by M. K. Krys
Beacon was just beginning to think that they’d gone the wrong east when the base appeared. He squinted through the swirling snow and spotted the entrance Daisy must have been talking about. It was a small, nondescript door next to an industrial garbage bin. Only it wasn’t unmanned. A knot of guards was clumped outside the door, standing stiffly in their starched uniforms, their belts shining with weapons.
“What now?” Galen said.
Beacon pulled the radio out of his jacket pocket and brought it close to his lips.
“We’ve got a problem,” he whisper-hissed. “There are a million guards at this door. Is there a different one we can use?”
Static crackled from the radio for a moment before Daisy’s voice came through. “No. Any other entrance will be much worse.”
“Then what do we do?” Arthur’s grandma whispered back urgently.
“I vote Galen goes Squidward on them,” Arthur said.
“Then what?” Galen said. “I hack the computer with my tentacles? Great idea if you want this to take twice as long.”
“You can transform back to human after,” Arthur said.
“With what energy? I used all my EpiPens to stay awake. I’m already running low on time.”
“I don’t know what EpiPens have to do with anything,” Arthur’s grandma said. “But in any case, that’s not exactly discreet. The idea is to slip past the guards.”
“Just hang tight,” Everleigh said. “I have an idea.”
A moment later, the ship swooped in low over the building, sending Beacon’s hood flying off his head and the air whooshing out of his lungs. A guard yelled something into his radio and they all ran inside, the door sliding shut behind them.
Beacon smiled. Thanks, Everleigh.
“Now!” Galen said.
They ran for the doors.
As Beacon bolted through the yard, it suddenly occurred to him that the place very well could have snipers manning the property like he’d seen in prison movies. The thought sent a jolt of adrenaline racing through him, and he ran faster. They finally reached the door. Beacon, Arthur, and Galen flattened themselves against the brick like secret agents as Arthur’s grandma swiped Daisy’s badge over the red light. The door slid open.
Arthur’s grandma poked her head inside, then waved for them to follow. They ducked into an empty hallway glinting with harsh green lights.
“We’re in,” Beacon whispered into the radio.
He waited for a reply, clutching the radio. When a second passed, then another, and no reply came, Beacon’s throat clenched with fear. What if their ship had been shot down? What if the building really did have snipers and—
“A little busy right now,” Everleigh said between crackles of static.
Beacon let out a small breath.
“What’s going on? Are the Sov after you?” he asked.
No reply.
“Come on, we don’t want to distract them,” Galen said. “Plus, we can’t stand here forever. Someone’s going to find us.”
Beacon pocketed the radio. Arthur produced his map of the building, which was now tattered and ripped.
“Which way?” his grandma asked.
“Computers would be in the office areas, right?” he said. “That should be here.” He pointed at a spot on the map. “One floor up and down a few halls.” He folded up the map and shoved it back into his pocket.
They slunk forward through the quiet, neon halls. The ice crystals inside Beacon’s jacket and rimming his socks melted, making him colder and wetter than ever. His skin burned and prickled as feeling returned to his body.
They followed Arthur up a set of wide stairs to the first floor, then through a labyrinth of empty halls lined with labs, file rooms, and doors with blacked-out windows that held who knows what. They hadn’t seen a single person the entire time, which is maybe why they got a little too comfortable and didn’t peer around the next corner before they turned it. Arthur slammed right into a squid. He skittered back on the tile, nearly slipping in the goo. The creature stood on its rear tentacles, its flesh rolling in a constant wave even as it stood still. Gelatinous snot oozed from the monster’s uncooked chicken meat skin. A chilling rattling noise issued from its mouth.
“Run!” Galen yelled.
Beacon was already on it. He forgot all about how frozen and tired he was and ran down the hall so fast, he knew that if he thought too much about it, he’d go tumbling down.
Arthur’s grandma loped along beside him.
Beacon had never had the occasion to wonder how Arthur’s grandma would fare during a chase, but he never would have guessed that she would be so fast. She more than kept up with the kids as they raced down hall after hall.
“I’m going to need an awful lot of ibuprofen if we survive this,” she grunted, as if she could hear Beacon’s thoughts.
They careened around a corner.
Another squid was waiting for them. They doubled back in a riot of elbows and shouts, thumps and slurps. They weren’t running anywhere in particular now, just away. Their boots squeaked loudly, but they were past being stealthy.
Beacon skidded around another corner and froze. The doors to the queen’s room were thrown open. Inside, a massive squid had Perry and Sumiko backed into the wall. It hadn’t even occurred to Beacon to be fearful for their safety. Sure, they were humans, but they were on the Sov’s side. But the Sov seemed to have forgotten all about that now. The squid slithered in front of them, darting a tentacle out at the Gold Stars every now and then, making them shriek.
It was playing with its food.
“P-please. We’re Junior Guards!” Sumiko stuttered.
“Let’s go!” Galen whisper-shouted.
But Beacon couldn’t leave them—even if that was what the Gold Stars would have done to him. What they deserved. He knew if he left them to die, he wasn’t any better than the Sov.
“Behind you!” Beacon screamed. “There’s a door behind the tapestry!”
Sumiko fumbled behind her and yanked the tapestry out of the way. She found the knob and they fell through the door, slamming it shut just as a tentacle clobbered it.
The squid reared back, revealing its razor-sharp teeth.
“Note to self. Don’t make the Sov mad,” Arthur said.
They ran. The next hall was empty, and Beacon had a moment of hope that they’d get away. But when they reached the next corridor, his heart sank. There was a squid on the floor. Two suctioned to the walls. One running along the ceiling. Beacon froze, feeling the blood drain from his face. This was bad. Really, really, bad.
Some corner of his mind that wasn’t freaking out registered that they hadn’t passed a single human since they’d reentered the base. He wondered if the Sov were giving up on blending in now that they’d started their takeover.
Arthur’s grandma was shouting something that Beacon couldn’t hear. He felt himself being ripped away. His feet moved without his body’s command, and the next thing he knew, they were crashing into a room. A door whizzed shut behind them, muting the sounds from the hall. Beacon slowly got his bearings, and sound funneled back. He took in his surroundings. High-tech computers lined a large, circular desk that took up the entire room. From the look of triumph on Galen’s face, this was exactly what they’d been looking for.
Galen jumped into a chair at the desk and pulled the keyboard close. Beacon’s limbs were still buzzing with adrenaline, and he could barely think. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog. They needed to keep Galen safe while he worked.
“Come on, help me move this.” Beacon raced over to a filing cabinet. If those things figured out they were in here before Galen finished up, they were in deep trouble. Arthur’s grandma was bent double, trying to catch her breath. She held up a finger in the universal “one minute” gesture.
“I got it, Grams!” Arthur ran ov
er and grabbed the other side of the cabinet. They slid it across the floor. Galen looked over his shoulder. The look he gave them said he could slap that cabinet aside with one swat of his tentacle, but it made Beacon feel better to be doing something. Once the cabinet was in front of the door, Beacon pulled out the radio.
“How’s it going? You guys okay?” he asked.
A crackle of static, then, “We’re good!”
Relief flooded through him at the sound of Everleigh’s voice.
“What happened?” Beacon asked as Arthur crowded close to the radio to listen.
“The Sov sent a few ships after us,” Daisy said. “I think they were trying to pen us in. Got a little tight for a minute, but Everleigh got an idea to—” Static cut out her next words, before her voice came back through. “Your girl’s got moves!”
“And we’ll never hear the end of it,” Beacon joked.
“How are things over there?” Daisy asked.
“Almost got slaughtered by some Sov,” Arthur said, “but we found the computers, and Galen’s working on getting in now.”
“Almost got slaughtered?” Daisy and Everleigh shouted together.
“We encountered a few Sov in squid mode,” Beacon confirmed, giving Arthur a look to shut up when he opened his mouth to protest that it was more than just a few. He didn’t want his sister worrying about him while she was trying to fly a freaking alien ship.
“We’ve got it all under control,” Arthur’s grandma said, pressing her hand against a stitch in her side.
“Just . . . be careful,” Everleigh said warily.
“Same goes for you,” Beacon said.
There was nothing else to say after that, so Beacon, Arthur, and his grandma went over to see what Galen was doing.
Fragments of code filled the screen. It might as well have been written in alien for all the sense it made to Beacon.
“Any progress?” Arthur whispered.
“Shhh,” Galen said, typing.
Arthur drummed his fingers on the desk until Galen shot him a dark look.
“Sorry, sorry!” Arthur said, raising his hands.
Beacon looked back at the door, his fingers clenching around the back of Galen’s chair.
Sweat glittered in beads on Galen’s forehead. For several long, anguishing minutes, the only sounds were the clacking of the keyboard, the occasional scream of a Sov through the thick metal door, and the even more distant sound of missiles outside. The tension solidified.
Then Galen let out a hysterical laugh of triumph.
“What happened? Did you do it?” Beacon asked.
“Not yet. But you were right about the antidote being a computer program.”
“I was?!” Beacon said, at the same time as Arthur said, “He was?!”
“The software is all right here. And they haven’t even encrypted it!” Galen cracked his knuckles and went back to work.
Arthur blew out a relieved breath, and his grandma grabbed his hand, giving it a squeeze.
Everything was going according to plan.
Just as he thought it, a deafening boom sounded, and then everything went black. For a horrible moment, Beacon thought he’d been killed. That a missile had struck the building, and now he was in some kind of afterlife. But then something slurp-slithered on the other side of the door three feet away. Arthur yelped and jumped back, his heel digging into Beacon’s foot. Beacon smothered a hiss of pain and shoved him off, while Galen shushed them both.
Dim emergency lights flickered on in sconces in the wall. Galen punched the computer’s power button about a hundred times, but it didn’t boot up.
“No, no, no, no!” Galen cried.
“What happened?” Arthur’s grandma said.
“They shut the power off.” Galen gave up trying to restart the computer and sank forward onto the desk, rubbing his temples. “It’s all over.”
Beacon shook his head. “It isn’t over. It can’t be over.”
There had to be a way to get these computers up and running again. They couldn’t give up now. He pushed past the fear that they would all die here and thought hard. “A building this big must have a source of backup power, right?”
“There’s probably a generator on the mechanical floor,” Arthur said.
“How are we going to get there?” Arthur’s grandma asked.
There was a long beat of silence, punctuated by the sound of something slithering outside the room. Then Arthur said, “I-I’ll go.”
Beacon spun to face his friend.
It wasn’t like when Daisy had announced her plan to lure away the Sov, when she’d looked and sounded so confident, she practically dared anyone to disagree with her. Arthur’s lips trembled, and even in the dark, Beacon could see that his skin had gone sickly pale.
“Don’t be silly,” Arthur’s grandma said. “You’re not going out there.”
“Those things will eat you for dinner,” Beacon agreed.
“We need Galen to hack the system,” Arthur said more confidently. “And you wouldn’t know the first thing about how to find a generator,” he told Beacon, “much less how to fix it. It has to be me.”
“No.” Arthur’s grandma shook her head.
“Look, it’s like Everleigh said before,” Arthur continued. “If we don’t stop the Sov, we’re all majorly screwed. What do we have to lose here? If we do nothing, we die. If I do this? We have a small chance. It’s like that saying goes: You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”
“Is . . . that from the poster in the guidance counselor’s office?” Beacon asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said guiltily. “But that doesn’t make it not true.”
He was right, but that didn’t mean Beacon had to like it.
“I’m coming with you,” Beacon said.
“Okay.”
“You’re not even going to try to convince me to stay back?” Beacon said.
“No, man, I’m not that stupid.” Arthur grinned.
“I’m coming, too,” Arthur’s grandma said.
They didn’t bother to argue with her. It was clear she wouldn’t back down.
“I hate to interrupt,” Galen said. “But how are you even going to get the door open with the power out?”
He had a good point. It was an automatic sliding door. There was no handle.
“The ventilation shafts!” Arthur said after a beat of silence.
Beacon looked up at the ceiling warily. There weren’t drop tiles on the ceiling, like in the old church.
Arthur produced the building plans again.
“Yes, they’re definitely up there.” He flattened the map on the desk and stabbed his finger at an area where a maze of ventilation shafts ran through the building.
“Should I point out how that plan worked out for us before?” Beacon said.
The last time they’d crawled through a ventilation shaft, they’d literally fallen into the middle of a Gold Stars meeting.
“If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.” Arthur hunched over the map, and they all crowded around him. “All of the automatic doors and elevators will have been affected by the power outage, but there’s an emergency stairwell here.” He pointed to a corner of the page. “If we can just crawl close, we can drop out near the stairs and shoot down without running into any Sov. Hopefully,” he added. “Galen, as soon as the power is back up, you need to work as fast as you can.”
“On it,” Galen said.
Arthur folded up the map and shoved it back into his pocket. “Now we just need to cut away the drywall on the ceiling somehow. There has to be something here we can use.” He began whipping open drawers. He shoved aside boxes of paper clips and highlighters, until he proudly produced a box cutter.
But before Arthur could get to work, a tentacle whipped out of Galen’
s chest, punching into the ceiling. Drywall blasted around them like fireworks. Beacon coughed, but when the dust cleared, there was a human-size hole in the ceiling and the side of the exposed ventilation shaft.
“That’s one way to do it,” Arthur said.
“Won’t you have to sleep now?” Beacon said in a panic.
“Nah,” Galen said. “Partial shifts don’t have the same effect. I’ll just be a bit tired. Now go. Stop wasting time.”
Arthur’s grandma peered up at the gap in the ceiling. “That passage is awfully small . . .”
“You can stay behind, Grams. Help Galen,” Arthur said.
She scoffed. “What does an old lady like me know about computers? No, I’m coming with you.”
Then there was nothing left to do but get into the shaft. Beacon climbed onto the desk and pulled himself up. He was just reaching down to help Arthur when someone banged on the door. Beacon froze.
“I know you’re in there,” Victor said calmly.
The door rattled, but it didn’t open. The power outage was the only thing standing between them and death.
“Go!” Galen shouted.
“But what if he gets in?” Arthur said.
“I can defend myself. We need that power up.”
Beacon had seen Galen battle Victor. It was true, he had held his own. But Galen still hadn’t recovered from his previous transformation. Would he have the energy for a battle with Victor?
“Go!” Galen said, clearly reading Beacon’s thoughts.
“Be safe,” Beacon said.
He gripped Arthur’s hand and hauled him up. His grandma must have climbed up next, because a moment later she was whisper-shouting at him to “go, go, go!”
Beacon tried not to imagine Victor shooting the ventilation shafts action-movie style while they were trapped like sitting ducks and crawled forward.
Static crackled, and then Everleigh’s voice came over the radio.
“They’re starting to drop the acid rain!” she said. “I can see it falling from the UFOs!”