We're Not from Here Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Geoff Rodkey

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Andrew Banneker

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524773045 (trade) — ISBN 9781524773052 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524773069

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Giant Bug Rumor

  Chapter 2: The Invitation

  Chapter 3: Never Mind, Can You Just Go Away?

  Chapter 4: Welcome to Choom

  Chapter 5: But Seriously, Please Go Away

  Chapter 6: A Home for Giant Marshmallows

  Chapter 7: Alien Dinner Party

  Chapter 8: Who Wants to Eat the New Kid?

  Chapter 9: Shakedown in the Lunchroom

  Chapter 10: Invasion of the Screen Snatchers

  Chapter 11: News, Weather, and Hate

  Chapter 12: The Mysterious Smell of Doughnuts

  Chapter 13: Psst! Wanna Buy a Cartoon?

  Chapter 14: Food for Thought

  Chapter 15: Sometimes History Isn’t Pretty

  Chapter 16: The Sweet Stink of Slapstick

  Chapter 17: A Pratfall Too Far

  Chapter 18: Mixed Messages

  Chapter 19: The Door in the Floor

  Chapter 20: Everyone Agrees (Except When They Don’t)

  Chapter 21: Put Your Heads in the Air

  Chapter 22: The Kind of Trouble You Don’t Get Out Of

  Chapter 23: This Might Get Messy

  Chapter 24: A Perfect Plan, Except for That One Horrible Part

  Chapter 25: Can Sweet Sounds Soothe a Savage Swarm?

  Chapter 26: Dying Onstage

  Chapter 27: Programming Transcript

  About the Author

  To any kid who’s ever had to start over in a new place…

  which, in one way or another, is pretty much all of us

  THE FIRST TIME I heard anything about Planet Choom, we’d been on Mars for almost a year. I was sitting in the rec center with Naya and Jens. We were taking a break from shooting a video we’d written. It was either How to Be Your Own Pet or Top Ten Toilets of the Mars Station. I can’t remember which.

  Naya leaned in over the table and whispered, like she was telling us a big secret. “My dad says they found a planet humans can live on permanently. Like, we can breathe the air and everything. But the thing is…”

  She looked around to make sure nobody else was listening before she went on. “There’s already aliens there. And they look like giant bugs.”

  “What kind of bugs?” Jens asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Naya. “I think mosquitoes.”

  “Are they dangerous? Like, do they have stingers?” A planet full of giant mosquitoes sounded terrifying.

  Naya shook her head. “They don’t act like mosquitoes. They just look like them. And they’re really smart.”

  “As smart as humans?”

  “Yeah. Like, maybe even smarter.”

  “Are they friendly?”

  “I guess. I mean, they know we exist. And they haven’t tried to kill us or anything.”

  “I’d rather just go to Novo,” I said. This was a few months after the Governing Council had announced they’d discovered Novo in a nearby solar system. It was a planet that could almost-but-not-quite support human life, and the GC was studying whether they could “terraform” it, which meant changing its environment enough for us to live there.

  Naya snorted. “Novo’s never going to work,” she said, shaking her head. “If it could, we’d all be headed there by now.”

  “Not necessarily,” I told her. “Novo’s really far away. So they have to be sure. And it’s hard to study it from here. Plus, they need time to get all the bio-suspension pods ready.” The trip to Novo would take fifteen Earth years, and the only way for a whole ship full of people to survive the trip without running out of food and water was to go into bio-suspension. Supposedly, that was just like going to sleep, except it lasted much longer, and you barfed a lot when you woke up.

  “Is that what your mom told you?”

  “No! It was in the weekly announcements. My mom doesn’t tell me anything.” Mom had been elected to the Governing Council when it got set up right after the first refugee ships arrived on Mars. It was a big deal, I guess, but it didn’t get my family any special treatment or inside info. All it meant for me was that I never saw Mom, because she was always working.

  “I’m just going to go back to Earth,” Jens announced.

  I rolled my eyes as Naya sighed. “You can’t go back to Earth!” she told Jens for about the fortieth time.

  “Why not?”

  “Everybody there is dead!”

  “So?”

  “So nobody can live there anymore!”

  “Nuh-uh!” Jens insisted. “We can live there again. We just have to wait a while.”

  “Yeah, like a thousand years.”

  “Nuh-uh! Just a year or two! My dad said so.”

  “Your dad’s wrong.”

  “No, he’s not!”

  They probably would’ve kept arguing until Jens started to cry, which was what usually happened when we tried to change his mind about Earth. But just then an old man passed by our table. He must’ve been on one of the last ships to arrive, because his face was pockmarked with dark red sores from radiation exposure.

  When he saw us, he stopped and looked down. “You kids making another one of your videos?”

  “Yes, sir.” I smiled at him, and he smiled back. Whenever we made a new video, the guy who ran Movie Night at the rec center played it on the big screen before the main feature. We’d done about half a dozen of them, and they’d turned Naya, Jens, and me into minor celebrities among the hundred or so people who usually showed up for the movie.

  “Keep it up!” the man told us. “Folks need to laugh. Now more than ever.”

  “Not too many people laughed at the last one,” Naya reminded him. I’d written Fabulous Fashion Looks for Fall myself, after I outgrew everything I’d brought from Earth and my parents sent me to the clothing exchange. All they had in my size were a pair of worn-out jeans with mysterious stains on them and a grimy T-shirt that said TAYLOR SWIFT WORLD TOUR 2028. Now I was stuck wearing them even though the stains grossed me out and I’d never even listened to Taylor Swift.

  So I wrote a video making fun of the clothing exchange. But it came out more angry than funny, and people didn’t like it nearly as much as our other ones.

  “Wa
s that the one about the clothes?” The old man grimaced in sympathy. “Yeah, that was a bit of a misfire. But don’t let it get you down! You know what they say: ‘Dying’s easy. Comedy’s hard.’ ”

  “People say that?” I’d never heard it before. To be honest, it seemed a little inappropriate.

  “They used to. Back in my theater days. Guess it made more sense back then.” He chuckled. “Point is—you just keep up the good work. You’re raising people’s spirits. We need all the joy we can get around here.” Then he put a scarred hand on my shoulder and lowered his head a little closer to mine. “Speaking of which, I heard a rumor….”

  I knew what was coming next even before he said it.

  “Is your sister Ila Mifune? From that Pop Singer show?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ila had been playing guitar and singing since she was six. By twelve she was writing her own songs. At sixteen she went to an open audition for Pop Singer, the highest-rated TV show in our country. She made it all the way through to the semifinals, where she sang one of her own songs, “Under a Blue Sky,” to a TV audience of sixty million people. Going into the live final episode, she had more votes than any of the other contestants.

  But the world had been slowly falling apart for a while, and two days before the episode was supposed to happen, it suddenly fell apart a lot faster. Instead of going to the airport and flying to see Ila in the Pop Singer finale, we wound up at the spaceport, where we were lucky enough to get seats for all four of us on a ship to Mars.

  Most people weren’t that lucky.

  The man brightened when I told him Ila was my sister. People always did, just like they always looked crushed after they got the answers to their follow-up questions.

  “You think she might grace us with that beautiful voice of hers?”

  “She doesn’t sing anymore, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not really, no. Says she doesn’t like to perform without a guitar.”

  “Got to be one around here somewhere.”

  “No, sir. Mars has no guitars.”

  “She can still sing, though. Can’t she?”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir. But her heart’s just not in it right now.”

  The rest of her wasn’t either. Most days, my sister wouldn’t even get out of bed. She’d just lie in her bunk, watching old episodes of The Birdleys and Ed and Fred on her screen. Having one of us in there 24/7 (although on Mars it was technically more like 25/7) made our shoebox-sized living compartment feel even more cramped and stuffy than it already was. Worse, Ila wasn’t even nice about it. She barely looked at me except to snarl whenever I asked her to put on headphones or move her feet so I could get into our drawer.

  I was pretty fed up with her moping, but Mom and Dad said I should feel sorry for her.

  “When something this terrible happens,” Mom told me during one of the rare times when we were alone, “it affects people in different ways. Ila hasn’t been able to bounce back from it like you have. We’ve just got to give her time.”

  Personally, I thought a year (although on Mars it was technically more like half a year) should be plenty of time to bounce back. But Ila didn’t seem like she was even trying. Sometimes when I came into our compartment, I’d catch the sound of one of her songs coming out of her screen. She always shut it off right away, but I suspected that when nobody else was around, she was watching her old TV performances over and over again.

  It didn’t seem like a healthy thing to do. Even so, when strangers like the old man asked about Ila, I smiled at them and lied a little.

  “I think she’ll sing again soon,” I told him. “She just needs time.”

  “Well, you tell her she’s got some big fans on this station,” he said, giving my shoulder a friendly little squeeze.

  “I will, sir. Thank you.”

  “Thank you. You kids have a good day now. Keep up the good work.” He ambled off toward the library.

  “How is your sister?” Naya asked me.

  “Angry. Dad started making her go to the exercise room every morning.”

  “Angry’s better than depressed, right?” Jens asked.

  “I dunno. She’s not as mean to me when she’s just depressed.”

  “Maybe she’s jealous because you’re more famous than she is now,” said Naya.

  “That’s ridiculous. Ila’s much more famous than me.”

  “Not as a percentage.” Naya tapped her screen open. “Think about it: Sixty million people watched that show she was on, right? But that was out of nine billion people on Earth.” She punched the numbers into her screen’s calculator. “And a hundred people watch our videos. But that’s out of twenty-four hundred total. So according to my calculations…” She looked up and grinned at me. “You are six point two five times more famous on Mars than your sister was on Earth.”

  “That’s not funny,” I told Naya. “It’s just sad.”

  Jens’s shoulders slumped. “I hate math,” he muttered.

  I reached across the table and smacked Naya’s hand. “Tell me more about these giant bug people.”

  “I don’t know anything else,” said Naya. “Just that they exist. And we asked them if we can come live on their planet.”

  “No way,” said Jens. “It’ll never happen. I mean, can you imagine? Living on a planet full of giant bugs?”

  I tried to imagine it. I couldn’t. It just didn’t seem possible.

  But then it actually happened.

  “THEY’RE CALLED THE Zhuri,” Mom told me when she got back to our living compartment late that night. “They seem very peaceful and civilized, and we’re grateful they’re even talking to us.”

  “Do they really look like giant bugs?” Ila asked. She didn’t lift her head from the pillow or even look at us. But she did pause the Birdleys episode she was watching on her screen, which by Ila’s standards meant she was incredibly interested.

  “Don’t call them bugs,” Mom warned her. “It could be very offensive to them.” Then she sighed. “But yes. They look like…very tall mosquitoes. And they’re not the only advanced species on Planet Choom. Apparently, there are four of them, all living together in the same society. Three of the four evolved on other planets before they came to Choom. That’s good for us—it means they have a history of welcoming other species as immigrants.”

  “Do the other species look like giant bugs too? Or just the Zhuri?”

  Mom gave me an annoyed frown. “Lan, seriously—don’t call them bugs.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But do they?”

  Mom shrugged. “We don’t know yet. There’s a lot we don’t know. It’s been hard to communicate. The lag time between here and Choom is huge, and we’re still trying to get a handle on their language. By the way—whatever you do, don’t discuss this with anybody until the GC makes an official announcement tomorrow.”

  Mom looked at me as she said that. Since Ila never left our compartment unless my parents insisted, the odds of my sister discussing anything with anybody were pretty slim.

  “Can we talk to Dad about it?”

  “Yes. But you probably won’t see him. He’s working late again tonight.” Back on Earth, Dad had been a scientist. On Mars, he was part of a group in the Nutrition Department that was trying to create a food substitute. It was important work, because everybody knew that sooner or later we’d run out of the rations we’d brought from Earth. As far as I could tell from a couple of whispered conversations I’d overheard between Mom and Dad, that was happening faster than a lot of people thought. Dad and the rest of his group had been working around the clock for weeks.

  “What’s the GC going to tell people?” Ila asked Mom.

  “Just that Planet Choom and the Zhuri exist, and that the Governing Council’s talking to them about accepting human refugees. But it might not happen. An
d if it does, it’ll take a while.”

  * * *

  —

  IT TOOK LONGER than a while. In the end, it was another eight months before the Zhuri officially invited humans to Choom. By then, life on the Mars station was grim. The air processors were wearing down, which made the oxygen levels drop so much that everybody felt tired all the time. Water rationing got so strict that people could only shower every ten days, so the whole station smelled like an armpit.

  People’s clothes were turning not just stinky, but ragged. Even on limited rations, I’d somehow managed to keep growing until I had to go back to the exchange and swap my stained jeans and Taylor Swift tee for a scratchy YOMIURI GIANTS jersey and a pair of beat-up khakis with holes in both knees, which kept reopening no matter how many times I sewed them back together.

  The biggest problem, though, was the food. When the Earth supplies ran out, Dad’s team in Nutrition introduced Chow, and everybody hated it. It came in three flavors: Curry, Berry, and Harvest. Within a few days, people had started calling them Choking, Barfing, and Heaving.

  After a month of nothing but Chow to eat, the food protests started. Dad took it personally. When people stopped him in the hallways to complain, he’d give them a tight smile and say things like, “We’re doing the best we can with the resources we’ve got,” and “I know it leaves a lot to be desired, but Chow’s keeping us alive.”

  Back in our compartment at night, he was a lot less polite. “It’s ridiculous!” he’d vent to Mom. “What did they expect? Lobster Newburg?”

  When Naya, Jens, and I made Top Ten Recipes for Chow, and one of them was Lobster Newburg, Dad didn’t think it was funny. A lot of other people did, though. Judging by the laughter when it first played, it was one of our most popular videos.