Dangerous (35 page)

outlined in mustard. I saw no obvious mark of a ghost inside,

but there was a wrongness in her eyes.

“So . . . do I just sit anywhere?” I asked.

She looked at some of the other people, thoughtful for lon-

ger than was comfortable, before directing me to a seat. Away

from the windows. Close to a back door.

I talked myself out of nerves. I believed these were regular

flesh-and-blood people, even if pink alien ghosts might be stuck

inside them, controlling their brains.

Everyone was still chewing and staring. I pointed to a man

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Dangerous

who was munching a hot dog slathered in peanut butter and

said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

Then I noticed a boy of ten or so, the youngest in the place,

though his eyes didn’t look young. He kept them trained on me,

unblinking, as he shoveled spoonfuls of chocolate cake into his

mouth.

No arms, no cake, I thought. And I laughed at that inane

joke for the first time, because suddenly its unfunniness made

sense. Here I was in a ghost town with a little boy who should

be in school or with his parents somewhere, but he was probably

possessed by an alien poltergeist and eating enough cake to kill

a horse, and I was freaking Supergirl and had no idea how to

shake that ghost out of him.“What’s your name?” I asked.

The kid watched me but just kept eating.

“Are you still in there?” I whispered. “The kid part, the hu-

man part. If the ghost comes out, will you be you again?”

He swallowed. He took another bite.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to help you.”

The door behind me opened with a
clank
. A white-plastic

suit of armor in a headless humanoid form was zooming toward

me. It was so fast, I’d only managed to get to my feet when a

limb-part struck my chest, clawing at my skin through my shirt.

But in the fraction of a second before I could bring my arm

down on the limb or kick the plastic robot away from me, it

zapped back on its own. The people looked at me, their wrong

eyes getting wronger.

Someone growled.

The man with the hot dog leaped at me, a steak knife in

his hand. I backhanded him midstride, and he hit a wall.

He wiped his forehead, his hand red with blood. I felt

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Shannon Hale

swoony. Besides their alien stowaways, these were real people

who could get hurt. By me.

I started for the door. The growling intensified and a dozen

of them seized my head, neck, arms, pulling, stabbing at me

with knives and forks. I tried to shake them off before someone

could pull out my already too short hair, but they kept coming,

howling with frustration.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

I stumbled toward the door, pushing them off as gently as

I could, shooting flat havoc pellets with a light touch. Maybe

among them was that old man’s daughter and grandson.

I pushed the last one away and ran out the door and down

the street. Howell had the helicopter blades rotating when

I jumped in, and we took off.

I was breathing hard.

“Don’t fly straight back to HAL,” I said. “If their ship is

watching—”

A bright, silent beam sliced through half our helicopter,

taking off the tail end. We tilted, spun, and fell.

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C h a p t e r 4 5

I grabbed Howell and Wilder and jumped out of the re-

mains of the helicopter, kicking it away from us in mid—air. A

second beam flashed and there wasn’t much of the helicopter

left to hit the ground.

I spun in the air, and my heels clicked together. Had I just

set my impact boots to hop? I clicked again and hoped they

were on impact. We were tearing toward the ground in full belly

flop position. I kicked my legs, struggling to arrive feet first. I hit

the ground on my toes, impact boots taking the fall with a jar-

ring that rattled my teeth. Howell and Wilder grunted.

Keeping an arm around their middles, I ran a few paces

and clicked my heels, switching the boots to hop, and took off

in huge bounds that left my stomach behind and made my pas-

sengers groan. We were easy targets in the open. I made for the

cover of trees and switched hop off.

A white beam chased us, severing tree branches and hiss-

ing through overgrowth. I zigged. I zagged. One beam got close

enough to singe my eyebrows.

Wilder was slipping free. I considered dropping him but

instead threw him over my shoulder. I could feel his belly slam-

ming against me as I ran.

“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” he said, which sort of sounded like

“Ow, ow, ow,” through his gag. Cry baby.

The canopy sizzled and disappeared, fragments of leaves

raining on our heads. I veered a quick left where the trees were

denser. Trees disappeared behind me, random potshots from

Shannon Hale

above wiping out groves in near-silent sputters. I veered left

again, and this time the firing stayed right. A couple of kilome-

ters later I felt safe enough to stop, dumping my cargo on the

forest floor.

Howell’s curly hair was tamed by sweat, limp over her ears.

Her cheek was bright red from knocking against my shoulder.

Wilder’s eyes were wide, his face red and shiny. I could see what

was coming. I released his havoc gag. He leaned over and dry

heaved.

“Bouncy ride?” I said.

I grew a thin havoc blade from one finger and sliced

through the bands on his ankles and wrists. He crawled away,

collapsing in the dirt.

“Well,” said Howell. “Well.” She pushed damp hair out of

her face and stared straight ahead. “Well.”

My stomach growled.

“Wish we could order a pizza,” I said.

From behind the tree, I could hear Wilder groan as if he

couldn’t bear the thought of food.

“Mmm, pizza,” I said louder. “Greasy, cheesy pizza, with

spicy sausage and crispy pepperoni and black olives as big as

beetles.”

“You’re cruel,” he said in a raspy voice.

“I learned from the best.”

I didn’t actually need a pizza. To decrease my meal depen-

dency, I’d designed concentrated carbon pellets. They looked

like rough diamonds, clear as crystals and slightly yellowish. I

swallowed them whole, and my amped-up stomach slowly di-

gested them. But I still needed water. I sucked one of my camel-

backs dry and stood, anxious to keep moving.

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Dangerous

“The diner in town was full of real people who seemed to

be possessed by ghostmen,” I said. “A plastic robot, kinda like

a mini Stormtrooper, came in clicking and clacking. It stuck

something on my chest and flew back as if I’d zapped it, as if . . .”

Wilder sat up, looking at me. My thoughts started spinning.

“That’s how the ghostmen get into people,” I said. “The

ghosts are inside those little robot suits. They leave their ship,

find a person, stick that probe in the person’s chest, and the

ghost transfers from the suit into the body. But it didn’t work

with me.”

Wilder tapped his chest.

“Yeah,” I said. “Token firewall. I’m safe, though no one else is.”

Anxiety gnawed at my bones. Go. Fight. Stop the ghost-

men. NOW! I couldn’t hear any more puffs of disintegrating

trees. Was the spacecraft gone or waiting for me to emerge from

the trees before firing again?

“I’m going to go scout out the situation.”

“You’re leaving us?” Howell tried to stand, but her legs were

too shaky. She sat down hard, a lock of damp hair flopping over

her forehead.

“Maybe I can take one of those blasts, but you can’t. Are

you worried about being alone with my attempted murderer?”

“Naw,” she said.

I shook my head.

I was just starting to run off when Wilder shouted my name.

I turned back and then wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like responding

like a dog to the sound of his voice.

“You might want to armor up,” he said.

I hadn’t worn havoc armor since getting the brute token back.

It seemed superfluous. So no thanks, Wilder, I didn’t armor up.

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Shannon Hale

At least, not until I was out of sight.

I ran through the forest and stayed under the cover of trees

while bounding back toward the town, following my GPS. It

took an hour but eventually I saw some “people.”

It was just too random, a group wandering through the

trees, silent and gorging themselves on food. Chocolate bars,

sodas, sandwiches, carrots.

“Hi there,” I said.

They stopped. They looked at me. And kept chewing.

“Nice day, isn’t it?”

The nearest one spoke. “Y’all are the one we couldn’t pin?”

His Texan accent was thick, but the inflection was awkward,

emphasizing insignificant words. However the ghosts possessed

those bodies, they must have had full access to their hosts’

brains—language, memories, sensations. They could speak like

humans, but they didn’t get it exactly right.

“Sure,” I said, guessing “pin” meant “insert ghost alien into

a human by means of mini-troopers.” I didn’t recognize them

from the diner, so the ghosts must be able to transmit infor-

mation to each other. Telepathically? Or via phone? “You guys

planning to stay long on my planet?”

“As long as we can, thank you kindly.” He reached for an-

other handful of nuts.

“You’re pretty fond of nuts?”

“Of course. But apples . . .” His eyes rolled up as he thought

of it. “Hot damn, ma’am.”

“So . . . you’re hijacking human bodies in order to eat

apples.”

He shrugged.

“You’re destroying people, taking away lives.”

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Dangerous

“Now, now, all we take is your shell.”

“But what if the flesh of our bodies is the extent of our mat-

ter? What if you take our bodies and there’s nothing left?”

He seemed to have never considered the possibility. “Why

would such a creature matter at all?”

“You’ve gotta learn to value the small things. So if I destroy

this body you’ve hijacked, the rest of you—the real part of you—”

“Never ends. If I lose this body, I just claim another.” He

smiled, and his wrong eyes looked that much wronger. “Let us

live out the lives of these bodies. We’re gentler on them now

that we’ve learned how to keep them alive. It could be years

before we move on to claim new ones, and generations for us to

use up all the bodies. You’re immune to the pinning, you’ve got

no reason to oppose us, okay?”

Two mini-troopers came whizzing through the trees. They

were built of white plastic but had no head or leg parts, hover-

ing over the ground and moving as fast as a car on the highway.

The torso part was about the size of a small child, and three

arms circled the torso, each tipped with different attachments.

I didn’t wait to see what they could do. I formed havoc bullets

between my fingers and shot the white suits.

With a puff of vapor and a screech like a braking train, the

suits fell over. Amorphous shapes bled out of the holes and rose

up like head-sized blobs of pink-tinted smoke. In a second, the

ghosts were out of sight in the sky.

The guy was staring hard at me. “You’ve had communica-

tion with the . . . star lickers?”

Did he mean the token-makers?

“There is only one of you,” he said, pointing to my chest.

“You killed the other four?”

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Shannon Hale

“No! I didn’t mean to. I—”

I shut my mouth. I’d thought I was getting all this great

info, but this ghost-faced killer was playing me. That’s why the

ship hadn’t taken a pot shot.

A battalion of mini-troopers came through the trees. I shot

havoc bullets. They screeched and dropped, pink transparents

flowing free. The ghosts rose, falling up instead of down, the

same speed as Jacques’s token had that night in the cave. Were

the ghosts immune to gravity, just like the tokens? I leaped for

the nearest rising pink blob, swiping my hand through, feeling

nothing but a slight chill. My touch didn’t deter it. The ghost

kept going up into the sky then suddenly disappeared.

Almost as if it’d been sucked into something. The idea felt

right. Maybe the ship was up there, hovering to catch ghostmen

freed of their suits.

I shot sharp havoc discs in the direction the ghost had

gone. Their blue trails stopped and the discs disappeared, slic-

ing, I assumed, into the ship alongside the ghosts. But after the

last ghost was safely inside, my line of discs just kept going into

the sky, striking nothing. The ship had moved.

I started to run just as a flash exploded behind me. The

ship was shooting at me again. I jumped, catching the edge of

the master blast. The havoc armor on my left side was smoking.

I made for the nearest possessed person, thinking that the

ship wouldn’t fire on its own, but there was a second flash, and I

leaped again. I hit the ground hard and screamed out. My back

stung as if Jack Havoc had struck me a hundred blows. Behind