Spaced Out

  “Where?”

  “Nina’s room, of course.” Kira gave me a devious smile, then slipped out of the gym.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  INFLATICUBES

  At first glance, it might appear that InflatiCubes are as safe as a piece of furniture can get—and for good reason: They are! After all, there are no hard parts to bang yourself on, nor any sharp edges to cut yourself with. And yet, please remember that, while InflatiCubes serve the purpose of chairs, they are not chairs. Should you attempt to lean back or recline on one the way you might with a real chair, you could fall off the back, bang your head on the floor, and suffer harm ranging anywhere from a nasty bruise to a subdural hematoma. So please exercise caution at all times when sitting.

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Lunar day 217

  T minus 22 minutes to Capsule Drop

  I bounded out the gym door after Kira. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not measuring the stupid gym anymore, that’s for sure.” Kira made a point of shoving her laser measuring device into her pocket. “That’s only busy work Chang made up to get us out of the way.”

  We passed the common room, which Dr. Janke and Dr. Balnikov were busily measuring.

  I pointed to them. “If it was busy work, would they be doing it?”

  Kira didn’t even glance at them. “If we really want to know where Nina went, the answer isn’t out here. It’s in her quarters.”

  “Why?”

  Kira rolled her eyes. “That’s the last place you saw her. And you were the last person to see her. So if somebody whacked her, they probably did it there.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well, there’s a better chance they did it there than anywhere else. And if they didn’t, there could still be a clue to who the killer is in Nina’s personal stuff.”

  “Nina didn’t have any personal stuff.”

  Kira froze at the bottom of the staircase and fixed me with a withering stare, like she was getting annoyed. “Everyone has personal stuff. Nina just kept hers secret.”

  I knew it was pointless to argue. Once Kira made up her mind to do something, she usually did it. Plus, she had a thing about entering places that were supposed to be off-limits to her. Back on earth, she’d trespassed a lot, going behind the scenes in places like museums, zoos, and movie theaters. She claimed she did this simply out of curiosity, but my parents suspected she was really trying to get attention. After all, her mother had died of cancer when she was young and her father tended to get lost in his own thoughts for hours at a time. Causing trouble was a good way to get him to focus on her.

  Given this, I wondered if Kira truly believed there were any clues in Nina’s residence—or if she was merely making an excuse to sneak into it.

  I followed her up the stairs to Nina’s door. Normally, getting past the electronic entry system would have been impossible, but since Chang had kicked the door open earlier that day, it couldn’t be locked again. When Kira pushed on it, it swung right open.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” I warned.

  “Who’s gonna punish us?” Kira asked. “Nina’s gone.”

  “What are you doing?” a voice behind us asked.

  Kira and I spun around to find Violet peeking around the corner from the stairs. She’d apparently followed us from the gym.

  “Come inside and I’ll tell you,” Kira said, then slipped through the door before anyone else noticed us.

  Violet and I followed her into the room. Kira shut the door behind us, then explained to Violet, “We’re on a top secret mission to investigate what happened to Nina.”

  “Okay!” Violet agreed happily. “But I thought she was made out of bananabots.”

  “Nanobots,” I corrected. “And no, she wasn’t.”

  “But Roddy said she was.”

  “Roddy was wrong,” Kira told her. “As usual. Now, you can help us if you want, but I need you to be very careful. You can touch things, but if you do, you have to put them right back where you found them. Understand?”

  Violet nodded so enthusiastically it looked as though her head might come off. “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kira admitted. “Anything unusual.” She scanned the room, then frowned. “Though that might not take long. There’s not much here.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  Kira ignored me and started poking through Nina’s desk. The drawers were unlocked.

  Violet picked up the InflatiCubes and searched under them, as if anything important would have been hidden that way.

  I stayed by the door. I didn’t feel comfortable rooting through Nina’s room. Plus, I wasn’t sure where else to look.

  “This desk is almost empty,” Kira said, sounding annoyed.

  I came over to see. So did Violet.

  The desk drawers had little in them, save for a few stray pencils and some other office supplies. In the right bottom drawer was a Moon Base Alpha commanders’ guide. It looked very similar to the Moon Base Alpha residents’ guide the rest of us had been issued, only it was a bit thicker.

  In the left bottom drawer was a toolbox, which was probably more useful on a moon base than any paperwork would have been. We opened it, but found only tools inside.

  “There’s nothing personal in this room at all,” Kira muttered. “No books. No pictures. No nothing. Maybe Nina really is a robot.”

  “You just said she wasn’t,” Violet pointed out.

  Kira smiled at her. “What I mean is, she doesn’t seem to have much of a personality.”

  “Sometimes Mommy says I have too much personality,” Violet reported.

  “I’m sure Nina had some books and photos and stuff,” I said. “But it’s probably all on her computer. I know she had a tablet, but I think Chang took it.”

  “Still,” Kira said. “It doesn’t seem she had anything in her life except running this base. Have you ever heard her talk about anyone in her family?”

  “I’ve never heard Nina talk about anything that wasn’t work,” I said, then walked over to Nina’s tabletop SlimScreen. It was in dormant mode, displaying a fake marble tabletop. I tapped on it. It instantly displayed a new screen: PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD.

  I frowned. My family had never enabled the password protection on the SlimScreens in our room. “Any idea what Nina’s password might be?” I asked.

  “Turnip!” Violet suggested.

  Kira said, “Knowing Nina, it’s probably a twenty-digit string of random letters and numbers she’s memorized.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I couldn’t imagine Nina using anything personal, like a pet’s name. In fact, I couldn’t imagine Nina having a pet.

  “Platypus!” Violet shouted, still trying to come up with the password. “Snorkel! Tiddlywinks!”

  Kira got down on her back and scooted under the desk, looking up at the bottom of it.

  Violet imitated her, lying down under the desk as well. “What are we doing?”

  “Seeing if there’s anything hidden under here.”

  “Is there?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” Kira slid back out from under the desk.

  Violet did the same thing.

  “Nina must have done something besides run this base,” Kira said thoughtfully. “Everyone has a hobby, right?”

  “I’ll bet she liked magic,” Violet suggested.

  “Magic?” I repeated.

  “Yes!” Violet exclaimed. “She made herself disappear.”

  “Music!” I said suddenly.

  Kira turned to me, intrigued. “What about it?”

  “Someone sent her some last night,” I reported. “Someone named Charlie, only Chang says that’s an alias. We figured it was some sort of cryptic message, but I’m not sure. Did Nina ever listen to music at all?”

  “She did!” Violet said e
nthusiastically. “In the gym, when she worked out. She listened to marching music.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Because I pay attention to things,” Violet said pointedly. “She worked out a lot, with headphones on, but she played it so loud I could hear it anyhow.”

  “What do you mean by marching music?” I asked. “Like, military music?”

  “Right,” Violet agreed. “Like the kind soldiers march to.”

  “Did you ever hear her listen to anything else?” I pressed.

  Violet screwed up her face in thought. “Maybe, but I don’t remember.”

  “Were the songs that this Charlie sent her marches?” Kira asked.

  “No. They were rock and roll,” I reported. “One was ‘Gimme Shelter’ by this band called the Rolling Stones. They were pretty huge back in the old days.”

  “I know who the Rolling Stones are,” Kira said coolly. “I know plenty about music.”

  “I know the Rolling Stones too!” Violet exclaimed. “Great-Grandpa used to play them for me. They did ‘Jumping Jack Flash’!”

  “That’s right,” Kira agreed, looking impressed.

  Violet promptly began singing. Only, as usual, she mangled the lyrics. “But it’s aaaaalllll right. Jumping Jack Flash gives me gas gas gas!”

  Kira laughed. “Actually, the words are ‘I’m Jumping Jack Flash. It’s a gas gas gas.’ ”

  Violet looked at her curiously. “What’s that mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Kira admitted. “I think ‘gas’ was old-fashioned for something fun.”

  Violet giggled. “Now ‘gas’ means you made a toot.”

  “What was the other song?” Kira asked me.

  “ ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room’ by Coronal Mass Ejection.”

  “Oh!” Violet cried. “I know that one! I love it!” She began to dance around the room, singing the song as she went, although it was evident that she didn’t know the lyrics to this one either. For starters, she seemed to think it was called “Fifty Smiles of Elmo Bloom.” Even though I’d just said the title.

  “I know this one, too,” Kira told me, watching Violet dance. “CME only did a cover, though. Originally, it was a gospel song.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “Going to heaven, I think,” Kira said. “Or someplace with a whole lot of space, at least.”

  “Like the moon?” I asked.

  Kira stared at me a moment. “You think that’s the message?”

  I shrugged. “This Charlie’s text said that he’d heard the songs and thought of Nina. Can you imagine Nina listening to rock and roll?”

  Kira thought about it a moment. “Not really.”

  Violet was still singing, although she was now drumming her hands along the wall. “For the gates are wide on the other slide where the flowers all go boom! On the right hand and the left hand, fifty smiles of Elmo Bloom!”

  “It’s not ‘Elmo Bloom,’ ” I corrected. “It’s ‘elbow room.’ ”

  Violet paused for a moment, then looked at me like I didn’t know what I was talking about. “ ‘Fifty smiles of elbow room’? That doesn’t make any sense.” With that, she went right back to her drumming.

  I turned to Kira and spoke under my breath. “See what I have to deal with all the time?”

  “It’s cute,” Kira chided. “I love Violet. It’s cool that she’s always so happy.” She then turned her attention to her smartwatch.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking up the real lyrics to both those songs. Maybe there’s a clue in them somewhere. Do you have any idea who this ‘Charlie’ is?”

  “No. Chang’s working on it, but he says it might not be easy to figure out.”

  “You think it’s a family member? Or a friend?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if Nina even had friends. I’ve never heard her mention one.”

  “Everyone has friends,” Kira said.

  “Nina didn’t have any here,” I pointed out. “Everyone else is friendly with each other—except the Sjobergs. I mean, we’re all going to be up here for three years together. But Nina didn’t even try. I never heard her talk about anything that wasn’t work. Or tell a joke. I can barely remember her ever smiling.”

  Kira frowned. “That’s pretty sad. I guess, maybe, because she came out of the military, she didn’t think it was right to be friends with everyone.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she just wasn’t very friendly. There’s only twenty-five people on this base and you came up with a pretty darn good list of folks who might have wanted her dead.”

  “Wait!” Kira exclaimed. “Maybe the music was supposed to be a threat of some sort. ‘Fifty Miles’ is about going to heaven—and then Nina ends up dead? Pretty suspicious, right?”

  “We don’t know that she’s dead,” I pointed out.

  “Dead, missing, whatever. Something bad happened right after she got the song. Seems like a threat all right.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “So what do you think the other song had to do with it?”

  “Hmmm,” Kira said thoughtfully. “I wonder if . . .” That was as far as she got. Because Violet, who was still singing about Elmo Bloom and dancing along the wall, drummed her hands along the area beneath Nina’s sleep pod.

  I didn’t notice anything odd about it—I was doing my best to ignore Violet—but Kira did. She clammed up in midthought and came over to the wall. “Violet, stop,” she said.

  Violet did exactly as Kira asked. “Want me to do a different song?” she asked. “I know lots of them! ‘Happy Birthday,’ ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ ‘The Star-Bangled Spammer’ . . .”

  “Maybe in a bit.” Kira rapped her knuckles on the wall under Nina’s sleep pod where Violet had just been drumming. Then she moved two feet to the left and did it again.

  The sound was different.

  Kira repeated the process to make sure. The spot right under the sleep pod sounded hollow, while the other spot sounded solid. “What’s on the other side of this wall?” Kira asked.

  “Our residence,” I answered. “Our sleep pods are built into this wall too, but they’re closer to the door.”

  Kira took a step back, staring at the wall. There were four sleep pods built into this side as well, even though only Nina used this room, because every residence had been constructed with multiple sleep pods. Someday, there might be a moon-base commander with a family.

  It was obvious which pod Nina slept in, though. It was the one on the upper left, the only one with an air mattress in it. The other three were empty.

  The mattress was exactly like the ones the rest of us had to use: a thin, uncomfortable rubber pad that smelled faintly like a fire at a tire factory. Her bed was made, the sheets tucked in around the edges and smoothed out with military precision.

  Kira yanked the mattress out and tossed it aside. It had been designed to be as light as possible for delivery to the moon, so it wasn’t hard for her to move it. Then she tossed the pillow off as well.

  “Ooh!” Violet exclaimed. “Pillow fight!”

  She snatched up Nina’s pillow. To everyone’s surprise, a teddy bear tumbled out of the pillowcase.

  It was small and gray, although it was so well worn, there was a chance that it had been some other color long before. Parts of it had been rubbed bare, like it had mange, and there were a few spots that seemed to have been surgically repaired over the years, with hospital-quality sutures.

  “Whoa,” Violet gasped. “Nina has a teddy bear?”

  “I guess,” Kira said, then looked at me. “See? She is human after all.”

  I stared at the teddy bear, almost as astonished by the fact that Nina slept with it as I was by the fact that Nina had vanished. Both facts seemed equally incomprehensible to me.

  Violet picked the bear up and hugged it. “Think I can keep it if Nina doesn’t come back?”

  “Nina’s coming back,” I tol
d her. “So be careful with that. It’s not yours.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Violet told me, then promptly dropped it. “Oopsy!” She picked it back up again and made a show of handling it carefully.

  Kira returned her attention to the sleep pod. Now that the mattress wasn’t there, she began tapping on the bottom of the pod, listening for where it sounded hollow. After thirty seconds, she’d narrowed it down to a small area. “Sounds like there’s a secret compartment here,” she announced.

  I joined her at the sleep pod. Since it was the upper one, it was four feet off the floor, with about eight inches of space between it and the lower pod. Like the sleep pod in my room, it was cramped, dark, and claustrophobic. Kira and I both used the flashlight functions on our watches to light it up.

  “Check it out,” Kira said.

  There was a hairline crack in the shape of a square, right above the area that had sounded hollow. It was so thin, we never would have noticed it if we hadn’t known to look for it.

  “What is it?” Violet asked. She wasn’t quite tall enough to see into the sleep pod, so she was bouncing on the balls of her feet. “What what what?”

  “Give us some room and we’ll find out,” I told her, then examined the crack closely.

  The square panel it surrounded fit perfectly into the base of the sleep pod. There was no handle or any other obvious way to remove it.

  “Whoever made this was no slouch,” I said.

  “Whoever made it?” Kira repeated. “Obviously, it was Nina.”

  I shrugged in response, not ready to assume anything about anyone anymore.

  “Can I see it?” Violet asked. In the low gravity of the moon, she was jumping high enough to peek over our shoulders.

  “There’s nothing to see,” I told her. “Not yet.”

  Kira and I examined the crack more closely. There was one spot on the right side where it widened slightly. I went back to Nina’s desk and dug around in the toolbox for a flathead screwdriver.

  The base computer’s voice came on over the intercom system. “The delivery rocket is nearing the drop zone. T minus five minutes until Capsule Drop.”

  On any other day, I would have been racing down to the rec room to watch the drop. But right now, there were more important things to do.