Dangerous

by Shannon Hale

  “When we confronted Jacques that first time, I was half hoping he’d tell you he thought I’d killed Mi-sun. If you hated me, it might make it easier to … to take your tokens too. But he didn’t say it. And I couldn’t bear to. In Philly, in the lair, lying next to you, holding you …” His exhale was nearly a sigh. “Full confession: after that night, I made sure we didn’t find GT and Jacques too quickly.”

  I gasped. That made him smile, though it faded quickly.

  “For weeks I believed I would have to kill you. The techno token was buried under the brute token. I would have to unite them with my thinker token or the fireteam would fail. Here I was trying so hard not to be my dad, and in order to be a hero, I would have to be a murderer.”

  I thought of his e-mails. He’d sweet-talked me into a death trap.

  “Then when you came to Philadelphia, this wall I’d been bricking up just crumbled, and I knew I couldn’t … well, kill you. But the Purpose pressed and insisted that all the tokens be together. I didn’t know how. My head hurt trying to find a way out, and I couldn’t and couldn’t until … you were beside me, asleep, and I thought, she would be a better thinker than I am. And like that I realized I could kill myself instead. It’s ludicrous I didn’t realize that before, but maybe it was a safety function of the thinker token—survival above all else. The moment I overrode that, everything changed.”

  Another swarm of aerial drones buzzed over us, heading for the night beyond the north wall. One of the turrets there was gone. It must have been destroyed while we were blind. I sat up, hugging my knees to my chest, too anxious to lie flat.

  “Did you ever read the book by that guy who was hiking alone when a boulder fell on his arm?” Wilder whispered. “For three days he was pinned, trying to get the boulder off, believing he was going to die. Then it occurred to him—he could cut off his own arm. He said when he realized that, he felt profound relief. That’s how I felt. It was the night after we kissed—you remember?—and you slept next to me, and I watched you sleep for hours—is that creepy?—but I watched and thought and realized I could cut off my own arm—I could kill myself—and give you all the tokens. I woke up unafraid for the first time in months.”

  “I remember that morning,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too.” His smile was more real now. “For whatever reason, you and I handled the tokens better than the others. Our brains took the changes without imploding. And you were a better candidate for the thinker. After you learned about Mi-sun and took off, I had to figure out how to get you to take my tokens. I knew you’d try to save me if you could, but if you believed I was evil—”

  Another light bomb. I shut my eyes just as Wilder pulled me down, piercing shrills passing over our heads. Those weren’t just numbing needles, I was pretty sure. Those would kill us if they could.

  We flat-crawled across the roof, away from the attack. Above us the south turret’s searching eye was still, staring motionless in one direction. I glanced around—the other searchlights were twitching, human hands moving them, looking for and finding targets.

  I called Dragon. “I think no one’s in the south turret. We’ve got a blind spot.”

  “Sending someone,” he said. “Stay put.”

  I crept to the edge of the roof. Below, the south courtyard was blacked out. I heard scraping, a mumbling drill, and then from a hole beneath the wall a figure dressed in black crawled free. All that on the north wall was a distraction. Here was the real danger.

  I formed a hollow havoc ball and shot it, knocking the figure flat. A second came through the hole. I went to shoot this one too but the first—injured but conscious—shot at me, a swarm of needles. I dropped.

  “Dragon, tunnelers under the south wall,” I called on Lady. “They’re packing needles.”

  “Don’t—” Wilder started.

  I leaped down. I wasn’t wearing impact boots, but a few stories didn’t bother my brute body. I landed near the tunneler and havoc-banded his wrists and ankles. Then I covered the hole with havoc armor, bonded to the concrete around it. Fast. I had to find the other ninja dude before he found Dad and Luther.

  I ran around the side of HAL, armoring myself as I went. A high whistle. I dived to the ground, the needles going over my head. A black shape disappeared around the corner. He was hunting me. I knew that. I should have been running away.

  There was a small explosion. I rounded the corner to find the door blown off its hinges. Inside the corridor was empty.

  I looked up. The ninja dude was clinging high to the wall. I shot a fist-sized havoc shield just as he shot needles. They met in the middle. My needles-studded shield crashed to the floor.

  I ducked behind a wall, breathing hard. The dozen poisoned needles had nailed straight through my impenetrable havoc shield. My armor wouldn’t protect me. He was waiting for me around the corner. And now I heard soft footsteps from behind.

  Chapter 51

  I couldn’t let myself get trapped between two bad guys. I leaned out to shoot at the ninja dude again but he was gone. I hurried out, looking. Around the corner. Up on the wall. Nothing.

  Come on, Maisie. If you need to take down an entire hostile ship, you should be able to stop a couple of regular creepos.

  I heard a zap and startled back.

  Around the other side of the wall, the ninja was still standing, his needle gun aimed at where I’d been. He fell to the floor. Dragon came from behind me, a fancy Taser gun in his hand.

  “Those needles can go through walls,” Dragon said.

  Of course they could go through walls if they could pierce my armor, but I hadn’t thought fast enough.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t try to soften me up,” he said, kicking the needle gun away from the unconscious guy. “You put yourself at risk against my express orders, and I intend to stay grumpy with you.”

  “Understood.” I felt pretty grumpy with myself.

  “No other breaches,” Dragon said. “Threat on the north wall contained for now. Keep your precious hide inside.”

  He glared so hard I didn’t go up to the roof for Wilder. I was on my way to check on Luther and Dad when I ran into Wilder in the corridor. It was as dark as outside. He stood alone, hands in his pockets.

  “I just checked on them,” he said. “They were asleep. The bunkers are soundproof.”

  “Thanks.” I looked at my hands. I was holding Dragon’s Taser gun, a little thing that had proved more effective than my whole fireteam self.

  Wilder reached up to rub his hair, forgetting he was wearing a havoc helmet. I went closer to crack the armor and ease it off his head and chest.

  His face was expectant. I took a step back.

  “Growing up, whenever faced with a problem, I would ask myself what my dad would do,” he said, turning the havoc helmet over in his hands. “But these past few months, that’s changed to you. I wish I knew—right now—what you would do.”

  His smile was so sad, but I didn’t know how to sum up the whirling and thumping and knotting inside me. The shouts of command from outside dimmed, the dark numbing everything outside of us. I lifted my hand to my chest, so aware of the five tokens I could practically feel their weight, their heat. Now that they were joined, I couldn’t imagine losing a single one.

  “Does it feel hollow there?” I asked.

  “A little …”

  I let my hand drop. “I understand why you did all you did.” I wouldn’t have done it the way he had, but I understood. “You could have told me days ago.”

  “I tried. But you wouldn’t have believed me anyway if I’d told you before you asked.”

  “Took me a long time to ask, didn’t it?”

  He groaned in agreement.

  I felt suddenly shy and turned away to go into the lab. Finishing the jet pack felt more urgent now than ever.

  My techno-token-inspired brain came up with an idea for a battery that would store electrons for me and have a higher capacity than my swamped shooter
token. It would take a few days to build. After tonight’s attack, I doubted I had the time to spare. If only I wasn’t the lone fireteam member.

  An hour passed as I worked, aware of Wilder beside me, watching, tapping notes on a tablet.

  “What will you wear when you attack?” he asked. “You can withstand the cold of the upper atmosphere, I think, but probably not the decreased pressure.”

  I nodded. “I don’t want to end up like Ruth. I’ll wear a pressure suit.”

  “And havoc armor too? It just seems wrong—risky—to depend on our own technology somehow. I remember thinking that, back when I could think better.”

  “Yeah, I agree.”

  I’d decided not to say what I’d been thinking when I suddenly changed my mind. The idea was too big, too stark and sharp to stay inside me. I whispered it.

  “Wilder, I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this alone.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “A ship, Wilder. A massive, flying, city-sized ship. I couldn’t even … Dragon had to … one guy in black clothes with a stupid needle gun, and I couldn’t—”

  “Maisie,” he said in such a way that I looked up. “I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’m pretty smart.”

  A laugh surprised me in my throat.

  “And I used to be even smarter, you know,” he said. “With my brain plus a thinker token, my superpowered conclusion was, Maisie Danger Brown is the best—the only—person who can do this. You, Maisie, can do this.”

  It was a nice pep talk. But I was the thinker now, and I knew the odds of a one-person fireteam were frighteningly small.

  “Maybe I could take the drug you took to stop your heart and dislodge the tokens,” I said. “And when the tokens leave me, you could take one or two, and Luther too, and give a couple back to me somehow after you revive me so there’d be three fireteam members—”

  His frown was as sad as his smile had been. He didn’t have to say it wouldn’t work. It was a fantasy. All five tokens were stuck together now. When Wilder’s two had come out into me, there’d been no way to separate one from the other.

  “I know,” I said.

  “If you want me to, I’ll take them. I’ll be the fireteam for you. But—” He shook his head. “What if we can’t revive you?”

  “It’s okay, I’ll be the fireteam,” I said. “I just thought—”

  “I know,” he said this time.

  He did know. He was the only one in the world who could.

  In silence I kept working, he kept watching. And I found myself examining his story for holes, weighing his actions one by one, still hesitant to trust him again.

  When at last I thought I could sleep, I fell onto one of the lab cots. Wilder was occupying another. He rolled over. He looked at me. This boy who had been a fairy tale, a figment, now was next to me and almost real again. I wanted to lift my arm. I wanted to touch his hand.

  The idea was too much. I closed my eyes.

  It seemed only moments later I woke up. Howell and the PhDs were stumbling in. No one had slept much after laser cannons and explosions. I sat up, saw Wilder beside me, and couldn’t remember if I was supposed to scowl or smile.

  Wilder must have detected my uncertainty. “I’m pretty sure you revoked my banishment last night.”

  “Did I?”

  “If you can’t remember, then my answer is yes, absolutely. You begged me to stay and swore unfailing, eternal love.”

  Dad and Luther came in, and I blushed, remembering what Luther had said. Promise me you won’t choose him.

  Howell was arguing with the whitecoats about whether or not to abandon HAL.

  “Think GT will give up after last night?” I asked.

  “That little skirmish? He was just testing our defenses.”

  “When will he be back?” I asked.

  Howell and Wilder looked at each other.

  “He needs time to regroup,” he said. “Less than a week, I’d guess.”

  “Then we end this first.” I was surprised by how confident I sounded. My stomach felt like dry ice on water.

  “You have a plan, oh great and terrible thinker?” Wilder asked.

  “I don’t know what you did to this thinker token, but it hasn’t been magically implanting foolproof plans into my head.”

  “Maisie.” Dragon was holding a cell phone. His expression was cautious. “Our team in Florida. They found your mother.”

  Dad sat upright. Luther put his hand on my shoulder, as if to shield me from bad news.

  Dragon held out the phone. I took it with my left hand. It was noticeably shaking so I switched to my cyborg hand.

  “Mom?”

  “Hola, Maisie. ¿Dónde estás?”

  Her voice! I bounced on my toes and smiled at Dad. Dragon set the phone to speaker so everyone could hear. I glanced at Howell, who I knew spoke Spanish as well as a dozen other languages, and she shook her head. I understood she didn’t want me to reveal my location, just to be safe.

  “I’m with Dad. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I am fine,” she said in English now. “I had dinner. I had meat for dinner.”

  What? Was she trying to speak to me in code or something, afraid bad guys were listening?

  “The people who found you are helping me out,” I said. “You can trust them.”

  “Do you still have that token? You’re still strong?”

  “Yes …”

  “Dígame dónde estás. Exactamente.” She was asking again where I was. Why wasn’t she asking about Dad? An idea began seeping through me, cold.

  “Um, what did you have for dinner?” I asked.

  “Meat. It was tender. Very easy to chew.”

  “Nothing like tender meat,” I said slowly. “Did you salt it?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Plenty of salt to bring out the flavor.”

  My cyborg hand was shaking too. I looked at Dad. His frown touched his eyes, wrinkled his forehead. He was confused. Wilder wasn’t. His look confirmed my fear.

  I wished Jacques were alive to express in his ear-singeing way exactly how I felt about the bleepity-bleep aliens who had claimed my mom.

  Chapter 52

  “Are you hurt?” I asked Mom. “Are you sick or injured at all?”

  “No. Where are you, Maisie?”

  “Mom, I’m going to come get you, okay?” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. I didn’t want to say anything that might lead the alien inside her to figure out that I was at HAL.

  “¿Dónde estás, mi hija? Dígame. I’ll come to you.”

  “That’s not safe. Stay with the guys who found you, and I’ll be there soon.”

  I ended the call. Dad was staring at me. I wished the nanites made me immune to sorrow. I didn’t want to cry, so I clenched my jaw and stared hard at the wall, my chin vibrating like a rabbit’s nose.

  “Don’t say it,” Dad begged.

  “I don’t know how to help her, Dad,” I whispered to keep from crying. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Frakking flatscans,” Luther muttered.

  Wilder cursed in Russian.

  “Apparently, while fleeing GT, she’d gone into a quarantined town a couple of hours from where you’d been staying in Florida,” said Dragon. “Our team rescued her from the town, but I told them to stay put with her for now.”

  “She must have gambled that GT’s guys wouldn’t pursue her into the quarantine,” I said, my voice dry. “She didn’t know that the Jumper Virus was an alien infestation.”

  Dragon stepped in front of me, his shoulders straight, his arms at his sides.

  “Tell me what to do, Brown,” he said. “Give me an order.”

  I knew—with a surety that felt like a thousand knives in my stomach—that my mother was no longer controlling her own body. I didn’t know if it was even possible to boot out the alien and reclaim her. The thinker token didn’t just upload facts into my head. I had to actively think something through and test out its truen
ess.

  “So Howell’s guys went into a quarantined town after your mom and came out still ghost-free?” said Luther. “Sounds like the ghostmen are trying to ferret you out. They want to find you through her.”

  I nodded. “Mom’s ghost-parasite has access to her mind. We should assume the ghostmen now know everything she knew, including that her daughter was a member of the fireteam. If we bring her here, their ship can track her and then master-blast us to a crater. They don’t seem to care about frying host bodies. The ghosts inside just rejoin the ship.”

  “Any way to move her without the ship knowing where she’s gone?” Luther asked.

  I shut my eyes and thought, demanding every kilowatt from my nanites.

  “Dragon?”

  He nodded, eager for anything I would say.

  “Tell your guys to sedate her. And capture and sedate as many possessed people from the quarantined town as they can manage—all at once, before any of them have a chance to report back to the ship. Wilder might have some tips on gassing a building. The ghosts inside become dependent on their hosts for their senses. I think when their host bodies are unconscious, the ghosts can’t communicate with the ship or each other. Bring Mom and the other sedated host people here.”

  “I will.” Dragon smiled, his teeth startlingly white. “Brown, I’d take a bullet for you.”

  He pointed at me as he left. Wilder followed him out.

  The lab was quiet for a time. We ate lunch. Dad and I held hands. I bet the last time we’d held hands, my preferred fashion style had been pigtails and pajama pants.

  We talked about Mom. We used present tense verbs. I was glad I’d never told him about the bodies I’d seen piled up, gnawed by stray dogs.

  Wilder returned to report that Dragon’s team was on their way to Florida.

  “We need to be ready by the time they get back,” I said. “All I’m sure of is I need to destroy the ship. Odds are it wasn’t near that diner when I went in, but the ghostmen must have communicated with the ship and it arrived fast enough to blast our helicopter. The only way to identify its location is to see an escaping ghost get sucked into it. So we need to boot a lot of ghosts, one after another, giving me a trail to follow.”