Sand Red

40

'It's easy now.'

Lars huffed, not answering. Aida had got her way and she had painstakingly dyed all the wires red, yellow, blue, green, purple, orange, black, white plain and a dozen other shades I couldn't remember before putting it back together. 'It's no use. There's a hundred more,' he said.

'The rest will be easy after you've figured this out.'

'Solved it?' he asked bitingly as she stared intently into the box with the tweezers tight in her grip.

Yul combed out his hair sitting on the bed beside me and I was carrying out my weekly maintenance of my nails. A front tooth hurt from a particularly bad blow I'd taken from En and I struggled to bite the growth off without its help.

'I did it,' Aida said suddenly. I perked up at the words and Lars lifted his face from his hands. She displayed the box to him. 'It's logical,' she said in barely concealed excitement. 'Check it.'

Lars took it from her, as careful as if it were a newborn. He put his eye to it in the light altogether without the magnifying glass. 'I don't think I've put Blue there before,' he said. His eyes shone. 'But why is White there?' he frowned.

'Orange to the left gives me leave to put White above. But we've got to test it!'

'Come on.'

They raced off to wherever they went to check the functionality of the cube. I looked at Yul, afraid. There was fear in his eyes too. If it worked, what happened to us?

'We can kill him if it comes to that,' Yul said reassuringly.

'And then what?' There was no way to get out of the fence without his help.

'But he can't kill us. We're obviously better fighters than him. At worst we're stuck here with him trying to kill us.'

'He has a gun,' I said doubtfully.

'Our chances have always been bleak.' He put his hand in mine. 'You're the best fighter in the land. We'll live through this.'

I smiled inside myself. We were friends.

'Keep your knife handy,' Yul said.

We were battle ready when the door flew open. We jumped to our feet only to find Aida with her mouth half open. 'It worked,' she said.

We exchanged a glance and stood ready with concealed weaponry to fight when Lars came through.

His eyes were comically wide when he walked in with a stiff gait. He banged his ankle into the corner of the bed as he did nearly every time he walked in, but he didn't even notice this time.

I watched him with sharp eyes. 'What now, Lars?' I ventured to ask.

He turned his milky gaze to me as if he had only just noticed I was there. 'What?'

'What do we do now?'

'Absolutely nothing, Kun! It's done, we can get to Cerulone!'

My ears stood up. 'What?' I asked, distracted from my thoughts.

He looked at Aida, then back at us. 'I didn't tell you earlier because if it didn't work, I didn't want the secret to get out. But Kun.' He struggled to speak. 'Follow me,' he said finally and he smiled like a boy before running back into the passageway. I looked at Yul questioningly and he nodded at me. We raced after Lars into the dark corridor outside.

He stopped where the passage ended, in the larger hall black in the darkness beneath the solar panels. He led us up this way and pushed open another set of double doors I had not known existed to lead us into the antechamber.

'Wait,' Lars said.

We stood cloaked in darkness until there came a little click from Lars' general direction and brilliant white light flooded the massive space we were standing in. I stopped dead in my tracks. It was staggeringly huge. My face must have betrayed the shock and wonder I felt, because Lars laughed when he saw me. A gigantic machine. Metres and metres of steel. Iron and steel, coloured gray, unrusted, bigger than a hundred men put together, and tens of thousands of parts lying and hanging haphazardly together.

'What is it?' I whispered, in awe at the sheer size of the object in the room.

Lars gave me a triumphant smile. 'A spaceship.'