Free Saving Thanehaven by Catherine Jinks Page B

like a window than a door, with eight sides to it. But since it’s hard and smooth and flat—unlike the fibrous, fleshy wall in which it’s embedded—Noble manages to identify it as a door.
    “Is that the way to Thanehaven?” he demands.
    “Kind of.”
    “And the man in the white coat just went through there? In his van?”
    “Sure did,” Rufus confirms.
    “But if that’s the way to Thanehaven, why did you tell me he was heading for the next game?”
    Rufus sighs. “Look,” he says, “I know what I’m doing, okay? So you can sit here and wait, or you can come with me to the bridge. It’s your choice. I’ll go by myself, if you want.”
    “No.” Shaking his head, Noble swings one leg over the side of the bin. “I’ll go. Where’s the river?”
    “The river?” echoes Rufus. “What river?”
    “If there’s a bridge, there must be a river.” Noble jumps down to the floor, which bounces under his feet. “Or maybe a ravine …”
    “Oh,” says Rufus. He smiles crookedly. “Um … actually, it’s not that kind of bridge. It’s more like a room.”
    Noble grunts. This doesn’t make much sense tohim. Why call it a bridge if it’s a room? “So you’ve already been there?” he asks.
    “Nope.”
    “Then how will you find it?”
    “Let’s just say I’m good at following my nose.”
    Rufus trudges away with his hands in his pockets, past an array of rubbery white garments dangling from hooks made of gristle, until he reaches what looks like a huge slab of muscle embedded in yellow fat. Only when this muscle parts at the center, flinching open like a valve, does Noble realize that it’s actually a
hatch
of some kind. On the other side of the hatch is a tunnel that vaguely resembles an enormous throat, with its rounded ceiling and moist, ribbed floor. Unlike most gullets, however, it’s very well lit. And it seems to go on forever, in both directions.
    “Cool,” says Rufus, sticking his head through the hatch. “This
has
to be a main road.”
    “It’s not a road. It’s a passage,” Noble points out beside him.
    “Yeah, but only because we’re on a spaceship. If we were in a town, this would be a main road.”
    “What’s a spaceship?” asks Noble, eyeing the pink jellyfish floating overhead.
    Rufus replies in an absentminded tone, glancing from left to right. “It’s like an ordinary ship, except that it flies through outer space,” he says.
    “What’s outer space?”
    Rufus grins. “Nothing
you
need to worry about,”he promises, before climbing through the hatch and slouching off down the tunnel. After a moment’s hesitation, Noble follows him. Together they pick their way along a raised path, some of it slick and smooth, some of it textured. At regular intervals, the wall to their left disappears as a narrower passage intersects with their tunnel. Each of these passages leads to another long tunnel in the distance, and each has more valvelike doors leading off it.
    The air is full of drifting shapes, some pink, some blue.
    “Don’t worry about those,” Rufus remarks. “They won’t hurt you.”
    “What about
that
?” Noble stops abruptly, having caught sight of a much larger thing in one of the passages. It looks a bit like a giant gray shellfish, with suckers and beating tentacles. “Is
that
dangerous?”
    “Not to you. Or to me.” Rufus keeps on walking. “It’s not programmed to attack us because we don’t belong here.”
    Noble hastens to catch up, placing his bare feet carefully on the slick, spongy floor. “But do they
usually
attack people?” he inquires.
    “Of course!” Rufus speaks with a certain amount of relish. “Most of the moving parts on board used to be run by the ship’s computer. But when the ship became a living organism, they turned into its immune system. Now they’re roaming around in search of foreign objects to kill.”
    Noble glances over his shoulder a little nervously. “
We’re
foreign objects,” he reminds Rufus.
    “Yeah.