“Sorry, that’s the effect of the rift,” said Clare. “I’m doing a little better managing it today than yesterday, but it’s still freaky.”
“Yeah, I can see why,” I said.
“Also, it makes my head hurt. Alina, is everyone still asleep?”
“Negative,” said Alina. “Baker is in the hangar, and your parents are in the cockpit. I’m afraid the life support in their suits is quickly approaching critical levels. All three have lost consciousness.”
“Oh no.” Clare turned to a heavy closed door. I could hear her breathing frantically as she reached out and tapped a keypad.
The door swung open, and she jogged out into a tunnel-like hallway. Suddenly, there were sounds around us, none of them good: the groaning and grating of the hull, the hiss and whine of what sounded like escaping steam, the distant warbling of sirens.
Clare’s boots clomped along the metal floor. The walls were rounded beside her, made of heavy curved panels welded together with thick bolts.
“This ship kind of looks like an old Earth submarine,” I said.
“Most ships are a lot more modern and homey-feeling than this,” Clare said. “We have the heaviest shielding you can get. As it turns out, junked ships are not usually hanging out in the safest locations.”
A little screen appeared on the inside of Clare’s helmet, showing a list of contacts. “Mom?” she said. “Dad? Baker?”
We passed a wide, thick window looking out into space. Clare glanced in that direction and for a second I saw a world of wild color: feathering purples and magentas in spiraling clouds, blurring the stars beyond them.
“Is this the nebula?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot I need to show you stuff.” Clare stopped and turned back. She leaned against the window and peered out toward the front of the ship. I could just see the fringes of some wild light, fluctuating and spiking, pure white in the center with chaotic rainbow edges.
“That’s the rift,” said Clare.
“Wow.” It reminded me of the wormholes that the Resolute and the Jupiter had fallen through, except this disturbance was way bigger.
Clare turned and kept running, down one corridor, then the next. Everything was lit in red light, but I noticed wet marks down the sides of the walls here and there, as if fuel lines or something had ruptured, corroding the metal with discolored streaks.
We passed signs and consoles on the walls. Most were dark, though some flashed with the symbols of a language that I couldn’t understand.
She halted as the corridor ended at a wide room: a hangar with a high ceiling and small craft parked here and there. The ships were hexagon-shaped with large metal arms folded at their sides—probably for remote salvage.
Clare tensed and I heard it, too—a voice groaning, in pain. “That’s Baker,” she said, and she bolted out into the hangar—
But immediately froze. She ducked beside one of the small ships, and her gaze flashed worriedly toward the high ceiling.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Wait…,” she whispered. Her view darted around, making me dizzy. “Did you see that?” she said urgently. “That shadow?”
“This place is all shadows.”
“No, the—” her head cocked, and she made a sound like she was wincing. “It’s like a whisper. I think… don’t you hear that?”
“I hear what you hear, but not—”
All of a sudden, she whipped around, peering behind herself and inhaling sharply.
“Clare, what’s going on?” I said.
“There’s something here,” she said. “I think it’s something I can’t see. It’s like a chill on the back of my neck, I—” She turned and peered out across the hangar again, up to the rafters, her breaths short and fast.
“You said something was weird on the ship,” I remembered. “Is this what you meant?”
“Yeah.… Do you feel it? It’s like a presence.”
“Not really.”
Distantly, that moaning voice called out again.
“If that’s your brother, shouldn’t we go check on him?”
Clare nodded, but her eyes were still darting. “Alina, are you picking up anything unusual?”
“Negative, Clare. You are most likely having a reaction to elevated stress levels, and some disorientation from your experience with the quantum rift.”
“You’re saying I’m delusional?” Clare muttered.
“Of course not,” said Alina.
“Whatever.” Clare stood and crossed the hangar between the little salvage ships. As we neared the far wall, she suddenly broke into a sprint. There was a figure sprawled on the floor. An older boy who looked around Penny’s age, wearing a purplish-black suit and helmet like Clare’s. His eyes were closed, and his head was rolling back and forth weakly.
Clare dropped to her knees beside him. “Baker!” She shook his shoulder, but he didn’t respond. “Hey! Wake up!”
There was a tool lying near Baker’s hand. Some sort of wrench. A compartment was open on the wall, and inside I saw a panel of the Antares version of circuitry.
“He’s gone toxic,” Clare said, holding her index finger over a sensor panel on the collar of his helmet. “The air in here has gotten worse way faster than my parents were predicting. I shouldn’t have left.” She checked her own readings. “My suit batteries are working harder as a result, and Baker’s… He doesn’t have much time left.”
There was a long, low creaking sound that rumbled the floor. Everything buckled and the ground shifted, making Clare glance around worriedly.
“Hey,” I said, “can you look into that circuit panel for a second so I can see it?”
“Sure.” Clare leaned on the wall and peered in, illuminating twin lights on either side of her helmet. It was so different than the circuitry on the Jupiter, with a maze of crisscrossing tubes with little packets of light coursing through them. And…
“Can you touch that nearest panel?” I asked.
“Okay.” Clare ran her finger over the tubes and it came away with black resin. “Does this mean something to you?”
“We found something like that on our ship,” I said. “From the power surge, I think.”
“And you guys know a way to stop it?” Clare asked.
“I think so. But I don’t know how your circuits work.”
Clare’s comm screen appeared inside her helmet again. “Mom? Dad?” Still no response, and different little displays swept by until a schematic appeared. It zoomed in, like on a map, until it showed two dots blinking. “They’re in the cockpit. Based on their readings, I think they’re in the same state as him.” Clare’s view returned to Baker, and she patted his shoulder. “We’ll be back soon. Hang in there.”
She stood and ran on, through more tunnel-like corridors, until she reached a ladder leading upward. She’d just stepped up to the first rung when she froze again and looked over her shoulder.
“Is it that same thing?” I asked, though all I could see was the red-lit halls behind us.
Clare shook her head. “I’m just freaking myself out.”
She climbed the ladder and emerged inside a cockpit with four chairs arranged facing a round window. There were two helmeted figures slumped over in the front chairs.
“Guys?” Clare said, and rushed to the nearest one: her mom. Her head was lolled to the side. “Mom,” she whispered. “Mom, it’s me.”
From the side of her helmet view, I could see the quantum rift through the window. It pulsed with white light, a jagged tear across space in front of the ship, its edges seething with rainbow energy. Its light dwarfed the reds and purples of the nebula around us. It looked like it was still hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, and yet, from the way the nebula clouds on either side of Clare’s ship were sliding by, I could tell that we were moving steadily toward it.
I also noticed a red light off to the left, dim by comparison to the rift, but still huge: the giant form of Antares A. I could see solar flares arcin
g off it in great ribbons.
Clare checked her dad. He was in the same condition. She sniffled and said, “Alina, what do I do?”
“The best course of action is to move them to the life support pods in the med lab,” Alina responded. “I will send the stretchers to your location.”
Clare nodded. “Okay.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Isn’t your suit going to run down like theirs?”
Clare’s readings appeared briefly in her visor. They were only there for a moment, so I couldn’t decipher exactly what they said, but there did seem to be status bars, some of which were green, and others that were yellow. “We’ll worry about that once they’re safe.”
There was a humming sound and Clare turned to see a long, thin metal structure rising up through the hatch and into the cockpit. It rotated and hovered level to the ground, and I saw that it was a stretcher. A second one appeared behind it. Clare tapped the side of the stretchers and they moved over to her parents and began to ripple and morph, the metal becoming like liquid. They slid beneath her mom and dad, lifting each of them up and re-forming flat beneath them. Once they were both lying down, thin metal bars slid over their bodies to hold them in place. They hummed over to the ladder, tilted vertical, and slid out of the cockpit.
Clare followed them, retracing her steps through the ship and entering a dark compartment crowded with the shadows of machinery. Her headlamp reflected on glass, and I saw that one wall was lined with four vertical pods, each tall enough to fit a person.
“Will those keep them alive?” I asked.
“Mostly,” said Clare. “They’re designed for emergencies; they put you into a kind of hibernation.”
“What’s that like?”
“I don’t know,” said Clare. “We’ve never had to use them before.”
The stretchers oriented vertically again and slid her parents into the pods. Straps extended from the walls of the pods to secure them in place. A third stretcher hummed into the compartment, carrying Baker and putting him in the pod beside their parents. Once the three family members were secured inside, the clear tops lowered and sealed shut. Mellow amber lights lit inside the rim of each pod, surrounding Clare’s family in a warm glow. Lights began to flash on the control panels on the sides of the pods, showing schematics of their bodies with readings flashing beside them.
“All hibernation systems are online,” Alina announced.
“Okay,” said Clare, exhaling and nodding to herself. “Everyone’s safe.” Her gaze moved to the one remaining empty pod.
“Except for you,” I said.
“I’ll be fine.” She turned. “I still have time. And I have you.”
“How long can you guys be in hibernation?”
“I don’t know,” said Clare. “Alina?”
“The pods are designed to extend lifespan by a factor of five,” she said. “After that, the likelihood of a rescue or salvage is considered statistically improbable.”
“But we can survive longer in the virtual storage, right?” said Clare.
“That is correct,” said Alina. “Virtual storage can be used for the lifespan of the ship’s long-term batteries, which are designed to last up to two-point-two Antares years… or approximately five thousand Earth years.”
“Wow,” I said. “What’s virtual storage?”
“If certain risk parameters are met,” said Alina, “or if a passenger’s biological condition becomes terminal, I can upload a complete virtual copy of their mind as a failsafe.”
“And there’s a simulated world in there, right Alina?” said Clare.
“Correct,” said Alina. “The virtual world inside storage is considered ninety-eight percent lifelike.”
“So, we wouldn’t have to die,” Clare said, looking at her family. “Not really.”
“Not until my batteries run out,” said Alina. “In the meantime, I will do everything possible to ensure your survival.”
“That’s pretty cool,” I said, “having a safety net like that.”
Clare was quiet for a moment. “I should get you back,” she finally said.
“Yeah.” With this view into Clare’s world, it was easy to forget that I still needed to worry about the tides in my own.
Clare took one last look at her family, nodded to herself, and then made her way back through the ship.
“Wait,” I said as we crossed the hangar. “Let’s grab one of those circuit boards. I’ll figure out how to do the same thing I did to ours.” Clare stopped and removed one of the rectangular panels and carried it carefully, keeping her fingers off the networks of glass tubes.
She continued on through the cramped corridors, the ship creaking and groaning ominously all around her, until she reached the engine room, where the vacuum core glowed in that rift light. “Okay, I’m coming back through the rift,” she said.
She closed her eyes and there was that rush and blur of light… and then the bright gray world of my planet. For a moment I saw her view of me, but then the overlay dissolved, the dark layer fading away, and I could see out my own visor again. I was back in the fort, as if I hadn’t just seen a ship from a different space and time.
“Uh-oh,” said Clare, looking down.
The space around our feet had filled up with water nearly to the top of my boots.
I scrambled up and out of the fort. “Oh no.” The tide had already come back in enough that the sandbar leading back to the Serpent’s head was beneath a thin layer of rippling water—and the wind was stronger than usual, making whitecaps everywhere.
“You should go,” said Clare. She climbed out of the fort and handed me the circuit board.
“Yeah,” I said, stowing it carefully in my backpack, “but what about you?”
“My suit doesn’t have to work nearly as hard here as on my ship.” Clare surveyed the area. “How high does the tide rise?”
“About a meter and a half,” I said, and held a hand near the top of my helmet. “Like up to here.”
“I know metrics,” said Clare, rolling her eyes. “Okay…” She surveyed the triangle rocks of our fort. “So, if I sit up there, I should be fine. I’ll just push back to my ship to get some snacks and then wait here until you can come back.”
“But it will be dangerous with these wind gusts.”
“It’s less dangerous than being on my ship. How long until you can get back?”
I checked my tide chart. “There will be another low one tonight, not as extreme as this one, but probably low enough for me to get out here. That’s in about nine hours.”
Clare nodded. “I’ll be bored, but I can download some games and check on my family now and then.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the growing waves. “Maybe you should come with me.”
“If your family is like mine, trying to explain who I am and what’s going on here and why they should let you cross through a rift with me might not go so well.”
“That’s true,” I said with a sigh. It hadn’t exactly gone well the first time. “Okay, then I guess just try to stay dry. I’ll be back tonight. Um…”
“I’ll be careful.”
I managed to smile, despite my worry. “Okay, good.”
I turned to go—
“Will.”
Clare threw her arms around me and hugged me tight. “You’re the bravest kid I’ve ever met. I’m so glad I found you.”
I hugged her back, and my nerves rang with a feeling that was like fear but mixed with something better and yet also worse. The bravest. “So are you,” I said.
She pulled back and we looked at each other, and the wildest thought flashed through my mind like a burning meteor: Was she going to want to kiss? That would have been impossible—of course—I mean we were literally wearing helmets that we couldn’t remove and besides calling me brave didn’t at all mean that she would want to kiss and so—Stop thinking about that! I yelled at myself. Except she was still looking at me, like right at me, in my eyes—You’re looking a
t her eyes, too! I immediately glanced away.
“I’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”
I ran across the submerged sandbar spine. The water was over ankle deep, and I had to peer beneath the little foaming waves to make sure I didn’t stray into deeper water. It took all my balance just to make it back to the rock across from the Serpent’s head.
I climbed up onto the little point that remained above the surface. The chasm of deep water between me and the Serpent’s head was wider than ever, with wind-driven waves sloshing through it. The spot that I usually jumped from and landed on was already submerged. I felt a freezing fear and knew immediately: There was no way I was going to make this jump.
I looked over my shoulder. There was Clare, sitting atop one of the triangle rocks, her legs swinging. She waved to me.
I waved back but slipped on the slick rock as I did. My leg plunged in up to my knee. I scrambled back to the point and surveyed the jump again, but my body was starting to shake, and I was hyperventilating. I activated my Exploration app and measured the jump. Thirty-seven percent success rate. Not good.
And yet with every second that passed, the tide would rush in farther, and it also seemed like the winds were getting stronger. I couldn’t make this. What if I fell in? I studied the side of the Serpent’s head but didn’t see any spots to grab on. Would I have time to swim all the way around to the other side before my suit failed? Would I even be able to fight the current?
I tapped my communicator and opened my intercom. Mom and Dad would kill me, but I was out of options.
Only no one was in range. My communicator scanned… nothing.
My boot slipped again. A wave sloshed over the top of the rock. You have to try. It’s only going to get worse.
I got up on my toes, held my breath, and leaped. I made it across but slammed against the side of the Serpent’s head—too low! I slid down, clawing at the rock, but it was no use, and I plunged into the poisonous water.
CHAPTER
I dunked under, and the world became a blur of purples and blacks. My suit was freaking out, alarms sounding on every panel. Water bubbles sloshed around the outside of my helmet. I kicked and thrust my arms and burst back to the surface, but that didn’t stop the suit warnings. I had maybe a minute at best to get myself up onto dry land—
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