Saving Thanehaven (11 page)

“I know,” Rufus agrees. “It wouldn’t be smart. Which is why I don’t think it’s the monsters that are missing.” He taps his chin thoughtfully, his narrowed eyes flitting around the airlock. “There must be another level to this game,” he muses. “A higher skill level. Once you reach the Biolab, you must have to go somewhere else. Someplace that’s got people in it.” His tone sharpens. “Come on, guys! You must have
some
ideas! Don’t you even know your own ship?”

“What about …?” Yestin begins, before trailing off.

“What about what?” Rufus demands.

“What about B Crew?”

Rufus looks surprised. “B Crew?” he echoes.

Yestin glances beseechingly at Arkwright, who clears his throat and says, “B Crew are in the Stasis Banks.” Since this means absolutely nothing to either Rufus or Noble, Arkwright goes on to explain that there are two crews on board, each of which spends alternating four-year shifts in suspended animation, or cytopic stasis. According to Arkwright, there’s an entire second crew tucked away in a stack of sleeping pods on B Deck. “Normally, they’re comatose,” he relates, “but they might have woken up.”

“No. They haven’t.” It’s the teenage girl Merrit speaking. Her voice is high and thin and hoarse. “They won’t wake up. They can’t. They’re part of the ship now.”

Everyone turns to stare at her.

“I was in the Vaults with Haemon. Before you found us,” she quavers. “We saw B Crew and they were … they were being absorbed.”

“Absorbed?”
yelps Dygall.

“All the tubes in their arms and the ‘trodes on their heads—those things were growing into them.
Burrowing
into them,” she croaks.

Merrit croaks, “Like pink spiders.”

“You mean B Crew are dissolving?” Tuddor asks her.

She spreads her hands helplessly. “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell,” she replies.

“I bet they’re turning into zombies.” Rufus sounds
brisk and confident, as if he’s been expecting zombies. “I bet that’s what you have to deal with on the next skill level. Spaceship games are always full of zombies.” He breaks off suddenly, an expression of alarm on his face. “Did you hear that?” he says.

A red light starts to flash above the closed hatch just behind him. There’s a
clunk
, followed by a soft whining noise as the door panel begins its slow, grinding ascent into the wall.

“Quick! Run! Hide!” cries Rufus.

Noble is taken aback. For a moment, he just stands and gapes. Then Yestin seizes his hand and pulls him toward Rufus, who’s now plastered against the shiny white wall to the left of the rising door panel. It’s not much of a hiding place. If a dozen soldiers pour through the hatchway and turn their heads, Rufus won’t stand a chance.

Perhaps that’s why only Yestin has decided to run
into
the airlock. Everyone else is bolting in the opposite direction, scattering like cockroaches. Yestin hurls himself straight at the corner where Rufus is cowering. It’s a narrow wedge of space between two silver cylinders, just wide enough to fit Noble, Rufus, and Yestin if they squeeze together very tightly.

With his view of the door blocked by a silver cylinder, Noble can’t see what’s heading their way. But he can hear it.

“Is that the man in the white coat?” he hisses, over the shuddering roar of an engine.

“Shhh!”
Rufus is so intent on the intruder that he doesn’t even glance at Noble or Yestin. Perhaps Rufus doesn’t realize that Yestin is actually with them. It’s easy to overlook someone so small and skinny.

“Get back! Back!” Rufus orders, flattening his whole body against the wall behind him. Noble does the same—less successfully than Rufus, because he’s so large. Cringing in the shadows, they watch a white van roll past: first its wheel hubs, then its wing mirror, then its window.

“Wait for it …,” Rufus whispers. “Wait for it.…”

Noble hasn’t the faintest idea what they’re waiting for. But as the van keeps moving, exposing more and more of its glossy white flank, Rufus abruptly seizes Noble’s arm.

“Now!”
yips Rufus.

He yanks Noble off the wall and drags him past the van’s rear wheels, through the newly opened escape route. It all happens so quickly that Noble can’t quite grasp what’s going on. He completely forgets that he’s still holding Yestin’s hand. When the van doesn’t stop, he concludes that its driver hasn’t seen them. But before he can say so, Rufus jerks him around a corner.

That’s when Noble registers that he’s not on the spaceship anymore. He can’t be. The ship is all drooling soft tissue and exposed cartilage. It doesn’t have woolly pink rugs on shiny wooden floors, or pretty plaster rosettes on the ceiling. It’s not a maze
of well-stocked clothes racks, stretching off into the distance beneath rows of crystal chandeliers.

Noble peers around in a daze. Where is he? He knows he’s not in Thanehaven. No one wears feathery blue scarves or canary-yellow hats where he comes from.

“What are you doing?” he asks Rufus, who’s pulling him away from the hatch. Noble now has his back against a gleaming expanse of pink wallpaper, so he can’t see the hatch very well from where he’s skulking. But he’s still able to identify the telltale
thud
of an escape route being blocked. “We gave the AV the slip. He doesn’t know where we are.”

“
Who
doesn’t?” Yestin squeals. “Who
was
that?” He’s yanking at Noble’s other arm, so that Noble feels like the rope in a tug-of-war. “We’ve got to help the others!” Yestin pleads. “We’ve got to go back!”

“Oh!” Rufus blinks at Yestin, looking surprised. “Are you here? Good.”

“We have to rescue them!” the younger boy wails.

“Shhh.”
Rufus puts a finger to his lips. “We will. But we can’t hang around. We have to keep moving.”

“Why?” says Noble. He’s abandoned a bunch of children trapped in a monsters’ lair, and he doesn’t like it. “The man in the white coat—the AV—won’t come after us. I told you—he didn’t see us. He kept driving straight through the airlock.”

“He’ll know I’ve been on board, though,” Rufus insists. “And when he works
that
out, this is the first
place he’ll check after searching the ship. We can’t let him find us. Not yet.” Seeing Yestin’s crumpled face and welling eyes, Rufus adds, “We’ll figure it out. Trust me. I’m going to blow this whole place wide open.”

He darts off down a long aisle formed by two overburdened clothes racks. But when he realizes that no one’s following him, he stops and turns, beckoning furiously. “Do you want to be
replaced
?” he says. “Both of you?”

Noble admits that he doesn’t. Yestin mutely shakes his head.

“Then you’d better move fast,” Rufus advises them. “Because if you don’t, that’s what’ll happen!”

With a sigh, Noble submits. There’s no point arguing with Rufus. For a start, he’s the only one who seems to know what’s going on.

“Rufus is right,” Noble informs Yestin. “There are mighty forces arrayed against us. We can’t free your friends unless we defeat the Colonel. Once we do that, everything else will follow.”

He begins to trudge after Rufus, but Yestin still won’t budge.

“What about the others?” Yestin pleads. “Can’t we at least open the hatch for them?”

Noble hesitates. He glances back over his shoulder, noting that the hatch looks like an ordinary door from this side, complete with a keyhole and brass hinges. “Can we open that hatch again?” he says, appealing to Rufus. “It will give all of Yestin’s friends a chance.…”

Rufus shrugs. “Hey—if
you
want to do it, feel free. I can’t. Not without passwords or access codes. I only wish I
could
breeze through all the portals around here. I’d have done it already.” Standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, he adds fretfully, “God knows how we’re going to get out of
this
place. Unless I try another buffer overflow.”

“Where are we?” asks Noble. “It’s not Thanehaven.”

“No. It sure isn’t.”

“But you said we were going back to Thanehaven.”

“I said we’d
try
to get back to Thanehaven. I didn’t promise anything.” Pushing the hair out of his eyes, Rufus regards Noble with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. “Look—the trouble is, I’m improvising. Okay? I don’t really know my way around this computer. So why don’t you tell me what you can see from up there, huh? Since you’re the big guy in this partnership.”

Frowning, Noble peers across the vast array of clothes racks in front of him. He can see distant walls, which are paneled with pink brocade and hung with gilded mirrors. He can make out a carved door and a gigantic cupboard. But he can’t see any people.

“Looks to me like the coast is clear,” he remarks. “Unless someone’s hiding behind all these clothes.”

“Is there a way out?”

“There’s a door. And it’s open.”

“Lead me to it, then,” says Rufus. “And keep your voice down.”

Noble glances back at Yestin, who hasn’t stirred.
The poor child looks so bleached and sickly and fragile that Noble feels a momentary qualm. Is Yestin going to survive this quest? Will he prove to be a dead-weight?

Rufus doesn’t seem to think so. “Are you coming, kid? You don’t want to be here when that van shows up again.”

Yestin swallows, blinking like an owl. “Where are we going?” he whimpers.

“I dunno.” Rufus shrugs. “We’ll have to play it by ear.” He then moves away briskly, as if nothing more needs to be said.

It’s Noble who stands patiently until Yestin joins him. The little boy’s shoulders are slumped. He walks with a dragging step, sniffing and wiping his nose.

Noble can only sympathize. He’d rather be in Thanehaven, himself.

“There must be a lot of people around here somewhere,” he observes quietly, when he and Yestin finally catch up with Rufus. “Hundreds of people. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many clothes.”

Rufus snorts. “I wouldn’t count on it,” he mutters. “Lots of clothes don’t necessarily mean lots of people.”

Noble finds this hard to believe. He can’t comprehend why
anyone
would want more than half a dozen outfits. Yestin, however, is more open to the idea.

“If some of these are spare clothes,” he suggests, eyeing Noble’s naked torso, “then maybe you can borrow them.”

Noble doesn’t answer. He can’t see himself in a pair of mauve boots with stiletto heels. Or a sheepskin vest embroidered with flowers. Or polka-dot pants or a ruffled silk shirt or a pink plaid jacket …

“Ah,” says Rufus, who’s just reached the carved door. It’s standing slightly ajar, so he gives it a gentle push. Meanwhile, Noble quickly checks the hatch behind them.

But it hasn’t reopened.

“Hello?” says Rufus. “Anybody there?” He crosses the threshold, then stops short and says, “Oh! Hello. Mind if I join you?”

Cautiously, Noble follows him into a small, windowless, octagonal room with three other doors leading off it. Everything in the room is white and pink and gold. Noble has to shade his eyes from the overpowering dazzle of full-length mirrors, overstuffed satin couches, highly polished parquet, jeweled hair accessories, and yet another gigantic crystal chandelier. Amid all the glitter and sparkle are four willowy figures: three girls and a boy.

“Who are you?” chirps a shrill little voice, which belongs to a blonde girl posing in front of a mirror. She has the longest legs and the smallest waist that Noble has ever seen. Her nose is practically nonexistent, but her eyes and lips are huge.

She’s wearing silver shoes, a red fur jacket, and a skirt that’s hardly bigger than a belt.

Her two female friends share identical proportions
and a similar taste in clothes. One of them, however, is a redhead, while the other has shiny black hair. The boy’s hair is slick and brown. He’s dressed a bit like Rufus, except that his pants are cleaner and baggier, and he hasn’t lost his shirt.

Rufus smirks at the boy’s lavish display of earrings.

“I’m Rufus,” he announces. “And I’m here to set you free.”

But the blonde girl isn’t interested in Rufus. Her gaze has fastened on Noble, who can’t understand why she’s staring at him. The other two girls are doing the same thing; their enormous eyes are almost popping out of their heart-shaped faces, and their glossy mouths are hanging open. Even the boy seems dumbstruck.

“Oh, wow,” the redhead finally exclaims. “Skye! Brandi! Jay! Would you look at that? Can you
believe
that?”

“Believe what?” asks Noble. He’s beginning to feel unnerved. “What’s wrong? What have I done?”

“Don’t you realize?” This time, it’s the dark-haired girl who speaks. “Can’t you see in the mirror?”

“See what?” Noble demands.

The girls glance at one another, appalled. Then the redhead turns back to Noble and says, very slowly and clearly, as if she’s talking to an idiot,
“You’re not wearing any clothes!”

N
oble squints down at himself, suddenly anxious. But his breeches are still there.

“What do you mean?” he says. “Are you blind? I’m wearing my breeches.”

“Those things aren’t
clothes
,” the redheaded girl insists. “They’re
undergarments
.”

“He looks good, though, don’t you think?” the blonde girl pipes up—much to her friends’ dismay. They gaze at her in horror.

“You can’t look good without clothes, Brandi!” the black-haired girl points out.

Brandi, however, isn’t convinced. “Yes, you can,” she squeaks. “
He
does.” And she smiles at Noble. “I guess you work out, huh?”

Noble hasn’t the faintest idea what she’s talking
about. He turns to Rufus for help.

“Oh, man,” Rufus mutters, rolling his eyes. Then he heaves a sigh and says, “Come on, guys, are you listening? I’m here to set you free.”

Brandi’s gaze slides off Noble, coming to rest on Rufus instead. Her forehead doesn’t wrinkle when she raises her eyebrows.

“Free from what?” she inquires.

It’s a good question. From what Noble can see, all four of these strange beings are perfectly happy. Nothing seems to be threatening them. They’re not hurt, lost, or frightened. Compared to poor Yestin—who’s clinging to Noble with a viselike grip—Brandi and her friends appear to be having a pretty good time.