11

“You ready?” Becka asks Ari.

“Almost,” he says, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He’s busy writing out his thousandth line of computer code. He’s been at it so long that his finger-bunches might fall off. “I want them to be realistic.”

“Just do the best you can,” she says.

I cross my arms. “For the record,” I say, “I still think this is a bad plan. A bad, stupid, bad plan.”

“Not like you’ve come up with anything better.”

She has a point. Last night I shot down about a dozen other ideas before we landed on this one. This is the best of the worst ideas, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel optimistic about it. “I just don’t think anyone will fall for it.”

“If we were back home,” Becka replies, “this definitely wouldn’t work. But we’re not back home. The Elvidians don’t know anything about us. So how are they supposed to know when we’re lying and when we’re not?”

I still don’t totally buy it. But I appreciate that she’s making an effort to convince me. I’ve seen how arguments with Becka usually play out. She tends to bulldoze her way forward without caring what other people think.

I open my mouth to list all the ways the Elvidians could definitely know we’re lying, but Ari announces—

“I’m done.”

So I keep quiet. Trying + failing to escape ampgreaterthan not trying.

Right?

“Let’s get started,” Becka says.

Ari takes a long breath, clicks twice, and dispenses what he’s been designing with his Pencil: Blisters. Or bad zits. Or nasty bug bites. Whatever they are, he made them look really icky. There are tiny bead ones, long scar ones, thick lumpy ones. Plastic stickers, basically. But very realistic plastic stickers. Hundreds of them, floating in front of our eyes.

“Ewwwww,” Becka says with admiration.

“Gross,” I agree, touching one of the stickers. It plops to the ground, oozing a bit as it hits the floor.

Ari’s beaming. “You think they’re good?”

“They’re awesome,” Becka assures him. “And they’re gonna be really useful when school—human school, I mean—starts back up again.”

I almost say, “You’re so sure this is going to work that you’re already planning for next year?” But I decide to let it go. Maybe sometimes her overconfidence is a good thing. Maybe.

“Shall we?” Ari asks.

And the three of us put the stickers on our skin one by one. On our faces, our necks, our arms, and our hands.

“You look . . . sick,” I say, once we’re done. And they do. Like they have the measles or something. On purpose, Becka pops a fake boil here and there on her cheeks and along her left arm, making her look like she has a particularly bad strain of whatever we’ve come down with. And we wait until the wall opens and our guard walks in. Like we rehearsed, we slump down to the floor and worm around in pretend pain.

“What’s happening in here?” he asks.

When the three of us were deciding on our escape plan, Becka wanted Ari to make a gun with his Pencil and shoot the guard when he walked in. I protested that we shouldn’t hurt anyone, so she suggested a stun gun. But what good would that do? There are still all the other guards and cameras and locked doors between here and the ship.

Becka’s Plan C involved us making a fake gun. (Noticing a pattern here?) Threaten the guard. Tell him that we’d shoot “or else!” Then use him as a hostage to wind our way up toward the top level. But I vetoed that plan too. What if the other guards in the corridor don’t care that we’ve taken a hostage? What if it just makes them madder? More likely to use their own giant weapons?

Instead, here we are, covered in fake rashes, squirming around on the cold ground. Not my idea of a great plan either. But at least the risk of sparking a shootout is relatively low.

“We . . .” Becka croaks, “we’re siiiiiicccckkkk.”

I’ve got to admit it: Becka sounds great. Her sick voice is very believable.

“Soooo ssssiiiiiiccccck,” Ari bellows.

Um. Yeah.

If we were in human school, any teacher would see right through him. But all he needs to do is fool an alien, right?

“Cough, cough,” Ari says, as if he’s reading the words from a book. “Sneeze, sneeze.”

Ugh.

“What’s wrong?” the guard asks, putting down the food and water. He steps a foot closer to us and I shout: “No! Stay back.”

He listens.

“We have—”

Uh oh. We made all these plans. Ran through every possible scenario. But we never came up with a name for our fake disease. I glance over at Becka, who’s got “Don’t look at me!” eyes, then over at Ari, who just says:

“Cough sneeze?”

Think, Jack. Come on! You know the name of at least one disease. Your mom is a doctor! “We have the . . . cold?”

Becka snorts and almost cracks up—but spins her fit of laughing into a fit of coughing.

“The Collllllld,” she repeats, drawing the word out like she’s telling a ghost story. “It’s the worst disease there is. Super contagious.”

“Even aliens can catch it!” Ari screams.

The guard steps back. “I . . .” he stutters, “I’ll get a doctor.”

“No!” we all yell.

“You’re already infected,” I explain. “It’s airborne. We have medicine—a cure—on our ship. We need to get to it right away.”

He looks down at me through his shiny black helmet. His face is covered—not that I’m great at reading Elvidian expressions anyway—but I know a skeptical head tilt when I see one.

“And how can you possibly know that I’ve been infected?” he asks.

This is where we really have to sell it. I remind myself that this guy doesn’t know anything about humans and that he can’t afford to take any chances. Who knows what the umjerrylochners are capable of?

“Didn’t you hear her?” Ari responds without missing a beat. “Super. Contagious. Like, if we were home, they’d already have quarantined us.”

I nod at him. Good callback.

“And tell me,” Becka adds, “how are you feeling?”

“Fine,” the guard says.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “You’re not”—she shivers for effect—“cold?”

He shuffles his clanky armor feet. “I—maybe? Maybe a little.”

Becka glances over at Ari, concerned.

“It’s begun,” she says, shaking her head. “He’ll be frozen solid in hours.”

Ari nods. “He’ll make a beautiful ice sculpture.” The two of them are playing pretty well off each other. Not that I’d ever tell Ari that.

“Enough!” the guard shouts. “Where is this medicine?” He lifts his wrist up to his helmet. His translator bracelet doubles as a communicator, I guess. “Tell me and I’ll call one of my superiors so that it can be brought here at once. And the Minister must be informed immediately.”

“No!” I yell again. The Elvidians are obsessed with the Minister, if you haven’t noticed. “You can’t call anyone.”

This is it. The icing on top of our lie cake. We figured the guard would try to call for backup. But we need him to take us to the ship. Alone.

“The disease,” I explain, pretending it’s hard for me to sit up. “The Cold. It’s so contagious that you can even catch it through computers!”

“You mean . . .” the guard says, sounding horrified, “that if I word to someone through my comm . . . the person on the other end could catch the disease?”

“No,” Becka tells him. “If you word to someone, they will catch it. And soon this whole planet will be infected.”

“I mean,” Ari chimes in, “if you don’t think that the Minister will mind getting sick and dying a super painful death and absolutely knowing that it was your fault, then go ahead. Give her a cough—er, a call. But if not, we should go get the medicine ourselves before anyone else gets sick. And we need to hurry!”

The guard stares at us, silent for ten seconds. Twenty.

“Get to your floor-walkers,” he finally says, swiveling his helmet to look at all three of us in turn and nudging his gun into our chests. “We will go. But I swear on the life of the Minister that if this is some kind of trick, you will quickly learn that there are much, much worse things in this universe than going to school.”