Untitled 6619

by Penguin Random House

  Both Rig and Jorgen stared at it.

  “I think we’ll notice if the box hyperjumps away,” I said. Which it might have been more likely to do if I hadn’t just fed them. I decided not to bring that up.

  “Good point,” Jorgen said.

  Rig looked nervously at me, and then at Jorgen. “Maybe you should try to make one of them move on purpose. Even if you don’t know any coordinates, could you try to figure out how to communicate with it?”

  “You want me to talk to a slug.” Jorgen stared down at the slugs in the crate.

  “I talk to them,” I said. “You don’t have to make it sound like it’s crazy. It might be easier with one of the ones you can see. That way you can get to know it.”

  Jorgen gave me a look that said he thought maybe I was crazy, but he still leaned over the crate, considering the slugs. The red and black slugs had finished with the mushrooms the fastest, and were now lounging about trilling softly. The way they sang almost sounded like music, though it was lower and deeper than the trills of the yellow and blue ones. The purple ones’ tones were somewhere in between. Their voices all together were calming, in an eerie sort of way.

  “Anyone have a suggestion as to how I should do this?” Jorgen asked.

  “You could start by befriending one,” I said. “Maybe give it a name?”

  “They aren’t my friends,” Jorgen said. “We’re not naming the test subjects.”

  “I already did,” I told him, pointing to one of the slugs. “This one is Gill. And I’m thinking those two”—I pointed to the extra-fat slugs I’d found in the mushroom crate—“should be Happy and Chubs.”

  Rig smiled, and both his cheeks dimpled adorably. He was really cute when he wasn’t snubbing me.

  Focus, FM. “Your turn,” I told Jorgen. “You name one.”

  “Really?” Jorgen said. “This is supposed to help me figure out how to talk to the slugs with my mind?”

  I put a hand on my hip. I understood that he liked to study everything out before he did it, but he was being a baby. “Do you have any better ideas?”

  He groaned, but reached in and picked up one of the purple and orange ones. It gave a shrill squeak.

  “You’re squeezing it too tight,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’m doing any irreparable harm to it.”

  “No. But if you were a little bit more gentle with them, they might like you better.”

  “I don’t care if they like me!” Jorgen said. “I only want to figure out how to use them so we have the tools we need to fight against the Superiority.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Usually I thought Jorgen was a really good commander. A little too stiff, a little too interested in running things by the book, but he cared about the pilots in his flight, and he went out of his way to make sure we were all okay even when it made him personally uncomfortable to do so.

  But Spensa had nicknamed him Jerkface on our first day as cadets, and at this moment I felt the callsign was well deserved.

  “It’s okay,” I said to the slug in his hand, mostly to bother him. “That’s how they treat the rest of us here too.”

  “All right!” Rig said. “So, Jorgen, do you feel anything? Like, that vibration you were talking about earlier?”

  “I don’t know,” Jorgen said. “I mean, I can hear the mass of them…humming, I guess. Singing in my mind.”

  “Can you hum back to it?” I asked.

  Jorgen glared at me, even though it was a perfectly reasonable question.

  I held up my hands. “We’re supposed to be experimenting with them, aren’t we? You could at least try.”

  “Fine, but I’m not naming it.”

  “Fine!” the slug trilled at Jorgen.

  “I think maybe you just did,” I said. “Fine.”

  “Fine!” the slug enthusiastically agreed.

  “Okay, Fine,” Jorgen said. “Be quiet now. I’m going to hum to it.”

  Jorgen squinted at Fine, then closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a moment and then he started to hum, a noise I would have described as off-key if it wasn’t so completely tuneless.

  Kimmalyn appeared in the doorway. “Is he constipated?” she asked. Probably Nedd and Arturo had mentioned to her what we were doing with the slugs, so she’d stopped by to check it out.

  Jorgen’s eyes popped open and he dropped Fine into the crate—a good two feet down. The slug gave a low, grumpy trill. I reached in and scritched its back in apology on Jorgen’s behalf, though Jorgen didn’t seem the least bit apologetic.

  “No,” I told Kimmalyn. “He’s trying to commune with the slugs. Cytonically.”

  “Close the door!” Jorgen said. “We don’t have to announce that to everyone.”

  “Did the humming seem to do anything?” Rig asked.

  “It made me feel stupid,” Jorgen said.

  “It’s like the Saint says,” Kimmalyn added, “ ‘I feel, therefore I am.’ ”

  Jorgen squinted at her, but Kimmalyn just smiled at him innocently.

  Jorgen sighed and looked over at the hyperdrive box. “What about those slugs? Are they still in there?”

  I opened the lid and peered inside. “Yes. Both of them. And they appear to be asleep.” One of them made a soft wheezing sound with its comb that I thought might be a snore.

  Jorgen looked down at the crate. “Maybe this would be easier if there were fewer of them. I can’t focus on this many at once. FM, pull out three of them, one of each color.”

  At least I was more gentle with them than he was. Rig brought me a cardboard box and I gingerly picked up purple Fine, yellow Gill, and one of the red and black slugs who was as yet unnamed.

  “I’m going to hum at them,” Jorgen said. “And you all are going to keep your comments to yourself. That is an order.”

  “Bless your stars,” Kimmalyn said.

  I bit my lips to keep from snickering. Jorgen’s hum sounded like a wounded animal.

  Finally Jorgen sighed. “This isn’t working. Maybe I should have some time alone with them.”

  “I still think you should try treating them nicer,” I told him. “Bond with them.”

  Jorgen rolled his eyes. “I don’t see how that’s going to help.”

  “Spensa has a bond with her slug, right? Maybe that’s how she found out it was a hyperdrive.”

  “We don’t have any idea how Spensa found out Doomslug was a hyperdrive.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” I said. “You’re the one who appointed me slug welfare specialist.”

  Jorgen stared at me. “What?”

  I thought what I’d said was obvious. “Slug welfare specialist. I’m here to take care of the slugs.”

  “FM,” Jorgen said, “you don’t know any more about these slugs than we do.”

  “I do so,” I said. “I was friends with Spensa’s slug.”

  “You were…”

  “Friends,” I repeated. “With Doomslug. You remember her?”

  “Of course I remember her,” Jorgen said. “That thing was supposed to stay in Spensa’s bunk, but it would show up all over the platform. I found it in my cockpit once, and I couldn’t get it to leave! Every time I tried to catch it, the thing kept shrieking ‘Jerkface’ at me. I swear Spensa trained it to do that on purpose.”

  “See?” I said. “Clearly you have no experience handling these animals. But Doomslug and I had a relationship. She used to sit on my arm and purr while I fed her caviar.”

  Jorgen looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “The slugs purr?”

  “I mean, they trill, but it was a purr-like trill—”

  “And you fed her caviar? Where did you even get caviar?”

  “My parents send it to me, okay?” I said. “The bottom line is that without Spensa, I’m the next best
person to help you handle the slugs. And I think if you make them comfortable—”

  “We’re not trying to make them comfortable. We’re trying to develop hyperdrives. Spensa said these things—”

  “They are animals, not things.”

  “—these animals are the key to getting us off Detritus. And in case you didn’t notice, we need to develop them as quickly as possible, because we were just visited by a delver, and it might return at any time to destroy us.”

  “I don’t think it’s coming back,” Rig said.

  We both looked over at him.

  “You said Spensa drove it off, right?” he said. “She’ll have figured out a way to keep it away from us.”

  Yeah, okay. He definitely had a crush on Spensa. Which was fine. It wasn’t like I was trying to date the boy—that wasn’t a pressing concern, what with the Krell on our doorstep—but a conversation would have been nice.

  Jorgen sighed. “Maybe. But even Spensa can’t keep the Superiority away from us forever. These slugs are our most important lead.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So we need to make sure we’re treating them with the respect they deserve.”

  “I simply think,” Jorgen said, “that we shouldn’t let your affection for the slugs get in the way of our progress.”

  “I wasn’t aware you were making progress,” I said.

  “Maybe we would be if we were focusing on the slugs instead of having this conversation,” Jorgen said. “We selected a box of three slugs—”

  “Two slugs,” Rig said.

  Jorgen blinked at him.

  “Technically,” Rig clarified, “there are only two slugs in this box.”

  Jorgen looked into the box, where there were in fact only two taynix—Fine and the red and black one.

  “Clearly the slug welfare specialist isn’t doing her job,” Jorgen said. “You were supposed to get them to stay in the box.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “No,” Rig said. “Fine is still here; it’s the other one.”

  Kimmalyn laughed. Maybe Rig did have a sense of humor after all. But when I grinned at him, his cheeks grew pink, like he’d messed up somehow by joking with me.

  Had someone told him not to talk to me?

  I looked around, but Gill appeared to have hyperjumped out of sight. “All right, I’ll go find him, but—”

  “Hey!” Jorgen said. I looked down to find that the red and black slug had eased its way out of the box and was now carefully sampling Jorgen’s bootlace. He reached down to pick it up, squeezing it too tightly again.

  “Jorgen, you need to be more—”

  “FM,” he said, raising his voice, “I’ve got it—”

  “Got it,” the slug trilled.

  Jorgen looked at the slug with a long-suffering expression.

  And then the slug exploded.

  The slug itself stayed intact and unharmed, but something pushed out of it, like it sent the air itself spinning in all directions.

  Jorgen dropped the slug and jumped back as ribbons of red opened up on his forearms and cheeks and across his nose. Rig startled, and even Kimmalyn looked terrified. The cuts weren’t particularly deep, but there were many of them, like they’d been opened by the soft touch of a dozen razor blades.

  We all stared at Jorgen. The slug crawled placidly across the floor.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I think you should name that one Boomslug,” Kimmalyn said.

  “I think you need to go to the infirmary,” Rig added.

  Jorgen pressed his fingertips to his nose, smearing blood in a streak across his face. “FM, do you think you can get the slug back into the crate?”

  “Sure,” I said. I bent down and let Boomslug inspect my hand before gingerly lifting it into the crate with the others.

  “Good,” Jorgen said. “Meeting adjourned.” And then he strode out of the room with little rivulets of blood still running down his skin.

  Five

  After I put Fine back in the crate and replaced the lid, I followed Jorgen to the infirmary. I had no idea what that slug had done to him—Doomslug had never done anything similar that I was aware of—but Jorgen was stressed out enough before being cut to ribbons. This couldn’t help.

  When I arrived in the doorway, the medtechs were applying tiny bandages to his cuts and questioning him about what happened.

  “It’s classified,” Jorgen told them.

  I supposed that was true—and it meant he didn’t have to explain he’d been cut because he’d startled a slug. I looked through the glass into the room across the way where the alien girl lay asleep on a stretcher. She was humanoid, though her skin was a pale violet color and her hair was an unnatural white, matching the color of the growths that protruded from her cheeks. She looked so strange, with high cheekbones and a wide forehead that were almost human, but also definitely not. The effect was disturbing, even in her sleep.

  “You can tell Command he’ll be fine,” one of the med techs said to me as they left the room. It made sense they thought I was waiting to report back, but Command wasn’t aware there was a problem yet.

  With Jorgen’s face all bandaged, that wasn’t going to last long, and I worried about what it meant for the slugs.

  I turned to look into the room. Jorgen was still sitting on the cot alone. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jorgen said, looking at his reflection in the glass window. “Fantastic.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “Though clearly I should have listened to you about not squeezing the slugs.”

  “I didn’t expect it to hurt you though,” I said. Doomslug had hung around Spensa enough to be startled a time or two, and she’d never exploded. Then again, only the yellow and blue slugs seemed to hyperjump, so maybe only the red and black ones…exploded?

  “I don’t know if that’s all there was to it,” Jorgen said. “I was still trying to focus on that vibration, you know? The one I can definitely not approximate by humming.”

  “That much is clear.”

  Jorgen’s smile grew more genuine, though it pulled a bit at a cut on his lip and he winced. “But I feel it in my mind. It’s hard to pinpoint one of them at a time because the vibration is so soft, but I was trying to get it to…talk to me, I guess. Like you were saying.”

  That sounded incredibly difficult. No wonder he was frustrated. “So you think when you talked to it, you convinced it to explode?”

  “Sometimes I have that effect on people. Just ask Spensa.”

  I laughed, and Jorgen joined me. Despite what people thought of him, Jorgen did have a sense of humor. He was simply too uptight to let it out most of the time.

  “I do think it would help if you built a relationship with them,” I said. “They’re not machine parts. You can’t expect to plug them in and make them work. They’re living creatures.”

  “So says the slug welfare specialist.”

  “That’s right. And speaking of their welfare…” I sighed. “Do you think this will put them at risk? If people think they’re dangerous…”

  Jorgen shook his head. “It won’t matter. If the taynix are really the secret to intergalactic travel, then we have to continue to experiment with them, no matter how dangerous they are. Though I may wear gloves next time. And a face mask.”

  “Maybe Cobb could find you some full-body armor.”

  “That might be nice.”

  “It’s possible only the yellow ones are hyperdrives,” I said. “The different colors might indicate different powers. Doomslug never exploded.”

  Jorgen nodded. “That’s a plausible theory. We have enough of the yellow kind to work with those first. We can worry about the other kinds later.” He looked up at me, fixing his dark eyes on me like he saw right through me. “Why are you so worried about the taynix any
way?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not.”

  “You appointed yourself slug welfare specialist, but you’re going to tell me you don’t care?”

  “You appointed me slug welfare specialist.”

  “FM, I told you to keep them in a crate. That makes you a slug location specialist. You made up the welfare part all on your own.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned against the door frame. “I just think we shouldn’t treat them like they’re machines. If they can get us off this planet before the Superiority succeeds in destroying us, we have to do everything in our power to make that happen. But they’re living creatures. We don’t have to be monsters while we do it, do we?”

  “Of course we don’t.” Jorgen winced. “And if I’d listened to you, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten my face sliced up. Tell me the truth. How bad is it?”

  “The medical people said you’d be fine.”

  “Right, but I look ridiculous.”

  He had little pieces of plastic tape holding his face together, so it was kind of true. “Hey, girls like scars, right?”

  Jorgen closed his eyes.

  Right. There was only one girl whose opinion he cared about, and she wasn’t here to appreciate them.

  Though, now that I thought about it…“I mean, really, if there was ever a girl who was going to appreciate a scar, it’s Spensa, am I right?”

  Jorgen gave me one satisfying look of shock and horror that I’d called him out before he recovered and turned the conversation back on me. “I think we were discussing your sudden obsession with animal rights.”

  “I think we were discussing your face, but if you want to talk about animal rights—”

  Jorgen’s eyes caught on something behind me, and I turned to find one of Cobb’s aides standing in the hallway. “Admiral Cobb needs you in the command center,” she said to Jorgen. “Should I tell him you’re indisposed?”

  Jorgen groaned. “No, tell him I’m coming. He’s going to hear about this eventually.”

  “What do you think it’s about?” I asked. “It’s too early for your report.”