Destination Unknown (7 page)

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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Mo’Steel nodded sagely. “Watch this.” He picked up a small rock and threw it as far out into the canyon as he could.
“Uh-huh,” Jobs said.
“Shh. Listen. You hear that?”
Jobs heard the rock hit bottom. It had hit bottom long before it should have.
Together they walked into the gray world. They stood at the edge of the canyon and looked down. Impossible not to believe it was real. You could feel the depth of the canyon in your soul. But when Jobs threw a second rock after the first it, too, fell for no more than five seconds before landing with a tiny rattling sound.
“Know what else? Look up at the sky. Look at that cloud up there.”
Jobs obeyed. He saw a puffy white, lavender-edged cloud moving serenely toward the border between environments. It reached the edge of the gray-shade environment and kept blowing. As it crossed the line it lost all color, gained clarity, and was absorbed into the sky above the canyon.
Mo’Steel seemed to expect him to say something penetrating, but all he could manage was, “Huh.”
Jobs walked back into the world of color, bent down, and stroked a single shaft of grass. Of course it was not grass. It was three inches across, a quarter-inch thick, smeared with green and blue.
He pulled at it and it came free. He stared at the root structure with Mo’Steel leaning over his shoulder.
“Look at that, Mo. The root structure looks normal. The dirt looks normal. Not like the dirt over in the canyon. This is like actual dirt. The roots are like actual roots. The leaf, though, no way.”
“Tastes like grass,” Mo’Steel said.
“You tried to eat it?”
Mo’Steel shrugged. “Hey, we gotta eat, right? I thought maybe you could eat it. But it’s like eating what the lawn mower left behind.”
Jobs sighed. He looked at the lost, confused, wondering, grieving gaggle of humans, all together in the Impressionist environment. They looked shabby and dull in this vivid landscape. Hard-edged, definite, almost vulgar in their detail. His brother was staring up at a sketchy tree.
“What are we going to do?” Jobs wondered.
Mo’Steel shook his head. “I was hoping you’d know.”
“I am lost,” Jobs said. He took a deep breath. “No food. No water. Not much, anyway. Whoever put this all together, aliens or whatever, they got the air right. They got the roots of these plants right. But I doubt there’s real water in that river over there.”
“Let’s go see.”
But Jobs was too distracted to answer. “They’re playing mix and match, that’s the problem.”
“Who is?”
“Them. The aliens. They don’t have a context. They downloaded our data, but they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, what’s actual and what’s just, you know, art or imagination. See, they found technical data on air quality so we have air. Or maybe it’s just the natural air of this planet. Maybe they have scientific descriptions of plants, so they got the roots right, but they don’t know what to do about the pictures and stuff.”
Mo’Steel said, “Hey, there must have been stuff about us, right? About humans? Like what we are, what we need to eat and drink and all?”
“I don’t know, Mo. You look in an encyclopedia under ‘humans’ you don’t exactly find a guide for the care and feeding of same. Probably says we’re omnivorous. If they access a dictionary they can figure out that means we eat anything. That may not be a good thing, depending on how these aliens interpret it.”
Jobs looked up at the shuttle. It was stupendously out of place. The white-painted shuttle was pockmarked with a thousand micrometeorite holes. The solar sails hung limp and crumpled, like carelessly hung laundry or broken arms. The Mylar sheen was gone, the microsheeting was dull.
Jobs and Mo’Steel had gone extra-vehicular to
deploy those sails. Hanging there in orbit around Earth they’d seen the Rock slam into it. They’d seen the planet ripped apart, shattered into three big, mismatched, irregular chunks.
Yesterday in Jobs’s mind and memory. It had happened yesterday.
Jobs’s parents were up there in the
Mayflower
. Dead. Yesterday he’d seen them alive, yesterday they had walked aboard the shuttle with him and settled into those berths beside him. But that was five-hundred years ago. When had they died? Had it happened right away? Or had they survived for centuries, only to die at the last minute?
There came a sound of raised voices from the dozen Wakers. An argument. Yago’s voice was heard most clearly.
Jobs and Mo’Steel joined the group.
“What’s the beef?” Jobs asked Errol in a whisper.
He and Errol had formed a working relationship based on mutual respect. Errol was an actual rocket scientist, a fuel systems designer. An engineer. He had come aboard the
Mayflower
with his wife and their one child, a girl. The girl’s berth had been perforated by a micrometeorite. It had drilled a hole right through her heart. His wife was cheese.
It was something else Jobs shared with Errol: a
need to keep busy in order to hold the avalanche of grief at bay.
“It’s the sergeant and her . . . her baby,” Errol said. “The baby . . . something’s not right.”
The baby was still in its mother’s arms. Not crying. But looking around with its empty eyes as though searching for something. And the more its searched, the more agitated its mother became.
“Something is going to happen,” Tamara Hoyle muttered. “Something is happening right now.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“YOU MAY NEED A SOLDIER.”
 
“It’s some kind of a freak — if it’s even human!” Yago cried. “Look at it! Look at the two of them. Am I the only one seeing this?”
2Face was already sick of Yago. He was a pampered monster, a spoiled brat with DNA-manipulated good looks and an awesome level of selfishness.
But he was right about the baby. There was something wrong.
The baby turned its head to look left. Tamara Hoyle turned her head to the left.
Puppet master and puppet? Or just some exaggeration of the natural sympathy between mother and child?
The baby stared right at Yago and Tamara’s eyes drilled into him. Identical expressions of fixed focus.
“Look! Look at that! Don’t you people see? They’re connected!” Yago yelled.
Olga said, “The umbilical cord’s — if that’s what it was — has been cut.”
“Cut?” Yago shrilled. “And do you see a difference? You want to know the difference? The difference is the doctor is dead.” He stabbed an accusing finger at Tamara and her baby. “She’s a killer. A killer and a freak.”
“What is it you want?” 2Face calmly asked Yago.
“A little order, that’s all,” Yago said. “We need some rules here. And we need those rules right from the start. Rule number one in any society is: You don’t let murderers go free.”
“We don’t have a judge or a courtroom,” 2Face pointed out. They’d been over this. And they had other, more pressing problems. “We don’t have any way to lock her up. And we need her to care for her baby. Are you going to do it?”
“We don’t need a court. Eye for an eye,” Yago hissed. “She’s a freak. A murdering freak. She should be driven out. Exiled. You let her and that freak alien baby stay, you’ll regret it.”
“All right, no one is exiling anyone,” 2Face snapped. This was hitting close to home. If the baby
was a freak, so, maybe, was 2Face. “We’re all that’s left of the human race; we’re not going to start drawing lines and saying who’s in and who’s out.”
“I see,” Yago said. “And you’ll take responsibility if this woman and her so-called baby create more trouble?”
2Face swallowed, hesitated. She’d seen Yago’s trap too late. He was putting her together with Tamara and the baby. He was making her responsible for whatever they did. “Yes,” she said at last.
“We won’t forget you said that,” Yago said. “And anyway, I suspect most people here don’t agree with you. How about you, Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake? What do you think? I know my mother always admired your judgment.”
Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake blinked, surprised and flattered, but quickly seized the tendered opportunity. “I think it’s too soon to foreclose any options. Let’s get the facts first, then we can reach a reasoned judgment.”
Yago let 2Face see his triumph, his sneering “gotcha” look.
Tamara Hoyle seemed to ignore the drama entirely. “Something is coming,” she whispered. She and her baby stared toward the distant river. The baby smiled.
2Face knew she’d been outmaneuvered. She’d known to expect it, known that Yago would make a move sooner or later. He was a bully, but not a simple one. He was, after all, the president’s son, someone raised in the political life.
She told herself it didn’t matter because now that more adults were awake her tenuous, accidental authority would have been displaced anyway. But she resented that Yago had engineered it. He had acted as the kingmaker. Or queenmaker, in this case.
It had happened in a heartbeat. Yago had neatly pulled the rug out from under her.
Within ten minutes after Yago’s move Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake, the Jane’s mother, was confidently pushing people around, bringing order out of chaos, detailing a search party, setting watches for duty back aboard the ship, organizing the unpacking of the shuttle’s tools and instruments.
Fine,
2Face told herself.
Truth was, the woman was better qualified to be in charge; she was the founder of a multibillion-dollar empire, of course she was in charge.
That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that 2Face didn’t like being outmaneuvered by Yago. And she didn’t want to be made responsible for the actions of the Marine sergeant and her eerie child.
Yago was right: There was something wrong
there. But not only there. There was something wrong with Billy Weir as well. 2Face couldn’t put her finger on it, but Billy made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. He was alive, his pupils reacted to light, but he’d said nothing, moved no muscle. They’d given him water and he’d swallowed some of it, that had been his greatest accomplishment so far.
2Face was as hungry and thirsty as anyone, as disturbed by the impossible landscape of this alien world. But she’d taken comfort in the distraction of being in charge. Now she was “one of the kids” in a world where the adults were reasserting themselves, especially Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake.
With less to do, there was more time to think. She didn’t want to think.
Wylson wasted no time getting rid of her.
“Okay, Mr. Hwang, you take your daughter and this one” — Wylson pointed at Mo’Steel — “over to take a look at the river. Come back and let us know if it’s actual water. Carry some jugs with you, might as well not waste a trip.”
“Send me, too,” Tamara Hoyle said.
“I don’t think we’re going to be using you,” Wylson said, making no attempt to disguise her contempt.
“I’m a trained soldier,” Tamara argued. “You may need a soldier.”
“You’re a murderer with a freak baby,” Yago said. He had attached himself to Wylson.
Tamara’s baby turned away, and a moment later, so did Tamara, as though the issue no longer interested either of them.
“Okay, you’d better get going,” Wylson said to Shy Hwang.
Shy Hwang nodded to his daughter and Mo’Steel. He looked a little sheepish, but determined. 2Face saw he was ready to reassert his prerogatives as her father. That was good, actually. 2Face loved her father. He had a right to be a father.
They picked up a couple of empty gallon jugs and set off through the brilliant cornhusk “grass.”
Mo’Steel forged ahead, the only one of the three who was remotely excited by the adventure.
Let it go,
2Face told herself. She touched her face, quite unconsciously, as she recalled the price that could be paid by the vengeance-seeker.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“THEY’RE HEADING FOR OUR PEOPLE!”
 
“It was peaceful,” Shy Hwang said to his daughter.
It took her a moment to track. Was he talking about Yago’s coup? The disturbing landscape?
No, of course not. He meant her mom’s death. 2Face blushed with the good half of her face.
“I know, Dad. We were all asleep. She was asleep. It was peaceful.”
Her father let out a stifled sob. He wiped tears from his eyes and set his face in a parody of determination.
2Face had never thought much about her parents’ relationship. It had always been there. They argued occasionally but made up quickly. But of course they’d been together for seven years before 2Face was born. Not that 2Face wasn’t devastated by her mother’s death. But, to her shame, she had to
admit that her father’s grief was deeper, more personal.
She resisted the insidious edge of contempt for her father. It was right that he grieve. She was the bad one, she was the one who was failing her mother’s memory. Her father was reacting the way a man who loved his wife should.

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