Seventh Grade vs. the Galaxy Page 12

  Distracted, I walk straight into Ari.

  “Huh?” he turns around. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  I make a split-second decision and close my hand. “Nothing,” I answer. “Sorry. Nothing.”

  “Excellent choice,” a nearby Elvidian says, talking to some other customers in the store. He’s crouching down on a small hovering platform, fishing something out from the top of another aquarium. He’s wearing goggles, thick gloves, and a white smock with the word “Wrangler” printed on the front. His long fingers are wrapped tight around a pole with a mechanical claw at the end, which he’s swirling around inside the tank.

  Becka and Ari watch him in fascination, but I’m lost in my thoughts about the text. About who could’ve sent it and what it might mean. Someone wants us to leave. Leave the mall? Leave Elvid IX? Leave this solar system? I mean, we will leave as soon as we get the fuel for our light speed engine. But unless the messenger wants to lend us some Elvidian credits to buy quantum hexachloride, they’re not being very helpful.

  The hovering wrangler is still talking to two other Elvidians on the ground—one tall, the other short. Maybe a dad and a kid? “These are substantially more docile than the Tacanite breed, although they are some of the fastest-growing creatures we stock.”

  “You sure this is the one you want, honey?” asks the taller Elvidian shopper.

  “Yes! Yes!” snaps his kid.

  “The Tacanites look more powerful, though,” the dad says, gesturing toward the scarier silvery monster across the aisle. He knocks on the glass to get the angry one’s attention. “Look at those teeth.”

  “I want this one!” the kid whines, jumping up and down. “This one!”

  The dad slumps over, disappointed. “Fine. But it’s your responsibility. I don’t want to have to come back here tomorrow because you forgot to feed it.”

  Should I tell the others about the message? I’d want to know if they’d gotten a mysterious text. On the other hand, what good would it do?

  The wrangler sways back and forth on his platform and clumsily plucks a small dragon out of the tank. It looks pretty friendly. It has colorful scales and short arms that end in smooth dolphin flippers, instead of sharp claws. And as the sea monster is lifted out of the tank, it leaves behind a swirling trail of purple and blue, like it’s shedding skin made out of glitter.

  “We have a six-cycle warranty with a full, money-back guarantee,” the wrangler explains. “You’d have to pass a basic lie detection examination, of course. To make sure your loss was not purposeful. Dragon fraud is a serious problem.”

  He pulls the creature out of the water and lowers himself to the ground. As he descends, we get a good look at the full-grown versions of the baby he’s holding in the claw. They’re as giant as the mean one behind us, but they’re doing happy cartwheels underwater instead of giving us the hungry-eye.

  No. I’m not going to tell them. It won’t change anything—it’ll only worry and confuse them. More than we’re all already worried and confused.

  Besides, I’m the captain. It’s my call.

  “A few more things you may already know,” the wrangler continues, plopping the baby sea monster down into a bowl on the floor. “This little Strykor will be fully matured in a few hours—”

  “Hours?” Ari whispers to himself.

  “—so transfer it to much, much larger accommodations as soon as possible. Growth spurts can be sudden and substantial, especially after a feeding. He’s a vegetarian, more or less. But Strykors can get aggressive if they’re not fed often. And they can survive for at least fifteen minutes outside the water. So it’s recommended that you keep him in a well-sealed tank for containment purposes.”

  Both the kid and the dad are nodding like this is all perfectly normal information, as if they’re well prepared to house and feed a soon-to-be-giant sea monster that can get “aggressive” and is only “more or less” a vegetarian. They finish their purchase: the worker cuts off a yellow band tied around the monster’s fin (“For security.”) and hands over the dragon bowl and a triangle piece of plastic (“Your receipt.”).

  “We should go,” I tell Ari and Becka. “Please? Becka, you’ve figured out where we are by now, right?”

  “Level 650,” she replies. “The fuel stores are on level 341.”

  “All right, let’s get moving.” We start to follow the dad and his kid toward the exit, where the store opens up to the main atrium of the mall—but the wrangler gets in our way.

  “And what about you?” he asks, adjusting his goggles. “Just browsing? Or can I interest you in a Pomona? Maybe a hybrid Skir?”

  “No thanks,” I answer, at the exact same time Ari says, “Sure!”

  “No thanks,” Becka agrees, pulling Ari along by his shirt.

  “Well, do come again,” the Elvidian calls after us.

  Suddenly, from somewhere outside the store, we hear a crash—like glass shattering—and shouting that we can’t make out. A second later, the dad and kid come walking back in. The kid is sopping-wet and empty-handed. No baby dragon in sight.

  “Excuse me,” the dad says, handing back the plastic triangle. “About that warranty?”

  The wrangler scowls, leading them toward the back of the store, while we finally make our exit.

  ***

  The mall is packed. It’s mostly Elvidian shoppers—maybe nineteen out of every twenty—but there are other aliens too: some Statues of Liberty, some velociraptors in tuxedos. And there are long lines everywhere, crisscrossing the floor and looping around a big circular fountain in the middle.

  “Okay,” I say. “How do we get down to level 341?”

  “We could walk,” Becka suggests, pointing out a spiral staircase near the fountain. “Or race!”

  Becka’s already bouncing up and down on her toes. She lives her whole life like someone’s about to blow the whistle on the start of a marathon.

  “Race down three hundred flights of stairs?” Ari asks.

  Becka tilts her head to the side and cracks her neck. “Yep.”

  “No thanks,” I say, spotting a quicker—but not necessarily less scary—way down: glass cylinders, scattered around the floor. They look like the tubes from Io’s underground subways. Only these are different. Emptier. There are no train cars here. These are more like one-person elevators, without the elevator.

  We get in line for the cylinder with the shortest wait. We’re behind an Elvidian lady dressed in a purple onesie and a half-rhino/half-goat wearing a flower-patterned shirt.

  The Elvidian steps inside the tube and says “Three ninety-seven,” as its doors close behind her. She doesn’t even flinch as the floor opens up beneath her feet and she disappears like a bowling ball falling down a garbage chute.

  “I changed my mind,” Ari says, gulping. “Why don’t we take the stairs? Stairs are good. I love stairs. Long live the stairs.” He salutes.

  “I changed my mind too,” Becka shoots back. “This looks much more fun.”

  The rhinogoat squeezes into the cylinder. But he’s a little too big and it takes him a minute to shove his entire body inside. “Six eighty-five,” he says uncomfortably.

  The doors slide shut onto his back and he has to shimmy around a few times before he can totally fit. But once the doors close completely, the top of the cylinder opens above him—and he shoots up the tube like he’s being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

  Becka instantly follows the rhinogoat into the elevator. “Three forty-one!”

  She wiggles her fingers to us in a silly wave and plummets down, screaming with what I hope is joy.

  “It’ll be fine,” I tell Ari. He’s frozen solid and I need to physically push him inside the tube. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Hurry up,” another rhinogoat groans from behind me.

  “We’re going, we’re going,” I tell him.

  Ari gulps—“Three forty-one”—and down he goes.

  My turn. “Three forty-one, please.”

 
Ever watch a cartoon set in a world where gravity only kind of applies? Where a character is walking along when, all of a sudden, the floor disappears and—because it takes him a second to realize the floor is gone and because he’s a cartoon—it also takes him a second to actually fall? That’s sort of what this feels like.

  The landing’s soft, at least, and the doors open back up to—

  “Step right up! Try your hand at what has been confirmed to be the hardest game in the galaxy! Two hundred years old and never beaten!”

  “Two-for-one Kerulian Combat! Free limb replacement with every dismemberment!”

  “Attention, attention: if you left a flamethrower inside the Hologram of Horrors, please contact the nearest robotic attendant. Repeat: if you left—”

  I look over at Becka, who’s beaming at Ari, who’s beaming at, well, everything. I get in Becka’s face.

  “This isn’t the fuel floor, is it?”

  “What gave it away?” she jokes, pushing me to the side. There’s a giant spinning “ARCADE” sign hovering above our heads. We’re surrounded by bright lights and loud noises. A lot of laughing. Even more shrieking (the good kind and the bad kind).

  “I want to get out of here too,” Becka tells me. “Get the fuel and get everybody rescued ASAP. Diana is still stuck in that jail. But she’s not going anywhere. None of the 118ers are. A few more hours isn’t going to make any difference. I mean, we deserve to be kids for like five minutes, don’t we? I was supposed to go to camp this year! And instead . . .”

  She trails off.

  Instead, she found herself halfway across the galaxy inside a nightmare dreamscape that tried to brainwash her into loving a mean-eyed alien queen. I know the feeling.

  Ari grabs my arm. “Come on,” he says. “Five minutes. Please? Just five minutes. Alien videogames,” he adds, whispering the words like they’re the most precious in the universe. “We’re not gonna get caught. No one knows we’re here.”

  Except maybe someone does. But—

  “Fine,” I agree, gritting my teeth. Maybe they’re right. And either way, I didn’t make a copy of the map for myself. Only Becka can get us around. “Five minutes.”

  Ari nods and uses his own ring to set a timer. Like a dog let loose from his leash in the park, he bolts around the room, zigzagging from one “game” to another: “Mech Attack” (where you sit inside a robot exoskeleton and bash other robots to bits), “Mind Wars” (where you attach sensors to your forehead and control small, laser-equipped drones with your brain), “Healthy Mix-and-Match” (where you combine the DNA of weird veggies to make something even weirder—we pocket a few free samples).

  I can’t pretend that this place isn’t awesome. But we have a mission.

  “One more,” he says, glancing at the timer. He’s got two minutes left. “Then we can go.”

  Ari walks over to two Elvidians waiting in the line for Mech Attack. “Excuse me. Where’s the time machine?”

  They shrug and he quickly moves on.

  “Sorry,” he says to a Statue of Liberty, “where’s the time machine?”

  She says something in a language that sounds almost like Spanish and we realize that she isn’t wearing a translation bracelet. I tap my foot impatiently. As soon as Ari’s timer goes off, I’m dragging him and Becka out of here.

  “Hey, do you know where the time machine is?” Ari asks another Elvidian.

  “Over there,” she answers, pointing straight ahead. “Next to the booth where you throw bean bags into tiny black holes.”

  Ari’s eyes go wide as he takes off. And within seconds, we’re standing at the back of a short line behind a smooth metal box, maybe ten feet tall and ten feet across. It hisses with steam as one side lifts open and a mid-sized rhinogoat unstraps himself from a chair in the center.

  “When am I?” he asks the crowd, before burping. Everyone chuckles. “Just kidding.”

  One by one, aliens enter the box and sit down. The hatch closes, the machine hisses, the hatch opens back up—and a different alien steps out.

  “Okay,” Ari says, “I think I get it. You go back in time inside the machine to this exact spot—so the people going in now are popping out in the past right here. And the people popping out now stood on this line in the future.”

  Above the metal box is a sign with a ton of writing on it. It starts big at the top and gets smaller and smaller until I can’t read it anymore. I squint to take in as much as I can:

  WELCOME TO THE TIME CANNON.

  Five tokens for one six-hour trip. Ten for a day. Twenty for two.

  RULES: Do not ride if you are pregnant or have been pregnant within the amount of time being traveled. Do not ride if you were born within the amount of time being traveled. Repeated riding may induce nausea, extreme eye watering, and/or cracks in the space-time continuum. NO SPECULATIVE FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS MAY BE PLACED UNTIL YOU HAVE NATURALLY RETURNED TO THE PRESENT. GAMBLING WINS—INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOTTERIES AND SPORTS BETS—SHALL BE NULL AND VOID.

  The Time Cannon is provided “AS IS.” The Elvidian Shopping Authority will not be held responsible for lost memories, uncreated personal milestones, or actions that inadvertently cause the very effect sought to be avoided. Do not exit the mall before you have naturally returned to the present. CONFRONTING YOURSELF IN AN OVERLAPPING TIME STREAM IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. The Time Cannon is not intended for political assassinations, undoing of significant historical events, or undertaking more educational assignments/examinations than would otherwise be feasible for a single individual. By riding the Time Cannon, you agree to indemnify the Elvidian Shopping Authority from any future or past third-party claims, illogical timeline loops, and/or unforeseen butterfly effects. Some alternate universes may result.

  “This looks awesome,” Ari says.

  “Does it?” I ask.

  I re-read the sign just as Ari’s ring bleeps and a tiny hologram pops up out of his hand, showing us that five minutes have passed.

  “Well,” I say. “It’s time. Let’s go.”

  Ari shakes his head. “We should stay!”

  I open my mouth to protest, but he puts up a hand and explains.

  “We could use this. I mean, you only wanted to spend five minutes here. What if we can spend negative a day here? Buy us some extra time. Start looking for fuel even before we’ve escaped the jail. Then we’ll for sure not get caught. Because we won’t have escaped yet!”

  Which I only maybe half understand. But it doesn’t matter. “We don’t have any tokens,” I remind Ari. “We don’t have any anything.”

  He leans over the shoulder of the alien who’s next in line: an Elvidian who’s holding a pile of small, round coins in his hand.

  Ari reaches into his pocket, pulls out a Pencil, and starts writing. It’s not hard to guess what he’s about to try.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I say.

  “Worth a shot!”

  Becka nods at him. “I like the way you think.”

  This is exactly why we shouldn’t have come down here. I get that he believes this could help us. But it’s not worth the risk. We’re going to get thrown back in jail before we’ve even tried to refuel the ship.

  Ari clicks, and out pops a handful of counterfeit tokens, the Minister’s face carved on both sides. He hands a bunch of coins to Becka and me.

  “Now we’re criminals,” Becka says happily.

  We reach the front of the line, a foot away from the steaming metal box.

  “Tokens,” says a robot squatting on the floor. It’s got six legs and even more eyes. “Tokens.”

  “Um, here you go,” Ari offers, handing over the fake coins. The robot tosses them into its mouth and starts biting down.

  “Evaluating,” it says, talking and chewing at the same time. “Evaluating.” And finally—“Blech.” The robot spits out a lump of bent and slimy metal onto Ari’s shoes. “Fakes. Please. You think you’re the only greedy kids with a nanoprinter?” It spits again and uses one
of its six claws to scrape some rust off its robot tongue. “And a cheap one too. Blech. Blech.”

  “Come on,” Ari says. “Please let us in.”

  “You’re lucky I’m not going to report you,” the robot says. “No tokens, no Time Cannon.”

  “How do we get tokens?” Ari asks.

  “Money,” it says, like we didn’t already know the answer. “Not much you can do here without money.”

  “But where do we get money?”

  The robot—who had been standing on four legs before, low to the ground—gets up onto its two back ones and starts laughing in Ari’s face.

  “I don’t know, kid. Get a job? There are a few token-taker shifts open here in the arcade. But they pay so badly that it’d take you years to earn enough for even one token.” Its head spins completely around. “Great, now you’re holding up the line—there’s a Setti waiting two days in the future whose tokens I’m going to have to refund if things don’t get moving.”

  The robot grabs the backs of our shirts with three of its hands and yanks us to the side. At the same time, it holds out a fourth hand to take someone else’s tokens. Ari looks pretty disappointed—but there’s a plus: I think the arcade is finally out of his system.

  I sigh. “Can we go now?”

  20

  In the time it takes us to head upstairs, I get two more texts to my ring: “Leave this place” and “Go, now.”

  “What do you want?” is all I’ve been able to text back without Ari and Becka noticing. And again: THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED.

  I put the texts out of my mind. Stay focused, Jack.

  “You sure we’re in the right place?” I ask Becka, worried she’s led us off course again.

  Because this level of the mall is in bad shape: Flickering lights (the spooky kind, not the arcade kind). Sparks shooting out from exposed wires in a crumbling ceiling. And water all over the floor. Like the other two levels we’ve visited, this one has a fountain in the center. But it’s bone dry and cracked clean down the middle. The debris-filled puddles all around us are so dirty that the water looks black.