MiNRS (8 page)

Chapter Twelve

Speaking

“My mother said to me,
before she was killed, that we needed to run. We have run. We have hid and we have survived. That’s what we are going to keep doing! Together!”

I punched my fist in the air for emphasis.

My voice echoed off the empty tunnel walls.

I was convinced.

Now I just had to make the speech before an actual crowd of kids.

That was making me more nervous than I liked to admit. What if they mocked me? I remembered the first time I’d had to give an oral presentation in school. The topic was “The Great Mission for Kids.” I’d prepared a
whole mini-slide show about Melming, mining, space exploration, and how I was going to be the next great genius scientist.

A couple of kids had begun giggling when I’d said that last part. I was so rattled that I stumbled through the rest of my notes and lost my place. It was a mess.

Brock and Jimmi had made fun of me the entire recess.

“Hey, genius, maybe you can invent a machine to help you talk!”

“I love Melming so much. I want to kiss him.
Smooch smooch
.”

Elena had defended me, but even she told me I had been “totally geeking out” and had needed to “dial it back” a bit.

Come to think of it, that was the first time Jimmi had called me Little Melming. I should have remembered it was an insult.

The next time I had to give a speech, I’d locked myself in the bathroom, my hands sweaty and cold. My mom had eventually lured me out and forced me to do the talk, but I’d just stared down at my notes and mumbled.
But that was then
, I told myself.
Suck it up
.

I had planned to give my speech after breakfast, but I’d panicked. Instead I sent Jimmi and Maria on the food search first.

They’d be back soon. I had to have something ready, so I went on a long walk to be alone and think. I continued my pattern of alternating left and right, rehearsing the speech where no one could hear me.

I knew I could find my way back quickly, so I wasn’t really paying attention when I turned a corner and the light from my headlamp glinted off something shiny. I just kept practicing.

“My mother said to me. My mom’s last words were. My mom, before she was killed by the Landers, turned to me.” I practiced the inflections that would work best. Reading
Twist
, oddly, was helping me. Oliver’s life was pretty horrible: getting accused of stealing and getting chased out of the orphanage. But he went on. I would go on. Maybe I should quote the book in my speech?

Distracted, I walked straight into something hard, smashing my knee. I tried to keep my balance while hopping on one foot. I failed and fell, banging my head hard on the ground. The impact tore my helmet loose, and it flew away. The headlamp shattered against the wall.

I was doubled over in pain, clutching my knee, and now I was without a light. Thankfully, my knee wasn’t broken—just dinged—but it hurt.

What had I walked into?

I reached out slowly, and my fingers touched
something cool and metallic. That was unexpected.

Had I found one of the emergency batteries? If so, I’d better be careful touching more parts of it.

Was it another series of lockers? Was this one of the satellite break rooms?

I carefully ran my fingers along the smooth metal, then all of a sudden it wasn’t so smooth. There was a discernable groove that ran diagonally as the metal began to slope downward.

A thrill was starting to climb up my spine. If this was what I hoped it was, this changed everything.

I let my fingers follow the slope until,
yes!
It ended in a very rough, almost thorny, cone about the size and shape of a spiky pineapple.

My heart raced, and a huge grin broke across my face.

I had stumbled on a digger, the undisputed technical marvel of the Melming Mining Company.

I’d read about them as a kid and had asked my dad to show me one on my first-ever trip to the mines on Perses. He’d snuck me into the garage. “But don’t tell anyone. These babies are special.” He’d tapped the side of one with his palm, eliciting a beautiful deep metallic sound.

“A digger is a one-person drilling machine. It can cut through rock like a knife through butter.”

I had just stared in awe. It had looked like someone had glued a giant drill bit onto the front of a luxury sports car.

He’d pointed at the bit. “The whole front assembly is the borer. The spiky cone at the front is the key. It’s called the disrupter. It’s a mini-fusion reactor, and I don’t totally get how it works.”

I had almost automatically picked up where he’d left off. “It’s called that because it uses a kind of energy field to ‘disrupt’ the matter in front of it.” I had known I’d been geeking out a bit, as usual, but my dad had beamed.

“That’s what they say. I do know that it lets the digger move at an incredible speed underground.”

“It actually breaks apart the molecules, so it’s like there’s almost no resistance. It even pulls the digger forward faster.”

He’d nodded. “But that also makes it really dangerous.”

“How?”

“Well, the disrupter is, as you’ve pointed out, ripping matter apart. It’s fine to do that when the reaction is contained by solid rock. But if you hit an air pocket, like a tunnel, the front can ignite all the oxygen and basically turn the air itself into a fire bomb.”

“But that must happen all the time.”

“It could. But the other little bit of genius is that the digger cone has a sensor. If it detects an air pocket, it shuts off immediately. Of course, that also means the digger is instantly reduced to a glorified golf cart. It doesn’t move very fast at all when it’s just running on its tracks.”

“So how do you keep that from happening?”

“We put warning signals inside any big seams of air, tunnels, or big gaps in volcanic rock to warn the driver to stay clear.”

His next words to me then were why everything had changed now.

“Would you like to take one for a spin?”

I knew how to drive one.

He’d made me promise never to tell anyone, but he’d sat me down on the seat next to him and we’d taken a joyride through solid rock. If his bosses had caught us, he could have been fired and sent back to Earth. But he’d said it was something I needed to know, and to heck with the rules.

He’d laughed as I’d fought the steering wheel and strained to reach the power pedals.

That was one of my favorite memories of him.

And it might be what saved us now.

I felt for a latch and opened the cockpit. The light inside came on immediately, so bright, I was almost
blinded. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see that the machine in front of me was just one digger in a whole row of diggers.

I’d stumbled on a garage.

I quickly slid my way onto the seat and pushed the ignition button.

The digger fired up.

“Thanks, Dad,” I whispered as I began to maneuver the gears.

I was no expert, and it took me about five minutes to turn the digger around so I could drive into the tunnel nose first. I pushed another button, and a guide light shone out from the cone.

I was about to turn left, to head back to the camp, when I thought of Alek. I also thought of the food and water we’d left behind.

I turned right, toward the infirmary, advancing slowly, staying as close to the wall as I could.

In a pinch I could dig straight into the rock, but I knew my way back better through the tunnels. Finally I arrived at the infirmary door. I pulled even with it and turned off the digger.

I hit the release button, and the hatch opened slowly. I was careful to turn off the light first. I listened. There was no noise at all other than the cooling engine.

“Alek,” I whispered. “Alek, it’s me, Christopher. I’m back. I came back.”

Silence.

I pushed the door, and to my surprise it swung open easily. Alek’s helmet was still hanging on the hook by the door.

This was not a good sign.

I put it on, switched on the light, and scanned the room.

All the cots were empty.

Alek was gone.

The poster he’d been staring at for days was gone.

I searched for any clues of what had happened: missing sheets, pillows, missing medical supplies. Everything seemed the same as we’d left it. I got down on all fours and searched for dirt, footsteps in the dust, or possibly even blood.

Nothing.

My heart raced. Had he tried to follow us? Surely, I’d have seen him on my drive back. If he had followed us, why hadn’t he taken the helmet?

Had he been taken?

I turned off the lamp and crept back out of the infirmary, my ears and eyes on high alert. I slunk into the cockpit of the digger and started it up.

As I inched forward, the blast door came into view.

It was open.

The Landers were in the tunnels.

I slammed the digger into reverse, crunching into the wall as I turned. I had to get back to the camp the fastest way possible, and that was a straight line.

I flicked open the red safety cap and activated the disrupter. Immediately the cone began to spin. I angled the digger toward the nearest wall and floored the speed pedal. My father had handled this on our joyride. I hoped I’d done everything right.

The digger sped forward. I closed my eyes, half expecting to smash like a tin can against the hard rock wall. But then, without even noticing the moment, I was inside solid rock. I opened my eyes. Sparks and flashes illuminated the window.

It was like being inside the northern lights. It was beautiful.

The compass on the dashboard pointed almost straight ahead. I was pretty sure I was heading in the right direction to hit the camp. At the speed I was traveling, I calculated that it should only take me a minute.

The digger began to beep, and I looked with a panic at the screen. A red light was flashing on the map, straight ahead.

An air pocket. The tunnel!

I veered to the right. The digger responded, easily turning at top speed, but I needed to slow down. The last thing I wanted to do was land in the middle of the kids I was trying to save with a red-hot digger.

The digger blasted through the wall and landed with a thud on the floor.

The sensor kicked in, instantly stopping the disrupter. My head snapped back, and it took me a second to realize what I was seeing.

All the lights were on, the real lights, and the tunnel was completely illuminated.

A mostly bald figure in combat pants and a leather jacket was facing all the kids, who were backing up against the wall.

I was too late.

The Landers had reached the camp ahead of me.

I jumped out of the digger, shouting, ready to attack with my fists, helmet—whatever I could grab. “Get away from those kids, Lander!”

The figure turned around.

I stopped. I hadn’t been shot, but I felt like I had.

Elena Rosales grinned at me and scoffed. “What the heck is a Lander?”

Chapter Thirteen

Sleepwalking

I sat against the side
of the tunnel with my knees scrunched up between my arms, keeping my distance from Elena, who was sitting with her back against the opposite wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She couldn’t seem to keep them still.

We were able to turn off the lights in one section of the tunnel, so that became the sleeping quarters. Everyone else had gone to bed, but Elena and I moved back to a lighted part to talk.

She was filling me in on what had happened since the attack, but I just stared at her, dumbstruck.

I remembered the feel of her fingertips on mine just before the bombs hit. Her lips were moving, but I could
only remember how close they’d been to mine just before the Landers had attacked.

It had been only three days, but she was so different in every possible way. She had shaved half of her head.

“Most of it had burned off in the attack. I just finished it off,” she said. “I’m not sure how much will grow back, if any.”

There were wounds on her face.

“When the bullets started flying, I was hit, more by the shrapnel than the bullets.”

“So you were able to get up after that first bomb hit us?”

She nodded. “I was on the playground when another bomb went off. I woke up covered in rubble. By some miracle, the metal from the swing set had created a kind of roof over me. I was pinned, but not crushed. I could breathe, and I could see. I could also hear that the shooting had ended. I stayed as still as possible until I saw a chance to escape.”

“Escape?”

“It wasn’t really an escape in the end. They kind of all left, and I got up and made my way down here. I’d seen your dad grab you and head for the roof, so I figured that’s where everyone went—everyone who wasn’t killed.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Did you see him die?”

Elena shook her head. “They’d all retreated to the middle of the field, trying to draw the fire away from the core-scraper. I was running to help them, or die with them, when the second bomb knocked me out.”

We were silent for a long time. I stared at Elena while she rubbed her legs and stared at the ground.

She lifted her head and looked straight into my eyes. “Then, after they—what did you want us to call them, oh, Fearless Leader? Landers?”

I nodded.

She rolled her eyes. “After the
Landers
left, I snuck back into the core-scraper through a crack in the roof. There were plenty of those. I grabbed some supplies from my apartment, changed, and hailed the elevator. To be honest, I was totally surprised that the elevator worked.”

“So was I. If I’d known it was you—”

“It took me a whole day to figure out a way to open that stupid blast door by the way. Thanks for shutting that on me.”

“I’m sorry. . . .”

Elena held up her hand. “I’m just hassling. It was a sound decision. Real leadership, in fact.” She actually
gave me a little salute that didn’t seem ironic.

“I saw black boots under the door. You were wearing red boots at the party.”

“They were red,” she said, lifting her leg so I could get a closer look. The boots had been scorched black, the leather cracking and flaking. Elena’s pants rode up her leg a bit, and I could see blisters and burns on her as well. She quickly tugged her pant leg into her socks.

“Are you okay?” I asked, shaken.

“Sure.” She shrugged. “I basically had to rip the leggings off. They’d melted into my skin, so some of the skin came off too.”

“That . . . sucks.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. But I’m alive. Once I was in the infirmary, I was able to put some cream on the worst burns. My legs feel better now, more irritated than painful.”

The infirmary. I’d forgotten all about Alek!

“Did you see Alek?”

“I saw him. He’s alive.”

I let out a relieved whew.

“I should say he was barely alive, more like a zombie. As soon as I came through the infirmary door, he came rushing at me with a scalpel. Luckily, I recognized him and yelled, ‘Alek, it’s me, Elena!’ One look at me and he
just dropped the scalpel and stood there like a statue.”

“So why isn’t he with you?”

“He followed me for a bit while I walked around looking for a way to turn off those stupid emergency flashers and get some real light down here.”

“The emergency backup room? I looked for it.”

“It’s just past the entrance to Tunnel Four, but you probably didn’t know that. Alek started muttering something about threes and rights and lefts, and then he just sat down on the floor and refused to move.”

“I gave him directions to follow us.”

“I figured that out pretty quickly, but he’d forgotten the first bit.” Elena stared at me. “But I know how your brain works, Christopher Nichols, and figured if you ended with three you’d start with three, so I headed down Tunnel Three.”

“That’s how you found the camp.”

She nodded. “It took a while for the lights to actually kick in, which is why the kids looked so scared when I showed up, and then you blasted out of the wall like that. I guess there are no adults down here?”

I shook my head.

“Didn’t think so.” She stared at the floor again.

“But Alek is still out there,” I said. “We have to go find him.”

Elena didn’t move. “I couldn’t carry him in the dark. He was asleep when I left, hugging some crumpled-up piece of paper. I’m sure we can find him in the morning.”

I calmed down, but my head was still swimming with questions.

“Wait, how did you open the blast door again?”

“My dad was the foreman down here, remember? I knew there was always a backup system, even for the backup systems.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that your detonator cap only blew off the top layer of the panel. The wires underneath were still there. I just needed to figure out a way to get them to recognize the right sequence of electronic bursts. I tapped them together in different combinations, and one of them finally worked.”

I must have looked skeptical.

“What, you think you’re the only genius here?” She smiled, a real smile, and for a moment I saw the old Elena.

I smiled too.

“I looked for you right after the first bombs hit,” I said.

She closed her eyes. The smile vanished.

Idiot
, I said to myself.

“It was chaos up there. I was in a crater after the first bomb, then running through that black smoke, then under that pile of rubble. There was probably no way you’d have seen me. The Landers didn’t, thank goodness.” She paused and gave a deep sigh. “They just marched straight at the field, firing at everything that moved, or didn’t.”

“I saw it too.”

She paused. “You saw some. After you left.” It almost sounded like an accusation. “After you left, I heard them talking. They walked all around me, giving orders. Some spoke English. Some spoke Spanish. Some spoke other languages I couldn’t pick up. They’d been waiting for the Blackout. They are here to steal the ore.”

“Any idea who they’re working for?”

She shook her head. “Once they finished attacking, they all got back in the ship and just took off.”

“Which direction?”

“South.”

I nodded. “Toward the main storage depots.”

“Duh. They’re pirates, Christopher. They’ll take everything and leave us here to die.”

“So they don’t even know there are survivors down here?”

Elena gave an annoyed snort. “Either they didn’t see
or they didn’t care. What can a bunch of kids do, right?” Something in her tone suggested she agreed.

“Even if they do know about us, they probably just figure we’ll die of starvation.”

“They might be right,” Elena said. “I saw what you left behind in the cafeteria. There’s not enough food there to last more than a month.”

“We’ll find more.”

Elena smirked. “The break rooms? There’s not enough in those, either. Where do you think all the extra food for the party came from? And how long do you think all those vegetables and stuff will last before they go bad, even in a refrigerator?”

I had actually thought of that, but it was not a cheery thought, so I changed the subject.

“Just one ship?

Elena threw up her hands. “Yes. One ship. One
big
ship. One big enough to carry them and their weapons.”

“So they all left,” I said, thinking out loud. “Which means we can go back into the core-scraper for more salvage to help us survive.”

She stood up suddenly and glared at me. Her voice was trembling.

“Survival? That’s your big plan?”

“Survive. That’s what we do. What we need to—”

She cut me off. Her eyes were blazing. “We need to fight! That’s what you should be working out. A battle plan. How do we fight those stupid Landers? How do we kill them?” Elena was now standing over me, her fists clenched so tightly, her fingers were turning white.

Her rage took me off guard. I stayed on the floor and looked straight ahead, avoiding her eyes.

“We can’t fight them.”

“Christopher. They killed our parents. They killed our friends. They killed children.”

I said nothing.

“We have to fight!”

I tried to sound as calm as possible. “We are kids, not soldiers. Fighting the Landers will guarantee we all die.”

“This is a war.” She punctuated each word with a poke of her finger.

I shook my head. “No. It’s not. What we have here now is a different kind of mission.”

She snorted. “You really are the same kid. The Great Mission and all that garbage. How’s that working out for us?”

I ignored the jab. “My father made me promise that I’d protect them. He made me promise to be a leader.”

“You want to be a leader? Give those kids something to fight for.”

Now my anger rose, and I glared at her. “I
am
a leader. A ‘fearless leader,’ as you keep telling me, and I have kept these kids,
kids
, safe for a whole week. We have diggers. We can use them to move around, stay away from the Landers. We can find food, we can survive. We are still alive and we have a goal.”

She shook, her jaw clenched, her hands in tight fists. Just a few days ago we’d stood even closer, and she’d almost kissed me. Now she looked like she wanted to kill me.

“What goal? To sit here and wait for the Landers to actually come through that blast door? For the Landers to leave? To die in some stupid cave-in, or die after they leave, waiting for somebody to come save us? Earth has no idea what’s happened up here.”

“We can let them know,” I said quietly.

“How?”

“There’s a beacon.” I lifted my head and stared straight at her. She didn’t seem as impressed as I’d hoped.

“A what now?” she said, cocking her head.

“A beacon. My dad told me there’s a warning beacon that can send a message back to Earth.”

“So, where is it? Did he leave directions? A map?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“I think I had a map, but I lost it.”

“You think?”

I nodded.

“I think your dad made it up to get you in the elevator and give you some bizarre sense of hope.”

I thought of how my father had stared at me when he’d given me the backpack and the book. He hadn’t been lying. “It’s real,” I said firmly.

She lifted and dropped her arms in frustration. “It doesn’t even matter.”

“Why not?”

“Your plan is to get all these kids searching a giant underground maze for weeks, with no supply of food and water, for something completely hidden and completely useless.”

“We can use it to signal Earth.”

Elena scoffed. “There’s a blackout, remember?”

“After the Blackout ends.”

“We’ll all be
dead
!” she yelled. The sound echoed off the tunnel walls.

“Shhhhh. Keep your voice down. I already told you we can find more food and water. We can survive.”

Elena paced the floor. When she finally spoke again, she almost hissed. “You know how I said they were walking all around me as I lay there, burned,
alone
,
and covered in junk? They weren’t doing their morning exercise. They were laying bombs to destroy everything, including the terra-forming equipment and the water reservoirs. Once they are gone, the Perses colony will be nothing more than rubble and corpses.”

She let that sink in.

I knew right away what she meant. The Landers wouldn’t destroy the terra-forming technology until they were safely off the planet. They needed it too.

They’d wait until they were done, they’d leave, and then they’d trigger the bombs. If they’d done it right, it would look like there’d been some accident during the Blackout.

News would never reach Earth about anything if those bombs were detonated.

The Landers would get away with no witnesses and no evidence they’d ever been here. The beacon would never be activated.

The Blackout would get the blame.

Elena took a step toward me. “Not doing anything to stop them is suicide. And running is not doing anything. We will have to fight. Are you a leader who can help us do that?”

I was shaking, but Elena was right. The Landers were true enemies, and I couldn’t make her an enemy as well.

“I don’t want to fight you, Elena.” I paused and sighed. “And you
are
right. We will need to fight the Landers.”

She softened her stance.

“But doing it now would also be suicide.” I paused again, trying to search her face for some sign of my friend. “We can train the older kids—Pavel, Jimmi, and Maria—to drive, fight. We can strategize. I can’t do it alone.”

“Meaning?”

“Elena, I need your help.”

A glimmer of the Elena I knew crept back into her eyes.

She gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then she saluted and turned and walked silently back to the camp.