The Moon Dwellers

Cole shrugs. “You’re growing on me.” His bottom lip doesn’t pout the way it normally does.

“Lie!” I declare, raising my arm in victory before it’s even confirmed.

Cole laughs and Tawni nearly spews out the spoonful of yellow goop she has in her mouth. “You’re right, Adele, you’re not growing on me. That would be disgusting. Hair grows on me, foot fungus on occasion, too, due to the shameful hygiene of the guys’ bathrooms, but not other people, and most definitely not you.”

His eyes are twinkling even more than before. I grin. “So what’s the real reason for wanting to help me?” I ask.

“I got nothing against you, nor your magical mysterious love affair with the sun prince”—I try to interject, but Cole sees it coming and pushes a finger to my lips, silencing me—“but I just don’t trust Tridlan one bit.”

“Tristan,” I say.

“What?”

“His name is Tristan. You said Tridlan.”

“Did I?” Cole says, throwing his hands up and feigning ignorance. I realize he’s mocking me. I want to be angry, but his ma

I ignore his repeated mispronunciation of Tristan’s name and try to focus. It will be great to have friends help me—at least to get out of the Pen. But I still don’t understand their motives, which bothers me. At least not Cole’s. Tawni is probably trying to make up for the actions of her parents—to prove that she is better than them. Also, she seems to just be a nice person, willing to help a friend in need, even a new friend like me. But Cole is a mystery. It doesn’t help that he jokes around so much, which makes it even harder to get a read on him. He has no reason to help me.

“Seriously, why do you want to help?” I repeat.

His eyes darken. “Okay, look. I’m just really tired of everyone getting treated unfairly by the sun dwellers. I’ve been in juvie once before, when I was eleven. I had this teacher, Mrs. Witchikata. She was really kind, really pretty, always saying nice things to me. What can I say? I fell for her—head over freakin’ heels. So one day I told her I loved her. Mrs. W would never have reported it, but a nasty little Year Five kid overheard and told the principal, who told the authorities. Unauthorized flirting, they called it. I got six weeks in the Pen. Since then, I’ve always wanted revenge.”

Tawni giggles. I look at her, then back at Cole. “La la lie,” I say.

“Almost, smarty,” Cole says. “It was a half lie. All the stuff about Mrs. W was BS—in fact she was about ninety-five years old, two hundred pounds overweight, covered in warts, with a mean streak a mile wide. I hated her guts. But I did give you the truth about why I want to help you. The sun dwellers are creeps, period.” I give him a look and he throws up his hands submissively. “Okay, okay, maybe not all of them, maybe not even your beloved Triptan, but the majority of them.”

“Okay,” I say. I believe him. It certainly fits with what little I know about the male species. Their motives are generally simple: fun, honor, sex, food, pride, revenge, sex. Pretty basic stuff.

“Okay?” Tawni says, confirming.

“Yeah, we’ll escape together.”

“And then go rescue your family,” she says.

I haven’t thought that far ahead, but I figure I can talk them out of it when the time comes. “Uh, yeah, whatever. So how do we pull it off?” I say, leaning in.

Cole dips his head forward conspiratorially and lowers his voice, half-covering his mouth with one of his hands. “I know a guy who can get one of the guards to turn off the electric fence for a few minutes, maybe ten if we’re lucky,” he says.

I gawk at him like he’s an alien.

“What?” he says. “We were thinking about trying to escape once so I looked into it.”

I don’t have to confirm that he is telling the truth—his face is dead serious. “Okay. If we get your guy to turn off the fence at say midnight, two hours after lights out, we can sneak out of our cells and climb the fence,” I say.

“Our cells will be locked,” Tawni points out.

“There’s a trick for that,” I say. “I’ve done it before. Get a small piece of cardboard or plastic from somewhere, anywhere, and when you shut your door for the last time at night, slide the plastic between the door and the frame, blocking the deadbolt. When the door automatically locks, it will still click, but you’ll be able to open it.”

“Nice,” Cole says, nodding. I smile. I am glad to be able to bring some level of expertise to the table.

“Right,” Tawni says, “so at five minutes to midnight we leave our cells. Adele and I will be together and we’ll meet you”—she gestures to Cole—“at the fence. We’ll meet in the shadows in the northeast wing. When the electricity goes out we start climbing.”

Cole’s eyes narrow and his face crinkles up. “How do we tell the time?” he asks.

“We’ll have to base it off of the guards’ patrols,” I say. “Start counting from the ten o’clock lights out. Approximately every fifteen minutes a guard will go by—watch through the slot in your doors. Once seven patrols pass we’ll know it’s about quarter to midnight. Then we’ll just have to count in our heads for ten minutes—six hundred seconds. Then we go.” I am feeling confident—probably too confident—but it is a good feeling, one I haven’t felt in a while.

“When should we do it?” Tawni asks.

“How about tonight?” I say, feeling eager butterflies in my stomach.

“That’s pretty tight,” Cole says. “I’ll have to check with my guy to see if it’s possible on such short notice.”

“It better be,” I say. Acting in a hurry is better than taking a long time to plan our escape. That way the dirty guard won’t have time to rethink his choice to help us.

“We’ll need money to pay him,” Cole says. “You know, the guard who helps us.”

I knew it sounded too good to be true. I don’t have any money and certainly no way of getting any. But I ask anyway. “How much?”

“At least fifty Nailins I expect.”

My heart sinks. I haven’t seen that much money in my entire life. It might as well be a million. Even if we come up with a way to raise some money, we won’t be able to get that much in ten lifetimes. I close my eyes tightly and clench my teeth, trying to stifle a scream. I need a miracle.

I get one.

“I can provide the money,” Tawni says.

My eyes flash open and I look at the ski

I turn back to Tawni. “You have access to fifty Nailins?” I say in disbelief.

“More if we need it,” she says. “When I got caught trying to go interdistrict without a travel permit my parents were all over me, asking me why, why would I do such a thing? So I gave them a BS story about how I really wanted to see the Lantern Caverns of the ninth subchapter and how I never thought they’d let me go.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face, gri

“Then why do you sleep in a crappy cell next to me?”

Tawni’s face falls. “Because if I took advantage of what my parents could do for me, then I’d be just as terrible as them. I swear to God, Adele, I’m not like them—never will be.”

“Truth,” I say solemnly.

Tawni nods. “In any case, I still have access to an account they set up for me with the warden, I mean with the concierge.” I chuckle at her little joke. “There are more than two hundred Nailins in it.”