“Quite the chase,” he said, bomping. “Quite. The. Chase! But who could expect less from Public Enemy Number One?”
“Yes, sir,” said a guard.
“Would you leave us a moment, officers?” Smek said to the other Boov. “I would like to have with the Squealer a private word.”
“Sir?” said the same guard. “Sir, he is dangerous—”
“Just move a little ways away, that’s right. Just out of earshot. I won’t need long.”
I couldn’t see them very well without turning (and probably falling), but several of the putt-putt noises faded until one stood out distinctly from the rest. Smek hovered closer and holstered his baton. He folded his arms on the scooter’s handlebars and leaned his chin against them, like he was just hanging out with the young folk, like he might at any moment ask if he could “chill” with us a while. He reminded me of the youth pastor at my church who nobody liked.
“An unfortunate situation,” he told us. “No easy solution.”
“I am ready for prison,” said J.Lo, and my heart sank a little. “The humansgirl has a little carship parked outside to the shell. It can take her home to Earth.”
“So I should just let her go is what you are saying?” asked Smek.
J.Lo struggled to turn his head. “She has...she has not done anything.”
“Gratuity,” said the captain. “It is Gratuity, yes? Forgive me, but humans all look the same. You are young?”
“Yes!” I answered, and the movement of my face made us slide a little. “Yes. I’m young. Can’t be tried as an adult and...so forth.”
“I suppose you have told all your little friends this story about world saving and Gorg and cats, yes?”
“No, actually. You see, I didn’t want people to—”
“Interesting. But you will tell people now, won’t you.”
I suddenly felt like the Tummy gun might have done a number on me after all. “No! I would never—”
“I will bet you are so young that the humans would say you were a foolish and irresponsible humansgirl to come here with this Boov,” said Smek. “I will bet they’d believe any sort of terrible accident may have befallen such an irresponsible girl.”
My heart was pounding.
“A tragedy, yes, that a humansgirl should have such a bad, bad accident on another world. But believable. What do the humans say? That it is ‘one of those things’?”
I sighed. “We do say that,” I admitted.
“You will have then to kill me too! I tell you,” said J.Lo.
“J.Lo, shut up!” I hissed.
“No I will not! Shut up. I will talk and talk!”
“No, see,” Captain Smek was saying. He practically bounced in his seat, he was so eager to tell us this part. “You won’t. I thought of it upstairs. What is the perfect punishment for a squealer?”
He gave us a moment to guess. “Um—”
“To make it so he can never squeal again!” Smek answered himself. “And to put him in jail, of course, but we will take out your talkbox! Surgically. The punishment fits the crime! And also keeps you quiet forever—is that not clever?” He turned to the guards. “Okay, men! You may return.”
“J.Lo,” I sighed.
“Yes.”
We took each other’s hand and pushed off the globe.
I turned as we fell and made a desperate grab for the ridge at the bottom of Smek’s scooter. It tipped, and sank, and I lost my grip but immediately grabbed hold of the handlebar antlers of one of the Boov guards’ scooters that had cruised up underneath.
One hand holding J.Lo’s, the other aching as I clutched the handlebar, I smiled weakly up at the guard. He scowled down at me.
Other scooters circled around, and other guards aimed their guns.
“Do not shoot! Do not shoot!” said the guard above us. He waggled his hands and must have shifted his weight on the scooter, because suddenly the whole thing was toppling over. The guard came tumbling down and plowed into my head. Now the entire scooter was upside-down, and the guard fumbled for a grip, and then each of us was hanging from a different section of antler handlebar as we slowly sank.
The other Boov dove to meet us, but J.Lo reached high and flicked something on the scooter’s handlebars, and we shuttled away and ever downward until we skidded to a halt against another glass saucer in the dead center of the palace globe.
We all came disentangled from the scooter, which turned a couple of circles on its side and then righted itself ten feet away. J.Lo wrestled with the guard, but the guard was a guard, and he soon had J.Lo facedown on the floor with a gun to his head.
The other guards were closing in.
“Go!” shouted J.Lo. “Run! Save yourself. Then come back and save me!”
I stood there, frozen.
“RUN!”
So I ran, God help me, to the empty scooter. Pardon my language. And I knew I’d never figure out how to fly the thing, so instead I took it by the antlers and spun it around over my head. All the way around, then around again, and then I hurled it into the middle of the little constellation of Boovish guards hovering there and got what I think you call a 7-10 split. Bad if you’re bowling, pretty good if you’re just trying to distract the pins while you run away.
I ran to the far edge of the platform and looked down.
“I’m sorry, J.Lo,” I said, and I jumped.
SIX
I’d listened to what J.Lo had said about running. Where could someone like me hide? I was the only human on New Boovworld.
That’s not true, actually. I’d learn later that there was a Human Embassy here, with a staff of like eight people, plus some college types doing research or whatever. Not a single one of them looked anything like me, not that it mattered. The HighBoovperial police were never going to sound the alarm for my arrest, because in another five minutes I was going to officially die.
Anyway. I’d hurled a scooter at those guards, like I said, and raced to the edge of the platform I was on, and thought to myself that if I got shot, just got shot right now and fell to my stupid death, I’d deserve it because I was turning my back on a friend. Literally turning my back.
There was another curvy bauble down below that I thought I could probably reach. Then slide off that to the disk beneath it. Then I didn’t know what.
“I’m sorry, J.Lo,” I said, and jumped.
Seemed like most of the civilian Boov had run, or had been ordered to leave. But I could see more guards rising up on scooters from the coaster level as I landed on the curvy glass and slid—and then I was falling through a hole in the roof that hadn’t been there before. One of the guards must have fired his eraser gun.
I dropped into a big glass room and landed like an understuffed pillow on the floor of some Boov’s office. Some important Boov, I guessed, since the office had the kind of frosted walls that meant you could pick your nose in private. If you wanted. And you had a nose to pick.
So my first thought was to pull the old hide-in-the-ventilation-ducts trick and hope the Boov didn’t watch the same spy movies I did. Like, in those movies there’s always an air vent you can reach from a desk, and it comes right open without a screwdriver or anything, and the good guy can pull himself right up into the ceiling even if his whole deal is that he’s supposed to be an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances and probably doesn’t do that many chin-ups.
Anyway. I couldn’t see an air vent at all. What I did see was a clutch of chubby houseplants and an aquarium full of balloonafish. A curvy white desk that you sat in the center of like the yolk in a fried egg. A photo of the Boov’s friend, or girlfriend, or boyfriend, or boyboygirlfriend or whatever. And next to the desk, a dull orange canister.
There were sounds at the door, but I guess the door was locked? Either way, it would only be a matter of seconds before the Boov came pouring in through the hole they’d made in the ceiling. I flipped the lid of the orange canister, and inside it was just a whooshing drop. Like a sucktunnel, b
ut smaller. And now I remembered all those orange tubes I’d noticed earlier: tubes that connected every part of the globe with the lower levels.
So I stepped up onto the lip of the canister, and dropped inside, and heard the lid clap down behind me.
And I hoped it wasn’t a Boovish toilet. I didn’t know what their toilets looked like.
I was sucked downward, my stomach in my throat, my body whapping against the sides of the tube. Whatever this was, it wasn’t meant for transport. I barely fit, and I’m a lot skinnier than a Boov. In near-total darkness I curved this way, that way, got briefly stuck in a U-bend, then dropped into a round room full of pointy metal teeth.
Rusty rings of them were stacked big to small to form a cone: a swirling, threshing vortex of destruction that would grind anything and everything into a gross paste. Or it would have if it had been working. The whole contraption growled, its motors frustrated and shivering with rage. At the bottom of the cone was one final, chattering set of teeth—the face of a cartoon metal monster—jammed open with a big piece of rebar. Garbage was collecting in the gaps, like the monster wasn’t flossing. And beyond all this, through the gaps, I could see a little bit of light.
So, with nothing better to do today, I squeezed through the jaws and fell onto a big mound of garbage.
It was really hot in the garbage pit. There was a weird humming somewhere. Probably goes without saying that I started breathing through my mouth.
Above me was a honeycomb ceiling, and the monster mouth, and a few other mouths like it, chomping away in the distance. The sides of the room were too far away to see clearly. I think I’ve mentioned I can’t read Boovish, but most of the garbage here was food wrappers, and most of the wrappers had a word that I’d later learn means “fun size.”
I lay back in the garbage to catch my breath. I closed my eyes.
It’s probably going to sound like an insult when I say that all this garbage made me think of my friend Chief Shouting Bear. But if he hadn’t wanted people thinking of him every time they saw a pile of hubcaps, then he shouldn’t have lived in a junkyard in the first place.
Back when the Chief was alive, he and I had all kinds of long talks. Arguments, sometimes. So I don’t want you to think I’m schizophrenic or anything, but I occasionally imagine the Chief and I are having one of those talks when I need a little company. And I needed a little company.
“Hey, Stupidlegs,” said the Chief.
“Hey, Chief,” I answered, smiling. And I opened my eyes. He was to my left, standing lightly on the surface of the trash.
I mean, he wasn’t really. I know he wasn’t.
I’m not crazy.
“What’re you an’ the Spook doing on an alien planet, kid?”
I got up on my elbows. “Technically it’s a moon,” I said.
“Don’t play games.”
“I’m hurt,” I said. “Shouldn’t you know everything that’s going on with me? Like don’t you have a big TV set in heaven where you can watch my life?”
“I do. But it also gets HBO.”
I lay back down. “Well. J.Lo wanted to come here to clear his name. But we bumbled into this whole election deal and now...now they’re going to do something so he can’t talk anymore. So I don’t know if I should try to save him, which seems impossible, or run home and send e-mails—”
“And the reason you didn’t just send an e-mail in the first place was...?”
“I know! I just said that upstairs. But I didn’t think of it back on Earth and—”
“Bullhockey,” said the Chief. “It’s the Spook who’d never think of e-mail. His solution for everything is some crazy contraption. You thought about sending a letter. But your ma, she wouldn’t have had any problem with a letter.”
I stared at him a moment.
“Whatever—we had a fight is all. I’ll explain to her why I had to go to New Boovworld once J.Lo and I are safely home.”
The Chief was inspecting some Boovish junk. Like, appraising it. Only not really. I can’t emphasize enough how perfectly normal this was, me talking to him.
“Kids, they always go about everything wrong,” he muttered.
When he was alive, I was always worried he’d die soon. I wasted a lot of time, worrying. Whenever I got scared about him being too old, I made these stupid jokes about him being too old.
“You forgot to say ‘kids these days,’” I told him in an old-man voice. “You forgot to spit and say ‘dagummit.’”
“Can’t spit no more,” said the Chief. He smirked. “Not sure when I ran out exactly, but Johnny Carson was still hosting The Tonight Show.”
“Well,” I said. “Anyway. When I’m old, I’m going to remember what it’s like being a kid.”
“I remember,” said the Chief. “Some days it’s all I remember. And I’m talking about all kids, always. Throwing tantrums ’cause their ma or pa won’t treat ’em like grown-ups? That’s irony for you. Or saying ‘please please please’ like it’s a magic spell. Teenagers casting off politeness like it’s a chore they outgrew.” The Chief coughed. Even as an imaginary ghost I couldn’t think of him for five minutes without making him cough. “Only I know you don’t fight like that,” he said. “I expect you and your mom sat down and calmly looked over the charts an’ graphs you’d made.”
I frowned and went silent for a while, thinking. As I lay there, an empty pudding cup fell through the mouth above and hit me in the face.
I roused, and got to my shaky feet in the garbage pile. “We can talk more later, Chief,” I said. “I gotta look for a way out. And get back to Slushious, and somehow pilot it all the way home to Earth, and get the president or whoever to talk Smek into releasing J.Lo before he gets his talkbox removed.” Simple. I’d done harder, crazier things during the invasion, when I was eleven. I’d saved the world, not that anybody knew or cared. I could do this.
Something rustled down the trash hill, to my right.
Just the garbage settling, I thought.
Most of the mounds beneath most of the grinders were this gross slurry of pulpy awfulness. Only mine had recognizable cans and wrappers and paper wads and probably Boovish Kleenex or whatever they use, and I was trying to force myself to stop thinking about it when something in the trash hill moved again.
Crumpled cellophane tumbled and turned and caught the light. A metal can rolled down the slope and stopped an inch from my sneaker. I took a breath.
“So then Luke says, ‘There’s something alive in here!’” I whispered. “And Han says, ‘That’s your imagina—’”
A stalk popped up through the pile—a stalk with a single glassy eye.
“AAH!” I started, stumbling backward. I grabbed a handful of trash and threw it at the one-eyed thing—but it was all just papery scraps, and they went every which way like confetti and fell with eerie slowness in the weak gravity.
Now the eyestalk dropped below the surface again and went on the move, pushing a gopher trail of garbage in its path. Moving right toward me. I slid down the opposite side of the hill, but the thing was fast, and right in my way again. The eye resurfaced, so I kicked it until it dove.
That was plastic, I thought. Not alive after all. Then it rose up again, a little ways off, and rose up some more, dripping garbage. And now a whole little bubble pod breached the surface, and there was a Boov inside.
The eyestalk was more like a periscope, and the bubble-pod had three sets of diggers along the bottom. The bubble retracted and the Boov stepped out.
“Hello!” he said. “What sort of thing are you?”
* * *
SEVEN
I was watching TV, sitting on an uncomfortable stool inside the uncomfortable home of the Boov who’d come out of the garbage submarine. I leaned back from the screen and exhaled.
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “Pardon my language.”
I was rubbing my throat—because my dog collar was tight, but also in sympathy for J.Lo’s vocal cords, which I didn’t realize were in his a
rmpit. I was foggy on Boovish anatomy at the time; their insides are like balloon animals and crazy straws.
“Yes!” said the garbage Boov as he came around to the back of the TV. “Is it not excellent reception? Just a tinysmall crack in the display. It is fall-on-your-face crazy what peoples throw away.” He paused, and gave me a sidelong look. “But I suppose I do not have to tell you that,” he added.
After a little mental Ping-Pong I figured nothing good could come of telling him that I hadn’t been thrown away, exactly, that I’d escaped down here on my own. “Totally crazy,” I agreed. “I’m sorry, I’ve already forgotten your name.”
“Funsize. And you are Grace!”
“Right.” Grace was an old alias. When the moment came, it had been the first thing to pop out of my mouth.
Funsize wore gloves and something like a balaclava over his head—a dark wet-suit kind of material with portholes for his eyes. He’d built a pagoda out of trash, and it was surprisingly pretty. It stood down the hill from the chomping mouths and used a rough stone wall for support. So I guessed we were underground. Beneath the palace. The tiered roofs of the pagoda were shingled with bits of shiny metal and strung all over with strips of crinkly plastic. Every now and then a gust of hot air belched through, and when it did the plastic whipped and crinkled and sounded like rain. Inside, the pagoda was damp and cool. Funsize had a water cloner and a dozen patchwork fans made out of this or that. A thick pillar ran up through the center, so he’d arranged his secondhand furniture around it. And when I say “secondhand furniture,” I mean chairs without seats, a stool with a single leg that you sort of balanced on like it was a giant thumbtack, that sort of thing. When Funsize invited me in and told me to get comfortable, I chose the cushiest-looking footstool in the place, but that turned out to be just a big mushroom.
Funsize was hopping around the inside of the pagoda, showing me things, stuff he’d made from other stuff. I had no idea what any of it was supposed to be, or had been.