Deadzone

  "What are you doing?" Molly yelled at him.

  "Testing it!" Yoshi replied. "We need to know what this thing can do."

  "That thing can snap you in half," Anna shouted. What else mattered?

  "I'm going to try breaking it," Yoshi said. "We might need to know how to do it in the future."

  "No, Yoshi!" Molly shouted. "Get over to this side of the river, now!"

  Yoshi only smiled back as he picked up a large rock and hefted it at the robot. It hit the robot directly but bounced off as if Yoshi had thrown a tennis ball. He stepped back from the pincers, keeping just out of their reach.

  "I gave you an order," Molly said.

  "I don't do orders." Yoshi looked over at her as he spoke, which was a mistake. He tripped over one of the rocks left behind by the mites and fell to his back. A pincer reached for his leg and snapped just as Yoshi pulled it away.

  He rolled to his feet and began running for the team. "On second thought," he said, "I deeply respect your leadership, Molly. An order is an order."

  "The river is too wide; he won't make it." Anna raised her device, ready to turn on low grav and get Yoshi, but another gust of wind was blowing now. She wouldn't be able to control her jump.

  As he ran, Yoshi withdrew his sword, turning it around so that he was holding the blade. "Someone had better catch this and help pull me across," he shouted.

  At the edge of the river, he leaped, holding the sword out. Anna was still holding the device. The sisters hadn't understood Yoshi's instructions. Oliver looked frozen, and Javi was moving toward Yoshi, but wouldn't make it in time.

  Molly reached out and grabbed the sword's handle as it came toward her, giving a hard enough yank that it pulled Yoshi across the river. The tip of his shoe dipped into the green goo, and he quickly pulled it out as if stung. The stuff had eaten a hole through his shoe, and continued to eat the leather until he wiped it off on the dirt. Javi was right. The goo was acidic.

  "Acid snot!" Javi shouted. "I named it! I get credit for the name!"

  "Your mom would be proud," Yoshi said, wiggling his bare toe through the front of the shoe. "Thanks for grabbing me, Molly." Then he looked around and his tone soured. "And thanks, everyone else, for forgetting me."

  Anna looked over at Molly, who was bent over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. That had been close. Too close. And they were only getting started.

  Molly wasn't about to share this with the group, but when she'd pulled Yoshi across the river, she'd felt a surge of strength within her shoulder--and not her healthy, uninjured shoulder. The other one. The infected one.

  What was happening to her?

  There wasn't time to think about that now.

  The pincer robot remained on the opposite side of the--she hated to even think the words, but it was too late--the opposite side of the acid snot, pincers outstretched and snapping. It was impossible for a robot to feel emotions, but this one looked angry.

  Team Killbot gathered around the captured sand mite. "I have rope," Anna offered, digging into her backpack. They wound it around the metal whiskers, still waving through the air, trying to attach itself to someone's arm or leg. When the whiskers were secured, the robot was tied onto Anna's backpack.

  Meanwhile, Molly scanned the horizon. From what she recalled of the view higher on the hill, they probably had a half mile or more of the hard clay soil before it turned to sand. The sun was already hot and its reflection off this solid ground made the air feel even warmer, and drier. Jumping in low gravity wouldn't be easy, but it'd be far better than walking. She passed out the bungee cords again, asking everyone to hook themselves in.

  "What now, Great Leader?" Javi asked. "The sand mites obviously didn't want us to come this way."

  Molly stared forward. The building was somewhere far ahead of them--very far, no doubt--but it seemed like their only hope. Neither of the options to her left or right offered anything better. "We have a plan, and we should stick to it."

  It wasn't necessarily a great plan, but when you ran out of options, making decisions became easy.

  "Let's try to jump together this time," Anna suggested. "We won't all fit on the same tether, but if Oliver and Kira hold hands, we won't get separated again."

  Oliver blushed. "Uh, why us?" he aked.

  "Because you're on the ends and you're not holding the devices, obviously."

  Molly grinned at Anna's logic. "Good plan. Let's jump."

  At the highest point in their arc, Molly surveyed the desert again. It was much bigger than she'd expected. It'd be dark soon. They'd have to spend at least one night down below. Just the thought of that sent a shudder through her.

  "Can we talk about the attack?" Anna asked, though it wasn't a question, just a statement of what she intended to do. "We learned a lot about the maintenance robots back there."

  "Like what?" Yoshi asked.

  "Did you see what happened when Javi picked up one of them? They all stopped what they were doing at exactly the same time. And when they moved again, they all did exactly the same thing!"

  "So someone is directing their actions," Yoshi mused.

  "Maybe," Javi said. "But it's more likely the robots are networked--that they have some way of communicating with each other. They don't have eyes or a mouth, so it's something internal."

  "Like robot Wi-Fi," Yoshi said. "Silent group texting."

  Molly smiled. If that was the way he wanted to think of it, then that was close enough.

  "The pincer robot is like their bodyguard," Javi said. "It's protecting the littler ones."

  "We don't know that for sure," Anna said. "We know that wherever the mites are, the pincer robot is probably nearby, too. But every time Molly threw a sand mite at it, those pincers clipped it in half. So I don't know if it's protecting them, or following them to get closer to us. That's the dangerous robot. The rest are just annoying."

  "Annoying is when the kid sitting behind you in class is smacking his gum," Javi said. "Those things attacked us!"

  "After we stole one of them," Anna countered. "We started the fight."

  They drifted to the ground, and Molly counted off their next jump. Javi was a little off, but the group pulled him along. This was slower than she'd hoped, and hard on their legs.

  She was still fixated on the robot skirmish. There was a final detail they hadn't discussed. Molly didn't even really want to talk about it. But Oliver apparently did.

  "Dangerous or not, they're creepy," Oliver said. "Even without eyes, it's pretty obvious when they're looking at you ... looking at me. Did you notice? It was like they were after me in particular."

  Molly hated it, but Oliver was right. They had definitely locked on to him. Even with Javi carrying a captured bot in his arms, it had been more important to them to surround Oliver.

  "Why you?" Anna asked. "No offense, but there are better engineers on the team, and you're the youngest."

  "Which means what, exactly?" Molly intended to take offense at that, even if Oliver wouldn't. "He earned his way onto our team, just like everyone else, and whatever chose us to survive the crash, it chose Oliver, too. If the robots noticed him, then there's a reason for it!"

  Silence followed, until Yoshi muttered, "Congratulations, kid." It was a stark reminder that being singled out here wasn't exactly a badge of honor.

  Molly didn't say it, but she worried that it was because Oliver was the youngest that he had been targeted. Had the robots identified him as a weak link--as prey? It was her fault he was here in the first place. She'd convinced his parents he was integral to the team. And she's promided to keep him safe.

  They continued flying, or high-bouncing, until the first of the moons rose against the white sky. It was a red moon, eerie but beautiful.

  "I've got a theory," she told them. "About the colors in this place."

  Javi gave her a funny look. "The colors?"

  "Have you noticed? Everything that's attacked us so far--everything natural, I mean--has been
green."

  "I'm not sure anything here is natural, exactly," Javi countered.

  "You know what I mean. Robots aside, what have we been up against? The shredders are green. So was the tanglevine. The duck."

  Oliver looked over at Anna. "What do you think?"

  Anna thought for a moment. "It's not impossible. Color can be very meaningful in nature. Yellows or reds can signal danger."

  Yoshi seemed intrigued. He fired off a translation for the sisters.

  "So it's mixed up here?" Javi asked. "At home, green means go, red means stop."

  "Think of it this way," Molly said. "Here in the rift, green means 'go ahead and die if you're near it.'"

  "Green," Akiko said. "Midori."

  "Midori," Molly repeated. "Midori is bad."

  "Bad ... midori," Akiko said. "Red. Aka."

  "Aka is good," Molly said. "Red means, 'stop fighting me and just relax already!'"

  Javi chuckled. "What about blue?"

  Molly hadn't quite figured out blue yet. Everyone else seemed to have liked the blue berries from the jungle, but she didn't. To her, they just tasted wrong.

  "Blue," Kira said. "Ao."

  The group repeated the word. Kira and Akiko smiled at each other, then at everyone around them. It wasn't much, but it was three more words they could share.

  "Anyway, it's just a theory," Molly said. "We can see if it pans out."

  This was basic scientific method. Develop a theory and then experiment to test that theory. However, while that worked fine in a robotics lab, this was real life. It bothered her to realize how much could be riding on this hunch of hers being correct.

  Oliver let out a whoop. "We need to go down!" he shouted. "Everyone, look ahead!"

  Not more robots, Molly thought with a groan, but that wasn't it. A handful of boxes were scattered across the ground. Was that luggage?

  When their plane had been torn apart, objects from the plane would naturally have flown out, but Molly never expected to find anything so far from the crash site. Then again, the crash hadn't exactly followed the laws of physics. There weren't many suitcases, only five or six, but each one potentially held a survivor's treasure. They had to know what was inside!

  When they touched down, Anna and Javi each rotated the devices to turn on the gravity again. Although Molly didn't usually like the additional weight that came with the end of a flight, she was far too eager to check out those bags to care about the sudden pit in her gut.

  They disconnected from the bungee cords, and everyone grabbed a bag for investigation. Javi took the largest one, stuffed so full it had needed a rope around the outside to keep it together. Molly grabbed one slightly smaller with hard sides that had taken a considerable beating. Yoshi was walking away from the rest of the group to open the one he'd chosen, plain black with only a line of red duct tape marking the top. He was clearly in a mood, perhaps dwelling on the people who'd packed these bags and were now gone. She'd give him space, so long as he didn't stray too far.

  "Pure gold!" Javi said, bringing her attention back to the others. He was raising up a bulk-size bag of candy. "Who feels like a snack?"

  Yoshi heard the others celebrate the large bag of candy and then heard Molly say everyone could take only three, because she was confiscating the rest for rationing. Based on their response, it wasn't a popular decision, but that's what made Molly a good leader. She didn't make her decisions for popularity. She was doing what she thought was right for the team. He respected that.

  He wished he were more like that, too. Stealing his father's sword to take it to America was hardly an act of honor. It was flat-out rebellion. And as it turned out, because the sword was a historic national treasure, his first major act of rebellion also happened to risk an international incident. That figured.

  If he did get out of this rift alive, would his crime be forgiven? Maybe Japan would say, "Hey, you were in a plane crash, survived that bizarre wilderness with its seriously nasty predators, and used a stolen sword to save a lot of lives. You've already been punished enough."

  Yeah, maybe that would work for Japan, and it might be his American mother's way to forgive and forget, but his father would be different. Yoshi could apologize a hundred times for taking the sword, and it wouldn't matter. Which was why he didn't intend to apologize even once.

  The group must have found something else of value back there. He wasn't sure what it was, but following a brief cheer, Molly confiscated that, too.

  Now Yoshi turned to the bag he had grabbed. There was a reason he had chosen this one. It was his.

  His name was on the luggage tag. When he'd written it down at the airport, though, he hadn't known which address to put. Should he have used the address where he wanted to be, the place he considered home? Or where he was going? In the end, he had skipped the address. He hadn't really cared if the airline lost his luggage. He hadn't expected the airline to lose him.

  "This bag has a lot of papers at the bottom," Molly was saying. "Looks like a lawyer's suitcase. The paper will be great for fire starters. And look! A cell phone."

  "I think we're out of texting range," Anna said wryly.

  "Sure, but it could still be useful. I'll turn it off, preserve the battery."

  "Mine has a cool knife," Javi said. "I'm keeping this. The rest of the stuff in here is clothes. It'd take four of me to wear any of these shirts."

  "Javi, shirt," Akiko said in English.

  "Shatsu," Yoshi mumbled under his breath. Not that anyone would hear.

  "I'm not wearing that!" Javi shouted. "No way! If there is even a .0001 percent chance that we get rescued, I am not having my picture splashed all over the world in that shirt!"

  Yoshi turned around, and even in his grim mood, he found himself smiling. Akiko had found a shirt that looked exactly Javi's size. It was light green and decorated in pink ponies.

  "The shirt you've been wearing is being held together by threads," Molly said. "You can't keep wearing it."

  "Besides, it smells," Anna said.

  "We all smell," Javi said. "I'm not wearing the pink ponies shirt."

  Kira began rattling off some excited Japanese. Yoshi understood. She'd found food--roasted seaweed with a soy-sauce spice. He liked it, and he was sure both sisters would, but he wondered how hungry the rest of the team would have to get before they decided to try the green crisps.

  Molly, he noticed, didn't attempt to confiscate it. She might not yet even be sure what it was.

  Yoshi unzipped his bag. He saw T-shirts, a pair of dress shoes, and some self-help book his mother thought he might want to read on the way over--which he hadn't. It was all familiar to him, of course, and yet his things felt utterly foreign in this place. What good were dress shoes to him now?

  His eyes drifted to a white envelope sticking out of the book. It was a sealed letter from his mother to his father, which she had made him promise to deliver unopened.

  Yoshi had intended to keep that promise, but what did it matter now? Their chances of getting out of this place weren't good, no matter how optimistic Molly pretended to be. He would never have the chance to deliver that letter.

  Yoshi ripped open the envelope, but held the letter closed between his fingers. Did his promise to his mother still matter? He had his flaws, but breaking promises wasn't one of them. On the other hand, Team Killbot was rummaging through those other passengers' things without a thought for who those people had been, for what secrets their baggage had held. If Yoshi hadn't survived, they'd be going through his bag now, too, just the same way. They'd have already opened this letter and read it.

  "This box is pretty valuable," Oliver was saying. "I think it's an emergency survival kit for the pilot. There's a couple of days' worth of food, two emergency blankets, a few more flares, some duct tape, rope, three water bottles, a fishing kit ..."

  "We won't get much fishing done in the desert," Anna said.

  "But maybe it'll be useful ahead," Molly said. "Good job, everyone. Let's pack
everything we can carry. We'll have to leave the rest behind." Then she called over to Yoshi. "Find anything useful?"

  He ignored her and unfolded the letter. It was signed by his mother and addressed to his father. This alone was significant. His parents' divorce had been anything but friendly, with his father accusing his mother of only wanting Yoshi because it would entitle her to more money, and she accusing him of making Yoshi a pawn in their negotiations. The court had ordered his parents to send all further communications through their lawyers.

  So if she was writing his father directly, that was big.

  Our son is often in trouble here, his mother had written. He says he's too Japanese to fit in with Americans, and too American to return to Japan.

  There was truth to that, though his father would only tell him to grow up and stop complaining about his heritage. That would be followed by an endless lecture about noble bloodlines and honor and his responsibility to his family, and whatever else his father would say once Yoshi had tuned out entirely.

  Yoshi needs to find himself, his mother continued. He needs to figure out who he really is. I think he needs a new adventure.

  Like surviving a plane crash and carnivorous plant life? Was that enough of an adventure for her?

  Then in the final paragraph, she wrote, I cannot control Yoshi anymore. I'm asking you to keep him in Japan, permanently.

  Permanently.

  The word rang out like a hammer in Yoshi's head. She wasn't sending him back to Japan to resolve the incident with the sword, or because it was his father's turn for custody. She was sending him there because she wanted to get rid of him. Permanently.

  "Are you all right?" Kira called to him. "You're really quiet."

  Yoshi didn't respond, because responding would have required him to speak Japanese, and he wasn't in the mood for that. He crumpled up the letter and stuffed it into his pocket. If Molly wanted paper for a fire starter, he would gladly provide it.

  So he could not be controlled? If his mother thought that was true before, then she should see him in the rift. Because he had no intention of letting anyone control him here. Not the robots, or their programmer, or even Molly with all her positive-attitude leadership. No one told him what to do.