4 MALICIOUS BLUEBERRIES

4 MALICIOUS BLUEBERRIES Lunar day 217 Breakfast time "Blecch," Violet said, spitting a hunk of chewed food onto her plate. "I hate waffles." "What are you talking about?" I asked her. "You liked waffles yesterday." My whole family was in the mess hall for breakfast. Mom, Dad, and I were dressed in our usual moon base clothing: shorts and T-shirts. Violet was still wearing her pink unicorn pajamas. "No," Violet insisted sternly. "I never liked waffles." "You sang a whole song about how much you liked them," I pointed out.

"I like bacon," Violet replied. As if that was an argument. In truth, I couldn't blame her for hating the waffles. Nobody liked the waffles at Moon Base Alpha. Or most of the other food, for that matter. Everything we ate at MBA had once been actual edible things, but then they'd all been precooked, irradiated, thermostabilized, dehydrated, and compacted into little cubes of disgustingness. And if that weren't bad enough, we had to rehydrate it all with water reclaimed from our own urine. For this reason, most Moonies didn't spend much time in the mess hall. They wolfed their food down as fast as possible, the idea being that the less time it was in your mouth, the less time you had to taste it. Violet hadn't quite grasped this concept, though. Or the fact that there were certain foods that would never show up at MBA, no matter how much she wanted them. "There is no bacon," Dad told her. "They don't have it on the moon." "But I waaaant it," Violet pleaded. "How about blueberry muffins instead?" Mom asked. "Okay!" Violet instantly returned to her usual

perky self, having forgotten all about bacon, and began to sing a song about how much she liked blueberry muffins. Violet was normally so cheerful, it was like living with an animated cartoon character, right down to breaking into song at random moments. "Good," Mom said. "Let's go get some." The two of them headed across the mess to dump Violet's waffles and get some muffins, which weren't really muffins at all, but more like muffin-flavored substance cubes. At the other tables in the mess were the Brahmaputra-Marquez family—except for Roddy— the Goldstein-Iwanyi family, and Kira Howard, the only girl at MBA my age, who was eating with her father. As usual, Kira's father, Maxwell, wasn't paying much attention to her. He was staring at his fork, lost in thought. As one of the main engineers for Moon Base Beta, he was constantly coming up with things to improve; at the moment, he was probably thinking of a better eating utensil. Kira's mother had passed away several years earlier; with her father's mind constantly somewhere else, it was sometimes like she didn't have any parents at all. Kira was tapping at a SlimScreen tablet while she

ate, probably coding. Kira was talented with computers, and she filled the long gaps of free time at MBA with hers. She'd developed several programs to improve life at MBA. Some were beneficial to everyone—like an oxygen-monitoring system for the air locks—although most were just for fun. My favorite allowed us to simulate a transmission failure during our school classes, which we could use to cut off our teachers back on earth if they ever tried to spring a pop quiz on us. The Sjobergs, the only other family on the moon, were nowhere to be seen. The other Moonies didn't have kids and were probably eating at their workstations. This was usually the case, which was why no one had noticed that Nina was missing yet. Everyone probably figured she was somewhere else at MBA, taking care of something important. Kira looked up from her tablet and waved to me. "You can go sit with her if you want," Dad told me. "I won't be offended." "I'm fine here," I said. "I'll spend the whole day with her in school." Dad poured Tabasco sauce onto his reconstituted eggs. Like many Moonies, Dad put Tabasco sauce on almost everything. Even stuff it shouldn't have

been on. Like pancakes. It was one of the only ways to give the rehydrated food flavor. "I really like Kira," Dad told me. "I'm glad she's up here with us." I shrugged. "Yeah. Me too, I guess." "You guess?" Dad repeated. "You've seemed a whole lot happier since she got here, now that you have someone else to hang out with besides Roddy." Dad was right. Kira was a lot more fun than Roddy, and I did really like her as a friend. But her presence at MBA was also a little awkward for me. All us Moonies have lots of fans back on earth—they usually call themselves "Moonatics"—and shortly after Kira arrived, it seemed as though every one of them had decided that we ought to be a couple. This wasn't because any of those Moonatics really knew us; it was because we were a boy and a girl, we were the same age, and there weren't any other options. It was a Noah's ark kind of thing. There were thousands of gossip sites that claimed we were going to become a couple any day—while thousands of others claimed we were already dating. (I think I was chosen over Roddy because he was an oddball and the public didn't like him as much as me.) While I liked Kira as a friend, the idea of dating her seemed kind of weird; we were only twelve, after all.

And yet, sometimes, it seemed that even our fellow Moonies—including my parents—felt we should be going out. "I wonder where Roddy is," I said, trying to change the subject. "Bet you a million dollars he's playing virtual- reality games," Dad replied. "If you want to find out what he saw last night, you're going to have to jack in." "Great," I grumbled, then forced down a forkful of space eggs and flushed my mouth with a swig of orange-flavored water. Beyond Dad, I could see into the greenhouse, which was a large atrium in the center of MBA across from the mess hall. The biggest window in all of the base was in the roof, allowing sunlight to spill down through it, illuminating the plants inside. Dr. Shari Goldstein, the lunar-agriculture specialist, was already at work. Despite her name, Dr. Goldstein was actually mostly of Chinese descent; everyone in her family had been Asian except her paternal great- grandfather. Normally, she was one of the more cheerful people at MBA, though she sometimes got too invested in her plants, as though they were pets. That morning, she seemed extremely distraught