Dad, gritting his teeth, grabbed for something, anything.
Suddenly there was this girl.
She interposed, all flying black hair and waving arms and crazy eyes.
“No!” she screamed at the wranglers. “They’re with me! Undercover 6065650!”
She waved some kind of plastic badge in the air.
The vacuum pulled the girl off her feet. The anaconda swallowed Milo and Dad, too—
—almost. The wranglers shut it down. Louvers slammed across the great mouth. Dad fell, and the wranglers kicked him to his feet.
“Follow me!” barked the girl, darting around, then running down the hall.
They followed, bewildered, as fast as they could.
—
The girl led them straight up to the commercial ring just as the shift whistle blew. The whole concourse trembled as the twilight shift came off, passing the grave shift going on. Boots thumped, voices growled. Toolbelts clanged.
The girl shook long dark hair over her face and gave Milo a look he couldn’t interpret.
“What you told them,” said Milo, “about the undercover—”
“They scanned us,” whispered Dad urgently. “They have our SPLAT codes.”
“Listen,” said the girl, flashing the plastic badge. “It’s not mine. It’s from an enforcement volunteer in our hall who died in one of the abandoned seed cages. I’m not a snitch. I help make food.”
“The kitchens.” Milo couldn’t help a tone of disgust.
“Not the kitchens,” said the girl, rolling her eyes. “I said ‘food.’ Medicine isn’t the only thing you can buy under the table, you know. You guys have never been pinched before, have you?”
They gave her identical dumb looks.
“By now they’ve scanned a thousand codes. Way more than they can process. If they didn’t get you with the anaconda, you’re clear.”
In the corridors behind them, noise and shouting. The Monitors in Frog’s corridor had obviously failed to contain the chaos.
“It’s turning into a real thing,” said Dad.
Milo grasped the girl’s elbow and asked, “Why did you help us?”
There was that unreadable look again. It was the only answer she gave.
Rioters spilled into the concourse.
“You dropped this!” said the girl, pressing something into Milo’s hand.
Mom’s pills.
Then she was gone, slipping away downstream.
—
Dad kept them close the next day. Even the twins had to follow him around in the tubes and tunnels.
“Rioters’ll break into the pods on the skilled level,” he explained. “For food.”
Dad gave the twins his fish and let them read important numbers to him.
From the corridors below, the smell of smoke.
“They’re burning the unrefined fuel,” said Mom.
“Idiots,” sneered Dad. “They’ll use up the air. Don’t they realize?”
That’s when the Monitors showed up. Five of them.
“Ventilation one one zero one zero zero one zero one?” the commander barked, his speaker cranked way up.
“That’s me,” answered Dad.
“Shut down the lung,” said the commander.
Dad’s whole body jerked, as if he’d gotten a mild shock.
Mom started to say something, but a sudden cough silenced her.
“That’ll kill the oxygen,” said Dad.
The commander leveled his burp gun.
The twins watched in silence. They understood that something important was happening.
Mom closed her eyes, trembling.
“No,” said Dad.
And he looked straight into their masks as they shot him.
His whole chest came apart. He fell, gagging, and died.
Milo’s jaw dropped. Before he could move or say anything, a handful of rioters spilled onto the gantry.
The Monitors’ burp guns sprayed green gas.
Milo felt his body go numb. He dropped to the floor for what seemed like a year.
—
He woke up underwater.
His eyes opened, and he saw sunlight and waves overhead. Felt himself immersed and sinking. He kicked and swam and broke onto the surface, gasping, treading water that stretched everywhere, as far as he could see.
Above, a flying machine whined and rumbled, then shrieked away.
He’d been dumped in the water—the ocean? Was this an ocean?
Shouting and panic, all around. Fifteen people, he guessed, struggled in the water.
Jupiter split the sky like a crescent knife. Other crescents—other moons—hung in space to either side. (It was a lot to take in for a kid who’d never been outside, never been anyplace bigger than the lung. If it hadn’t been for sims, he might have panicked and definitely would have drowned.) (Are we downplanet? Is this Europa?)
“Mom!” he cried out.
Fwoom! A giant orange fish exploded from the sea and fell toward them, fell on top of them— A raft! It inflated, grew rigid, and sat turning in the water like a floating fort.
There was Mom. There were the twins, already clambering over the side.
Giggling. Pushing each other.
Milo crawled over to his mother, and her eyes brightened. She grasped the back of his head and brought their foreheads together. They sat like that without a word.
The twins, meanwhile, gamboled in the middle of the raft.
“Whootoi!” yelped Carlo.
“Nok beta,” answered Serene.
Then they turned to Milo, turned to Mom, and together said, “Dad.”
There was nothing to do but shake their heads. Milo felt his mother trembling.
The twins fell silent, holding hands.
—
“Land,” someone said.
What? Milo wasn’t sure what to look for. Except in movies and sims, he’d never seen a horizon before.
Something like a dark wall, way ahead. Cliffsides rising above the waves.
The island seemed to race toward them.
“Tidal currents,” coughed Mom. “We might get carried right past.”
Milo gave her a curious look. She and Dad had lived in other places, off-crawler. They had something called “education.”
“Europa practically sits in Jupiter’s lap,” Mom explained, “in an elliptical orbit. So it’s got huge tides that squeeze it like a rubber ball.”
The island loomed close. At the top, jungle trees and vines bristled and hung. At the waterline, the ocean hissed and swirled, exploding on sharp rock.
“Ho!” someone yelled.
People and boats surrounded them, darting between waves. Dark, naked people. Long, skinny boats, like things made from scraps, with ragged curving sails. The dark people threw cables over the raft. Passengers grabbed for these lifelines.
“Hold tight!” bellowed the dark people. Some of them, Milo noticed, had breasts.
He grabbed a cable—like nothing he’d ever touched before, rough and unfamiliar—and gripped tight. The raft slowed.
The water did things he couldn’t understand. It seemed to be rising, swallowing the island whole. The water climbed and climbed. Was the island sinking?
“Tides,” repeated Mom. “Hundreds of feet high.”
The twins clung to her arms and to each other.
They rode the rising tide like that, with their mysterious saviors grinning all around them and the sea racing by.
The sea reached the top of the cliff, and there it stopped.
It crashed against a long white beach.