Diggers: The Sharp Edge of the Universe (3 page)

Ignoring him, Finn and Reggie sat back down and started working on their ice cream again while the mean boy stood at their table trying to decide what to do next. No one else had joined him in the bullying because no one else was that stupid.

“What ride do you want to do next?” Finn forced himself not to look at the boy’s enormous belly poking out at them.

“Dunno.” Reggie kept his eyes on his own ice cream.

Without warning, the boy grabbed Finn’s head and shoved it into his ice cream.

A moment later, the boy rolled around on the ground, screaming and grabbing at his neck.
“AHAHAEEEEEAHAH!”

Bullying was strictly prohibited—so much so that every person received a bully sensor implanted in their neck when they were born. The moment children, or even adults, went too far, they received a jolt of electricity that left them twitching on the ground for at least ten minutes.

Finn wiped off his face and looked around at all the people beginning to gather around the pudgy boy. “Serves him right,” Finn said a little louder than he needed to.

“Yep,” Reggie nodded.

They stepped over the twitching boy and headed for the next ride.

Chapter 4: Lectures

The silence at the dinner table, and the three pairs of glaring eyes attached to the biggest people on the Space Station, made for a rotten start to the evening.

The awesome birthday party yesterday, already a distant memory, didn't seem so amazing at the moment. After the fat-green-boy incident, Reggie seemed more in the mood for rides. They’d managed to ride everything at least once and even squeeze in a movie.

None of it mattered now.

“So?” Gus O’Reilly, Finn’s dad, said.

A massive man with disheveled, blazing-red hair that made him look like his head had caught
fire,
Finn's dad had a natural knack for making everything around him seem ready to be crushed just by his presence. Gus's long, red eyebrows lent his blue eyes an extra bit of fury. Like Quinn’s, his arms were thicker than Finn’s waist. Actually, Quinn and their dad could have been twins—another thing Finn didn’t have in common with them.    

“I’m sorry, Dad. I just…I lost track of time. Then I forgot my stuff, and when I came back here…Jasper was…gone. So, I…I thought I’d try to help Mom and find him myself. Yeah. By the time I found him, it was too late to go to class.” He hoped his lie would fly under the radar.

Gus studied Finn for a long moment,
then
sighed.

“Ah, Dad!
You believe him?” Quinn threw his massive weight back onto two legs of the chair, which creaked against his weight.

“Look, Noodle—”

“Tsk! Fergus…” Finn’s mom said from the sanitizer, where she stood cleaning the dinner dishes—the same place she could always be found after a meal.

“Sorry, Maggie.”
Gus shuddered a little under Maggie’s glare. Digger nicknames were off limits at their home—at least while Maggie was there. “Look…Finn,” Gus continued, “this is your last chance. You’ve got to pass this time. You’ve got nothing else to fill your future with if you don’t. Do you understand?”

“Finn,” Maggie added as she finished up the dishes and took a seat at the table, “it’s your responsibility to do your best, even with the things you don’t like to do. Classes might be boring, but when you pass, you’ll be able to start the training and that’s a blast. You already know how to do most of the stuff they teach in class. You aced all the mechanical and electrical engineering classes. Just…get through this…okay?”

“Okay,” Finn said slowly, hunching his shoulders.

He didn’t wait for a response before he pushed away from the table and headed for his room, putting his door into privacy mode. He found Jasper curled up in his usual place in the middle of the mound of blankets on his bed. Just as he started to pull his slides out from their hiding place, ELAINA announced, “Mrs. Margaret O’Reilly is at the door.”

“’Kay.”
Finn covered his hiding place and tried to paste on a smile, but Maggie standing beyond the door could only mean one thing—the lecture wasn’t over.

When the door
whooshed
open, his mom stood at the entrance and looked around for a place to sit. She finally settled on the desk chair filled with miscellaneous articles of clothing.

“Finn, what’s going on with you?” she asked.

“Nothing.”
Finn chose the automatic answer over the truth.

Maggie ignored his auto-response. “Look, I just want you to know that you
do
have other choices for Journeymen positions. You don’t have to be a Digger.”

Finn looked up without smiling. “Mom, I don’t want to go into Janitorial Training.”

“Well, it wasn’t what I wanted to do, either.” Maggie pushed the pile of clothes on the floor and leaned back in the chair. “Just know it’s there for you if you change your mind.”

Finn gave a little gasp at the revelation.

Maggie had spent the last eleven years telling him to clean his room and lecturing him about how much mold and junk grew in his used spaceball gear. She’d made him clean his room until it glowed so bright it actually hurt his eyes. When Maggie wasn’t cleaning the entire Space Station to a high gloss, she was telling Finn, Quinn, and his dad to clean up their messes.

“Mom?”
Finn asked. “If you could have done any job on the entire space station, what would it have been?”

Maggie sat for a moment and stared at the luminaries in the ceiling. “When I was your age, I wanted to be a Space Station captain, or maybe a captain of a scout ship.” She smiled at the memory.

“Well, why didn’t you go for it?” Finn sat forward.

Maggie leaned over and massaged the spot in her back that always gave her trouble. Her demeanor might come across as severe to people who didn’t know her, but not to Finn. Most people just assumed she was no fun from her tight bun of auburn hair, or maybe the boring beige uniform she made sure never had a wrinkle. She came from Digger heritage, like Gus, so her thick waist and shoulders didn’t help, either.

Finn loved her light blue eyes most, because even if she didn’t say the words, he could always tell she loved him. Then, too, she’d been known to give a look that made ice melt when her anger flared. An angry look from Maggie could make a person want to hide. But the blue color made them Finn’s favorite feature. He was glad he’d inherited her subtle hair and eyes and not the various shades of orange or flaming red hair most of the Diggers possessed.

“Finn, you know very well we all continue the careers our first ancestors took aboard the
Vortex
,” Maggie said. “It’s tradition.”

“Why didn’t you become a captain anyway?” Finn pressed for the answer he’d hope she would give. "Some people try new things. Well, one or two people, at least."

Maggie laughed. “It was a just dream, Finn. Nana McGee worked in Food Services, and Papa worked as a Digger. My Nana Gwenevere was a Janitor.
Me
wanting to be a captain didn’t even register as a possibility to them.”

She was the only person in the family who tried to understand Finn, and yet she still didn’t seem to grasp his true nature. He wondered for the hundredth time if he should just tell her about his dream of being a scientist.

Just as Finn started to muster up the courage to tell Maggie about his dreams, she pushed out of the chair, walked the few steps to his bed, and kissed him on the head. “Remember, Finn, you made a promise. You aren’t going to miss anymore Digger classes. O’Reillys
don’t
go back on their promises.”

As Maggie walked out of the room and the door whooshed shut, Finn fell back onto his bed, pierced in the chest by her words. He’d just been hit with the worst weapon in his parents’ arsenal, the “O’Reillys don’t go back on their promises” guilt trip.

He’d have to keep his promise and make it to class every night, which meant he’d have to make some alterations to his nightly trips to the Science Lab. If he hurried, he could be in and out in fifteen minutes, which would give him more than enough time to make it to the hover and get to class on time. The
SS Vortex
had just made orbit around a new planet, called Takkaur, and the Diggers would be setting up their equipment soon. Finn had a couple of days before the Science Lab began processing their discoveries.

He leaned over and scratched Jasper on the neck. “Well, Jas, you’re on your own exploring for a few days.”

Jasper opened one eye and closed it.

“Come here, Quigley,” Finn said.

A fish bowl holding the gigantic goldfish rose up off the cluttered night stand and hovered its way over to Finn. The bowl slowly raised and lowered in mid-air like a balloon without a string, and Quigley moved in and out of his plastic castle, completely unaware that his home was also floating.

“Don’t look at me like that, Quig,” Finn said. “Mom only said I have to be in Digger class every night. She didn’t say anything about the new discoveries or going into the Science Lab.”

Quigley flipped around the perimeters of his small home, staring at the top of his bowl. Finn leaned over to the other side of his bed, grabbed the food flakes, and gave Quigley a couple shakes of food. Quigley’s lips popped out of the water over and over, sucking in the flakes.

“Okay, go back to your spot.” Quigley’s bowl floated back to the night stand and made a perfect landing.

Chapter 5: The Science Lab Invader

Finn heard the last “whoosh” of the front door and headed out of his room, checking quickly to make sure no one in his family had stayed behind. Grabbing the dust-covered backpack sitting in the corner of the closet, he headed for his meeting spot with Reg in front of the Science Lab window.

When he reached the lab, he pushed his nose flat against the window. The new metal, Mikaylimide, still sat like a glorious trophy under the only light in the room.
A stupid name for such cool metal discovery.

“So you’re the one leaving the greasy nose marks and finger prints all over the window every night.”

Finn hit his forehead hard on the window and flipped around.

Mikayla Fishborne stood next to him staring at the greasy smudge his nose had just made. A mixture of nauseous disgust and curiosity crossed her face, the same look Diggers received from everyone. Mikayla wore her crimson Science Training suit, and her hair fell in golden ringlets down to the middle of her back. She stood about the same height as Finn. She and Reggie were both thirteen, but she acted like a know-it-all adult. Her blue eyes bored holes into the nose smudge, and then she turned on Finn to take a long slow look at him. Her gaze paused on a massive food stain he’d just made on his brown Digger suit during dinner. She also took an extra moment to survey his massive knot of hair, and then she crinkled her nose.

“No, this is my first night here,” Finn lied.

Mikayla gave a high, helium laugh. “No, it’s not. I see you here all the time.”

“Oh…what?
Are you spying on me or something?” Finn quizzed.

“Why would
I
spy on
you
?” She huffed and flicked her hair over her shoulder, just like Jasper flicked his tail when he became irritated.

“Jealousy.”
Finn returned her disgusted expression.

“You’re kidding, right? Why in the Milky Way would I be jealous of you?”

Finn felt the snobby bite in her words.

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe because Scientists couldn’t find a thing without Diggers.” Finn had no idea why he yelled, or why he defended Diggers, but he wasn’t going to let this prissy girl act like she was better. No way.

“Hey,” Reggie’s voice came from behind him. Finn wondered how long Reggie had been standing there listening before he’d decided to say something. “We
going?”

“Yeah,” Finn tried to sound as disgusted as Mikayla looked. “Let’s go.”

Before Finn could make a grand departure, Mikayla flipped around and headed for the Science Lab door. Finn watched with jealous rage as Mikayla slipped into the room, made her way over to the box of lab slides, and began looking at each slide under the microscope. After she studied a slide, she either put it in the box marked “trash” or put it back into the slide box.

Finn stood stunned, his eyes fixed to the scene beyond the window. His legs wobbled, and he had a sudden urge to vomit. Mikayla had the coolest job on the entire Space Station and she performed it all wrong. At least 90 percent of the slides she dumped in the trash box were treasures. This couldn’t be.
Mikayla
was the evil, stupid…person…throwing away all of those amazing slides?

“Gonna be late,” Reggie said from several feet away.

Finn shook his head a few times and followed Reggie to the hover. His stomach turned and threatened to let loose, but he forced the sick feeling back down. He finally felt sick for real on the one night he couldn’t stay home.

Digger classes, most anything Digger related, took place at night to cut down on the amount of time people had to deal with the Diggers. Finn ate dinner for breakfast, but still called it dinner because dinner-type foods were usually served. Lunch was still lunch, even though Finn ate it around midnight, and breakfast happened just before he went to bed.