“THE GOOD NEWS,” DANI ANNOUNCED, IN HER AGGRAVATINGLY MATTER-OF-FACT way, “is that I did hack into the digital output and life-support system of your transport pods to make it seem like you were all safely stowed away in stasis. They think you’re part of the payload on the transport shuttle. No one will be looking for you for at least twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, goody,” said Eric.
Meanwhile, my father was shooting into space, a prisoner of the Shepherds, who wanted him and Dr. Underberg dead.
By this time, we’d all convened in Dani’s living room. I was still feeling a little weak and was curled up on the couch, idly flipping through photo albums of Dani and other Shepherds posing in front of early rocket launch tests. It was all I was capable of. I’d hyperventilated the whole way back to Dani’s house, then thrown up again, for good measure.
If it was so hard for us to get to Dad when he was merely in hypothermic torpor in the back of a Shepherd truck, how would we ever save him . . . up there?
Mom was presiding over us from the big armchair, and Eric sat at her feet, knees drawn up to his chest. Nearby, Howard knelt in front of Savannah, the top half of his utility suit bunched around his waist, while she tried to reattach the zipper pull he’d broken off yesterday.
No one seemed to know what came next.
“So what now?” I asked. “What do we do now?”
Dani looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dani. Neither said anything, but they didn’t need to. They thought Dad and Nate were toast.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” Dani said. “Not right at this moment, anyway. Luckily, we have some time to figure it out. The shuttle is going to take a day to reach Infinity Base. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s something.”
Barely.
“We need to plan our own escape,” said Mom.
“But—” I began.
She held up her index finger. “Gillian, we can’t stay here. There’s nothing in Eureka Cove for us, and every second we’re here makes it more likely they’ll find us.” She turned to Dani. “When was the last time you slept?”
Dani rolled her eyes. “I gave up sleep when I was twenty. But maybe I’ll take a shower. Don’t know when I’ll have another chance.”
“Don’t you want to chain us to the radiator or something before you go?” Eric asked drily.
Dani paused.
“My son is joking,” Mom clarified. “We’re not going to leave.”
Dani still hesitated, watching us warily.
Mom threw her hands up in the air. “Please. I can’t walk out of here with four kids in tow, and your stupid car won’t work for me. We’re not going anywhere without you. Take a shower!”
Wordlessly, Dani turned on her heel and departed.
Mom blew out a breath. “And here I thought your father was paranoid.”
“You can’t be paranoid if people are really after you,” I quoted. Dad used to say that all the time. And he’d been right. People were after him—after all of us.
I gripped the photo album tightly. Dani’s house was full of them. And Eric thought Dad’s hobbies were weird. Growing up a Shepherd must have been beyond bizarre. All Dani’s pictures were with the same two or three people, and usually at least one of them was in a lab coat. Didn’t she ever have any fun? I squinted at a shot of two kids running around in front of what looked like a rocket launch pad. The little brown girl with the beaded braids must have been Dani. The other kid was a white boy a few years older with dark hair styled in a bowl cut.
Savannah groaned in frustration and dropped the top of Howard’s suit. “I don’t think this is going to attach again. The loopy thing is warped from you chewing on it all summer,” Savannah said. She held up the little pull. It was about the size of a dollar coin, but shaped like a hexagon. “Look, it’s all twisted and broken.” She squeezed it with her fingers, and it crumpled up like a paper fortune-teller into a little star-shaped pyramid.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked. “Will you trade suits with me?”
“Ew, no,” said Savannah. “Yours is disgusting.”
Mom jumped up and started pacing back and forth, nervous energy pouring off her like a wake behind a boat.
Somehow, this scared me more than anything else that had happened today. We’d been in tough spaces before. I’d been trapped in a flooded underground city, holding my breath and swimming through tunnels until I thought my lungs would burst. I’d outrun a rocket ship.
But I didn’t know what to do this time, and it didn’t look like the grown-ups did, either.
Eric looked at me, worried, and I knew he was thinking the same thing as I was. We were in hiding from the Shepherds—again—and Mom was freaking out, just like when Dad made us hide off grid. I wished we could go back to just a few days ago, when all we had to worry about was whether we were going to move to Idaho and live with Mom.
Howard’s forehead wrinkled. “But I want a complete suit.”
Savannah sighed, taking pity on him, and reached for her own zipper pull. “Here, go get me a pair of scissors or something. You can have mine.”
“Where am I supposed to find scissors?”
Abruptly, Eric stood up. “Come on. Dani’s a computer engineer. She probably has wire cutters in her desk or something.” They went off in search of tools.
Mom watched them go. “Well, that’s one way to keep busy. The quest for the zipper pull.” She turned to me. “How are you?”
“Scared,” I answered honestly.
“Yeah,” she agreed. She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something more—something stupid and untrue like it’s okay—then thought better of it. “Yeah.”
I toyed with the corner of the photo album I was holding. “Nothing we’ve tried to do has worked. I let Dani knock us all out—I let her hurt Howard—and we’re still stuck here.”
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, joining me on the couch. “You didn’t let her hurt Howard. That was all on her.”
But I was on a roll now. “And I don’t know how we’re going to get out of here. If we even raise our voices too loud her neighbors will hear us. We didn’t get to Dad and Nate in time. And now we can’t get to them at all.”
“Gillian—”
“No, Mom,” I said, my voice shaky. “I’m not stupid. They’re in outer space. And Elana told me herself—she’ll destroy Infinity Base before she lets Dr. Underberg escape again. We’re not getting them back.”
Mom sighed and put her arm around me. “No, you’re not stupid. But your father wouldn’t want you to give up, either. We can’t trust Dani. But, Gillian, I do trust you.”
I looked up at her.
“And I know that together we can think of a way out of here.”
Dani emerged from her bedroom freshly washed. Her hair was done in a severe braid tucked down the back of her utility suit. “Where are the others?”
“In your office fixing a zipper pull.”
Dani blinked. “Glad they’re making themselves useful.” She picked up the photo album from the couch cushions, where I’d left it. “Have you been researching my background, Gillian? You really are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?”
At least one of us was. I clenched my jaw. “What else did you want me to do?”
She examined the page I was on. “I remember this. It was one of our first test launches. We were all so excited.”
“Who is that boy?” I asked, pointing at the dark-haired one doing a cartwheel on the launch pad.
“Believe it or not, that’s Anton.”
Anton Everett, the VP of Guidant. Anton Everett, killer of bees. I studied the skinny kid. He didn’t look evil. He looked like someone I might see at school. Like someone I might even have been friends with. “I didn’t realize he was so . . . young.”
“He’s five years older than me.” She touched the photo gently for a second, then straightened. “I told you we grew up together.”
Yeah, but hearing it and seeing them as kids were two entirely different things. I’d met Anton the day before yesterday, at that fancy dinner with Elana where he’d told us the world was ending and maybe the Shepherds had the right idea. If Anton was that devout a Shepherd, I doubted that he would be too thrilled with Dani tricking them all and hiding us. She really was giving up everything to help us escape.
“He’s so brilliant,” Dani said, as if lost in thought. “I’ve never met anyone like him, inside the Shepherds or outside. Unreal.”
Mom was still watching Dani. “Your ex?”
“So obvious?” Dani said with a snort. She closed the album and tossed it aside. “Anton is obsessed with the end of the world. You can hardly have children with a man who thinks the human race is about to go extinct.”
“No,” Mom said. “The constant threat of disaster can make it difficult to raise a family.”
I was sure she was talking about Dad now. Except we’d gone far beyond the threat of disaster this time.
The others emerged from Dani’s office. Savannah and Eric took in our expressions and looked sufficiently worried. Howard toyed with his shiny new zipper pull. At least he wasn’t chewing on it.
“How’s your zipper, Howard?”
“Fine,” he replied, as if the Shepherds hadn’t just shot his brother into space. “The old one is broken, though.” He held it up.
Dani leaned forward to take a look, then, unbelievably, started laughing.
She must have really gone around the bend this time. “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s my father. He’s so full of himself. His stupid riddles and his stupid codes. My mother used to say everything was a game to him. She was right. I just can’t believe I never noticed it before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you about my mother. She was a mathematician and a computer scientist.” Dani retrieved the album and opened it to a page with a faded photograph of people in dorky-looking seventies clothes and hair. It was a lot of white guys and then Dani’s mother—dark skin, bright eyes, hair done in a bouffant.
Savannah pointed out Dr. Underberg in the crowd. He looked so young, with broad shoulders and salt-and-pepper hair. “Is that where they fell in love?” she asked dreamily.
“More important, it’s where Underberg got the idea to recruit her into the Shepherds,” Dani replied. “We don’t care about your race or your gender or your nationality.”
“Yeah, Shepherds will lie to anyone,” I said.
Dani ignored me. “She worked at NASA during the Apollo missions, just like Underberg. It kind of sucked for her back then. She was only twenty, and smarter than half the engineers on the projects. A perfect target for Shepherd recruitment. The falling in love or whatever . . . that happened later.”
“Didn’t your dad think the world was coming to an end, too?” I asked.
“Yes, but he’s an optimist. He thinks we can save it. Omega City was meant to save us. And his version of Infinity Base was pure optimism. He thought the Shepherds’ duty was to lead humanity to the stars.”
Well, that sounded better than lying to them and then forcing them there, like the Shepherds did now.
She turned to another page in the album, this one showing her parents at some kind of cocktail party. They were seated together at a table, Dr. Underberg in a tuxedo, his hair much grayer, and Dani’s mom beside him in a shimmery dress. Metallic streamers cascaded behind them, and there were shiny foil stars exploding out of a vase in the foreground of the shot. They were looking at the camera with uncertain smiles on their faces, as if caught unexpectedly during an intimate moment. “This is the only picture I have of the two of them. Not even the Shepherds knew they were together . . . until I was born, of course.” She frowned, then shook it off. “See those things on the table?”
We all peered closer at the little figures scattered around the surface of the table. “What is it,” I asked, “confetti?”
“They look like . . .” Savannah squinted. “Hexagons.”
“Close,” said Dani. “They’re flexagons.”
“What?” I asked.
“They’re a mathematical puzzle,” Dani said. “One of my mom’s favorites. Have you heard of Möbius strips?”
“No,” Eric, Howard, and I said.
“Yes,” said Savannah. We all looked at her. “It’s a strip of paper with only one side,” she explained.
“Every piece of paper has two sides,” Howard stated.
Dani leaned back. “Want to show them? There’s some tape in my desk.”
Savannah headed off, then returned with a notebook and a roll of Scotch tape. She pulled out a piece of paper, then tore it into a long ribbonlike strip, which she taped into a loop with a single twist in the middle. “This is a Möbius strip. It has only one side.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Eric argued. “It has an inside and an outside.”
“Wrong.” Savannah handed it to him. “Try to color in just the outside.”
Eric looked skeptical, but sat down at the coffee table and grabbed a pen. He started scribbling on the middle of the paper, starting at the piece of tape. He shifted the loop around as the colored-in parts got longer and longer, and when he got back to the piece of tape . . . the beginning of the scribbles weren’t there.
“Oh. Where is it?” He frowned. “It’s on the other side now.”
“Keep going,” said Savannah.
By the time Eric got back to the part where he’d first started coloring in the paper, the entire Möbius strip was completely covered in his scribbles.
Savannah folded her arms in triumph. “See? One side.”
“Great,” said Eric, tossing the strip at her. “What does that have to do with flexathingies?”
“Well,” said Dani, “if a Möbius strip is a shape that has fewer sides than it should, then a flexagon is the opposite, a shape that has more sides than it should.” She held up the zipper pull, flattened back out. “How many sides does this have, front and back?”
“Two,” I said automatically.
Savannah’s brow furrowed. She took it from Dani, letting it crumple up again into the arrowhead pyramid shape. The outside side was shiny, with the omega symbol raised like a ridge. The inside side—what had been the back side—was brushed silver. It didn’t look anything like the Möbius strip. “Two?”
With the tip of her fingernail, Dani tugged at the peak of the pyramid, and the inside opened like a flower. Like magic, she flattened the shape out again. Now the brushed silver side was on top, and the shiny, omega-stamped side was on the bottom.
Savannah turned it over in her hand. The omega symbol was all messed up now, nothing but squiggles on the surface. “Weird,” she said. “But still two.”
“Do it again,” Dani suggested.
Again, Savannah collapsed the hexagon into triangles, then, like Dani, she tugged at the peak of the pyramid.
This time what opened up was dark and grimy. I shuddered. This was what Howard had been sucking on for months.
But Savannah didn’t look grossed out. She looked amazed. “Three!”
“Exactly.” Dani grabbed a tissue and wiped it off. Underneath all the muck was another shiny surface, this one stamped with the crossed crooks-and-globe symbol of the Shepherds. “This is called a trihexaflexagon, because it has three sides and is shaped like a hexagon. There are lots of different kinds of hexaflexagons—some with six sides or even more. My mom loved these things.”
“Wow,” said Savannah. She kept folding it back and forth, revealing each of the three sides in turn. Howard stared intently at the piece of metal, gripping his own in his hand. He looked like he regretted trading with Savannah.
I touched the zipper pull on my own suit.
Eric made a face. “Why would he put a puzzle on a zipper pull?”
“That’s Underberg for you,” Dani said. “It’s not remotely practical, but he was always doing that. Little games and puzzles and stuff for his friends. And the people he made the utility suits for were definitely his friends.”
“True,” I said. “That’s how we found Omega City in the first place. Only people who knew him could have figured out the riddle in his diary.”
“And my code book,” Howard said. “We never could have figured out those codes if he hadn’t sent me that code book from outer space.”
Dani frowned. “I’m still not certain how he did that. Or why.”
Was she serious? “It’s so we could figure out the messages you were sending,” I argued. “So we could find out all the fishy stuff going on around here and try to stop it.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to send a note saying that there was a lot of fishy stuff going on around here?” Savannah asked. “You know, before we put ourselves in all this danger?”
“No,” Mom said, her voice tight. “That would have been helpful. But this is a game. And he played it with children.” She sounded like she had back before the divorce. We’d been hiding out from the Shepherds then, too, in a tent in the woods. And just like then, there hadn’t been a thing she could do about it.
“Dr. Underberg clearly thinks very highly of your children, Grace,” said Dani.
“Yeah,” Eric said, rolling his eyes. “The guy thought it would be fun to take us into outer space in his broken-down rocket. The guy who just had a rocket sitting around ready to get shot into outer space in the first place. He’s crazy. We’re lucky we’re not all melted puddles of goo at the bottom of the Omega City missile silo.”
Dani turned to him, her eyes wide. “That’s it. That’s how we’ll get to Dr. Underberg.”
“What?” Eric asked. “Goo?”
“No,” she replied. “Omega City.”
“Omega City was destroyed.”
“But the ruins were taken over by the Shepherds. Remember, Eric?” I said. “Dad took us back to the site and they had all those barbed-wire fences up?” Dad had tried to look into the company that bought out the land where Omega City lay buried, but he’d never been able to uncover much about them. It was a Shepherd front.
“We’ve been excavating the ruins for months,” Dani said. “That’s why I have the extra utility suit I wore, and the one I gave to you, Dr. Seagret.”
“So if we can get to Omega City, you think you can send a message to Dr. Underberg?” I asked as a spark of hope ignited inside me.
“I can do better than that, Gillian. If we can get to Omega City, then I can save them all.”