“AAH!” shouted Smek. “Tummy Trouble! Fire!”
“Fire! Fire!” squawked the parrot, distantly.
Tummy Trouble sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but the guards must have missed. We sailed though the sparkling air and I felt like a superhero. Why had I been bothered by this low-gravity thing? I was amazing. I made the jump easily and landed with a roll on the lower platform.
“EEEEEEEEE!” screamed the scattering Boov, who ran for either a narrow bridge or a glass slide that connected this platform to others.
“Oh man, I really wanna try that slide,” I muttered.
“Ooh!” said J.Lo. “Oooooh! My tummy!”
I set him down. “Are you okay? I thought they missed us.”
“It...must not work on humans. Feel like I could marf.”
Smek’s shrill voice followed us down. “After them! The Squealer is Public Enemy Number One!”
“Like I could marf right out my poomp,” J.Lo insisted.
I looked up to see each of the guards pull a rip cord and inflate his uniform. They swelled up all over like they were covered in swimmies and vaulted off the upper skywalk toward us. I lifted J.Lo up again and made for the slide as the guards released air valves on their backsides and shot like farting balloons across the gap. I jumped butt-first onto the slide and spiraled down to a larger platform below us. I’m ashamed to say that it was just as much fun as I thought it would be.
“I am ready to give up,” said J.Lo.
Boov scattered off this platform too, mostly to an elevator off at the far side.
“Oh, c’mon,” I said. “I think we’re doing pretty well.”
“Only a smatter of times before someone is hurt,” he answered.
One Boov on this platform rushed us—looking to be a hero, I guess—so I turned him over carefully and balanced him on his head.
“WAAAAAA,” he yelled, waving and wiggling his legs.
“And what if we get into the outside?” added J.Lo as he clutched his midsection. “Where could two such as us hide?”
He had a point there. And even though he was being nice about it, the real problem was me and only me. They wouldn’t even have to put a description of me on the wanted poster—they could just say “human.”
“I will go into jail,” said J.Lo. “You will be sent home. And at home you can send e-mails to New Boovworld, asking for my release. E-mails to this Ponch Sanderson, maybies.”
“You should listen to him,” said the Boov on his head.
This was beginning to make sense, and I don’t know what I would have decided if I hadn’t looked up just then to see the security guards. They were on the disk above, gathered around the edge, and pointing their weapons straight down at us. I didn’t want to find out what another blast of Tummy Trouble might do to J.Lo, so I grabbed him and hurtled us toward the center of our platform just as the Boov fired.
Over the screech of the weapons I could hear one of the guards shouting. The barrage ended and he was still telling the others, “Not all at once! Not all at once! Too much sonic will—”
He was interrupted by a deafening crack.
A sliver of our platform’s glass disk was suddenly shot through with silvery webs—and then it shattered, musically, and the glittering shards of it dropped from sight. And the crack spread.
“Oh, jeez,” I said as I grabbed J.Lo’s arm. I took off running and the crack ran behind, and I dove off the opposite edge of the platform.
“Ooooooooooooh,” J.Lo groaned.
We tumbled downward, in slow motion, as another firecracker echoed above. I caught a glimpse of a bridge coming up fast, managed to get a toehold on it to push against, and launched us off in a new direction. And now we plummeted onto a globe suspended below, hitting the upper curve of it with a smack.
The chunks and splinters of the ruined platform above us showered down, smashed the bridge I’d just touched, and barely missed the big glass globe we were clinging to. We listened to the debris break a few other things on the way down and finally crash onto the roof of the coaster section with a sound like every waiter dropping every dish in every restaurant in America.
I’d lost my wind for a second. “Ow,” I said when it came back to me, my face smooshed against the glass. And then SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK, we slid, and I dragged an oily faceprint down the side of the globe. With my free hand I managed to slow us down a bit.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I am okay. I marfed a little and it made me feel better.”
Boov inside the globe were staring up at us. One of them did something complicated with his fingers.
“That is a very rude gesture,” said J.Lo.
Captain Smek and his inflatable commandos floated down to meet us now, seated on little scooters. They looked just like the antler scooter J.Lo had when I’d met him, and they made putt-putt noises as they hovered there. Smek had his baton. He bomped me a little on the head with it.
“Quite the chase,” he said, bomping. “Quite. The. Chase! But who could expect less from Public Enemy Number One?”
“Yes, sir,” said a guard.
“Would you leave us a moment, officers?” Smek said to the other Boov. “I would like to have with the Squealer a private word.”
“Sir?” said the same guard. “Sir, he is dangerous—”
“Just move a little ways away, that’s right. Just out of earshot. I won’t need long.”
I couldn’t see them very well without turning (and probably falling), but several of the putt-putt noises faded until one stood out distinctly from the rest. Smek hovered closer and holstered his baton. He folded his arms on the scooter’s handlebars and leaned his chin against them, like he was just hanging out with the young folk, like he might at any moment ask if he could “chill” with us a while. He reminded me of the youth pastor at my church who nobody liked.
“An unfortunate situation,” he told us. “No easy solution.”
“I am ready for prison,” said J.Lo, and my heart sank a little. “The humansgirl has a little carship parked outside to the shell. It can take her home to Earth.”
“So I should just let her go is what you are saying?” asked Smek.
J.Lo struggled to turn his head. “She has...she has not done anything.”
“Gratuity,” said the captain. “It is Gratuity, yes? Forgive me, but humans all look the same. You are young?”
“Yes!” I answered, and the movement of my face made us slide a little. “Yes. I’m young. Can’t be tried as an adult and...so forth.”
“I suppose you have told all your little friends this story about world saving and Gorg and cats, yes?”
“No, actually. You see, I didn’t want people to—”
“Interesting. But you will tell people now, won’t you.”
I suddenly felt like the Tummy gun might have done a number on me after all. “No! I would never—”
“I will bet you are so young that the humans would say you were a foolish and irresponsible humansgirl to come here with this Boov,” said Smek. “I will bet they’d believe any sort of terrible accident may have befallen such an irresponsible girl.”
My heart was pounding.
“A tragedy, yes, that a humansgirl should have such a bad, bad accident on another world. But believable. What do the humans say? That it is ‘one of those things’?”
I sighed. “We do say that,” I admitted.
“You will have then to kill me too! I tell you,” said J.Lo.
“J.Lo, shut up!” I hissed.
“No I will not! Shut up. I will talk and talk!”
“No, see,” Captain Smek was saying. He practically bounced in his seat, he was so eager to tell us this part. “You won’t. I thought of it upstairs. What is the perfect punishment for a squealer?”
He gave us a moment to guess. “Um—”
“To make it so he can never squeal again!” Smek answered himself. “And to put him in jail, of course, but we will take out your talkbox! Surgically. The punishment fits the crime! And also keeps you quiet forever—is that not clever?” He turned to the guards. “Okay, men! You may return.”
“J.Lo,” I sighed.
“Yes.”
We took each other’s hand and pushed off the globe.
I turned as we fell and made a desperate grab for the ridge at the bottom of Smek’s scooter. It tipped, and sank, and I lost my grip but immediately grabbed hold of the handlebar antlers of one of the Boov guards’ scooters that had cruised up underneath.
One hand holding J.Lo’s, the other aching as I clutched the handlebar, I smiled weakly up at the guard. He scowled down at me.
Other scooters circled around, and other guards aimed their guns.
“Do not shoot! Do not shoot!” said the guard above us. He waggled his hands and must have shifted his weight on the scooter, because suddenly the whole thing was toppling over. The guard came tumbling down and plowed into my head. Now the entire scooter was upside-down, and the guard fumbled for a grip, and then each of us was hanging from a different section of antler handlebar as we slowly sank.
The other Boov dove to meet us, but J.Lo reached high and flicked something on the scooter’s handlebars, and we shuttled away and ever downward until we skidded to a halt against another glass saucer in the dead center of the palace globe.
We all came disentangled from the scooter, which turned a couple of circles on its side and then righted itself ten feet away. J.Lo wrestled with the guard, but the guard was a guard, and he soon had J.Lo facedown on the floor with a gun to his head.
The other guards were closing in.
“Go!” shouted J.Lo. “Run! Save yourself. Then come back and save me!”
I stood there, frozen.
“RUN!”
So I ran, God help me, to the empty scooter. Pardon my language. And I knew I’d never figure out how to fly the thing, so instead I took it by the antlers and spun it around over my head. All the way around, then around again, and then I hurled it into the middle of the little constellation of Boovish guards hovering there and got what I think you call a 7-10 split. Bad if you’re bowling, pretty good if you’re just trying to distract the pins while you run away.
I ran to the far edge of the platform and looked down.
“I’m sorry, J.Lo,” I said, and I jumped.