by Holly Hook
“Tess has a good idea,” Matt said. At least he was on my wavelength. “There might still be a way out. We at least need to peek out and see what’s going on.” Matt dared a few steps towards the wreckage, which groaned a little in the wind, but otherwise stayed put. He stepped over the piece that had nearly decapitated me earlier and crouched down, crawling under a twisted beam and a diagonal piece of metal. I watched as his legs vanished.
“I can see,” he said. “So far, I’m not dead. It’s a mess out there.”
“Let me see,” I said, hating that I sounded like a child. I left the old man in the middle of the Solar System room, trying to breathe and calm down, even though I felt terrible about it. I hadn’t caught the guy’s name yet.
At last, he backed out to allow me entry. I crawled in, feeling like a snake, and scraped my head against an overhanging beam. I slid over dirt that had blown in from the impact and found myself gripping it in my hands to push myself forward.
At last, I found myself at an opening about the size of my head. I had to crane my neck back all the way to look out and rest my chin on the dirt. I lay there, sandwiched between wreckage and earth. It was full of stones that made it impossible to move with my hands, and the opening only allowed my face. If it collapsed, I might die. Even Matt and the old man might not get me out.
But I cast that thought away when I surveyed the scene.
The sky stretched overhead, greenish-yellow. The daylight was fading, turning the sky into a murky brown on one horizon. It looked as if half the monorail station had blown away, and the crater that plunged below my hiding spot had remnants of magnet tracks twisted and gathered on the bottom as if someone had mangled an army of stick men. Beyond the crater, red forest stretched out seemingly forever.
The cylinder rested in the middle of the expansive hole, rising from the dirt and stone and wreckage like an alien monolith. Like ours, it had landed at an angle, just enough so the occupants could slide down the side if they needed to, as Matt and I had before. The metal gave off a sickly shine in the dying light, but even so, it had a reddish hue. The thing was still hot, too hot to touch, which trapped the occupants inside. Even so, they must be counting their smoke bombs and getting their nanobots ready to mine and create their walker.
I wondered who was managing all the communication now.
I didn’t know just what was going on, and that was terrifying.
No one gathered around this cylinder, not even Grounders. At least, not yet. It must be radicals, then. I shuddered in the tight space and watched, but the light just continued to fade. Soon, I wouldn’t see anything. Only one weak bulb glowed from a section of the monorail station that hadn’t gotten destroyed. No cars waited. All travel must have shut down in this area, stranding any people still left in Woking.
I crawled back. It would be a few hours before the cylinder cooled enough for anyone to open, occupants included. I still had the electric baton. That was a plus. Matt and I would have to give them a welcoming party.
That was if we could figure out how to make the hole big enough to allow our escape.
The old man had backed away to stand by the fake sun. Matt also stood there like he wasn’t sure what to do. “We need to surprise them,” I said. I faced the old man. “What’s in the maintenance room?”
He seemed to come to his senses a little. “Tools,” he said. “Cleaning supplies. Replacement parts.”
“Is there anything that can dig through some dirt? It’s not hopeless. I just can’t do it with my hands very well.” I wasn’t sure if I could dig out an exit without making stuff collapse on me. If we could find something to stabilize the tunnel, we might be able to get out.
“We have spades,” the old man said. “They use those to dig through the sand in the Mars Exhibit sometimes.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s what we need.”
“But,” the old man said, “I do not have the keys to the maintenance room. The Grounders have those. A Grounder named Wallace Peking now manages the museum, and he is not here right now. He may be in Space Port Nine.”
Matt and I faced each other. “That’s great,” Matt said. “Does he come here often?”
The old man shook his head. I feared the answer already. The dusty desk had already given me one.
“Once in a while,” the old man said. “He may tour the museum to look at the damage. The Grounders use this place to lead people into Space Port Nine. Well, some tour groups. Most people can visit and leave without being deported.” He was starting to lose it again. The old man spoke faster and faster and paced around the inner Solar System. “I can’t stop them. I can only watch as they exact their revenge.”
“Revenge?” I asked.
Matt pulled on my arm. “Let’s see if there are any ways to break into the maintenance room. Getting those spades will help us dig out of here. I can see how that would work, but we’re also going to need something to keep that tunnel from collapsing on us. As soon as we dig, we’re going to destabilize things.”
Wow, Matt and I sure thought alike. It wasn’t like we had an able-minded adult with us. The old man paced in a large circle around the room, muttering to himself. I didn’t want to go anywhere near him, even though I knew his mind had gotten destroyed by the extreme stress. At least I had someone else to talk with, someone who was making some sense. I had the sense I wouldn’t get too many straight answers out of this man. He was slipping.
Matt and I left the old man pacing around the room and searched the manager’s office again, but found nothing more useful than a chair. The gift shop also yielded nothing else. Then we tried hitting the lock area of the maintenance door over and over again with the meteor, but nothing changed. It wasn’t a glass door like the others. It was a door meant to keep people out. There might be dangerous chemicals in there, and ever since a small child had sneaked into a maintenance room and gotten poisoned several years ago, the Great Council had passed laws requiring all rooms with chemicals to stay locked at all times.
They sure liked to look like they were looking out for our welfare.
“Well, that went well,” Matt said. “We’re going to have to dig out with our hands. It’s better than trying nothing.”
“Time’s not on our side,” I said. “We have to start now.”
“Wait,” Matt said. “The chair. We can use that to prop stuff up while we dig. It’ll give us a little bit of support."
“Good idea,” I said.
So we got the chair out of the manager’s office after all. The gift shop didn’t have one, forcing whoever worked there to stand for their entire shift. I thought of going to the Mars theater and ripping out some of those to use as supports, but Matt and I had no tools. Thankfully, the managerial chair had wheels, and we could roll it out into the Solar System room without a problem.
And just to try to make the old man laugh and pull out of his panic, I rode on the chair while Matt pushed.
The old man still paced around the room, muttering. He was in the middle of saying something about invaders when we burst into the room. He stopped and watched us for a few seconds before looking at the floor again and continuing his pace. He would wear a trail on the floor with the way he was going.
“Well, that didn’t work,” I said. “I wished we could get Mr. Former Manager on board with us.”
“He’s going to get us detected,” Matt said. “He might start screaming with the way he’s going. I’m glad you’re not like that, Tess.”
“My parents would have killed me,” I said. “Earthers aren’t allowed to have emotions. Well, we’re not allowed to show them. We have to be tough.” I was glad that Mom and Dad had instilled that in me. Always think, and then react. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. If I hadn’t taken their lessons to heart (well, sort of), then I might be like that man in the chamber, lost in a sea of fear. Fear got you nowhere.
It turned out that getting the office chair into the tunnel wasn’t going to be as easy as Matt and I thought. Fo
r one thing, it was too big, and it got stuck only about a meter in the tunnel when we had about three meters to crawl through the wreckage. Pulling the metal beams and panels up to allow more room also proved impossible with ordinary human strength. It was a job for machines, not living things.
“We can’t do it this way,” I said, dropping one of the panels. It settled with a creak. “We should keep the chair here as a support, but we need tools to get through this.”
“So you’re saying we have to head towards Space Port Nine,” Matt said.
“What choice do we have?”
“Hey. If we’re lucky, we’ll just get deported again. If not, they’ll kill us. The Grounders might not have a concept of revenge, but even their logic should tell them that we should die after what happened. They know that we’re more than stray stowaways by now.”
“We can also sit here and starve,” I said. “That man out there is going to eat food.”
And yes—he was still pacing. Matt and I were on our own. But maybe he knew some things about Space Port Nine. He had said that hundreds of Grounders had gathered there, but that could have been panic.
“Sir,” I asked, approaching the old man.
He faced me, his eyes wild.
“We have to head into the spaceport,” I said. “What’s the best way? Are there any ways to get there and stay hidden?”
The old guy looked at me as if I had grown tentacles. Then he faced Matt. “They will destroy you,” he said. “They have a plan. I have overheard it. They understand that they cannot send all of us to Mars. Those who remain—it will be terrible.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. It was news to me. Of course, this man had spent more time around Grounders than most.
But the guy turned away, babbling nonsense. He was going off the deep end more and more.
“Some help you are,” I said, trying not to follow him into a panic. “Matt—come on. There might be something.”
The old guy shocked me by turning. “The gas vents!”
“The what?”
“The gas vents!” he shouted. “If they do not turn them on, you might be able to travel through them. There are keys somewhere in the spaceport for opening the maintenance room.”
“Is he kidding?” Matt asked, facing me. He grimaced, making his pollution mask crinkle.
“It might be our only option,” I said, thinking of that white vapor that had filled the Mars Exhibit, the little theater, and the connector hallway to the spaceport. Of course, that gas would have come out of vents designed to look innocent.
They might be vents we could pop off. As long as the Grounders didn’t know we were here, we might get away with it. I hated the thought of crawling through vents that could fill with sleeping gas at any moment, even if we weren’t detected, but we had no other option. Maybe it was possible that we could find an escape through them, and we wouldn’t have to dig through the wreckage.
But before we went, Matt and I raided the snacks from the gift shop. I offered the old man a bag of peanuts, but he had gone back into his world of terror and begun pacing again. The guy would have to stop and eat or drink something soon. I feared that he’d try something violent. Maybe he would mistake us for Grounders eventually, or start hallucinating. The guy wasn’t mentally stable.
And it was sad to think of the fact that he might have once been a level-headed, logical person.
Matt and I finished our small meal, and I felt a little better. I needed all the strength I could get to manage this feat. I led the way since I had gone this way before, and we went through the Exhibit first. In here, things were so disorienting that I couldn’t see the vents at all. Matt and I even went off the walkway and through the exhibits, climbing over one of the model rovers in the process, but the vents here were well hidden. I didn’t want to go through the hallway because that was much closer to the spaceport, but it was looking increasingly like Matt and I would have no choice.
We checked the little theater next. I hadn’t given this place much thought, but in here, a short vent near the floor waited behind all the seats as if it were trying to hide.
“Bingo,” I said.
“But can we fit?” Matt asked. “The vents in the hallway were a lot bigger than this one.”
“We might,” I said. The vent must stand a quarter of a meter high. Of course, the Grounders would want to pump a lot of the sleeping gas into a large space at once to stop any escapees from the spaceports. It made sense to have large vents rather than tiny ones, and it benefited us.
I lay on my stomach, having to twist to get around the seats. I had to lie right under the projector. A Grounder had mentioned that this was the intro film for the trip to Mars. My classmates had sat here, watching whatever it showed right before boarding the ships. Maybe it was propaganda, designed to make Mars look awesome and designed to calm the would-be passengers. The Grounders would want order.
And for some reason, the former manager had been watching it.
I’d think about it later if I survived this. I pulled on the vent, then realized that it was screwed in with ordinary nails.
“Now what?” Matt asked.
I held up one finger. “When you eat natural food, you grow strong fingernails.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “You Earthers.”
“Without us, you wouldn’t have hatched your plan,” I said. I knew Matt was teasing me. Now that we were trapped together, he was opening up again. His new rule about not getting too close was getting broken right and left.
So I went to work on the nails with my fingernail. Two of them loosened right away, but the other two took two broken nails, which made my hands look stupid. But it could be worse. I had never been into the vanity thing like Lin, who kept her nails manicured and painted. Doing this would be a nightmare for her.
Of course, I might never see her again. My heart ached thinking of my friend and whatever might be happening to my parents, so I endured the broken nails and finally threw the final screw down below one of the theater seats.
And then I pulled the vent off the wall.
“You’re more of a man than I am,” Matt said. “I mean that as a compliment.”
“You’ll get your physique back,” I said. “It’ll just be a matter of time, and then you can compete in those bodybuilding contests.”
Matt’s cheeks turned a bit darker. Well, the part of them that I could see above his pollution mask.
“Guys first,” I said, gesturing to the open vent.
Matt grimaced. “Okay. Fair.”
He crawled into the vent, getting on his belly and scooting forward like a snake. I watched as his feet vanished into the opening. Then it was my turn to follow. I had an easier time than Matt did, but my shoulders weren’t as broad, and I was naturally a bit shorter.
Ahead, Matt’s feet vanished into the dark. “This slopes upward,” he said. “We’ll have to put some effort into this. Be quiet. Move slow.”
“I was planning on shouting and making lots of noise,” I said. “I wish that man could have told us the layout of these vents if he practically lives here.” I wondered if being around Grounders had worn away his sanity. I put nothing past them.
Matt was right about the slope. One of his feet kicked me in the shoulder on the way up, but the climb didn't stop our progress. Matt and I climbed for what felt like five minutes. We were getting above wherever the Grounders would be. I hoped that their fear of heights extended to the inside of buildings.
Their fear of turning on the gas switch didn’t. Even if the aliens didn’t detect us, and someone else tried to escape the spaceport, Matt and I could end up gassed. The thought made terror creep into my heart. Of course, the gas didn’t kill. We would only fall asleep for a while until it cleared, but that would take too much time. We might miss our chance to get the keys to the maintenance room in time to catch the radicals before they got another walker all ready to go. I thought of my parents and held my breath, just in case.
But no ga
s came on. We continued to crawl through the tunnel of darkness until at last, a bit of light came through the floor ahead. I could barely see it around Matt, but it made a grid pattern on the ceiling of the vent.
Neither of us spoke. We had to find the Grounder with the keys, or another way out of here. Either would work. Could I go back and get the old man? It was the right thing to do, but he was so crazy that I feared he would give us away.
“We’re in the spaceport,” Matt said. “It’s the hallway.”
I could barely hear him. We crawled forward. The tunnel here was a little higher, enough so I could bend my knees and use them to propel myself forward. He was right. I peered down through a metal cage and into the very same, polished corridor where Winnie had fallen so many weeks ago. The mop robot was busy polishing up the floor. It whirled and bumped into the wall occasionally, looking down at its handiwork instead of blocking people from escaping. From up here, it appeared innocent.
I kept going. Soon, we would get into the real spaceport.
And it didn’t take long, either. Matt stopped once we had crossed over two more vents that looked down into the hallway.
“We’re here.”
He spoke in a hushed voice now, as if he were scared there were Grounders in this tunnel, ready to attack us. My arm hurt with the memory of the one sucking out my blood. I rubbed the tiny scar that the nanobots hadn’t been able to erase.
Matt inched over another vent that looked down on the room below, and I followed. I stopped long enough to peer out into the main room of Space Port Nine.
I bit back some profanity.
The central room of Space Port Nine had filled with Grounders. The old man had been correct. Dozens, maybe hundreds of Task Force employees in blue-gray uniforms and stifling high collars stood around the tower of departure times. Closed metal doors lined the round room, all of them leading to different terminals.
