I looked down at the lantern. “Lasso of truth. That seems like a stupid weapon. Why not a machine gun of truth?” I held the lantern up to the door and saw that there were a few glowing lights inside. So this side of the ship wasn’t completely without power. I stepped across the threshold, Rachel and Brynne on my heels.
There was blood everywhere. And worse, those farm tools we’d seen in the other room—the lab—were here, too. They were covered in blood, their spikes and hooks crusted with it. I think I would have thrown up if I hadn’t been wearing a mask. I didn’t dare take it off to throw up, and I certainly wasn’t going to throw up with it on. Rachel pivoted around and stepped back out of the room.
“Okay,” I said, turning and facing a wall so I wouldn’t have to look at the mess all across the floor. There was more than just blood. There was . . . flesh. Matter. Whatever word is used for little bits of bodies.
“Okay,” Brynne said quietly.
“Let’s just take pictures and get out of here.”
“Okay.”
I slapped a sticker—2142—on the nearest thing, a bed. There were six beds in this room—bigger and nicer, with blood-soaked mattresses. I started snapping pictures, shaking as I tried to hold the camera still.
“It could have been an accident,” Brynne said. “The aliens in here could have died in the crash. And then the farm tools were used to pry the door open. Right?”
“Right,” I said, “an accident. Lots of blood, but there are lots of sharp corners in this room. Lots of places for a person—for an alien—to crash into. Frankly, I’m amazed we haven’t seen more bloody messes all over this sleeping area. People should have gotten thrown all over.”
“Why aren’t you guys calling it what it is?” Rachel said, plainly trembling. “Another mass suicide.”
“There’s so much blood,” Brynne said, but it wasn’t scientist Brynne talking. It was teenager, only-a-few-years-ago-was-a-little-kid Brynne talking.
“We did see a few wounded aliens leaving the ship,” I said, trying to be optimistic.
“I hate to burst your bubble,” Brynne said, trying to shake off her nerves and go back to being the scientist. “But these people didn’t survive. People don’t have this much blood in them. Not enough to lose this much and survive. I don’t care what your high-tech alien rescue equipment is. These people didn’t make it. These people didn’t even leave the room to get to where the other people committed suicide. They died right here.”
“If they’re like humans,” I said. “You called them people, which they’re not.”
“Maybe,” Brynne said.
We continued through the room, stepping over blood where we could and tiptoeing across it where we couldn’t. We affixed stickers and took pictures, and it was horrifying. It was like the Halloween decor at the dorms if all the fake blood and gore were real. It was a horror movie.
When we’d taken pictures of room 2142 from every angle we could think of, we moved back into the long room with bunk beds.
I could tell I was breathing too fast, and Brynne was bent in half, hands on her knees. Rachel leaned against a wall, hugging herself.
I pulled out my phone. Dad answered on the fourth ring.
“Find anything awesome?” he asked.
“Dad,” I said. “This place is a nightmare. I think we just found a murder scene. Like a real, live murder scene. Or another suicide. We don’t know.”
“Aly,” he said, and I heard him mumble something to someone else. “Aly, I’m sorry.”
“We’re done, Dad. Sorry, but this ship is crazy.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “What did you find?”
“A murder room. A haunted house. I don’t know what it was.”
“I’m like half a mile away from you now. Can you wait there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “If you can hurry.”
“Okay. Remember, if you need to leave just follow those metal rings and the extension cords the way you came in. Seriously, honey, don’t worry about it. You did great.”
I was starting to cry. “We only got four rooms.”
“That’s four we didn’t have before,” he said. “Listen, I’m coming. We’ll figure this out.”
“Okay.”
“You all right?”
“I guess.”
It took him seven minutes to get there. I was counting. None of us said anything. No speculation, no jokes to lighten the mood. Just fear.
These were Guides. But what the hell were they going to be guiding us about?
Dad saw us sitting, nervous and frightened, on the beds opposite the door to the murder room. He pointed at the jammed door without saying a word. I nodded.
He aimed his flashlight into the room for ten or twenty seconds, and then squeezed inside. He was in there for a good five minutes before he called out: “Did you get photos of this whole place?”
“Yeah,” I answered, finally standing up and walking back to the door.
“We haven’t found anything like this anywhere else. We thought the suicide room was the only place like this.”
I started to speak, but my flashlight caught a torn piece of flesh, and I had to fight to keep from throwing up.
“I’m sorry, Alice.”
I closed my eyes. “It’s okay.”
“No. I’m really sorry.”
“We’re leaving.”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll come with you.” He got on his radio and called back to someone, telling them he’d be back in thirty minutes. He slid back through the jammed door and gave me a hug, and I wanted to cry, but I stopped myself. I had to be tougher than that. For Dad.
ELEVEN
All I could think about was Coya. She was the gentlest creature I think I’d ever met. So calm and fragile. And she had been stranded inside the ship for so long.
“Dad,” I asked, holding his hand like I was half my age. Wishing I still was. “Did they still have lights on inside the ship? While they waited to open the door?”
“We think so, Aly. At least most of the time.”
“Good.”
We showered for a long time at the NASA tent, and then when we got back home, we showered again, hoping that by some miracle our shampoos and bodywashes would somehow soak through our skulls and into our brains and turn us back into innocent teenage girls.
When we got back to our room, Brynne asked if she could sleep in the room with me and Rachel—it was late and she didn’t want to be alone in her room with Coya. Not tonight.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said, knowing that this was exactly what the stupid RAs would have wanted me to ask. They’d be all into us expressing our feelings in order to process what happened.
“It’s not like movies,” Rachel said. “Well, it’s not like most movies. It’s like Alien. It’s not like 2001.”
“These people are not Guides,” Brynne said. “I don’t care what they say. I don’t care how miserable it was waiting inside a spaceship for everyone to get out. They don’t have some heretofore undiscovered miraculous philosophy. They’re people who can’t even be bothered to make their beds. I can understand a messy bathroom, because they didn’t have running water, but not making their beds? Not cleaning up the hallway? I know that’s petty, but I don’t care. Did you guys see that movie with Keanu Reeves where he’s an alien who comes to tell the world how we’ve all gotten it wrong? It’s The Day the Earth Stood Still or something like that. Anyway, his solution is to wipe everything out and make the world start over from the cavemen. Maybe that’s the kind of Guides these aliens are. They’re not peaceful. They’re messy, and they’re ready to start a fight.”
“I’ll admit it,” Rachel said. “I’m a Star Wars nerd. I love it. And the production designers say they want to give their ships a ‘lived-in’ look. But they don’t have ships like that. The real world sucks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, staring at the ceiling. The textured paint reminded me of a sea of stars. “I’m sorry I dragged yo
u into this. I should have warned you about the suicides.”
“No,” Rachel said, leaning up on one elbow. “It was awesome. It was horrible, and I hated it, but it was going into a spaceship just days after it landed. If I was with a group of NASA researchers—people who knew what they should have done when they came across what we found—then I’d go back in a heartbeat.”
“You would? Seriously?” Brynne said.
“Yes, seriously. It was totally a freak show, but that’s because it was just the three of us, and we didn’t have any real protection other than the lasso of truth. But if there were a dozen of us, and one of us was your dad, and he knew what he was doing and he was the one who entered all the rooms first, then I’d go back. I just want someone who knows what they’re doing to be the one to discover the horrible stuff and tell me that it’s okay.”
“I think I’m with you,” I said, and Brynne sighed. “No, really. I’d go back with someone who had a gun.”
“I don’t need a gun,” Rachel said. “Just someone who could talk about all the bad stuff and explain to us why we’re not looking at a mass murder.”
Brynne sat up. “But what if it was a mass murder?”
“It wasn’t,” Rachel said. “It was a ship crashing at six hundred miles an hour. I don’t know why those pointy sticks were in the room, but they were an accident waiting to happen. In low gravity they probably never even got looked at twice.”
“So,” Brynne said. “We just have to find out what those pointy sticks were for. Because I can’t see much reason for them other than to kill someone.”
“They have to have some other purpose,” I said. “Because killing people doesn’t seem like the point of the ship. What ship crosses the galaxy and along the way kills half the people on board?”
I swung my legs over the end of the bed and stood up. I was wearing a clean pair of scrubs. We all were—they were the best part of our trip to the spaceship. We didn’t want to leave without a souvenir.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked.
“Coya’s in the other room. Let’s just ask her. It’s what Wonder Woman would do, right?”
Brynne and Rachel grimaced, then nodded. We trooped into the next room. Coya was sleeping, and we softly called her name until she sat up and looked at us. I motioned for her to put on her translator, and she did.
“So,” I said. “We have a question.”
“Yes?” Coya said.
“We went inside your ship.”
She nodded slowly, looking confused.
“We found a room while we were there. There were tools—hooks and spikes on long poles.”
What tiny amount of color she had in her face vanished.
“Do you know what those hooks and spikes are for?” I asked her.
She suddenly took a great interest in smoothing out her quilt, adamantly avoiding all eye contact.
“Coya, honey,” Brynne said. “Can you tell us what those were for?”
“For working on the ship,” she said. “We all worked on the ship. Some people used hooks and spikes.”
“To do what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It was not my job.”
“What was your job?”
“I had many jobs,” she said, seeming eager to change the subject. “I cleaned. There is a lot that needs to be cleaned on a ship so big. I also worked in a laboratory. I was learning how to extract blood and test it.”
“Test it for what?” Brynne asked, her tone changing to one of academic interest.
“Purity. There were sicknesses on the ship. I do not know how it worked. I was only a beginner.”
“I have to ask you a hard question,” I said. “And I don’t want to upset you.”
She looked me, her expression wary.
“When we were in the ship, we found a room where there was blood all over the floor.”
“No,” Coya said adamantly.
“Coya,” I said. “It looked like people had been murdered there. Do you know what murder is?”
“You mean killing a person?”
“Yes.”
“There were no murders.”
“Do you know about a room like that?”
“Many people were hurt in the crash,” she said. “It may be their blood.”
“Were people killed in the crash?”
She paused for a long time, looking from Brynne, to Rachel, to me. “Yes. People were killed in the crash.”
“Where are their bodies?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because we’re worried,” Rachel said.
“Worried that I will kill you?” Coya said with sudden outrage. “I am not like that. I am not a monster.”
“We’re not saying you’re a monster,” I said. “We just want to know what happened, so we can help. We’re worried about you.”
“You don’t need to be worried about me. Not anymore.”
“But—” I began.
“I’m tired now,” Coya interrupted. “Good night.”
“We’re your friends,” I pleaded. “We want to help.” But it was clear we had worn out our welcome for the night. Rachel shrugged, and the three of us tiptoed out of the room.
Brynne slept in Rachel’s bed, neither one of them snoring, which made me feel bad because I knew that I did. But I just couldn’t sleep. What was the aliens’ plan? They weren’t good at landing their ship, and they didn’t even have a real door for coming out. Was this really the plan of aliens who wanted to guide us? To crash-land and fill us with terror for two weeks while we fed them and gave them shelter and warmth? Were they beggars, come to teach us the true meaning of Christmas?
“I’m going to find something to eat,” I whispered, but neither Rachel nor Brynne made a sound.
Except I wasn’t going to find something to eat. As soon as I got up, I texted Kurt to ask him to meet me in the main common room. I needed to talk to someone who hadn’t been in the ship, who hadn’t seen what we’d seen.
I crept past Coya’s room and stepped out into the hallway. The lights were on halfway, but the dimness didn’t scare me. This part of the school was too new to look creepy.
I passed the cafeteria and made it to the common room. It was the first time I had been there when the TV was off. I checked my phone. It was three in the morning. We had class in five hours, and I hadn’t slept a wink. Kurt wasn’t there yet, so I went to the cafeteria and got myself a Diet Coke.
By the time I got back to the common room, Kurt had turned on the gas fireplace and was shoving a couch up close to it. When he saw me, he smiled. He looked different without his glasses.
“Don’t get any ideas, hot shot,” I said. “I dragged you out of bed to tell you horror stories, not to woo you with midnight fantasies.”
“The only ideas I’m getting are that my feet are freezing,” he said.
“You are such a liar,” I said. “Just know that any ideas you have that would result in me spilling my Diet Coke are bad ones.”
I sat down on the couch—an orange modern thing that was really beautiful but could have been more comfortable. I leaned back and put my stocking feet up on the hearth. Kurt sat next to me. He was wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and he put his bare feet next to mine. What we really needed was a big blanket.
Because it was Minnesota at three a.m. Get your mind out of the gutter.
“First of all,” I said, “you have to tell me that I can trust you.”
“Implicitly.”
“I need more than that. I need . . . an embarrassing story,” I said. “Blackmail material.”
“What magnitude of embarrassing story are we talking about? I mean, I don’t want to tell you something extremely embarrassing in exchange for something only mild in return.”
“We went in the spaceship,” I said.
His mouth hung open for a minute. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me, Brynne, and Rachel. With my dad. So, big-time embarrassing.”
/>
“Wow. I don’t know if I have something that level of embarrassing.”
“Do the best you can.”
“Seventh grade,” he said, and paused.
“This already sounds promising.”
“My first year in a coed boarding school. We had it in our heads that the funniest thing in the world was to hide somewhere and get accidentally discovered. So, like, you’d hide in the closet for hours, and then someone would come by and open the door and you’d scare the crap out of them.”
“I’d say this sounds like seventh-grade-level embarrassing.”
“It wasn’t just the boys. The girls did it, too. Anyway, I was trying to be the best at it, because whoever created the biggest scare got popularity points. It was very competitive. Somehow I got into the girls’ dorm, which was a lot harder in middle school.”
I was already covering my face. I knew this couldn’t end well.
“So I had it in my head that the funniest thing would be to get under a girl’s bed, and when she came in, I’d grab her leg, and she’d scream, and everyone would laugh and I’d be a hero.”
“Oh no.”
“The problem was that I got in the room and under the bed, but she came in too soon, and I was facing the wrong way, so she was sitting on her bed before I could do anything.”
I could feel my face turning red on his behalf, although he was plenty red himself. “And?”
“And I lay under the bed for an hour, terrified, trying to figure out the best way to get myself out of the situation. Finally I just said, ‘Boo.’ I spent the rest of middle school as ‘That Kid Who Hid Under a Girl’s Bed and Watched Her Undress.’”
“Ouch.”
“It was not my finest hour.”
“Okay, that works,” I said. “It might even be worse than anything I’m going to tell you.”
Then I laid it all out for him. I told him about the lab, the long rows of beds, the awful bathroom, and the murder room. I knew Rachel didn’t think it was a mass murder, but I couldn’t believe it was an accident. It didn’t look like people had been thrown around the room in the crash.
There weren’t any bodies, though. Maybe they were brought out with the wounded.