“How are we supposed to get there?” he asked. “She can’t walk.”
Molly’s eyes fluttered open.
“Simple,” she said. “We fly.”
Molly recognized the voices, but it took a long time to understand the words flowing over her. They’d sounded like an alien language at first, or the gabbling of birds. But finally their meaning had trickled into her brain.
She’d listened and realized that Anna and Yoshi were only half right—this was a valley, a rift in the arctic snows. But it was also a rift in the world itself, and somehow Molly had fallen deeper into it than the others.
She had to wake up now, or she never would.
Molly sat up slowly, looking into each of the startled faces around her.
She could see them all clearly now. Yoshi was battered, exhausted, but a new determination surged in him, now that he had a goal. Javi was filled with relief, ready to do as she commanded. Anna was still walled off. She’d never really faced the airplane crash or the numbness that threatened to swallow her. Oliver and Akiko looked like they were about to cry—they were still themselves after everything that had happened.
Kira was calmly staring at Molly, studying her, reaching for her pencils. She was the only one who saw the change.
The air smelled different now, full of a million weird scents Molly hadn’t noticed before. It was too much, like someone was trying to cram a thousand new sensations into her mind.
Her shoulder burned, and she still felt faint. She tried to swallow away the acid taste in her mouth.
Javi gave her a handful of blue berries. They tasted wrong, cloying and soapy. Molly dropped them to the ground and reached for the red omoshiroi-berries instead. They were sweet and delicious, full of everything her body needed.
Red was good.
It was green you had to watch out for.
Molly saw it now—pukeberries, shredder birds, the baleful smaller moon that signaled danger. And of course the dreadful duck of doom.
Stay away from green.
“Are you okay?” Javi asked gently.
Molly nodded. Maybe okay was the wrong word, but she was something.
“I’ll be ready to go soon,” she said. “We should start right away.”
Javi frowned. “Start what?”
“Looking for answers.”
They all stared at her.
“We have to find out what crashed our plane,” she said. “Why we survived when no one else did.”
“Okay,” Javi said. “How?”
“Same as always,” she said. “We gather data. We form conclusions. We figure this out.” She swallowed some water. Water, at least, tasted exactly the same. “I think we’re here for a reason. I think the answers are at the other end of the rift.”
She’d seen it on the plane, in her dream before the crash, the thing in the distance—something powerful and dangerous. Something acting with intention.
Each of them had been chosen. She was sure of it. The electricity that had moved through the cabin had picked them all with deadly purpose.
“Molly’s right,” Yoshi said. “The other end of the rift is the only way out. We could climb the walls with low gravity, but we’d never make it across the arctic.”
“And there’s no point sticking around here,” Anna added, gesturing at the burned-out plane. “For one thing, we stirred up those robots back at the wall, and they might have followed us.”
Javi gave a tired sigh. “I just wish you guys had seen the first-class cabin. It was baller.”
Yoshi started translating for Akiko and Kira, but the girls seemed to have understood already. Everyone was ready to move on, to go wherever the promise of answers lay.
Molly wanted to sink back onto the pile of cushions, to sleep and dream some more. To prepare herself. But there had to be new dangers moving toward them even now. The catastrophic airplane fire was too big a wound for the jungle to ignore.
It would be a long journey, longer than the others were ready to understand yet. She was going to have to carry them at least part of the way, when they lost hope and nothing made sense.
But that was okay. Molly Davis had been born to lead.
She was different now, but she was still herself.
And she would get them home.
Scott Westerfeld is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Uglies series, which has been translated into thirty-five languages; the Leviathan series; the Zeroes series (cowritten with Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti); Afterworlds; and many other books for young readers. He was born in Texas, and alternates summers between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.
The struggle to survive gets even more deadly in
Book Two
Deadzone
By Jennifer A. Nielsen
Read on for a special sneak peek!
In the end, saving them would be up to her.
Molly knew this in the same way she knew her own name, or the way she knew that the sun would rise each day, just as it had this morning.
Actually, the sun wasn’t a problem. It was the moon, or moons, that worried her. Wherever they were now, whatever this place was, there were two artificial moons. One was red, the other was green, and those moons—alien, unfathomable, and cold—symbolized everything that was wrong with this place. Molly couldn’t shake the feeling the moons meant something, something important. Maybe even something that would determine whether they all survived.
Seven of them remained, out of over five hundred on a plane bound for Tokyo. After being ripped apart like an aluminum can, their plane had crashed four days ago. Was it really only four days?
By now, she and her Killbot team, and their instructor, Mr. Keating, should have been deep into competition at the Robot Soccer World Championship. They might not have had the most complicated robots, but the things were built like rocks and could kick the daylights out of any flimsier machine, no matter how fancy it was. Molly had liked their odds.
For months, getting to that championship had been the biggest goal in her life. Now, her biggest goal—her only goal—was to stay alive. Plane crashes onto alien environments had a funny way of changing one’s priorities.
It wasn’t only her life at stake, but the other remaining members of her team: Javi, Anna, and Oliver. Three other survivors of the crash were here with them, too: Yoshi, who was half-American and half-Japanese, and two Japanese sisters, Kira and Akiko.
Molly was determined to get them all home. Whether she would get there herself was still in doubt. The injury to her shoulder from the dreadful duck of doom was far more serious than the bird’s name implied. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t healing, either. Not that she would tell anyone how bad it looked. They had larger problems on their mind. She kept it covered and kept quiet about it.
Everyone was packing up camp, or they were supposed to be. Yoshi had just gotten back from exploring the terrain in front of them, and his report had been less than encouraging. Now he was cleaning his sword with oil and keeping his mouth shut about whatever he’d just killed with it. The sword itself was some four-hundred-year-old artifact that she was pretty sure he had stolen. By now, Yoshi should have been with his father in Japan, serving his fourth day of a life sentence of grounding.
Kira had her head bent down over her notebook, drawing a picture of Akiko, who was playing her flute. The sisters looked alike, but even ignoring the fact that Kira had a stripe of red running through her black hair, Molly had no trouble telling them apart. It was all in their posture. Kira was tough and a little angry, her body tense as if always ready for a fight. Akiko was the shy one, who more often than not looked like she’d prefer to fade into the background. She came alive when she played her flute, though. Even when the purpose of her playing was to lure in a slide-whistle bird for their last meal before the group ventured into an unfriendly desert.
Unfriendly had been the kindest word Yoshi had used to describe what lay ahead.
Javi, Anna, and Oliver were bus
y tinkering over what remained of their last soccer-playing robot, though they all knew it had too many damaged parts to be of any use. Besides, with some seriously dangerous predators around nearly every bend they’d passed so far, what did they need with a game of soccer?
Okay, so maybe no one was packing up camp. Molly could fix that.
“We need to leave in one hour,” she announced to the group, then her eyes settled on Akiko. “Bird or no bird.”
Akiko lowered her flute. “Bird,” she repeated. She spoke fluent Japanese and French, but only a few words of English.
“We should stay here long enough to get fresh food,” Anna said. “We burned through a lot of our food supplies in the jungle.”
Literally burned through them, thought Molly. They’d experimented with the settings on one of two strange devices they’d found in the jungle. It had sparked the broken plane back to life, lighting up its technology so much that it exploded, taking much of their food with it.
“If we’ve got to wait for food, then play faster,” Molly told Akiko, who only stared blankly back at her until Yoshi translated and Akiko resumed playing. “Everyone else, if we’re short on food, then maybe we’re short on other supplies, too. Let’s pause and take inventory. If you have anything of value—and I mean, if you have even a stick of gum in your pocket that you’ve been saving for later—then bring it forward!”
Nobody had a stick of gum, apparently, or maybe they just weren’t about to sacrifice their one chance at a minty fresh mouth to someone else. But other items did come forward.
Anna brought out the two devices they had found in the jungle. These were metal disks in the shape of a donut but about the size of a dinner plate. Each had rotating inner and outer rings, with unfamiliar symbols on both rings. When they aligned, the matching symbols lit up and pressing those lit symbols made things happened. Crazy things that would’ve blown Einstein’s mind and invalidated every theory of physics he’d ever come up with. With a twist of the rings, gravity got lighter or heavier, technology went to zero or powered up. Molly suspected one setting affected the temperature in the area—something was holding back the arctic ice, after all—but she wasn’t interested in testing that theory and sending the rift into a sudden ice age.
“What else do we have?” Molly asked.
They had a battery taken from a cave-dwelling robot Anna had smashed, two backpacks, a canteen half-full of water, a handful of flares, some packaged food, some bungee cords, and a radio that played only static.
“We don’t have enough supplies here to survive a weekend campout in the backyard,” Oliver said, his voice drifting dangerously close to whining. “Now we’re about to head into a desert with this?”
“We wasted too many supplies already,” Yoshi said. “You guys were using flares like they grew on trees.”
“Or like they protected us from what flew out of the trees!” Javi said. “We had to use them to keep the shredder birds from ripping us apart.”
“At least the jungle gave us a lot of what we need to survive,” Anna said. “We were able to find water and food and shelter. We won’t be so lucky in the desert. Water is sure to be scarce, so plants and animals will be, too. No plants mean no trees for shelter.”
“And no wood to build a fire,” Yoshi said. “So even if we catch a bird, there’ll be no way to cook it.”
Oliver moaned. “We’re goners for sure.”
Molly pressed her fingers to her temples. “Stop it, all of you!” She hadn’t meant to yell, or maybe she did. At least everyone was looking at her again. “We are smart enough to figure this out, no matter how bad it seems. We can do this. We just have to work together.”
“That’s fine for your Killbot team,” Yoshi said. “You know each other and take care of each other. What about me and the sisters?”
Akiko and Kira smiled, as if they knew he was talking about them.
“From now on, we’re all on Team Killbot.” Molly made sure she looked each person in the eye as she spoke. “All of us.”
She thought Yoshi looked especially pleased by that, though she wasn’t sure why. She had been careful not to treat him or the sisters as outsiders. Now she wondered if Yoshi had simply never been part of a team before. He seemed like the kind of kid who had trouble fitting in.
So he wasn’t a loner entirely by choice. That would be good to keep in mind if she was going to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
Molly continued, “And if we’re going to be a single team, then we’re going to function like one. Everyone gets a responsibility, and we’re all counting on you to do your part. I will take charge of our team, unless anyone else wants the job.”
No one spoke. Except for Akiko, who said, “Bird,” for some reason.
Molly looked around the group. “Javi, I want you to be my second-in-command.”
His face lit up. “Like the vice president? Deputy?”
“Annoying sidekick,” Anna said.
“First Officer Spock,” Yoshi added. “Can we call you Spock?”
“I’ll work on my own title,” Javi said.
Molly turned to Yoshi. “You’ll be in charge of defending us. Kira and Akiko can look for food. I want Anna to specifically find us water while we’re out there.”
“What about me?” Oliver said.
She hadn’t forgotten about him. On the contrary, Molly felt a growing need to protect Oliver. He was the smallest and youngest, and had an innocence about him that was being ripped away by the reality of their situation. But he needed a job, to feel as much a part of the team as everyone else.
“I need you to be Yoshi’s lookout,” she finally said. “If something is coming for us, I want you to be the first to warn us.”
Oliver smiled and nodded.
“Bird,” Akiko repeated.
This time they looked in the direction she was nodding. A slide-whistle bird had landed right in their camp. Yoshi stepped forward with his sword raised.
“All right,” Molly said a moment later. “Let’s eat, and then we can go.”
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