Escape the Vortex

by Jeanne DuPrau

  “I’m doing my best,” said Chris, which didn’t really answer the question, but Dash didn’t mind. He might not want to hear the answer.

  Chris gave Dash a long, serious look. “Now you know: we both have a secret. We both have to do everything we can to make it to the end of this journey. Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

  “I will,” said Dash. He rapped lightly on the side of the ship. “And you promise to take care of this rotting heap of junk.”

  Down in the Cloud Leopard’s docking bay, the ZRKs were busy with last-minute touch-ups to the transport ship, the Cloud Cat. They buzzed around it in swarms. The cockpit was full of them, hovering over the control panel, testing lights and poking buttons and wiping down the seats. There were ZRKs checking fuel gauges, ZRKs polishing the windshield, ZRKs oiling the landing gear and adjusting the thruster angles and dusting off the roof. The air was loud with their chattering, whizzing sounds.

  A few minutes before launch time, Chris, Dash, and Carly arrived in the engine room.

  “All right,” said Chris. “Let’s get this show on the road.” He turned to the equipment cabinet beside the docking bay door. From it he took out the special body suits Dash and Carly would wear to protect themselves against the extreme cold. They were dark red, to show up against the white of Tundra, and they had helmets that looked like the ones a deep-sea diver would wear. On the back was a pack for tools and supplies, and each suit also held a small oxygen tank with a filter that heated the air they would breathe. “You can’t breathe the air of Tundra,” Chris said. “Don’t even try. It will freeze your lungs.” He clapped his hands a couple of times, loudly. “ZRKs finished?” he called.

  Apparently they were. They all flew off.

  “Okay,” said Chris. “Let’s load up.”

  Dash opened the hatch at the back of the Cloud Cat. Together, he and Carly hoisted in TULIP. Dash had had some doubts about taking her. She carried the element from Meta Prime inside her, and it seemed like a huge risk to bring an element with them. But Chris had insisted. “She’s fearless because she feels no pain,” he said. “She can go places you can’t.” Carly was glad the little robot was coming, so Dash didn’t object.

  They got her settled in the cargo space, next to the Streak, the speedy little snowmobile they’d use to get around on Tundra’s surface.

  “When we get back,” Dash said, “we’re rescuing Piper, right? Whatever it takes.”

  “Right,” said Chris.

  “Even if we have to trick them,” said Carly. “The way they tricked us.”

  “Right again,” said Chris.

  “Even if we have to storm the Light Blade!” cried Gabriel. “With our laser swords and zap guns!” He slashed an imaginary weapon through the air and made zapping noises.

  “I hope zap guns won’t be necessary,” Chris said, laughing a little. “Especially since we don’t have any. Let’s go.”

  Gabriel smiled to himself. It was all just for show; he had other ideas that he wasn’t ready to talk about.

  Dash and Carly got into their protective suits. It took a lot of zipping and buckling and clamping. When they were done, they both looked about twice their usual size.

  “You won’t be able to hear each other in these,” said Chris. “So there’s a two-way radio built in.” He showed them how to turn it on.

  “Alpha One calling Alpha Two,” said Dash. “Come in, Alpha Two.”

  “Hearing you loud and clear, Alpha One,” said Carly.

  They grinned at each other through the thick clear plastic of their helmets.

  “You should be able to communicate with the Omega team too,” Chris said. “Once you encounter them—as I’m sure you will—just flip this switch to change frequencies.”

  Chris opened the Cloud Cat’s door and got into the pilot’s seat. He would fly the Cloud Cat down onto Tundra’s surface, leave Dash and Carly, and return to the ship. Dash and Carly settled into the two seats in back of him. Before Dash flicked the switch that would close the hatch, he turned to wave at Gabriel. “Take care of things back here!”

  “No problem!” Gabriel called. “See you soon!”

  I hope so, thought Dash.

  “Ready for launch,” Chris said. He touched a screen, and the thrusters fired.

  —

  On the Light Blade, Siena was reading in the library. She paused with her finger on the screen to listen when she heard Anna’s voice through the intercom system.

  “Ready for launch to Tundra,” Anna called out. “Ravi and Colin, meet me in the docking bay. Siena and Niko, to the navigation deck. Make it quick!”

  Nine minutes later, Niko and Siena watched as the Clipper swooped down toward Tundra. When it was gone, Niko turned to Siena and said, “Okay, then. Back to work.”

  “Right,” said Siena.

  But neither one of them moved.

  Niko gave Siena a sideways glance. “I’ve been thinking about Piper,” he said.

  “I have too,” Siena admitted.

  “I don’t feel good about seeing her locked up.”

  “Neither do I,” Siena said.

  “Without her, I’d probably be dead. I couldn’t have cured my own sting after Infinity,” Niko said.

  Siena nodded. “I feel worse and worse. And not just about Piper. It’s Colin and Anna and their…leadership. I think we have to do something.”

  “Yes,” said Niko. “We need a plan.”

  —

  As the Cloud Cat sailed through the dense Tundra atmosphere, Dash closed his eyes and breathed deeply and steadily, calming his heart and filling his mind with pictures of power: a soaring bird, its black wings twenty feet wide; a crouching cougar, every muscle ready. He wanted to push aside the uneasy feelings he had about this planet of ice and snow.

  Carly obviously didn’t feel the same. She leaned against the window, looking out with a hungry stare, as if she couldn’t wait to get to Tundra and tackle an ice crawler. That wasn’t quite it, Dash knew; what Carly was eager for was driving the Streak. She’d reached the top skill level on the simulator ages ago and was more than ready for the real thing.

  Behind them, TULIP made small chuckling noises, her way of expressing excitement.

  It took only a short time to shoot through Tundra’s atmosphere and come within sight of its surface.

  “Nearly there,” said Chris. “You’re clear on the coordinates for the cave, right?”

  They both lifted their left hands and checked their MTBs. They’d entered the numbers that would lead them to the cave where, long ago, Chris had hidden what he called the Talons.

  “Yep, got the numbers,” said Dash.

  “And the numbers for ice crawlers?”

  “Got them.” Dash and Carly said it at exactly the same time, which made them turn and smile at each other. Once again: a team on a mission. Dash began to feel better.

  Chris fired the landing jets, and the transport ship slowed and descended. Forgetting his worries, Dash stared out the window at the terrible beauty of this planet. Snow white and ice blue as far as his eyes could see, and all its shapes jagged, pointed, and fierce-looking as wolf teeth. They came down toward the edge of a vast plain and landed, spraying snow in great plumes to either side, just where the flat snow-covered ground began to slant upward, where the foothills of a range of peaks began.

  Chris flicked the switch that opened the ship’s back hatch and lowered the ramp for the snowmobile.

  “Ready for some fresh air?” Dash radioed to Carly.

  “Bring it on,” she radioed back.

  They gave the thumbs-up signal to Chris, and he opened the doors.

  Outside, the wind hit them, icy and powerful. They leaned against it and made their way to the back of the transport ship. Carly climbed the ramp and brought TULIP outside, and then she and Dash took hold of the Streak and slid it down onto the ground. They opened its doors, hoisted in TULIP, and got in themselves.

  Carly tapped here and there on the controls
, and the engine growled and roared into life. She and Dash strapped themselves securely into their seats and then Carly gripped the steering lever and smiled. Because of all her exercises on the simulator, this machine felt utterly familiar. She had no fears about driving it. But when she raised her eyes and looked through the windscreen, she understood that no simulator could have prepared her for this place. It was vast beyond imagining, and not a single thing in its blazing white landscape looked remotely friendly. It definitely did not remind her of ice cream.

  Chris’s voice came to them one last time through their earpieces. “Off you go,” he said. “Remember: be careful, and be quick.”

  Carly pressed lightly on the accelerator, and they glided out onto the surface of Tundra. When she’d driven clear of the Cloud Cat, she stopped, and she and Dash watched as Chris saluted them. Then the transport’s thrusters fired, melting a wide track of snow, and the ship rose into the air, heading back to the Cloud Leopard.

  Three and a half miles to the northeast of where the Cloud Cat had landed, a herd of ice crawlers, nearly a hundred of them, huddled together by the shore of a silvery lake. The herd sensed a change. Something unfamiliar had arrived in their territory. Awareness of it swept among them like a wind, and the crawlers rumbled. Their humped, sluglike gray bodies shuddered. A few of them, as if sniffing the air, lifted their blunt front ends. On the underside were their mouths, long slits that opened and closed and were rimmed with teeth. A few crawlers at the edge of the herd inched forward. Others followed, slowly, in a long disorderly group. What was the new thing that had come? Was it good to eat?

  Carly and Dash sat still for a moment, gazing out at the Tundra landscape. Wind whistled around them and blew spirals of snow into the air. Carly spoke into her transmitter, and Dash heard her voice as if she were speaking right next to his ear. “First on the agenda,” she said. “The cave.”

  “Right,” said Dash. He checked his MTB and read out the coordinates that Chris had provided.

  Carly pressed a button, and the motor roared. The Streak leaned and turned. Dash could see nothing but white, white, and more white as they sped along, until suddenly a strip of black rock would rear up and be gone, or they’d pass a snowdrift shaped by the wind into peaks with blue shadows. Ridges of jagged ice, cliffs that seemed to rise out of nowhere—it was a rugged landscape, where fast travel was perilous.

  And yet Carly kept the racer moving at incredible speed. “I love this!” she cried. She ran the Streak up a slope and over the top, and for a few seconds, they were airborne. “Wheee!”

  When they’d been speeding along for five or six minutes, Dash noticed that they were picking up a heat signal. “Slow down for a minute,” he said. “Something’s out there.”

  Carly braked. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Look at this reading.” He held out his wrist.

  “Maybe an ice crawler?”

  “I don’t think so. This thing is moving faster than any animal would.”

  Carly changed course, and they headed toward the signal. It wasn’t long before they saw a dark dot speeding across the landscape. It could be only one thing.

  “The Light Blade team,” Dash said. “They got here before us.”

  Carly’s voice sounded grim in Dash’s ear. “All right,” she said, “they’re here, but they haven’t found the cave. They’re in the wrong place. We’ll get there before them.”

  She stepped on the accelerator. The engine roared and screamed as Carly swung around a sharp curve.

  Dash’s heart was racing—full of adrenaline. This is awesome, he thought, but the next moment, when he glanced down at the map, a shock ran through him. “Carly, look out! Straight ahead—a crevasse! Slow down!”

  Carly veered sharp right. The brakes squealed, and the racer stopped in a cloud of snow. They turned to look at each other, wide-eyed. Carly moved the Streak forward an inch at a time, until they were right at the edge of the great crack in the ice—sheer walls of deep blue plunged to an invisible bottom.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “We can do it easily,” Carly said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure. I’ve jumped wider ones a hundred times on the simulator. We just have to get up speed. Come on.”

  She turned the Streak and drove it back the way they’d come for half a mile, then turned again in the direction of the crevasse. Dash watched the speedometer—sixty miles per hour, sixty-five, seventy—and then looked through the windshield to see the lip of the yawning crack straight ahead, and suddenly, there was air beneath them, deep blue fathoms of it. But before he knew it, the white ground was below them again, the landing so smooth and soft he hardly felt it.

  Carly grinned and kept going. Dash gave her a quick, happy punch in the arm.

  For a while, they sped across the snow easily, like expert skiers, riding the curves, catching air on the high dunes, never slackening their speed. Dash sat back; his tension drained away.

  They crested a hill, and Dash looked out toward the horizon and saw pale, cloudlike columns rising against the sky, dipping and twirling and bending like mile-high dancers. They moved together, in an unruly crowd, maybe fifty of them, maybe more, sweeping across the snowy land toward a region of low hills.

  “Uh-oh,” said Carly. “Look.” She pointed to the west, where a line of darkness showed above the mountains.

  “A storm,” said Dash. “Do you think we’re headed for it?”

  “I think it’s headed for us,” Carly answered, and immediately, Dash could see that it was. The dark line was rising, covering more and more of the sky.

  “The wind’s picking up,” Carly said. “I can feel it trying to blow us sideways.” She tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

  Snow struck against the windshield, hard, like little pebbles, and the clouds came lower, and then they were inside the blizzard. Wind drove the snow at them in a blinding spiral.

  “I can’t see anything!” Carly wrestled with the steering wheel, trying to steady the Streak against the wind howling around them. “We have to slow down.”

  Dash pressed against the glass, squinting, trying to see through the swirling white. “Looks like a gap in the cliff up ahead,” he said, pointing. “Can we get there?”

  “I don’t know!” Carly’s voice had an edge of fear. “This wind! It’s so strong!”

  The noise was thunderous. A powerful gust struck them from the side, and Dash felt the Streak tipping him toward the ground. “We’re going over!” he shouted.

  Carly fought hard, but when the wind caught their underside, it pushed full force, and the snowmobile leaned and fell, leaving them sitting sideways, strapped into their seats, one above the other. The driver’s side door was now the roof door.

  Carly clicked its lock and pushed upward with all her might. The door sprang open, letting in showers of snow. “Climbing out!” Carly radioed. She undid her seat belt and gripped the edge of the door and hoisted herself through, feeling a moment of gratitude for all those pull-ups STEAM had made her do. Lying across the Streak’s side, she stretched an arm down toward Dash. He grabbed her hand, she pulled, and he made his way up and out.

  What struck him first was not the wind, not the driving snow, but the cold. It seemed to come right through his protective suit and find its way into his bones. He was stunned by it.

  They both were.

  But they had to move. They dropped down to ground level and stood beside the Streak, which lay with its runners facing them. “Grab the top runner,” Dash said. Carly did, and he did too, and they both pulled on it with all their strength. But the Streak, though it ran across snow as lightly as a water spider, was built of heavy stuff, and they couldn’t budge it. They walked around it and tried hoisting it up from the other side. “Look,” said Carly, “this whole part is already frozen into the snow.”

  If they’d had a long board and a rock, they might have made a lever to lift the Streak, but Tundra was treeless. If they
’d had a way to boil water, they might have freed the Streak by melting the ice that held it. But though they had water with them, they had no stove to heat it on. “We could make a fire,” said Dash, but without hope. What fire would survive in this wind?

  They heard some scraping sounds, and in the open hatch of the Streak, a trapezoidal head appeared.

  “TULIP!” cried Carly. “We forgot her!”

  They lifted up TULIP’s heavy little body and set her down on the snow. Her belly glowed orange.

  “Good call, Carly!” shouted Dash.

  Carly smiled. “The cold never bothered me anyway.”

  TULIP was already at work. Heat beamed out from her middle at the ice locking the Streak to the ground, and in a few minutes, the ice was water. Dash and Carly slid their fat-gloved hands underneath, found the ridge at the top of the window, and pulled with all their might. When the ship came free, they backed up to it and pushed with the force of their whole bodies. The Streak groaned, creaked, and at last sat upright on its runners.

  Carly cheered. “Done!” she cried out. “Let’s go!”

  But Dash stood still. A wave of weakness swept over him. His body felt heavy as stone. He couldn’t show Carly he was breaking down, so he leaned against a snowbank and pretended to be tinkering with his wrist tech settings. “Hold on a second,” he said. “I need to make an adjustment here.” His heart was pounding at his ribs—thud, thud, thud—way too fast.

  “What adjustment? What’s wrong?”

  “Just have to get these coordinates…” Breathe, he told himself.

  “Do it while we ride!” yelled Carly. “We have to hurry!”

  But it was several seconds before Dash could make his legs move. By the time he got into the Streak and fastened his straps, Carly was vibrating with impatience. “I don’t understand what took so long,” she said.

  Dash spoke as strongly as he could, which was hard, knowing he was lying. “I had to get the settings right. It’s tough to do it when we’re going a thousand miles an hour.”