Destination Unknown by Katherine Applegate Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t loaded into any accessible system.”

    “They were on the ship,” Jobs said. “Whoever did all this, whoever created this environment? They had to have been aboard this ship.”

CHAPTER TEN
“THE BABY . . . SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT.”
     

    Jobs was one of the last to set foot on the planet’s surface. He had stayed behind to fashion a bosun’s chair that was used to ferry some of the less-agile Wakers, as they were now called. Now he was ready to go down himself.

    He was reluctant. It wasn’t that the surface frightened him — it fascinated him. The poet within him found it stirring. But the poet was a subset, a mere file within the hard-core techie. This ship was Earth. This ship was human technology. He could unscrew panels and look inside and understand what he was seeing. He could follow fiber-optic pathways and know why they went where they went.

    It was like a museum, of course. The shuttle and the Mayflower capsule within it were a strangemixture of cutting-edge toys and antique systems. Old and new.

    Somehow, it had actually worked. It had carried them for five centuries and more through space. Jobs felt intense admiration for that, for what it represented in terms of human ingenuity.

    Their numbers had grown. Jobs’s little brother, Edward, had awakened, and by a stroke of luck Jobs had been able to keep him from seeing their parents. Or what was left of them.

    Miss Blake’s mother was awake now, as well as three other kids, a ten-year-old who called himself Roger Dodger, a fourteen-year-old girl named Tate, and a sixteen-year-old guy named Anamull.

    And D-Caf had awakened.

    That made seventeen people in all. Seventeen thirsty, hungry people.

    Emotional breakdowns were common. Grief was a virus that spread from one to another, was suppressed only to mutate, take on some new aspect, and attack again.

    Jobs and Errol had worked out a pulley system to allow them to reascend to the Mayflower . That way people could serve watches aboard, waiting for others to revive.

    But now it was time, at last, for Jobs to leave the ship.

    Jobs slid down the main cable. He would have liked to use the bosun’s chair, but he was unwilling to look like one of the lame. Not with Mo’Steel grinning up at him.

    “So. What do you think, Duck?” Mo’Steel asked, indicating the landscape.

    Down at ground level the weirdness of it was infinitely more pronounced. Jobs straddled the line between environments. One foot was planted in gray dust. The other crunched thick, irregular grass.

    To the left a vast canyon yawned, impossibly deep, impossibly steep. Silent, immeasurably huge. Perfectly detailed until you looked too closely, and then you could see quite clearly that the dust was not dust but identical round pebbles. And everything, the rocks, the few gray cacti, were all made up of those same gray-shade pebbles.

    “Pixels,” Jobs said. “The original photo was predigital. This is the max resolution, I guess.”

    Mo’Steel nodded sagely. “Watch this.” He picked up a small rock and threw it as far out into the canyon as he could.

    “Uh-huh,” Jobs said.

    “Shh. Listen. You hear that?”

    Jobs heard the rock hit bottom. It had hit bottom long before it should have.

    Together they walked into the gray world. They stood at the edge of the canyon and looked down. Impossible not to believe it was real. You could feel the depth of the canyon in your soul. But when Jobs threw a second rock after the first it, too, fell for no more than five seconds before landing with a tiny rattling sound.

    “Know what else? Look up at the sky. Look at that cloud up there.”

    Jobs obeyed. He saw a puffy white, lavender-edged cloud moving serenely toward the border between environments. It reached the edge of the gray-shade environment and kept blowing. As it crossed the line it lost all color, gained clarity, and was absorbed into the sky above the canyon.

    Mo’Steel seemed to expect him to say