As if on cue, Don blew his nose loudly at the table.
“Gross,” Penny muttered with a smile, and now I realized that she sounded stuffy, too.
Don put his tissue down and I noticed that it had a green tinge to it. Okay, gross. But that’s important, I thought to myself. Isn’t it?
Don’t think about that, I thought immediately, and the thought seemed odd, almost like it wasn’t quite my own—
Clare tugged my arm. “Let’s go.”
I shook my head and had a blank feeling, like I’d just been thinking something but I’d forgotten it. “Right. Okay, guys, I’ll be back.”
“Good luck,” Dad said around a bite of food.
Mom sneezed and wiped her nose. “Have fun,” she said.
“Will,” said Judy, “don’t forget your pack.” She pointed and I saw my backpack lying by the doorway.
“Right, thanks.” I picked it up, opened it, and put the circuit board inside. As I did, I saw one of the Jupiter’s first aid kits in there. I looked at Judy. “Did you put that in there hoping I wouldn’t notice?” I asked.
Judy blew her nose. “Put what in there?” she said, getting back to her breakfast. I couldn’t tell if she was being sly or really had no idea.
“Sure,” I said, and I appreciated that she was looking out for me but for once not making a big deal about me being safe, like I was a little kid. Meeting Clare had really changed everything.
Clare wasn’t there—
“Come on,” said Clare and we left the hub and headed down to the cargo bay. I got my helmet and breathing unit on, and we started toward the greenhouse.
“Wait.” I jogged over to the equipment lockers and picked out a coil of safety line and two harnesses.
“What are those for?” Clare asked.
“Oh, um…” I looked at the equipment and for a moment felt blank. Then I remembered: “Just in case we have to cross any new gaps in the sand, or whatever. I almost got washed away yesterday on my way back.”
“Good thinking,” said Clare.
“Thanks,” I said, although as I stuffed the gear into my backpack, a weird sensation passed through my head. Had I really thought about it? It felt more like the idea just popped into my head.
We crossed through the greenhouse and out onto the windswept beach. The suns weren’t up yet, and we both turned on our headlamps as the wind lashed against us, coating our visors with sand and spray. As we stalked away from the Jupiter, I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Clare was right; the erosion had been serious overnight. There were fresh curves in the coastline of our island, and little pothole puddles, and even a few new rocks peeking out here and there.
But those were also partly due to this low tide. I’d never seen it like this. The bluff beside Mom’s office was so far from the waterline that it was hard to believe waves ever crashed against it.
“Your family is pretty cool,” Clare said as we rounded the bluff and started across the Whaleback.
“They’re all right,” I said, but the memories of the night before flashed in my head—the looks they gave me, Dad holding me while Mom stabbed me with that syringe, her eyes wet with tears. They’d been so different just now. Like all that had never happened.…
“I think if my parents had a futuristic, interstellar visitor walk right into their ship,” Clare was saying, “they wouldn’t be nearly as friendly and understanding.”
We hopped our way across the Pools, where the rocks were more exposed than ever.
“Yeah, I guess.” My head felt so foggy, like there were thoughts I couldn’t quite get my brain around. My family hadn’t even been able to see Clare last night—Neither could I, I reminded myself, not on the video. But they’d been so adamant about it, refusing to believe me. So, why had everything been fine this morning? How was it that they could suddenly see her when she came to the ship?
“They didn’t act weird when you first showed up?” I asked.
“Not really,” said Clare. “I mean, it took them a minute to put it all together but then they realized you were telling the truth, and it clicked.”
“That’s good, because they were not cool about it last night—wait.” A thought had occurred to me. “Maybe it’s the rift that caused it.”
Clare paused. “Caused what?”
“You not appearing on the video that Penny made. Maybe there’s some side effect of the rift, like to your molecules or something, that makes it so you don’t appear on recordings.”
“Is that possible? Or am I actually a vampire?” Clare jokingly hissed and bared her teeth at me.
“There are still vampire stories in the future?”
Clare shrugged. “We may have nanotech, but we still have blood to suck. And you have to admit, vampires would love space travel. Very dark and cold!”
I grinned. “But seriously, there could be some sort of disturbance to your wavelengths, I mean, you are traveling across space and time.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Clare’s face fell. “Sometimes I feel like there’s something… incomplete about me. I was feeling it a lot last night. When I went back to the ship to check on my parents, I felt that presence again, like the darkness was going to swallow me up. And then sitting on the rocks, I felt so small compared to everything around me, the ocean, the planet, like I wondered if I was even real.”
“I know that feeling,” I said, thinking about the times I’d been out exploring on my own, especially since I’d lost the Robot. “How’s your family doing?”
“The same. Holding steady in their pods… but I miss them. I hope your idea to fix the circuits works.”
“Me too.” And I reminded myself: That’s what I need to worry about. Everything else is fine now. Except, was it? The shell wasn’t a shell—
“Coming, Will?” Clare had started across the Serpent’s twisting sand body.
“Yeah,” I said, except I stood where I was and cocked my head at her. My neck flared up, and my fingers jumped uselessly to the outside of my suit. “What exactly did they say to you when you showed up?”
“Who, your parents? Well… I ran into your dad outside first. I was going to introduce myself but he was like, Hey, you must be Clare.”
Something’s wrong with you! I remembered him shouting last night, holding me tightly so I couldn’t escape. He hadn’t believed in Clare at all.…
I joined her on the Serpent. My head thudded as I went, like it was blocked up with snot. “He wasn’t surprised?”
Clare shrugged. “He didn’t seem to be.”
“But isn’t that weird?”
“What do you mean? I thought it was nice, like I said. My parents would have been all wary and cautious.”
I stopped. “But that’s just it. I mean, I know that would be annoying, but isn’t that how parents are supposed to act? My sisters, too, especially Judy. Cautious is, like, her middle name.”
“Maybe all they needed was proof, and that was seeing me for themselves.” Clare shrugged again. “I’m just glad they let you go. Before I came to get you, I checked in with Alina, and she said our drifting speed is increasing. We’re getting closer to the red line for escaping the rift.”
We reached the Serpent’s head and started to climb up the rock. I didn’t want to ask any more about Clare meeting my parents, because obviously it had worked out better than I ever could have imagined with them actually letting me go with her, and yet… something about it was still nagging at me, this weird, persistent worry that was making my stomach churn. “I feel like there’s something in my head I can’t quite see,” I admitted. “You know that feeling when there’s something you want to remember, but then you can’t quite find it?”
“Sounds like how I feel when I’m back on my ship,” Clare said, pausing at the top of the Serpent’s head, her face growing serious.
“Right, it’s kind of like that. Almost like there’s a shadow in my head.”
As I climbed up beside her, I unslung my bag and started to get out the safet
y line. “This was the spot where I nearly got washed away yesterday—”
“Not going to be a problem,” said Clare, pointing. Below, the tide had receded so far that there was only a narrow channel between us and the rock that I’d had to jump so far to reach on previous days. Beyond that, in the distance, the triangle rocks looked taller than ever.
Clare climbed down the Serpent’s head and hopped across. While I waited, I put away the safety line, and in the process, I noticed that the medical kit in my pack had a note stuck to it: one of Penny’s little stickies that she used in writing and would never share because apparently they were vintage and she only had a few packs to last her forever. Except this note was in Judy’s handwriting:
Writing this down before I forget… Start this ASAP to beat your cold. Please don’t wait. And give the other ones to us if you need to.
—J
That was weird; why hadn’t she said anything about this back in the hub? It was unlike Judy to miss the chance to give explicit doctor’s orders. And why would I need to give something to them? Wasn’t that Doctor Judy’s job? It didn’t make sense but given that my nostrils felt like they were filled with old glue, I decided to do what she said.
“Come on!” Clare called from the other side of the gap.
“One sec.” I unzipped the medical kit. Stuffed in among the usual supplies were six slim green plastic pods. These things had complicated names, but our family just called them space needles because you clipped them into the port on your sleeve, and then inside your suit, a little syringe system would insert whatever it was into the crook of your arm.
But this was weird. Why would Judy have given me all these, instead of just passing them out to everyone else herself? Hopefully she’d clue me in next time I saw her. I pulled out one and slid it into the port. My suit’s computer spoke in my helmet: “You have added an injection course of… Custom Chelating Vector. Would you like to initiate this course of treatment?”
I tapped the DETAILS button and text appeared: A chelating vector designed to reduce harmful levels of titanium and silicates in the bloodstream. I’d never heard of chelating, but I hadn’t exactly studied medicine like Judy. I tapped the button to initiate and felt the little sting as the internal needle pricked my skin.
“Chelation treatment initiated,” my suit announced.
“Will, let’s go!” Clare had walked ten meters down the long sandbar to our fort.
“Sorry, coming.” I climbed down, hopped across, and jogged to catch up.
We trudged the rest of the way through the whipping wind to the fort. The sand had been gouged out around the triangle rocks overnight, exposing more of their smooth, angled sides. The hollow space in between them was even deeper. From down there, the rocks would rise to nearly twice our height. The more the rocks got exposed, the more uniform they looked, almost like they were copies of one another, but that was probably just more evidence that they had originally been one rock that had split down the center.
I stepped beside Clare and we both looked down into the shadowy space. It now looked too tight for us to both stand down there at the same time.
Clare flinched and made a little sighing sound. Her eyes were closed tightly.
“What’s up?”
“I can’t see it.”
“Your ship?”
“Yeah, it’s—” She shook her head. “It’s like I lost the connection.” She opened her eyes, her gaze darting around. “Maybe I need to be in here. That’s always been where it’s strongest, maybe fewer distractions from the wind or whatever.”
She jumped down into the shadowy space between the rocks, her feet splashing in wet sand. She closed her eyes again, crossing her arms.
“Anything?”
Clare shook her head.
“Is there some way I can help?”
She shifted her position. “No. I have to find it,” she said, her voice tightening with panic. “If I can’t get back, I’m stuck here.” She closed her eyes, but after a second she sighed and moved again—“Ow!” She doubled over and grabbed at her ankle.
“What happened?” I said, crouching on the sand above. “Was it a shell? One of those got me.”
Clare made a pained, hissing sound. “Something snagged my ankle.”
“Is your suit okay?”
She ran her fingers around her boot. “Yeah, it seems to be intact. It poked me hard, though. Feels like it broke the skin inside. Jeez, what did that?” She bent over and dug around at the wet sand floor, along the base of one of the rocks.
“Those little things are sharp—”
“Will…” Clare was examining something in the shadows that I couldn’t see. Her ribs were rising and falling, like she was breathing hard.
“What is it?” I said.
“I don’t know… I…”
“It’s not a shell?”
Clare didn’t answer. She looked up at me with this strange expression that I couldn’t quite read, her eyes wide. “You look.” She climbed out.
“Clare, what?” But she didn’t answer as I climbed down into the space.
I turned on my headlamp and crouched, running my fingers along the base of the rock. I found the sharp protrusion and knew immediately by its smoothness that it wasn’t a shell. I cleared away some sand and could see that it was short and black with sharp, angular edges. I bent farther, pushing more of the sand away. The protrusion was part of the rock, except my fingers were telling me more about it: that it had distinct sides. I bent farther still until my light was straight on it. It was a hexagon shape. It—
“It looks like a bolt,” I said, and even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I heard Judy’s voice in my head. Titanium and silicates… How could there be a bolt on a rock?
My heart started to race. I looked up at this nearest triangle, looming over me, and ran my hand down its face. Those pock marks, the ones that had reminded me of when I’d seen corrosion beneath the Jupiter… “I, um, I don’t think these rocks are actually rock,” I said, and felt a deep tremor inside. What I was saying barely made sense, and I had that feeling again, like there was some big thought in my head, one that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around.…
“Dig down in the sand,” Clare said quietly, hugging herself and looking down at me with this ghostly expression, as if that same feeling was overcoming her.
“Why?” I said. “What do you think this is?”
“Just dig. Please.” She moved around out of sight behind the rock and appeared on the other side. “Here.” She handed me one of the metallic pieces of driftwood. Except seeing it now, I realized that it looked far straighter than I remembered, less like the branch of some tree, and more like a piece of tubing, or piping.…
“Does this look different to you?” I asked, turning it over in my hands. It looked like it had been made, not grown, like it was a part of something.…
“Please, Will.” She motioned to the sand. “It won’t be far.”
My heart was absolutely pounding. “What won’t be far?”
Clare didn’t reply; she was just staring at the sand, her eyes wide.
I started to dig, my fingers trembling. My thoughts felt tight, and one thing kept repeating over and over: Get out of here! Get back to the Jupiter!
But why? This was our fort.… Again, it was like there was a bigger thought I couldn’t quite grasp. Or like you’re not able to grasp—
CLANG! The pipe struck something beneath the sand. I looked up at Clare. She was gazing down, but she might as well have been a light-year away.
I put the pipe aside and dropped to my knees, tossing handfuls of wet sand out of the space. My fingers scraped against something hard and bumpy. I moved more sand and I saw a surface down there: This space, our fort, had a floor.
“I, um, I found the bottom,” I said, but by that point, I didn’t think that’s what it was at all. I pushed more sand aside, and as I saw what I was uncovering, I made wide, frantic sweeps. Then I stood up and just stared
.
The three triangular rocks came together around a flat, circular piece of metal. There was a thin indentation just inside its outer edge, like—
“It’s a hatch,” I said, my voice hoarse, my mouth dry. And there were markings around that indentation, curving on the same arc. “There are symbols.”
“Letters,” said Clare.
“What?”
“Let me look.” Her voice sounded right on the edge of crying. I traded places with her and she knelt and ran her fingers around the circle.
“I think it’s a… a serial number.”
“You can read those?” I said.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she brushed more sand away. “A fleet registration.” Her voice was shaking. “And a name…”
“A name?”
Get out of here! The voice screamed inside.
Clare touched the symbols one more time, like she was making sure. “It says Derelict.” Clare looked up at me, her eyes wide with fear. “Will, this is my ship.”
CHAPTER
Your ship?” I said. “But… your ship is in space, in that nebula at Antares—”
“It’s right here!” Clare shouted, tears springing from her eyes. “This is it. I’ve spent most of my life on this ship. I think I’d know.”
“Okay, but how is that possible?”
Clare stood up, running her fingers over one of the triangle rocks—no, not rocks; the very front tip of a massive spacecraft. “I’m so stupid; it was right here in front of me this whole time. How could I not have seen it?”
“There’s been a lot of that,” I said to myself. “Not seeing things. But—”
“I don’t know how it’s here,” Clare said, shaking her head, like she knew that’s what I was going to ask. “I mean, we must have crashed. Right?” She looked wildly around the ocean world. “We…”
I followed her gaze across the sand and water, trying to wrap my mind around what this could possibly mean. “We would have noticed if you’d crashed here in the last six months. Clare, I mean, your ship is big. To be buried this much, and to have this kind of corrosion…”
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