredible achievement. For engineering. But even more so for cooperation. We joked that such a project would never have happened on Earth because of all the red tape.”

  “What’s red tape?” I asked.

  “Regulations and rules and all sorts of nonsense that get in the way of progress,” he said.

  “We have rules here on Mars, though,” I said.

  “Yes, and I’ve noticed you’re not very good at following them,” he pointed out.

  Whoops. He was right about that.

  “After several years, relations between various countries on Earth started to deteriorate. Countries began fighting over mineral deposits discovered in Antarctica. But here on Mars, things were fine. We were in our own little bubble. Then Lissa died.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Lissa had gone out in a rover with two other people—one French, one Russian. There was an accident, and she didn’t make it back,” he said, his eyes sad.

  “Why?” I asked.

  A voice behind me said, “Because they left her behind.”

  I looked up, startled to see Sai in the doorway.