8 DEAD ENDS

8 DEAD ENDS Lunar day 217 T minus 55 minutes to Capsule Drop Instead of going back to school, I went to look for my parents. If Zan was right, every minute counted for Nina. I found them with Chang in the control room, examining an image of the blueprints for MBA on the SlimScreen. Daphne Merritt was there too, though she appeared to have something on her mind other than Nina. "I don't know what could have happened to them," she was saying. She sounded unusually stressed out. "I've never had anything like this occur before."

"What's wrong?" I asked. Most adults probably would have told me it was none of my business, but Daphne did her best to flash a smile and said, "My robotics logs from the last week have vanished." Mom looked at me and said, "Aren't you supposed to be in math right now?" "Dr. Levinson gave me permission to leave," I said. "For what?" Mom asked. I hesitated a moment before answering. I couldn't tell my parents the truth about why I was there—the alien that only I could see had sensed that Nina was running out of time to live—and I'd been in such a hurry, I hadn't concocted a suitable lie yet. So I went with bending the truth. "I was worried about Nina. I think she's in serious trouble." For a moment, it looked as though Mom was going to say I still ought to be in school, but then she softened. "You're probably right." "We're doing everything we can to find her," Dad said. He sounded frustrated with himself, and Chang looked frustrated too. Everyone in the room was extremely intelligent. They weren't used to not understanding things.

"Have you found anything out?" I asked. "Did you get the text off her watch?" "I don't know that we should be discussing this with you right now," Chang said. "What could it hurt?" Dad asked. "Dash was the one who figured out who killed Dr. Holtz." "Or that he'd even been killed at all," Daphne added. "And he's the one who told us about the text Nina got in the first place," Mom pressed. "We might as well have another mind on this..." "All right, I give!" Chang raised his hands in surrender, then turned to me. "The text wasn't quite as helpful as we'd hoped. It was only someone sending her some music." "Music?" I repeated. Chang tapped on the computer keypad and brought a list of text messages up on the SlimScreen. "NASA gave me authorization to hack into Nina's personal account. According to your parents, you came back from her room at eleven forty-five last night. This was delivered to her at eleven forty-one." He highlighted a text from someone named Charlie. All it said was, "Heard these and thought of you."

There were two songs attached. One was "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room" by Coronal Mass Ejection, which was Violet's favorite band. The other was "Gimme Shelter" by an old group called the Rolling Stones. I knew about them because they'd been one of my great-grandfather's favorites. "Are you sure this is right?" I asked. "It's the only message she received during the time you were with her," Chang replied. "Maybe she got another and erased it," I suggested. "It wouldn't matter," Chang said. "Every communication to and from this base is logged by NASA. Even if Nina erased the message, there'd still be a record of it having come in. But there isn't. This is all she received within a twenty-minute window." "That doesn't make sense," I said. "If you'd seen her then... well, she didn't look like she'd only received some music..." "We know something's important about this," Dad told me. "Nina received other texts after this one came in, some of which were very important base business—but she didn't open any of them." He pointed to the list of messages on the SlimScreen. After the one from Charlie, they were

all marked as unread. The first had come in at 11:47. "That's not like Nina. It's as though she disappeared right after Charlie's music showed up." "And then," Chang added, "this "Charlie" isn't a real person. It's an alias someone set up." "Have you figured out who?" I asked. "No," Chang sighed. "Charlie did a darn good job of protecting himself through encryption. We've tipped NASA off, though, and they have people working on it." I said, "So, was whoever did this some kind of computer genius?" "Probably not," Chang replied. "It's not all that hard to create a decent alias. I could do it when I was six." "But you are a genius," I pointed out. Chang laughed. "I'm not any smarter than anyone else on this base," he said. "Including you." I was quite sure he was only being humble. Chang's IQ scores were rumored to be higher than Albert Einstein's. In addition to knowing everything about physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, he could also fix anything that broke at MBA and was a world-class pianist. "Was Charlie's message really about music?" I

asked. "Or do you think it was really about something else?" "Well, this Charlie actually sent the songs," Mom said. "We listened to them. They weren't encrypted files or anything." "And no additional files were piggybacked on them," Dad added. "So we figure the music meant something to Nina somehow. A message of some sort. Only we have no idea what it could be." Mom asked me, "Can you be more specific about Nina's reaction to this text? How was she distracted exactly? Was she scared?" I thought back to my encounter with Nina the night before. "I don't think so. It was more like she realized she had to do something." "Was she excited?" Daphne asked. "No." It was hard to even imagine Nina expressing excitement. Or think of anything she would even be excited about. "She just wanted to get rid of me." The adults all looked from one to another, like this might have meant something. "Have you checked the video feeds from last night?" I asked. There were thousands of cameras around MBA, inside and out. Even in the