Dangerous (8 page)

ing it down into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.”

“How is the asteroid yours?” said Ruth. “Did you buy it?”

“I got to it first,” said Howell. “Finders keepers. Astrono-

mers thought Big Barda would pass us by, but she got caught in

Earth’s gravitation pull and entered orbit. At the time, my craft

the Space Beetle was already prepped for the first private-sector

mission to the moon, but we changed our destination and got to

Big Barda first. I can tell you, several countries and corporations

were P.O.’d, but you know, losers weepers.”

And back to Module 1, which was the lab. Howell showed

us how they unfolded tabletops from the walls and stuck things

to them with Velcro. The novices were all trying to maintain

ourselves vertically while the crew hung horizontally or upside-

down. Of course all those designations were meaningless now.

“Without gravity, everything we do is ten times more chal-

Dangerous

lenging,” one of the crew was saying. “Really, an astronaut

needs four hands.”

Ruth and Jacques glanced at me, and I became keenly

aware of Ms. Pincher, dead plastic floating on the end of my

arm.

We used the restroom (peeing into a vacuum hose—weird

but effective) and ate, sucking chicken noodle soup out of bags.

I was floating near Howell, reaching for a bag of juice, when I

heard her whisper to Dragon, “Should I show them?”

Dragon shook his head.

“Show us what?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Dragon.

Everyone went silent. I hadn’t noticed before how noisy

the station was—the whir of fans, creaks and clanks and ticks.

All that equipment working to keep us warm and breathing and

safe from the freezing vacuum on the other side of the curved

wall.

“What is it?” Mi-sun asked.

“Well, now you
have
to show us,” said Ruth.

Howell’s fingers strummed the air with eagerness. “Come

now, Dragon, we’ve been planning to reveal them soon anyway,”

said Howell. “Why not let the kiddies take the first peek? They

were brave enough to climb the Beanstalk. They deserve a treat.”

Dragon didn’t protest again. The five of us gathered closer

to Howell. My feet felt cold.

“As lucrative as mining Big Barda has been,” she said, “we

uncovered something inside the asteroid even more valuable

than platinum: a container, undoubtedly crafted by an intel-

ligent species.”

I snorted. This was clearly a joke.

59

Shannon Hale

“The container held several items of different shape but

similar substance,” said Howell. “They are the first proof of

alien life ever discovered. And you are about to become five of

only about thirty human beings to see them and touch them.”

Howell handed small wooden boxes to the other four

adults, keeping one for herself.

Dragon hovered near me. I noticed he was balding on top,

but he shaved his whole head down to its shine. Dad would look

better like that.

“What’s really in the box,” I whispered. “Pez dispenser?

Star Wars action figure?”

He shook his head and returned his attention to Howell.

“Go ahead,” Howell said, opening her own box. Dragon

lifted the lid, tilting his box and moving it down, so the thing

hung in the air between him and me. It was pale and about as

long and thick as my index finger, curved without a definitive

shape.

What a shame, I thought. They could have planned some-

thing genuinely funny.

Howell picked up her item and showed it to Wilder.

“Unusual, isn’t it? Unlike any other matter I’ve encountered.”

Dragon plucked his out of the air, holding it to his palm

with his thumb.

“We call them tokens, for lack of a better signifier,” How-

ell said. “They are cool against the skin and tingle a little. Go

ahead, you can touch them.”

“It isn’t dangerous?” Ruth asked, eyeing the token in her

astronaut’s hand.

“My team and I have been holding and studying these for

years,” said Howell. “As you can see, we’re perfectly fine.”

60

Dangerous

That might be a matter of opinion, I thought.

Dragon offered the token to me between his thumb and

forefinger. It was like liquid that could hold form. I pinched it

between my fingers, and it brightened as if turning on.

“This is not a Pez dispenser,” I whispered. The token felt

crazy cold. I was leaning in to get a closer look when it slid, set-

tling into my palm. The lack of gravity should have made that

impossible.

I started to ask Dragon, “What is this really?” But then the

pain struck.

White-hot cold piercing my hand, stealing my breath. I

heard someone scream and someone else say, “Owie, owie,

owie . . .” but I couldn’t look away from the token thing sub-

merging as if my palm were water. I clawed at it with Ms.

Pincher’s plastic fingers.

The ripping pain stabbed into my wrist and crawled up my

arm, tearing through my shoulder and thudding into my chest,

where it flared to a point of agony that killed every thought from

my head.

The torture lasted seconds that felt like hours, and then the

pain just ended.

I became conscious of myself again. I seemed to be upside-

down from where I’d been, huddled against the ceiling in the

corridor outside the lab, my knees against my chest, my hand

pressed to my heart. Dragon was holding me, one arm around

my back, his other under my knees, as if I were a baby.

“Are you okay, are you okay?” he was asking over and over

again.

“No,” I said. My voice was cracked from screaming. I

touched my palm. There was no mark. “I saw that thing go into

61

Shannon Hale

my hand. Did I hallucinate it? Am I crazy?”

“You’re not crazy,” said Dragon. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure

this out.”

The way he held me reminded me again of my dad, and

a pang of homesickness twitched in my chest. When you’re a

thousand kilometers above Earth and an alien sausage burrows

into your arm, all you really want is Mommy and Daddy.

“Dragon—I’m just going to call you Dragon, okay?” I fig-

ured the whole alien torture token had earned me a first-name

basis. He nodded. “Dragon, did something lethally bad just

happen?”

He was taking my pulse. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but

I don’t know.”

In the lab, the others looked as bad as I felt, crouched

against walls, shuddering. Ruth was yelling at Howell.

“You just infected us with an alien parasite! Are you in-

sane?”

“But it’s not a parasite. It’s . . . it’s technology. Of some sort,”

Howell said. Beads of sweat shivered on her brow, no gravity to

slide them down.

Dragon checked my pupils and fit me with a blood pres-

sure cuff.

“His blood pressure is a little high,” said the astronaut

checking out Jacques, “but that’s normal, considering . . .”

Was there something on Wilder’s chest? Pale brown, peer-

ing over the V-neck of his jumpsuit. I pushed off to him so hard,

we crashed and spun while I held his collar and investigated the

tattoo like mark. A circle with four squiggles, two sticking out of

the circle, two sticking in.

“Whoa, Maisie,” he said.

62

Dangerous

Technically I
had
been rubbing his chest. I let go and

looked at the same spot on my own chest. Starting four finger-

widths from the hollow of my throat, a deep-brown crooked X.

The others loosened their collars—Jacques’s mark was as dark

as mine. Ruth’s and Mi-sun’s were henna brown, each shape

unique, reminding me a little of Arabic symbols.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” said Mi-sun. “That thing that went into

my palm. It’s still inside me.”

“Why did it attack me but not you?” Ruth asked her astronaut.

“I don’t know.” She was a dark-haired woman, petite with

large, scared eyes.

“Mine got brighter when I held it,” I said.

“So did mine,” said Jacques.

“You affected these tokens differently than we did.” Howell

held onto a wall and bobbed up and down, as if wishing she

could pace. “Was this the first time five people touched the to-

kens all at the same time? Are they linked to act together? Were

there environmental factors? Or do you all have something in

common that we lacked—genetics or age?”

“You should have known,” I said. My arm burned with the

memory of pain. “We’re
minors
, and you just threw us into space

and assailed us with unknown alien technology!”

“How could I have known?” A drop of sweat lifted from

Howell’s brow and floated in the air. “I couldn’t have known.

I . . . I . . .”

“You’re reckless and crazy and you’re going to get us killed!”

I yelled.

“I told you it was alien. No one made you touch it.”

The talking went on. There were lots of “What’s happen-

ing?” followed by “I don’t know” in various forms. It’s amazing

63

Shannon Hale

how often people will repeat the same opinions in case no one

heard them the first three times.

Howell said we’d find out more back at HAL where they

could do tests, but that we wouldn’t risk the trip till she was sure

we were stable. Mi-sun started in with a dry wail. Ruth locked

herself in the toilet closet. If the token was sucking my life away

and would leave me an empty husk there wasn’t anything I

could do about it, so I decided there was no reason to waste the

few hours I had left in space.

I helped Dragon unload supplies from the pod, tossing

around huge bags of food as if they were feather pillows. When

Wilder joined us, I opened my mouth to ask him why he’d been

so weird before, but the words melted on my tongue. Nothing

seemed to matter compared with the things in our chests.

Every once in a while (i.e., a hundred times an hour) I

checked to see if the mark was still there. My skin over the mark

was warm, a localized fever.

The crew got us dinner and tucked us into the crew beds,

which were like sleeping bags attached to the walls.

I shut my eyes, trying to shut off my thoughts, and the

darkness seemed to shift into something tangible, something

real and huge, something that I could fall into. I was already

falling. Fear of what the token might do to me made my heart

feel leaden, and yet excitement tickled my belly.

I shifted in my sack, afraid and excited and too tired to sleep.

64

C h a p t e r 1 0

After a few hours of darkness-staring, I pulled free from

the Velcro bag and went back to the lab. A headache had been

swelling ever since the token crawled up my arm. I found pain

relievers in a med kit and took them with a squirt of water.

The moon was out of sight, but a thick band of speckled

light showed one sweep of the Milky Way. For years I’d known

its stats—a spiral galaxy housing 300 billion stars, just one of

billions of galaxies in the universe. But until that moment, I’d

never really absorbed the fact that the Milky Way galaxy wasn’t

something far away—I was
in
it.

Earth seemed alien, eerie in its darkness, a black orb

marred with the orange electricity of cities in splutters and

cracks like bleeding lava. I could no longer imagine what my

life would be like when I returned there.

Wilder emerged from the crew quarters, rubbing his head.

Jacques and Ruth started rummaging around the kitchen area.

“I don’t feel good,” said Ruth, holding her stomach.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t eat,” I said.

“I can’t help it,” she said, her fists full of protein bars.

Jacques nodded agreement, sucking in his fifth bag of

yogurt.

I went back to Mi-sun’s sack and found her awake and

twitching.

I rubbed my sternum. Was the token a kind of computer?

A bomb? An egg sac? Maybe soon robot babies would tear out

of me and take over the world.

Shannon Hale

Howell came up from the pod.

“The tokens are doing something to us,” I said.

She nodded. “We’re going back, and we’ll figure it out.”

She and the other crew readied the pod while the five of

us waited in the lab. I noticed that we sort of clumped together,

shoulders and knees bumping and touching. We watched the

moon rise.

“I don’t like being afraid,” Ruth whispered.

No one responded. I think the others were as startled as I

was to hear those words from Ruth. She kept talking, glancing

from the window to Wilder.

“My sister hits me,” she went on. “Usually on my head so

my hair will hide the marks. Grandma won’t tolerate crybabies,

so I stopped crying. I shouldn’t let Sabine hit me, right? That’s

what I think, until I go home after school and there she is, and

I’m scared and don’t say a word.” She glared at us. “This doesn’t

mean you can feel sorry for me. I just wanted to say it out loud.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Ruth shrugged. “We can’t let them hurt us.
Any
of us.”