by K. A. Holt
I was falling.
Falling.
Freaking out.
Falling some more. And oof I landed with a tiny thump. I had fallen through the grate and was free of the gravity net. Of course, I was also now about six inches tall. Sigh.
Well, from past experience, I knew that it took a couple of hours to resize after, uh, “accidentally” shrinking oneself. So I hustled as fast as my tiny, tiny legs could carry me, searching for an escape.
After a while, I looked up and saw another grate. I climbed up some wires, pretending they were those awful ropes from gym class, and once I was at the top, I scrambled through the grate. Just in time, too, because I felt my body lurch as it began the resizing process.
I was now about two feet tall. I looked around and saw that I was back in the hallway but past the net. Yay! I made my way forward, feeling more and more curious. It felt like I was moving downhill, into the belly of the ship. Down, down, down I walked, losing all sense of where I was in the ship. This is probably just a shortcut to the mainframe, I thought. But, no, that couldn’t be it. Because up ahead I saw a soft blue glow. And a noise like a faraway hive of bees. I felt another lurch as I resized some more. I was already almost normal size.
The hallway made a sharp right turn. The glow seemed brighter. I held my breath as I inched toward the turn…. The light grew deeper, the buzzing louder.
Wait. What was—?
Oh no.
No. No. No.
“Arrrghhhh!”
Someone had tapped me on the shoulder. Hard. How had anyone gotten past that net? Expecting to see Shugabert—or a floating antigravity monster—I swallowed and hastily prepared a lame speech about how I was miserably lost and my mapper was broken and I was on my way back to my apartment, et cetera, et cetera. But when I turned around to see who it was …
Dad!
And he did not look happy.
“Michael,” he said gruffly, “what are you doing?” “I …,” I said, completely forgetting the lie. “Uh …” “Let’s go.” He stepped behind me and poked me in the back. “March.”
“But, Dad,” I whined, sort of regaining my composure. “What’s down there? What’s that noise?”
“What’s down there?” he asked, his eyes shooting sparks and narrowing into two small slits. “You want to know what’s down there?”
I hesitated, not liking how red his face was.
Dad huffed, “Three weeks of no viserator is down that hallway.”
“Da-ad!”
“Shhh!” He glanced around nervously and grabbed my arm. He growled in a low voice, “Never being trusted by your parents again. That’s what’s down that hallway.”
“But … !” I said, tripping as he dragged me closer to the doorway.
“But nothing!” Dad spat. “You don’t get to talk right now.” He stopped and looked me straight in the eyes. “Did you even think about how your mom and I would feel when we woke up and you weren’t there?”
He was blowing this way out of proportion. I mean, come on. This was a spaceship. It wasn’t like I could get lost or hit by an electri-bus. I looked at the floor, feeling ashamed and then feeling angry at feeling ashamed.
His grip tightened on my arm as he used his other hand to punch a concealed button. The gravity enhancement net powered down with a dying buzz. We walked through the doorway and he dragged me over the bench. He pushed another button hidden right in the middle of the wall and I heard the doorway buzz back to life. He looked both ways before we set out into the lobby, like there really was a chance of us getting hit by an electri-bus. Then we walked briskly and silently back to the apartment.
Inside, Mom nearly suffocated me with a bone-crushing hug.
“Thank God,” she sighed into my ear, and I felt her wet cheek pressed against my face. “Don’t ever, ever do anything like that again,” she said, and her vise-grip hug softened. “We told you not to go out on your own. What were you thinking?”
I wiggled out of her grip. “I was thinking that I’m on a spaceship and it’s not like I can get lost or anything. Plus, you never said anything about me not going out! Ask the robotic, disembodied Sugar Bear. He probably has recordings of all our conversations. You never said anything.” I pouted and no one spoke for a minute. Mom blew her nose. “What is the deal with you guys?” I asked. “I just went to check things out. That’s all.”
The parentals stared angrily, so I added, “I was, uh, just trying to map out a good way to get to class. You know, so that I won’t be late on my first day.”
“Ever heard of a mapper?” Mom asked icily, swiping at her cheeks. I stood there wondering why they were making such a big deal out of this.
Then I thought of something peculiar.
“How did you know where I was? I mean, you woke up and just knew to go look in a secret hallway at the other end of the lobby? Did Mr. Shugabert tell you where I was? And how did you know where those buttons were?”
“We haven’t seen Mr. Shugabert this morning,” Mom said. “And how did you get past the security measures?”
Ignoring her question (Mom thinks shrinking yourself is dangerous, no matter what the commercials say), I answered, “Well, I saw Sugar Bear and he was creepy. He was all trying to get me to go back to the apartment and threatening to snitch on me.”
“He’s just doing his job, Mike,” Mom said, rolling her eyes. “He’s not creepy; he’s looking out for you.”
After a few seconds Dad cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mr. Shugabert didn’t say anything. I just woke up and you were gone. When I went to look for you, I saw that the gravity net had changed color, indicating an anomaly. When I went to check it out, I saw you ducking around a corner.” He talked quickly and scratched his nose as he spoke.
Then Mom broke in. “It doesn’t matter how we found you, Michael. What matters is that you are in big trouble. Big trouble. Now eat something and get to class. We’ll talk about this … incident later.” She gave me an and-I-mean-business look and went to her room.
Dad threw a plate of cold eggs onto the table and said stiffly, “Eat.”
I had choked down about two forkfuls when he thrust another vial of the vitamin serum at me.
“Drink this, too. You’ll need your energy, since you were up so early this morning.”
I broke the seal on the vial and took a minty sip. It did not go well with the eggs. I was about to ask if I had to drink the whole thing when Mr. Shugabert’s disembodied voice broke in and said, “Mike. School starts in approximately fifteen minutes. For optimal arrival time, you should leave in two minutes.”
“See there,” Dad grumbled. “You don’t even need to map out a route.”
I pushed my plate away and went into my room without a word. I grabbed my school stuff and marched to the front door.
“Hey,” Dad said as I pushed the button and the door whooshed open. “I need you to take this with you.” He shoved an old book at me. It was the one that had been on his mattress the night before.
“Why?” I asked. I didn’t want to lug some heavy thing with me the whole day.
“Your teacher is an expert on these things and I’d like her to look at the binding. I’m worried it’s in bad shape.”
“Whatever,” I said, snatching the book from him.
“Be gentle with it, Mike,” he said impatiently. “Don’t let any pages fall out.”
“Fine!” I said. I shoved it in my bag and stomped out the door.
“What is their problem?” I muttered to myself, walking down the hall in front of our apartment. I just couldn’t figure out why Mom and Dad were acting so protective and weird. And what was that blue light, anyway? And the humming noise? Maybe I could pop by on my way home from class this afternoon. After all, I now knew where those handy buttons were located….
“Hello.”
I wheeled around and saw Larc walking next to me, her feet perfectly in step with mine.
“Uh, hello,” I said.
“Your name
is Mike.”
“That’s right,” I said, instinctively not being too friendly.
“My name is Larc.”
“I know,” I said, giving her a quizzical look. “We met yesterday.”
Her eyes glinted and a smirk formed at the corner of her mouth. “I vomited on the shuttle yesterday.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. This girl had obvious memory and … conversational issues, and I had stuff to think about. So I started walking faster.
“Yes. But I feel better today.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, staring straight ahead.
“Are you excited about class?”
Man. Would this girl never shut up? I kept walking.
“I’m pretty jazzed. I bet we get to learn a bevy of fascinating space facts.”
I looked at her like “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Plus,” she said, leaning her pale face toward mine and grabbing my arm to stop me, “I can tell you what the blue light is. And the humming. I know all about the humming.”
I stared at Larc, gaping. How did she know about the blue light? And more importantly, how did she know that I knew about the blue light?
She smiled at me, flashing those teeth mottled with blue braces. I yanked my arm from her grip and kept walking. I wasn’t sure I wanted to delve into taboo subjects with this girl. I couldn’t tell if she was setting me up for some kind of practical joke or what. Kids were always causing me grief, and sometimes it seemed like the girls were the worst. At least with the boys, I knew when they wanted to come after me. But with girls, well, they were trickier. They’d smile at you kind of pretty and lure you in. Then whap. Someone would drop a grasshrinker in your pants and you’d spend the next three hours in the nurse’s office waiting to resize.
“Don’t you want to know what I know?” asked Larc in a singsong voice.
“No,” I growled, even though I was dying to find out what she knew.
“Fine,” she said, and walked ahead of me, her white ponytail bouncing from side to side.
I slumped my shoulders and grumbled to myself. Should I be nice to this girl? It didn’t seem like she wanted to be mean to me. But really, was it even that important for me to figure out what was in the hallway? It was probably something stupid. But if it was something stupid, why did it have that crazy net? And why did I get into so much trouble?
I quickened my pace to catch up to Larc. Without looking her straight in the face, I saw with a sideways glance that she was smirking.
“Okay,” I said in a low voice, with a little more attitude than I intended, “what about the blue light and the humming and—”
She cut me off with an excited whisper. “It’s an escape pod.”
I frowned. “So? There’s an escape pod right by my apartment. There’s nothing exciting about that.”
“No, dummy, it’s a special escape pod, with faster thrusters and search-and-rescue capabilities.”
My shoulder rose in a kind of half shrug and I said, “I still don’t get it. If it’s an escape pod, it shouldn’t be a secret. People have to know where the escape pods are, duh. Plus, the pod by my apartment doesn’t have a blue glow and it doesn’t make any noise. I think you’re just making this up.”
She grinned and hoisted her backpack farther up on her shoulder. “Oh, I’m not making it up.”
“How do you even know that I was over there?”
“I saw you and your dad coming out of the hallway.” She laughed. “Boy, he looked furious.”
“You saw us?” I asked. “But Dad looked all around…. There was no one within a mile of us.”
“He didn’t look up, did he? I was coming back from the cafeteria with some doughnuts for my dad when I saw you guys down in the lobby. I would have brought some doughnuts back for my mom, too, but I don’t have a mom. Maybe sometime I can bring doughnuts to you and your dad. And your mom.”
I had to figure this girl out. She wasn’t like any girl I’d ever met before. I couldn’t decide if she was kidding me or if she was genuinely trying to be helpful. She had this spark in her eye like she was totally in control of the situation (and yet totally joking around at the same time). And she acted like we’d been best friends for years. I didn’t even know anything about her!
“Anyway, the escape pod by your apartment doesn’t run on plasma propulsion,” she said, stopping just outside the classroom door.
“What?”
“Plasma propulsion. That’s why the hidden pod glows blue and makes a humming noise. It’s the magnets. That’s also why the pod is so far down a hallway. It has to be away from the captain’s controls or the magnets will interfere with all of the instruments.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” I argued, remembering possibly the only thing I learned in astrophysics. “Plasma propulsion is what makes ships able to travel far out into the universe. An escape pod would never need that kind of power unless …” I trailed off.
“Unless it was going to be launched into—or from—deep space.”
“But the Sojourner’s pods are only meant to be short-range. That way if we have to escape for some reason, people won’t get lost and it’ll be easier to rescue everyone. That’s what my mom said, at least.”
Larc raised her eyebrows in a way that made my stomach drop. Then she opened the classroom door. There were already several kids sitting at desks and rustling their stuff.
“Who are you?” I asked as she chose a desk in the front of the classroom.
“I told you, my name is Larc.”
“Right. But where are you from? You’re not from Star City. I would have seen you in school. And how do you know all this stuff?” I sat down at the desk behind her.
She turned in her seat and said, “One: I am from Star City. I was, uh, homeschooled by my nanny.”
“Your nanny?” I said.
“Natalie Jones. The nicest lady on the planet.”
“Hang on. Isn’t Natalie Jones the name of the park out by the Project airfield? It is. Natalie Jones Park. I air-board at Jones Park all the time.”
Larc blinked a couple of times and acted like she hadn’t heard me. “And two: I know stuff because my dad works on a lot of special projects. He’s the most skilled astrorobotics employee the Project has.” She drew circles on my desk with her finger. “Plus, I’m a good listener. People tend to not notice when I’m in a room, and, well, they chat.”
“Not notice you? Yeah, right.” I didn’t mean it as a compliment. This was the freakiest girl—person, really—I had ever met. She was probably two feet taller than me; her hair was crazy white, her skin almost translucent. And those blue braces … Plus the supposedly one-size-fits-all jumpsuit she wore was way too short. I could see the tops of her Project-issued socks and a blindingly white patch of skin on each of her legs.
I furrowed my brow and bent down to grab my handheld from my bag.
I froze.
At that moment I caught a whiff of something very familiar. Something I thought I’d never smell again: the commingling of burnt coffee beans and sweet old-lady perfume.
I closed my eyes, hoping that I was just imagining things, until I heard …
“Sleeping, Mr. Stellar? Not a great way to start off your first day in class.”
My eyes shot open and so did my mouth. What was Mrs. Halebopp doing here?
“Your original teacher was unable to make the trip,” Mrs. Halebopp said in her gravelly voice. “I was called in at the last minute. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Mrs. Halebopp.” She paused and ran her fat gray tongue over her lips. “I’ll be your teacher for the duration of this trip.” She shot me a smirk.
I thought I was going to faint. Or throw up. Or throw up and then faint. Up until that moment the only thing this trip had going for it was that I never had to find myself in Mrs. H’s clutches ever again. But here she was, leaning over my desk, her snarled beehive blocking out the light, just like she’d been doing every school day all year.
“I hope yo
u’ve been working on your speech, Mike.”
I gripped my desk and looked into her bottomless eyes. “Well, uh, to be honest, I …”
“Didn’t think you were going to have to finish it after all, did you?” She cackled. “Well, look on the bright side. It’s going to be a new assignment for this class, which means you’ll have a leg up. Of course, I’ll grade you harder because you’ve had more time for research, and I’ll expect your speech to be longer—and given earlier—than everyone else’s, but …” She trailed off.
I didn’t know what to say. I closed my eyes and tried to wish her away.
Mrs. Halebopp swept herself over to the holoboard hanging in the front of the classroom, leaving me in a wake of burnt coffee stench. She began writing the rules for the assignment, which by this time I had memorized.
Larc turned around in her seat and whispered, “I think she likes you.”
I stared at my handheld, not wanting to get caught whispering.
“Seriously,” said Larc, braces glinting. “I’ve never seen her take such a liking to—”
“What do you mean you’ve ‘never seen her’?” I blurted out in a fierce whisper. “You were homeschooled, remember?”
Larc sucked in her bottom lip, smiling. She turned back around in her seat. And before I could even try to figure out what Larc was hinting at, Mrs. Halebopp winked and motioned for her to go to the big teacher’s desk at the front of the room.
I had never, ever seen Mrs. Halebopp wink. The sight frightened and captivated me. I thought I could actually hear rusty creaking coming from her eyelid.
Larc flounced out of her seat. I stared after her in disbelief. She and Mrs. H held a short private conversation and then Larc returned to her seat. I tapped her on the shoulder.
“What was that all about?” I whispered.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she singsonged over her shoulder.
I glanced up at Mrs. H hulking behind her desk. Seeing that she was shuffling some papers and not looking at the class, I leaned forward and whispered to Larc. “Do you know her or something?”