Space Hostages (19 page)

“S
o, well, this happened,” said Josephine heavily.

Now the rubbish-dump kids were close up, I could see that some wore necklaces and bracelets of colored plastic, others had shaved strips into the fur of their chests, and they all had patterns painted on the insides of their wings. But none of them wore the collars we'd seen on the adults. Lilac Fur had pierced ears, though ribbons of bright plastic were threaded through the holes instead of earrings.

Lilac Fur fluttered down in front of us to grab a handful of my hair, exclaiming it with intrigue. Then she/he/they seized Carl's arm and wagged it up and down, apparently fascinated by the absence of either wings or additional legs.

“HIN-NIN ulanae lalOONha, Uwaelee,”
pleaded another of the kids, a tall, plum-colored one, who maybe thought Lilac was a bit too happy to get their hands all over the alien invaders. I'd never heard anything like the way their voices leaped from a solid chest voice to ringing soprano within a single syllable, as effortlessly aerial as their bodies in flight. It was dizzying to listen to.

Carl was trying to communicate through improvised sign language: he pointed at the sky, mimed a rapid descent that ended with a
splat
, and then walked his fingers across his palm and finished up with his hands spread in a “so now here we are” gesture.

Lilac tipped their head this way and that, interested, but it was hard to tell what they'd understood. And then decided to grab my hair again.

“Ow,”
I said as Lilac yanked rather hard, and I tried to twist away. This alarmed the onlookers, and a small indigo kid with a green plastic pouch belt around their waist threw another lump of rubbish and hit Carl on the head.

Fortunately, it was something squashy and smelly and Carl was not seriously damaged. But Lilac flapped over to Small Indigo—using me as a jumping-off post on the way—and, as far as we
could tell, delivered a good telling-off.

“BULin-NIN aelOONya,”
complained Plum, who I was going to assume was either Lilac's second-in-command or joint leader, and then Lilac and Plum flew up a few yards among the tangle of roots to hold an animated conference in midair. They somersaulted and hovered, sometimes gesturing at us or at the group—several of whom, in the meantime, indulged themselves in experimentally poking us.

And then all of a sudden, Plum and Lilac reached some kind of agreement.
“HIN-nalay!”
called Plum, and the whole gang closed in on us. Four small hands seized on each limb, and with some difficulty, they hauled us into the air.

“Yalu, EEN naweeta,”
grumbled the one straining with my right arm.

Flying is, in theory, a wonderful thing to do. But dangling facedown between grabby fruit-bat people was horribly uncomfortable, and hurtling through the forest with no way to even shield our faces from arcing roots was pretty terrifying. They didn't fly us far, though. In barely a minute, we were under the city and above the dump, where they dropped us. Unsurprisingly, it smelled even worse close up. Plum swiftly tied my hands and then Carl's with a length of twine—which had the effect of removing what
little ability we had to even
try
to talk to them, as we weren't going to get very far by speaking English loudly and slowly.

And then, before we'd had a chance to adapt to our new surroundings, four more of the kids flew in carrying a large red funnel they'd cut from the forest, which they dropped over all three of us like a glass over a spider, and we were trapped and helpless.

The inside of the funnel was humid, and it trapped the smell of the dump in there with us. At first the darkness seemed total. But gradually our eyes adjusted, and I realized a little light did filter through the funnel's glossy flanks; I could see the others, silhouetted in a bloodred glow. But for a long time, no one spoke.

“We could probably push this thing over,” I said eventually.

“And do what?” said Josephine listlessly. “They outnumber us. We can't even move our arms.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm just, you know. Brainstorming.”

But the brainstorming session didn't get any further.

“It's kind of up to them,” said Carl dully. “What happens next. Sometimes you just can't do anything.”

And it was true. I'd always been able to at least keep going, before, but right now we couldn't even do that.

Josephine whispered, “I keep messing everything up.”

“What?” I said.

“I don't mean to. I didn't use to. I used to get things right. But now . . . first the exams and then everything with the—with the
book,
and with Dad, and now this. I didn't even know about oxygen toxicity.”

“Josephine,” I said, alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“We should have kept walking, the first night. Carl was right. We shouldn't have slept in the other city.”

“We'd still have ended up here,” said Carl.

“But we'd have more
time
,” said Josephine. “I should have . . . Like you said, I shouldn't have brought us down here. I mean, I couldn't just leave you out there, I had to do
something
. But maybe I could have got us back onto the ship. The hull doors were shut, but maybe there was another way. Maybe we could have got to the
Helen
. For
months
, I've made one mistake after another.”

“Jo,” groaned Carl. “Don't do this.”

“What do you mean, for months?” I said.

Josephine sighed. “It doesn't really matter now,” she said. “But. You know I was retaking the baccalaureate?”

“Yeah.”

“You don't have to retake things you get right the first time.”

“Well . . . that just means you had a bad day,” I said, confused. The world of exams felt a very long way away. “That's all.”

“I wanted to go to university.”

“You're
thirteen
,” I said.

“I know that,” said Josephine, with a bleak trace of amusement in her voice. “But I thought I could do it anyway.”

I thought about it. “Yeah, you probably could. But everyone would be older than you. It'd be lonely.”

“Oh, well, I can deal with that,” said Josephine blankly.

“
Why
did you want to go?” I asked, but Josephine didn't answer that.

“Dr. Muldoon thought I could do it too. But she was wrong. When I took the exams, I made all these stupid mistakes. I've never
done
that before. I thought—if I could discover something new on this
trip, I'd be sure to get in this time—”

“Jo, no offense,” said Carl, slumped against the wall of the funnel. “But that's got nothing to do with why we're stuck on this stinking planet.”

“It doesn't matter about university now, I know,” agreed Josephine. “Except that there's a pattern of things going badly because I keep . . .
thinking I know how to do things
when obviously I
don't.
”

“
No. Look. I'm sorry I said all that, okay?” Carl sighed. “Can you stop sitting there believing stuff I said when I was in full-on drongo mode? I mean, you want to talk about mistakes, how about being the bloke who thought mouthing off to the guys with the airlock was a good idea?” I couldn't see his expression, but he nudged me, and I thought he was trying to smile. “Remember. We're not dead, it's not raining, and Alice's foot is only slightly broken.”

I was glad he was trying. But there was no sign that it was doing Josephine any good. And I wanted to think of something else to say, but it smelled so bad under there, and I was feeling so woozy from not eating. I thought if anyone had a history of doing incredibly stupid things, it was the girl who'd run away to space against parental advice in the first place.

“It's the Krakkiluks,” I said. “It's all the Krakkiluks' fault.”

“Ul-nik-prrk-klidikehk!”
bellowed a loud Krakkiluk voice, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. And something flew hard at the upturned funnel and knocked it over, and we blinked in the restored sunshine.

“Kzet pli kleng!”
said the Krakkiluk, as the rubbish-dump kids screeched in shock.

Only it wasn't a Krakkiluk. It was the Goldfish.

“Yaeeee!”
wailed Lilac, leaping into the air and hurling a lump of broken plastic at the Goldfish, which it dodged.

“
If you kids'd just
listen
,” said the Goldfish in its normal voice, exasperated.

“Goldfish,” I whispered. “You . . . you learned Krakkiluk?”

“Well, some of it, Alice, sure!” said the Goldfish merrily. “Boy, all this new processing power is superuseful! They were speaking and translating it right there in front of me on the ship, and those big bullies had plenty to say about spawn being silent, remember? So that's what I said to these feisty little guys. And hey! ‘You would be wise to listen,' the guy with the diamonds said that too.
KIHL-YIH TLUL
TAKT-TLITOP!
” it thundered at the rubbish-dump kids, several of whom decided this was all too much and scampered away.

“YOOLwa,”
retorted Lilac, who was made of sterner stuff, putting one pair of hands on their hips and throwing their wings wide.

“So . . . can we talk to them in Krakkiluk?” I said doubtfully.

“Klhel-ol-zlik tlak,”
the Goldfish crunched. I didn't know what it was saying, but Plum and Lilac looked at each other. Then Lilac held up one pair of hands, the fingers close together.
“Trrnk-skuk,”
they said hesitantly.
A bit.
I didn't need the Goldfish's translation to know they meant they spoke the Krakkiluk language “a bit.”

“Well, why don't you guys take a look at this and say what you see,” said the Goldfish, and projected an image of a Krakkiluk—Tlag-li-Glig, from the look of it.

“Oooh,” breathed Plum. If I'd known the Goldfish was going to do that, I'd have been worried the alien kids would be scared; they'd been understandably freaked out by the Goldfish's Krakkiluk voice. But they weren't. They knew the projection wasn't real. They circled the image cautiously: impressed,
but not astonished.

“Krakkiluk,” said the Goldfish, and left a meaningful pause. “Krakkiluk.”

“KraKLOO!”
said Lilac, understanding, pointing at the image.

“KraKLOO—in your language, KraKLOO?” repeated Josephine. Lilac stared at her and swiveled their head about. Josephine tried again, this time pitching her voice up on the second syllable as high as she could:
“KraKLOO!”

Lilac burst into a series of deafeningly high-pitched chirps that had to be laughter and somersaulted over backward.
“Heewa. KraKLOO!”

Josephine couldn't move her hands—she had to point from Carl to me with one foot, then nodded down at her own body. “Humans,” she said.

“YUUma!”
hooted Lilac.

“Humans,”
repeated the Goldfish, sternly, not one to let slapdash pronunciation go.

Plum tried: “H'yoo. Humans.” Which Lilac once again thought sounded very funny.

“GOOD JOB, BUDDY,” crowed the Goldfish, delighted. It showered Plum with a cascade of golden stars that nearly caused a riot. Even the kids who had run away in a panic before came fluttering back.

“Eyma OOOhula!”
they chorused, which I was
willing to bet meant “Do it again.”

“Goldfish, tell them you'll give them sparkles all day long if they untie us,” said Josephine.

The Goldfish was rather flummoxed, as the Krakkiluks hadn't said anything like that in front of it. Eventually it pointed a beam of light at each of our bindings and told the kids to “restore us to our proper state.” I'm not sure the kids understood, but we writhed and grimaced and wriggled our hands until they got the message.

Though that didn't mean they were sure about it.

“HIN-NIN aelOONya,”
worried Plum.

“OONyel lal-ne,”
volunteered Small Indigo.

“Whssh!”
Lilac scoffed.

“Oh, come on, we're not going to hurt you,” said Carl, and then went off in a fit of coughing. Which was worrying, but also quite well timed, because the kids turned and looked at him and their postures softened a little.

“Ool NYEE bul-lul,”
said Plum softly, and fluttering closer, patted Carl on the head.

Lilac said something throat-mangling to the Goldfish in the Krakkiluk language:
“Ul-nik kzet?”

“Do you know what that means?” I asked.

“They want to know if you're kids,” said the Goldfish. “Well. Spawn, you know.”

“Heewa,”
said Josephine. “Heewa means yes in their language, right?
KraKLOO,
” she continued. She looked pointedly up at the sky.

“Ahh, KraKLOO!”
said Lilac, and mimicked the little sign-language story Carl had performed before.

“Heewa, heewa!”
we said.

“Pssh,”
Lilac decided suddenly, and in a second swooped over to us and bit through our bindings. The feeling of small alien teeth nuzzling against my wrists was very odd, but the Goldfish, obligingly, provided another round of sparkles.
“Waaay!”
cheered the rubbish-dump kids.

“Well, I guess we can kind of communicate,” Josephine said.

“Oh, boy!” said the Goldfish happily. “Kids, you know what this means? You know how we're going to learn and grow and make new friends?”

“Oh, no,” said Carl.

“That's right. It's SCHOOLTIME!” whooped the Goldfish, barrel rolling in the air in glee.

To begin with, the Goldfish didn't have to do anything. The kids did most of the teaching themselves.

“Eemala,”
volunteered Lilac eagerly, encompassing all the kids in a sweeping gesture. Pointing at
us again:
“H'yumans.”
Then back at the kids, and the city. “Eemala.” And then pointing to their chest: “Uwaelee.”