Jonesy Flux and the Gray Legion by James Pray

Author:James Pray [Pray, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling Children's Books
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’m keeping our landing place a surprise, okay? Also, hold on. This is the bumpy part!

Cass didn’t let Jonesy out for another hour. By then the Jinx had stopped moving because it was safely on the ground.

“That was mean,” Jonesy said when Cass opened her door.

“Was not,” Cass replied. “Surprises aren’t mean.”

Jonesy tried to look past Cass to see what was outside the cockpit windows, but Cass pushed her the other way, toward the airlock. “Go on. You can be first out.”

Jonesy opened the airlock’s inner hatch and stepped inside. The outer hatch’s screen was green, but all she saw through the hatch’s small window was something very smooth and bright, like a vast bluish-whitish light fixture.

She touched the airlock controls.

The outer hatch unsealed with a hiss. A burst of wind swirled into the airlock as it folded open, and suddenly the air was warm and dry and filled the back of her throat with a strange delicious smell, smoky and salty and toasty sweet. The world outside was blue-white on top and red on bottom and overwhelmingly bright.

Jonesy squinted and shielded her eyes. The blue-white was sky. The red was sand and rocks. It looked just like a desert. She was so used to simulations and games that she almost said something about how amazingly real it seemed.

Except she was on a planet. So it didn’t just look like a desert. It was a desert.

A real desert.

A real desert on a real planet under a real sky.

She scrambled down the boarding ladder, gawking skyward so intently that she almost missed a couple of steps. “Oh, weird,” she gasped when she hopped to the ground and felt the sand’s odd, crunchy give under her shoes.

She looked around.

Apart from the red-dusted Jinx (which was already undusting itself with some sort of static generator that made her skin prickle), all she saw in any direction were red hills of cracked stones and red dunes of gritty sand. Nothing moving but effervescent heat haze and windblown sand. Nothing alive-looking except a scattering of brown, lonely things like stunted leafless trees and, way out on the horizon, something like a headless, legless, mountain-sized tortoise with tall bony sails sticking out of its shell.

Cass hopped down beside her. “What do you think?”

“It’s so pretty.” Jonesy turned in a circle, letting her eyes spiral up from the red desert into the blue-white sky. “And it’s so big. Cass, it’s so big!”

She started giggling and couldn’t stop. She started running and couldn’t stop that, either. For the first time, no walls or hatches blocked her way.

For the first time, she could run anywhere.

She ran around the Jinx to see what the horizon looked like on the other side (about the same, except no mountain-sized creatures). She ran to visit the closest lonely twisted tree-thing (but didn’t touch it, because it looked harmless and she’d seen enough movies to know what happened when you touched the first harmless-looking life-form you found). She jumped over rocks and clattered across

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