1942664419 (S) (15 page)

“Come on! Try harder!”

The fire in my shoulder deepened. I let my other arm fall. “I can’t.”

“Oh no,” David whispered.

“What? What is it?” I squirmed, trying to reach for him again.

Something chirped and chittered beside my ear.

“
Ereb catalle est
.” David’s tone scared me more than the unfamiliar words.

Taking a deep breath, I forced my free hand upward until David’s fingers vised around mine. I rose slightly as the chirping grew louder.

“
Ereb catalle
!”

David released one of my hands as strange, hairy fingers crawled up my arm. I screamed and flailed, dislodging whatever had been there. The darkness took on a silver-gray tone at the bottom of my field of vision. A shadow only, not enough to see what accosted me.

Two prickly somethings crawled up my back. “David!”

“I see them. Don’t let go.”

“You see who? What is it?” My body swayed as I looked over each shoulder. My mind envisioned fanged horrors inching up my shirt, ready to bite. I whimpered as my sweaty hand began to slip from David’s grip. “I’m falling.”

“Jess, no!”

My hand slid free.

A coppery odor mixed with the humid air whipping around me. I heaved and lurched to the side, falling forever. The creatures on my back released me, and the wind swirled, raising me like a vortex. My hip slurped into a gelatinous surface before I skidded downward as if on a slide.

Then the slide ended.

“No!” I scrabbled and clawed as my legs and hips breached the edge. I kicked my feet, imagining I hung on the brink of nothingness.

Wind whisked past my ears, blowing my hair into my face. I grappled with the gelatinous mush covering the flat surface I clung to, but my fingers found nothing to hold. Down I slid, until bony fingers heaved from below, pushing my ribs and propelling me upward. I flipped over and slammed into the muck.

What just happened?

I lay on my back, grayness coating my vision. My panting filled my ears. I was alive. Actually alive!

“Jess!” David’s voice came from above, but distant. “Stay still. I’m coming!”

I imagined myself on a narrow ledge. A wall on one side and near death looming just inches away. Stay still? No problem.

The darkness beside me chittered. Something tangled in my hair. Every goose bump on my body goosed at the same time. “David,” I whispered. “Where are you?”

His voice echoed down to me. “It’s
grassen
. A lot of them. Don’t move. I’m coming!”

Grassen
? As in watermelon-sized spiders? I squeezed my eyes shut as a hairy finger grazed my cheek.
Don’t bite me. Please, please, please don’t bite me
.

How far had I fallen? Was David a mile away? Three miles away?

I blinked, and a murky form tilted from side to side over my face. Three spectral, glowing spheres cut through the shroud glazing my sight. Something chirped.

My shriek echoed through the chamber. Swiping the beast from my face, I sat up. Black blurs scattered in the soft gray hues still coating my vision.

“Jess, stay still.” David’s voice was close.

“Where are you?”

“Just above you. I don’t want to hop down and startle them. Are you hurt?”

“Startle them? How many them?”

The gloppy goo shifted beside me, and a big, dark, wonderful, blurry figure of David filled my vision. I reached where I thought his face would be.

“Can you see?” He took my hands.

“Only shadows.”

His form shifted. “You’re probably better off.”

“Where are the spiders?”

“The
grassen
? They’re gone.”

I gulped. “Are we on the staircase thingy?”

“Yes.”

My stomach sank. We could be miles above the floor. “Can the ambassador find us here?”

“There are two people sitting on the ship’s spine. Yes, I’m sure he’ll find out soon if he doesn’t know already.”

I rubbed my eyes, smearing greasy goo across my lids. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. If I—” Bright spots of light blasted past my face. “Wait!” Blinking hard, I turned to David. Color shot into my sight, startling me.

David’s blurry form moved closer. “You can see me?”

I blinked again, and his beautiful turquoise eyes came into focus.

“Yes!” I wiped away the goo. “I can see! I can actually see!”

David pulled me to him. “You don’t know how relieved I am to hear you say that. I’ve never heard of impedance barbs causing blindness. I wasn’t sure how long it would last.”

“I’m just glad it’s over.”

Then again, maybe the blindness was a blessing. We sat submersed nearly to our hips in what looked like strawberry-lemon JELL-O. Peachy-pink blobs dripped from my fingers.

I flared my nose at the coppery stench and rubbed my hands on my shirt. Yuck.

Darkness surrounded us: a vast space with miniature pinpoint lights hovering and moving in the distance. The only illumination came from the JELL-O staircase that reached several stories above and so far below I couldn’t see the bottom.

“Whoa.”

“Yeah,” David said. “We’re lucky this is a small ship. We could have been killed.”

Small? The Eiffel Tower was small. Dang.

He looked over the edge. “And the
grassen
carried you onto this shelf when you fell. That was one of the strangest thing’s I’ve ever seen.”

I cringed. “The spiders put me up here?”

He nodded.

The lights swirling through the darkness seemed to chase each other and separate—sometimes moving as one, other times moving in miscellaneous directions. Was that the glowing eyes of the
grassen
way out there in the dark?

“Why didn’t they hurt me?”

“I haven’t got the slightest idea. This is their world, not ours. They instinctively attack anyone entering the center of the ship. It’s one of the reasons no one ventures into the heights. Normally the
grassen
would protect this place as fiercely as you’d protect your own home.” He inched out. “There is another alcove below us. I think we can swing down.”

My eyes widened. “Swing down? Are you crazy?”

He reached for me. “We have to get moving. It’s either up, or down.”

Sure. Easy to say when you’re freaking Spider-Man.

David slithered over the edge and hung down before dropping onto the next platform of goo. His feet squished as if he’d splatted into a mucky mud puddle. “It’s not that far. Hop down.”

Hop down
, he says. Who did he think I was, the Easter Bunny?

Stinking, stupid, athletic alien.

My hands slipped as I groped for a hold in the peachy-pink goo, but slid right off the ledge. I gasped and jerked to a stop in David’s arms. Panting, I clung to him, my heart thumping through my ribcage.

Ground. I needed safe ground, but for now, I pulled deeper into his arms. “How come whenever we get together someone is always chasing us?”

David smiled. “I’m just a lowly scientist. It must be you.” He set me down and looked into the abyss. All I wanted to do was crawl back into his arms and pretend everything was okay.

“The next one is a little farther,” he said,

Farther?
“Great. Can’t wait.”

He eased off the ledge and swung down, but his hands still gripped the shelf.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

David heaved back onto the platform, the muscles in his arms nearly burst through his white shirt. He rolled onto his back, sinking an inch into the goo, and looked toward the ceiling.

I eased beside him. “What is it?”

He turned to me. “We’re on top of the
entaligran
. It’s attached directly underneath this step.”

“In-telegram? What does that mean?”

“Consider it the brain of the ship.” His gaze traveled back to the ceiling.

“Is that bad?”

“No.” He sat up and tapped his fingers on his lips. “There is a child’s story about a boy named Champlier Ebon. He was on a ship that was taken over by a being that had infused itself into the ship’s biological systems.”

“Kind of like the Brother’s Grimm for outer space?”

He tilted his head in that condescending
you make no sense
sort of a way before continuing. “Champlier Ebon climbed the ship’s spine, battling
grassen
to get to the
entaligran
.”

He scooted around me and dug his fingers into the goo, pulling out a blob and setting it to the side. After three more fistfuls, he motioned me to join him. The goo squashed between my fingers, warm, wet, and puke-worthy. Yuck. I pulled out a pile and placed it beside us.

“There it is,” David said.

Within the strawberry-lemon JELL-O laid a soccer ball-sized magenta sphere.

“Is that the in-telegram?”

David nodded. “Champlier Ebon punched the
entaligran
, damaged it enough to start a slow, unnoticeable chain reaction.” He turned to me. “It gave him just enough time to climb down and get off the ship before complete systems degradation.”

My eyes widened. “Are you talking about a self-destruct button? What about all the people on the ship? What about Nematali?”

He leaned back. “It won’t happen that quickly. Once the reaction starts, the security systems will trigger an evacuation to make sure everyone gets off.”

“And what, we sneak out with everyone else?”

“Exactly. What’s even better is that every escape ship will be scanned, and all contents and passengers accounted for. If anyone tries to smuggle off the mustard powder or any of its components, the elements will be found and neutralized.” He pointed at my backpack. “And we can give them the existing powder. Anything that’s left on the ship will be destroyed when the ship loses cohesion. It’s perfect, and no-one gets hurt.” He looked away and nodded, almost as if he were trying to convince himself.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“The histories teach that we had nearly a million passenger ships when we first left Erescopia. There are only several thousand left.” He glanced up toward the moving lights in the distance. “This cruiser is not large, but it’s not small either. Our ships are precious commodities. Purposely damaging one is unthinkable.”

“Then let’s do something else.”

“Like what?” He ran his fingers through his raven locks. “That’s why they probably chose this powder. The only way we have to demolecularize
colotia
is a cataclysmic explosion, and the only way to trigger that kind of energy is to sacrifice a ship. No one in his right mind would destroy one of our vessels.”

The muscles in his neck contracted as he gulped. I guess there was no assembly line building liquidic ships out here in space. “David, you need to decide what to do. I can’t make this decision for you.”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and returned his gaze to me. “My people are going to inhabit Mars. We won’t need to live on ships anymore. This cruiser is a small price to pay to keep Earth safe.”

The conviction in his voice startled me: firm and resolute, despite the anxiety in his eyes. He was about to do something unthinkable, and all to save Earth. To save me.

I choked down the painful ball building in my throat and inched toward the edge. Darkness and flittering firefly lights sank into oblivion. Damn, that was a long way down.

“How long will we have to get away?”

David shrugged. “It depends on how hard I punch it. They don’t exactly give you directions on how to destroy a ship in flight school.”

I crinkled my brow. “So you are going off a fable. You don’t even know if this will work?”

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

“What if we … ”

David made a fist and hit the magenta ball. His knuckles shot back toward him. “Ouch.” He shook his hand.

So much for fairytales. “Now what?”

He grimaced, gazing into the swirling magenta orb. “They’re supposed to be incredibly delicate. That’s why they’re covered by developing tissue, and guarded by the
grassen
.”

“But if we can’t break it … ”

He punched again. And again. And again.

The glowing staircase winked out, leaving us in darkness.

Oh, shi
…

The staircase slowly regained its glow. Pinkish vapor rose from the in-telegram as the stench of copper and garlic-coated fish surrounded us.

“Ugh.” I waved near my nose. “What … ”

A deep, bellowing tone like a whale dying echoed through the chamber. In the distance, the
grassen’s
shiny, lighted eyes froze, shimmied in place, and then started heading in our direction. The sounds of thousands of chittering bugs filled the air.

That couldn’t be good.

David took my hand. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

He grabbed my waist, and we dove off the platform. The stench deepened and assaulted my tongue as I screamed.

We squished onto the next shelf and the next. The chittering behind us increased in intensity. Yellow light flew into my face. Hairy legs scratched at my arms.

Grassen
. Hundreds of
grassen
. Hundreds of hundreds.

The creatures swarmed over us like a legion of hornets. I skidded from David’s arms as he struggled to beat the giant spiders off his shoulders. He cried out, and I leaped toward him. But something wrapped around my ankle, pulling me back. Three shimmering opal eyes looked back at me from the edge of my jeans. I froze as one gray leg inched up from its purplish-black counterparts and pointed at me. Huge jaws chittered.

“Yuck!”

I kicked the giant spider off and made my way toward David, only to be pulled back. Bony, hairy legs wrapped around my wrists, raising me into the air. I screamed, helpless and floating.

David’s growl echoed through the chamber, overcoming the chatter of the spiders. He struck the gross, hairy bugs, throwing them off one at a time, but they had hundreds of friends.

My bugs plopped me back on the platform above David. My butt sank deep into the goo. The sticky surface slurped as I scrambled to the edge and peered over.

Thousands of spiders amassed on the ledge where David and I had been.