Free Dangerous by Shannon Hale Page A

was, just shutting
    his own.
    He glanced at me. He took a double take. “You changed.”
    I touched my face. “Is the alien worm rewriting my DNA?”
    “No, I mean . . .” he gestured to my clothing.
    I couldn’t read his expression. “So are you still going to be
    zombie-weird or are you normal-weird again?”
    He frowned. “Sorry. Kinda. I don’t know. Can we just start
    over?” He stuck out his left hand. “Hi, I’m Jonathan Ingalls
    Wilder. And you are?”
    “Being eaten from the inside out by a rabid hamster.”
    He didn’t respond.
    “Maisie Brown,” I said and shook his hand. And that was it.
    He’d chosen to erase everything that had happened between us.
    “Nice to meet you,” he said, businesslike.
    I didn’t answer—the words on my tongue were borrowed
    from Jacques’s lexicon.
    I followed Wilder to the lab, where the whitecoats were
    pleased to subject us to more tests. In between my duties as a
    lab rat, I started to take apart an electron microscope. No one
    stopped me.
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    Dangerous
    A crash startled me to my feet. Ruth stood beside the metal
    ruins of an examination table, her face redder than her hair.
    “I didn’t mean to.” She stared at her hands. “This morning I
    tore off the faucet in my sink. I feel so weird, as if . . .” Her gaze
    wandered to the food table in the adjoining conference room.
    “Ooh, ham!”
    Jacques and Mi-sun had arrived too. Jacques wasn’t wear-
    ing his black geek glasses, and his face seemed smaller, younger.
    Mi-sun was shaking away.
    “Have the rest of you noticed increased strength?” Wilder
    asked.
    Mi-sun and I shook our heads.
    “No, but . . .” Jacques scooted in closer and whispered. “I
    clogged the shower drain.”
    “Gross!” Ruth said.
    “It wasn’t me! I mean . . .” Jacques held out his hand, palm
    down. “Watch.”
    The back of his hand seemed a little shinier than before,
    and then his knuckles smoothed over as if being airbrushed.
    Something the color of his skin was growing over his hand. He
    removed a perfect mold and handed it to Wilder.
    “Jacques is molting,” Mi-sun said.
    “It’s not skin,” said Wilder.
    There was another crash. Ruth stood over a broken confer-
    ence table, a sandwich in each hand.
    “Oops,” Ruth mumbled, her mouth full.
    “Ruth, are your clothes pinching on you?” Wilder asked.
    “What? No! I’m not gaining weight. I’m just . . . really hungry.”
    But one of the doctors put Ruth on a scale and reported
    she’d gained thirty pounds since before our space trip.
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    Shannon Hale
    “She looks the same to me,” I said.
    “And thirty pounds can’t explain all that strength . . .” Wild-
    er glanced at me as if I’d know why.
    “Maybe she’s denser,” I said.
    “Maybe you’re denser,” said Ruth.
    So I shut up. But I was thinking about how everything is
    mostly empty space. If you compacted all the atoms in the plan-
    et, Earth would be the size of a golf ball and yet still weigh the
    same and have the same gravitational pull. What if the atoms of
    Ruth’s skin, muscles, and bones were compacting, even a little?
    With less space between the protons and electrons, her atoms
    would weigh the same but be so much denser. The repulsion
    between the protons and electrons would have to be masked
    somehow, and scientifically, that was impossible , but that word
    was rapidly losing meaning to me.
    My headache was easier to bear when I was busy, so I
    kept fiddling with the electron microscope while Wilder talked
    with Mi-sun. She was gripping her hands together, but when he
    pulled them apart and touched her hand to his, he said he felt
    a prickling.
    It was too hard to follow the conversation from under my
    cloud of pain. I put the microscope back together. Sometime
    later I heard a scream.
    There was a small hole in the conference room wall, and
    on the other side Ruth was laid flat. She jumped back up, pluck-
    ing a metal tack out of her shirt.
    “Are you guys mental?” she said,