Mike Stellar (13 page)

I abruptly stopped running.
“What?
Kiss you? No! Of course not! Why would I want to do tha—”

Suddenly we heard footsteps rounding the corner.

“In here!” Larc said, swiping her flash key and opening a door right next to us. She dragged me into the dark apartment. We both stood there for a minute, breathing hard and listening even harder. We didn’t hear anything. My heartbeat began to calm down and I looked around. The apartment was dark but I could still see that it was pretty much the same as my apartment.

“Whose apartment is this?” I asked, picking up a small globe that was sitting on a shelf near the door.

“Aunt Beebo’s.”

I almost dropped the globe.
“Your aunt Beebo’s?”
I felt my skin crawl as I realized I was standing in the lair of the devil. “Do you know what she would do if she knew I was in here?”

Larc offered, “She’d probably be relieved that you weren’t getting pummeled by some insane person who was chasing you in the hallway.”

“Relieved?” I laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your aunt Beebo
was
the crazy person chasing us in the hall.”

“Don’t be silly. She’s teaching class, remember?” Larc wandered over to the kitchen and pushed a couple of buttons. “Do you want a drink or something?”

I wanted to say no, but then I thought a drink would actually be nice. “Okay,” I grumbled, and Larc handed me a pouch of water.

She said, “Anything to eat? A snack or something? You didn’t eat much for lunch.”

I chuckled. “You’re acting like my mother.” Then I said quietly, “No, I don’t want anything. Thanks, though.”

It always seems dorky to say things that are polite to your friends. Why is that? I drank my water…. Hmm. Friends. Did I think of Larc as my friend? It still seemed like we hardly even knew each other.

Larc walked out of the kitchen and into the little living room. She sat on the sofa.

“We can still study, if you want.”

I made a
pssssh
noise and waved my hand like I was backhanding a bug.

“What do you want to do, then?”

“Besides not get in trouble for hacking some internal system? Oh, I don’t know….” I gave Larc an exasperated look. “Play handball?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Go study by yourself, then.”

“How are you not worried about this?” I asked incredulously. “We just saw our parents and a bunch of other people on some secret internal surveillance system.
And they might have even seen us.
This doesn’t bother you because …?”

“Because nothing, Mike. If they were doing some kind of secret thing, they won’t come after us.”

“Why not?”

“Because, dope, if they come after us, they have to admit that
they
were doing something that obviously isn’t protocol.”

“Oh,” I said. “Hmmm. That’s a very good point.”

Larc showed off her blue braces with a big smile. “So are we going to study or what?”

I wandered around the apartment, looking at odds and ends on the shelves lining the walls. There were old-fashioned poetry books and glowing knickknacks everywhere. I drank a sip of my water. After a bit of awkward silence, I said, “Has your dad been acting weird lately?”

Larc cocked her head to the side and said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean weird. Has he been acting secretive or whispery or anything? Does he raise his eyebrows a lot? Is he reading books?”

Larc raised
her
eyebrows and smiled in a joking way.
Then she said seriously, “I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any books around. And he’s no weirder than usual. He always has classified projects he’s working on for the Project. He doesn’t talk about those. But I don’t know if you’d call that being secretive. Why do you ask?”

I didn’t know why I was opening up to this girl, but when I started talking, it was like white-water rapids. I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d wanted to. By the time I finished, I’d told her practically everything. From Mom and Dad’s acting so preoccupied, to Mr. Shugabert’s creepy smile and knack for being everywhere, to Nita’s strange request about Hubble … I just blurted it all out. And the whole time I talked, Larc sat on the sofa, looking thoughtful and never interrupting. Sometimes she played with her hair. Other times she wrinkled her lips over her teeth like she was trying to make sure her braces were still there. But she always kept her eyes on me and acted like she was taking everything in.

When I finished, I collapsed next to her on the sofa, dropping my empty water pouch on the floor. She got up and walked out of the room. A few minutes later she came back with a fresh water pouch and a candy bar. She handed them to me without saying anything.

“That was some story,” she said finally. “I’d like to meet your friend Stinky. He seems like a nice boy.”

“He is,” I agreed. “He’s a really cool guy.”

“I’d like to meet his brother, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hubble was a great guy, too.”

“Your sister sure seemed to think so.”

I gave a halfhearted gag. “Nita probably thought they were going to get married one day.”

“Maybe they would have.”

I thought about that. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard for me to remember how Nita used to be. When Hubble went on the
Spirit
mission, and then disappeared … she got so mean and mad all the time. And I just pretended like Hubble never existed. I was afraid if I talked about Hubble, Stinky wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. Anyway …” I trailed off.

Larc patted my shoulder. “It must have been a real smack in the head to have everyone turn against you—even your sister.”

“Smack in the face, you mean?” I started chewing my fingernails. “Yeah, it was. I mean, it’s not like I had a million friends to start with, but yeah, I guess. Nita and I used to be friends. I just got lucky that Stinky didn’t start hating me.”

“Why would he have?” Larc asked softly.

“I … I should probably get going,” I said abruptly, moving away from Larc. “It’s getting late. I have to find out if I can get the com-bracelet hack to work, and if Mom and Dad have heard anything from Nita.”

“Right,” Larc said, putting her hands in her pockets. “Keep me updated.”

I turned around to make my way out the door and spotted a framed certificate on the wall.

I made a face. Excellence in teaching, my butt. I reached up to wipe some dust off the glass so I could see the date on the certificate, and—
whoosh
—the door flew open.

Mrs. Halebopp stood there, with her black eyes wide as ever. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look startled. I immediately yanked my hand off the framed certificate. It was one of those instinctual yanks that you do when you’re caught, and I totally pulled the frame off the wall by accident. It crashed to the floor and the glass shattered.

Mrs. Halebopp’s startled look quickly turned into a scowl.

“S-sorry,” I stammered. “I can clean it up.” I knelt down and fumbled with some of the large pieces of glass.

“Leave it,” she said in a hushed tone that meant she was already planning the recipe for boiling my hide.

“What’s happening here, Larc?” she asked crisply, setting the book she was carrying onto a shelf and marching over to where Larc was standing. Mrs. H stood there, arms crossed, shooting fire from her eyes, and Larc, bless her amazing soul, launched into this
long story about coming here to study because it was neutral territory, blah blah.

I was still kneeling by the broken glass when I saw a piece of paper that had slipped out from under the certificate. I couldn’t see all of it, just the top part. It looked like a poem or something. I have no idea why I did it, but I snatched the piece of paper and shoved it deep into my pocket. I stood up. Larc and Mrs. H were still having a somewhat heated conversation about “boundaries” and “responsibilities” when I bolted out the door. Fight-or-flight had kicked in late. Thankfully, flight won.

After running at top speed for a few minutes, I stopped to catch my breath. The regulated seventy-two-degree temperature in the ship was suddenly feeling very hot. I didn’t think Mrs. H was going to chase me, but I had run just to be sure. Now I was huffing and puffing, my mind struggling to make sense of what had happened. Why had I just opened up like that to Larc? I guess because she was nice. Crazy. But nice. And she seemed to like me, or at least like talking to me. And it had been so long since I’d had a friend other than Stinky.

I wiped my face and reached into my pocket.

“anyone lived in a pretty how town” by e. e. cummings.

Weird.

It had been
almost a week since we’d found out about Nita. There was still no word from her. My secret attempt to hack Nita’s com-bracelet was moving at a teeth-gnashingly slow pace. After the first success of hacking into Larc’s monitor, I’d had no luck with anything. I was down to three hours of sleep a night, trying to get the stupid thing to work.

Understandably, Mom and Dad were even more preoccupied than usual. They spent almost all their free time locked in their bedroom. I tried listening through the door several times, but I could never hear anything.

They hardly noticed my sunken zombie eyes and I pretended not to care that they ignored me most of the time. None of us had mentioned anything about the whole “whoops, look who’s on the computer monitor”
thing, so it looked like that little catastrophe was going to pass under the radar. Whew.

I was now on my way to “rendezvous” with Stinky. My parents didn’t know I was gone, and I had about twenty minutes until they woke up. Before calling Stink, though, I had something important to do. I’d tried to hack into the navigation system so that I could find out where the ship was going, but the code was taking me forever to penetrate. I’d tried asking Mom, but she just kept vaguely assuring me that everything was okay. She wouldn’t say what the deal was with the plasma propulsion and I knew there was no way we could make it to Mars without a full charge. So if we weren’t going to Mars, then where
were
we going? With Mom’s suspicious answers I figured it’d just be faster to bust into the flight deck, take a quick look around, and figure it all out for myself. I had done some research (well, hacking) into the mainframe of the
Sojourner
and found the captain’s personal and professional schedule. He was supposed to be in the gym having a morning workout. That meant the autopilot systems were running the ship and I could slip onto the flight deck without being spotted.

I walked quickly to the flight deck door at the front of the ship. Glancing around, I didn’t see anyone, which was a miracle. I took a deep breath and stared at the keypad next to the locked door. It had one row of
letters, one row of numbers, and one row of symbols. Dang.

I knew there was going to be a keypad, but I thought it was going to be a regular one, not a fancy-shmancy one. Dang. Dang. Double dang. My plan had been to try Mom’s code for the house back on Earth.

Dang.

I looked over my shoulder again; then I held my breath and tried Mom’s code anyway, just ignoring the letters and symbols. I was rewarded with the loudest buzz I’d ever heard. I winced and ducked, looking around for anyone who might have heard the deafening noise.

One more try
, I thought,
and then I’m going to have to just take the time to hack the navigation system.
I steeled myself and steadied my finger.

I tried a trick Hubble had taught me. Most security systems have a backdoor code for emergency personnel and repairmen and people like that. The backdoor code for the keypad at home was every single key on the keypad, in order, one after the other. I gave it a whirl.

Bzzzzzzzzzzz.

I should have known that wouldn’t work…. Too simple. I looked at my watch. Five minutes until I was supposed to contact Stinky. I was just going to give up, but I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye.

Sugar Bear.

He was coming down the stairs from the observation deck and he was headed straight for me. It didn’t look like he could see me—there was a tree kind of obscuring me—but he was heading down the stairs at a pants-on-fire pace. Had he heard the buzzes?

Wait!
I suddenly remembered the keypad on our drivedropper at home. We hardly ever used it because Mom and Dad had remotes on their key chains, but it had the letters/numbers/symbols interface. I wasn’t sure if I had it right or not, but I held my breath and tried the drivedropper code anyway. To my surprise, the keypad turned green.
Mom’s really got to work on her security protocols
, I thought, laughing. The door whooshed open and I darted inside, just missing Shugabert.

Once on the flight deck, I took a minute to catch my breath. It would so suck if I had a heart attack.

“Mom?” I said, knowing she wasn’t there. “Mom, are you here?” I figured it was a good cover if someone
was
here. I was just looking for my mom, right?

I glanced around the room. In a corner was the air lock capsule they used for spacewalking. The suits hung in the capsule, their huge helmets hanging limply, like decapitated ghosts. I shivered and walked over to a strange desk at the front of the room. It was placed in a clear alcove so that it looked like it was just floating in space. As I checked out all the computers and various
equipment it held, one screen caught my attention. It had a red dot blipping along a curved line, kind of like a really old-fashioned radar screen. Under the blip, a list of coordinates streamed. From what I could tell, they were charting a path. Each coordinate had a corresponding date and time and—suddenly there was a loud …