Triple Trouble

by Elise Allen

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Sure it is! It’s Arkrapharaggog. In my language? ‘Danger.’”

  Gabby rolled her eyes. She took a deep breath, then set him down on the ground. “Okay, Danger,” she said. “Go for it. But be careful.”

  Petey gave her a cocky point-and-wink. Then he took a few steps back, while Gabby moved just close enough to the tower to blink the red laser lattice to life. Gabby wanted to say something encouraging to Petey, but she didn’t want to distract him. If she threw off his rhythm even the slightest bit…She didn’t even want to think about what would happen.

  Petey looked at the lattice, measuring it with his gaze. He set his jaw, narrowed his eyes, then took two loping leaps…and dove forward, his arms extended over his head and his legs pointed long. Gabby ached to reach out and yank him away from peril, but instead she gripped her hair in one fist and chewed on her other hand’s nails as Petey arced through space…and right through the center of a mesh hole. He somersaulted onto the red pebbles on the other side, then stood up with his arms held high, as if he’d just finished an Olympic gymnastics routine…or as if he were a Martian listening to his planet’s anthem.

  Gabby let out her breath in a whoosh. “Great job, Petey. The rest’ll be easy.”

  The rest wouldn’t be easy at all, but she thought maybe if she said it out loud, she’d believe it.

  Petey didn’t seem worried. He strode to the lip gloss compact Gabby had slipped through the mesh. It was almost as long as Petey was tall; he had to squat to pick it up. When he rose with it wrapped in his arms, it reminded Gabby of Ralph Gilland, a fellow Brensville Middle School Orchestra member, holding his standing bass. Ralph could do it, but barely, and the entire operation always looked precarious and unwieldy.

  Gabby realized she should have had Petey try holding the lip gloss before she put it through the mesh. Now it was too late. She bit her tongue to stop herself from scrapping the mission. Petey believed he could do this; she had to believe in him.

  Gripping the lip gloss compact, he bounced into the air. At first he wobbled, and Gabby had a horrible image of him bouncing off course and right into the laser mesh that blazed just a couple feet in front of him, but soon he got used to the extra weight, and bounced straight and true. With each bounce he rose higher…then higher still…then even higher….

  After an eternity he landed on the small telescoping stem of the laser beam projector, around twenty feet in the air. Gabby vaguely heard a triumphant holler. He was so high up she couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but she knew the plan. He had to open the compact, then hold the lip gloss side and dangle the mirror directly in front of the laser eye so its beams would ref lect back at itself. If he did it and it worked…

  The laser mesh snapped out of sight. Gabby grabbed her knapsack and raced forward a split second before she heard Petey squeal, “Hot-hot-hot-hot!”

  Instantly, the compact fell and the mesh snapped back into place…but now with Gabby on the inside.

  A moment later, Petey soared down, bounced off the ground, and somersaulted up and into Gabby’s outstretched hand.

  “Good thing you’re fast,” he said. “That thing got hot. I could only hold it for a second.”

  “Did your hands get burned?” Gabby asked.

  Petey shook his head and held them out. His fingers looked a little red but not angrily so, and there were no blisters.

  “You’re good,” Gabby said. “But if they hurt, let me know, okay? I have cream in my knapsack.”

  Petey nodded. He wasn’t usually at a loss for words. She wondered if it was just now sinking in, the danger of what he’d accomplished.

  “You’re really brave,” Gabby told him. “I’m proud to be your friend, Petey.”

  One corner of Petey’s mouth turned up. The beginning of a smile.

  “Call me Danger,” he said.

  Gabby smiled back. “Okay, Danger, let’s see what’s inside.”

  With no idea what awaited them, Gabby took a deep breath and strode through the wall.

  nside the tower, Gabby didn’t see much of anything. The room was basically an empty steel-gray cylinder.

  She didn’t see much of anything, but she heard a lot.

  From outside the tower walls came a f lurry of loud, angry voices.

  “Where did she go?”

  “Where is she?”

  “We lost her!”

  A roar of rage rang out from the crowd, then Gabby heard the thunder of metallic footsteps grow louder as the horde of Martians they’d evaded outside ran toward the tower.

  Apparently, the Bluetooth connection between Gabby’s phone and the speaker wasn’t strong enough to go through the tower walls. With the anthem no longer playing, the Martians were back on the warpath.

  “What if they find us?” Petey asked.

  Gabby put a finger to her lips. She didn’t think they could hear her through the walls—certainly not over the sound of their own pounding feet—but she didn’t want to risk it. If she’d dared to speak, she’d have told Petey she thought they were safe. The Martians had only noticed Gabby in the first place after she’d backed away from the tower—they wouldn’t know she’d been trying to get into this particular building. They’d also walked her a good distance away, and they’d been facing the park the entire time Gabby and Petey had worked their way inside.

  She thought they were safe, but she didn’t feel safe until the pounding footsteps reached their crescendo, then faded away into the distance.

  “We’re good. At least for now,” Gabby said. Then she looked around the room. “What do you think this place is?”

  The cylindrical room they were in was small, maybe the size of one of the food stands back at the fair. When Gabby tilted her head up, she saw the room stretched high above, eventually ending in a steel-gray ceiling. In the very center of the room sat a second cylinder, but this one had an oval cut out of it, like an entryway.

  Gabby thought of how the building looked from the outside—skinny with the three wide donuts leading up to the giant dome at the top.

  “I bet that’s an elevator,” she said, looking at the inner cylinder.

  “Cool,” Petey said. “Where do we take it?”

  Gabby had no idea. She’d brought Petey inside, but the elevator gave her no added information. It was blank metal, with only four unmarked buttons to even hint that it did anything at all. She wished Sneakers had marked one of them for her, but she guessed it was harder to get away with peeing inside the building.

  Which button should she press? She wished Sneakers could tell her. The dog had been so good about sending Gabby signals when she needed them. She wished there were a way to reach out to Sneakers and tell the dog she desperately needed one now.

  Gabby smiled. Maybe there was. Sneakers had already proven he could send images into Gabby’s head; maybe he could receive images, too.

  Gabby stared at the buttons, concentrating on them with every ounce of energy in her body. In her head she called out to Sneakers, loud as she could. Which button, Sneakers? How do we get to you? Where are you, Sneakers? Where???

  Minutes ticked by. Gabby started to sweat. She was probably wasting her time. Any second now, someone in the horde of Martians would realize where they’d gone and storm into the tower to grab them for recycling….

  Then Gabby saw something, as if it were right in front of her: a view out a window. The view was high in the air, and through it Gabby could see the uppermost dome of another tower.

  When the image faded, Gabby slammed her finger into the uppermost button. “They’re at the top,” she said as the doors slid closed. “When Sneakers looks out the window, he sees the top of the next tower. Hold on tight, Petey.”

  After everything else Gabby had experienced on Mars, she expected the elevator ride to be equally intense. She thought she and Petey might zip up at hyper-speed, pushed painfully into the f loor from G-force pressure.

  Instead she felt a lurch as the el
evator slowly meandered upward, while tinny Muzak tinkled from an unseen speaker.

  “Why am I holding on tight, exactly?” Petey asked.

  Gabby had no good answer for that. Elevators, apparently, were one technological item the Martians hadn’t mastered.

  A moment later, Petey had another question. “What do we do when the doors open? What if someone’s there? My throat’s still kinda sore; I don’t think I can sing the anthem well enough to help.”

  “You don’t need to,” Gabby said. “I have it on my phone, remember?”

  She pulled out her phone…which had gone completely black. Gabby’s neck hair stood on end. “No…no—no—no…it was totally charged!”

  “Well, yeah, on Earth!” Petey said. “Batteries drain fast on other planets. Do you have any idea how much power it takes to search for service through space?”

  Gabby was only half paying attention. She’d already swung her knapsack in front of her and was rummaging through it for the charger she always kept inside. She couldn’t feel it anywhere, so she took the bag all the way off and sat on the elevator f loor to dig around.

  Suddenly, panic tickled her skin as she remembered.

  “No…” she said, rummaging faster, as if the universe might somehow have changed the past to help her when she needed it most.

  “What?” Petey asked.

  “I can’t recharge the phone. I gave my charger to Carmen back at the fair.”

  She wheeled to Petey, her eyes desperate. “You need to teach me the song. Now. I’m good with music; I can learn it fast.”

  “But can you sing? If you’re bad, the Martians won’t listen.”

  Gabby didn’t have time to answer before the elevator jolted to a stop. In a heartbeat, Gabby grabbed Petey and hid him in her hair, then pressed herself against the wall. It might only give her an extra second if the doors opened on a sea of metal suits, but at least it was something.

  The doors did open…but Gabby didn’t see any Martians, only a rounded metal vestibule. Cautiously, she eased herself and Petey out of the elevator and into a steel-gray circular hall with eight entryways, each of which opened out into another large room—a pie section of the giant dome at the top of the tower, Gabby imagined. She heard the dull sound of footsteps and voices, but they were far away, coming from all the different rooms, and they overlapped into a susurrant murmur too layered for her translator to decipher.

  Moving slowly, Gabby tiptoed to the closest entrance. She peered in only long enough to make sure no one was looking her way, then slipped behind the closest thing that could give her cover: a tall metal cylinder, tapered at the bottom. Even with that tapering, the slimmest part was more than wide enough to hide two Gabbys.

  Gabby waited a minute, heart thumping, just to be sure no one had seen her. Then she peeked out and saw the cylinder hiding her and Petey was just one of countless similar cylinders—some thinner than Gabby’s and some thicker—in a cavernous room teeming with metallic-suited Martians in all shapes and sizes.

  “The tubes…” Gabby whispered to Petey. “They look kind of like the one in the weapons testing ground. The one I left when I first got here.”

  “Well, yeah,” Petey whispered back. “That’s ’cause they are. But these are just for Martians. You can tell ’cause they’re bigger, and not just on the inside. Martians know all about Mars; they don’t need a Holographic Acclimation Booth. So these are just Transport Tubes. They’re lower tech, and they come in lots of different sizes: small enough to fit just one Martian, or big enough to fit a bunch of ’em delivering a major weapon…unless the weapon’s so big they have to Shrink-O-Zap it first.”

  Gabby was impressed. “You know a lot about this stuff,” she whispered. “Was this room in your VR tour?”

  “I wish! The tour doesn’t let you go in the towers. I’ve got another VR tour that’s just about all the weapons and tech from Mars. There’s a whole section about the pods. It lets you go in and check ’em out and program ’em…” He stopped and his eyes got wide. “Can we go in and program one now? I could take you to Minisculea!”

  “We have to save Sneakers and Sharli,” Gabby said.

  “Well, yeah, but like…after,” he said. “You could see my home.”

  He sounded so sweet and hopeful, Gabby hated to say no. “I think we have to get right back to Earth afterward,” she said. “Your parents are probably really worried about all of you.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Petey said. “I just thought you might want to see it.”

  “I do,” Gabby assured him. “Maybe next time I sit for you. You can get there from Earth, right?”

  “Yeah! We have a Minisculean Transport Pod at home! It’s—”

  Gabby didn’t let him finish his sentence. She pulled Petey off her shoulder and put her index finger over his lips so he couldn’t speak.

  A Martian was coming. The alien’s green metal suit was thick, not sleek; it made him look like an armored tank. Gabby kept Petey’s mouth covered and pulled him close, hunching deeper into the shadow between the nearest pod and the wall. From here she couldn’t see the Martian, so hopefully it couldn’t see her either. She heard the Martian step inside the pod, then heard its door slide closed.

  How long did it take for the pod to work? If she ran out of the room right now, would the Martian hear her? Would he suspect anything? Was it even safe to hide behind the pod while it was working? What if it let off radiation, or got burning hot, or—

  DING!

  The pod chimed pleasantly. Petey peeled her finger off his mouth, then crawled up the front of her jacket to stand back on her shoulder.

  “It’s done. The Martian’s gone,” he said, smacking his lips with a grimace. “And your finger tastes like pennies.”

  “We should get out of here,” Gabby said. “I don’t think Sharli and Sneakers are in this section.”

  Gabby leaned out from behind the pod. There were still Martians everywhere, moving in and out of the countless pods in the room. Yet aside from the one they’d just seen, none of them were heading in Gabby and Petey’s direction. The f low of traffic actually seemed to move the opposite way, toward the windows at the far end of the dome.

  “I don’t understand,” Gabby whispered to Petey. “If all these Martians are coming to and from the planet through here, why is this part of the room so empty? Why aren’t they all coming this way to go down the elevator and back home?”

  Petey peered into the room. “’Cause they’re all going the other way,” he said. “We couldn’t see it from down below, but there’s a walkway around the edge of the dome—that I did see in VR. They probably catch the Aeroway out there, so they’d get dropped off there too. The elevator’s gotta be old tech—that’s why it was so empty and slow.”

  Gabby nodded. What Petey said made sense, and it was good for them. If the Martians came in and out of the dome by Aeroway, then the little circular hallway around the elevator was relatively safe. There was no good reason for a Martian to go through there at all, unless maybe someone wanted to go from one dome room to another and was closer to the inside hall than the dome edge. Or maybe if a Martian wanted to go from the dome to one of the lower donut-f loors…though for all Gabby knew, there was a faster way to do that, too.

  This new information made Gabby feel much better about leaving their pod-cover and zipping back into the hall, where there was no cover at all. They might be totally exposed, but they were alone.

  “Where do we try next?” Petey asked.

  There were still seven more entrances into different parts of the dome. Sharli and Sneakers could be in any of them.

  “We just work our way around, I guess,” Gabby said.

  She stayed close to the wall, which would give her a split second of cover if she heard footsteps coming, and sidled counterclockwise to the next entryway. She dropped to her knees, hoping no one would be looking at the bottom half of the opening, and peered around the edge.

  Unlike the first area, this one
wasn’t one cavernous room. Instead Gabby saw a long hallway with many arched openings, as well as other hallways branching off in different directions. The openings glowed red, and Gabby could see the red laser mesh on the nearest one.

  “Prison cells,” Petey said, echoing Gabby’s own thoughts.

  “You think that’s where they’re holding Sharli and Sneakers?” Gabby asked.

  Before Petey could answer, a deep, guttural, raging voice echoed through the circular hallway. “NO, BLINZARRA! THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!”

  Gabby reared back and gasped. “Blinzarra!” she whispered.

  “Sharli’s mom!” Petey whispered back.

  “YOU HAVE TWO MINUTES!” the voice raged again, and this time Gabby heard it clearly come from the entryway directly across from them. The voice was so furious and menacing, every instinct Gabby had told her to run away from it as fast as she could.

  But if she did that, she’d never save Sneakers and Sharli.

  Gabby tucked Petey into her hair for camouf lage, then raced across the hall toward the booming voice.

  abby peeked in the doorway, looking for something she could duck behind. Immediately to her left was a red metal statue that looked a lot like the ones she and Petey had seen in the park across from the towers. Gabby didn’t bother to look at it closely; she figured it was a safe bet that it commemorated some kind of monstrous weapon that did something equally monstrous to another planet. She was just happy it sat on a large dais. She immediately slipped behind it, then peered over its edge to see what was going on.

  She was in some kind of giant, fancy executive office. The curved far wall was all windows that looked out on the same view of the next dome over that Sneakers had shown in his vision. Set back from that was a large desk with several computer screens hovering over it, and a plush wheeled chair that faced the screens and the window. In another area, Gabby saw what had to be a recliner. It was shaped like a large purple hand, with long, fuzzy fingers where someone would stretch out their legs. Gabby saw more chairs around a table set with bowls of food, more scattered statues, a shelving unit filled with all kinds of strange objects that Gabby couldn’t place at all, and—