by Wendy Mass
Dash glanced at the group. The members of the Alpha team were showing the Omegas some of the cooler things the MTB could do. He’d have to stop thinking of them as Alphas and Omegas now that they were one team. They needed a new name.
No one noticed Dash and Chris slip out of the room. Rocket followed at their heels as they headed toward Chris’s quarters.
“Did you tell the newcomers yet about your age?” Chris asked.
Dash shook his head. “I’ll tell them in a few days, I promise. Everything is new for them now, I don’t want them to worry that the leader Shawn chose might not be able to lead them after all. Anna knows, though. She figured it out.”
Chris nodded. “Not much gets by her. She was a powerful opponent, and now you will need her to be a powerful partner.”
“I know.”
Chris opened his door, and before Dash could react, an arm reached out, grabbed Chris by the shirt collar, yanked him inside, and shut the door.
Dash stared at the door in shock. What just happened? He tried to push on the handle, but it didn’t budge. Rocket pawed and scratched on the door. He began to whine and then bark, which he almost never did. Chris would never leave Rocket locked outside like this if he was able to open it…which could only mean one thing!
Dash lifted his arm to alert the others that Chris was in danger. It turned out he didn’t need to. They were all running down the hall toward him.
“What’s wrong?” Carly asked, reaching him first. “We heard Rocket barking.”
If the situation wasn’t so dire, Dash might have laughed. Who needed high-tech arm bands when they had a dog? But the situation was dire, so he said, “Colin grabbed Chris and pulled him inside his room! I can’t get in!”
Anna tried the door, putting all her strength into it.
“It’s no use,” Gabriel explained. “The only person who can get in or out of this door is Chris.”
Dash cleared his throat. “No. There is another way in. I’ve been there.”
The others looked at him in surprise.
Dash leaned against the wall for support as he collected his thoughts. Chris had told him not to tell anyone about his tiny ship, which actually powered the entire Cloud Leopard. And also happened to be falling apart. But surely Chris had never expected to be trapped in his own room with his evil clone.
Dash made his decision. “Piper, I’m going to need you to wait here and guard the entrance with Rocket, okay?”
Piper hesitated a second, then nodded. If he picked her specifically, he must have a reason. That was good enough for her.
“Follow me,” Dash said to the others, and he ran into the medical bay across the hall. He swiped his finger along the computer screen on the wall beside the portal and set his destination. “We need to get up to the relaxation room. I’ll explain there.” He jumped in. One by one, the others followed until they were all standing beside him again.
“Aren’t we just farther away now?” Anna asked, looking around. “Why’d you bring us up here?”
“Spill,” Gabriel said, crossing his arms.
“I was goofing around in the tubes before we left for Tundra,” Dash explained as his fingers flew across the navigation screen next to a tube entrance, “and I figured out a new route from here. It dumped me out in a hallway that led to a door I’d never seen before.” Dash realized he didn’t have to tell them about the tiny ship inside yet. They’d see it for themselves.
“Colin may look like Chris,” Anna warned, “but trust me, from what we’ve seen here so far, they couldn’t be more different. We should move fast.”
“I’m trying,” he said. Had he turned left after the library, or right?
Gabriel stepped up beside him. “If you took this route before, all you need to do is call up your old log entry.”
Relieved, Dash did as he suggested. There it was, the longest one so far.
“Hey, when did that happen? You’re in the lead!” Carly said, looking it over. “And you didn’t even brag about it?”
“I would have gotten around to it eventually,” Dash replied. “Okay, let’s go. No one try to go inside the room until we all get there.”
Everyone nodded. Dash stepped aside. One by one, they threw themselves into the portal, pressing the saved route each time before jumping. The Omegas couldn’t help but squeal with surprise as the twists and turns kept coming. “Wow,” Ravi said when he landed at the other end on the cool white floor. “If we’d had sweet rides like that on the Light Blade, I might have spent all day in those tubes!”
“Sometimes we do,” Carly admitted, landing beside him.
“Everyone good?” Dash asked, the last to arrive. The Omegas nodded, catching their breath. Gabriel and Carly turned in circles, both shocked to have arrived somewhere new on their own ship.
Dash led them toward the near-invisible door in the wall and pointed at the metal strip on the wall that acted as a handle. Gabriel reached for it, but Anna yanked his hand back. “Wait! We need a plan.”
“We need to get in there,” Gabriel insisted.
“Anna’s right,” Dash said. “We’ve learned not to go into battle unprepared.”
Gabriel grumbled but lowered his hand.
“Do you think this is going to be a battle?” Siena asked.
“I hope not,” Dash said. “I don’t know what Colin’s capable of, though.”
The Omegas exchanged glances. “I’d give this plan making about twenty seconds,” Niko said. “Then we get in there either way.”
Dash glanced at Anna. “You know Colin better than anyone, right? What do you think is the best way to handle this with the least risk to Chris?”
“And us,” Ravi muttered. When they all gave him a look, he held up his hands and said, “What? It’s true, right?”
“But you don’t say it,” Siena whispered with an eye roll.
Anna thought for a few seconds. “Colin’s not as good as he thinks he is at hiding his agenda. We all knew he would ditch any one of us if it helped him. He tries to hide that, though, by pretending that we’re all on the same side and that he’s not plotting anything.”
Dash considered that. “Okay, how about this. We’ll pretend that we’re lost and that we just found this door. Chris will know it’s not true, but hopefully he’ll just go along with it. We’ll pretend everything’s normal. If Colin doesn’t suspect that we’re onto him, maybe he’ll let his guard down. Then we surround him, edging Chris off to the side to keep him safe.”
“What then?” Gabriel asked.
Niko ducked low and put his hands up at face level. “Then we come at him from all sides with all the martial arts training we’ve had.”
The others crouched into various poses—tae kwon do, karate, Krav Maga. With all the giant monster creatures they’d encountered, there hadn’t been much use for simple hand-to-hand combat.
“I’m all for trying out my Krav Maga moves on the clone,” Ravi said. “But then what? It doesn’t seem like Chris can contain him. He must have broken out of whatever holding bay he was keeping him in.”
“Maybe he has some kind of on-and-off switch,” Carly said, practicing her high kick.
“He’s not a robot,” Gabriel said.
“I know that,” Carly grumbled.
“Are we gonna do this?” Anna asked, pushing Dash toward the door. “Your plan. You make the first move.”
Dash took a deep breath. “Here goes.” He pulled on the thin metal strip, and the door swung open, just as it had the first time. He stepped inside. The others kept close behind him. ZRKs were everywhere. They seemed agitated, buzzing and zooming in all directions. Dash hadn’t seen this many in one place for a long time. He scanned the room quickly but didn’t see Chris or Colin. He figured this room must connect to the one Piper was guarding.
“What is this place?” Carly whispered, taking in the bright lights and high ceiling. Her head spun as she tried to figure out how this huge room could be hidden within the ship. Then her eyes
scanned down, and she saw the ancient-looking flying machine sitting in the center of the floor. She stopped short. “Holy cow!”
“How is this on our ship and we never knew?” Gabriel asked, his eyes wide.
“I’ll explain later,” Dash promised. “Right now we need to figure out how this room connects with the locked one. We need to rescue Chris.”
“That won’t be necessary,” a voice said from inside the small ship.
Dash stiffened. They all crouched down in their favorite martial arts pose. So much for their surprise attack!
A hatch creaked opened on the side of the ship, and Chris walked out, with Colin right behind him. This was the first time the Alpha crew had seen Colin up close. The two looked identical, except that Colin wore glasses.
Colin spoke first. “I’m sorry if I scared you before, at the door. I just got overexcited to show Chris something I’d figured out about his little ship here.”
Chris nodded. “It’s going to really boost the power on this thing.”
“What is this thing?” Carly asked.
Chris explained to everyone what he’d told Dash before. The ship was the one that had carried him from his home planet of Flora, all the way to Earth. Now it powered the Cloud Leopard.
Dash only half listened. The others were asking questions about the ship, and he understood their curiosity, but a few seconds ago, they had this whole plan and now it was all for nothing? Chris was acting like he and Colin were the best of buddies. It didn’t feel right. Dash looked back and forth between the two. How could they look so alike and yet be so different?
Gabriel must have been thinking the same thing because he said, “Chris, I don’t mean to overstep my bounds here, but hello? This guy was made from your DNA—your stolen DNA—and trained to work for your enemy. You’re not, like, working together now, are you?”
Chris shrugged. “He’s a part of me, whether I like it or not. And I have to admit, in our current stage of the mission, two of me are better than one.”
Colin puffed out his chest, looking every bit like a high school football player about to brag that he threw a forty-yard pass. “I’m Chris 2.0,” he said with a smirk. “Faster, smarter, and I don’t need to sleep.”
Chris’s smile faltered just a bit. “You don’t sleep?”
Colin shook his head, which, Dash now realized, was the tiniest bit larger and squarer than Chris’s. Maybe they didn’t look exactly alike after all?
“C’mon, guys,” Ravi said, heading toward the door. “This reunion is giving me the creeps. Let’s go start the movie.”
Dash stayed still while the others began to file out of the room. “Are you coming? We’re going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy,” Gabriel said. “It was Piper’s choice. Some of these guys have never seen it. Can you imagine?”
“I’ll join you in a minute,” Dash said.
“Me too,” Anna said.
Niko gave them both a salute. “Bring the popcorn.”
“Just ask the snack station for it,” Dash said. “It’s in the wall of the rec room by the water station.”
“Why am I not surprised that your walls make popcorn?” Niko said, shaking his head as he left.
Chris turned to Colin. “Can you finish adjusting the gravitational regulator without me? I need to give them some medical supplies from across the hall.”
Without waiting for an answer, Chris ushered Dash and Anna out his front door and straight across the hall to the medical bay. Even without turning around, Dash could tell Colin was watching them walk away. “Is he going to follow us?” Dash whispered as the door to the medical bay slid closed. “He can’t leave the room,” Chris replied. “My door is programmed to my fingerprint, which, clone or not, he does not share. Well, not once I altered mine when I discovered his existence.”
“You don’t really trust him, do you?” Anna demanded.
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Chris replied in a low voice.
“Phew,” Anna said. “Otherwise I would have said Colin was right, that you aren’t very bright.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Dash asked. “Isn’t it dangerous letting him around your old ship?”
“I don’t think he’d do anything to risk not getting back home. We will have to be on our guard at the end for any double-crossing, but for now I’d like to think we’re on the same side.”
Dash looked over his shoulder. “And he’s okay staying in your room?”
“For now,” Chris said. “I let him have my private quarters, and I’ll move into the old ship. There’s plenty of room—well, there’s enough room—in the back for a cot.”
“You know, you’ve really got to give your ship a name,” Dash said. “It deserves something distinguished and powerful, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Anna agreed, “like how about Rolling Thunder, or Sky Wolf, or the Freedom of the Stars, or—”
“It already has a name,” Chris admitted, his cheeks growing red.
“What is it?” Dash asked, surprised to see his friend blush. Usually his face was so expressionless.
Chris muttered something and looked away.
“Sorry,” Anna said, “what was that again?”
Chris repeated it, only a tiny bit louder. “It’s called the Cloud Kitten.”
Dash and Anna looked at each other and burst out laughing. Laughing felt good for both of them, and they went on doing it longer than was truly necessary. “Not really the fiercest name,” Anna said, wiping a tear away. “You know, for a ship that crossed the universe and back.”
“I know that,” Chris said. “But Shawn named it when he was a little boy, and it stuck. That’s why the transport ship is the Cloud Cat and the big mother ship is the Cloud Leopard.”
“Ah, I get it,” Anna said, just now realizing that Chris had a special bond with the man she knew only as Commander Phillips. She had trouble picturing Phillips as a kid.
“On to more pressing needs,” Chris said. He pushed a button on the wall, and a nearly hidden drawer slid out. It contained the metal box with the serum Dash needed to keep his cells from aging too rapidly. Chris himself used a similar biologic so he could travel through space safely, but because of how his species aged so slowly and uniquely, his injection was different and he only had to take it once so far. If he’d known ahead of time of Dash’s situation, he could have come up with a better solution for the boy. As it was, he and Commander Phillips considered themselves lucky that they could get these together in time for the voyage.
Dash grabbed a syringe off the top of the dwindling pile and jammed it into his leg. In all the excitement, he’d actually forgotten he never received it that morning.
Chris pushed the box toward Dash. “With the Colin situation, I don’t think it’s wise for you to come to my room for these anymore. You’ll have to store the shots from now on.”
“I could give them to you,” Anna offered. “The thought of jabbing Dash with something pointy every day sounds fun!”
“Ha, ha,” Dash said dryly. “I’ll be just fine on my own. My MTB will remind me or Piper will.”
“Spoilsport,” Anna said.
“Go catch up with your friends,” Chris said. “Try to enjoy yourselves for the next couple of weeks. I’m going to stay in the room a lot working on my ship…I mean…the Cloud Kitten. Now that we’re in the final leg of our journey, it’s even more important that nothing goes wrong. We can’t afford to lose any time at all, not even a day.”
Dash and Anna nodded, stepping out into the hall. They were both relieved to see that Colin was no longer in the doorway of Chris’s room. “Be careful,” Dash said as they left Chris.
“I will,” he promised.
When they were far enough away, Dash whispered, “Cloud Kitten.”
Anna giggled.
He shifted the box from one arm to the other. “I don’t think I’ve heard you giggle before, Anna Turner.”
“You tell anyone, I’ll
deny it.”
They ducked into the training center and took the stairs up to the upper floor so Dash could put the box of needles in the boys’ dorm. Going through the tunnels with them didn’t seem like the smartest idea.
Halfway back to the rec room, Anna murmured, “Cloud Kitten.”
Now it was Dash’s turn to giggle.
Usually the weeks spent in Gamma Speed on the Cloud Leopard dragged by at a snail’s pace. After all, there wasn’t much to see. Outside, nothing but streaks of light interrupted the blackness of space as they flew past the stars at an impossible speed.
But those were the old days. Now, with the four Omegas on board, the ship buzzed and hummed with a new energy. After screening Guardians of the Galaxy (with nonstop commentary from Gabriel), the group discovered there were a lot of classic alien movies the majority of them hadn’t seen. They decided to start weekly movie nights. Each person could choose their own movie to show the others from the seemingly endless supply on board. With eight of them, they figured it would take them right up to their arrival on Dargon. In the five weeks that had passed so far, it had become their favorite group activity. Racing through the tubes and cheering on Anna and Gabriel as they soared side by side in the flight simulators were close seconds (even though Anna usually got too competitive and had to apologize for some of the things she called Gabriel during the flights).
The group clapped as the final credits rolled on Carly’s choice. “There,” she said, wiping away a stray tear. “Now none of you can say you never saw E.T. Did you like it?”
Piper and the boys had seen it already, but Siena and Anna nodded, dabbing at their cheeks.
“I don’t think I cried that much since reading Charlotte’s Web in fourth grade,” Siena said.
“Too bad all the real aliens we’ve met haven’t been as cuddly as E.T.,” Dash said. “It would make our missions a lot easier.” He pulled a heavy sweatshirt over his head, and when he glanced back up, he saw the others were all looking away from him. He wished he’d waited till he got back to the dorm to put it on. He knew what they were thinking. No one wanted to be the one to point out that it wasn’t cold in the ship. The ZRKs kept the air at the perfect temperature, and their uniforms also had some kind of technology to help keep them comfortable on board.