ERIC GROANED. “WHAT? GILLS, NO.”
“Gillian—” Savannah’s words came at me as if from a great distance. I didn’t answer. I didn’t care. I was going to space, and I was bringing my father home.
Howard flipped another switch, and the voice of Dr. Underberg sprang to life once more.
Launch sequence paused. Deploy hex key to continue.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Eric cried.
“Okay,” I said to Howard. “Now what?” This was as far as Dani had gotten, and it still wasn’t blasting anyone into space.
“Now go to the bathroom. Get ready. I’ll go see what’s going on inside the rocket.”
There was a restroom conveniently located outside the launch terminal station. I used it, and while I was washing my hands, I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My ponytail was a mess; my utility suit looked rumpled. I smoothed out my hair. Were ponytails annoying in zero g? Maybe I should put it in a braid. A bun wouldn’t fit under my helmet. A braid, at least, I could tuck down the back of my suit.
Sure, Gillian. Think of your hair when you’re about to launch into outer space.
I was almost done braiding when I caught sight of Eric standing behind me.
“Do you know what Savannah and I have spent the last ten minutes doing?”
“No.”
“Checking to see if Dani left any more tranquilizers behind. Gills. We can’t talk Howard out of this. I know that. But I can’t let you go. It’s too dangerous.”
I wound a rubber band around the end of my braid. “Everything we’ve ever done in Omega City has been dangerous. It was dangerous for us to scuba dive through a parking lot. It was dangerous for us to use grappling hooks to escape an exploding rocket ship.”
“Yeah,” Eric agreed, “but we didn’t have a choice there.”
I turned around to face him. “I don’t have a choice, either. Someone has to get Dad. Someone has to get Nate. I’ll be fine.”
“Dad would not want you to risk your life for him.” Eric grabbed my shoulders. “Astronauts die, Gills. They die all the time.”
A shudder passed through me as I met his eyes. The usual teasing light was nowhere to be found. He was totally serious, and seriously terrified.
And so was I.
“Well, I’m going to make sure we don’t. All of us.” I slid my arms around his back and hugged him, hard. “I love you, Eric. Give my love to Mom and Paper Clip.”
Then I pushed past him and back into the stairwell, but instead of going up, I went down. I don’t know if he followed me. I couldn’t bring myself to stop and check.
The door to the walkway opened at my approach.
Greetings, space explorers. You have arrived at the doorway of the Rocketship Wisdom. Please come prepared with your blood type, life-support gear, and thirst for adventure.
I took a deep breath and stepped out. This walkway was sturdy and solid, unlike the one I’d crossed the last time I’d gotten on a rocket ship in Omega City. I tried not to look down as I walked out above the void. Though since I was about to get farther away from the ground than most humans, the idea of being scared of this height seemed a bit silly.
The door lay open. Inside, it looked like a spruced-up version of Underberg’s other ship. The same panels and screens and storage covered every inch of the interior chambers—but everything gleamed and shone in this one. I made my way down through the circular hatches connecting floor to ceiling into the pilot’s chamber. Howard was kneeling by one of the chairs and checking a bunch of wires and tubes that protruded from its base.
“The life-support stuff seems to be in great shape,” he said. “And they have all kinds of instruction checklists everywhere. I don’t know what Savannah and Eric are worried about. A child could do this.”
We are children, I thought. And just because we can follow instructions doesn’t mean we can launch a rocket.
I looked at the screen showing the launch terminal. Eric and Savannah sat in the seats up there, their eyes glued to their own monitors. I waved, and watched their reaction.
I came closer and flicked on the audio. “Hi, Sav.”
“Hi, Gillian.” She didn’t sound happy. On-screen, she folded her arms across her chest.
“Don’t be mad at me!” I exclaimed. “You know I have to do this.”
“I’m not mad,” she said.
“I mean, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. Because you aren’t going to do it.”
“Yes, we are!” Howard shouted, then went back to work.
Launch sequence paused. Deploy hex key to continue.
Then again, maybe we wouldn’t. “Um, Howard? Did you ever figure out what that code is that Dani was stuck on?”
“I’m doing that next.” He held up some tubing. “Here, attach the life support on your suit.”
You know what’s a scary term? Life support.
Howard lifted the flaps of my utility suit to find the panel used to set the cooling or heating elements, then plugged two different wires and a tube into the ports there. The suit suddenly felt tightly squeezed around me and then, on a breath, puffed up until all the wrinkles stretched out.
“There you go. Pressurized. Want me to show you how to attach the helmet?”
I nodded and he got to work. The helmet was hard, with an airtight seal around the base of my neck that tucked into the collar of my utility suit. My ears popped when he had it all worked out. I swallowed thickly and peered through the shadowy glass. All of a sudden, it seemed like too small a thing to really protect me.
And it was pointless, anyway, unless Howard unlocked Underberg’s code.
“So, Howard?” I said, and my voice echoed around the inside of my helmet. “You do have the hex key, right?”
“I will.”
Savannah was still sitting there smugly, watching us with crossed arms and a self-satisfied expression.
“Sav, seriously? I don’t want this to be my last memory of you.”
“Oh?” Eric snapped. “What happened to ‘I’ll be fine’?”
“It won’t be your last memory,” she said. “Because you aren’t going anywhere.”
Launch sequence paused. Deploy hex key to continue.
She grinned.
Inside my space suit, I stamped my foot. I could not believe she was smiling about all this. “Sav, this isn’t funny. Dad’s up there. Nate’s up there. And no one can save them if we can’t. Don’t you get that? Nate saved your life last year. You almost drowned in that elevator”—I gestured vaguely to where I figured that chamber was in Omega City—“and he rescued you. We owe him the same thing.”
The smile vanished from her face.
“Don’t,” Eric said to her as Savannah’s arms dropped to her sides. “Sav, don’t help them.”
But Savannah had disappeared from view. Eric glared at me through the screen. I ignored him.
A few minutes later, she crawled down through the hatch.
“Savannah!” Howard exclaimed. He jumped out of his seat and started rigging up another one of the flight chairs. “Come try on a helmet.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. She turned to me. “I’m here to help you take off. And I’m not doing it just because of Nate and the elevator, either. Besides, I already know you’ll risk your life to save someone you love, Gillian. Because I almost drowned twice in Omega City, and it was you who saved me the other time.”
My eyes began to burn and I took two steps forward and encased her in a hug. Even through the weird, rubberized sensation of my pressurized utility suit, I could imagine I felt her heart pounding as hard as my own.
She pulled away and wiped her eyes. “Now let’s get you guys into outer space.”
“How do you plan to do that?” I asked. “Suddenly learn codes?”
She shook her head. “You’ve got it all wrong. Dani did, too. The hex key isn’t a code. It’s an actual key.” She held up the hexaflexagon zipper pull. “Now all we need to do is find the lock.”
“How do you know this?” asked Howard. He crossed the chamber in a single step and went to snatch the hexaflexagon out of Savannah’s grip, but she closed her fingers around it and held tight.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she replied. “Dani said anyone could hack into the old computer tech on Omega City, but she couldn’t figure out one measly hex code? And you said yourself that Dr. Underberg liked to make things easy for his friends to figure out here. What’s easier than a key every single resident of Omega City would be wearing on their clothes?”
I looked at her in amazement. My best friend was a genius.
“You knew this whole time? Then why didn’t you tell Dani?” I asked.
“I only figured it out when we were hiding,” she said. “We were just sitting there, forever, so I started playing with the hexaflexagon again. And that stupid voice kept repeating ‘hex key, hex key, hex key . . .’” She folded the hexaflexagon and revealed the bumpy side. In the light, I could see the pattern on the surface clearly—an arrangement of bumps and grooves and squiggles that covered every facet. “See?”
It did make sense to me. And it was just like Dr. Underberg, too. These rockets were for Omega City, and so he’d design it so that Omega City residents could use them. Maybe there were even directions on how, directions that had been burned up when I’d been forced to throw away all those instructional videos right before we escaped the last time we were here.
“So where does it go?” asked Howard. He pointed at the control panel. “I don’t see any kind of hexagon-shaped lock anywhere here.”
Savannah shrugged. “I don’t know.” She pointed at the pilot chairs. “Maybe there?”
I looked at the chairs again. There were six of them, arranged in three rows of pairs. Each was firmly bolted to the floor of the chamber, and covered with an oversized piece of fabric and a five-point seat-belt harness. When I touched the fabric, I felt the unmistakable squish of silicone gel inside. The side of my chair had printed instructions for activating something called Shock Absorption Molding. The instructions were marked with the Shepherd crest.
Shock absorption molding. I’d seen that before—in the pods Dani had used to transfer us out of the biostation! I thought back to meeting Dr. Underberg in his rocket, trying to remember what the pilot chairs had looked like on Knowledge. If these chairs were new, replaced by the Shepherds when they were refurbishing the rocket, then the hex key lock might be gone.
Launch sequence paused. Deploy hex key to continue.
I walked around the back of my chair, careful not to disturb the wires and tubes, but couldn’t see anything.
A dead end. Again.
Howard was currently searching every button and switch on the terminal. I started scanning the walls, the storage lockers, the screens and readouts. Even Savannah was looking around, kneeling on the floor and running her hands over the tiles in case there was something useful there. But another five minutes passed with no progress. Dr. Underberg kept repeating his order, over and over, and I began to despair. We were never going to find it. We were never going to get out of here.
“You guys are idiots,” said Eric, poking his head through the top of the hatch. He pulled himself in, dropped lightly to the floor, and picked the hexaflexagon up where Savannah had left it at the terminal. “It’s a zipper pull on a jumpsuit. Where do you think the lock is? Not on the floor, I promise you that.”
He came over to me and planted one hand on my shoulder.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” He tilted up the edge of my helmet and pressed the hexaflexagon onto a spot at the bottom of my chin. It clicked into place.
Instantly, a pale green light rimmed my visor shield and I heard a small metallic hum, like I’d put on a headset.
Hex key activated. Launch sequence in progress for Rocketship Wisdom.