A Mutiny in Time - James Dashner Page 0,3

around. I don’t know, actually enjoy ourselves.”

Dak’s mouth dropped open. “Are you insane?” And he really meant it — she obviously didn’t comprehend the opportunity they were about to be given. “We need to plan this to the second — I’m not taking any chance of missing something cool.”

“Oh, for the love of mincemeat,” was her only response before she returned her attention to String Theory and Other Quantum Leaps in Quantum Physics.

Sera was a nerd in her own right, almost nerdy enough in stature to compete with Dak himself. Oh, who am I kidding? Dak thought. She had him beat by a mile.

This was the girl who had recently convinced him to attend a Saturday afternoon thesis reading at the local university — “convinced” him by threatening to scream out in the middle of lunch that she was in love with him if he said no. Dak had fiercely protested because he’d wanted to see the guy at the state fair who swore he was so old that he’d been Mussolini’s foot doctor during World War Two. (The man evidently had toenail clippings to prove it.) But Sera swore that it’d be more exciting to hear a three-hour presentation called “The Effect of Tachyon Generation on Ambient Wellsian Radiation.”

It wasn’t.

Sera had finally agreed to leave the presentation early, but only because the speaker kept using the words baryon and meson interchangeably when, according to Sera, everyone knows that’s not proper.

Suddenly Dak had an idea. He ran his fingers through his sandy blond hair and stared intently at his color-coded floor plan. “I guess we can skip the Hope Diamond exhibit if we’re short on time. It’s supposed to be cursed, which is cool. I’m not sure what it means by ‘an exploration of the biogeochemical processes that give minerals their unique properties,’ though. It sounds like a total snooze fest if you ask me.”

“Who asked you?” said Sera, putting her SQuare down. “Let me see that map.”

By the time Dak and Sera marched off the bus, Dak’s heart was giddy with excitement.

They had two hours and forty-seven minutes before the earthquake that would almost kill them.

3. Halls of Boring Wonder

POOR DAK, Sera thought as she and her classmates filed through the entrance to the Smithsonian. Her best friend was always annoying people with his ill-timed speeches on useless historical facts. And his obsession with cheese was just . . . well, weird.

Last year in fourth grade he’d written an entire poem about types of cheeses and how each one of them was like a family member to him. Mrs. E’Brien had finally relented and let him recite it to the class in exchange for his promise to spare them any spontaneous sermons about people who were dead. He’d proudly done his performance, but then only made it a day and a half before he suddenly blurted out a five-minute information dump about the guy who invented the stepladder.

So yeah, Dak was quaint and unique and a little bit annoying in his own quaint, unique way. But none of these qualities were what made Sera think Poor Dak that morning. What worried her was how clueless he seemed to be about the true state of the world. The SQ. The natural disasters. The ever-increasing crime rates.

The Remnants.

That last thought made her pause, a deep ache pressing against her heart. . . .

And then the stinky kid named Roberk bumped into her from behind.

She knew it was him because an untimely draft pushed the boy’s patented smell across her body like rotten air escaping from a newly unsealed tomb. The odor itself was a one-of-a-kind mixture of fried liver and boiled cabbage — it definitely put her in mind of hydrogen sulfide. “Geez, Sera,” he said. “If you want a hug, just ask for it.”

Sera wanted to tell him all about hydrogen sulfide, about how it was usually produced by swamps and sewage, which basically made Roberk a walking sewer — but it was hard to say anything while holding her breath. So she just gave him the biggest eye roll she could muster, then continued walking. She caught up to Dak in the atrium of the building, where the exhibits began on the other side of a huge open archway. Dak was craning his neck so much she thought he might strain a muscle. He was obviously dying to see what awaited them in the museum.

“Don’t hurt yourself, there,” she leaned over and said to him, determined to slam a