Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  And then, before we’d had a chance to adapt to our new surroundings, four more of the kids flew in carrying a large red funnel they’d cut from the forest, which they dropped over all three of us like a glass over a spider, and we were trapped and helpless.

  The inside of the funnel was humid, and it trapped the smell of the dump in there with us. At first the darkness seemed total. But gradually our eyes adjusted, and I realized a little light did filter through the funnel’s glossy flanks; I could see the others, silhouetted in a bloodred glow. But for a long time, no one spoke.

  “We could probably push this thing over,” I said eventually.

  “And do what?” said Josephine listlessly. “They outnumber us. We can’t even move our arms.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just, you know. Brainstorming.”

  But the brainstorming session didn’t get any further.

  “It’s kind of up to them,” said Carl dully. “What happens next. Sometimes you just can’t do anything.”

  And it was true. I’d always been able to at least keep going, before, but right now we couldn’t even do that.

  Josephine whispered, “I keep messing everything up.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t mean to. I didn’t use to. I used to get things right. But now . . . first the exams and then everything with the—with the book, and with Dad, and now this. I didn’t even know about oxygen toxicity.”

  “Josephine,” I said, alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

  “We should have kept walking, the first night. Carl was right. We shouldn’t have slept in the other city.”

  “We’d still have ended up here,” said Carl.

  “But we’d have more time,” said Josephine. “I should have . . . Like you said, I shouldn’t have brought us down here. I mean, I couldn’t just leave you out there, I had to do something. But maybe I could have got us back onto the ship. The hull doors were shut, but maybe there was another way. Maybe we could have got to the Helen. For months, I’ve made one mistake after another.”

  “Jo,” groaned Carl. “Don’t do this.”

  “What do you mean, for months?” I said.

  Josephine sighed. “It doesn’t really matter now,” she said. “But. You know I was retaking the baccalaureate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to retake things you get right the first time.”

  “Well . . . that just means you had a bad day,” I said, confused. The world of exams felt a very long way away. “That’s all.”

  “I wanted to go to university.”

  “You’re thirteen,” I said.

  “I know that,” said Josephine, with a bleak trace of amusement in her voice. “But I thought I could do it anyway.”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, you probably could. But everyone would be older than you. It’d be lonely.”

  “Oh, well, I can deal with that,” said Josephine blankly.

  “Why did you want to go?” I asked, but Josephine didn’t answer that.

  “Dr. Muldoon thought I could do it too. But she was wrong. When I took the exams, I made all these stupid mistakes. I’ve never done that before. I thought—if I could discover something new on this trip, I’d be sure to get in this time—”

  “Jo, no offense,” said Carl, slumped against the wall of the funnel. “But that’s got nothing to do with why we’re stuck on this stinking planet.”

  “It doesn’t matter about university now, I know,” agreed Josephine. “Except that there’s a pattern of things going badly because I keep . . . thinking I know how to do things when obviously I don’t.”

  “No. Look. I’m sorry I said all that, okay?” Carl sighed. “Can you stop sitting there believing stuff I said when I was in full-on drongo mode? I mean, you want to talk about mistakes, how about being the bloke who thought mouthing off to the guys with the airlock was a good idea?” I couldn’t see his expression, but he nudged me, and I thought he was trying to smile. “Remember. We’re not dead, it’s not raining, and Alice’s foot is only slightly broken.”

  I was glad he was trying. But there was no sign that it was doing Josephine any good. And I wanted to think of something else to say, but it smelled so bad under there, and I was feeling so woozy from not eating. I thought if anyone had a history of doing incredibly stupid things, it was the girl who’d run away to space against parental advice in the first place.

  “It’s the Krakkiluks,” I said. “It’s all the Krakkiluks’ fault.”

  “Ul-nik-prrk-klidikehk!” bellowed a loud Krakkiluk voice, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. And something flew hard at the upturned funnel and knocked it over, and we blinked in the restored sunshine.

  “Kzet pli kleng!” said the Krakkiluk, as the rubbish-dump kids screeched in shock.

  Only it wasn’t a Krakkiluk. It was the Goldfish.

  “Yaeeee!” wailed Lilac, leaping into the air and hurling a lump of broken plastic at the Goldfish, which it dodged.

  “If you kids’d just listen,” said the Goldfish in its normal voice, exasperated.

  “Goldfish,” I whispered. “You . . . you learned Krakkiluk?”

  “Well, some of it, Alice, sure!” said the Goldfish merrily. “Boy, all this new processing power is superuseful! They were speaking and translating it right there in front of me on the ship, and those big bullies had plenty to say about spawn being silent, remember? So that’s what I said to these feisty little guys. And hey! ‘You would be wise to listen,’ the guy with the diamonds said that too. KIHL-YIH TLUL TAKT-TLITOP!” it thundered at the rubbish-dump kids, several of whom decided this was all too much and scampered away.

  “YOOLwa,” retorted Lilac, who was made of sterner stuff, putting one pair of hands on their hips and throwing their wings wide.

  “So . . . can we talk to them in Krakkiluk?” I said doubtfully.

  “Klhel-ol-zlik tlak,” the Goldfish crunched. I didn’t know what it was saying, but Plum and Lilac looked at each other. Then Lilac held up one pair of hands, the fingers close together. “Trrnk-skuk,” they said hesitantly. A bit. I didn’t need the Goldfish’s translation to know they meant they spoke the Krakkiluk language “a bit.”

  “Well, why don’t you guys take a look at this and say what you see,” said the Goldfish, and projected an image of a Krakkiluk—Tlag-li-Glig, from the look of it.

  “Oooh,” breathed Plum. If I’d known the Goldfish was going to do that, I’d have been worried the alien kids would be scared; they’d been understandably freaked out by the Goldfish’s Krakkiluk voice. But they weren’t. They knew the projection wasn’t real. They circled the image cautiously: impressed, but not astonished.

  “Krakkiluk,” said the Goldfish, and left a meaningful pause. “Krakkiluk.”

  “KraKLOO!” said Lilac, understanding, pointing at the image.

  “KraKLOO—in your language, KraKLOO?” repeated Josephine. Lilac stared at her and swiveled their head about. Josephine tried again, this time pitching her voice up on the second syllable as high as she could: “KraKLOO!”

  Lilac burst into a series of deafeningly high-pitched chirps that had to be laughter and somersaulted over backward. “Heewa. KraKLOO!”

  Josephine couldn’t move her hands—she had to point from Carl to me with one foot, then nodded down at her own body. “Humans,” she said.

  “YUUma!” hooted Lilac.

  “Humans,” repeated the Goldfish, sternly, not one to let slapdash pronunciation go.

  Plum tried: “H’yoo. Humans.” Which Lilac once again thought sounded very funny.

  “GOOD JOB, BUDDY,” crowed the Goldfish, delighted. It showered Plum with a cascade of golden stars that nearly caused a riot. Even the kids who had run away in a panic before came fluttering back.

  “Eyma OOOhula!” they chorused, which I was willing to bet meant “Do it again.”

  “Goldfish, tell them you’ll give them sparkles all day long if they untie us,” said Josephine.

&nbs
p; The Goldfish was rather flummoxed, as the Krakkiluks hadn’t said anything like that in front of it. Eventually it pointed a beam of light at each of our bindings and told the kids to “restore us to our proper state.” I’m not sure the kids understood, but we writhed and grimaced and wriggled our hands until they got the message.

  Though that didn’t mean they were sure about it.

  “HIN-NIN aelOONya,” worried Plum.

  “OONyel lal-ne,” volunteered Small Indigo.

  “Whssh!” Lilac scoffed.

  “Oh, come on, we’re not going to hurt you,” said Carl, and then went off in a fit of coughing. Which was worrying, but also quite well timed, because the kids turned and looked at him and their postures softened a little.

  “Ool NYEE bul-lul,” said Plum softly, and fluttering closer, patted Carl on the head.

  Lilac said something throat-mangling to the Goldfish in the Krakkiluk language: “Ul-nik kzet?”

  “Do you know what that means?” I asked.

  “They want to know if you’re kids,” said the Goldfish. “Well. Spawn, you know.”

  “Heewa,” said Josephine. “Heewa means yes in their language, right? KraKLOO,” she continued. She looked pointedly up at the sky.

  “Ahh, KraKLOO!” said Lilac, and mimicked the little sign-language story Carl had performed before.

  “Heewa, heewa!” we said.

  “Pssh,” Lilac decided suddenly, and in a second swooped over to us and bit through our bindings. The feeling of small alien teeth nuzzling against my wrists was very odd, but the Goldfish, obligingly, provided another round of sparkles. “Waaay!” cheered the rubbish-dump kids.

  “Well, I guess we can kind of communicate,” Josephine said.

  “Oh, boy!” said the Goldfish happily. “Kids, you know what this means? You know how we’re going to learn and grow and make new friends?”

  “Oh, no,” said Carl.

  “That’s right. It’s SCHOOLTIME!” whooped the Goldfish, barrel rolling in the air in glee.

  To begin with, the Goldfish didn’t have to do anything. The kids did most of the teaching themselves.

  “Eemala,” volunteered Lilac eagerly, encompassing all the kids in a sweeping gesture. Pointing at us again: “H’yumans.” Then back at the kids, and the city. “Eemala.” And then pointing to their chest: “Uwaelee.”

  “Uwaelee? Your name, Uwaelee?” I said.

  “Heewa AY! Uwaelee,” agreed Lilac, and pointed to Plum. “Naonwai!”

  “HIN-NIN, Uwaelee!” complained Naonwai, who hadn’t agreed to this.

  “Ael-ay, ael-ay,” Uwaelee asked us.

  “Josephine. Alice. Carl,” Josephine answered, guessing that Uwaelee wanted our names in return.

  They’d said “Ael-ay” before while pointing at us, so that probably meant you, I thought.

  “Shosfeen. Ally. Cal,” said Naonwai.

  “EEPla-lae-YEE?” demanded Uwaelee, bouncing into the air and rapping a small fist on the Goldfish’s back.

  “That’s the Goldfish,” I said.

  “GoltFEESH,” exulted Uwaelee. “Humans, Shosfeen, Ally, Cal, Goltfeesh.”

  So, they had all of that, and we had:

  Eemala: fruit-bat people

  heewa: yes

  KraKLOO: Krakkiluk

  ael-ay: you (probably)

  It was a start.

  “Do we have no yet, Goldfish?” asked Josephine.

  We hadn’t. “I know!” I said. I picked up a warped plastic pot from the heap and pushed it into Carl’s hands. “Give that to me,” I said. Carl held it out. “Heewa!” I said, happily taking it from him. “Now do it again.” I handed it back.

  Carl did, and this time I made a great show of refusing to take the pot. Of course the head-shaking didn’t mean anything to the Eemala kids, but they understood when I held up my hands, then crossed them and turned my back.

  “OON,” they said.

  The bad thing about the language was that it took a lot of lung power to get it right. After singing OON somewhere around high C a few times, we got faint and woozy and needed to sit down. But the Goldfish didn’t, and it didn’t forget anything, or need anything to be repeated. At least lessons were voluntary, for once. When some of the rubbish-dump kids started looking anxiously at the heights of the city and drifting off to pick through the litter again, the Goldfish let them go and just kept teaching the ones who were left. And when we got so tired and wobbly we couldn’t think straight, the Goldfish let us crawl to the edge of the dump and fall asleep on a mat of dried lily-pad leaves. I was starting to get used to the smell.

  When I looked up, I saw the Goldfish leading a pack of tiny Eemala children in an aerial dance around the dump, singing.

  “NOOla yaon-wi LA, Ael-ya linoolay NA,

  Ael-YALA leyu EE, OOhoola NEEN-a YEE.”

  It must be nice for it, I thought, to have pupils who could follow it into the air.

  “Did they teach you that song?” Carl asked woozily when the Goldfish jigged close.

  “Not that one! They taught me, oh . . . five others, but can you believe that they didn’t have any songs about math?”

  “You’re teaching the alien kids math,” said Carl. “You’re making up new math songs for aliens.”

  “Well, gosh, Carl, someone has to!” said the Goldfish, its eyes tingeing ominous red. “Do you know they don’t get to go to school up there in the city without one of those things around their necks? Or to go see a doctor? Or pretty much anything? Most of them down here don’t even have parents. Why, if I had my warning and defense unit. . . . Why, I could just say—” It paused, glowing with frustrated feeling: “Heck.”

  Uwaelee and Naonwai came swooping over. “Yey, LEE-laas-yala?” said Uwaelee, flicking a lilac ear so that the strips of colored plastic threaded through it shook.

  “She’s asking if you’re sick,” explained the Goldfish.

  “She?”

  “Sure! And Naonwai there’s a boy. But it looks like little Tweel hasn’t decided yet.”

  Tweel was the one I’d been calling Small Indigo. I didn’t know how “not decided yet” worked among the Eemala, but it didn’t seem the most important thing at present. I thought I could tell that the girls were slightly bigger and had a tufty ridge of fur from the middle of their foreheads to the center of their backs, and the boys had darker fur on their ears and around their eyes. But Tweel didn’t seem to have either of those traits.

  “We’re okay,” I said to Uwaelee.

  “No okay,” said Naonwai unexpectedly. “Ael-ay HEENla.” And he dropped a package of red plastic in front of it. Inside was some of the white crumbly stuff, and brownish sheets of something papery that didn’t look like food but presumably was, and a heap of scarily purple capsules that might be fruit.

  They’d brought us lunch. I could almost have cried from the kindness. Especially as it wasn’t as if they had food to spare; I’d begun to notice how thin they were.

  “Ael-ay NEEla,” I said. Thank you.

  But it could still be poisonous to us.

  “Oh, god, can we at least try it?” moaned Carl.

  We nibbled very, very tentatively at the food. The fruit and the crumbly stuff were so bitter, we hastily put them down, but the papery stuff tasted of almost nothing, and between being so hungry and desperate and wanting to be polite, we ate most of it. It made us feel slightly less hungry and weak, but slightly more sick. So at least that was a change.

  There was a sudden scream of “YALU!” from above.

  A flying car swept down from the city’s heights and powered under the lower arches. “EEena lill naley!” shouted Naonwai at us. He made shooing gestures with one pair of plum-colored hands and pointing warningly at the upper reaches of the city with another.

  “Hide, kids!” said the Goldfish.

  We had to dive into the fallen red funnel to take cover as the kids scattered into the air, shrieking. Lying motionless, watching from the funnel’s mouth, we saw the car surge above the m
ounds of the dump. And for the first time, I saw what Carl had meant about Krakkiluk armor: a tall Eemala male, standing upright in the vehicle, wore panels of some glossy acid-green substance strapped to his body. He didn’t actually look like a Krakkiluk, of course, but the influence was clear. There was another Eemala, this one armored in electric blue patterned with black, crouched beside him, steering the car.

  Acid Green yodeled something and then leaped from the car into the air, reaching long, slender arms for the fleeing kids.

  “They’re, like, cops,” said Carl.

  The kids whirled in the air like autumn leaves on a flurry of wind. Uwaelee, who had almost cleared the edge of the city, doubled back to snatch a mauve toddler from Acid Green’s fingertips. She dragged it down to the surface of the rubbish mound and burrowed right inside it. Acid Green hesitated for a second but evidently decided that following was too disgusting.

  “Being caught must be pretty bad,” Carl said. “Because, ew.”

  “Why are they trying to catch them? The kids weren’t doing anything wrong,” I said.

  Most of the other kids had broken past the outer arches of the city and were making for the shelter of the root forest. Acid Green focused on one straggler in particular, a wine-colored kid of maybe Noel’s size—some distance away, but with one wing that seemed to be injured, so that she flew in short, clumsy bursts, often bouncing awkwardly off the surface of the dump. Naonwai came speeding back to help. He grabbed Wine Red by the scruff of the neck and flew with her, wings pumping desperately.

  “No, no,” I found myself moaning. Because the weight was slowing him down too much, and they were flying over a patch littered with spars of rusted metal and something like broken glass—nowhere soft enough to burrow down.