Escape the Vortex

by Jeanne DuPrau

  Lying on his back in the snow, Dash saw its gray underside rise over him and its mouth open into a black cavern, rimmed with teeth. From deep within the creature came a hissing noise, like a ton of sand rushing down a metal slide.

  “Carly!” Dash screamed. “Catch!” He flung the Talon to her with all his might. Then he curled himself into a ball and rolled, and when the crawler crashed back down to land, Dash was not underneath it.

  With one hand, Carly steered the Streak, driving right next to the crawler’s back end, just inches away, and with the other hand, she gripped the Talon and drew it down in a long line on the slick skin. She did it as gently as she could, considering the tricky situation. The Talon left a stripe like a tiny railroad track.

  “Got it!” she screamed. “Come on!”

  Dash scrambled to his feet, Carly swooped the Streak up beside him, he climbed in, and in moments, they were back to the cave. They tumbled out, weak in the knees, panting, freezing, and laughing. Carly held up the Talon, and with what breath they had, they both cheered.

  “Now back inside!” Dash said. “Back to our pal TULIP! Let’s get warm!”

  Anna and Ravi hadn’t moved yet from their spot on the cliff. They couldn’t take their eyes from the vast, unnerving view before them: the great gathering of ice crawlers on the slopes of the low hills, the whirlwinds twisting and towering among them, and the strange silver lake, whose waters also appeared to be in motion.

  “We have to make a plan,” said Anna.

  “That’s right,” said Ravi. He gazed at the sight before him with awe. In a way, it was beautiful, almost like an old-fashioned photograph—black, white, gray, and silver. But he wasn’t eager to go down and get into that scene himself.

  “We’ll find one of those beasts that’s kind of apart from the rest, a straggler.” She pointed downward. “See? There’s one. And there’s another one, over by that lake. We’ll pick that one. We have to move up on it fast, do the job, and get away.”

  “As long as it doesn’t have a calf next to it,” said Ravi.

  “Right. And we’ll have to steer clear of those whirlwinds of locusts.” Anna’s voice turned businesslike. “You do the driving this time,” she said. “Get us up close to the one by the lake. I’ll be ready with the Talon.”

  They swapped places, and Ravi started the motor and guided the Cheetah down the steep slope into the valley. The way was rough. He had to keep a sharp lookout for rocks that could scrape or break the Cheetah’s runners, and for patches of slick ice where the Cheetah could slide sideways, tip, and tumble downhill. He was so focused on all this that he was taken by surprise when the ground leveled out, and he looked up to see two of the huge, blubbery creatures only a short distance ahead.

  But he had no time to sit and look.

  “On your left!” Anna cried out, and when Ravi looked left, he saw the white finger of a whirlwind bearing down on them, so close that a few stray locusts were already batting against the windshield.

  He steered hard away from it, only to see another one just ahead.

  “Go right!” Anna yelled, and he did, and they passed the twisting spiral just as it dissolved, releasing a blizzard of locusts, cutting off their view completely.

  “Slow down!” Anna yelled.

  “I know, I know!” Ravi yelled back. “I have to, I can’t see!”

  Out of the whiteness loomed a huge dim shape. Ravi had to swerve fast to miss it.

  “That’s our crawler!” cried Anna.

  But right away, they could see that it wasn’t the isolated one they’d been aiming for. Other crawlers clustered near it at the top of a slope, at least ten or fifteen of them. As the storm of locusts passed over them, they reared up, opening their mouths, and then they curled into enormous balls and rolled downhill.

  “Left, left!” screamed Anna, and Ravi curved left, and then right and then left again, dodging the moving boulders and the spirals of wind, and it went that way for what seemed like ages until Anna pointed to the right and shouted, “There! That’s the shore of the lake, and there’s that one crawler by itself.”

  They’d come into the clear somewhat. Only a couple of spirals twisted nearby, and the air was free of flying locusts. The lone crawler must have eaten all it wanted; it lay still on a bank of ice. Beyond it was a lake like no other Ravi and Anna had ever seen.

  “How can there be a lake on a planet where the temperature is way, way below freezing?” Ravi said. “If it’s a lake, it should be frozen.”

  “But it isn’t frozen,” said Anna. “It’s moving.”

  And yet it wasn’t moving the way water moves. There were no waves coming in toward the shore. There were no ripples caused by the wind. Instead, it looked as if the lake was being stirred by an enormous, invisible spoon. Its water moved in a circle, slowly.

  “And it isn’t water,” said Ravi. “It has to be some other kind of liquid, something that doesn’t freeze at the usual freezing point.”

  “It looks like mercury,” Anna said.

  Ravi agreed. What filled that lake looked thicker than water, and silver, not clear. At the edges, where the liquid swept up against the land, it broke here and there not into streams and trickles but into sprays of tiny silver balls that ran up the slope of ice and then rolled back down, where they melted into the lake again. Ravi couldn’t stop watching. He felt a strong temptation to run over and catch some of those silver balls and hold them in his hand.

  “Come on,” Anna said. “We have to get the crystals.”

  “I just want to try one thing,” said Ravi. “Wait, okay?”

  He opened the Cheetah door and stepped out into the cold. With the toe of his boot, he kicked at a chunk of ice until it broke into pieces, and then he picked up a piece about the size of a tennis ball and pitched it into the lake.

  Just as he’d hoped, the splash flew up in loopy metallic shapes and gleaming, wobbling balls.

  But something else happened that he hadn’t expected. The slow swirl of the lake quickened a little, as if the invisible spoon were stirring a bit faster. Interesting, he thought.

  “Ravi!” Anna called through the radio. “Get back in here! We don’t have time to play around.”

  Ravi climbed back into the Cheetah. “That wasn’t playing around,” he objected. “That was a scientific experiment.”

  “Use your science talent another way,” said Anna, starting up the motor. “I want you to scratch the crawler this time.”

  “Okay.” Ravi was glad to have the chance. Somehow Anna had done it wrong before. He thought she’d come down too hard with the Talon. He would do it more lightly. After all, Colin had told them the crystals were right under the skin. Maybe they needed more precision here.

  Anna drove the Cheetah cautiously toward the crawler, approaching it from behind, moving so slowly that the engine barely made a sound.

  The crawler didn’t move, except for a slight shudder of its bulging sides.

  “Do you think it’s asleep?” Ravi said. “In that coma that comes after they eat?”

  “Probably,” Anna answered. “I think it’s safe to get pretty close.” She drove along the icy shore of the lake. Flecks of snow and stray locusts sprinkled the windshield, driven sideways by the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger.

  When they were about ten feet to one side of the crawler’s back end, Anna brought the Cheetah to a halt. “Are you ready?”

  Ravi turned around and pulled the Talon from behind the seat. He took a good look at the crawler, which still hadn’t moved. He visualized his plan of attack: run up fast, do the scratch, and run like crazy back to the Cheetah.

  “Ready,” he said, and jumped out.

  The first part of his plan worked perfectly. He ran right up next to the crawler, raised the Talon, and brought it down along the creature’s flank, very lightly, making a faint pink stripe against the skin.

  He was turning back toward the Cheetah when Anna called to him over the tech, “Harder! Do it harder!�
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  He didn’t see why—she’d already tried a hard scratch and it hadn’t worked out very well—but she was the commander, and so he obeyed. He brought the Talon down hard.

  And that was when his plan went terribly wrong. The ice crawler came out of its sleep. It didn’t make a sound, but it gave a titanic twitch. Its whole massive body crimped in the middle, and the rear part of it swept sideways, struck the Cheetah with terrific force, and flung it—and Anna—into the lake.

  Ravi heard Anna’s horrified scream as she sailed through the air, and he saw the Cheetah splash down. He waited in terror for the lake to engulf it, but the Cheetah, with Anna still inside, didn’t sink. The liquid in the lake swirled faster and faster, around and around, growing deeper in the middle, like a funnel. It carried the Cheetah and Anna around with it, as if it were trying to swallow them.

  Ravi grabbed his radio transmitter and punched in the Alpha team’s frequency. “Emergency!” he yelled. “Extreme emergency!”

  —

  Anna tried her best to keep panic at bay. She screamed only once, when the Cheetah went flying from solid ground into the air and then plunged into this terrible metallic water. The impact banged her sideways against the door and then back against the seat. It jolted her hands from the steering wheel. For a moment, all light was gone because the Cheetah had flipped upside down, but it righted itself and steely light flooded in again.

  When she found that she was still alive, and that the Cheetah was riding the current rather than going under, Anna forced herself to stop shaking and to breathe. From the window she could see nothing but swirling silver—above her, rising almost vertically, and far below her, narrowing and darkening. She was inside an immense funnel, being carried around its inner surface. The shore was just a narrow white curve high above her; the sky looked miles overhead.

  She tried her two-way radio: “Ravi! Ravi! Can you hear me?”

  An answer came, but the words were broken and blurry.

  She tried again, her voice rising: “Ravi! Help me! Call for help!”

  His voice came again, still blurry, but she made out the words: “Yes, getting help. Hold on!”

  She knew he was trying. He would be calling the Alpha team—what else could he do? She didn’t like asking for help from them. But at this point, she knew, it was way too late for pride.

  Rocking gently, the Cheetah circled the funnel. It didn’t take Anna long to realize that each time around, she was being carried a little farther down into the whirlpool.

  Piper sat in her air chair next to one of the training room’s treadmills. She had her eyes on the clock, watching the time. In a few minutes, she’d be out that door. It would be so easy, except of course that SUMI mustn’t see her go. She had to figure out how to distract her. And the timing had to be just right.

  She waited. Minutes passed, incredibly slowly. Finally it was twelve forty. Piper’s heart began beating faster.

  “SUMI,” she said. “Want to play a new game?”

  SUMI looked up. “New game?” she echoed.

  “Yes. It’s sort of like hide-and-seek, but different.”

  “Different,” SUMI said.

  “Right. And more fun! Here’s how it works.”

  SUMI cocked her head, listening.

  “It’s called hide-and-squeak.” Piper explained. “Person number one hides in the equipment closet.” She pointed across the room, to the door of the closet that held balls, rackets, running shoes, weights, and spare machine parts. “Person number two has to hide this”—she held up a bright orange football—“in a place that’s really hard to find. When it’s hidden, person two makes a squeak like this.” In a high, sharp voice, Piper squeaked. “Then person one comes out and has one minute to find it.”

  “Who is person one?” said SUMI. “Who is person two?”

  “I’ll be person one the first time,” Piper said. “I’ll go in the closet. You hide the football and squeak when you’re ready.”

  “Good game,” said SUMI.

  Piper handed her the football, which she clutched between her skinny arms. Then Piper floated across the room, opened the door of the closet, and went inside. She closed herself in. Now she just had to hope that SUMI would hide the football quickly.

  It took her about two minutes. A high, metallic squeak sounded, and Piper came out of the closet. “Where could it be?” she said, looking around in a puzzled way. She floated this way and that, searching for the bright orange of the football. It had to be down near the floor, since SUMI was too short to reach high up. Where could she have put it? She looked behind the bank of servers, behind the controls console, behind the weight-lifting bench. She didn’t see it.

  “Eighteen seconds left,” said SUMI.

  Piper zoomed down closer to ground level and circled the room.

  “Four seconds left,” said SUMI.

  “I see it!” cried Piper. “Right there!” It was a clever hiding place: on the floor beside the closet, where it would be out of sight behind the door when Piper opened it. “I win!”

  “You win,” said SUMI in a gloomy voice.

  “Your turn,” Piper said. “You go in the closet, and I’ll hide the football.”

  “This time I will win,” SUMI said.

  “Remember, you have to wait until I squeak.”

  SUMI shuffled into the closet, and Piper closed the door. Then, working in complete silence, she bent down from her chair and grasped one of the rolled-up yoga mats that stood against the wall. She pulled it in front of the closet door and went back for another mat, and then another. It would have been much better to roll one of the big exercise machines to block the door, but there was no way she could manage that. The mats would have to do. She did manage to lean a couple of five-pound weights against them.

  I’m sorry, SUMI, she said silently. I’m sure someone will let you out soon.

  Then she sped to the console, entered the code, and opened the training room door. For a second, she hovered, listening, and when she heard no voices and no footsteps, she flew out. She heard the door lock behind her.

  She was free, free! She was going home at last!

  The Light Blade’s main corridor was empty. Piper looked both ways. No sign of anyone, and no sound. She flew out of the training room and closed the door silently behind her. Someone would find SUMI sooner or later; being locked in the supply closet for a while wouldn’t hurt her.

  Now Piper had to move quickly. It was twelve fifty-five. The engine room should be in the same place where it was on the Cloud Leopard—straight down the hallway. An easy flight, if she could do it without being seen. She made her way past the door to the research lab—and then, up ahead, she saw someone pop out of a portal.

  It was Niko. He tumbled out, did a quick somersault, and jumped to his feet. She had only a second to get out of sight. There was a door to her left. She hit the control panel and the door silently slid open. She saw only darkness inside, but she steered in anyhow and the door closed behind her. She would just wait here until she didn’t hear Niko’s footsteps any more.

  Slowly, a dim light began to shine—there must be a sensor in here that detected a person’s presence. She was in a supply closet, Piper saw. Stacks of boxes held lightbulbs, coils of cable, and electronic equipment, and there was a clothes rod with spare space suits, thermal underwear, and a row of boots below. Surely Niko wouldn’t be coming in here.

  She waited and listened. She heard footsteps passing the door—two sets of footsteps. Someone else must have met up with Niko. They didn’t pause, and the footsteps faded away. She waited another whole minute, and then she opened the door and peered out.

  Empty corridor. Only a few dozen yards to the door of the engine room. She sailed to it, slid it open, and flew in.

  Safe in the cave, Carly and Dash collapsed next to TULIP. Dash took a long breath. “You’re sure you got the crystals?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carly said. “Let’s find out.”

 
; While Dash held the flashlight, she slid open the lid of the Talon. They peered inside. The light glittered on something that looked at first like salt. It was a sprinkling of tiny crystals, each one clear as glass and perfectly spherical.

  “We did it,” Carly whispered.

  “They’re beautiful,” said Dash. “And you can feel the cold coming from them.”

  It was true. The tiny crystals radiated a cold that almost felt like heat—a burning cold. They could feel it on their faces, searing their skin.

  Carly closed the Talon and set it aside. She took off her pack and reached into it. “Good time to celebrate with a snack,” she said, pulling out two small packets and handing one of them to Dash. She turned off her flashlight to keep the battery from running down, and they sat there in the dark, munching on chocolate-raspberry energy bars.

  When they’d finished, Dash stood up. “I’ll call Chris now and ask him to come and get us. I’ll need to go out—probably won’t be able to get a signal in the cave. Be right back.”

  Outside, snowflakes came at him hard, like tiny splinters of glass. Snow had fallen into the cab of the broken Streak, mounded on the seats, and made a white rim on the steering wheel. The Streak looked like an abandoned wreck.

  Dash leaned against it. He’d been holding on to his last bit of strength, and now it threatened to drain out of him. He entered the number for the Cloud Leopard control on his transmitter. “Calling Chris,” he said. “Alpha team calling, ready for pickup.”

  But there was interference on the line. A loud crackling sounded in his ear, and a panicked voice came through. It wasn’t Chris. It was Ravi, shouting so fast and desperately he could barely understand what he was saying.

  “Ravi, slow down!” Dash shouted. “What’s happening?”

  In the rush of words that came back, Dash made out just a few: lake, Anna, drown, and die.

  “Say it again!” he called. “I didn’t understand!”

  This time Ravi spoke the words loudly, clearly, and with space in between. “Anna…and…Cheetah…thrown in LAKE. She could…DIE. COME RIGHT NOW!”