Chapter 28

  Leah Walker

  Leah Walker didn’t understand what was happening. She realized this, and made the conscious decision not to worry about it. When they finally arrived at the place they’d been trying to get to, Mr. Carter said something about a door he had built and how they had to leave Earth.

  “What happens to anyone who stays on Earth?” asked Mr. Mike.

  Mr. Carter didn’t know, but he thought it wouldn’t be good. “This world is becoming unstable,” he said. “Soon it might be nothing but, ah, genesis mist.”

  Everyone seemed sad about that, and this at least was something Leah understood. No one knew if she would see her parents again. Almost everyone else in the car also had people they might not see again. And Leah had liked Earth, even though she had not seen very much of it.

  Mr. Sheppard had a plan. Leah knew he would. Mr. Sheppard always knew what to do. But Ms. Carter didn’t like the plan, and there were some raised voices, and then the plan was changed so that she was going outside too. That made sense. Leah knew how much Ms. Carter liked being outside. Ms. Carter said all the time how she didn’t like being ‘cooped up’ in the ALL-Rover.

  So Ms. Carter went out with her brother and with Mr. Sheppard to make sure the coast was clear. Leah had seen no beaches outside, and she didn’t even know what it meant for a coast to be clear. Was Chicago’s coast clear? She didn’t know. She would ask Eric when she saw him again.

  She played with Short the Turtle while everyone waited. They were all nervous. Mr. Hartman kept shuffling cards, which reminded Leah of Eric because he had always amazed her with how he could make the cards all blur together with a cool sound. The cards looked pretty silly when Mr. Hartman shuffled them, though. They looked so small. Mr. Mike kept walking back and forth and looking out of the windows. Ms. AJ went back to check on Eric’s friends, Liz and Jim, who were sleeping a lot. Ms. Shape kept staring out the window.

  Leah got bored of playing with Short after a while and began pretending to be a moose. She made antlers out of her hands and stomped around the room, snuffling at everyone. She knew that mooses were really tall, and very grouchy, and also very selfish, so she took one of Mr. Hartman’s cards in her mouth and did not give it back.

  Mr. Carter and the others returned, but a moose wouldn’t have cared about that, so Leah stomped off and knocked over a half-full cup of coffee right into the sink. Then she dropped the card into the spilled cold coffee at the bottom of the sink. Everyone would always know that the coffee-card was the jack of hearts. This moose did not care. Like many mooses, she enjoyed messing things up. No one dared question a moose if they messed things up; that was one benefit of being a moose. Definitely the best thing about mooses, though, was that they did not stay up crying at night because of not knowing where their family was.

  “Leah?” said Ms. AJ from over where all the grown-ups were talking. “You should come listen.”

  Leah did not listen to boring adult stuff. She made a moose noise at Ms. AJ.

  But maybe moose Leah was a little curious what they were all talking about. She moosed over to where everyone else was, going unnoticed, which was easy because mooses were sneaky.

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  “…dangerous,” said Ms. Carter, though she didn’t say it with the excitement most people use when talking about dangerous things.

  “Still our best chance,” said Mr. Sheppard.

  “I’m not leaving Jim,” said Mr. Mike.

  “Riley is coming,” said Mr. Carter. “With, er, the other two. He will correct the error and follow us in this vehicle.”

  “He’s right,” said Mr. Sheppard, who looked so serious that he was almost scary. “If we can’t wake them up, we can’t afford to carry them along. We might have to move fast.”

  “They will be, eh, quite safe here,” said Mr. Carter.

  It was boring adult stuff. Leah moved over to a window to look out at the fog. Mooses didn’t like fog, but pirates did. Hmm.

  Eventually, the grown-ups finished talking. By this time Leah was writing all the words she could think of that had to do with palm trees, listing them neatly in red crayon on the back of a paper that Mr. Hartman had been using to show her music. Leah liked the music, but couldn’t figure out why it always had to be five lines. Maybe it was because most people had five fingers on each hand.

  She was working on this problem, multiplying and dividing fives and numbers with five in them at random, when she felt a huge hand settle on top of her head. Only one person had hands so big. She looked up and saw the huge beard of Mr. Hartman smiling down at her. “We’re staying here,” he told her.

  Leah twisted around to look at everyone else. They were packing up to leave! “Where are they going?” she asked.

  “Oh, they’ll go on ahead, we’ll just wait for…” Leah looked up at him. He was staring in confusion at all the numbers on her page. “For your brother,” he finished.

  That got her attention. “Eric’s coming?”

  Mr. Hartman nodded. “So we’ll sit tight here while they go on ahead.”

  Leah said goodbye to everyone as they left. Then she went back to her numbers. Five was a weird number because no matter how many times you put it together with itself, it always ended in either a zero or another five. She went back to being a moose, because that had been fun, and she had learned a lot, and mooses liked the number five.