by Shannon Hale
Only the boss lady and Dragon were waiting for me in Howell’s office.
She entered a code into a wall safe, Dragon entered a second code, then Howell again, followed by voice recognition and an eye scan. She opened the safe, and Dragon brought out a heavy metal box. It was scratched and gouged as if it had been chiseled free of something. The lid bore a symbol of all five tokens, a fancier version of what I wore on my chest.
“Dragon, where do I begin?” she asked, blinking.
“Big Barda, I think,” he said.
“Tell me, Miss Brown, how did a previously uncharted asteroid manage to reach Earth at such an angle as to nestle perfectly into Earth’s orbit?”
“Because it was sent here on purpose,” I guessed.
She nodded. “We were the first to reach Big Barda and discovered she was lousy with platinum—one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust and yet highly useful and therefore more precious than gold. We built a lab on the asteroid and were able to produce the carbon nanotubes needed for a space elevator much faster in a weightless environment. We tugged Barda into geosynchronous orbit and used her as the anchor point for the ribbon. A Beanstalk ride costs one fiftieth of a Space Beetle launch, allowing us to mine the asteroid. Our profits turned a megalomaniac like GT a nauseating shade of green. So he bought out one of my astronauts to spy for him. And—there’s so much to tell. What next, Dragon?”
“There was a metallic mark on the asteroid,” said Dragon.
“Yes, and it seemed purposeful, like a character of writing. Buried beneath it in a chunk of ice we found this platinum container. Inside were the five tokens and this disc.”
She opened the lid. The box was thick on all sides, the bottom bearing six grooves. Five of the grooves were empty. In the center groove lay a flat, circular object. Howell lifted it out, and I saw that the disc was transparent like glass, smooth on the outside and full of cracks on the inside. Closer, the cracks looked like deliberate cuts, symmetrical facets, like a diamond inside-out.
Dragon took the disc from Howell’s palm and placed it under a strong lamp. The direct light pierced the disc and images rose out like colorful candle smoke.
“You are only the third human to view this,” said Howell.
“It’s basically alien video,” said Dragon.
The colors twisted together, shapes emerging.
“We learned you have to relax your vision,” Dragon said.
My mind ached trying to form order out of chaos, and I gave myself an eyeball headache.
“Whatever species made that, their eyes don’t work like ours,” I said.
When I kind of dazed out, I could discern figures. Smoky blue and pink. The marks of the tokens. Some movement. A ball. Figures on the ball. Figures gone. Figures again, smoky blue and pink. What was it trying to communicate? I leaned forward.
My body felt yanked, my muscles burning with whiplash. I couldn’t feel any floor beneath my feet. Suddenly I was in space without a pressure suit, and I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t breathe. Between me and the stars the smoky images whooshed, urgent, chaotic. I clawed at the air—or lack thereof. I should have been floating, but I felt like I was falling.
I was screaming. And I was on my knees, Howell’s carpet beneath my hand.
“Maisie,” Dragon was saying. Howell was backed against her desk, her face a mask of alarm.
“I was … I was in space,” I said.
“You weren’t.” Dragon was crouched beside me, his arm around my shoulders. “You were here.”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” Howell whispered. “The thinker token?”
“I guess so.” I took deep breaths and shut my eyes to avoid looking at the disc. “My tokens must receive the data directly, shout it right at my brain. It seemed so real.”
“Maybe you can get more out of it than we could,” said Howell.
I nodded, but I didn’t open my eyes.
I felt Dragon take my hand. His hand was so large, I felt like a small girl again, my dad walking me across the street to the park.
“I’ve got you, Brown,” he said.
“Don’t let go,” I whispered.
I opened my eyes and fell once more into the images of the disc.
Chapter 41
Again I seemed to be in space, the freezing vacuum pressing against me, piercing into my eyeballs, my eardrums, trying to pull me inside-out into the endless blackness. I tried to ignore my body, to focus just on viewing. It was like being shoved underwater and pretending I wasn’t drowning.
I saw two ships, nearly black as space, move toward a green planet. Pink shapes poured out of the boats, and like a creeping mold, blackness consumed the planet. Suddenly I was hurtling into the planet too, toward something—or somebody. Not human. A squat body, limblike parts, something like eyes that were silver and always moving. I seemed to go into an eye, where I felt both terror and urgency.
That image spit me out, and I was streaking through space, past one solar system, into another, toward a second green planet.
The scene there was chaotic, everything so alien nothing made sense, like watching a dozen movies all laid over one another. I wanted nothing more than to shut my eyes. But I forced myself to watch. Finally amid all the images I noticed something familiar—the marks of the tokens on alien bodies. I was seeing the original fireteam.
The fireteam was on that second green planet. Then the fireteam was in space with me. The two ships the color of between-stars were coming. The fireteam went inside one. Maybe I did too. I couldn’t comprehend anything that I saw, images pummeling me like fists.
Then there was only one ship. It left. The planet below me was still green. The marks of the tokens went into a box and left too. Ahead, a blue-green planet, spinning, spinning …
I shut my eyes. I was curled up on the carpet. I was shaking. Dragon still held my hand. He helped me up into a chair.
“Put it away, please,” I said, and I heard a clink and a lid shut.
I took some trembling breaths. “There were two ships. Spacecraft. They annihilated Planet A somehow, because it turned black. Before they all died, the inhabitants of Planet A sent a warning to Planet B—a colony planet, I guess, because the inhabitants there looked similar. By the time the spacecraft arrived at Planet B, there was a fireteam waiting. The fireteam destroyed one of the spacecraft, and their planet didn’t go black. The other spacecraft fled. The Planet B inhabitants put the tokens into a box, into an asteroid, and sent it to … to us. Because that’s where the second ship was heading.”
“And it’ll try to change our planet from green to black,” said Howell.
“And you’re the fireteam, so you will stop it,” said Dragon.
Yes. This was the Purpose. Every cell in my body seemed to sing with it. My eyes teared up with relief like hammer blows that the Purpose was clear. Or somewhat clear. Or not very clear at all, now that I thought about it. A shame the complicated actions of the alien fireteam hadn’t been more obvious.
There had been five of them. And there was one of me.
“Brown?” said Dragon. “You okay?”
I looked at the twisted curves I’d squeezed into my chair’s armrest.
Robots didn’t break chairs when they got scared. Robots didn’t get scared. What if the chair had been someone’s arm? I shuddered, disgusted with myself.
“You should have told us—”
“I planned to, once you were stable, trained, and unified,” Howell said.
“Whatever. Each token grants a specific ability, so all those skills must be needed to stop the spacecraft.”
“Which is why I insisted you claim Jacques’s token,” said Howell.
I glared up at Howell. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop the aliens from killing Earth,” she said, her eyes uneasy.
“Why are you involved?”
“Because I’ve invested a lot in these tokens already. When aliens invade, there’s surely money to
be made. Rule of war.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
Howell looked at Dragon as if she hadn’t understood the question.
“Maisie finds your motivation in this so shocking, she thinks you’re plying her with humor,” Dragon said.
Howell nodded slowly. “Would that be funny? I could try that sometime, if it would be funny.”
“Howell is making an effort to increase her comic intelligence,” Dragon explained to me.
I resisted pulling out what was left of my hair. “Tell me the rest,” I said.
“We tested the tokens as best we could on Big Barda,” said Howell. “Nothing happened when we handled them. Now we believe that was because we were adults.”
Dragon settled into a professor tone. “At puberty, adolescent brains have a growth surge and gain as much gray matter as adult brains, but they still lack some white matter. White matter connects the different brain regions and, eventually, myelin coats the white matter, making it more efficient. We think it’s myelin that prevents nanites from entering and altering adult brains.”
I thought of those blue figures. “There’s no way the species that made the tokens has our same brains.”
“Exactly!” said Howell. “But their anatomy must include something akin to our central nervous system to enable them to move, communicate, and build as they have. Perhaps their adults can bond with the tokens.”
“The tokens must have sensors to tell which hosts would support the nanites,” I said. “But how do you know that it has to do with the age of the brain?”
“Kira and Gabe,” said Dragon, and Howell rubbed her eyes again.
“Crew members,” she said. “When Dragon and I took the disc back to Earth, we left the tokens behind, fearing atmospheric pressure might affect them. While we were at HAL—”
“Let me guess—Gabe and Kira are younger than the rest of your crew?” I said.
Howell nodded. “Twenty-two and twenty-three, both brilliant for their age. When they touched the tokens, well, you experienced firsthand what happened. Soon after, Gabe gained strength and Kira technological clarity. But after a time they became violently ill. I imagine the nanites discovered Gabe’s and Kira’s brains were too old after all and were rejecting them as hosts. The station commander put them in the emergency pod and accompanied them back down the Beanstalk. We lost contact with the pod at reentry. It broke apart.”
I remembered reading news reports about the tragedy. Obviously, there’d been no mention of tokens.
“We believe the tokens removed themselves from Gabe and Kira,” said Dragon, “thereby stopping their hearts. Unbonded, tokens cannot exist in higher levels of gravity. As the pod neared Earth’s mesosphere and gravity increased, the tokens were repelled. They slide through living flesh without a mark, but metal—”
“The tokens ripped a hole in the elevator pod,” I said.
“We never would have located the tiny tokens adrift in space if they hadn’t been suspended among the pod debris, orbiting the Earth,” said Howell. “We compared Gabe’s and Kira’s standard prelaunch brain scans with the rest of the crew’s. Their frontal lobes were not yet completely encased in myelin, so we concluded we needed younger hosts.”
“Teenagers,” I said.
“I believe Gabe’s and Kira’s brains had been too developed,” said Howell. “There wasn’t much myelin, so the nanites could enter and alter the brain, but their synapses were fully formed, their areas of expertise already developed, and other areas going dormant. Adolescent brains are playgrounds, still open to programming. Habits are not yet locked in, personality is in flux, knowledge and skill areas are open. Teenagers are the perfect subjects.” Howell sighed. “If I could have my adolescent brain again and start over, I could rebuild myself. I could pursue dozens of different courses of study. I could be brilliant.”
“You are brilliant,” Dragon said.
“Yeah,” said Howell, shrugging. “I meant more brilliant.”
We were getting off track. “Hey, you put those things into the five of us knowing they might rip out of our bodies.”
“GT was confident enough to risk his own son,” she said. “And I bet my life on it, didn’t I? As you see, you did not die.”
“Yet,” I said.
“I saw the danger of a ship that turns a green planet black. I thought a little risk was in order.”
I frowned and so got them chatting a bit faster, since I’d guessed much of it. Howell started an astronaut boot camp to find a fireteam, using the “marketing survey” of the sweepstakes to profile ideal candidates.
“Children raised hearing two languages have higher-level cognitive abilities. I also wanted subjects who were intelligent, risk takers, and problem solvers. You, Miss Brown, were an unexpected bonus. I examined your DNA after you arrived at boot camp, and as I suspected, you are genetically inclined toward being right-handed but are forced to use your left. Therefore the pathway between your right and left hemispheres is more open than most. Your brain has been forced to compromise and is stronger for it.”
“Um … yay?” I said.
She evaluated us further by our academic success, rankings in the fireteam competitions, IQ exams, physicals, and brain scans.
“Some of the participants’ brains were still too immature, some too mature. Some were already spoiled by alcohol abuse, which damages the forebrain and hippocampus of adolescent brains and halts the production of new nerve cells. Abominable waste of minds!”
Dragon rolled his eyes. Clearly this was a common tirade.
“There were other decent candidates for the fifth position, but Jonathan Wilder got in because his father blackmailed me.” Howell absently rubbed her nose. “On paper, you five were perfect.”
Far away, a sentient species created tokens to help five individuals stop the invaders. As a safeguard, if one member died, the thinker could absorb and still use both tokens. I wondered if Ruth and Jacques, and maybe Mi-sun too, might have recovered from their injuries. But when their bodies were weakened, the tokens fled to be ready for a new, healthy host, and in the process stopped their hearts.
There were five potential traitors in my chest. One day they might kill me too. I wondered if I’d have a chance to save the planet first.
Chapter 42
I slept for a few hours in the same room as my Dad and Luther, curling up on the floor between them and the door. In the morning, we talked.
“I don’t want to have to trust Howell,” I said. “But she sent fifty people to scout for Mom. She has resources. If the big bad boat is coming, I want to be ready.”
“When? Soon?” Luther asked.
“It feels soon. If the thinker token is uploading the data into my brain, I still can’t think in specifics. I’m just aware of a persistent urgency. Not helpful, thinker token!” I shouted at my chest. “Dad, Howell is going to pay off the bank and get our house out of foreclosure, so there’s that.”
“Don’tworry’boutme,” Dad said groggily.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Maybe those docs should lighten up your meds.”
We decided to stay. Howell was our best chance to find where Mom was hiding. I kept busy so I wouldn’t have to consider bleaker alternatives.
First I built myself a new arm—Lady Robotica the First, Avenger of Fido. I wasn’t able to make Lady quite as extraordinary as Fido had been. Too many nanites in my body elbowing for brain space. The weakness also showed on Ruth’s weight machine.
“How do I compare?” I asked after a workout.
Dragon checked the charts. “Ruth was stronger by a fair bit, but you’ve got her on class.”
I tackled the training mission out at the abandoned building. Five months before, the fireteam had rescued the cardboard hostages in two minutes. Alone, I took over fifteen minutes. I thought how disappointed Wilder would be before I remembered that I didn’t care what Wilder thought anymore.
Luther kept me company while I worked on Lady, practiced blue shot
outside, and lifted weights. He talked to me as I made my way to the scuba pool three times each day. I’d go under for twenty minutes, holding my breath and completing obstacle courses that Howell designed for me. When I came back up, Luther would start talking again.
I loved his company but didn’t talk back much. My brain was too busy. Why would aliens go from inhabited planet to planet? How might they attack? What could a fireteam do to stop them that a military with nuclear weapons couldn’t?
Luther and I were alone in the lab five days after returning to HAL. I was working on an engine that I hoped to convert to a jet pack.
“I wonder …” I didn’t mean to say it aloud, but then I had to finish the thought. “I wonder if the police charged Wilder yet. If they can prove he killed Mi-sun, Wilder could go to prison for a long time.”
“Which is what he deserves,” Luther said without looking at me.
“I’m glad you’re here, Luther.”
“Of course you are. I’m monumental.”
“No, I’m really, really glad.”
I smiled at him. He looked at me funny, scratched his nose, straightened his shirt. I was expecting him to say something snarky. Instead, he grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed his mouth to mine.
My instinct was to shove him away, so I froze, afraid to hurt him. Luther seemed to find this encouraging. He gripped my shoulders tighter, kissing harder.
“Luther …,” I mumbled against his mouth.
He pulled back, his forehead shiny. “Yeah? What?”
“Luther …” What could I say? “That’s not something … I could hurt you, you should be careful.”
Luther began to pace, talking with his hands.
“I have pondered this question for a long time, Maisie, and I have decided that it is awkward, if not impossible, to change from friend to … to … to boyfriend, especially since we were prepubescent when we met …”
I wrinkled my nose. Some words I really never wanted to hear from Luther’s mouth.
“… and incapable of honest romantic attraction. But now I realize that you are the most attractive girl I know—”
