The Forgotten Shrine Read online

  “This one looks like a frog,” I say.

  “Do you think they traded with other aliens for these vessels?” Cole asks.

  Traded or stole, Mira thinks.

  “Mira believes some of these crafts might not have come from a fair trade, if you know what I mean,” I say.

  “I’m with you, Mira,” Lucy whispers. “These Alks are bad news.”

  “I’m with Jasper,” Marco says, “and we’re calling this thing the Frog.”

  Steve scoots into the pilot seat and closes up the craft. He hits some switches, and the Frog springs to life. And I mean it literally springs. The Frog hops over to a grate on the far side of the room. The grate opens, revealing a narrow tube. The Frog squeezes in, so that there’s no air between the vessel and the walls.

  “Compre-sssion commensss-ing,” Steve says.

  Wind builds to a loud whistle, and then . . .

  Pop!

  We fly out of the tube like a spitball from a straw. Next thing we know, we’re cruising through the water.

  “Awesome!” Cole says. He asks Steve about the compression technology. Steve mostly dodges his questions.

  My stomach turns. The farther we travel from the Alkalinian Seat, the more dizzy I get. I’m thinking I may need a barf bag like Bad Breath.

  Mira places her hand on the back of my neck. Look back at the Seat. That might help.

  I turn to the window and press my forehead against the glass. The Alkalinian Seat starts to fade in the distance, but there’s a structure that runs along the seafloor leading back. It’s some sort of tube with a sickly yellowish glow. I keep my gaze fixed on it as we glide along.

  I count my breath. Five counts to inhale, five counts to exhale. Finally the nausea starts to pass.

  But . . . am I seeing things? Something long and black is headed for the Frog.

  I blink, but the thing is still there. It’s some sort of creature. It has huge onyx eyes and sharp silver teeth. It’s headed straight for the Frog.

  Slam!

  11

  THE SEA CREATURE BASHES THE window and circles around.

  “Whoa! What was that?” Lucy asks.

  Slam!

  It collides with the Frog again. The dark shape moves along my side of the vessel. Silver teeth jut like serrated knives from its open mouth. It glides across the bow and circles around to the back.

  “If we travel quickly, it won’t bother usss,” Steve says.

  “Yeah, but what is it?” I ask with a shaky voice.

  “You never told us there were sea monsters here,” Marco says. “You’ve been holding out on us, Stevie.”

  “Nothing to caussse con-sssern. The creaturesss rissse from the depthsss when they sss-senssse currentsss like the onesss causssed by our sss-ship.”

  Sure. I won’t be concerned at all about a giant sea monster with razor-sharp teeth that keeps bashing our boat.

  “Shouldn’t there be more fish?” Cole asks. “That’s the only one I’ve seen.”

  “There isn’t much that can sss-survive here. The water is contaminated.”

  “What do you mean the water’s contaminated?” Marco asks.

  Steve hisses and flicks his tail. I have the sense he wasn’t supposed to say anything about the contaminated water. Marco presses him for more information, but he refuses, saying only that we’ll be at the training facility in a few minutes.

  Soon another structure is visible up ahead. It’s an enormous silver disk that is tied to the ocean floor with thick cables along its perimeter. The tube that stretches all the way back to the Alkalinian Seat connects with it. Near the tube, a second shaft leads from the structure down to the seabed at an angle. There’s a clear dome at the bottom that glows silver.

  “Bingo!” Marco says.

  That must be the occludium tether giving off that silver light.

  Mira squeezes my hand. Confirm.

  “So . . . umm . . . Steve,” I start. My voice sounds as queasy as I feel. “Is that the occludium tether?”

  “Yesss, that’sss it. Can’t wait to be free of it, huh? Try to bound in-ssside it and bye-bye!”

  “Comforting,” Lucy says.

  Mission accomplished. We found the tether. Can we leave now? I ask Mira.

  I wish. She sends me a wave of images and emotions that amount to one thing: she doesn’t trust the Alks at all.

  Soon we squish through a tube that looks just like the one we left from, except we’re sucked inside the second structure, not blown out.

  Once we’re inside, though, the differences are obvious. Only half of the lights work, and some of the ones that do blink on and off. Along one wall, big pieces of paneling are peeling off. And there’s junk everywhere.

  “Ever think of calling a handyman, Stevie?” Marco asks.

  “What is a handyman?”

  “Why is it everything gets lost in translation with you aliens?” Marco says. “Most of my jokes go up in smoke. My audience barely knows the half of my humor.”

  “They’re not missing much,” Lucy says.

  “I think what Marco was trying to say . . .”

  Cole as translator? We’re doomed.

  “. . . is that this facility is not as well maintained as the Alkalinian Seat.”

  “True,” Steve says. “The sss-sau-ssser is no longer inhabited. It hasssn’t been for many yearsss. My people lived here while the Alkalinian Sss-seat was con-ssstructed, but now our re-sssettlement is complete. We maintain the occludium tether from here, and we ussse the sss-sau-ssser for sss-storage and misss-ellaneousss other thingsss, but not much of sss-significanssse. Lotsss of room for you to practissse uninterrupted.”

  He brings the Frog to a stop, pops open the roof, and folds out the ladder. “I’ll be back to get you at sss-sixsss-teen hundred hoursss.”

  “You’re just leaving us here?” Lucy asks.

  “The hangar is sss-secure. You will not be able to leave thisss sss-section of the sss-sau-ssser. It wouldn’t be sss-safe to wander around. Have an exsss-ellent time.”

  As soon as we’ve climbed out of the Frog and unloaded our packs, Steve bounces back to the launch duct and disappears. At first it feels great. Anything would be better than being cooped up in the Frog with an enormous sea creature banging against the glass. But as I take in the broken-down hangar, a new kind of discomfort sets in. After all, we’re underwater in a contaminated sea on an alien planet.

  “Do you think this place is safe?” I ask.

  “Honestly?” Lucy says, looking around. “Not really.”

  “It’s safer than the Alkalinian Seat,” Marco says. “At least we don’t have snakes slithering around us at every turn.”

  “Do you think we’re locked in like Steve said?” Cole asks.

  “Probably,” I say. “I don’t know why he’d lie about that.”

  “Maybe because they’re nothing but sneaky, deceitful reptilian scum?” Lucy says. “Something’s wrong about this whole planet. It’s like my mind knows what’s wrong, but I’m too tired and foggy to figure it out. Know what I mean?”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” I say.

  Me, too, Mira calls from the other side of the hangar, where she’s checking out some of the abandoned junk.

  “We know they were listening to us this morning,” Lucy says. “Gedney said they’d probably have surveillance, and it’s the only explanation for why Steve would show up exactly when we tried to leave for the first time in a week!”

  “No kidding.” I almost tell them I heard Mira calling for me this morning, but I stop myself. My pod mates are still pretty creeped out about how we communicate. Plus, maybe I imagined it. Mira ended up being fine, minus our mutual headaches. Stupid brain patches.

  “You know what would make us feel better?” Marco asks. “Some exercise. Let’s get some bounding and blast pack practice in and then do some exploring. There’s got to be a way out of this hangar.”

  “You heard what Steve said,” Cole says. “We can’t go wander
ing around this place.”

  “How else do you think we’re going to locate the occludium tether?” Marco asks. “Sure, we saw it from the water, but since we don’t know how to get to it from the inside, that doesn’t do us much good, unless you want to go for a swim in the contaminated sea.”

  “So practice first, then snoop around?” Lucy asks.

  We slap palms in a round of high fives.

  I throw down my blast pack and pull out my gloves.

  Even though we’re thousands of kilometers from the space station and stuck in the middle of a contaminated sea with a bunch of snakes, I truly feel like I’m back at the Academy the moment I slip my hands into my gloves. Nothing beats the feeling.

  As I reach out with my mind and practice building a bounding port, pictures pop into my head: training in the Ezone, bounding across Waters’s laboratory on Earth, zooming across the frozen tundra in Gulaga. Across the hangar, Mira is smiling. She’s sending me shared memories.

  I close my eyes and focus on the memory of us winning the pod competition at the end of our first tour.

  Seconds later an image forms in my mind of Mira playing piano in the sensory gym at the space station and me standing beside her with my clarinet.

  My turn. I send Mira a memory of the night we were caught out on the tundra, the two of us gazing up at the star-filled sky, my arms wrapped around her waist.

  Mira severs our connection.

  My brain feels cold, empty.

  I try to catch Mira’s eye, but she turns away.

  What happened? Was that memory too personal? Is she mad because that’s the night she lost her glove and almost died? I reach back out to her but then break it off. Maybe she’s trying to give me the message that the night I remembered wasn’t special, no matter how close we were in the moment. We’re friends, sure, but I’m just another member of the pod.

  I am such a loser.

  Something collides with my shoulder.

  Ouch!

  Marco’s fist.

  “Hey! Why’d you do that?”

  “I’ve just been calling your name for a solid minute, Zone-Out.”

  Lucy laughs. “Leave him alone.”

  Mira’s sparkly laughter reaches my mind. She’s laughing, too? I don’t get it.

  “Wiki found some empty crates in the corner,” Marco says. “Want to play catch?”

  I shake out my arms to get some energy flowing. “Definitely. I have to wake up.”

  We spread across the hangar. Mira and Lucy pair off. Marco, Cole, and I form a triangle. Marco trains his gloves on one of the empty purple packing crates stacked against a wall. He seizes control of the atoms and hurls the crate at Cole. A little rusty, but his skills are still there.

  Cole lifts his hands to block the crate. He stops it half a meter before it hits him, but then the crate drops to the floor. He couldn’t make the catch.

  I’m out of practice, too, but I totally tune in when Cole lobs the crate at me. I reach out with my gloves and feel the atoms hurling in my direction. Rather than focus on stopping the crate, I work to shift the atoms to my control. The crate lands softly in my hands. I backpedal, but only because it’s heavier than I expected.

  “Nice catch, Ace,” Marco says.

  “Thanks.” I place the crate on the ground and focus my attention. Then, just like Gedney taught us in the Ezone, I tap into the source and shoot from my brain out my fingertips like I’m pulling the rod of a pinball machine. The crate rockets into the air. I stop its progression when it’s nearly at the ceiling and let it hang suspended, then I zip it down at a forty-five-degree angle at Marco.

  “Take it easy,” he shouts as he barely makes the catch.

  Soon we’re launching trick shots from across the hangar, trying to top one another with each toss.

  I wonder if Addy has started bounding training with Gedney at the space station. I can’t wait for her to experience the gloves for herself!

  Mira and Lucy lift crates with their gloves to build a tower all the way to the ceiling. As soon as their last block is in place, Marco whips a crate into the center of the tower, and they all crash down.

  “Hey!” Lucy shouts. “That wasn’t nice! We’re going to have to teach you a lesson. Girls versus boys!”

  Marco looks back at me and Cole.

  “You’re on!” I holler. “In the hangar. Anything goes.”

  Wait! Over here! Mira’s standing on the far side of the hangar near the stack of crates, which is considerably shorter than when we started our practice.

  “Hold up!” I say. “I think Mira’s found something.”

  We zoom over to where she’s standing. Sure enough, we’ve pulled down enough crates to reveal that they were blocking a door.

  “Clear the rest of these out!” Marco says. “Let’s see if our serpentine friends forgot to lock this beauty!”

  When the crates are moved aside, Marco tries the handle. We’re in luck. The door swings back to reveal a dark hallway. “Bingo!” he says, stepping through the door.

  Lucy grabs the back of his shirt. “Not so fast. Practice first, snoop later, right? And if I remember correctly, you accepted my girls-versus-boys challenge. What? Are you scared?”

  Marco turns around. “Me? Scared? Are you kidding? Let’s go!”

  Lucy grins and clasps Mira’s hand. They duck around the corner to talk strategy (which really means Lucy jabbers away at Mira with instructions, and Mira does exactly what she wants to do, although they both stay focused on the main objective of clobbering us).

  “As if they stand a chance,” Marco says as we fly to the center of the hangar and get ready for battle.

  “We do have the numbers,” Cole says.

  Before we can plan our attack, crates crash down on us from above, and Lucy and Mira soar by in their blast packs.

  “No fair! We weren’t ready!” Cole shouts.

  Lucy turns to face us in midair and smiles. “Who said anything about playing fair?”

  “You asked for it,” Marco yells. “Game on!” He chucks a crate, narrowly missing Lucy. She giggles and chucks a crate back. He dodges and kicks off, heading straight for Lucy.

  “Oh, no you don’t, Marco Romero!” She lets Marco come in close, then kicks off and under him. She spins around and taunts him with a gigantic grin.

  I loosen the control straps from my blast pack and lift off. I was so excited about my gloves, I forgot how awesome it feels to fly. Swooping low to the ground, I pick up speed. Wind blows against my face, sealing my hair flat on my forehead. I stretch long, almost like I’m riding through one of the chutes at the space station, pushing faster as I go.

  I’ll catch you!

  I sneak a glance over my shoulder. Mira is gaining on me.

  Racing to the end of the hangar, I swing low and left. Mira cuts me off. She flies straight for the ceiling, drops her grips, and grabs my atoms.

  She holds me for only a second, but it’s enough to throw me off. As soon as she lets go, I fall to the floor, luckily only a meter or so. She lowers herself slowly with her gloves and smiles in my direction.

  You okay? she asks.

  Never better.

  Then, catch me if you can. She pushes off and flies for the other side of the hangar by the launch duct.

  I brush off my pants and pick up my grips, then I’m flying. I stop and hover in the center of the hangar. Try to pass me, I dare her.

  My brain hums with sparkly energy. She’s laughing at me.

  She takes off, speeding straight for me. This is too easy. I use her own tactics against her. I fly straight for the ceiling, drop my straps, and grab crates on either side of the hangar. I fling them toward each other, aiming them to collide at their midpoint: Mira’s trajectory.

  At the last second Mira flips. She crosses just above the crates as they collide and pushes off them with her feet. She zips past me, across the hangar, and out the door we uncovered.

  “Hey!” Cole calls. “The game’s in here!”

/>   I ignore him and chase Mira out of the hangar.

  The hallway is dark, narrow, and curved like the ones at the Alkalinian Seat. This place was definitely not built for humans. There is no way I could stand up without hitting my head. It’s like I’m back in Gulaga.

  Mira slows as she takes the corner, so I make up some ground.

  I close in, ready to grab her shoes. As I drop my hands and lunge for her ankles, she drops her feet to the ground. My body keeps going. I slow myself with my gloves just before I crash into the next corner wall.

  Graceful. Mira glides past me with a smile. Then she stops. Whoa.

  What is it?

  Mira’s mind is a question. Whatever she’s seeing, she doesn’t have a word for it.

  I pick myself up off the ground, stoop low, and drag myself to her side.

  She’s standing at the threshold of a door that looks just like every other door we’ve passed. But it’s what’s on the other side that is perplexing.

  We’re looking out at a rocky landscape. Light from a star bears down on the stone, casting glimmers of reflection in the silver rock formations. In the distance a turquoise-blue sea stretches to the horizon.

  “What is this place?” I ask. “It must be virtual, right?”

  Mira shrugs and takes a tentative step into the room.

  I grab her arm. “Maybe that’s not the best idea.”

  She smirks at me, shakes her arm free, then slowly walks across the rocks. When she’s fully in the room, she tips her face to the sun. Warm.

  A few seconds later Marco, Cole, and Lucy show up.

  “Amazing!” Cole shouts, walking right into the room. “This is incredible VR tech! So lifelike!”

  “What do you think this place is?” Lucy says.

  “No clue,” Marco says, “but it beats the rest of this dump.”

  He runs across the rocks and lifts off in his blast pack. “Hey, J! Let’s race!”

  Why not? I enter the room, grab my blast pack straps, and take off after Marco. Within seconds I almost forget that I’m in a virtual simulation. The rocks below are covered with moss that smells like the gardeners’ trucks that maintain the green blocks near my apartment in Americana East. I touch down on the rocks and press my hands against the cool stone. Then I breathe deep and let the rays of the powerful star warm my skin.