Gob's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

The saucers came fast. Hoola grabbed Gob and ran for the stairs. But a white beam struck the roof between them and the door. The floor buckled. Hoola stumbled. Her arm swung wide, and Gob slipped free. He rolled off the roof's edge into open air. The fall never came. Gob hung in a cold black nothing. No wind. No roof. No stars. He opened his mouth. His light spilled out and touched nothing at all. Then two shapes drifted into the cone. PomPom floated beside him, pompoms limp, her tall blue hair strange without gravity. She was the cheer captain who had counted every stair, who never wasted a word. Now she said nothing. She stared past Gob, jaw tight. Hoola turned slow circles, arms reaching for a wall that was not there. "Where's the roof," she said. "Where'd the roof go. Gob, where are we?" Gob had no answer. The beam had thrown them somewhere the light could not measure. A voice cracked across the void, huge and furious. "WHY DID YOU TAKE OUR CHILD?!" Gob knew that voice. Potbelly. Both heads roared it together. Two green shapes swam into his light, teeth snapping, jaws wide with rage. Beside them glowed a soft gold figure, one hand raised. Fluroess. His parents. Here. Somehow, the void had pulled them in too. "Potbelly!" Gob cried. "It's me!" The two heads froze. Both stared at the small letter e in the dark. Potbelly's jaws hung open. "Gob," said one head. "You," said the other. The rage drained out of both at once. Potbelly had thought a captor floated there. Not a son. Fluroess drifted close and cupped Gob in both glowing hands. Warm. Real. "We felt the beam," Fluroess said, voice low and even. "It took the whole rise. It took us with it." Gob understood then. The saucer's beam had not killed them. It had swallowed them, all of them, into this dark. His signal had led his parents straight into the trap. "Then we're together," Gob said. "We made it." "No," PomPom said flatly. She pointed. Far off in the black, a pale rim began to spin. Then another. The saucers were in here too, and they had lights of their own. Potbelly pushed both heads in front of Gob. "Stay behind us," one head said. Fluroess raised a hand, and gold light flared out to meet Gob's cone. Two lights. Bright enough to be seen. Bright enough to be hunted. "We can't hide in the dark," Gob said. "We're the only light in it." Hoola stopped spinning. She grabbed Gob's cone with her eyes and grinned, fierce. "Then we stop hiding," she said. "We're the brightest thing here. So we lead them. Right into each other." Gob had found his parents at last. They were reunited, floating, hunted, trapped in a void with the whole fleet closing in. The reunion had a price, and the price was nowhere left to run.