Rocking the Resistance

by Erin Downing

  For the first time in her life, Luna had run out of things to say. And her drink was almost gone. “Juno, can you join me in the restroom for a sec?” she said cheerfully as Dane put his e-reader away.

  “Gladly,” Juno grunted, sliding out of her seat. When they got to the bathroom, Juno put her hands on her hips and glared at Luna. “This is torture,” she said, preparing for a fight.

  But instead of fighting back, Luna surprised Juno by exploding in a fit of giggles. “He’s awful!”

  “Really?” Juno said, surprised. “You noticed?”

  “I’m not blind, Juno. He’s completely self-absorbed. Being totally gorgeous does not make up for being a majorly egotistical dud.” She grinned at herself in the mirror. “I should know—I have looks and personality. I’ve learned from experience that you can totally have both.”

  Juno shook her head. “You’re a piece of work, Luna.”

  “At least I am an interesting piece of work,” Luna said. “Dane is like a cheap cardboard cutout of a piece of work. Want to get out of here?”

  “Like, just leave?” Juno narrowed her eyes. A hint of a smile crossed her lips. Maybe she had underestimated Luna’s ability to judge people after all. “Without saying goodbye?”

  “Serves him right,” Luna said. She tipped her head in the direction of the bathroom window and giggled. “Shall we put some of our spy skills to good use and take the back way out?” Then she scrambled up onto the bathroom counter and opened the window, glancing back over her shoulder to ask, “How long do you think it will take good old Dane to realize we’re gone?”

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time Luna and Juno got back to the band’s dressing room, the other three girls were ready and waiting in their all-black rebel costumes … and they did not look happy. In fairness, Juno and Luna had returned from their date much later than they had promised to—but there was a good reason for their tardiness, and they were returning with some very good news.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Luna said breathlessly. “But we brought everyone doughnuts to make up for it! Who wants a tasty treat before tonight’s mission?”

  “Me!” Hera cheered, reaching for one of the glazed raised doughnuts in a plain white box. All five of the girls’ pets clustered around her, grabbing at the snacks with their furry paws. There was a brief tussle between Roxie and Springle, but things were quickly resolved when the doughnut they’d been fighting over ripped in half.

  Athena and Rhea stared impassively at the doughnuts, unwilling to be so easily won over. “What took you so long? You promised you’d be back before midnight,” Athena scolded. “It’s exactly quarter after, which means we’ve lost fifteen minutes of our search time.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Luna said. “But we’re here now. And we come bearing snacks and news!”

  “You missed a visit from Bradbury,” Rhea grumped. “You can imagine his disappointment when he had to interview his three least favorite members of SPACEPOP—he clearly likes both of you more than he likes the rest of us put together. He spent most of our interview time blubbering about Geela’s party and how glamorous it was, and then he wouldn’t stop talking about the secret he can’t wait to reveal to the world. He wouldn’t tell us what it was without Luna in the room.” She glared at both Luna and Juno. “And you obviously weren’t here.”

  “Luna said we’re sorry,” Juno snapped. “Do you want to hear about our night, or no?”

  Athena nodded coolly, so Juno began the story. She breezed over the details of their so-called date with Dane, starting the story with their escape out the bathroom window. After the two girls snuck out of the diner, they quickly realized they were seriously turned around and apparently lost on the deserted streets of Lud.

  “We raced around for a while,” Juno told the others as she slipped into her rebel gear. “But it was really hard to get a bearing on where we were, considering we were surrounded on all sides by tall industrial towers and glowing billboards. It felt like being inside a huge metal maze. The whole thing brought back crazy memories of my experience on Fight or Flight.”

  Luna jumped in and continued their story. “So we’re walking down this long block when, all of a sudden, one of Geela’s Android Soldiers came zooming toward us. In this awful, tinny voice, it screamed, ‘You are under arrest for dress code violation! I’m taking you in.’ I was totally getting ready to fight back and run when Juno said—”

  “Let him take us,” Juno said, cutting her off to continue the story.

  “What?!” Chamberlin gasped. Their butler, who had appeared to be dozing in a corner of the dressing room when the girls returned from their outing, was now up and alert. “Why would you let one of those beasts take you? Juno, I sent you along with Luna to protect her, not to let her be taken into custody!”

  Juno laughed. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Here’s the thing: it was one stupid metal droid, arresting us for a dress code violation. I knew I could take him down if I needed to. But by going along with him, I hoped the awful Android Soldier would lead us straight to Geela’s headquarters here on Lud—thus simplifying our search for the Dungeon of Dark Doom later tonight.”

  “You let yourselves get arrested so you could find out where Geela takes prisoners?” Athena blurted out. “That was incredibly risky … and extremely brilliant.”

  “Thank you!” Luna said cheerfully.

  “So we let him take us in for the minor dress code infraction,” Juno went on. “But before he could get the paperwork under way, we stunned him and the rest of the desk guards using Athena’s hypno-glasses.”

  “You got to use the hypno-glasses?” Hera asked, pouting. “Lucky duck!”

  “I hid them in my bag before Luna and I went out with Dane tonight,” Juno explained. “Figured I could use them on Luna or Dane if I’d had enough chaperone time and needed to make their date end.”

  “Our spy gadgets are supposed to be reserved for spy missions,” Athena scolded.

  “Then it’s a good thing I had them, eh?” Juno said. “Since we were doing some spying? It got us out of Geela’s custody before they had time to take our mug shots or book us. No one will ever know we were there.”

  “Dane was a dud, but two good things came of our date tonight,” Luna said proudly. “We now know where Geela’s administrative headquarters are here on Lud … and we stole some of her doughnuts before we escaped. Win-win!”

  “Win-win,” Rhea echoed, holding her doughnut in the air. The other girls all grabbed a doughnut as Rhea went on, “To being arrested for dressing well, stealing the empress’s doughnuts, and getting us off to a very fortuitous start on tonight’s reconnaissance mission. Cheers!”

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, the five spies were standing at the base of Geela’s administrative building on Lud—ready to continue the search for their parents. Unlike all the other buildings on the planet of Lud, Geela’s administrative building was short and stocky. Towering only two stories high, it would be easy to miss it completely, surrounded as it was by all the tall, magnificent towers.

  “Follow me,” Athena said. She shot a length of rope out of her belt, tugged it to be sure it had hooked to the side of the roof, and then climbed up the side of the building. The others quickly followed. A few minutes later, the five spies were stepping carefully among hundreds of solar panels on the roof of the building. “I have to admit, I’m glad Chamberlin sat this one out,” Athena said quietly.

  The girls’ nervous butler usually insisted that he accompany the princesses on their rebel missions. But as the assignments had grown more and more difficult, he had begun to opt out of their adventures more often.

  “The guy can make a mean cup of tea,” Rhea said. “But I’m not sure he’s cut out for climbing a rope up the side of a building. Or, you know, climbing out of his chair after nine o’clock.”

  The girls walked silently around the solar panels, and eventually they arrived at an air shaft in the center of the roof. “Entry point,”
Juno said, pointing. Carefully and quietly, the girls slipped into the air shaft and snuck into the top floor of the building. Inside, everything was very dark, and the girls paused a moment to let their eyes adjust to the blackness. But after only a moment, they noticed there was a very faint glow coming from tiny lights spaced out every ten feet or so in the floors. The track lighting wasn’t bright, but the faint glimmer of yellow certainly would help.

  After a brief exploration of the top floor, they discovered that Geela’s administrative building was—as the Resistance had suspected—much larger than it seemed from the outside. While there were only two stories of offices and such aboveground—both of which were devoid of staff at such a late hour—the tower stretched 111 stories belowground. Someone had posted a handy guide to floors beside the elevator shaft. The floors nearest ground level were marked with boring labels such as “Offices,” “Administration,” and “Personnel.” The bottom ten floors, however, were labeled “Restricted.”

  “Seems like a few hundred feet belowground, on a restricted floor, would be a mighty fine place to hide something called the Dungeon of Dark Doom,” Luna said quietly.

  “Very true,” agreed Athena.

  “We should focus our search at the bottom of the building, yeah?” Juno said. The others quickly agreed. But when they pressed the button in the elevator to go down, nothing happened.

  “No power to make the elevator run!” Hera whispered. “Not until morning, remember?”

  “Right,” said Athena.

  “A little exercise won’t kill us,” said Juno, leading them toward the stairs.

  “Speak for yourself,” Luna grumbled. She was huffing and puffing two flights of stairs into the journey, and her hair began to droop.

  It took much longer than any of them would have expected to climb one hundred stories down. When they finally reached the bottommost floors of the building, it then took nearly half an hour for them to come up with a strategy to avoid the cadre of patrols roaming the heavily guarded corridors. They sent a small bug droid in ahead of them to take footage of the guards’ actions for a while. By studying the footage carefully, they were able to figure out the guards’ rotation schedule—and determine when the coast would be clear. If they timed their actions carefully, they might avoid being seen.

  When it was go time, the girls split up into two groups so they could search as much of the restricted area as possible before daybreak. By splitting up into smaller groups, they were also much less likely to attract notice. Hera was thrilled, since dividing and conquering meant she would get to use her lipstick communicator—finally!—to report any findings back to the other team.

  But sadly, after a long and stressful search, there was nothing interesting to report.

  “Nine of ten floors searched, and still no sign that the Dungeon of Dark Doom is hidden here on Lud,” Athena said quietly. The team had reconvened in the stairwell right outside the bottommost floor of the building. There was only one floor left to search, and everyone was losing hope.

  “There are still two more planets to explore,” Rhea said in an upbeat voice. “If the dungeon isn’t here on Lud, all hope is not lost.”

  “Yeah.” Juno nodded. “I just want to find them soon, you know? After hearing Geela talk about torturing my family, it’s hard to be patient.”

  “We’ll find them,” Luna promised, knowing full well there were no guarantees when it came to Geela. But she had no choice but to promise and then make the promise come true. “We will.”

  The bottom floor of Geela’s central command center on Lud was extremely different from everywhere else they had searched in the past weeks. The floors of the basement level were covered in lush carpet, rather than the cheap marble or polished concrete Geela used in many of her other buildings. The walls were covered in soft tapestries and paintings. Even in the dim light, it was clear that this floor was Geela’s lair on Lud. It was also clear that this was most definitely not the Dungeon of Dark Doom.

  Still, the girls searched for any sign of strange doors or secret passageways, anything that might lead them to a hidden torture chamber. But the only things they found were rooms stuffed with crazy collections of things: one was wall-to-wall shoes (everything from last-century clogs to elegant, sky-high stilettos), another had an assortment of yoga pants and sweats mixed together with stolen designs from the season finale of Galactic Fashion, and a third was filled with dozens of wigs, each styled in an elegant hairstyle.

  “You know what we’ve gotta do…” Rhea said, grinning back at the others. “Obviously, Geela has an absurdly large collection of wigs. Surely she won’t notice if a few go missing? We didn’t find the prisoners, but I can assure you I’m not walking out of here empty-handed.” She began to grab handfuls of wigs off the walls, stuffing them carelessly into her backpack. Juno, Athena, and Hera followed suit. They filled their bags as full as they possibly could, but still there were more.

  “Wait! Wait!” Luna giggled. “I have an idea! We don’t have to take them all. I have a couple bottles of Solar Glow hair spray with me. We can douse the wig hair with Solar Glow—I guarantee that if the product soaks into the hair for a couple hours, the wigs will fall apart. Don’t tell the galaxy I said so, but Solar Glow destroys hair.”

  “Do you ever feel at all guilty that you’re the one telling people to buy this stuff, even when you know it’s awful?” Rhea asked, her eyebrows raised.

  Luna shrugged and said, “Does anyone actually believe the stuff they tell you in commercials?” She handed Hera and Rhea bottles of hair spray, and they went to work covering every last wig with as much of the product as possible.

  The girls were still laughing and celebrating when Athena called out, “I found something!” Masked behind one of the racks of wigs was a small door. The door wasn’t locked, but Geela had obviously taken extra steps to keep the entrance to this room hidden. The girls crouched low and stepped inside. Their smiles slipped off their faces when they got a look at the space.

  The hidden room was cozy and luxurious, filled with comfortable sofas and elegant display cases. It looked like the kind of living room a museum curator might have in her house. The walls were filled with extravagant art and shelves that displayed a huge collection of artifacts—treasures that Geela’s troops had clearly harvested from the five princesses’ former homes.

  “This is the painting that was hanging in our castle’s front hall on Heralda!” Hera shrieked.

  The other girls shushed her. No matter how upset they all felt, this would be a terrible time to get caught. Lowering her voice, Hera said, “This painting has been in my family for centuries. She stole it. My great-great-great-great-grandfather painted it for our home when it was first built. It belongs on Heralda—not here, in Geela’s creepy treasure room on Lud!”

  “And this,” Juno said, running her fingers across a chunk of hard stone. The stone was being used as a coaster for a half-full cup of juice in the center of a coffee table. Juno set the cup on the table, then flipped the stone over, revealing a child’s handprint. “This must have been taken from the front hallway in the Junoia palace. This is my father’s handprint, hidden inside the floor of our great hall when he was still a boy.”

  Each of the girls took a moment to look around at the shards of their old lives, now collected in messy piles in Geela’s treasure room. “We must go,” Athena said after a few minutes of reminiscing, her usually calm voice breaking.

  “What is this?” Rhea asked, pointing to a tiny, jewel-encrusted box that was hanging from the center of the room in a glass case. It was clearly the showpiece of the room, visible from every seat and corner. “Which of our planets did this come from?”

  No one answered.

  “Does anyone recognize it?” Luna asked. “It’s beautiful. It’s not jewelry.” She stepped closer to the glass case. “It almost looks like it’s glowing.”

  “Could—” Rhea began. “Could it be Geela’s? Perhaps this is an artifact from her own l
ife?”

  “Something of her father’s, perhaps?” Athena wondered aloud. “I know, from listening to my parents talk about her, that Geela and her father were very close.”

  “It’s ours now,” Juno said, reaching toward the glass cylinder to remove the jewel-encrusted box from its spot. “My guess is, this either belonged to the royal family on one of our planets to begin with … or it’s something that holds sentimental value for Geela.”

  Hera nodded. “Whichever it is, after all the damage she’s done to our planets and people, she doesn’t deserve to possess it anymore.”

  “I think we can all agree on that,” Athena said curtly. “Take it and let’s go. It will be light soon, so we can afford no further delays. We will have to figure out its importance later.”

  As they began their long, slow climb back up to the ground floor, the girls were quiet, tired, and lost in their thoughts.

  To try to keep their spirits up, Rhea pulled one of Geela’s long, curly-haired wigs out of her bag. She waved it in the air, dropped it on her head, and said, “Anyone else think it will be fun to see how cute Chamberlin looks in curls?” Their laughter made the last part of the climb just a little bit easier.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Tonight, on Dancing with the Empress, we’ll be doing the cha—” Tont, the slimy-skinned host of Dancing with the Empress, broke off midsentence and gaped at something offscreen. Luna looked up from doing her nails and watched the life-size hologram in the center of the space bus living room curiously. Luna was the only one of the princesses who could stand to watch Geela’s shows. She didn’t enjoy watching a life-size version of Geela strut around the living room, but Luna was convinced the awful woman might accidentally slip up and reveal a hint about the Dungeon of Dark Doom location while she was on-air. So Luna watched new episodes of Dancing with the Empress, Geela’s design shows, Cooking with G!, and The Empress fairly religiously.