Chapter 12
A Tomb in the Rocks
Chapter 12
Joey lay in his bed with the stupid Book resting on his chest. It was all he could do to not tear out the pages. There would be no hiding that mess, and besides, his dad didn’t let him close the door to his room.
He spent the last several hours looking not at the thin vellum pages but over the top of them and out the window. He drifted to sleep several times. Each time his eyes closed, the claustrophobic feeling returned and he snapped awake, gasping for air. He then stared out the window, and the cycle played out again.
This time when he awoke, his dad was snoring in the next room. Joey set The Book aside and grabbed his spiral-bound notebook. With his finger, he traced the lines on his drawing of the tile. Stan had said it was a map of the asteroid cluster. Joey had only caught glimpses of a foreman’s map but recognized the crater and the TMS structures arranged around it.
He studied his drawing, trying to decipher the jumble of lines and circles and dots. It must mean something that two of the dots were bigger. Joey had been sure to capture that detail. Maybe one of them was the tomb, and the other was where they were now. Yes! If the tile was indeed what Stan had claimed, it made sense. One dot for where you were, the other for where you wanted to go. But which was which?
He got up and went to the window. RN-3b was crossing the sky at that moment. The slow rotation of RN-3a had his window aligned with several asteroids in the cluster. Some were so distant it was hard to tell them from dim stars. He looked at his drawing to compare. There was a pattern, a cluster of two asteroids, a solitary asteroid, then a cluster of three, and he found that pattern on the drawing. He imagined he was floating in space far above the cluster. That was it! The big dot near the lower corner of the tile, the one with the circle around it, it was RN-3a, and the dot on the circle must be RN-3b. The circles were orbits!
Joey wanted to shout. Could he get in contact with Stan somehow? Probably not. The grounds would be patrolled by foremen looking out for reffies. But it didn’t matter. He had to try. There was no way he could go back to sleep, or back to mining again, until this itch was scratched.
He turned back to his bed, grabbed his notebook and pencil. The comic sat on the corner of his mattress. The illustration of Olly stared up from the cover, grinning stupidly as the rock runner was about to crush him.
Joey smiled.
With both hands, he eased the door to his room closed. He winced as the soft click of the latch tolled like a dropped pot in his ears. He whipped his head to look at Joseph Senior. He still snored. Joey let his breath go and pulled his dad’s door closed.
In the kitchen, Joey opened the fridge. He grabbed one of the unmade meal kits. The package read Stew, Beef and Veggies. He tore open the tough plastic bag and ate the congealed stew cold. He didn’t know when he’d get a full meal again. But they only ate once a day, so missing a couple meals seemed manageable. Next, he grabbed three snack blocks from the cupboard. He choked one of the gelatin cubes down right away. His eyes squeezed from the tartness. They weren’t meant to be eaten like that, only nibbled.
He wrote something in his notebook, tore the page out, and left it next to the fridge.
He realized the buzzer would go off as soon as he opened the inner airlock door. He thought for a moment, then bit off half of one remaining snack block. Powering through the sour-fruit flavor, he chewed until it was soft and sticky, then smashed it against the buzzer. He swallowed the other half. The block did its job and left his mouth watering.
Joey took a deep breath and slid the door open. The buzzer sounded but it was muffled and faint. I guess I’m really doing this, he thought.