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Vairocina or alert the central computer. I could not break the rope Weegin used, and even if I could, I didn’t think I could make it out of there. I couldn’t figure out what to do. There were no options.
    The large alien in the smelly brown robe was now next to me. He put his hand on my head and shouted, “They’re diseased!”
    Weegin whipped around and pulled me away from him. The crowd was on its feet. Max tried to say something, but all I could see were her lips moving in the racket.
    “He lies! He’s crazy!” Weegin shouted to the crowd. “They are healthy. Perfect condition. Soon they will be of breeding age.”
    “Weegin, please. Stop this. You can’t do this to us,” I begged.
    “I am doing it,” he growled at me.
    “
Dreekt
ten
foort
crystals. For the
semel
female!” yelled one alien, standing on his stool.
    “Ne, ne, ne!”
Weegin yelled back, quickly waving his hands above his head. He stepped onto the stage and pulled us up with him. “
Ne Dreekt.
You must take
trell
!” he shouted.
    The alien who bid made a hissing sound at Weegin. One of the small aliens, with a narrow forehead and big eyes, pushed the large, cloaked alien aside and stepped onto the stage with Weegin.
    “We have to do something,” Max whispered.
    “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
    “Who would expect anything else? That dumbwire isn’t worth the brain it’s stuck in,” Switzer sneered.
    “What? If you’re so smart, then you do something,” I told him.
    “I will.”
    The bug-eyed alien began to speak. Its voice resonated throughout the entire arena, and everyone grew silent. The alien spoke slowly so every word was translated.
    “Joca Krig Weegin . . . is offering . . . these twenty . . . human children . . . for trade,” the alien shouted.
    “This can’t be happening,” Max said.
    “Trading begins . . . at forty thousand yornaling crystals,” he added.
    More than one alien laughed at the price. Others sat back down at their smoking pots, shaking their heads.
    One alien yelled out, “Not for the whole ring.”
    “One child is a telepath. The other is . . . a softwire,” the buglike alien announced.
    There was a brief moment of complete silence before the entire crowd erupted into a fierce bidding war. A tall slender alien whose spine and ribs appeared to be outside its body stepped forward and bid forty-one thousand yornaling crystals. Another bid forty-two thousand, then forty-five. Then a large, burly alien with long teeth and thick, gray skin shouted out ninety thousand. I couldn’t keep track, things were happening so fast.
    “JT?” Max whispered. There was panic in her voice.
    If there had been some kind of computer translating the alien languages, then maybe I could have used that to link back to the central computer. Didn’t
they
have to do that, I wondered, for air control or waste management or the zillion other things the central computer controlled on the rings? I didn’t know, but it was my only shot.
    The pace of the bidding increased, and I scanned the area around me for any sort of computer terminal. All I found was a small blinking key plate on the wall behind the stage.
It’s a start,
I thought, and slunk toward it as far as the rope would allow. I pushed into the device and immediately sensed something was wrong. My ears burned hot, and the inside of whatever computer I had just pushed into was dense with a thick, green fog of static electricity. Normally, a cool rush of current surges across my skin and the colors inside the computer brighten with an enhanced sense of clarity. But not this time. Security devices were mounted on top of more security devices, and everything looked as if it was patched together, piece by piece.
    I pushed in farther and turned down a corridor, looking for anything familiar. The dataway opened into a long, thin hallway that was at least a thousand times taller than any computer I’ve ever been inside. Way up, through the thick, crackling soup of