Dangerous (7 page)

“Why not? It’s for education’s sake.”

“Howell, it’s not safe for children. Their parents—”

“Why would they protest? This is a singular opportunity!”

She clapped her hands and gave a command. A horde of

crew in white jumpsuits squeezed into the pod, fitting the fire-

team with headsets under soft helmets, leading us to chairs, and

harnessing us in. My stomach squelched.

“Howell,” Dragon said with exasperation.

“Don’t be such a wet blanket. We’ll only go up a bit.”

Howell sat in the sixth and last chair. Dragon grumbled

and sat on the floor, pulling his arms through some straps of

the cargo bags.

Howell
tsked
her tongue. “
You’re
the one not being safe.”

That phrase caught in my mind, stuck on repeat:
not being

safe, not being safe
. . .

“If you’re going, I’m going,” he said.

The pod door sealed with a hiss.

“Wait.” Jacques started fumbling with his harness. “What is

‘up a bit’? How far is a bit?”

“Isn’t this exciting?” Howell said in a happy singsong voice.

“Next stop: space!”

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C h a p t e r 8

“Stay strapped in and remember your training,” Dragon

said.

“What training?” Ruth yelled. “You mean kiddie camp?

You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

I was smiling but it was that freaky kind of smile, hard and

frozen, as if my facial muscles couldn’t decide between ecstatic

glee and eyeball-clawing horror.

“If any of you want to turn down this chance, speak up now,”

said Dragon. “Just say the word and we’ll open the door.”

Ruth stopped squirming. No one answered.

The pod rose slowly for a few of meters and then stopped

with a loud
click
. I heard control counting down on my headset.

Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .

My parents would so not be okay with this. Was I okay with

this? Space travel is not a field trip, and I was not an astronaut.

Three Beanstalk astronauts were killed a couple of years ago.

Their pod just cracked open on descent. I didn’t want to go to

space like this, unprepared, unearned, rushed off in a possibly

faulty space elevator. It was too dangerous.

And then I thought, Danger is my middle name.

I thought those very words.

Six . . . five . . . four . . .

Prove it, Maisie Danger Brown, I dared myself. Your name

was supposed to be a joke. Prove it’s not.

Three . . . two . . .

I didn’t say no. I didn’t say anything at all.

Shannon Hale

One . . .

The pod pushed up with a force that left my stomach on

the ground. There was a lot of screaming. Mostly Jacques.

“AAH! AAH! I DO NOT LIKE HEIGHTS! I DO
NOT

LIKE HEIGHTS!”

“Say it, Jacques,” I said.

“Ican’tIcan’tIcan’t—”

“Come on,” I said. “Your war whoop, your rebel yell, your

battle—”

“Cry havoc,” he said, his voice trembling. “Cry havoc!

CRY! HAVOC!”

It was better than his screaming. I began muttering prayers

in Spanish as my mother did when she was worried or scared.

Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu

nombre . . .

We rose so fast, in seconds the ocean waves looked mo-

tionless, a great expanse of cake frosting. I glimpsed red—la-

sers pointed up at the photovoltaic cells on the pod’s wings,

powering the elevator’s ascent. The whole pod was vibrating,

a plucked elastic band. The vibration chattered my teeth. My

vision wiggled. My bones felt too close together. Gravity would

not let us go without a fight.

I was thinking of those rides at amusement parks that lift

you terrifyingly high and then drop you in a rush of butterflies

and squeals. My body kept expecting the drop. A ribbon of

carbon nanotubes had sounded so sciencey cool. Now climb-

ing a string into space was the most ludicrous thing I could

imagine. I shut my eyes. I hugged my chest. I wondered if I

was about to die.

Then everything turned off. The whole world, as if some-

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Dangerous

one had hit the switch. I felt strange. Lifted. Out the window

the sky was changing from summer noon to midnight.

“Really?” I whispered. “Really?”

My stomach tingled in the middle of my body. My toes

curled up in my boots. I watched my knees rise.

Beside me, Mi-sun smiled at a lock of her black hair that

had escaped her helmet and was floating in front of her face.

Jacques was shaking. Wilder was looking out his window, his

face turned away.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Howell, “welcome to space.

It’s a long trip to our anchoring asteroid Big Barda, so today

we’ll only go as far as Midway Station. Remain in your seats

with seat belts fastened and tray tables up . . .” She broke off,

giggling.

“What is she talking about?” Mi-sun asked.

“That we’re not going all the way up.” I was proud of the

lack of emotion in my voice, but I couldn’t seem to shut up.

“Most human-space activity takes place at two hundred and

twenty kilometers, but at that level, a satellite orbits the earth

in ninety minutes. The physics of the space elevator require

the anchoring end of the tether to be in geostationary orbit, so

it moves at the same rate as the earth itself and remains straight

above its equatorial platform. So the ribbon extends thirty-six

thousand kilometers to the asteroid Big Barda, which is about

ten percent of the distance to the moon. If it were any closer—”

“Enough, Maisie,” said Jacques. “I don’t like heights.”

“Yeah, I think you mentioned that,” I said. “Or screamed it.”

“So stop rattling off those big numbers or I’m going to
bleep

this
bleeping
diaper.”

Dragon and Howell floated past us, doing astronaut stuff.

53

Shannon Hale

Without gravity to tame her frizzy hair, it looked like a clown

wig.

Jacques started to undo his harness.

“Hey!” Dragon’s voice seemed to shake the whole craft. “If I

snap your neck out here, no one will hear you scream.”

Jacques did his harness back up. I suspect that sometime

during our trip, he made use of his allotted diaper.

I spent most of the trip staring at the planet and its misty

cloak, all those gas molecules drawn to earth’s gravity. Around

its curve, we saw the white glow of sunlight, no atmosphere to

trap the light and trick us into thinking the sun was yellow. No

atmosphere to soak up and scatter the blue light, fill the heav-

ens with that safe, robin-egg hue. No tricks. Black space, white

light. A place without ambiguity.

I’d never understood before so clearly that we don’t live

in a Ziploc bag that kept the air in and the freezing vacuum of

space out. It made the world seem vulnerable. Precious.

I wish I could explain better. NASA’s next urgent mission

should be to send good poets into space so they can describe

what it’s really like.

“‘Stars, hide your fires,’” Jacques said, looking not down at

the Earth but out. “‘Let not light see my black and deep desires.’”

He was quoting
Macbeth
, I was pretty sure. At least I wasn’t

the only apt-to-quote nerd aboard.

While keeping our gazes on the spectacular Out There, we

chatted and played “Name That Tune.” Jacques was unbeatable.

“Trivia is my pattycake,” he said.

Ruth snorted. “‘Trivia is my pattycake’? What does that—”

“Just think about it,” Jacques said.

“That doesn’t even mean anything,” she said.

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Dangerous

Jacques spouted something in French. All French sounds

vaguely insulting to me, so I told him in Spanish to watch his

tongue. Mi-sun spoke a sequence of crisp Korean. Wilder said

something obviously crude in Russian. Ruth spoke two hard

words in German.

“We’re all bilingual?” I said. The way they spoke, it wasn’t

Foreign Language 101. It was raised-from-birth.

Chatter on the headset silenced us, the Midway crew com-

municating with Howell. The pod sealed to the station, and the

hatch opened. When Dragon unlatched my straps, they hung

in the air as if underwater. I was so distracted by them, Drag-

on had to lift me by my sleeve and pull me toward the airlock.

There were three station crew members wearing shorts and T-

shirts, and they helped me strip down to my orange jumpsuit.

“Go ahead and find your space legs,” said Howell. “Just

don’t push any big red buttons.”

I grabbed the handle along the narrow corridor and pulled

myself up, kicking my legs before reminding myself that I wasn’t

swimming. I emerged into an open chamber, caught another

handle, and hung in the air.

My head was dizzy as if I were spinning, and my stomach

rolled with mild nausea. I was still but felt as if I were rising

through the ceiling and into space. My arms flailed, my legs

thrashed. I felt like I was suffocating, my brain confusing little

gravity with little oxygen.

I remembered our training and focused on breathing in,

breathing out. I calmed. Looked. Lifted my arm, turned slowly,

and let go.

It didn’t feel like flying did in my dreams. The universe

was just holding me up. Gravity had been chaining me for my

55

Shannon Hale

whole life. But here I was everything I could be. I was Maisie

Danger Brown.

Jacques was tumbling, Mi-sun was doing spiral spins as

she launched herself between this chamber and the next. Ruth

pushed off and let herself zoom down the passage, her red hair

streaking like flames. Her high laugh sparked one in my own

chest.

Wilder eased himself into the chamber until he was sus-

pended in the center, touching nothing. My ponytail snaked

around my neck, tickling me unexpectedly and pulling out

goose bumps.

“Isn’t this it?” I was so happy, I didn’t want to remember

that he had turned into evil zombie Wilder. “You said we’d find

it here. This is a start, isn’t it?”

I laughed and spun around.

He smiled just enough that it touched his eyes, and he said,

“You’re beautiful.”

He said it like he hadn’t meant to, like it just slipped out.

Which, I believe, is the very best way to say those words to any-

one. I felt as if all the oxygen in the module had sucked out into

space. There was an enormous moon out the window just over

his shoulder, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Wilder.

He looked around. Mi-sun was gone, Jacques was spinning

into the next chamber, and Ruth was staring at the moon, so for

a few seconds, we were alone.

I reached out my left hand. Wilder took it. I flew into him.

His arms were around me. I closed my eyes while we hung there,

spinning, kissing. I didn’t count. It all seemed part of the same

long, tingling kiss. His lips were cool, but mine seemed to burn.

I didn’t want to take it slowly—it felt like any moment it would

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Dangerous

end and never come back. I held him tighter, and I heard him

inhale sharply. His arms circled my waist, our knees touching,

our feet too. Weightless, we were upright and lying down at the

same time.

Compatible, I thought. We were negatively and positively

charged ions, irresistibly attracted to each other. It was simple

physics.

We hit the wall, propelled by the impact of me flying into

his arms. We pressed there for just a moment, kiss paused, lips

still touching, and then he let go, pushing against a wall to flee

into the next module. Jacques floated back in, Ruth turned

around, Mi-sun called out that she’d discovered the astronaut

ice cream, all of them oblivious to the fact that my world had

just cracked open. I hovered where he’d left me, spinning just a

little, my arms floating at my sides. I didn’t flex a muscle. I held

my breath. I wanted to remember that moment.

Through a porthole I could see the Earth turning, very

slowly, just like me. Green and blue, brown and white, big fat

gorgeous Earth. My whole body tingled. At that moment, I truly

believed that the rest of my life would be glorious and happy

and easy as sipping soda through a straw because I’d gone to

space, witnessed the whole world, and Wilder had kissed me

again.

57

C h a p t e r 9

“Now this is what I call astronaut boot camp!” Howell

shouted.

“Yeah!” said Ruth. Space had greatly improved her mood.

Howell gave us a tour of Midway Station. Module 2 was

the crew’s living quarters with workout machine and kitchen.

Module 3 was storage, where bags of food and water floated,

tethered to walls, and rows of drawers held tools and supplies.

“It’s cheaper to send water from the asteroid to Midway than

from Earth,” said Howell. “Big Barda is unusually rich in both

precious metals and ice. We mine ice from the asteroid, and a

machine melts water for drinking and cleaning as well as break-