35
“MAX!”
I was assaulted by excited bird kids as soon as I stepped over the threshold. Iggy and Gazzy were sitting on our bunks, and there was so much energy in the air that we could have powered the boat with it.
“Yeah?” I said, trying to calm my jangled nerves.
“Max, this is great!” said Nudge. “This is way better than going to school. Or being on the run. It’s like we have something fun to do, plus we have people protecting us, plus food and beds, all at the same time!”
“The food and beds are a huge plus,” I agreed.
“And we have a real mission,” said Gazzy. “I mean, you’ve been having a mission. But now we’re in on it too. And it’s a good mission!”
“You think?” I looked for a place to sit down and finally chose the tiny chair at the tiny built-in desk as my only option. Total was stretched out on Angel’s bunk, not sleeping, just sighing heavily from time to time.
“Yeah, I think!” said Gazzy.
“It’s pretty cool,” said Iggy. “Despite being cooped up like sardines in this can. It still makes sense. I’d like to do some actual good, instead of just trying to thwart bad all the time.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I jerked a thumb at Total just as Fang joined us. I didn’t look at him and was furious to feel my cheeks heat up again.
Angel patted Total’s small black head. “I think it’s Akila,” she confided.
“Cruelty, thy name is woman!” Total moaned. “Or rather, dog.”
“She won’t talk to him,” Gazzy told me.
“Total, she doesn’t talk,” I pointed out.
“She won’t even talk to me in the universal language,” Total said.
“French,” Angel said knowingly.
“Love hurts,” Fang said, almost to himself.
“Oh, shut up!” I snapped.
Which made five heads swivel toward me. I wanted to spit.
“Let’s talk about something interesting,” I said pointedly. Fang + Brigid = pain. Check. Fang + me = confusion, and also pain and fear. Check. Mission to save the world? Scary, challenging, uncertain, possibly very worthwhile. Check.
Total in love with a Malamute? That I could handle.
“What’s the problem, Total?”
“She won’t give me the time of day,” Total said wearily. “I can’t blame her. Look at her — she’s purebred, classy, important. Tall. I’m . . . a short mutant with no papers. Always on the run, hanging out with hunted criminals —”
“Hey!” I said.
“You’ve stolen three cars,” Total pointed out. “That I know of. Plus breaking and entering, assault —”
“Okay, okay,” I said irritably. “Whatever. Hey, anytime it’s too much for you, pal . . .”
Angel wrapped her arm around his neck.
Total drew himself up proudly. “And leave you on your own? I’m not a traitor! You need me!”
I was about to retort with a scathing “For what?” when Nudge interrupted.
“Total, just be nice to Akila,” she advised. “Don’t grovel. Just be yourself, but extra thoughtful, polite. Act more like a dog, you know, strong and silenter.”
Total seemed to take this in, nodding thoughtfully.
“Now, about the mission,” said Nudge. “I’m all for it! I mean, it’s cold here, which sucks, but I like these people. I say we stay for a while.”
“Me too!” said Gazzy.
They were all waiting for me.
I didn’t want to argue with them about jumping on the global warming bandwagon. What the hey. We had food and beds. “All right,” I said, and they erupted into cheers. “Let’s stay for a while.”
36
“YOU NEED A JACKET,” I told Total the next day. We were on the upper deck, and it was, hey, really cold! The scientists had all sorts of cold-weather gear for us kids, so we were okay. They hadn’t even minded us slicing long slits in the backs.
Total was shivering, watching the endless ocean through the metal railings.
“Akila doesn’t wear a jacket,” he said through chattering teeth.
“Then go below before I have to chip ice off your nose,” I said.
Turning with great dignity, he trotted over to the stairs and jumped down them.
“I can’t get used to a talking dog,” said Melanie, coming up next to me. “Or even flying kids, really.” She gave me a friendly smile, then went back to making notes in a log.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We document weather conditions every day,” she explained. “Air temperature, barometric pressure, water temperature. Wind direction and speed, what the seas are like.” She flipped through the pages in her log to show me month after month of meticulously graphed weather conditions. It was cool that someone was doing this, but it would have made me gonzo by the fourth day.
“You gotta check out their computers,” Nudge said, running up to us. “They are so cool! They can show you what the earth will look like in fifty years, or what would happen if there’s an earthquake. Gazzy just ran a demonstration of what would happen if a tsunami hit Los Angeles!”
“Cool,” I said. “What’re Fang and Iggy doing?”
“Scalping Brian and Brigid at poker,” she said matter-of-factly. Melanie looked up in surprise.
“What about Angel?”
“She’s ahead by about thirty bucks.”
Here’s a freebie: Don’t play poker with a kid who can read minds. Well, they would have to learn sometime.
“How long have you been here?” I asked Melanie out of sheer boredom. I don’t usually bother getting to know people, because (a) I don’t trust any of them, (b) we’re usually leaving soon, and in a hurry, and (c) they’re usually trying to kill us. The only humans I’d ever met and liked were my mom and my half sister, Ella.
“I’ve been part of an Antarctica team for five years,” she said. She put a small plastic container in a clawlike thing, which she lowered over the boat’s side on a rope. “Off and on. We’re privately funded, so every once in a while we run out of money and have to scramble.” She looked at me curiously. “How long have you been on the run? Dr. Martinez warned us we’d have to take extra measures to keep you safe.”
I decided it wouldn’t be a disaster to tell her. “We’ve been on our own for more than two years. On the run for — I don’t know — six months? It feels like forever.”
She nodded sympathetically.
Just then Angel appeared on deck, stuffing a wad of money into her pocket. “Whales,” she said.
37
“HUH?” I SAID.
Angel nodded toward the ocean. “Whales. I wanted to see them.”
Melanie drew up her water sample. “Yes, we’ll probably see some before too long. There are eight different species of whales in this region.”
“We’re gonna see ’em now,” said Angel, moving to the railing.
Smiling, Melanie said, “We’ll definitely see them at some point.”
“No, they’re here,” said Angel, pointing. “They’re curious. They think this boat smells yucky.”
“What?” Melanie said, just as the biggest gol-dang animal I’ve ever seen suddenly burst out of the ocean.
I gasped — it was like a gray-and-black wall of wet skin, almost filling my vision. It was super close, maybe forty feet away, and it got about two-thirds of its body above water before crashing back down in a ginormous belly flop that rocked our boat.
Angel smiled.
“That was a humpback,” said Melanie. “They love to throw themselves out of the water. You think he was curious?”
“She,” Angel said absently, watching the water. “She’s curious. There’s a bunch of them down there.”
Paul Carey came out of the pilothouse. “There’s a pod of humpbacks all around us,” he said. “I just saw them on sonar.”
Angel glanced at him pityingly but didn’t say anything.
“I can’t believe how huge they are. H
ow many of them are there?” I asked Angel.
“Can’t tell,” she said slowly. “They’re all thinking at once. Maybe twenty-five?”
Melanie’s brow wrinkled, and she looked at Paul, who shrugged.
“There are babies,” said Angel. “They want to come closer, but their moms are saying no. Their moms know the boat is unnatural and shouldn’t be here, but they’re mostly curious, not mad or anything.”
Paul looked at Angel. “Do you like making up stories about things you see?” He sounded friendly, not trying to be insulting.
Angel gazed at him seriously. “I’m not making things up. Uh-oh.” She turned quickly, and two seconds later, another whale suddenly breached even closer to us, leaping almost entirely out of the water and then crashing down. It looked so, so fun.
“He was showing off,” Angel told me. “Like a teenager.”
“Are we missing something here?” Melanie asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not just a weird little kid,” Angel told Paul, whose eyes widened. “Well, actually, I guess I am a weird little kid, but not in the way you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking —,” Paul began, but Angel shook her head.
“My file should have told you,” she explained. “I can hear what people are thinking.”
I decided not to mention that often she could also control what people were thinking.
Angel patted her pocket of poker winnings regretfully, as if realizing she wouldn’t be able to pull that again on this crew. “Not just people, but most animals too. I heard the whales thinking and came up to see them.”
Paul and Melanie were at a loss for words.
Get used to it, I thought.
38
IT WAS HARD HAVING to stay on the Wendy K., taking three days to get from Argentina to Antarctica, when we could have flown it in about five hours. We did go for nice, long flights a couple of times a day. The air was cold, but no colder than it was at 25,000 feet, which was well below freezing. We found out that frigid air didn’t bother us as long as we were moving, but standing around on the ship’s deck got pretty uncomfortable.
Total broke down and consented to wear a small down dog coat. Akila had worn it as a puppy. During a record-setting cold spell, when it was, like, eighty below zero.
“Land ahoy!” Gazzy shouted from five hundred feet in the air. He pointed into the distance, where I could see a white island sticking up out of the ocean.
Michael Papa squinted at the horizon. “It should be visible pretty soon,” he said. “The air is so clear here that we get great visibility.”
“It’s visible now,” I told him. “We have really good eyesight. Like hawks.”
He nodded, digesting this, and again I saw the look of almost envy that I’d seen on all these scientists’ faces from time to time. No one had ever been truly envious of our abilities before, and it was a cool feeling. The bird kid version of being a football captain or homecoming queen. Sort of.
“I see gray, like rocks,” I told Michael. “I thought everything was covered in snow.”
“Virtually everything is,” he said. “But along the coasts and some of the outer islands, there are thin strips of bare rock where glaciers have broken off. Also, it’s summer here now, since the seasons are reversed, so things aren’t as icy as they can be.”
“I see red buildings.”
“I don’t see a thing yet,” Michael said regretfully. “But, yes, the buildings are usually bright red or bright lime green, to stand out as much as possible.”
“Like if there’s a blizzard?”
“Uh-huh. Though here blizzards just mean ferocious winds blowing snow and ice around. Hardly any new snow ever falls. Almost never.”
“That’s so weird,” I said.
“What’s weird?” Fang asked, making me jump. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me, as usual. For the past two days I’d been kind of avoiding him. I’d stood back and watched as he and Brigid Dwyer struck up a mutual-admiration society. She didn’t flirt with him, but they hung out together a lot, and every time I saw their heads bent over a computer screen or map, it made my stomach clench. Also my teeth. And my fists.
“That it doesn’t snow here,” I said. “Not a lot of precipitation.”
Fang nodded. “Brigid says the air here is some of the driest on earth.”
“I guess you’ll be glad to get off the boat,” Michael said. “We’ll be staying in the guest quarters at the Lucir station. They get tourists there every year.”
“I didn’t realize we’d be around a bunch of other people,” I said slowly. I’d gotten almost — well, comfortable is a strong word, but somewhat less tense, which is about as good as I ever get — around the scientists on board the Wendy K. I didn’t want to start over with a bunch of strangers. Especially given the explode-o-pizza in Washington.
“There are twelve permanent families who live and work here,” Michael explained. “About forty people in all.”
Fang’s eyes met mine. Time to be back on guard.
39
A Poem
By Max
White is the color of little bunnies with pink noses.
White is the color of fluffy clouds fluffing their way across the sky.
White is the color of soft-serve ice cream in a cone.
White is the color of angels’ wings and Angel’s wings.
White is the color of brand-new ankle socks fresh out of the bag.
White is the color of crisp sheets in schmancy hotels.
White is the color of every last freaking, gol-danged thing you see for endless miles and miles if you happen to be in Antarctica trying to save the world, which now you aren’t so sure you can do because you feel like if you see any more whiteness — Wonder Bread, someone’s underwear, teeth — you will completely and totally lose your ever-lovin’ mind and wind up pushing a grocery cart full of empty cans around New York City, muttering to yourself.
That was my first poem ever.
Okay, so it’s not Shakespeare, but I liked it.
We tied up at the Lucir station’s dock, next to a couple other boats. Awaiting us were a bunch of bright red metal buildings built up on stilts.
“They’re expecting us,” said Sue-Ann, motioning to the first building. “We can go in, meet some people, and they’ll show us to the guest quarters.”
“Okay,” I said, teeth prepared to clench, prebattle adrenaline starting to trickle into my veins.
There was no green: no trees, no shrubs, no grass, no weeds. There were also no sidewalks, no trash, no skyscrapers, no cars. It was completely different from anything we’d ever seen before, and suddenly the phrase “polar opposites” made a lot more sense.
“This is like being on the moon,” Nudge said in an awed voice. “It’s so clean.”
“We’re explorers,” said Gazzy happily. “We might see stuff no one else has ever seen.”
I looked at my flock. Each of them seemed a little nervous and a lot excited. They had a real purpose, beyond just cleaning their rooms or keeping watch or finding food. Even if that real purpose was concocted by scientists to create needless panic in the populace, still. The kids felt as though they could help. Clearly they just wanted to forget that this time three weeks ago we’d been fighting for our lives again. And, I mean, why would any kid want to forget that?
If they really liked being here, really really liked it, would they still come with me when it was time to leave? Because no matter what happened here or how much they felt they were helping, we would still eventually have to leave. We always leave.
This reality check brought to you by Max. You’re welcome.
Fang and Iggy were facing away from the station buildings, in the direction of the endless whitescape. Fang stood out against the ice as if carved out of black marble. He turned and motioned me over with a nod.
“Gosh, lots of . . . white, huh?” I said, bouncing on my heels, already feeling the cold.
“Yeah .
. . ,” Iggy said in a weird voice.
“You’re actually not missing that much, Ig,” I told him. “It’s not like other places, where there’s tons of different stuff to see. Everything here is pretty much white. Lots of sharp white edges.”
Fang touched my hand, and I turned to him. He nodded at Iggy.
“I know,” said Iggy. “I can see it.”
40
OKAY, I’M GOING to float out a theory here, and maybe it’s crap, but I’m thinking that the complete absence of color had something to do with the blind kid suddenly being able to see stuff.
’Cause he really could. I waved my hand in front of his face, and he blinked and pulled away.
“What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.
I let my jaw drop open, looking from him to Fang and back, and then Iggy was smiling huge in a way he hardly ever does, and Fang was grinning in a way he hardly ever does, and I felt like skipping around like a ballerina, which, I promise you, I never, ever do.
“What’s going on?” Gazzy asked, coming over to us.
“Iggy can see,” I said, still unable to believe it.
Excitedly Iggy whirled to see the Gasman, and then stopped dead, frowning. He blinked several times.
“It’s . . . it’s gone,” he said in a hollow voice.
“What?”
“You could see?” Gazzy asked.
Iggy turned around again, his head hanging. He sighed heavily, then stiffened. “No! I can see again! I see the white mountains again!”
So here’s the deal: Iggy could see whiteness. He could see the shapes of the cliffs and glaciers, the occasional gray rocks jutting out from the snow, the horizon line where land met sky. When he turned around, the ocean, the rocky shore, everything, went blank.
“I’m cold,” I said after we’d been standing around looking at Iggy look at stuff for a while. “Let’s go inside.”
Lucir station consisted of about fifteen metal buildings raised up on steel stilts. Some of them were connected, like stepping-stones, going up the nearest hill. A few stood alone. Most of them had snowcats and bobsleds and ice trucks parked underneath.
The Final Warning Page 8
