Out of This World Read online

  “You can!” Jack told him, one hand on his collar, propelling him onward. “You can do it!”

  The Fangbeast blinked as it shrugged off the effects of Gradius’s last attack and turned its attention back to its fleeing prey. Angrily, it broke into a run.

  “Ready?” Jack cried as they neared the edge.

  “No!” Thomas blubbered.

  The ground shook as the monster pounded toward them, closing the distance in moments.

  “Jump!” Jack shouted.

  The two of them leaped out into the air, flailing. For an instant Jack saw the terrifying drop pass beneath him. Then his feet hit the floor, and he tumbled into the cargo hold among the crates and piles of tarp. The moment he was inside, the gunship lurched upward and away. He caught a glimpse of the Fangbeast, jaws wide, pounding closer. He saw it bunch its many legs and leap—

  Then the gunship rocketed forward, and the Fangbeast missed them. Jack scrambled to the doorway and looked out in time to see it plummeting through the air toward the ground, far, far below.

  “He’d better hope he really is immortal,” Jack muttered. There was a tiny paf and a small puff of smoke as the monster hit the ground. Jack rolled his shoulders and looked back inside the gunship. “Everyone all right?”

  “Mmmmf,” said Mazzy, who was lying pinned underneath Thomas, her arms and legs waving helplessly. Thomas himself had fainted.

  “See?” Jack said to him. “Told you you could jump.”

  The cockpit was sealed off from the gunship’s cargo hold, so they were unable to speak to Gradius after he had rescued them. The burning white landscape sped by below, visible through the open door in the side of the aircraft, and they were surrounded by the sound of the engines. Hot wind stirred their hair as they picked themselves back up after their encounter with the Fangbeast.

  Jack helped Mazzy extract herself, red-faced and angry, from beneath the unconscious Thomas. After she was free, she volunteered to help wake him up by giving him a few slaps around the face. Jack said he’d wake him instead. Mazzy looked a bit too eager.

  A little gentle shaking had Thomas back with them. Once he came to terms with the fact that he was still alive, he crawled over to a corner and sat there looking ashamed.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled at last.

  “What for?” Jack asked.

  “I … I guess I just froze up. That thing just scared me so much.”

  “You weren’t much use in the nightclub, either,” Mazzy reminded him.

  Jack gave her a look. “We’re not all cut out to be action heroes, okay?” he told her.

  “No. Some of us are just here to screw things up and slow everyone down,” said Thomas miserably. “You both nearly got killed because of me.”

  Jack began to argue, then realized that he really couldn’t. “Yeah, well,” he said. “We’re all still here, though, aren’t we?”

  That didn’t seem to make Thomas feel much better, so Jack went over and sat next to him. “Hey,” he said. “Come on. We just escaped certain death at the hands of a three-story-tall monster. What else were you going to do with your Saturday?”

  Thomas looked even more glum. “I was going to spend it on my own, like always,” he said. “You were supposed to come for a sleepover, but you went off with Jodie Ellis instead.”

  Mazzy raised an eyebrow. “Jodie Ellis, eh?”

  “She turned out to be a slime creature,” said Jack. “Long story.”

  “You think I don’t know what everyone thinks of me?” Thomas said. “I’m a klutz. I’m a goof. I say the wrong thing all the time. No wonder everyone tries to avoid me or pretend I’m not there. I know you want to get rid of me, just like Mom did.”

  Jack was shocked by that. “Hey, hey! Your mom did not want to get rid of you!”

  “How would you know? You never asked about her. All she did was watch TV. She could go days without saying a word to me.”

  Jack’s stomach plummeted, and he felt utterly awful. Thomas was right: Jack had never been interested enough to ask. No wonder he was so desperate for attention that he’d latch on to anyone who would give it to him. All this time Jack had been complaining about how hard it was for him, with his weird parents and their assault courses, when Thomas had it much worse and would have traded places with him in an instant. He could hardly imagine what it must have been like to be so ignored.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “It’s not you who should be sorry; it’s me.”

  Thomas shrugged.

  “Anyway …” said Jack, struggling to find a way to make it up. “Anyway, you’re wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  “I don’t care if you’re a goof. I’m a goof, too. I’m not really any good at anything, except that I can draw a little. And where do you think all my friends are? I’ve never had any that lasted more than a year, because I always had to leave them behind.”

  “Are you seriously having a contest to see who’s the most unpopular?” Mazzy asked in amazement.

  Jack ignored her. “Listen, Thomas. You know how many people ever bought me a birthday cake? Zero. You know what I’d be doing right now if it weren’t for you? I’d be doing Dad’s assault course again, still wondering why my parents were so weird, waiting for the next time we moved so I could lose all my friends and start over. So I don’t want to get rid of you. If I did, I’d have left you in that temple. I want you to stick with me. Nobody else ever has.”

  That finally got a smile out of Thomas, and he seemed to buck up a little. “All right,” he said. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  Mazzy rolled her eyes. “You two are something, you know that? What a pair. Is everyone from Earth like you?”

  Jack grinned. “Only the awesome ones,” he said.

  A short distance from the temple was a cavern inside a mountain. Gradius steered the gunship in through a cleft in the rock and put them down on a ledge high up on the cavern’s side. Beams of blinding sunlight lanced down through the gloom from gaps overhead, illuminating a landscape of strange and colorful rock formations and delicate, glittering crystal flowers. The suns had bleached all life and color from the surface, but here in the shade, there grew a hard kind of beauty.

  They climbed out and found him waiting there, his back to them, looking thoughtfully over the lip of the ledge into the echoing space below. He turned around as his passengers emerged and gave them a steady gaze.

  Jack studied him uneasily. Now that they were face-to-face, he felt a little afraid. He wondered if Gradius really had the answers he was seeking and whether he’d like what he heard if he did.

  It was like looking into a mirror and seeing a more handsome version of himself. Gradius’s features were identical, but he stood straighter, with a certain self-assuredness that Jack lacked. Plus he had a better haircut. Jack didn’t generally like to see photos of himself, but every once in a while a picture caught his best side. The boy before him seemed to be made up of best sides. There wasn’t a bad angle to him.

  “So, which one are you?” he asked Jack.

  Jack was puzzled by the question. “I’m Jack,” he said. “From Earth.”

  “And you’re Gradius Clench,” Mazzy said.

  He favored her with an easy smile. Jack was appalled and faintly jealous to see Mazzy smile back.

  “That’s me,” he said. “So, you mind telling me what you were doing in an old Drax temple on Arcturus Prime?”

  “We were looking for you,” said Mazzy.

  “I’m flattered,” said Gradius. “Well, now you’ve found me. Why don’t you tell me why you were looking?”

  “Before we get into all that, there’s the matter of Boston and the others,” said Mazzy. “They could still be in trouble.”

  “If they are, we can’t help them now,” said Gradius. “I’m sorry, but they’re on their own. I can’t risk exposing myself to those Hunters. There’s too much on the line.” Mazzy took a breath to argue, but Gradius gestured toward the gunship. “They have a military-grade co
mbat aircraft. Mine’s built for stealth. I can’t fight them in that.”

  “But we need to do something!” Mazzy cried.

  “If they spot us, they’ll shoot us out of the sky. And the mission I’m on … well, let’s just say the fate of the Nexus might depend on it. So I’d rather not die yet, and I’d rather you all didn’t, either. We’ll simply have to trust they can get out of it themselves.”

  Mazzy looked frustrated, but she seemed to accept that he was right. Thomas blundered forward and thrust out a hand. “I’m Thomas!” he said enthusiastically.

  Gradius pumped his hand. “Great to meet you, Thomas,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. Jack hated how smooth he was. He had a way of making people like him. Jack didn’t have that skill. “Now, I bet you’re the guy to fill me in on how you all got here,” he told Thomas.

  Thomas eagerly obliged, delivering a breathless recap of events so far, which only ended when he got to the part about Mazzy activating the mysterious pedestal in the temple.

  “You managed to make it work?” Gradius asked Mazzy. “Incredible! How did you do it?”

  Mazzy waved it away modestly. “Oh, just takes a bit of mechanical know-how,” she said.

  “She kicked it,” Jack told him.

  “I’d never have thought of that,” he said with admiration. “I was trying to get the pedestal to work when my gunship detected your approach, so I retreated to a safe distance to see if you were friend or foe. What did you find when you turned it on?”

  “A star map!” said Thomas. “And we found the coordinates for a rift gate on—”

  “The thirteenth planet!” Gradius said excitedly. “You have them with you?”

  “Right here,” said Mazzy, tapping her head.

  “That’s what I came for!” said Gradius. “Come over to the gunship! All you have to do is transfer them into the onboard computer and—”

  “Uh-uh,” said Mazzy, shaking her head, her multicolored locks flopping around. “Not until you give us some answers.”

  “But it’s critical to the safety of the Nexus that I get to the thirteenth planet!”

  “Oh yeah?” said Mazzy. “Why?”

  “That,” said Gradius with a charming wink and a flourish, “is classified.”

  Mazzy was not impressed. “Then so are the coordinates.”

  Jack was pleased to see irritation flash across the superspy’s annoyingly handsome face. “Did I mention it was critical to the safety of the Nexus?”

  “Three of my friends are out there being chased by bounty hunters, and we all nearly got killed by a psycho robot with class issues,” Mazzy said. “All because everyone thinks Jack here is you. I figure you owe us an explanation, don’t you? You can start by telling us why you two look freakily alike.”

  Gradius looked at Jack, surprised. “Nobody told you yet? Not even your Guardians?”

  “My … Guardians are dead,” said Jack. “Until about twenty-four hours ago, I thought they were my parents.”

  “Oh,” said Gradius, his eyes softening in sympathy. “I can see how you might be confused, then.”

  “I am, a little,” Jack said dryly. “And I’d really like to know what happened to my real parents, too.”

  A strange expression flickered across Gradius’s face, something that might have been sadness. He turned away and looked out over the cavern, his hands linked behind his back, while he tried to think where to begin. Jack watched him, framed against the beams of light slanting down from the roof. His very existence made Jack feel inadequate. He was just more … heroic somehow. Even the way he stood was heroic. His parents … his Guardians had wanted him to be like that—strong, confident, and proud—but he’d never managed to live up to their expectations.

  “There is a secret organization called the Hexagram,” Gradius said at last. “They work behind the scenes, looking out for the good of the Nexus. They don’t follow any law but their own. They don’t recognize any government. They just do whatever needs to be done to keep us all safe.” His voice became dark. “Whatever needs to be done.”

  Thomas squealed with delighted excitement, clapping his hands together. Jack gave him a look.

  “They saw the Mechanics coming long before anyone else did,” Gradius continued. “They warned people, but nobody listened. They tried to stop it, but they couldn’t. So they made plans to deal with the Mechanics when the time came. One of those plans was us.”

  “Us?” said Jack.

  “Him?” said Mazzy in surprise, pointing at Jack.

  “The idea was to create a superspy who could infiltrate the Mechanics. Someone nobody would suspect. A kid. And not only that, but a kid who could come back from the dead.”

  “You can come back from the dead?” Thomas gawked at Jack.

  “I don’t know, and I am totally not finding out,” said Jack. “What are you talking about, Gradius?”

  “I’m talking about clones,” he said. “There were ten of us born, all identical in every way. Ten of us sent to ten different planets in the Nexus. The idea was—”

  “Wait!” said Jack, who couldn’t bear not knowing a moment longer. “Born to whom? If my Guardians weren’t my parents, who were?”

  Gradius gave him a pitying gaze. Jack felt a sense of dread settle on him, and he knew the answer before Gradius gave it.

  “We don’t have any parents,” said Gradius. “We were grown in a tank.”

  “Cool!” Thomas breathed, completely missing the stricken look on Jack’s face.

  Jack went numb. In the space of less than a day he’d lost two sets of parents: one fake, and one imaginary. Now there was nothing left to hold on to. His Guardians were the only parents he would ever have, and there was no one to replace them. He felt that loss at last, sudden and hard, like a punch in the guts.

  They’re gone. They’re really gone.

  Gradius went on, a little more gently. “The idea was that we would all be intensively trained from birth, and when the time came, the best of us would be sent into action. The rest would be kept on standby. If the one who was in action got killed, the next one would step in and take his place. His friends and contacts would think he’d miraculously escaped death, and the legend of Gradius Clench would grow. His enemies would think he actually was dead, so they’d never see it coming when the next one turned up. As far as anyone knew, there was only ever one Gradius Clench. But really, there were ten.”

  “The ultimate spy!” Thomas gasped, his enormous eyes sparkling. “Every time you think you’ve killed him, he keeps coming back!”

  “And which one are you?” Mazzy asked.

  “I’m number two.”

  “Wait, wait!” Jack waved his hands in front of Gradius’s face, swinging from sadness to anger in an instant. “You’re saying I’m an insurance policy?”

  “More like a spare, actually,” said Gradius. “Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. If I die, the honor of being Gradius Clench passes on to the next-most-competent clone. I’ve read your progress reports. If there’s a list somewhere, I’m pretty sure you’re at the bottom of it.”

  He gave Jack a pat on the shoulder, which was meant to be comforting but made him seethe instead. The very sight of Gradius made his blood boil. Here was a boy who was the embodiment of everything his dad had ever wanted. Jack paled in comparison to him. He knew it wasn’t entirely fair, but fury felt better than anguish.

  Mom. Dad. You weren’t much, but you were my safe place, even so. Now nowhere is safe anymore.

  “If you’re a superspy, how come everyone knows your face?” Thomas asked Gradius, oblivious to the turmoil Jack felt. “I mean, it’s all over the space news, or whatever you call it out here.”

  Gradius looked grave. “We don’t know. My predecessor was doing great work sabotaging the Mechanics’ plans, even though he had to tread on the toes of a lot of powerful people to do it. He was on the verge of finding a way to shut them down for good. Then something went wrong. A leak inside the Hexagram, maybe. Someone ti
pped off the Mechanics, and General Kara ambushed him. That’s why I was activated.”

  Mazzy had gone pale. “General Kara?” she said.

  “Yes. And since then three more of our clones have gone missing. I’d assumed you were safe on Earth, Jack, since it’s literally the last place anyone would want to go to look for anything—”

  “Hey!”

  “But then you sent that distress signal, which you’re only supposed to send if your cover is blown and you’re in deadly peril.”

  Thomas looked sheepish and studied his toes.

  “Well, whoever leaked our face to the world must have also given General Kara the key to decode our messages, because she knew right away that it had come from you, and the next time the rift gate to Earth opened, she sent those Hunters through. You’re lucky this young lady and her people got to you first.”

  Lucky, thought Jack bitterly. Luckier still if Thomas had never come by on my birthday and found the attic.

  But was that true? Would he have rather stayed in the life he had, instead of a new life of adventure on alien planets? He couldn’t blame Thomas for what had happened; only a moment ago he’d been thanking him for it. And yet now that there was no prospect of finding his parents, he felt lost, directionless. The anger drained out of him and left him empty. They’d found Gradius, and he had no answers. What was he doing here, then?

  Gradius turned to Mazzy, out of patience. “Now, listen. I’ve told you what I know. You need to give me those coordinates. My predecessor found out the Mechanics are cooking up something big. I’ve been trying to find out what, but you can bet it won’t be good for us. All I’ve got so far are rumors that they’ve found the thirteenth planet and they’re up to something there. That, and the name they’ve given to their plan. Firehawk.”

  Firehawk. Jack’s mind went back to the picture in his sketchbook. A flaming bird, flying through space.

  “So you want to go to this mysterious thirteenth planet to find out what the Mechanics are up to and what this Firehawk thing is?” Mazzy said.