Asking for trouble, p.1
Asking for Trouble, page 1
Also by Sarah Prineas
Trouble in the Stars
The Magic Thief
The Magic Thief: Lost
The Magic Thief: Found
The Magic Thief: Home
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Viking,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Sarah Prineas
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Ebook ISBN 9780593204337
Edited by Kelsey Murphy
Cover art © 2022 by Pétur Antonsson
Cover design by Tony Sahara
Design by Monique Sterling, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Sarah Prineas
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
About the Author
To my BFFs
Jenn Reese, Deb Coates, and Greg van Eekhout
You know what a black hole is, right? It’s what happens when a star dies.
Yep, as a star is dying, it collapses in on itself until all its atoms are squished into this teeny space, and then its intense gravity warps the fabric of space-time and starts sucking in everything around it. I mean everything. Planets, other stars, even light particles. It all gets gobbled up. Nothing escapes from a black hole. It’s a huge, hungry beast.
There are dead stars—black holes—wandering around all over our galaxy.
And at the very center of our galaxy lurks the biggest one—a super-massive black hole.
Don’t worry. The black hole at our galactic center is not going to gobble up our entire galaxy. It’s big, but our galaxy is way bigger. It’s more like . . . a donut.
Just in case you don’t know what a donut is, it’s a human food that is like a round cake with a hole in the middle. It might be the best food in the entire universe, especially sprinkled with powdered sugar. Mmmm.
Our galaxy is like a 587,900,000,000,000,000-mile-wide donut, except the hole in the middle is a black hole, and compared to the size of the donut, it’s tiny.
Sweeping out from the edges of the black hole is the rest of the galaxy, crowded with 400 billion stars and even more planets and comets and asteroids and other black holes, and clouds of dust and gas. There’s trade and space stations, and shopping moons, and spaceships, and light and color and lots of different kinds of people, and the StarLeague keeping it all in order.
But if you keep going, away from the black-hole galactic center, away from the swirls of stars and planets, you get to the edge of the galaxy. The Deep Dark. This far out, the stars are faint pinpoints and you can almost go off the edge, out into nothing but nothingness, forever.
1
“We,” Captain Astra announces, “have just encountered something interesting.”
I know my captain. When she says interesting, it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
We’re in the mess-room of the spaceship Hindsight. The mess-room is the bright, colorful place where the crew gets together to eat, and also to socialize, and for important meetings, which is what this is.
At the head of the long table is the captain, who’s leaning back in her chair with both hands behind her head. She has light brown skin, curly white-gray hair, and brown eyes with wrinkles at the corners. Right now her wrinkles are crinkled because she’s smiling widely at the rest of us. “Very interesting,” she repeats.
Next to her is Electra Zox, my best friend. As usual, she is tense, her hands clenched, her green skin a little pale, and her tintacles are dark gray. Tintacles are kind of like hair, but more tentacly, and they change color depending on how she’s feeling. Dark gray means that she’s suspicious.
Then comes Telly, our vegetarian cargo master, who is grinning around his tusks. “What’re you planning?” he asks Captain Astra.
“Oh, you’re going to love it,” she answers. Then she nods at one of the Shkkka, who is standing in the doorway. The Shkkka are three insectoids who are one person, and they are our ship’s engineer. “Is the ship ready to go?” the captain asks her. “Because we need to move.”
The Shkkka twitches her antennae, which means yes.
There’s one person missing from the crew, and that’s Amby, the tall blue humanoid who was our navigator. They returned to their home planet to be with their other family.
Instead of Amby, we have a new navigator. He’s a humanoid. He says that his name is impossible for us to pronounce; we call him Fred.
Then comes me. One of two shapeshifters in the entire galaxy. I’m curled in Amby’s old nest chair in my human boy shape: pale skin, brown hair, brown eyes. Protein bar wrappers are scattered around me. I am listening to the captain while keeping an eye on the thing sitting on a plate in the middle of the table.
It looks like a delicious donut sprinkled with powdered sugar.
The donut isn’t doing anything. It’s just sitting there.
At the head of the table, the captain gives a nod toward Reetha, the big green-scaled lizardian who is in charge of our communications and security. “You want to tell them about the interesting thing?” the captain asks. “Or should I?”
Reetha, who doesn’t talk much, and also doesn’t blink—lizardians don’t have eyelids to blink with—just stares back at the captain with her golden, slit-pupilled eyes.
The captain leans forward. “I’ll tell them.” She rubs her hands together and makes a low laughing sound that is almost a cackle. Heh-heh-heh. “Reetha picked up a signal from the edge of the galaxy.”
“Deep. Dark,” Reetha corrects.
Captain Astra shrugs. “The edge of the Deep Dark, but not actually outside our galaxy.” She looks around at all of us. “Reetha detected a strange blip on the sensors. We think it might be a certain lost ship . . .”
Everybody looks blankly back at her.
“A ship packed with supplies,” she hints. “Lost, drifting around the galaxy, big news about twelve years ago . . .”
“No.” Telly’s eyes widen. “Not the Skeleton?”
“Hah!” the captain says, and bangs the table with her hand. “Yes. The Skeleton.”
I must look blanker than everybody else, because the captain grins at me. “Never heard of the Skeleton, Trouble?”
“Nope,” I tell her, and take a bite of protein bar.
“Twelve years ago,” she explains, “the Skeleton was a cargo ship stuffed with valuable supplies on its way from a station near the galactic center to a newly settled planet on the Outer Rim. And then—” She makes a wavy motion with her hands; I think it’s supposed to be spooky. “And then, it disappeared, like a ghost, never to
“Until now,” I say.
“Until now,” she confirms.
“If it’s been twelve years,” I ask, “wouldn’t the Skeleton’s cargo be rotten or falling apart?”
Telly’s the cargo expert. “It’d be in stasis,” he tells me. “Perfectly preserved.” His furry ears twitch, making the bells on his earrings tinkle.
“Metals and wood,” the captain says. “Farming machinery, precious seeds, medical supplies. Treasure!” She gives another cackle, and I remember that she is, at heart, sort of a pirate. “All ours!” She points at our new navigator. “Fred,” she orders, “set a new course—for the edge of the Deep Dark. We’re going to find the Skeleton!”
See? When my captain says interesting, what she really means is dangerous.
2
On his way out of the mess-room, our new navigator, Fred, pauses to examine the thing on the plate in the middle of the table that looks like a donut.
Fred is a humanoid, but instead of eyes in his head he has eyestalks that can see in every direction. This means he’s impossible to sneak up on, and also when he looks at something, he really looks at it. His skin is shiny and wet and a muddy gray color. Below his eyestalks he has regular gray hair and ears and a nose, and then a narrow mouth full of tiny, sharp teeth. When he talks, he sounds like he’s biting off every word and spitting it out. He has supplemented his short humanoid arms with a set of two more robot arms that he wears on a belt around his waist.
With one eyestalk Fred is examining the donut; the other eyestalk is looking suspiciously at me.
The rest of the crew is heading out of the mess-room, talking excitedly about the Skeleton and what it’ll mean for all of us if we can find it. Except for Electra, who seems angry about something and is glaring at the captain.
I climb out of the nest chair and start to collect the protein bar wrappers.
While I’m distracted, Fred reaches out with one of his regular arms, picks up the donut, and sniffs at it.
“I wouldn’t try to eat that if I were you,” I tell him.
Here is another thing about Fred: when he eats, he can unhinge his jaw so that his mouth becomes huge enough to swallow things whole.
Sometimes I get so hungry that I wish my human shape could do that.
Fred ignores my warning. He sniffs the thing again. Then his mouth gapes open, bristling with sharp teeth.
“Stop!” I shout.
But he shoves the donut in. His mouth snaps shut.
“No!” I gasp. “Don’t swallow it!”
The captain and Electra are in the mess-room doorway; they whirl to see what’s going on.
Which is when the baby shapeshifter who’s been pretending to be a donut decides it doesn’t want to be eaten by Fred, and it shifts into something metallic and covered with needle-sharp spines that make Fred spit it out with a loud bleck!
By the time the baby shapeshifter lands on the floor, it’s shifted again, this time into its blob of goo form. It slinks under the table and pretends to be invisible.
Fred’s giant mouth is hanging open, revealing rows and rows of teeth. Carefully, he closes it and glowers at me with both eyestalks. One of his robot arms reaches out, and a metallic finger pokes me in the chest. “I blame you for this,” he snaps. His other metallic arm points at the baby shapeshifter. “That creature is a menace!” Then he turns and stomps out of the mess-room. When he passes the captain and Electra, he repeats, “A menace!”
He’s not entirely wrong.
I crouch down to check on the baby shapeshifter under the table. In its blob of goo form it’s about the size of . . . well, of a donut. Its goo is clear and bubbly, and it looks completely innocent.
But it’s not.
Why did it take the shape of a donut?
I’ll tell you why. I am the ship’s galley boy, which means I’m the one who makes all of the food. A few days ago I made something new. Donuts—human dessert food that are like cakes with a hole in the middle. The crew loved them and demanded that I make them again soon.
By pretending to be a donut, the baby shapeshifter was being very tricky. It wanted somebody to pick it up and try to eat it and then get a big, sharp surprise.
“That wasn’t very nice,” I tell it.
In response, the blob of goo quivers.
“I know,” I say. “You’re sorry.” At least, I hope it is sorry.
Captain Astra’s boots appear next to me. I look up, and she’s looking down at me with her hands on her hips. “Trouble, Trouble?” she asks.
“Donut,” I say, pointing to the baby shapeshifter. Its goo contracts, and then it shifts into the shape of a protein bar. Does it think I’m dumb enough to try to eat it?
The captain crouches so she can peer under the table. “Donut? Is that what you’re calling it?”
“Yep,” I say. “I want to take good care of it, and be a good big sibling. But it’s harder than I thought it would be.”
“Ah.” She nods wisely as we get to our feet. “Families. Always complicated.” She fixes me with a keen look. “We need Fred. He’s one of the best navigators in the galaxy.”
Electra is leaning against the wall by the door. “We know,” she puts in. “He’s told us that about fourteen times.” She sighs. “I wish Amby hadn’t left.”
“Thinking about Amby makes me hungry,” I say.
“What?” Electra says, staring at me.
I pat my stomach. “In here. A sort of hollow feeling. Hungry.”
“No, Trouble,” Captain Astra corrects. “There’s a place where Amby used to be, and now they’re gone. You miss them. That’s the feeling. It’s not the same as being hungry.”
“Then I miss Amby,” I say sadly.
“Me too,” says Electra.
“Families,” the captain reminds us. She’s right. Amby’s family is big and complicated, and I guess they must need Amby more than we do.
That means we’re stuck with Fred, and I can’t let the baby shapeshifter play any more mean tricks on him.
Suddenly the door slides open and Reetha, who is never in a hurry, hurries back into the mess-room. “Captain,” she says.
“Yes?” Captain Astra replies, turning.
“Trouble,” Reetha says.
“Yes?” I reply.
“No,” Reetha says firmly. “Trouble.”
Oops. She doesn’t mean me; she means something has happened and trouble is what we’re in.
3
The captain races down the main corridor of the Hindsight to the bridge—the ship’s control center—with me and Electra right behind her.
You’d think a ship’s bridge would be all shiny devices and flashing lights and self-destruct buttons, but the bridge of the Hindsight is sort of cramped and messy. In its center is the captain’s command chair, which is lumpy and has stuffing leaking out of it. As we arrive, Reetha pushes past us and sits at the communication station. At the navigation station is Fred, who twists an eyestalk to glance at us and then goes back to work. The giant screen at the front of the bridge shows stars streaming past as we zoom along through space.
“What’s the problem?” the captain asks, flinging herself into her command chair. “What are we dealing with here?”
Reetha pushes some buttons, and the screen goes dark and then shows us a sleek, shiny ship bristling with weaponry. It looks fast and deadly.
“StarLeague,” the captain curses.
Electra and I go to stand beside her chair. “I know that ship,” Electra says, and she’s gone a little pale. “It’s the Arrow.”
“Yeah, I know what it is,” the captain says. “Long-range attack ship, heavily armed. It could squish us like a . . . a small, squishy thing.”
“It’s more of an exploration ship,” Electra corrects. “It’s famous. It discovered the Pip wormholes and led the colonization of the Maud planetary system way on the edge of the galaxy.”
“Whatever,” the captain says. “The StarLeague isn’t exploring or colonizing anymore, Electra. It’s all military all the time. The Arrow carries a lot of weapons, and if it’s interested in us, we have a problem. Reetha,” she snaps. “How close are they?”
“Getting. Closer,” Reetha replies.
