The Lion of Mars Page 5

  His face was shuttered, cold. “Lissa was injured, and they left her there to die.”

  Phinneus sighed and looked down, squeezing his cane.

  “Now you know why we have no contact with the other settlements,” Sai said.

  * * *

  Meems helped me into my bed. I couldn’t lie down because of the sling, so she propped me up with pillows. But I was asleep before she even turned out the light.

  I dreamt that I was back in the overturned rover. But it was different this time. Scarier somehow. I looked at the seat next to mine.

  Trey was gone. But where?

  I looked ahead at the driver’s seat. It was empty, too. So was the one next to it.

  “Trey? Flossy? Vera? Where are you?”

  No one answered.

  Then I heard the rumble of a rover. I plastered my face to the window and saw the Yellow Submarine driving away.

  Without me.

  “Wait!” I shouted, banging on the window. “Don’t leave me!”

  But the rover kept driving, leaving me behind. Just like Lissa.

  Alone.

  I woke up with a shout, my heart pounding.

  Albie’s light clicked on, and he was out of bed and by my side.

  “Bell,” he asked anxiously, “are you in pain? Are you okay?”

  “No!”

  “You’re not in pain?” he asked, confused.

  “I’m not okay!” Then the terror and stress of the day caught up to me, and I burst into tears.

  “It’s okay,” Albie said, handing me a tissue. “You’re safe now. You’re back.”

  “It was so scary,” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can’t imagine. Do you want me to get Meems?”

  “No,” I said. “She’ll be here in another hour to wake me up to check my head.”

  Albie got back in bed and reached to turn off the light.

  “Can you leave it on?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I looked around the room. Seeing all the familiar things—Albie’s cap, the drawings on the wall, Leo at my feet—calmed me until I could finally breathe again.

  “Phinneus told me what happened to Lissa,” I said, and explained what I’d learned.

  “It makes sense now,” he said.

  “What makes sense?”

  “The grown-ups were all so angry when Lissa died. I didn’t understand why,” he said, shaking his head. “How could they just leave her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Albie gave a low whistle. “No wonder we aren’t allowed to have contact with the other countries.”

  I stared at the ceiling, remembering the terror.

  It wasn’t until Albie’s snores filled the air that I felt safe enough to fall asleep again.

  DATE: 3.15.2091

  FROM: CDR Dexter

  TO: US Terrestrial Command

  MESSAGE: Situation Report

  Due to an accident, Rover 2.0 Enterprise is permanently disabled. We only have one working rover now.

  Please advise.

  Sai Dexter, COMMANDER

  Expeditionary & Settlement Team

  United States Territory, Mars

  For the first few days, I spent most of my time sitting in bed propped up with pillows, my arm in the sling.

  I worked my way through the library of digi-reels, avoiding the alien ones. And I had my share of visitors.

  Flossy usually brought me breakfast and a cheery smile. Vera brought me lunch and gossip. Meems checked on me every few hours. Phinneus read to me. Eliana and Darby popped by and played cards with me (Eliana always won). Salty Bill delivered supper, and even Sai stopped by to see how I was doing. Leo was my constant companion, happy to lie with me on the bed. Especially when I shared my food with him. But there was someone who didn’t visit: Trey.

  It stung.

  I think Albie tried to make up for it. He was always there to help. Whether it was to fluff my pillows or cut up my food (since I was now one-handed) or help me put on my clothes. No wonder Sai wanted him to be his apprentice. He never once complained.

  I was half dozing in bed when Phinneus walked in carrying a book.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, studying me with sharp eyes.

  “My shoulder really hurts,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. Then he handed me a book. “I thought you might like this.”

  It was called Animals of the World and was full of pictures of Earth creatures. As I flipped through it, Phinneus petted Leo.

  “You’re a fine boy,” he said, and I looked up.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I was talking to Leo,” he teased.

  That’s when I noticed the thick white bandage on his arm.

  “What happened to your arm?” I asked.

  “Alligator skin,” he said.

  The lack of humidity on Mars made skin dry and itchy. Meems had dubbed it “alligator skin.” The grown-ups seemed to suffer from it more than we kids did.

  “It’s to be expected,” he said. “We’re all getting old.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Old skin is thin.”

  I’d never really thought of Phinneus as old. He’d always looked the same to me: white hair, glasses, warm smile, cane.

  “Would you like to see my favorite animal?” he asked me, nodding at the book.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He paged through it, then held it out for me to see. There was a picture of a small, furry animal with floppy ears. The writing beneath it said The Rabbit.

  “There were lots of those where I lived in New California,” Phinneus said with a smile. “They always came hopping out at dusk. We used to call it the Bunny Hour.”

  “Do you wish you could go back?” I asked him. Not that it was an option; none of us could ever return to Earth. Our bodies were permanently altered from living here. Meems joked that it was a one-way ticket to Mars.

  “I did in the beginning. But very rarely these days,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Mostly I miss Chinese food.”

  “Chinese food?”

  “It’s delicious,” he said. “There’s nothing tastier than beef chow fun.”

  “Do you miss your old home?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” he said. “It didn’t feel like home after Rose died.”

  “I don’t ever want to leave,” I told him, remembering the French people in the environmental suits chasing us. “It’s too scary!”

  “Oh, Bell.” Phinneus sighed, leaning heavily on his cane. “There is more to life than this settlement.”

  I shook my head.

  “After all, if I hadn’t left Earth, I never would have met you,” he said with a smile. “And you, my dear boy, were worth the trip.”

  He patted the pockets of his sweater. “I nearly forgot. I brought you something else.”

  “You did?”

  “Cookies!” he said, pulling out two cookies wrapped in algae paper napkins. He handed me one.

  I nibbled on it.

  “Are cookies as good on Earth as they are on Mars?” I asked him.

  “They’re better on Mars,” he confided.

  “Really?”

  He winked. “If I said anything else, Salty Bill wouldn’t make any more cookies for me!”

  We both laughed because he was right.

  * * *

  I spent hours poring over the animal book. I loved learning about Earth animals. They were awesomely strange.

  Like giraffes. Why didn’t they tip over with those long necks? Or snakes. How did they move, since they didn’t have legs? And penguins. Did they really live on floating pieces of ice?

 
But the lions were my favorite. How could I not love the big cats? They were social and lived in a group called a pride. They helped each other and raised their cubs communally. They sounded just like us. All our grown-ups had raised us together. One sentence stood out to me:

  Lions who are rejected by their pride do not survive long.

  The more I learned about Earth animals, the more everyone started to resemble them in my eyes. Sai was a lion, of course. Darby and Eliana were wolves (which mate for life). Meems was a protective mother cat, and I was her kitten. Flossy was a beautiful peacock in her lovely clothes. Of course, Vera was a sneaky fox. Trey was a loyal dog. Salty Bill was easy: he was a cranky ostrich. But Phinneus? I couldn’t quite decide what he was. Or Albie for that matter.

  I was still thinking about it a few days later when Albie and I were getting ready for bed. He turned off the light. After a few minutes, he started to snore lightly, and I clicked my light on.

  “Albie!”

  “What? Was I snoring again?” he asked.

  “Yes, but that’s not why I woke you up! I figured it out!” I told Albie. “Phinneus is a bee!”

  “What’s a bee?”

  “It’s an Earth insect with wings. Bees make honey to eat, and Phinneus grows algae for us to eat. See, Phinneus is a bee!”

  “If you say so.”

  “Although he’s definitely got some whale in him, too. Whales are very smart.”

  “Good to know,” Albie said, and yawned. “Now turn off the light. I need to get some sleep. I’ve got to fix that air scrubber first thing tomorrow. It’s broken again.”

  The air scrubbers removed the carbon dioxide we created by breathing. Too much was dangerous.

  “Okay,” I said, and clicked my light off.

  I lay there in the dark. A few minutes later, Albie’s snores filled the room.

  “Albie!” I shouted.

  Albie blinked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I got it! You’re an elephant! A noisy elephant!”

  He threw his ball cap at me.

  * * *

  Finally, at the end of the week, there was a knock at my door.

  “Come in,” I called, expecting it to be Flossy or Vera.

  I looked up to see Trey in the doorway. He had on a sweatshirt from Fordham University.

  “Hi,” I said, surprised.

  “Uh, yeah, it’s laundry day. I’m here to get the sheets.”

  It was really nice of him.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Trey looked around the room. “You kept the map up,” he observed.

  “Of course,” I said.

  The map hung over my bed. Trey and I had created it together. It had started as a way to get us out of Meems’s hair. We were young and bouncing off the walls, so she gave us a gigantic piece of paper and told us to draw a map of our ideal settlement on Mars. Most of our inspiration came from Earth digi-reels. There was a castle with a moat and drawbridge, skyscrapers, a racing track for rovers, a monorail, and dozens of other things we thought a perfect Mars needed. We’d added sections over the years, so that now it sprawled over a huge area of the wall.

  “We never did add that tree house,” Trey said almost wistfully.

  “We could still do it,” I said. “I have some paper!”

  He shook his head. “You need to move. I have to get the sheets off the bed.”

  After I got into a chair, I watched as he stripped the sheets.

  “So how have you been?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen you since the accident. What’s new?”

  “Nothing,” he said, tugging off the bottom sheet and tossing it to the floor.

  I tried again. “What have you been doing?”

  “Chores,” he said, pulling a pillowcase off.

  “Just chores?”

  “That’s all I have time for. We got punished with extra ones for taking the rover,” he said bitterly.

  “Oh,” I said in a small voice.

  “Except you, of course. You get to lounge around all day.”

  “I’m hurt!” I protested.

  “I told Vera we shouldn’t have taken you in the first place,” Trey said with a sneer. “Now I’ll never get to be Sai’s apprentice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Trey whirled on me furiously. “Sai blames us for you getting hurt. He said we’re older and we should have known better.”

  “But—”

  Trey grabbed the dirty sheets in an angry armload and stomped out of the room.

  “—it wasn’t even my idea,” I whispered to no one.

  As his footsteps faded, I knew I’d been right about Trey being a dog.

  Because he had a terrible bite.

  Sai gave us the same boring speech about safety once a year. No one really paid much attention to it. But after the alien/meteorite crash and the rover incident, Sai was now on a personal mission to make sure everyone was up-to-date on emergency protocols.

  We had to carry a glow stick in our pocket (Sai would stop and check us). We had to make sure our enviro suits were clean and hung up and loaded with a fresh oxygen canister, and that our shoes were always close to our beds, and on and on and on. It was annoying but tolerable.

  Until it wasn’t.

  I was lying in bed, fast asleep. After a few weeks of rehab with Meems, my sling was finally off, and while I still had occasional twinges of pain, it was nice to be able to sleep lying down again.

  That is, until an alarm blared through the corridors, jerking me wide-awake. Right away, I knew it was the emergency alarm. The whole settlement was rigged with them. An emergency could be anything from an injury to a fire. Whatever it was, everyone was supposed to rush to that location to help.

  As the alarm blared through the air, I realized Albie’s snores had officially met their match. I squinted at the glowing digi-clock.

  “It’s oh-three-hundred!” I said, and groaned.

  “Let’s go,” Albie said, slapping his ball cap on and staggering out of bed.

  When we made it to the source of the alarm—the mess hall—everyone was standing around in their pajamas, looking half-asleep. Everyone except Sai, who was alert, dressed in his uniform, and staring at his digi-watch.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted. “What’s the emergency?”

  “This is a drill,” Sai explained.

  We hadn’t had an emergency drill in years. In fact, I only remembered ever having two.

  “We’re still missing Flossy and Vera,” he said.

  I sat at a table next to Phinneus. He was leaning against his cane and wearing his blue button-up sweater over his pajamas. If a piece of clothing could perfectly describe a person, this sweater was it for Phinneus. It was fuzzy, with fraying threads and two missing buttons. But it was soft and comforting and always made me feel safe. When I was little and had nightmares, Phinneus would tuck that sweater around me and read to me until I fell asleep again.

  “I believe you children have caused Sai to lose his mind,” Phinneus told me in a loud voice.

  “Why do we have to do this in the middle of the night?” Eliana complained. She was wearing her pink pajamas.

  “Because it’s Sai, Peanut Butter,” Darby said, and gave her a kiss on the nose.

  Finally, Vera and Flossy came running in, and Sai turned off the alarm.

  He shook his head at them.

  “It took you five minutes longer than everyone else,” Sai told them.

  “Wait. This isn’t an emergency?” Flossy asked in confusion.

  “No. But it could have been,” Sai said. “We need to tighten up our safety protocols around here.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Vera muttered.

  But Sai
didn’t hear her. Or maybe he pretended not to.

  “Next time,” he said ominously, “move faster.”

  I looked over at Albie. Next time?

  Aw, dust it.

  * * *

  Everyone was exhausted the next morning. I heard Salty Bill tell Sai if he did an emergency drill in the middle of the night again, he could cook his own breakfast.

  Then it was time for chores. Meems wouldn’t let me do anything strenuous. No heavy lifting. No bending for hours in the farm. Which left only one option: dust duty.

  The dust on Mars was fine and got into everything. It stung eyes and burned skin and caused dust cough. So there were filters to collect the dust in the air vents. They needed to be emptied every day. It was tedious but necessary.

  I grabbed a bucket and started my rounds. It was pretty simple: just open each vent, and empty the dust into a bucket. Today there wasn’t much.

  Even though working in the farm was my favorite chore, I didn’t mind dust duty. It was easy, and I liked getting to go around the whole settlement. I worked my way from room to room, emptying filters one by one. When I walked into the generator room, Darby was standing on a ladder, fiddling with something high on the wall. He was wearing overalls and a tool belt.

  “That’s the wrong node for that air scrubber, Jelly!” Eliana shouted up to him.

  “No, it’s not, Peanut Butter,” he said.

  On Earth, Darby had been a general contractor, which meant he could fix just about anything.

  “I’m telling you it’s the wrong one,” she said with her hands on her hips.

  “I replaced them three seasons ago, remember?” he said as he climbed down.

  “Did you put it in the Record?” Eliana asked.

  Darby gave her a hopeful smile. “Maybe?”

  The Record was where changes and improvements to the settlement were recorded. Because while most of the grown-ups could do a little of everything—cooking, gardening, plumbing—each one had a primary responsibility. If that person was unavailable, the Record would help someone else figure out what to do when something broke.