Two.
If they don’t have her gloves, where could they be?
One.
If someone in Ridders’s pod mistakenly took them, they could be anywhere on Gulaga. We’ll never find them in time.
Marco hits the ground in front of us. My chest surges with hope. He shakes his head and hands me the compass. “We’ll keep looking. If we find them, I’ll track you down on the tundra.”
I nod. “We need to go.”
“Good luck. We’ll be waiting for you in the Nest.” Marco pauses for another moment, then nods, opens his port, and vanishes.
I place Mira’s hand on her lap and slip my glove back on. I may have to travel by blast pack, but I’m not willing to give up my sensor straps. Mira knows I’m a disaster with the manual controls.
Mira stands and retrieves her pack from the clearing where we had lunch. She detaches her sensor straps and clips in the manuals.
I buckle the astrocache compass on my wrist and hoist my pack onto my shoulders. After confirming our route on the map, I nod to Mira, squeeze my grips, and lift off. She flies to my side.
“We have a lot of ground to cover, so don’t ease up on speed.” Setting our course for the base, I accelerate.
I don’t check my watch too frequently because all that does is stress me out. It seems like we’ve flown for hours over the rocky, monotonous Gulagan plain. Every second that passes brings us closer to the base. I hope. We’re working on a very narrow margin of time to make it back before the gates close.
I wish Cole was here to read the map. It’s not that I don’t know how, but I haven’t had much practice. And the way we constructed our routes and staggered our targets, we never had to cross this stretch of Gulaga.
From the map, it almost looks like Earth Force is steering us away from this area. None of the caches are close to here. In fact, none of the caches are even on a flight line between the base and this place.
We glide over a ridge. Beneath us is a big bowl with steep cliffs on all sides. As soon as we crest, the wind picks up. It’s hard to cut a straight path with so much turbulence. Typically I would descend, so we weren’t flying so far aboveground, but we’re very short on time.
Roughly halfway across the bowl, my pack sputters and drops a few meters. A gust of wind tumbles me. I manage to right myself and fly on. Mira’s up ahead. I don’t think she noticed.
I shake off my fear, sure it’s just nerves as we race against the curfew clock.
Sputter. Putter. Putt. Putt.
My pack spurts forward, then stops, then drops.
I gain control again, but can’t stop the pack from losing altitude.
It’s just like . . .
The trash tunnel . . .
Oh no!
“Mira! My battery!”
My brain’s connection with the pack starts to fizzle. I won’t be able to stay aloft for long. I focus my full attention on lowering to the ground. I set my course in a sloping arc, trying to capitalize on inertia and not fight too much with gravity.
“Mira!” I shout again, but she continues on her straight course across the valley. She must not be able to hear me over the wind.
Mira! Help!
She slows to a hover and spins her pack.
My battery dies, and I plunge for the valley floor.
No!
Dropping the straps, I flash my palms at the ground and push against the atoms on the planet’s surface.
A familiar pressure surges at the base of my skull, just like this morning at the cache site. With the amplified power of my gloves, I repel off the ground, easing my landing. A fraction of a second before I hit, I turn my body, so my back and butt bear the brunt of the impact. Air is knocked from my lungs. I gasp for breath, but none comes. I gasp again, and the sweet taste of oxygen rushes in. I turn over onto my stomach and push my forehead to the cold ground.
A hand on my back. Okay?
Mira must sense the pain in my hip. Why am I always landing on my hip?
She moves her hand to the bull’s-eye of the pain. I flinch, expecting her touch to hurt, but it doesn’t. Instead, I feel immediate relief, like she’s radiating warm energy through my body.
I push my chest off the ground and sit cross-legged in front of her. “How do you do that without your gloves?”
Mira shrugs. She cups her palm against my cheek, which is still aching from Regis’s blow, just like Annette did earlier.
I lean into her hand, letting her soothing energy run through me.
The cliffs rise up around us, nearly as high as my apartment building back on Earth. I check my watch: 1545 hours.
Fifteen minutes until curfew. No gloves. No blast pack.
The reality starts to sink in.
We’re stuck out here overnight.
A shiver ripples through my body. The temperature is already dropping. We’re probably going to freeze to death.
The ground shakes. Or does it? Am I imagining things? Am I just shivering extra hard?
“Did you feel that?”
The next shake knocks me over.
Mira springs to her feet. Move!
I scramble to get up, wincing against the pain in my hip.
Move now!
Okay, okay. Geez. The ground lurches, and I fall back to my knees.
The surface of the planet bubbles and curls around me, circling my feet, enclosing my legs in a pool of ooze.
“Slimer!”
Mira kicks at the creature that’s sucking me into its blob belly.
I yank my feet, but it oozes tighter.
Gloves! Mira screams in my mind.
I flash my hands at the creature, and it recoils enough for me to pull my left foot out of its grasp.
A second slimer attacks Mira. She lunges. It trips her to the ground and slurps her legs in ooze. Help!
I zap my other leg free and spring to where the creature is sucking down Mira. I wrap my arm around her chest and repel the slimer with my gloves. An oozy tendril from another slimer wraps around my ankle.
The entire basin bubbles like a writhing witches’ brew. “They’re everywhere!”
Run! Mira screams.
I force our feet free, and we dash across the valley. I aim my gloves ahead to clear a path. When we reach the cliffs, we climb until we pull up on a ledge ten meters above the ground, safely outside the slimers’ ooze.
“Those things are super scary,” I say. “They sounded bad when the junior ambassadors described them, but they’re even worse.”
Mira’s feelings on the topic can be summed up in one word: gross.
“What do we do now?”
Mira scans the cliffs. She points to indentations several meters above us that might be caves. Shelter.
Good idea. We’re getting colder by the second. I try to stand, but a shooting pain bursts across my hip and sends me falling back on my butt. Ouch.
Things are not looking good.
My neck tingles, and an image of the music room at the space station flashes in my mind. Mira must be trying to tell me that everything’s going to be all right.
I wish I believed her. The warmth fades, and we’re still stranded on the tundra. This is going to be a long night.
Mira ducks under my arm and helps me stand. A pain shoots down my right leg, but I hobble forward. Seriously, another blast pack fall? How could this happen to me again? Regis would be dying of laughter.
Regis.
Thinking his name is like a magic key to a throwaway memory. Today at lunch, when Ryan was pressing us for details about the cache conflict, Meggi said they’d run into Regis at the base, and he was threatening to track us down on the tundra. What if he figured out where we ate lunch? It’s no secret we meet up with Ridders’s pod at the same spot most days. One of them must have told Regis. Or maybe Regis bribed someone else to get the information.
It makes complete sense. When we were eating, Cole said he saw something moving by the blast packs. That wasn’t a something, it was a someone
.
“Regis took your gloves,” I say to Mira. My voice shakes with rage. Sure, we’ve gotten pretty nasty with our pranks, but this time he crossed the line.
Climb. She presses my back, urging me onto the cliff. We have another ten-meter climb before we reach a stretch of narrow switchbacks that lead to the caves.
“Did you hear me? Regis took your gloves!”
Climb. Shelter.
“We’ve got to do something about it!”
Mira shoves me, and I stumble. Her hands hit hard against my shoulders, but I’m also knocked back by her brain. She thinks I’m a big blockhead for worrying about Regis when we’re on the verge of freezing to death.
“Okay! Okay, you’re right.”
Mira shakes her head and starts up the cliff on her own. She scans the rock face and sets in at a spot where there are lots of grips.
I place my gloved hand on the rock and pull myself up. My hip throbs. I ignore the pain and press forward, trying to match my movements to Mira’s.
Every switch in grip, Mira stops and shakes her hands. There’s a strange crackling sensation in my brain. I finally realize she’s in pain, too.
Since she doesn’t have her gloves, her hands are exposed. I didn’t even think of that. She had to fly all the way here with just her sleeves for protection, and now she has to grab hold of this ice-cold rock. If we don’t take cover soon, she’ll definitely have frostbite. She could lose her fingers! What would we do if Mira couldn’t use her hands?
I’m fine. Her thoughts sound annoyed.
You could hear what I was thinking?
You’re very transparent.
Those thoughts are private, Mira! These patches do not give you the right to barge into my brain whenever you want.
No response. Well, fine, then. See for yourself how you like it. I reach out with my brain with the grand plan of probing her thoughts. I feel her mind like a shimmering veil, then—Slam!—a solid door bangs shut.
So much for that.
Mira hoists herself up the last half meter of our climb and sets out on the narrow path. A couple of grabs and pulls later, and I’m stepping up behind her. Only a sliver of the star is left on the horizon, and the temperature is dropping at an alarming rate. Mira overlaps the sleeves of her coat so that her hands are tucked inside.
The path couldn’t be more than half a meter wide, and there are lots of spots where it’s worn away and we have to traverse across by grabbing the rock face. It’s slow going, and certainly not made for a klutz like me. Several switchbacks later, we finally near the second ledge. I can barely feel my toes. And when I force a wiggle, it comes with a dull, dark pain that rivals the ache in my hip.
Still, as I scramble onto the ledge next to Mira, an ounce of hope creeps in. If we can get deep enough into one of the caves up ahead, we might make it through the night.
As I set off toward the caves, Mira grabs my hand and pulls me back. When I turn, her brain opens, and words pour out. Look up!
Above us, the sky blazes with stars, not Gulaga’s primary star, but the stars of the heavens. Just like ours on Earth.
It’s amazing.
And I’m transported. Mira and I are on the grass at Waters’s lab, lying side by side, staring up at the stars. At first, I’m not sure if this is my memory or Mira’s, but soon I see it belongs to both of us.
My breath catches in my throat. I wrap my arms around Mira, and she leans back against me. Her blond hair brushes against my cheek. Together we share a memory and we make a new one. I see what she sees and what I see and it is so much—too much—that I have to close my eyes for a moment before my entire mind is blown to bits from the enormity of it all.
It’s a perfect moment, really.
A perfect moment in our far-from-perfect night.
22
THE MOMENT DOESN’T LAST. MAYBE Mira slams down her brain door like before, or maybe the fact that we’re freezing trumps the shared memory magic. Whatever it is, Mira steps forward and breaks our bond.
She turns around and nods at me. Light. Gloves.
Huh? I mean, Huh?
Light!
Yes, Mira, a bit more light would be terrific. And where exactly do you suggest I find such a thing out here in the tundra?
Gloves!
Oh. I raise my hands and tap in like I’m getting ready to open a port. Lights shoot from my fingertips. We make our way along the ledge, the light from my fingers casting strange shadows along the path and the cliff rising beside us.
Before long, we come to one of the indentations we saw from below. Sure enough, it’s a cave. I’m not super keen about exploring a cave in the dark on an alien planet, but it might be our only chance at making it through the night.
I head in first, led by the light of my gloves. Mira follows close behind. The ceiling is low, and I have to duck, which I’m used to after these weeks in Gulaga. With every step, I cringe, afraid that a slimer or something worse is going to wrap around my leg.
We don’t go far, just deep enough to escape the wind and anything else that might be lurking on the tundra. Mira grabs my hand and points its light at the wall. She heads in that direction and sits down. I slide in beside her.
Mira pulls her arms inside her coat and huddles tight. I do the same. For the first stretch, my mind wanders. I think about the Tundra Trials and how all the skills we’ve practiced have primed us for war. I think about what Waters said about intragalactic relations being vast and complicated, and about how more was at stake than we can possibly imagine. Mostly I think about Regis and how I’m going to get my revenge. Ultio.
Every few minutes, Mira shifts. I’m paranoid that she’s listening in on my thoughts since I don’t know how to close my brain door, but she never comments or shows any sign that she’s interested.
Then it gets colder, and harder to think. I lean my head against Mira’s. At least we’re together. My brain sparkles in a way that lets me know she’s thinking of me. I call up the time Mom and Dad took us to see the fireworks. I hope Mira knows those explosions of light in my mind are for her.
The notes of a piano trickle into my mind. It’s a pretty song. Simple and sweet. It almost feels like we’re sitting against a wall sharing earbuds, not freezing in Gulaga with bonded brain patches. When Mira breaks the melody, I imagine my clarinet and echo the song back to her. With each pass, she adds to the harmony, until we’ve built a beautiful duet.
Then the music fades, and it grows colder still. My mind can’t fix on anything except the cold. For what seems like forever, sharp pains shoot up my toes into my shins. But now I can’t feel my toes at all. Our breath puffs in little clouds as it escapes our mouths. Mira’s teeth chatter. She hums quietly, maybe to keep her mouth still, but it’s haunting. I’ve rarely heard the sound of her voice, even the sound of her hum.
I don’t know how much longer we’re going to make it. My head aches, a deep throbbing right behind my temples. My brain is slowly freezing. It’s kind of funny, really. My brain is worth so much to Earth Force, and it’s worth even more now that Waters rigged it up with the Youli patch, but it’s not going to think us out of this mess. There are some predicaments no amount of brainpower can fix.
We’re going to die here.
Go. There’s a calm determination in Mira’s thoughts. Go, please.
I knew she’d eventually suggest this—that I use my gloves to bound back to the base and try to get them to let me in—and I already have my response planned out. Just stop it, Mira. There’s no way I’m leaving you. It’s my fault we’re in this mess. My pack wasn’t fully charged. If it had been, we might have made it back to the base. Plus, I can’t bound into the base anyway. The scrambler would scatter my atoms. So no, I’m not going to bound, no matter what you say. I’m staying with you. We’ll get through the night together.
Go! The determination is still there, but the calm is gone. Go! Go! Go! She bashes me with her shoulder. I bash her back. Neither one of us wants to take our hands out of our
coats. We must look like bowling pins knocking into each other.
She bashes me hard, knocking herself off balance as she strikes me. I fall back and she falls against me. In that moment, the scarce body heat we have left seems to multiply. If we get as close as we can, maybe our body heat will keep us warm.
I press myself up against the wall and reluctantly unwrap my hands from my body and shake them through their sleeves. I gesture to Mira to sit in front of me, between my legs, and just in case she can’t figure out why I’m flailing, I send her a mental picture of my idea.
She crawls over and sits, leaning her back against my chest. I wrap my arms around her in a bear hug, my gloved hands resting against her coat.
Gloves. Warm.
I thought of that before, but the truth is, I don’t really know how to make the gloves warm up. Gedney said they were limitless, but I suppose I’ve hit my limit.
My patch prickles, and then my fingers burn like I’m running them under hot water after playing in the snow.
“Are you doing that?”
Focus.
I sense the connection between my brain and the gloves. Then I feel the river of current Mira is feeding me through our brain patches. Once I get the hang of it, I’m able to warm my gloves. The heat circulates through Mira, and back into me. It’s not much, and it’s making me very tired, but maybe it’s enough to keep our hearts beating through the night. I lose all sense of time, channeling the energy I have left into keeping the heat connection.
Kreek. Arrrgh. Grakakreet.
Breekeet. Karmareek. Arrkkk.
Kargarr. Gareer. Arrrgh.
Mira and I jerk up with a start. My head hurts so much from the sudden movement, I nearly pass out.
Noreek. Arrrgreek. Breeka.
Five Tunnelers wearing headlamps surround us. They’re dressed in funny clothes—big, furry hats and coats dyed red and purple and electric blue. They keep grunting in Gulagan. I don’t know if they’re talking to us or each other. I don’t know if they’re here to kill us or save us, but since death seemed the only option just seconds ago, my heart leaps with hope.
“What are you doing here?” A robotic voice sounds. “We thought we saw something on the ridge hours ago.” One of the Tunnelers steps forward. He has a deep scar by his eye. Barrick.
The Tundra Trials Page 18