Clare managed to smile. “Let’s try, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, nodding to her.
“Great. Well, until—”
She winked away.
I waited, counting to myself. One… two… three… four…
But I got all the way to thirty and she hadn’t returned.
I stood there for another minute, the wind elbowing me, the sound of slapping waves growing louder. What the heck had just happened? Looking around, I could almost convince myself that it had all been a dream.
But no, that had been real, I was sure of it. I mean, considering everything we had seen since we’d left Earth, I could reasonably say that meeting some sort of transmission of a girl from the future was more likely than me losing my mind, or at least as likely.
Speaking of likely, I glanced back and saw that, uh-oh, the waves were about to cover my route.
I stepped out of the sunken spot beneath the three triangle rocks. “I’ll be back,” I said to the hideout, to Clare, wherever she was. And then I turned and jogged across the long, straight, rapidly disappearing sandbar as fast as I dared, knowing I couldn’t afford a wrong step. By the time I got back to the rock that was across the channel from the Serpent’s head, the waves were lapping at my ankles. Could I make the jump back across?
It turned out that I could.
It turned out I could get all the way back home safely.
And later, it turned out all of that had been the least of my worries.
CHAPTER
This is Will Robinson of the twenty-fourth colonist group, and I have made a major discovery… I think.”
I was back on our island. Everyone except Mom was on board the Jupiter—I knew I’d get no privacy in there—so I was sitting on the sand underneath the ship, leaning against one of the landing struts, the one farthest from the greenhouse and the air lock. I had my video recorder out and had ported it into my communicator so it could pick up my voice without me having to use the speaker on my helmet.
I’d said I think because you know that feeling when something is so strange or different than the rest of your life that you have to remind yourself it actually happened? That was what meeting Clare felt like.
And I had no evidence, except for that little shell in my pocket.
“I have made contact with a future human,” I continued for my recording, “who was somehow projected across space to this location.” I kicked myself for not even trying to take a picture of Clare, although that would have been sort of rude. Hey, girl-from-the-future-who’s-in-a-star-exploding-crisis, smile! But I should have at least run a scan of her or something, even if I’d had to do it secretly.
Maybe I’d get another chance. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to get the earliest start possible the next morning to get back out there.
“Actually, she’s not exactly a human. They call themselves—” I paused my recording because my neck had flared up again, and it felt like it was on fire, the worst it had been. I scratched uselessly at my suit and realized I was kind of breathing hard, too, even though I was just sitting here. I closed my eyes and it settled down, enough that I could get back to my video.
I recounted everything that Clare had told me about her situation. “I should have more to report when I go back tomorrow,” I finished. “Hopefully, she’ll be there.” As I stopped the recording, I felt a little nervous rush. I really did hope Clare would show up again. We had so much more to figure out! There was everything that was happening to her, but then there was also the fact that people from the future might have some ideas about how we could un-strand ourselves from this planet.… But also, it had just been nice to be talking to someone my own age, no matter if she was a projection or not. A fellow young space traveler like me.
At the same time, I knew the first thing I needed to do was tell Mom and Dad, and while I was excited to share my discovery, the thought also caused a nervous wave inside me. Sometimes their reaction to unknown or dangerous stuff was to keep me from it, like how they’d been so apprehensive about the Robot. In fact, sometimes I even felt like if it wasn’t for them, things might have gone differently, and the Robot wouldn’t be gone. And I did not want that to happen with Clare.
I put away my recorder and headed inside. Pulling off my helmet and inhaling the sweet, damp greenhouse air only made the last hour seem even more surreal. My fingers flew to the back of my neck and started scratching furiously. The skin felt bumpy, a little oily, and really hot.
I hung up my helmet and put my breathing pack on its charger. I took the shell I’d found over to the sample sterilizer, a rectangular metal box with a door on the front, sort of like an oven. I placed the shell inside and activated the system. The machine hummed and flashed with ultraviolet light. After a minute, a green light blinked and it shut off, and I removed the shell.
I looked down at my suit, realizing that it was damp and laced with sand. Since I’d been to new and “uncharted” spots, Mom would want me to run it through the ionizing dryer, which would dry it out thoroughly and also sterilize it, but I really wasn’t in the mood to traipse through the ship in just my thermals, which I’d also started outgrowing—Dad had even called the pants “high waters,” which was an old Earth expression—so I decided to change first and then run my suit.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to the clear door of the dryer, over on the far side of the garage.
I headed up the ladder to the main hall. On my way to my compartment, I overheard Dad and Don conferring about something in the direction of the engine room.
“How am I supposed to know?” I heard Dad saying. “Maureen is the expert on that.”
“Yeah,” Don was saying, “but I’ve been expressly forbidden from bringing my unique brand of humor to her office door uninvited. Could you ask her?”
“I’ll see what she thinks,” Dad said.
I stopped by my compartment and exchanged my suit for sweats. I added the new shell to my collection, which was in a neat row across my clothing locker. I looked at my model of the Robot and smiled. “You would have liked her,” I said, thinking of Clare again. The Robot might have been able to help her, too. Once again, I felt full of frustration and loneliness.
I brought my suit back to the ionizer and headed for the hub to get lunch. Penny and Judy were both there, Penny still curled with her notebook on her knees, exactly as I’d left her hours before, her pen scribbling along. Judy was at the round table in the center of the room, flipping through a medical textbook on her reader. She’d been keeping herself busy by retaking her med school courses, even the exams. No surprise, she was getting straight As again. The page she was looking at now had a diagram of some kind of joint.
“Hey,” Penny said to me without looking up.
This got Judy’s attention. “Will, you’re back.”
“Of course he’s back. He’s standing right there,” Penny muttered.
Sometimes you could tell we’d been cooped up together for six months.
Judy frowned at her. “How was your nature walk?” she asked me.
“It wasn’t a nature walk,” I said, immediately feeling a flash of annoyance.
“He’s an intrepid explorer,” Penny said, writing away.
“Shut up,” I said.
“What? I was serious!” said Penny. “You’re out there charting the unknown reaches of”—her face started to crack into a laugh—“the great continent of Moist Sandia.”
“Whatever.” I started out.
“Hold on.” I heard Judy’s chair move and realized that I’d been scratching my neck as I turned.
“Why?” I took another step—
Judy caught my shoulder. “Hey, doctor’s orders.”
“Can’t believe you gave her a chance to say that,” Penny piped up.
Judy ignored her and touched my neck. “Has this been feeling worse?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It has been pretty itchy a couple of times.… Does it look worse?”
/>
“Maybe.” Suddenly, she was going full Judy, pulling a latex glove from her pocket and snapping it on. She held up her communicator and took a photo. “Look.”
She moved her wrist so I could see. Okay, ew. The red area looked kind of bubbly, and there were these white dots here and there. “Are they oozing?” I asked.
“They are, indeed.”
“Ooh, wait!” Penny dropped her notebook and jumped up. “Remember: If it oozes or has weird grossness, I demand to see.”
Judy huffed. “These almost look like stings. Remember the yellow jackets when we were little?”
“You mean those bees?” said Penny.
“They weren’t bees,” said Judy. “There haven’t been bees in the wild since our parents were kids.”
I felt Judy’s breath on my neck. And now a pinching sensation that made me flinch.
“What are you doing?”
“Stay still. I’m looking for stingers.”
“I didn’t get stung by a stupid yellow jacket on this planet!” I said. “It’s the same allergy I’ve had for days now.”
“Maybe,” said Judy, “but that doesn’t mean that whatever is causing this hasn’t…” She trailed off.
Worry flashed through me. “Hasn’t what?”
“I don’t know,” said Judy. “Hold on.” I winced as Judy squeezed an area of my neck skin between her fingers. I felt a light scratch and glanced back to see that she had run a little swab over my neck. It came away with yellowish streaks.
“Oh yeah,” said Penny, grinning but also stepping away from me. “That’s the good stuff.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Judy peered at the yellow streaks. “Pus, most likely. That’s usually less a sign of an allergic reaction and more of an infection. I’ll analyze it.” She produced a little sample bag from the pouch on her belt and put the swab in. “You’re sure you haven’t torn your suit or anything when you’ve been out exploring?”
“I would have known if I’d torn my suit.”
“And you haven’t snared your oxygen tank on anything?”
“No, why?”
“I’m just trying to figure out how you were exposed to something that none of the rest of us seem to have been exposed to, so I’m thinking about how things spread. Has there been anything out of the ordinary on your walks?”
“Um, this whole place is out of the ordinary,” said Penny.
Judy frowned at her. “I’m serious, Will. Anything at all?”
“Maybe…,” I said, my heart skipping a beat.
“Will.” Judy turned me around by my shoulders. “Explain. What did you find?”
“Ooh, did we make a discovery?” Mom walked in, her attention half on a tablet she was tapping.
Don’t tell them! I thought immediately. “Nothing, really.” Except of course I needed to tell them. And I wanted to… didn’t I? Clare’s appearance was a massive discovery that changed everything we thought we knew about our universe, about our own future! Not to mention how her future tech might be helpful. Also, it had crossed my mind that the space-time rift Clare had run into might also be dangerous to us.
“He’s definitely hiding something,” said Penny, glancing at Judy.
“Spill it,” said Judy.
“Yeah, Will. What’s the big secret?” said Mom, her eyes darting from the tablet to me.
“There are secrets?” Now Dad entered, too!
“Will’s keeping something from us,” Penny said immediately.
“I’m not—shut up!” I threw up my hands. “Would you give me a chance to talk?”
They all closed their mouths, barely hiding grins.
“Okay, so, I found a new spot farther from here, and I sort of had an encounter.”
“An encounter?” said Mom, her face getting serious.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Penny asked.
“I kinda met someone,” I said nervously. “I mean, not really someone, but, yeah. It was a girl from another spaceship.”
“Another Jupiter?” Judy nearly jumped.
“Where are they?” said Dad.
“No, not a Jupiter, not even close! Just listen: She’s actually from another star system, I mean, she’s from the future, technically.…”
“Was she human?” Penny asked, her face suddenly pale. “Or more like a black-cloaked goggle-wearing time traveler?”
“Huh?” said Dad, looking at her quizzically.
“What are you talking about?” Judy asked, with a similar look.
“Nothing,” Penny said quickly. She’d been referring to the beings we had run into on our last planet, through the time portal in the cave when Penny had stolen the candy. But because of how the Robot had fixed things afterward, only Penny and I remembered any of that.
“This was a girl,” I continued, “like my age. She’s human, except she’s from the future. But she wasn’t all here. She was more like a projection, caused by some sort of space-time rift. A quantum disturbance.”
I caught Mom and Dad exchanging a look.
“Okay…,” Judy said. “Did this space-time-projection-rift-girl-person have a name?”
“Clare.”
“Clare.” Judy reached for my forehead. “Do you feel feverish?”
“No.”
“What about your pulse?” She took my wrist. “I should have checked that.”
“Stop, my pulse is fine. But—”
“You’re saying this happened out at the rocks,” said Mom, “while you were exploring.” She’d crossed her arms. “Were you feeling feverish out there?”
“No—I mean, yeah, a little, but that doesn’t matter. I didn’t hallucinate her.”
“Will,” Judy said, and her tone got soft, like a gentle doctor’s voice about to tell me my condition was terminal. She sounded exactly like Mom. “I think we understand what Clare is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means it’s okay, we get it,” said Penny.
“Get what?”
Judy made a very Mom-like face, the one when she was about to try to “break it to you.” “It’s perfectly natural for you to invent an imaginary friend considering that you lost—”
“What? She’s not imaginary!” I shouted. “Why would you say that?”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” said Judy, raising her hands.
Penny looked away. “It just kind of sounds like an imaginary friend is all—”
“Whatever, fine!” I turned toward the doorway.
“Hold on, Will,” said Dad. He eyed Penny and Judy. “Guys, settle down.”
“Will,” said Mom, “I think the girls were just trying to empathize, not diminish whatever you saw out there.”
“We all know you’ve been going through some hard feelings lately,” Dad added.
“This isn’t about the Robot!” I shouted. “If you guys aren’t going to listen—I didn’t even want to tell you, anyway.”
“No, it’s always good to tell us,” said Dad.
“We want to know,” said Mom. “And if you encountered something out of the ordinary on this planet, we need to know. I just think what you’re describing sounds pretty…” Her mouth scrunched.
“What?” I asked.
“Unlikely, that’s all. Not impossible, but…”
“You know what? You’re right,” I said suddenly. “It does sound ridiculous.” I rubbed my head. “I think I just need to lie down for a minute.”
“And put on another antihistamine patch,” said Judy.
“Right, and that.”
“Okay,” said Dad, sounding confused. “But this thing you saw…”
I could tell now that I needed to show them some kind of proof about Clare. Otherwise they weren’t going to believe me, and if I kept pushing it, they might not even let me go back out there tomorrow. “I don’t even know if I saw anything,” I said. “You guys might be right. I’ve been feeling a lot lately. And this rash is making me irrational. And we’re lost on this p
lanet.”
Mom stepped over and hugged me. “It’s okay, honey. It’s a hard time.”
“For sure,” Penny echoed.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I pulled away from Mom. “I’ll be in my compartment.”
“I’ll check on you in a little bit,” said Mom.
“Okay.” I turned, leaving them all there, and walked down the corridor to my compartment, where I shut the door and threw myself down on my bunk. “Imaginary friend,” I muttered to myself. That sounded like such little-kid stuff!
I lay there staring at the ceiling, my fists balled in frustration, and then my eyes returned to my Robot model. “You would have believed me,” I said. “You wouldn’t have needed any evidence.” But then I realized that I was basically doing the same thing they’d just accused me of—talking to someone who wasn’t there—and I punched my mattress.
I got a new antihistamine patch out of my med kit, put it on my wrist, and closed my eyes. I took deep breaths and tried to picture our old planet, the Robot and me tromping through the woods, climbing the rocks, playing tic-tac-toe. I wish you were here right now.
The itching started to subside. As I calmed down, I thought about Clare. What kind of thing could she and her family have run into that would make her appear across the galaxy? It had to be some sort of wormhole, didn’t it? Sort of like the portal technology that the beings on our last planet had. It still seemed possible that maybe they had something to do with this—
My thoughts got cut off when the ship’s emergency lights, the only ones we regularly used, blinked off, then back on. And then all the lights in my room flashed on, including the overhead ones that we hadn’t used since we’d arrived. I squinted, throwing a hand over my eyes. Those lights shouldn’t be coming on—
And now an alarm sounded.
“Warning!” the Jupiter’s emergency computer announced. “Life support levels critical! Prepare for immediate evacuation!”
Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge Page 4
