Rada got to the pods quickest. The suits inside didn’t look like the large, white, bulky spacesuits with fishbowl helmets that I thought of when I heard the word ‘spacesuit.’
These spacesuits had a helmet that looked just like the breathers we used down on Ehalla. And underneath them hung what looked like a giant, black garbage bag.
“That’s a spacesuit?” Sita sounded horrified. It crinkled when she grabbed it. She tugged at a corner, and like super thin silly putty, the material kept on stretching in her fingers.
“That has to be a…” I started to say: mistake, but then I wondered what kind of suit a dryad would wear? Or any other alien. Whatever ‘suit’ the All Tree provided, it would have to be able to fit all kinds of aliens. “Wait, try it anyway.”
Sita cocked her head at me, twisting in the middle of the air to do it. “It’s going to be all alien and weird, but work, isn’t it?”
In reply I stepped into the giant garbage bag and pulled it up my body. The material began to shift and stretch, clinging to my body and shape.
I held my hand up as the black stuff crawled and reshaped itself around my hands, clinging tight. “I feel like Eddie Brock,” I said.
Both Rada and Sita stared at me. “Who?” Rada asked.
“Venom,” I explained. But they were still not getting it. “From Spider-Man. You know, the alien symbiote that turned into Spider-Man’s suit, but then it attached itself to Eddie Brock. It was black and climbed all over them just like this.”
The black stuff had stopped around my neck. I would bet anything that once I put the insect-looking breather over my head, the black stuff coating my clothes would seal with it.
This was a spacesuit. One that could fit anyone… or anything.
Very, very cool. I wiggled my fingers and moved my arms around. When Yggdrasil has let us use the spacesuits in the pool at NASA when we were training to get ready to come to the All Tree, the spacesuits had been large, clunky, and cumbersome. This suit barely weighed a thing and stayed out of the way.
“Sita, can I borrow a hair band?” I asked, holding out a hand.
She frowned, but I pointed at my locks, hanging every which way in the air around me. She pulled a spare one free from her ponytail, and I used it to pull my hair back. Hah. I didn’t need to cut them to get in space. Yggdrasil had been wrong yet again.
I pulled on the collar around my neck, and the suit began to stretch and pull away from me, enough that I could reach down into my pocket and pull out the black box of the backup.
“Here.” I gave it to Sita.
“Why are you giving it to me?” she asked.
“I have to go help Jessica,” I said. She’d risked everything to lock herself into that room to give us a message. I couldn’t just run off. “You get that thing to Mimir. And there’s something else…”
I didn’t get to finish. I was going to tell them what Kyros had told me about the true nature of the All Tree, but a new voice filled the inside of the elevator.
“Hello Kadie, this is Alan,” it said. And we all froze.
His voice filled the room, smooth and deep and larger than life, lapping like water off the rounded curves and edges of the alien interior styling all around us.
“Kadie, what happened down there: it wasn’t your fault, I know it. I’m not mad at you. Maddy chose to come at you aggressively and she didn’t listen to your warning. That was her mistake. And we’ve made a lot of mistakes, Kadie. We really messed this whole thing up in a big way.”
I looked over at Sita and Rada. Alan sounded so genuine.
“Kadie, I’m sorry.” Sadness dripped from his careful words. “And I’m really sorry we rushed this virus. Look, we didn’t know it would put everyone in danger. We didn’t mean anyone any harm. We still don’t. We want to resolve this without hurting anyone aboard the All Tree. We’re working with our scientists back on Earth in real time to try and fix it. But the All Tree will not talk to us now. We need your help.”
I shook my head, wobbling in the air where I hung between Sita and Rada. “No. You put us in this danger.”
“I know,” Alan replied. “But we’re all in danger together now. Very real danger, more than you might realize. We’ve started this process, and it’s too late to turn back. Plus, we’ve found some things out. The virus we released is starting to let us look deep into the All Tree, and even gain some command of pieces of it. And the All Tree is too powerful a tool to give up. Kadie, our scientists are saying the All Tree has some very powerful weapons aboard. Powerful enough to destroy planets. Maybe even suns. And the All Tree knows where Earth is. It looks like it may have even used them in the past. Do you understand what that might mean?”
I felt the guilt of not saying anything earlier hanging onto my face like a mask as I looked over at Sita and Rada, and I replied. “Yes, I know what it means. It has used those weapons in the past, and that’s why those fool things you did might kill us all. You keep attacking the All Tree, you have a good chance it will come for us all yet, including Earth. Because it wasn’t doing that anymore until all this. Stop what you doing and back off. Let Mimir help the All Tree get itself back right.”
Both Sita and Rada looked horrified. “Earth? What do you mean it doesn’t do that anymore?” they both asked at the same time.
Alan talked over them, though. “We can’t take that risk, Kadie. It’s Earth we’re talking about. Our families. Our home. Your parents. You help us, we can make sure we save them all.”
I hated him for saying all that. Just for a second. “You keep using the worst methods. Control. Attack. You never listen.” And he lied. So much. Even if he was telling truth, it was all twisted up in lies. He was dangerous, and he was manipulative, and I had to assume the worst.
“We have to get out of here now,” I whispered. “I’ll bet they’re coming to capture us even as he’s speaking. I’ll explain everything, I promise you.”
“You better,” Sita hissed at me.
Rada grabbed my shoulder. “When will you explain all this?” she asked me.
I looked at her and flinched. Her lips were pressed tight and angry together. She was scared, I realized. Just as scared as any of us. And angry at me.
“After I save Jessica,” I told her.
We pulled the black material up around our necks and we pulled the breathers on. Just as I predicted, the black stuff sealed up with the bottom of the breather with a sucking sound. Rada pushed herself through the air and grabbed at what looked like a giant, purple doorknob next to the pod.
She tried to twist it, but nothing happened. She then finally pulled at it.
A crack appeared in the wall in the shape of an arc, as if someone were drawing right there onto the wall. Then the line kept moving on either side of the arc, dropping down toward the ground, until a large circle had appeared in the wall.
Then the circle cracked away from the wall, opening inward as it became a door which moved aside to reveal a large room. We were getting better at the lack of gravity, but we still fumbled our way through the air, pushing gently off anything we could grab, to get inside.
Inside, pushing the doorknob on the other side of the door made it shut.
We all three faced the outer wall, and Sita pulled the purple knob out.
The round airlock door appeared and opened up to space, air blowing out past us like a sudden gust of wind.
“Wow,” Sita said.
We hung inside the room, looking outside at the long spine of the All Tree, stretching out for miles below us. Again, I was reminded of what it was like to stand at the top of a skyscraper, looking down onto an entire city.
Clades stuck out like massive, triangular buildings before us, though we could see some that didn’t stand up at the same angle as ours. These jutted off in to the sides.
And in the canyons between the clades, the skin of the All Tree’s spine was filled with shapes that made no sense to me.
Before I could spend anymore time staring, Rada grabbed me.
“Rada! What are you doing?” I shouted inside the helmet as I struggled to twist away from her.
She threw me out of the door, out into the black abyss, miles over the spine of the All Tree.