PLAN B
Lunar day 252
T minus 19.5 hours to evacuation
When I entered the rec room, things were bad. Violet was cowering in a corner, defiantly holding a set of hologoggles, while Patton advanced on her menacingly. Patton’s face was as red as his father’s had been, and there was rage in his eyes.
Kira was yelling at Patton to leave Violet alone, while Lily was cheering him on. Kira looked terrified. Lily looked disturbingly excited, like a spectator at a dogfight.
“Patton!” I yelled. “Stop!”
Patton froze in his tracks and whirled toward me. The blood drained from his face in fright. He instantly went from red to white, like he’d been bleached. He’d apparently been so angry with Violet that he’d forgotten all about the space snakes.
“Don’t call the snakes on me!” he pleaded, then pointed accusingly at Violet. “She started it! She kicked me!”
“He deserved it!” Violet argued. “Kira and I were in here, playing Unicorn Fantasy, and then they came in and tried to boot us off!”
“We asked nicely,” Patton protested.
“Like heck you did,” Kira said, then looked to me. “They tried to take the goggles right off us. Violet was only defending herself.”
“Yeah, you big jerk!” Violet screamed at Patton. “I hate you!”
Patton seethed with rage and spun toward Violet, his fists clenched.
“Don’t you dare touch her!” I yelled. It surprised me how forceful I sounded.
Patton backed down, torn between his anger at Violet and his fear of me.
However, Lily Sjoberg grew even more excited, as though she had been anticipating this moment. “Or what?” she asked me tauntingly. “Are you going to call your space snakes on us?”
“Lily . . . ,” Patton said weakly. “Don’t . . .”
“Oh, give it a rest, you moron,” Lily told him. “There’s no such thing as space snakes.”
“Yes, there is!” Violet said. “And if you don’t back off, Dash will call one here and it will swallow you whole and then barf up your bones.”
She was probably trying to be helpful, but her threat made the space snakes sound even more ridiculous than usual. If anything, this encouraged Lily.
“All right, then,” she said confidently. “Call them, Dashiell. I’m not afraid of them.” She came toward me, smiling cruelly, enjoying this. I thought back to what I had just learned about her, how she snuck into the greenhouse at night to sit among the plants. Even if she was the kind of person who took time to contemplate the wonders of life now and then, she was still a bad person. She was cruel and mean and as big a bully as her brother. Bigger, maybe.
I looked around the room, hoping Zan might make a sudden appearance. Maybe she could present herself to Lily as something even more hideous than what she’d shown Patton, scaring the pee out of her, too, and then the Sjobergs would finally leave the rest of us alone once and for all.
Only Zan didn’t show herself. We were on our own.
“You should be afraid of them,” I said, although the threat sounded hollow, even to me. “Don’t tempt me.”
“You mean I shouldn’t try to hurt you?” Lily continued toward me, her wicked smile growing bigger. “Even though you cost us our ComLink privileges. . . .”
“I didn’t cost you those,” I protested. “You’re the ones who broke the rules here.”
“And you’re the one who ratted us out to Nina!” Lily snapped. “The whole time we’ve been at this base, you have been constantly causing trouble for us.”
“Me?” I asked, backing away. “You’ve been bullying me and everyone else since you got here!”
“Because everyone here has been horrible to us,” Lily said. “But you . . . You have been the worst. You even tricked my poor brother into believing in these stupid snakes. He’s been a wreck because of you!” Lily’s eyes narrowed into little angry slits. “So now I think I am going to tempt you. Because I need to prove to Patton once and for all that you’re a liar and a fool.”
“My brother isn’t a liar!” Violet shouted. “Show them, Dashiell! Call those snakes!”
I glanced outside the rec room, looking for an adult or two who might be walking past, someone who could come to my aid. To my dismay, the only adult I could see was Sonja Sjoberg, and Sonja wasn’t going to be any help at all. Instead she was standing in the doorway, watching everything transpire with glee, her overinflated lips curled into a frightening grin.
Just my luck. Normally, I couldn’t do anything at MBA without an adult stumbling onto me, and now when I needed one, there was no one to be seen but the dragon queen.
Lily was now looming over me. She was a head taller than me and built like her brother, big and broad-shouldered. I had never considered fighting a girl, but I figured that Lily could probably wipe the floor with me. “What do I have to do to see these snakes?” she taunted. “This?” She poked me hard in the chest with a sharpened fingernail.
Patton cringed, as though Lily had made the worst mistake of her life.
But of course, no snakes appeared. Because I couldn’t conjure them up. All I could do was make a final desperate bluff. “Trust me, Lily, you really don’t want to do this.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “I really do want to see them. What if I do this?” She shoved me backward with an open palm.
“Lily! Stop!” Kira yelled.
But Lily kept on coming. She was grinning broadly now, pleased that she’d called my bluff. Behind her, even Patton seemed to grasp what was going on.
“Hey!” he growled. “There aren’t any snakes, are there? You tricked me!”
“Of course he tricked you, you idiot!” Lily shouted. “The snakes don’t exist. This twerp can’t defend himself against us. Which means it’s payback time.”
Now Patton grinned cruelly as well. His hands clenched into fists and he stormed toward me. It seemed that he’d spent the last month building up hatred for me, and now it was all about to come flooding out.
“No!” Kira yelled. “Patton! Don’t!”
I tried to run, but Lily was already on me. She grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise it and held me there.
Out in the hallway, Sonja Sjoberg was watching intently, enjoying every second of this.
Patton was almost on top of me, fire in his eyes.
So I resorted to plan B. Maybe no adults were going to come to my rescue. And maybe Zan wasn’t, either. But Lily had been wrong about one thing: I still had ways to defend myself. I had figured there was a good chance my space-snake bluff wasn’t going to hold up, so before leaving the greenhouse, I had swiped something in case of emergency:
Two bags of grade-A Moon Base Alpha human excrement.
They were crammed into the pockets of my cargo shorts. I whipped out one of the opaque white packets and held it up, clutching the plastic zipper like the pin on a grenade. “Don’t make me use this,” I warned.
Patton paused long enough to read the label. Unfortunately, he had no idea what “excrement”’ meant. Instead of being concerned, he laughed. “Oooh. Excrement,” he taunted. “I’m soooo scared.” And then he lunged at me.
So I had no choice but to rip the bag open and cram it in his face.
Now Patton discovered what excrement was.
Since the poop had had most of the water sucked out of it, it didn’t splatter all over him. Instead it was more like a thick wad of extremely disgusting dirt. It smeared his pale face brown and got into his eyes and his nose. And since Patton was laughing as he attacked, the biggest portion of it went straight into his mouth.
He reared back, screaming in disgust. Or trying to scream in disgust. It was hard to scream with a mouth full of dehydrated human feces. Instead of words, he could only make guttural screeches. Then he collapsed to his knees, gagging and retching.
Lily Sjoberg had released my arm to give her brother the chance to pummel me. Now, she reached for me again, determined to avenge his honor. I quickly skirted away from her.
“You’re dead!” she yelled at me, slashing with her nails. “I’m going to kill you!”
“Dash, shut her up, will you?” Kira asked.
“Gladly,” I said, then pulled a second packet of excrement from my other pocket and tore it open.
Lily’s eyes went wide as she realized I was more prepared than she’d expected. But instead of backing off, she slashed at me again.
I dodged her and then slammed the second bag into her face.
Lily might have been a little bit smarter than Patton, but she still hadn’t been smart enough to keep her mouth closed while attacking me. In fact, she’d had hers open quite wide, as she’d been screaming some sort of Swedish war cry. The moment she got a mouthful of space poop, however, she abandoned her attack and dropped to the floor beside her brother. Now both Sjobergs were gagging and retching in unison.
Violet burst into laughter. “You guys just ate excrement! And excrement is poop! So you ate poop! Serves you right!”
A banshee wail echoed through the room. It was so unearthly, for a moment I thought we might be under alien attack, but then I realized it was coming from Sonja Sjoberg. She was staring in horror at her children as they writhed on the floor, spitting and hacking up poop. Then she turned on me. Her wail became more of a shriek and she charged.
I didn’t have any more bags of excrement.
I didn’t need them, though. Sonja had only taken a few steps when Kira lashed out a foot and tripped her. In the low gravity, Sonja went flying. I dove out of the way as she soared past me and smacked face-first into the wall. There was a faint crunch, and then she grabbed her face, howling. It appeared that her surgically sculpted nose had been broken. “My nose!” she cried. “My nose!” Although due to the damage, it sounded more like “By doze! By doze!”
Violet kept on laughing. “This is way better than Unicorn Fantasy,” she announced.
“What on earth happened here?” Dr. Janke stood at the doorway to the rec room, gaping at the Sjobergs. Now an adult had shown up.
Sonja pointed at me accusingly. “He boke by doze! And he bade by babies eat excrebent!”
Dr. Janke looked at her curiously. “I’m sorry. Was that Swedish?”
Kira immediately came to my defense. “They attacked Dash first! He was defending himself.”
“He made Patton and Lily swallow poop!” Violet said, then burst into laughter again.
“He did?” Dr. Janke asked. It looked as though he was on the verge of laughing himself. “That’s unfortunate.”
Patton finally appeared to have coughed up most of the poop that had gone in his mouth. He staggered to his feet, trying to claw brown gunk off his tongue, and started for the door.
“Batton!” Sonja yelled at him, then pointed at me. “Kill him!”
“I’ll do it later,” Patton whined. “I have to wash my mouth out.” And then he scurried out the door.
“Me too!” Lily gasped, and then she raced out after him.
Sonja let out a scream of frustration, as though she was upset that her children had opted to rinse the excrement from their mouths instead of causing me bodily harm. She fixed me with a hard stare and threatened, “Dis isn’t over. You will bay for dis.” She pointed to her damaged nose, then stormed out of the room.
“They won’t really try to kill you,” Dr. Janke told me, trying to be supportive, although it sounded as if he wasn’t quite so sure of this. “They’re just very upset right now.”
“Look at it this way,” Kira said. “Even if they do want you dead, we’re leaving tomorrow. You only have to watch your back for one more day, and then you’ll be in the clear.”
Assuming the rockets actually get here on time, I thought. Or they don’t blow up while landing. Or the oxygen doesn’t all leak out of the base.
I didn’t say any of that out loud, because I didn’t want to upset Violet. But the fact was, things rarely worked out exactly as planned in outer space. The only thing you could really count on was that you couldn’t count on anything. And even if things did work out, and the rockets came right when they were supposed to, that was still hours away: easily long enough for the Sjobergs to try to get their revenge.
Plus, Nina was still blackmailing me into helping her hunt for a killer, sending me into Chang’s room to hunt for evidence against him and then who knew what else. It seemed there were plenty of ways that could go wrong as well.
Overall, it was shaping up to be a pretty lousy birthday.