Dangerous (45 page)

cause of your
arm
.”

She tilted her head and smiled, her eyes accusing me of

being silly for asking such a question.

376

C h a p t e r 6 1

After my crash landing I didn’t see Wilder.

“The FBI want him, now that they arrested GT,” said Dad.

My stomach felt hollow. “Why do they want him?”

“To testify against his father. They have Wilder in protec-

tive custody.”

“When is the trial?”

“It’s not set yet.” Mom tucked a piece of my short hair back

into my head bandage. “These things can take a long time,

Maisie. The officer told me it’s likely he’ll be in witness protec-

tion for years, and possibly forever.”

I stared out the window. It faced the backside of anoth-

er building.
I miss you
. I thought those words like a message,

words everyone should hear sometimes. I missed him, with a

clean, brilliant, sidewalk-after-the-rainstorm kind of longing.

No twitch, no sick need of a teammate for the thinker. I just

missed
him
.

“Are you in pain,
mi hija
?”

“No,” I lied, because I didn’t want any more pain medicine.

It muddied my brain.

Mom must have guessed that in fact most of my body felt

as if I were caught in a combine, because she turned on the TV

for me. Way better than nasty pain meds. I watched this guy

show how you could live off the carcass of a camel. And then a

marathon of
Xena: Warrior Princess
.

Nothing in the news mentioned an alien invasion, but

plenty about the Jumper Virus. Howell was credited for discov-

Shannon Hale

ering the cure: a simple session in a modified hyperbolic cham-

ber killed the virus, she claimed. Her group traveled the world,

curing the infected—for free in poorer nations (with plenty of

media to document her philanthropy), and for a nice sum in

others.

The newscaster interviewed people in a small Texas town

that had all recovered.

“I don’t remember a thing,” said a busty, big-haired blonde.

“Five months of my life, just wiped out. I feel fine, ’cept I gained

thirty pounds. That’s not going to be a treat to lose!” She

laughed.

Others could not manage to be so chipper. They spoke

of family members missing or dead, their bones found rotting

in the street. Of small children who were taken away, now re-

turned, no longer recognizing their parents.

Behind one interviewee, I recognized the boy who’d been

devouring chocolate cake in the diner. He was with a group of

boys, jostling each other for room to get in front of the camera.

I followed the Jumper Virus story over the next few weeks,

mostly because I never turned off the TV until the day my doc-

tor released me.

“Your recovery was speedy, considering the shape you were

in. Extraordinary, really,” he said, shaking his head as he left.

Mom and Dad looked at me. I shrugged.

“Maybe when I got zapped and lost the tokens, the nanites

couldn’t return for reassignments, so they just shut down. It

wasn’t like when I got the brute token and it overrode my tech-

no nanites. This time some of the changes the nanites made in

me remained, at least temporarily. The powers I’d had for the

least amount of time—blue shot, thinker, havoc—diminished

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Dangerous

pretty quickly. But the brute enhancements stayed longer, so

when I hit the ground . . . it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.”

“And your technology intuition?” Dad asked.

I glanced at the notebook by my bed and away again. The

moment in the ship when the tokens slid out of me, I’d had a

techno-nanite-inspired idea. It’d hit me like night lightning, so

sharp and clear I didn’t forget on that long fall or through my

long sleep. As soon as I was able to hold a pencil, I’d jotted it

down. But I wasn’t ready to share it.

“It’s mostly gone,” I said. “Though when I watched tech

shows, my mind felt more alive.”

Howell didn’t come to see me discharged, but she char-

tered a plane to take me home, since I wouldn’t be able to sit

up for another three months or so. Howell was currently in Sri

Lanka with one of her Team Rescue groups, and we talked on

the phone. She was surly about not making more money off the

aliens. She’d found and collected debris from the crashed ship,

but it was just scraps and nothing useful. The one mini-trooper

suit I’d liberated had been destroyed with HAL. All she had to

show for it all were the plans for the inventions I’d made, tucked

safely away on offshore servers.

“Go to college,” Howell told me over the phone. “Study

something useful, and then come see me about a job. I am ap-

plying for patents on your jet pack design. Try to sue me and I

will win. No whining, I paid off your parents’ mortgage, had your

mother’s identity properly sponged, and created a college fund

for you—enough to cover an advanced degree, as well as living

expenses, food and rent and books, computers, phones, private

lab rental, research supplies, solar paneling . . . the basics.”

“I didn’t whine—”

379

Shannon Hale

“And you won’t, because I’m hanging up.”

And she did, before I could ask her how she was doing, but

I already knew. She missed Dragon. I guessed she always would.

I spent a few weeks on a hospital bed in our living room.

Mom and Dad got me a TV to help ease me through my con-

valescence. After being starved for TV most of my life, it took

me months to finally reach the “enough” moment—the day I

turned it off because I was really and truly sick of it.

Soon after that I started walking with crutches and could

sit in a car, go to a movie, eat out at the noodle place.

The world was normalizing. There’d been a burst of cha-

os right after the mother ship broke apart, and I guessed that

the remaining pink parasites had been angry and rampaged in

their human hosts. But then they got gassed and decompression

chambered, and their unwilling hosts woke up with limited am-

nesia. I had no idea how many out-of-the-way towns were still

body-snatched, but Howell would get to them all eventually.

TV off, casts off, weather great, I stopped paying attention

to the rest of the world. I was about to get really busy. I was en-

rolling in high school.

380

C h a p t e r 6 2

First day jitters are probably normal. Maybe everyone gets

that buggy excitement in the belly and an obsessive need to

keep looking in the mirror. We converted my hacked-off hair

into a pixie cut, and I think I prefer that style after all.

Luther picks me up in his hideous 1989 Ford Fiesta—a

two-door hatchback, zero to thirty MPH in one minute flat. He

loves this car way more than he thought he loved me. Lately

his cuticles are black with grease because he’s constantly taking

the engine apart and putting it back together. The radio doesn’t

work, so we drive to school sans soundtrack.

“Why are you so twitchy?” he asks.

“I’m nervous, I guess,” I say. “Aren’t you?”

“No.”

He’d better be nervous. The high school thing is his obses-

sion all of a sudden. My heart feels fluttery, my hands shake a

little. I put on the sunglasses Dragon gave me. They’re my last

piece of armor.

We enter the front doors of West High School, and I hold

my breath, half expecting a gang of mean girls and football guys

to accost us and mock our nerdish ways and handless limbs.

I’m wearing Gidget. It’s a prototype Howell’s crew built

based on Fido’s design. Gidget is a far cry from Lady and even

farther from Fido. But I love her. I’m rethinking my whole as-

tronaut goal. If I were an engineer, maybe I could develop an

affordable, mass-producible robotic arm.

“Ooh, look at the lockers!” Luther says as we walk down the

Shannon Hale

hall. “And everything smells just like I imagined.”

“Like bleach and sweat?” I said.

He nods, his eyes shining.

His excitement is catching. Only partly teasing, I chant

“high school, high school,” and dance down the hall.

“Stop that. Don’t get me labeled a geek-by-association

on my first day. Besides, I don’t want your sorry dance moves

burned into my brain.”

“Now by
sorry
, do you mean smokin’ hot?”

“I’ve measured your hotness and passed. I kissed you once,

remember?”

“Yep.”

“Wait, you were supposed to forget!”

“Forget what?”

“But if I ever
had
thought I wanted to be your boyfriend, it

was just because you were the
only
girl I knew. Don’t go think-

ing you’re some kind of dream girl. You’re already in danger of

getting conceited, what with being the hero who saved the hu-

man race from slavery and extinction.”

I shush him, but still no one is paying us any attention. We

are invisible in our inconsequentialness. I like it.

“See you at lunch, best friend!” I shout after him, super

cheery.

He squints at me before entering his calculus class.

I’ve decided to be super cheery with Luther all the time.

It actually takes less energy than admitting to him that I’m ex-

hausted. That all night, dream after dream assaults me. That I

still feel broken up and not sure if I’ll ever heal.

But don’t let me get dramatic. I survived a fall from the

stratosphere. I can handle a few nightmares and a little loneliness.

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Dangerous

I go down the wrong hall, finally arriving at college prep

chemistry as the bell rings. The teacher is at the board, squeak-

ily writing, and I scan for an empty chair. There’s one in the

back. Next to a guy in a gray t-shirt.

The guy in gray stands up to look at me. He’s still wear-

ing the woven leather wristband his mother gave him. I’m still

wearing Dragon’s sunglasses, but I pull them off. I can’t seem to

breathe. There’s that sloshy feeling, my head like a bag of water

minus the goldfish.

I say, “Jonathan.”

The teacher is looking at us. Everyone in the class is look-

ing at us, two idiots standing there, looking at each other. It’s

way too much
looking
all around, but I can’t seem to do any-

thing else—besides say, “Jonathan,” which seems to surprise

him as much as it does me.

His gray T-shirt says FBI in yellow letters, and I wonder if it

was a gift after months in hiding. His hair is longer, and a little

lighter too, bleached by the sun. And he is looking at me in a

way that reminds me the heart is a pump that works very hard.

“Is something the matter?” the teacher asks.

I shake my head and with an effort break eye contact with

Wilder. With Jonathan.

“No, sorry, we just . . . know each other.”

“Congratulations,” says the teacher.

Jonathan watches me cross the room. He waits until I am

in the chair beside him before he sits.

And he doesn’t say anything. And I don’t say anything.

And we sit through all of chemistry not saying anything.

It has been six months since he donned a jet pack and

stuffed me into a parachute before I crunched to the ground.

383

Shannon Hale

Six months since I lay on the rocks, a heap of broken bones and

bleeding organs, Jonathan holding my hand.

The bell rings, and I still don’t know what to say. Maybe

Jonathan doesn’t either. A year ago at astronaut boot camp he

was calling me “stone-cold fox.” Now he stands in silence, his

hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched a little.

“Hi,” I say, holding out my left hand. “Maisie Danger

Brown.”

“Jonathan Ingalls Wilder,” he says and shakes my hand.

We hold on, looking at each other. I can’t help smiling,

and then he does too, and then we laugh. The classroom is

clearing out, but I’m not in a hurry.

The teacher is the only one left. She slips us glances, and I

know she’s trying to guess our story. Good luck.

He switches his left hand for his right so he can hold my

hand and walk beside me.

He’s holding my hand.

Jonathan Wilder is in Salt Lake City, Utah, walking beside

me and holding my hand.

“So, your dad’s trial . . . ,” I say.

“Will go on for years. But it turns out I’m not an ideal witness.

My sordid background, my grudge against my mother’s killer. He

wasn’t very cautious once he started going after you and the tokens,

so they had enough crimes on him without my help.”

We find Luther by his locker.

“Maisie, did you see—” Luther stops, his gaze frozen on

Jonathan. “Craptastic.”

“Hey, I know you thought I was a jackass,” says Jonathan.

“Thought?”

“And you want to protect Maisie from my jackassiness. I

384

Dangerous

respect that. And I’m sorry.” Jonathan holds out his hand as if

to shake. “Truce?”

Luther squints at Jonathan.

“You know I think you are a ridiculous entity.”