by Shannon Hale
Don’t look down, I thought.
I looked down. Freezing panic shot through me as if new tokens were burrowing through all my limbs. I could still see the shreds of my equipment falling toward Earth, and I seemed to be falling with them, the ground hurtling toward me.
Vertigo. Just vertigo.
I blinked hard and focused on the pink ghosts rising up. As soon as the last one entered, the ship would probably take off, maybe into space. I had to get inside first.
Dangling from my right arm, I shot havoc pipes from my left at the invisible shell of the ship. Something cracked. What had seemed empty air now showed silver-white lines.
Waves of white energy flowed from the ship, rolling over my armor. I could feel heat and a sharp tingle, especially against my eyes where my armor was the thinnest. The ship was attacking me. Perhaps it couldn’t directly master-blast me here, so it sent a localized blast. The wave of energy didn’t breach my havoc armor.
My oxygen tank and mask had been lost, my face was armored, my breath was held. The twenty-minute count had begun.
I formed a pick tool on my left hand, and I tore away chunks of the ship’s hull. I widened the crack into a Maisie-sized gap.
I bet the bleeping token-makers could fly, I thought.
Below me I could see the end of the line of ghostmen, the last little pink one that perhaps had come from Mom. The ship didn’t wait. It moved. Dangling, I whipped around.
I swung up, catching the edge of the hole with my armored toes, pulling myself in feetfirst. Beside me the last ghost entered. I rammed myself forward.
The interior of the ship was solid with the same nougat stuff as the interior of the mini-trooper—white, halfway between soft and stiff, like slightly stale marshmallow. I was curled up in the hole I’d hacked. I pressed the nougat, and it compressed with the shape of my hand. I was inside a giant candy bar. The only way forward was to dig.
I formed a scooper over one of my havoc-lengthened arms and a machete over the other. I started to dig and hack my way through the nougat.
I felt a rush in my belly. The ship was moving up.
I dug and hacked, and dug and hacked some more. I didn’t form ammo to shoot myself a passage. I had to guard my resources.
The brute strength was essential. Normal Maisie would have tired quickly. If I’d had the whole fireteam, I would’ve had Jack Havoc make machetes for Ruthless and sent her through first.
I thought over the design of the mini-trooper suit. Most of it was filled with nougat like this, with controls in the center.
I dug toward where I thought was the center. And hoped it was the right direction. The farther in, the darker it was, the only light coming through the hole I’d made, now far behind at the beginning of the narrow tunnel I was digging.
My throat was dry. My pouches of water were gone with the rest of my gear. At least I had a bellyful of carbon nuggets. I’d swallowed three handfuls of the rough-diamond–like pebbles. My lab groupies had helped me enhance the concentrated carbon with oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Was I ever glad now. I had no air to breathe, no water to drink, no other way to get the elements I needed to make havoc tools and ammo.
I dug. Everything looked the same. The ship was huge, and I had only twenty minutes of air. No, make that eighteen.
Ghosts drifted through the nougat. The solid stuff was a passage to them. It seemed ghostmen could no sooner move through empty space than people could move through walls. One ghost stopped at the edge of my tunnel, trembled, and then dived at me, swooping right through my body. I felt the sting of its presence, like the prickles of a limb falling asleep. It passed through, entering the nougat on the other side of my tunnel. Another dived at me. And another. Stinging chills made my chest hurt. But they couldn’t claim token-protected me. I kept digging.
Poems dodged in and out of my brain like ghosts through the nougat. I clung to Robert Frost, desperate to have a companion here at the end of the world.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Humans were nothing to the ghosts. We were candy wrappers, apple cores, something they would toss aside. You’d think with all those millennia to grow up, the ghosts wouldn’t be so selfish. Maybe it was the brevity of life that forced humans to mature. Life is precious because it’s finite.
I didn’t want to think about the brevity of life anymore.
Between stars—on stars where no human race is …
I kept digging.
I was so deep, no more sunlight reached into my tunnel. Nothing to orient my trek. I blindly hacked at the nougat with my machete, breaking the stiff stuff. With my scooper I pulled the loose nougat apart, then trampled it under my armored feet, compressing it enough to give me space to walk forward. One step at a time, my shoulders hunched. The nougat felt harder than it had before. Maybe my muscles were tiring.
I couldn’t see the pink ghosts now, only feel them gathered around me, dozens or hundreds, swooping, diving at my chest. My token firewall rejected them, but they kept trying. Every time one passed through me, it felt as if someone wriggled a finger inside my backbone to stroke my spine. I shivered uncontrollably.
They can’t scare me, Mr. Frost.
My havoc machete bounced off something. It radiated a soft white light. I pushed back the nougat around it, exposing a glowing fiber, like a vein running through flesh. I followed the fiber, cutting my tunnel alongside. The ghostmen swarms thickened. I swatted uselessly.
Faster, Maisie. Ruth wouldn’t have tired. And Wilder would have known what to do.
There was a hum followed by a crackle, and the fiber lit up lightning bright. I shielded my eyes. The ship vibrated, and then the fiber dulled again.
Had the ship just master-blasted a bus zipping around on monster truck tires? I shook my head. If ever I needed to be robot Maisie, it was now.
Adding teeth to the havoc machete, I sawed through the fiber. It was a pointless gesture. My tinker-and-techno-self concurred that cutting just one such fiber wouldn’t prevent another master-blast. There might be thousands of them. But I also suspected the fiber converged somewhere important, so I followed it deeper.
I dug, clenching my teeth against the burn in my arm muscles and the horrible feeling of all those ghostmen reaching inside me. My held breath, my armored face, the tiny space of the tunnel—everything seemed to press against me, long to squish me, end me.
I don’t think I can do this, I thought.
Don’t be such a frakking wuss, Luther would say.
I didn’t want Luther to think I was a wuss, frakking or otherwise. I kept digging.
The fiber reached a bulbous sac, also glowing. It made me think of a lymph node or a gland nestled inside a body. The nougat didn’t touch it, leaving about a half meter of space around the sac, the only empty space I’d seen inside the ship.
That, I thought.
I had an inkling that the stuff inside would hurt me, so I hacked past it to a safe distance and then shot it with a havoc dart. There was a wet explosion. The goo melted the nougat around it. I waited to feel the ship react. Nothing changed.
Time was definitely getting to its sticky end. I wouldn’t have breath and strength to dig my way to all such sacs. If only there were four other teammates. I pushed myself harder.
The fiber continued past the now-empty sac. I kept digging.
Suddenly my machete hit nothing and I lurched forward. My tunnel met up with a spacious chamber.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces …
I pushed my way inside, spilling clumps of nougat into the chamber. The ghostmen that had been clinging to me couldn’t follow into the hollow center of their ship and stayed stuck in the solid nougat behind me.
The chamber was low but as expansive as several soccer fields. The ceiling was nougat, the floor was gray
and firm, and around the sides dozens of empty mini-trooper suits waited. In the far distant center of the chamber glowed something blue.
It was the size of a hearth fire. It moved like kelp underwater, twinkled like a galaxy. The fiber I’d been following ran along the ceiling and converged with many others above the blue thing. The ceiling arched high right above it, as if the nougat couldn’t get too close. If the techno token was a person, it would have been screaming at me. That was the power source for the craft. That was what I needed to destroy.
In that moment, two thoughts thundered through me:
1. My shooter token might not be able to fire something that far anymore, not with as much force as I guessed it would require.
2. If I broke that, the ship would go down. My jet pack was gone, so I’d go down with the ship.
I’d calculated that survival was a long shot anyway, but I’d still harbored a small, hard diamond of a hope. That now dissolved like the carbon nuggets in my belly.
I removed the havoc machete from my left arm and formed a large havoc dart. If I’d been a true robot, I would have tried the shot without hesitation. Instead, crouching under the low ceiling, I ran forward. I was too conscious of my mortality, I guess. I was aware that this was a moment like Sydney Carton walking to the gallows; like Samson, his hands on the building’s support pillar just before he pushed. Who knew if there was a part of me that never ended, like the ghostmen themselves? I’d climbed the Beanstalk and found space. Maybe there wasn’t anything else to find.
My own desert places, between stars, on stars …
I wasted five precious seconds in order to linger, to savor, to say adiós, la vida.
A suit moved off to my left. I turned and shot a havoc pellet through it, watched the pink ghost inside rip free and flail into the white ceiling. By the time I turned back, I couldn’t see the blue hearth. All the mini-trooper suits were live, blocking the way, and moving toward me.
I shot them rapid-fire, downing one after another, sometimes several in a row as the havoc darts I formed shot clean through suit after suit. I turned, shooting all sides, till a wall of wrecked suits formed around me.
There was one mini-trooper different from the rest. It was holding a weapon. I turned to face it. Turned my chest toward it.
I shot it just as its weapon fired with a burst of white, striking me in the chest. I slammed against the wall, leaving an imprint of my body in its softness.
I looked down. Something was leaking straight through my chest armor. Not blood. It was the tokens, squeezing through, dripping free.
Chapter 55
I would have expected pain, considering how the tokens felt going in. But I watched as the five tokens emerged from my chest, and I felt nothing.
They were gray now. A dead color. They fell on the floor with a wet slap.
I scooped up the tokens in my hand, praying for them to light up, willing them to reenter me. They oozed through my fingers—a shapeless, lifeless goo.
Cold touched my back, and I flung myself away from the wall, where pink ghostmen stuck out limb-shaped parts. My token firewall was gone. Pink bits reached from the ceiling too, and I dropped to my belly, shaking on the firm floor.
I have it in me so much nearer home …
The chamber was alive with clicks and whooshing as the mini-troopers worked a way through the piles of downed suits. I had been the only thing standing between Earth and the aliens, but there was no more fireteam.
I expected to die immediately, but my lungs weren’t convulsing for air yet. Maybe the tokens had left so quickly that most of the nanites remained in my body? Would they keep working without their tokens? I kept shooting havoc pellets at the mini-troopers, but after a time the shots barely pinged their armor. I tried to form a sword and there was nothing left.
I have it in me … The havoc machete I’d removed from my hand lay on the floor. I dived for it and slashed at the swarm of mini-troopers. My brute strength was lasting longer than blue shot and havoc. As I hammered cracks into the suits, their ghosts whisked back into the ceiling. The lifeless suits piled up around me, creating a temporary barrier between me and the onslaught.
I remembered Samson now with desperate respect, tearing down the building over his own head.
Yes, I thought. Yes, I’ll do that. Please let me do that.
But the goal seemed impossible. I crawled forward, stabbing wildly, pushing aside the damaged suits on my way.
I touched the one with the weapon.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces.
The white burst of power the weapon had fired reminded me of when I first held the techno token, how it had lit up to my touch. This weapon had been created to destroy the tokens. And the tokens were made of the same stuff as the aliens.
I grabbed it, sensing the mechanics of the weapon, the remnants of my techno token still live enough to teach me to slide my fingers along the side, to cup my hand around a bulbous part and apply pressure. It fired. Mini-troopers flung away with the force. More were coming in, but for a split second I had a view of the blue thing in the center of the chamber. This time I didn’t hesitate.
I fired.
My white blast struck the blue hearth. The motion of firelike tendrils stopped. They quivered. Then they melted. Sloppy blue sludge poured out, pooling on the hard floor. Where it dripped, holes sputtered through. The air began to crackle. Mini-troopers hung where they were, vibrating.
Victory. It was victory. Wasn’t it? Not the Death Star exploding in spectacular violence perhaps, but I thought I’d done it.
The room was sizzling, hissing, crumbling.
As one, the trembling suits panicked. It was a mad rush for the walls, ghostmen abandoning their suits for the safety of the nougat. The crackling reached right through my havoc armor and raised the hairs on my arms. The hole around the blue sludge lengthened, crumbling my way.
I crawled across the floor and wormed back into the tunnel. The white foam I’d cut had already begun reconnecting. I swiped at strands like thick spiderwebs, scrambling on my knees, my heart pounding. There was nowhere to go. But whatever was left of techno-sense in me warned to get away from the chamber as fast as I could.
A parachute. I need a parachute, I thought.
Forget the parachute, chica. You’re not going to find anything that resembles a parachute on a ghost ship.
A havoc parachute! I thought, before remembering. I could no longer havoc anything.
Even if I got out of the ship, I was going to fall a long way, and I was going to die. It was pointless, but I kept crawling. My skin inside the armor felt tender, my knees ached. I was not the same person who had come this way only minutes ago.
The crackling behind me got louder, lightning striking lightning, electric and angry. A pulse convulsed through the whole ship, knocking me flat. My lungs took a useless breath, somehow anticipating what would happen next before it did.
And what happened was, everything fell.
The ship had lost power. It was falling to Earth. I could hear tearing, the ship a meteor, breaking apart, burning. Falling, me falling with it, my body pressed to the top of the tunnel I’d cut. Falling hard, too hard to breathe even if there had been air. I was conscious, though, so my cells must have still retained some oxygen from my last breath.
My last breath had been so long ago—ten minutes, fifteen. Twenty?
I was nearly blind in my little tunnel, seeing little, feeling nothing but falling. And I wondered if the ship would hit the ground and splatter like a clown’s whipped cream pie, whatever pieces of me that remained smooshed into the white gunk.
I managed to turn my head a few centimeters to one side and saw the tips of ghosts dipping into my tunnel, shivering as they circled and circled through the nougat. The ghosts were falling too, stuck inside the ship, nowhere to go. I had no more token firewall, they could have entered me. But they didn’t bother. That scared me like a knife at the throat. Even they knew I was about to die.<
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Chapter 56
Booming sounds, crackles and cracks, and then suddenly there was no more ship. The floor beneath me broke apart. The hull ruptured into pieces. The nougat crumbled. And gravity claimed us all.
All except the ghosts. Their safe, solid ship was gone. Gravity rejected them. I looked up as I fell and saw thousands of pink shapes falling the other way, going up into the black to be claimed by the vacuum of space. The ghostmen would just keep going, I thought. With no ship, no form, their momentum would send them hurtling through outer space indefinitely. They’d never be able to come back.
I did it, I thought. But I didn’t feel the victory. I could only feel the fall. Every cell of my body seemed to scream with it, every atom spinning faster and faster, trying to escape the fact that I was going to die. And that I was being given a few minutes to know it first.
Horror, horror, cannot compute this, Maisie.
While I was inside it, the ship must have moved up very high. I was still in Earth’s gravity but so close to space I thought I could reach out and touch it. The sun was bright and colorless, and through the scant atmosphere I could see straight to blackness. The stars twinkled down at me, all unsympathetic innocence. Just then, I hated the stars.
I was falling in a cloud of nougat dust and ship pieces. Even at full brute strength, I wouldn’t be able to survive a fall this high. There was almost no air up here to stabilize me, no friction to slow me, and I sped faster and faster the farther I dropped. I was flipping, my arms and legs flailing, trying to swim or fly maybe. I clawed at the nothing, pathetic as a fish on a bank.
And I just kept hurtling down, though the distance was so great, the Earth seemed no closer. The thin layer of armor over my eyes started to crack. I covered my eyes with my hand.
My stomach hurt, seemingly yanked from my body over and over again. My heart was pounding at machine-gun speed, my head pained to cracking, my muscles so tense I wondered if my skin would split open. I vaguely realized my body must be overdosing on adrenaline, higher brain functions shutting down and primal brain functions taking over. All I knew was fear and panic.
