Dangerous (9 page)

“We won’t,” said Wilder. “That’s what a team is for.”

Ruth looked at Wilder, considering, then said, “Okay.”

Mi-sun put her hand out. Wilder put his hand on top of

hers and the rest of us followed, as if we were a Little League

team. It did make me feel safer somehow.

“Did you guys know that fireteam is a military term?” Mi-

sun’s voice was so trembly from her shaking I had to strain to

understand. “My mom’s military. A fireteam is the smallest unit

of s-s-soldiers.”

“Fitting, since we’re probably being reprogrammed into the

advance force of an alien invasion,” said Jacques.

66

Dangerous

“I highly doubt that,” Wilder said.

“Why would the tokens seize us and ignore the adults?”

asked Mi-sun.

“I don’t know.” Jacques stared at his hand. “Does my skin

look weird to you?”

“Your everything looks weird to me,” said Ruth, eating a

protein bar.

Jacques peered closer at his arm. “It feels weird . . .”

Mi-sun bumped into me, and I could feel how hard she

was shaking. She reminded me of Baron Harkonnen, Luther’s

pet bunny. The baron wasn’t exactly a calming influence. Every

time anyone held him, that rabbit literally vibrated with panic, his

pink eyes open wide, fuzzy white nose going like a jackhammer.

Mi-sun’s just a kid, I reminded myself, and I wished my

mom were there to take care of her.

“So is your dad military too?” I asked, hoping to distract her.

“No. He’s crazy,” said Mi-sun.

Wilder and Jacques looked up. Mi-sun’s gaze was full of

stars, but her mouth was serious.

“He hasn’t hurt anyone yet, so insurance won’t send him

to an institution. He just stays home and g-g-grumbles. After

school, when my mom’s at work, I take care of my little broth-

ers. Sometimes I have to take my dad food. When I open his

door, the grumbles turn into yells. Usually that’s all he does, but

sometimes—”

“Mi-sun,” I said, interrupting her in case she wanted to stop

talking.

“Sometimes he’s on top of the dresser or in the closet or—”

“Mi-sun,” Jacques said, as if afraid to hear any more.

“Or in the bathroom. One time I found him with our

67

Shannon Hale

stuffed animals. He must have sneaked out of his room when

we were asleep and taken them. He had them in the ba-bathtub,

pushing them under the water, and . . . and I don’t want to go

home.”

“What does he say?” Wilder asked. “When he grumbles.”

“
Herma, harma, herma
,” Mi-sun said in a scratchy low imi-

tation of her father. “
Herma arrgh toast soup. Toast soup crunchy

toast eat it.
”

Jacques and Ruth laughed. Mi-sun’s pale cheeks turned

bright with a pleased blush.

Wilder rubbed the back of his head.

“You’ve got a headache too,” I said.

“Feels like there’s a rat with steel claws trapped in there,” he

said, touching the top of his neck, “trying to dig free.”

That was exactly what it felt like, except the rat was clawing

at my forehead. I laughed a little, and Wilder smiled, then we

both laughed because what else are you supposed to do when

you’re orbiting the Earth and alien technology is making your

head feel like a cage for violent vermin?

I couldn’t keep laughing for long. By the time I climbed

back into the pod, I could barely see for the pain.

“Wait,” I said as Dragon harnessed me in. “What if we
are

the advance force of an alien army sent to destroy Earth—”

“You’re nobody’s puppet, Brown,” he said, patting my head.

“And if I’m wrong, I’ll take you out myself and save the world.”

I couldn’t focus on his expression through the pain, but I

was almost sure he was kidding.

We started the long descent, and I could feel force again

as my shoulders pressed against the harness. Jacques was say-

ing, “Oh
bleep
, oh
bleep
, oh
bleep
. . .” Apparently for his fear of
68

Dangerous

heights, going down was worse than going up. I barely registered

the planet enlarging outside my slit window. Pain screamed in

my brain.

Suddenly space was gone, and we were in a barely blue sky,

early in the morning. The pod stopped with a sigh followed by

a snap. The door hushed open, and warm, humid air gushed in.

I climbed onto the ocean platform, gravity a giant’s hand

pushing down. My arms were like logs, my neck felt too weak

to hold my head.

Ruth shoved past me, announcing to all of Earth that she

was starving.

A breeze tickled the hairs on my face and hand and seemed

to tie the world together—rough morning sun, swishing air, salty

scent, and huge spaces of quiet. I gazed at the sliding color of the

sky while my feet pressed hard against the ground and almost said,

“Where do I belong?” Aloud, the question would have sounded

cheesy and immature. But quiet in my head, it was small and

hard and perfect, like a seashell.
Where do I belong
?

Ruth sat on the pocked metal floor and ripped open a bag

of potato chips.

As soon as we were back in Texas on the shuttle van to

HAL, I asked to borrow Howell’s phone.

“Flapping mouths will prove dangerous,” she said. “You’ll

be able to contact your parents shortly, but first, let’s figure out

as much as we can.”

I hugged my chest and stared out the window. The world

pulsed with pain.

We spent the rest of the day in a large lab examined by

Howell’s MDs and PhDs. Pain meds did nothing. One bonus of

the crippling headache was that I barely noticed the spinal tap.

69

Shannon Hale

When the doctors sent us to bed, I flailed through sleep,

the headache riding with me into dreams and out again. It was

easier to just give up trying.

All my stuff had been moved into my cozy room, so I

tossed aside the boot camp jumpsuit and dressed in my Normal

Maisie uniform: hightop sneakers, jeans, peach cotton blouse, a

clay bead necklace and silver hoop earrings. I brushed my hair

back into my usual ponytail.

I had a sudden conviction that Wilder was leaving his

room. I squeaked open my door, and there he was, just shutting

his own.

He glanced at me. He took a double take. “You changed.”

I touched my face. “Is the alien worm rewriting my DNA?”

“No, I mean . . .” he gestured to my clothing.

I couldn’t read his expression. “So are you still going to be

zombie-weird or are you normal-weird again?”

He frowned. “Sorry. Kinda. I don’t know. Can we just start

over?” He stuck out his left hand. “Hi, I’m Jonathan Ingalls

Wilder. And you are?”

“Being eaten from the inside out by a rabid hamster.”

He didn’t respond.

“Maisie Brown,” I said and shook his hand. And that was it.

He’d chosen to erase everything that had happened between us.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, businesslike.

I didn’t answer—the words on my tongue were borrowed

from Jacques’s lexicon.

I followed Wilder to the lab, where the whitecoats were

pleased to subject us to more tests. In between my duties as a

lab rat, I started to take apart an electron microscope. No one

stopped me.

70

Dangerous

A crash startled me to my feet. Ruth stood beside the metal

ruins of an examination table, her face redder than her hair.

“I didn’t mean to.” She stared at her hands. “This morning I

tore off the faucet in my sink. I feel so weird, as if . . .” Her gaze

wandered to the food table in the adjoining conference room.

“Ooh, ham!”

Jacques and Mi-sun had arrived too. Jacques wasn’t wear-

ing his black geek glasses, and his face seemed smaller, younger.

Mi-sun was shaking away.

“Have the rest of you noticed increased strength?” Wilder

asked.

Mi-sun and I shook our heads.

“No, but . . .” Jacques scooted in closer and whispered. “I

clogged the shower drain.”

“Gross!” Ruth said.

“It wasn’t me! I mean . . .” Jacques held out his hand, palm

down. “Watch.”

The back of his hand seemed a little shinier than before,

and then his knuckles smoothed over as if being airbrushed.

Something the color of his skin was growing over his hand. He

removed a perfect mold and handed it to Wilder.

“Jacques is molting,” Mi-sun said.

“It’s not skin,” said Wilder.

There was another crash. Ruth stood over a broken confer-

ence table, a sandwich in each hand.

“Oops,” Ruth mumbled, her mouth full.

“Ruth, are your clothes pinching on you?” Wilder asked.

“What? No! I’m not gaining weight. I’m just . . . really hungry.”

But one of the doctors put Ruth on a scale and reported

she’d gained thirty pounds since before our space trip.

71

Shannon Hale

“She looks the same to me,” I said.

“And thirty pounds can’t explain all that strength . . .” Wild-

er glanced at me as if I’d know why.

“Maybe she’s denser,” I said.

“Maybe
you’re
denser,” said Ruth.

So I shut up. But I was thinking about how everything is

mostly empty space. If you compacted all the atoms in the plan-

et, Earth would be the size of a golf ball and yet still weigh the

same and have the same gravitational pull. What if the atoms of

Ruth’s skin, muscles, and bones were compacting, even a little?

With less space between the protons and electrons, her atoms

would weigh the same but be so much denser. The repulsion

between the protons and electrons would have to be masked

somehow, and scientifically, that was
impossible
, but that word

was rapidly losing meaning to me.

My headache was easier to bear when I was busy, so I

kept fiddling with the electron microscope while Wilder talked

with Mi-sun. She was gripping her hands together, but when he

pulled them apart and touched her hand to his, he said he felt

a prickling.

It was too hard to follow the conversation from under my

cloud of pain. I put the microscope back together. Sometime

later I heard a scream.

There was a small hole in the conference room wall, and

on the other side Ruth was laid flat. She jumped back up, pluck-

ing a metal tack out of her shirt.

“Are you guys mental?” she said, hurling it back at the floor.

“I have a feeling,” Wilder said quietly, “that tack would have

gone straight through anyone besides Ruth. Let’s try something

less lethal.”

72

Dangerous

Mi-sun pinched Cheerios between her thumb and forefin-

ger and aimed at the wall. The cereal shot from her fingers in

an electric-blue streak, hit the wall, and shattered.

This was getting too bizarre. I started taking apart a defibril-

lator. I knew Wilder was standing next to me before I looked up.

“What are you up to?” Wilder asked me.

“Just . . . you know . . . preparing a defibrillator in case

someone gets heart failure from Code Blue over there,” I said,

nodding at Mi-sun.

One of the whitecoats returned with a piece of Jacques’s

shedding and spoke to Howell. “I couldn’t cut through it with

anything we have here. My best guess? It’s a polymer—”

“Of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen,” said another whitecoat,

swaying side-to-side, too excited to stand still. “Or maybe nitrogen!”

“What is it?” Mi-sun asked.

“Plastic,” I said.

Strong plastic, grown like armor. These changes weren’t dis-

ease symptoms. These were very specific alterations to our bodies.

Or to Ruth, Mi-sun, and Jacques anyway. What about me

and Wilder, the headache twins?

“Are we dying?” I asked Dragon.

“Your vitals are good.” He showed me scans of my brain,

and I could see the color blobs were different prespace and

postspace. “That red streak is usually a dormant area, but

yours is hot.”

I was trying to read Dragon’s notes when a loud
clang

knocked my headache. Howell was shaking a brass bell like an

old-time town crier.

“Time for talking, my chickadees,” said Howell. “Time for

deciding.”

73

C h a p t e r 1 1

Dragon led the five of us to Howell’s office, plush with

carpet, garish wallpaper, and floral-patterned sofas.

Wilder’s dad, GT, was leaning against Howell’s desk at the

head of the room. His hair was combed back under a baseball

cap, and he wore a plain T-shirt and cutoff jeans, but his eyes

were all Wilder—blue and cunning. Wilder hesitated before

standing at his shoulder.

Howell sat on the coffee table, her back to GT. She rooted

in a bag and pulled out three red balls.

No way is she going to juggle, I thought.

She juggled.

There was a disbelieving kind of silence. At the end she

threw one ball high and caught it behind her back. Mi-sun

clapped politely.

“Thank you!” said Howell. “So, I can’t let you go home.”

“What?” said Ruth. “We’re, like, prisoners?”