30

I sense it more than I see it or hear it. It’s not an explosion. Just a coming apart. Like the individual atoms inside my body are fighting against whatever keeps them together. Remember that first time we used the light speed engine? When I said that it felt like life went dark? Well, this feels the same. Only then, the darkness lasted for a moment. This time, it’s longer. Everything’s just . . . blank. I’m losing myself. Slipping away into pieces. I know that I’m supposed to come back together. Reappear. But I can’t. Maybe I shouldn’t. How did I get here? Do I know who I am? Where—

Boom.

My eyes snap open. I’m crumpled over in the chair behind one of the computer consoles, still regaining feeling in my arms and legs. The light on the bridge is bright—too bright for me to see anything but colors and shapes. All I make out through the window is what looks like the remnants of a fiery shockwave spreading out from around the ship. I’m still lightheaded and can’t think clearly. Did we make it to Earth?

Somebody’s screaming.

“Jack!”

My vision clears and, fighting the pain, I turn my neck to the side. Ari, Becka, and Principal Lochner. Right where I left them. An alarm is shrieking in the background.

Ari is staring helplessly down at the smoking computer terminal in front of us and Becka, like me, is only now regaining consciousness. Principal Lochner is still passed out in the captain’s chair. And the ship is in the worst shape of all.

I can feel it in the chair, in the floor, and in the walls. The ship is coming apart.

The engines are useless. Most of the power is gone. And we’re plummeting straight down, shooting through cloud after cloud as we get lower. I’m trying to see something—anything—out the front window. But it’s still only blue and white for now.

Blue and white.

The sky. This is the sky. And not just any sky. This is Earth’s sky. I’d recognize it anywhere. From books, TV, magazines, holofilms. If you don’t know what the sky looks like, you’re not really human.

It worked.

We bank hard to one side as an air current overpowers our lifeless ship.

It sort of worked.

I mean, our ship is toast. But we came out of light speed, alive. We didn’t explode or implode or dissolve or whatever else might happen when you go to light speed in a ship that’s been beaten to a pulp.

The ship spins around again. And, as Ari fights to regain control, he pulls too strongly to one side and we flip over two, no three, times.

We’re here. But we’re crashing.

“Can’t you do anything?” Becka groans from her chair. She’s buckled in, holding on to her computer station for dear life.

Ari presses a few buttons and pulls a few levers, but nothing slows us down. As we enter the lower atmosphere, through the front window, I can see the telltale fire of reentry burning too hot.

Suddenly Ari jolts upright and turns some switch from underneath his station.

“There!” he shouts, and the ship jerks backward, moaning in pain.

But after a few seconds, we settle out a little. We feel steadier.

“What did you do?” I scream over the noise.

“I opened the hangar!” he answers.

Ari pulls down on one of the two hangar door releases with every ounce of his strength—he even needs to prop his legs up against a nearby panel to get enough force behind his grip—and the ship banks hard to the left. He lets go. The ship rights itself. He pulls the other one. And we tilt to the right with a jerky, dizzying jolt.

“You can control it?!” Becka yells.

“Yeah!” Ari answers. “There are two huge doors back there! I switched the controls to manual. We can use them like sails, see?”

“Ari!” Becka shouts with approval. “You’re a genius!”

True. But I’m not sure it’s enough this time.

The ship spins in a full circle as Ari loses his grip on one of the reins and leans exhaustedly against the other like he’s about to collapse. I try to help him control the hangar bay levers, but we’re still not slowing down enough. Gravity is gravity. The engines are completely dead and if we hit the ground at this speed it won’t matter if we can turn a bit to the right or left, or if we splat against the surface at a few hundred miles per hour less.

“Where we are we?” I shout to Becka.

“External sensors are down!” she screams.

The clouds part and it’s now terrifyingly clear that we’re not as high up as I thought we were. In the distance—but not far enough away by a long shot—I spot a familiar shoreline. Massive city walls protect impossibly tall skyscrapers from the surrounding water. And of course I recognize the small green statue near the bottom edge of the island.

I grip the sides of my chair even more tightly. On any other day, I’d be thrilled to be here. It would be a dream come true. But not today. Because there probably isn’t any worse place to crash land a spaceship than into the middle of New York City.

“Turn down! Head for the river!” I shout.

“I’m trying!”

Our best bet would be to fall straight into the water. But we’re not coming in steep enough. Most of the ocean is already behind us and even the rigged hangar doors can’t send us into a nosedive.

Out toward the left side of the bridge window, we see boathouses and stores and apartment buildings and a large grassy lawn. Over on the right and up ahead, countless towers gleam in the sunlight, stretching north for miles. We can’t go too far to either side. And the ship won’t let us go straight down.

We’re close enough now that I can make out George Washington Bridge Park directly ahead. Ari and I did an Earth Fair project on it once. It connects New York to New Jersey across a river and hasn’t been used for old wheelcars since, well, whenever we stopped using old wheelcars. These days, it’s a park. A popular park. The sun is beaming. There’s barely a cloud in the sky. It’s the kind of summer day that would draw people out.

But the closer grassy space on our left looks empty. Big and empty.

“I’m gonna aim for that park!” Ari shouts, pointing ahead and to our left.

“It’s just like a runway!” I tell him. If we had full control over the ship, there’d be plenty of room to take the 118 down safely. But we don’t have full control over the ship.

We’ve got only one chance to save ourselves without doing damage to the city. At this rate, we’ll never land safely in the grass. We’re too low down already. We need to skid directly onto the water and hope we come to a soft enough landing by the time we hit the empty shore.

“Right!” I scream. “Right!”

We jerk to the side, barely avoiding clipping the edges of a giant building.

“Too much! Left! Left!”

We readjust at the last second. But even though the river is wide, we’re moving fast. We dip and smack hard against the New Jersey side, too early. A giant chunk of the seawall breaks off, nearly crushing a building beneath it. We get turned around and spin back out the way we came.

“Steady!” I yell.

Through the window, I can see pieces of our ship that have come off in the descent. Fiery metal is flying everywhere. I hope there aren’t any boats underneath us and that everyone else is okay down in the gym.

The 118 shudders as another piece of the hull goes flying by, knocked loose. Flat and sharp, it lodges itself into the cliff now on our right.

One of the hangar doors.

“Hold on!” Ari shouts.

The ship turns around and around, unbalanced and completely out of control.

We’re screaming at the top of our lungs. Everything is moving so quickly now. And I only know we’ve touched down when we smack the water and I’m almost thrown out of my chair. Huge waves spout up on all sides of us and the room begins filling with water, which seeps through the walls. But the ship doesn’t come to a stop. Instead it bounces, like a pebble skipped across a lake, and rises back up into the air.

I can feel everything I’ve ever eaten in my stomach, churning like I’m on a rollercoaster. We clear the park Ari was aiming for—blocks of other buildings pass directly beneath us—and finally slam down hard into another river, flowing just behind the first one. We’re far enough away from New York City now that we don’t have to worry about it. But there’s another city directly ahead of us.

As we hit the water again, the front window shatters, spraying glass and salt water into the bridge. I duck, covering my face with my arms.

We skid forward, this time sliding along the water like it’s a solid sheet of ice. We’re careening to the side, directly toward the city. We jump the riverbank and run aground on a wide street surrounded by towers of metal and glass. We’re flailing down an avenue, inches away from the buildings around us. I hear a loud scratching sound as the ship tears up the street in its wake.

Until little by little, we slow down.

And stop.

Alive.

I can’t believe it. We’re alive. On Earth. We made it.

I turn my head around to look at Ari and Becka. They’re as shocked as I am. Principal Lochner is just starting to regain consciousness. He’s going to be sorry he missed this (or, then again, maybe not). And one glance at Doctor Shrew confirms that he’s still having a perfectly normal day. He glances up at me for maybe half a second before he goes back to snacking.

Looking at Doctor Shew, I can’t help it—I start laughing. And not a normal laugh either. A full, whole-body-shaking laugh. I’m cracking up and Ari and Becka do the same. I know that there’s still a lot to worry about. We just crash landed into a pretty big city near New York. I’m scared that we may have hurt people. And there’s still the big question of what the Quarantine did to the people on Ganymede and whether the Minister is sending someone after us. But for the moment, none of that matters: I’m alive and I’m cracking up.

The ship flickers back to life just long enough to say: “SO PRETTY MUCH AN AVERAGE 118 LANDING, EH?” Which isn’t really that funny. But this is one of those moments where everything is funny.

After a minute I calm down—and look out of the huge hole in front of me, where the bridge’s main window used to be. I expect to see crowds of people or firefighters starting to gather. But there’s no one. I’m relieved. Maybe there was some kind of surface proximity alarm that got everyone to safety.

“Come on!” I say, standing up. I’m bruised and my legs and arms feel like jelly. But otherwise, I’m all right. “Let’s get out of here!”

We could use the door and wind through the ship toward the main exit. But why bother when there’s a new opening right in front of us.

“Let’s just hop out the window,” I suggest.

“Awesome,” Ari agrees.

“Um . . . wait,” Becka says.

“Wait?” I ask. “For what?”

I look back at Ari and Becka, who are now both huddled around Becka’s console. I guess it’s back up and running, although I don’t know what they’re looking at. We don’t need a damage report to tell us that the ship is busted.

But fine, if they want to stay here and look at screens all day, that’s up to them. So I step over the edge of the window and onto the nose of the ship. The 118 juts out about twenty feet from the front of the bridge. I test the stability of the hull with one foot before stepping outside with all my weight. For the first time in my life, I feel the warmth of the sun. The real sun. When I’m done with school, I’m totally moving to Earth.

“Come on!” I call over my shoulder. “You have to come out here.”

I take another step forward, crunching a pile of broken glass underneath my feet. It’s so quiet that I can hear every little thing. The ship settling. A nearby fire crackling. And Ari and Becka slowly walking across the bridge and up toward me. I hear more footsteps. Principal Lochner stumbles off the bridge, holding his head. And behind him, the rest of the 118ers pile out too, taking stunned steps out into the sun.

We all stare at what’s ahead of us. The street is completely empty. We’re in the middle of a large intersection, hovercars sprinkled down each of the roads. At first, I thought that we had knocked them down. But now I see that they’re not just bunched up around where the 118 crashed. They’re everywhere. Piled on the ground. Jammed into the sides of nearby buildings.

It’s as if, all at once, every single hovercar fell out of the sky.

I look up. There are flames in the distance all across this city. I look behind me, across the little river, and see more plumes of smoke dotting the horizon. But not a single siren.

And no people anywhere. No stranded hovercar drivers, no gawkers watching us from the windows of buildings, no panicked pedestrians. Even if there was a surface proximity alarm, someone would still be outside.

“Where are all the people?” I wonder out loud. But even as I’m saying it, Bale Kontra’s explanation of the Quarantine comes rushing back to me. And I realize that I misunderstood. The Quarantine was bigger than the 118. Much bigger.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Becka says. “The ship didn’t pick up any human life signs.” She pauses, lowering her voice to almost a whisper. “Anywhere.”