Dangerous (43 page)

a large havoc dart. If I’d been a true robot, I would have tried

the shot without hesitation. Instead, crouching under the low

ceiling, I ran forward. I was too conscious of my mortality, I

guess. I was aware that this was a moment like Sydney Carton

walking to the gallows; like Samson, his hands on the building’s

support pillar just before he pushed. Who knew if there was a

part of me that never ended, like the ghostmen themselves? I’d

climbed the Beanstalk and found space. Maybe there wasn’t

anything else to find.

My own desert places, between stars, on stars . . .

I wasted five precious seconds in order to linger, to savor, to

say,
adios, la vida.

A suit moved off to my left. I turned and shot a havoc pellet

through it, watched the pink ghost inside rip free and flail into

the white ceiling. By the time I turned back, I couldn’t see the

blue hearth. All the mini-trooper suits were live, blocking the

wall, and moving toward me.

357

Shannon Hale

I shot them rapid-fire, downing one after another, some-

times several in a row as the havoc darts I formed shot clean

through suit after suit. I turned, shooting all sides, till a wall of

wrecked suits formed around me.

There was one mini-trooper different than the rest. It was

holding a weapon. I turned to face it. Turned my chest toward it.

I shot it just as its weapon fired with a burst of white, strik-

ing me in the chest. I slammed against the wall, leaving an

imprint of my body in its softness.

I looked down. Something was leaking straight through my

chest armor. Not blood. It was the tokens, squeezing through,

dripping free.

358

C h a p t e r 5 5

I would have expected pain, considering how the tokens

felt going in. But I watched as the five tokens emerged from my

chest, and I felt nothing.

They were gray now. A dead color. They fell on the floor

with a wet slap.

I scooped up the tokens in my hand, praying for them to

light up, willing them to reenter me. They oozed through my

fingers—a shapeless, lifeless goo.

Cold touched my back, and I flung myself away from the

wall, where pink ghostmen stuck out limb-shaped parts. My to-

ken firewall was gone. Pink bits reached from the ceiling too,

and I dropped to my belly, shaking on the firm floor.

I have it in me so much nearer home . . .

The chamber was alive with clicks and whooshing as the

mini-troopers worked a way through the piles of downed suits. I

had been the only thing standing between Earth and the aliens,

but there was no more fireteam.

I expected to die immediately, but my lungs weren’t con-

vulsing for air yet. Maybe the tokens had left so quickly most of

the nanites remained in my body? Would they keep working

without their tokens? I kept shooting havoc pellets at the mini-

troopers but after a time the shots barely pinged their armor. I

tried to form a sword and there was nothing left.

I have it in me . . .
The havoc machete I’d removed from

my hand lay on the floor. I dove for it and slashed at the swarm

of mini-troopers. My brute strength was lasting longer than

Shannon Hale

blue shot and havoc. As I hammered cracks into the suits their

ghosts whisked back into the ceiling. The lifeless suits piled up

around me, creating a temporary barrier between me and the

onslaught.

I remembered Samson now with desperate respect, tearing

down the building over his own head.

Yes, I thought. Yes, I’ll do that. Please let me do that.

But the goal seemed impossible. I crawled forward, stab-

bing wildly, pushing aside the damaged suits on my way.

I touched the one with the weapon.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces.

The white burst of power the weapon had fired reminded

me of when I first held the techno token, how it had lit up to

my touch. This weapon had been created to destroy the tokens.

And the tokens were made of the same stuff as the aliens.

I grabbed it, sensing the mechanics of the weapon, the

remnants of my techno token still live enough to teach me to

slide my fingers along the side, to cup my hand around a bul-

bous part and apply pressure. It fired. Mini-troopers flung away

with the force. More were coming in, but for a split second I had

a view of the blue thing in the center of the chamber. This time

I didn’t hesitate.

I fired.

My white blast struck the blue hearth. The motion of fire-

like tendrils stopped. They quivered. Then they melted. Sloppy

blue sludge poured out, pooling on the hard floor. Where it

dripped, holes sputtered through. The air began to crackle.

Mini-troopers hung where they were, vibrating.

Victory. It was victory. Wasn’t it? Not the Deathstar explod-

ing in spectacular violence perhaps, but I thought I’d done it.

360

Dangerous

The room was sizzling, hissing, crumbling.

As one, the trembling suits panicked. It was a mad rush for

the walls, ghostmen abandoning their suits for the safety of the

nougat. The crackling reached right through my havoc armor

and raised the hairs on my arms. The hole around the blue

sludge lengthened, crumbling my way.

I crawled across the floor and wormed back into the tun-

nel. The white foam I’d cut had already begun reconnecting. I

swiped at strands like thick spiderwebs, scrambling on my knees,

my heart pounding. There was nowhere to go. But whatever was

left of techno-sense in me warned to get away from the chamber

as fast as I could.

A parachute, I need a parachute, I thought.

Forget the parachute,
chica.
You’re not going to find any-

thing that resembles a parachute on a ghost ship.

A havoc parachute! I thought, before remembering. I could

no longer havoc anything.

Even if I got out of the ship, I was going to fall a long way,

and I was going to die. It was pointless, but I kept crawling. My

skin inside the armor felt tender, my knees ached. I was not the

same person who had come this way only minutes ago.

The crackling behind me got louder, lightning striking

lightning, electric and angry. A pulse convulsed through the

whole ship, knocking me flat. My lungs took a useless breath,

somehow anticipating what would happen next before it did.

And what happened was, everything fell.

The ship had lost power. It was falling to Earth. I could

hear tearing, the ship a meteor, breaking apart, burning. Fall-

ing, me falling with it, my body pressed to the top of the tunnel

I’d cut. Falling hard, too hard to breathe even if there had been

361

Shannon Hale

air. I was conscious though, so my cells must have still retained

some oxygen from my last breath.

My last breath had been so long ago—ten minutes, fifteen.

Twenty?

I was nearly blind in my little tunnel, seeing little, feeling

nothing but falling. And I wondered if the ship would hit the

ground and splatter like a clown’s whipped cream pie, and what-

ever pieces of me that remained smooshed into the white gunk.

I managed to turn my head a few centimeters to one side

and saw the tips of ghosts dipping into my tunnel, shivering as

they circled and circled through the nougat. The ghosts were

falling too, stuck inside the ship, nowhere to go. I had no more

token firewall, they could have entered me. But they didn’t

bother. That scared me like a knife at the throat. Even they

knew I was about to die.

362

C h a p t e r 5 6

Booming sounds, crackles and cracks, and then suddenly

there was no more ship. The floor beneath me broke apart. The

hull ruptured into pieces. The nougat crumbled. And gravity

claimed us all.

All except the ghosts. Their safe, solid ship was gone. Grav-

ity rejected them. I looked up as I fell and saw thousands of

pink shapes falling the other way, going up into the black to

be claimed by the vacuum of space. The ghostmen would just

keep going, I thought. With no ship, no form, their momen-

tum would send them hurtling through outer space indefinitely.

They’d never be able to come back.

I did it, I thought. But I didn’t feel the victory. I could only

feel the fall. Every cell of my body seemed to scream with it,

every atom spinning faster and faster, trying to escape the fact

that I was going to die. And that I was being given a few minutes

to know it first.

Horror, horror, cannot compute this, Maisie.

While I was inside it, the ship must have moved up very

high. I was still in Earth’s gravity but so close to space I thought

I could reach out and touch it. The sun was bright and colorless,

and through the scant atmosphere I could see through straight

to blackness. The stars twinkled down at me, all unsympathetic

innocence. Just then, I hated the stars.

I was falling in a cloud of nougat dust and ship pieces.

Even at full brute strength, I wouldn’t be able to survive a fall

this high. There was almost no air up here to stabilize me, no

Shannon Hale

friction to slow me, and I sped faster and faster the farther I

dropped. I was flipping, my arms and legs flailing, trying to

swim or fly maybe. I clawed at the nothing, pathetic as a fish

on a bank.

And I just kept hurtling down, though the distance was so

great, the Earth seemed no closer. The thin layer of armor over

my eyes started to crack. I covered my eyes with my hand.

My stomach hurt, seemingly yanked from my body over

and over again. My heart was pounding at machine-gun speed,

my head pained to cracking, my muscles so tense I wondered

if my skin would split open. I vaguely realized my body must

be overdosing on adrenaline, higher brain functions shutting

down and primal brain functions taking over. All I knew was

fear and panic.

This was the part of my life when I
should
have gone robot.

But I didn’t want to anymore. Even battling terror like being

strangled in slow motion, I wanted to
experience
it. This was life, these few minutes were all that I had left. I didn’t want to die

halfway down. I wanted every single second I had left. I yelled

at my brain to work.

Mom and Dad, I thought.

Mom and Dad. And Luther, my best friend.

And Jonathan, I thought.

I meant Wilder, but with its last electrical fizzing, my

mind called him Jonathan. The whooshing feeling, the terror

of falling, the lightning in my belly, the frantic pounding of my

heart—all reminded me of how I felt when I kissed him. And

when I didn’t. And when I’d lost him, and when I almost had

him again.

Falling in love and falling to your death feel about the

364

Dangerous

same, I thought. And I almost laughed.

And still I fell.

There was a crackling sound. Heat. I’d hit the lower atmo-

sphere now, the friction of gas molecules slowing me slightly,

the speed of my passage sparking fire across my armor.

When my body splattered, would a soul-—my soul—come

rising out of it, like a ghostman fleeing a useless body? Would it

rise up, drift through space, pause in nebulae, moving from star

to star? Would I be sucked up into a God-touched place with

billions of other souls? Or would I simply cease to be? Mom

believed, Dad did not. I didn’t want to simply choose to believe

or not believe; I wanted to
know
. I had no answers, and at the

moment this seemed a catastrophic hole in my education.

I seemed to be falling for hours, though surely it was only

two or three minutes. I let my hand drop from my eyes. I was

back under a blue sky again—
in
a blue sky. The world was air

and blueness and patches of color below.

And then I saw a road.

Until then, it hadn’t felt completely real. I was falling, I

was thinking, I was sure I would die, in an abstract way. But see-

ing that road was like a gut punch. The ground wasn’t distant.

There was a highway. The green speckle of trees.
So much near-

er home, so much nearer home, so much nearer . . . scare myself

with my own . . .
Where was I? The ship could have moved over

Australia or China or anywhere. When I hit there’d be nothing

to identify, no way for my parents to even know what had hap-

pened. If they were still alive.

Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad, Mom, Mom,
Mami
,

please . . .

My face armor was pierced with cracks, and I tore off a

365

Shannon Hale

piece now, sucking in any air I could, the oxygen in my cells de-

pleted at last. My lungs battled the rushing air, losing. I flipped

myself over, my back hitting the hard rush of air.

Land charged closer. There appeared to be a huge black

crater, but maybe I imagined it because black dots were rushing