Dangerous (42 page)

ghosts. Seven minutes from the time the first one entered the

ship till the last. Seven minutes to try and get inside it myself.
If

the ship stayed put till all the ghosts were in.

The jet pack had two exhausts tied to the backs of my legs,

belching fire past my feet. I maneuvered by moving my legs,

like a tiller of a boat. I kept my head tilted back, my arms at my

side, speeding to reach the ship at the same time as the first

ghost. This high up, oxygen was getting spare, so I was breath-

ing from a tank in the robot suit. I wanted to save my twenty

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Shannon Hale

minutes of held breath for when I’d really need it.

I was only a couple of kilometers up when I thought of

Ruth, shooting up through the water as I now did through air. I

was wearing a pressurized astronaut suit over my havoc armor,

but what if . . .? I didn’t know what the rest of the question was,

but I’d learned to trust these nanite-induced intuitions. The

only place on my body that wasn’t havoc-armored was my face.

I grew an ultra-thin layer of armor over my eyes, only a few mol-

ecules thick but it should be enough to maintain my internal

pressure should something happen to my astronaut suit. I could

see through it like sunglasses. I extended the armor over the rest

of my face, leaving just a hole in my mouth so I could breathe

from the oxygen mask.

I didn’t dare look down and slow my ascent. Were more

ghosts coming? Was one of them from Mom?

“Can you hear me?” I asked in the headset.

I didn’t know if there was an answer. The rush of air was

deafening.

Just ahead of me, the first ghost disappeared. The ship had

arrived. I followed at full speed, hoping to break into the hull of

the ship with the force of my impact.

But before I hit the spot where the ghost had disappeared,

I passed through some other barrier. Electric needles of pain

pierced my skin, digging, fingering my nerves. I screamed. And

my astronaut suit, robot suit, oxygen tank, and jet pack shred-

ded and fell away.

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C h a p t e r 5 4

In a second everything but my body and havoc armor was

torn apart. Even inside my armor, I felt Lady tremble and twitch,

savaged perhaps by the ship’s barrier. I havocked the small

breathing hole over my mouth, sealing myself completely in.

At last I understood why the tokens resisted gravity just like the

ghosts—nothing but ghostmen could get close to the ship, and

so the tokens had to be created from the same stuff. Dragon in

the Speetle. Metal bullets. A nuclear missile. Nothing would

have made it through the ship’s barrier.

I survived because I was bonded with the tokens, my armor

made by them. My pressure suit had not made the cut.

Not to mention I was now several kilometers above the

ground without a jet pack.

The momentum of my flight kept pushing me up for a

few more seconds, and I used that time to extend my right arm

with a meter-long havoc hook and swing it with all the force

of my body. Just as the second ghost disappeared, my hook hit

something solid. The ship. I seemed to be dangling from an

empty sky.

Don’t look down, I thought.

I looked down. Freezing panic shot through me as if new

tokens were burrowing through all my limbs. I could still see

the shreds of my equipment falling toward Earth, and I seemed

to be falling with them, the ground rising up toward me.

Vertigo. Just vertigo.

I blinked hard and focused on the the pink ghosts rising up.

Shannon Hale

As soon as the last one entered, the ship would probably take off,

maybe into space. I had to get inside first.

Dangling from my right arm, I shot havoc pipes from my

left at the invisible shell of the boat. Something cracked. What

had seemed empty air now showed silver-white lines.

Waves of white energy flowed from the ship, rolling over

my armor. I could feel heat and a sharp tingle, especially against

my eyes where my armor was the thinnest. The ship was attack-

ing me. Perhaps it couldn’t directly master-blast me here, so

it sent a localized blast. The wave of energy didn’t breach my

havoc armor.

My oxygen tank and mask had been lost, my face was ar-

mored, my breath was held. The twenty-minute count had begun.

I formed a pick tool on my left hand, and I tore away chunks

of the ship’s hull. I widened the crack into a Maisie-sized gap.

I bet the
bleeping
token-makers could fly, I thought.

Below me I could see the end of the line of ghostmen, the

last little pink one that perhaps had come from Mom. The ship

didn’t wait. It moved. Dangling, I whipped around.

I swung up, catching the edge of the hole with my ar-

mored toes, pulling myself in feet first. Beside me the last ghost

entered. I rammed myself forward.

The interior of the ship was solid with the same nougat

stuff as the interior of the mini-trooper had been—white, half-

way between soft and stiff, like slightly stale marshmallow. I

was curled up in the hole I’d hacked. I pressed the nougat and

it compressed with the shape of my hand. I was inside a giant

candy bar. The only way forward was to dig.

I formed a scooper over one of my havoc-lengthened arms

and a machete over the other. I started to dig and hack my way

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Dangerous

through the nougat.

I felt a rush in my belly. The ship was moving up.

I dug and hacked, and dug and hacked some more. I didn’t

form ammo to shoot myself a passage. I had to guard my re-

sources.

The brute strength was essential. Normal Maisie would

have tired quickly. If I’d had the whole fireteam, I would’ve had

Jack Havoc make machetes for Ruthless and sent her through

first.

I thought over the design of the mini-trooper suit. Most

of it was filled with nougat like this, with controls in the center.

I dug toward where I thought was the center. And hoped it

was the right direction. The farther in, the darker, the only light

coming in through the hole I’d made, now far behind at the

beginning of the narrow tunnel I was digging.

My throat was dry. My pouches of water were gone with

the rest of my gear. At least I had a bellyful of carbon nuggets.

I’d swallowed three handfuls of the rough-diamond-like peb-

bles. My lab groupies had helped me enhance the concentrated

carbon with oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Was I ever glad

now. I had no air to breathe, no water to drink, no other way to

get the elements I needed to make havoc tools and ammo.

I dug. Everything looked the same. The ship was huge,

and I only had twenty minutes of air. No, make that eighteen.

Ghosts drifted through the nougat. The solid stuff was a

passage to them. It seemed ghostmen could no sooner move

through empty space than people could move through walls.

One ghost stopped at the edge of my tunnel, trembled, and

then dove at me, swooping right through my body. I felt the

sting of its presence, like the prickles of a limb falling asleep.

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Shannon Hale

It passed through, entering the nougat on the other side of my

tunnel. Another dove at me. And another. Stinging chills made

my chest hurt. But they couldn’t claim token-protected me. I

kept digging.

Poems dodged in and out of my brain like ghosts through

the nougat. I clung to Robert Frost, desperate to have a compan-

ion here at the end of the world.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

Humans were nothing to the ghosts. We were candy wrap-

pers, apple cores, something they would toss aside. You’d think

with all those millennia to grow up, the ghosts wouldn’t be so

selfish. Maybe it was the brevity of life that forced humans to

mature. Life is precious because it’s finite.

I didn’t want to think about the brevity of life anymore.

Between stars—on stars where no human race is . . .

I kept digging.

I was so deep no more sunlight reached into my tunnel.

Nothing to orient my trek. I blindly hacked at the nougat with

my machete, breaking the stiff stuff. With my scooper, I pulled

the loose nougat apart, then trampled it under my armored feet,

compressing it enough to give me space to walk forward. One

step at a time, my shoulders hunched. The nougat felt harder

than it had before. Maybe my muscles were tiring.

I couldn’t see the pink ghosts now, only feel them gathered

around me, dozens or hundreds, swooping, diving at my chest.

My token firewall rejected them, but they kept trying. Every

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Dangerous

time one passed through me, it felt as if someone wriggled a

finger inside my backbone to stroke my spine. I shivered uncon-

trollably.

They can’t scare me, Mr. Frost.

My havoc machete bounced off something. It radiated a

soft, white light. I pushed back the nougat around it, exposing

a glowing fiber, like a vein running through flesh. I followed

the fiber, cutting my tunnel alongside. The ghostmen swarms

thickened. I swatted uselessly.

Faster, Maisie. Ruth wouldn’t have tired. And Wilder

would have known what to do.

There was a hum followed by a crackle, and the fiber lit

up lightning-bright. I shielded my eyes. The ship vibrated, and

then the fiber dulled again.

Had the ship just master-blasted a bus zipping around on

monster truck tires? I shook my head. If ever I needed to be

robot Maisie, it was now.

Adding teeth to the havoc machete, I sawed through the

fiber. It was a pointless gesture. My tinker-and-techno-self con-

curred that cutting just one such fiber wouldn’t prevent another

master-blast. There might be thousands of them. But I also sus-

pected the fiber converged somewhere important, so I followed

it deeper.

I dug, clenching my teeth against the burn in my arm

muscles and the horrible feeling of all those ghostmen reach-

ing inside me. My held breath, my armored face, the tiny space

of the tunnel—everything seemed to press against me, long to

squish me, end me.

I don’t think I can do this, I thought.

Don’t be such a frakking wuss
, Luther would say.

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Shannon Hale

I didn’t want Luther to think I was a wuss, frakking or oth-

erwise. I kept digging.

The fiber reached a bulbous sac, also glowing. It made me

think of a lymph node or a gland nestled inside a body. The

nougat didn’t touch it, leaving about a half meter of space

around the sac, the only empty space I’d seen inside the ship.

That, I thought.

I had an inkling that the stuff inside would hurt me, so I

hacked past it to a safe distance and then shot it with a havoc

dart. There was a wet explosion. The goo melted the nougat

around it. I waited to feel the ship react. Nothing changed.

Time was definitely getting to its sticky end. I wouldn’t

have breath and strength to dig my way to all such sacs. If only

there were four other teammates. I pushed myself harder.

The fiber continued past the now-empty sac. I kept digging.

Suddenly my machete hit nothing and I lurched forward.

My tunnel met up with a spacious chamber.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces . . .

I pushed my way inside, spilling clumps of nougat into the

chamber. The ghostmen that had been clinging to me couldn’t

follow into the hollow center of their ship and stayed stuck in

the solid nougat behind me.

The chamber was low but as expansive as several soccer

fields. The ceiling was nougat, the floor was gray and firm, and

around the sides dozens of empty mini-trooper suits waited. In

the far distant center of the chamber glowed something blue.

It was the size of a hearth fire. It moved like kelp under-

water, twinkled like a galaxy. The fiber I’d been following ran

along the ceiling and converged with many other ligaments

above the blue thing. The ceiling arched high right above it

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Dangerous

as if the nougat couldn’t get too close. If the techno token was

a person, it would have been screaming at me. That was the

power source for the craft. That was what I needed to destroy.

In that moment two thoughts thundered through me:

1. My shooter token might not be able to fire something

that far anymore, not with as much force as I guessed it would

require.

2. If I broke that, the ship would go down. My jetpack was

gone, so I’d go down with the ship.

I’d calculated that survival was a long shot anyway, but I’d

still harbored a small, hard diamond of a hope. That now dis-

solved like the carbon nuggets in my belly.

I removed the havoc machete from my left arm and formed