Dad turned his head to cough into his arm and presumably got a look at the ever stoic Suski.
“They don’t wear shoes?”
“I know! Crazy, right? They’re not very guiding. Listen to this: they don’t wear shoes, they don’t have mothers—what does that even mean?—and they don’t know how to read.”
“They don’t know how to read?”
“That shocks you more than the mothers thing?”
“Different cultures do different things,” he said. “Even Plato said we didn’t need mother-child attachment. But they should be able to read. You’d think a star-faring race would emphasize education.”
“I know!”
“Honestly, we’ve noticed the same thing with the engineers we’ve been working with. They know how to run the engines—which are surprisingly complicated and take a lot of manpower—but we haven’t been able to get much of substance from them as to how anything works. They know their jobs, but they aren’t pouring out great wisdom.”
“But you’re learning a lot, right?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Tons. We’re just having to do most of the figuring out on our own.”
“So what about all the big questions?” I asked, glancing at him. “Faster-than-light travel? Their mission? What that ship is made of that allowed it to skid for nearly three hundred miles and not break up?”
He rubbed a hand over his face tiredly. “I wish. But we have their engines. And somewhere, in that giant sea of Guides, there’s someone who knows how they work. We just have to figure out who. My guess is this: all the real knowledge is being saved as bargaining chips by this Mai guy. The real scientists are just blending in until we reach some deals.”
“Then we ought to start reaching some deals,” I said.
“No kidding. Days are dragging on, and things aren’t going well—not for us, not for them. It’s got to be getting pretty miserable in that shantytown where they’re living.”
“It’s not going to be getting much better anytime soon,” I said. “It’s not like we have an entire empty city where we can move them.”
“And I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but all the federal money is going to victims of the crash first. They haven’t approved anything for the Guides.”
“I can’t say that I blame them,” I said.
“Congress is flailing,” he said. “Mai is the only person from the Guides who is talking—it’s not like they have a secretary of state and a vice president. It all just seems to be Mai.”
“What about that woman who came out of the ship with Mai?”
“Right now it’s the president and Mai.”
“And in the meantime, the people are going crazy. We had a hundred protestors out in front of the school today.”
“You were headline news yesterday. I’m not surprised.”
“I’m sharing a room with one of them,” I said.
“And are you being a good roommate?”
“I am being a model roommate. And she’s a model roommate. They’re totally normal people—and I use that word intentionally. They’re people, just like any other kind of people. You wouldn’t know the difference between her and me, except for my abundance of melanin.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really?”
“We dyed her hair, to match mine.”
“What?”
“She loved the streak in my hair, and she said she wanted one—and, like good friends and roommates, we dyed her hair and then snuck her around the back of the building to avoid the RA.”
“If I didn’t know you were a good kid, I’d be terrified.”
“What makes you think I’m a good kid?”
“Because a bad kid would lie about sneaking out and getting caught.”
After we finished eating, Dad jokingly asked for a beer and the cafeteria amazingly had not only one, but a selection. I’d forgotten that they served all the adults, too. I ordered coffee and alternately steamed my hands and sipped at it.
“Okay, Alice,” he said, once he had half a bottle of microbrew in him. “I have a proposal.”
I nodded for him to continue.
“This is between you and your closest friends—the two girls in your dorm room, the ones you keep saying are so smart.”
“They’re way smart—one of them at math and one at genetics.”
“Okay, here’s my problem: that ship is enormous.” He took another long swallow of his beer. “You’re a responsible kid.”
“Very.”
“And you get good grades. You’re going to college.”
I wondered how potent that microbrew was, but I agreed and kept listening.
“And your two roommates sound like they’re just counting down time until graduation.”
“Brynne already has offers to skip senior year and go to college. And Rachel’s like a math savant.”
“Then that does it,” he said.
“That does what?”
“Get some cameras and come down to the crash site. We have a lot of people from NASA there, and we’ve recruited kids from the University of Minnesota, but we need more people on the ground to help us document it.”
“What? Really?”
“Here’s the deal: we’ve heard rumors from Washington that the United Nations is trying to take over the crash site, but we want the first crack at it. We want to map it and understand the technology and photograph everything, and it’s so big that we can’t do it all with the manpower we have. We estimate that so far we’ve explored about 15 percent of it. It doesn’t help that the hull is round, so we need climbers to get at half of it.”
“So you’re inviting me and my friends to go inside the ship?” I confirmed, giddy to tell Rachel and Brynne.
“And work, yes.”
“When can we start?”
“Tomorrow.”
“That’s perfect. I’ve been tracking it online, and Bluebell is supposed to get here in the morning. But you’re going to have to clear this with the headmistress and the FBI.”
Dad pulled out one of his NASA business cards. “These tend to get me what I want.”
I grabbed my phone to call Rachel so that she and Brynne could come down and hear the news. The two of them were jogging around the corner in their pajamas in less than a minute. Brynne looked gorgeous as always, and Rachel had her hair in curlers—although she didn’t seem to care if anyone saw her that way.
They sat down at the table, and I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.
“Dad wants us to go inside the ship.”
Brynne’s jaw dropped, and Rachel squealed.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “This is my dad.”
Brynne stood up and shook his hand. “Brynne Fuller.”
Rachel reached across the table. “I’m Rachel,” she said, too dumbfounded to even give her last name.
“What’s it like down there?” Brynne asked. “I mean, we’ve been watching the news, but what’s it really like?”
“It’s not a pretty sight,” he said. “I don’t know what the count is up to, but it looks like a sea of endless tents. I think every Porta-Potty in Minnesota is there.”
“Meaning they . . . do their business just like people do?” I asked. I’d been the one who’d had to explain toilets to Coya, and it was much harder than I would have expected.
“They’re just like humans from head to toe, as far as our researchers have gathered. Their translators are getting really good, but I’m not privy to all the interesting conversations.”
“Why not? You’re director of special projects!” Rachel said.
“My job is entirely based on the ship. Too bad it’s getting pretty rotten in there. Remember a couple years ago when a cruise ship lost power and kind of drifted around at sea for an extra week, and none of the water pumps worked so none of the toilets worked?”
I made a face. “Gross.”
“That’s kind of the picture that we’re getting from inside the ship. Want to know how many G
uides were on it?”
“Sure.”
“Fifty-five thousand.”
Rachel spoke. “Really? We’d guessed one thirty.”
He laughed, and then finally took a bite of his cherry pie. I knew he’d eat it. I win. “I came up with that same number on the plane. But, nope, it’s less. Still, fifty-five thousand. That’s a lot.”
“What else is on the ship? If there’re eighty thousand fewer Guides than you thought?”
“I’ve actually gotten to talk to a few of the Guides who worked in engineering,” he said. “They have some words that don’t translate, which means they’re probably terms that we don’t have in English—new, alieny things like dilithium crystals or beryllium spheres. Do you realize what kind of advances we’ll be able to make in our space program based off the ship alone, not to mention their engineering minds? It’s amazing!”
I talked with my mouth full of pie. “You sound like a kid on Christmas.”
“This is better than Christmas,” Rachel said, looking at me like I was crazy.
“So we’ll be doing what on the ship?” Brynne asked. “Just taking pictures?”
“Yep,” he said. “But I’ll explain all of that tomorrow.”
“Is it safe?” Rachel asked.
“I’ll only send you to safe areas,” Dad said in a gentle voice. “We’re going to need an army of monkeys to fully explore this thing because so much of it is upside down, but right now we’re just focusing on the bottom couple of floors, so there won’t be much climbing. You’ll get dizzy. And if you are prone to throwing up, you might throw up. We’ve found some rooms where people got pretty injured—a lot of dried blood—and some other rooms that were used as temporary bathrooms. But nothing dangerous.”
“Sounds good to me!” Brynne exclaimed, and Rachel nodded vigorously.
Despite the girls’ enthusiasm, there was something weird about the way my dad was acting. I knew him too well. He was hiding something.
He stood up and the girls thanked him and shook his hand.
I took his arm and walked him to the door.
“I think you’re getting too excited about this,” I told him. “Promise me one thing: you won’t fall in love with some pretty Guide engineer and get married, because that would be the worst kind of wicked stepmother. An alien wicked stepmother.”
“Aly.”
“Promise me.”
“Pinkie swear,” he said, and held up his little finger. I yanked his pinkie with mine.
“Good. And no pinkie swearing with the pretty Guide engineers. I’ve seen their tight outfits. What’s the deal with those, by the way?”
“Not sure. They’re not the mummy wrappings they looked like on TV. When you’re up close they look more like strips of cloth all sewn together. Very weird.”
“They seem to be designed for wardrobe malfunctions.” I didn’t know how to get him to spill.
“They do. The Guides don’t seem to care, though. Or, at least, they don’t seem to know anything different. Have you seen all the wounded?”
“Of course. It’s hard to watch TV and not see them.”
“Imagine you were in a spaceship going nine hundred feet per second and you hit the ground. The only way they survived is by skimming like a rock across water. It slowed them down. It was a crash landing, but it was a really amazing crash landing. They totally could have made a crater out of Iowa if they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Dad, you’re doing your Wait, there’s more voice.”
He frowned. “Deep inside the ship, in the heart, as far as we can tell, there was a mass suicide. We think it was the only one. But I want you guys to be ready.”
“How many?” I asked, feeling like I’d just been punched in the chest.
“We’re still counting, but it looks like it will be more than a thousand. And the strangest part? Sometimes they stabbed themselves in the heart or slit their own throat or slashed their wrists, but all of them—every single one—had a wound in their abdomen.
“Think about it—a spaceship crashes going Mach One, and eighty percent of the injuries are puncture wounds to the abdomen, after which they killed themselves. It’s just so weird. It has to be a clue.”
“Why don’t you ask somebody?”
“Like I said, they don’t tell us much.”
“That’s superweird.”
“It is,” he said, and looked at his watch.
“Go, have your nerd fun,” I said.
“You follow the rules.”
“How much trouble can I get in between now and tomorrow morning?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
When we got to the admin office, it was locked, but there was a night number for the secretary posted.
Dad talked to the secretary, who then gave him the headmistress’s home number. He explained the situation and all of the great press the school could get for this, and before the call was over, the headmistress had offered to let us visit the crash site and to buy $3,000 cameras for the three of us girls. Score.
“Agents,” Dad said when we got to the front door, “tomorrow evening I’m taking my daughter and her two roommates with me onto the ship. They will be gone for several hours. Oh, also, her car is being delivered, so it needs to be allowed through the gate. The headmistress will brief you on all of this in the morning, and I’ll contact the FBI office just so we’re all on the same page.”
The agents didn’t seem used to taking orders from civilians, but they nodded. “If you clear it with them,” one of them said, “then we’ll be okay.”
Dad hugged me, and it was the first time I noticed he was still holding the cup of pickled herring.
“You only eat two bites of pie, but you take the herring?”
“The pie was on a ceramic plate. This is a disposable cup.”
“Gross, Dad. Gross.”
“Love you, Aly.”
“You, too.”
When I made it back to the cafeteria, Brynne sat on the couch giving a neck rub to Malcolm, who was sitting at her feet and blasting the hell out of pixelated aliens on the TV. Rachel was curled up on an oversized chair, staring at the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper like she was doing it in her head. Maybe she was. Was that possible?
I crossed the room and sat down at Suski’s table. He was in no mood to talk to me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to him. A thousand suicides? I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.
Why did a thousand people commit suicide inside the ship, Suski? Why were they all stabbed in the stomach before they killed themselves?
Suski looked at me from across the table. There was something in his eyes. It wasn’t just stoic staring. There was hurt in there. Or maybe I was projecting that on to him, seeing what I wanted to see. I met his gaze and held it, but below the table my hand began to shake.
What had happened on that ship in the week that it was sitting in the dirt by Lakeville? What were they afraid of?
Was it a fight? The losers got stabbed in the stomach?
I glanced up at Suski. He was on the winning team. Was he a good guy or a bad guy?
TEN
I hadn’t been sure how to explain it to Coya, that we were going to investigate her home. But she was up in the library watching a video for history class.
Rachel and Brynne hadn’t seen the ship in real life and were completely awed by it even in the waning evening light. The National Guard officer at the entrance to the site was considerably less awed by us. He looked at all of our IDs, and even though our names were on the list, he called my dad and asked if we were really the Alice, Brynne, and Rachel that he was waiting for. Dad confirmed our identities and confirmed the identity of Bluebell, and soon we were heading down a hardpacked dirt road away from I-35 and toward the enormous object that was blocking out all the skyline. The guardsman had hung a tag on my rearview mirror—a big green 16—and as we drove, traffic directors motioned me to take this road and then that road, and we got closer and clo
ser to the ship.
It was completely overwhelming. I had been to the Grand Canyon once and had been stunned by the size of that—that something could be so incredibly massive, it stretched from horizon to horizon. This spaceship felt a little like that. It was an enormous wall of darkness that rose higher than I could see and in both directions away from us. In fact, at one point Rachel pointed up through the sunroof and said that it was above us; we were under the curve of the cylinder.
One more guard guided us toward a parking lot that contained about eighty cars and a dozen large tents.
“Do you think we’re going to see more aliens?” Brynne asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling into an empty spot. “Dad said he was working with alien engineers. But I think they’ll just be like Coya and Suski.”
I dialed Dad’s cell, and he answered quickly. “You’re ten minutes late.”
“I didn’t want to get pulled over and miss this completely.”
“Good. You’re in the parking lot? Wait—I see you.”
A moment later he was at my car shaking Brynne and Rachel’s hands again and generally acting like he was powered by coffee and excitement.
“Did you sleep last night?” I asked.
“Sleep is for the weak,” he said, motioning us toward one of the tents.
“You can’t have a heart attack and leave me an orphan. You know I’d just blow all our money on drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”
“All the best heroes are orphans,” Dad said. “You’d be in good company, if you went on a quest or something.” He looked at the other girls. “You’re not orphans, are you?”
“Not me,” they both answered.
“You’ll never amount to anything. Anyway, here’s the deal. You’re going to get suited up. I’m going to give you a pad of stickers that have numbers on them. We’re going to go through the ship, find rooms that haven’t been touched, and take pictures of them. Treat it like a crime scene—don’t touch anything, just take pictures, and one of these numbered stickers needs to be in every shot. Every room has a number, and every picture from that room uses the same number. Clear as mud?”
We nodded.
“We’re exploring places in the ship where no one has gone?” I asked. “You’re sure this isn’t dangerous? What if we find another . . . you know.” I still hadn’t told the girls about the suicides. I don’t know why. I just hoped it wouldn’t come up.