the Lunar Taj. His thumping heart might as well have been powered by a supercharged hyperdrive engine.
The Taj was not the only thing to blame for this. Benny was starting to worry that Drue might get them killed before they even landed.
“Maybe I can pry this loose and we can take this thing out for a real joyride,” Drue said through clenched teeth as he tried to wrench the Space Runner’s flight yoke out of its locked position.
“Uh …” Benny said. “Should you really be pulling on that?”
“Don’t tell me you’re scared.” Drue’s face was starting to turn red from exertion. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing. Don’t you want to be the first person to carve your name into the surface of Mars or something?”
“How would we do that?” Benny asked, but it was obvious that Drue wasn’t listening. He made a final desperate pull, only to end up losing his grip and crashing back into the pilot’s seat.
There was a heaving sound from behind them.
Benny had almost forgotten the third member of their party. He and Drue turned, peeking over their headrests at the girl in the back seat. Her freckled skin had an almost greenish cast to it.
“Hey,” Benny said. “Are you OK?”
“Negative, flyboy,” the girl replied in a chirping, clipped tone. She put her hands on the back of her head, burying her fingers in the reddish-blond hair that was pulled off her forehead with what looked to Benny like a piece of twisted silver wire. “Girl down. Out of commish. Max sploitz.”
Drue cocked his head to one side. “Are we sure that’s English?”
“Sounds like she’s talking in robot,” Benny said.
“Newbz,” the girl muttered.
Her suit said “Robinson”, but her first name was Ramona. Or at least, Benny was pretty sure that was right. She’d been jabbering quite a bit before take-off, not to him or Drue but to the various electronics she’d brought with her. Benny thought her accent was British, but based on the gibberish she spouted he couldn’t be sure. Since blast-off, though, Ramona had hardly said a word. As far as Benny could tell she’d spent most the flight with her head between her knees, braced for a crash landing.
There were only supposed to be a hundred EW-SCAB winners. Benny’s invitation had said so. Yet when the transport dropped him off at the launch site earlier that morning and he saw the rows of fifty shining Space Runners for the first time, the adults in charge mentioned that there would actually be a hundred and one kids going to the Moon. Benny had been assigned to the vehicle with an extra kid in it. As he watched Ramona reach for a sick bag with shaking hands, he worried that his Space Runner assignment and the missing spider were bad omens for what the rest of his visit to the Moon was going to be like.
Drue leaned closer to Benny. “If she pukes, I’m flushing her out of the emergency airlock.”
Benny chuckled until he heard Ramona groan while wrapping her arms around her stomach. Then, feeling a little bad for her, he turned back around in his seat. In front of them, the Moon was getting larger by the second. Drue tapped on a few of the dashboard displays. Benny watched his fingers fly over the screens, adjusting the cabin lights and air-conditioning. He seemed right at home in the Space Runner.
“No point in going back to sleep, I guess,” Drue said. “We’re only a few minutes from descent.”
“Have you done sims for this or something?” Benny asked.
Drue shrugged.
“I have a few, but I never play them. My father has one of the first Space Runner models, so I’ve ridden around in it a little bit. They’re pretty easy to handle once you get out of the atmosphere.”
Benny’s forehead scrunched up as he considered this, trying to figure out how someone whose family owned a Space Runner ended up winning an EW-SCAB. Perhaps Drue was just lying about his previous visit to the Taj and everything else. Or maybe he was a spoiled kid who lived in a shining tower in one of the luxury buildings for the richest of the rich that had sprung up when the cities began to be overrun with drought refugees.
“So, what was your application vid like?” Benny asked, thinking this might get him some answers. “Why do you think Elijah picked you?”
Drue shrugged. “I bet he saw some of himself in me. An adventurer. Brave, smart – a young Elijah! What about you?”
“Well, some of it was of me pulling tricks in my dune buggy,” Benny said, grinning. “I got my hands on a floating GoCam for a few days and it caught me doing all sorts of flips and stuff out in the desert. You should have seen the height I got on some of the jumps. It was insane. Then this kid got separated from our caravan, which was really sad and all but I—”
“Wait,” Drue said, jutting his head forward, one eye narrowed and the other opened wide. “Did you say ‘caravan’? Like, one of those groups of homeless people who live in what used to be California and Nevada and stuff out west?”
“Well, yeah,” Benny said, the excitement fading from his voice. “But we’re not homeless. We just … camp a lot.”
Drue’s expression twisted for a moment. Then he shook his head and opened his mouth a few times like he was going to say something, but only air escaped. Benny reflexively wiped his hands across his space suit, trying to knock any extra dirt off it. He felt his cheeks burn, and another, different heat rising inside him. Drue was again staring at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. Benny had seen that look countless times, sometimes even from members of the caravan – newcomers who had been driven out of the cities because they couldn’t afford it any more, just like Benny’s family had been when he was a little kid. They’d hated the canned food or how they weren’t allowed to shower or take a bath because it wasted water, having to rely on old baby wipes instead. Mostly they complained about how boring caravan life was. Benny’s dad had been quick to tell him to be patient with these new recruits. He’d said their attitudes were just to hide how scared they were and that with time they’d come around. Not all of them did.
His dad had always looked for the good in people. It was something Benny had always loved about him. He’d never even heard him say an unkind word about his mother, even though she’d walked out of their apartment one morning when they were still living in the city and never come back.
Though, now, Benny couldn’t help but wonder if his dad maybe should have been more cautious around people. Then he might still be alive.
Benny glanced into the back seat to see if Ramona had anything to say about their conversation; she’d plugged her ears with wireless headphones and was sprawled out with one arm over her eyes. So he tried to follow his dad’s advice and give Drue a chance. He kept talking.
“Anyway, this kid, right? He got separated from the caravan. He was little, five or six, and you don’t survive out in the desert very long if you can’t take care of yourself or don’t have any water. I took an ATV out and found him. The GoCam caught all of it. Me picking him up in my buggy and everyone all excited when I got back and stuff. I think it made for a good vid. The aerial shots of us returning were pretty impressive.”
“Wow,” Drue said. “Lucky for you, I guess. Did they give you a medal or something?”
“No,
