Atherton #3: The Dark Planet (No. 3) by Patrick Carman

imaginable. His head was
    throbbing, which made him angrier than usual at this hour. He
    looked at Aggie, picked up the end of her bed, and flipped it
    over on top of her.
    Socket cackled as Aggie hit the metal floor and scrambled out
    from under the overturned cot.
    "Get up! Out of these beds and moving!" said Red Eye, turning
    his gaze on the rest of the room. He was hunched over more
    than usual from a poor night's sleep. Glancing back at Aggie he
    yelled: "And pick up that filthy cot or you'll be sleeping on the
    floor."
    Aggie and Teagan turned the rusted shell of the cot back over
    and set the rumpled mattress on top. They both groaned quietly.
    The drying room was one of the worst jobs in the Silo.
    Anything but the drying room....
    CHAPTER 8THE DOCKING
    STATION
    As his feet left the ground, Edgar felt so impossibly heavy it was
    hard to imagine not dropping like a stone into the boiling pool
    below. And the heat was virtually unbearable. He was sure the
    steam had burned every hair off his head and the eyebrows
    from his face. His shirt was almost certainly in flames, his shorts
    torn free by fire. It felt as if it was cooking his skin, his brains,
    every thing.
    By some miracle Edgar felt his toes touch the other side. He
    had an immediate and highly distressing sense of falling
    backward that took his breath away and gave him the extra
    burst of adrenaline he needed to lean forward and out of harm's
    way.
    He lay on the ground and rolled away from the heat as his limbs
    came back to a lower temperature. He felt his arms. The skin
    was still there. He slowly reached his hands up and touched his
    head. He laughed out loud at the joy of finding his full head of
    black hair still there. And his clothes, too--they were all intact.
    He stepped farther away from the opening, and then turned to
    see something he would never forget.
    The object was a full thirty feet across at least and rose twenty
    feet into the air. It was, in a word, gargantuan. It was shaped a
    lot like an egg, perfectly round for the length of its middle and
    tapering off at both ends. And it was solid black. The object
    hovered several feet above the floor of the space, suspended
    by two wide black pins that stuck into the sides of the room.
    What in the world is this thing? thought Edgar.
    The object had one other feature that kept Edgar at bay. All
    along the deep black surface were spikes the likes of which
    Edgar had never seen. They appeared to have grown out of the
    object like razor-sharp roots in every direction. A million needle
    points, the tip of each one glistening in the yellow light of the
    room--and ever so slowly, randomly in and out, they moved as if
    trying to feel the air in the room. They seemed... could it be?
    Yes--they were alive.
    Edgar looked down the line of the wall and saw that the deep
    grooves in which the wide pins sat ran down the sides of the
    room. It looked like the stone walls had been gouged by
    something hard and spinning.
    "This moves," whispered Edgar. "It moves down the line and
    past the opening. And then where?"
    Edgar crouched down and peered under the object. The
    moving spikes were there as well, leaving only a few feet to
    crawl under. On the other side was what appeared to be a door,
    but did he dare go under the million black spikes?
    I'm standing in the path of this thing, thought Edgar, wondering
    what it would feel like to be rolled over if it started to move. And
    if the thing fell down while he was under it... well, he couldn't
    imagine. There would be nothing left of him.
    Despite his fear, Edgar resolved to lie on his back and creep
    ever so slowly along the floor. The spikes moved in and out,
    closer to his face as he went, as though they were trying to sniff
    Edgar as he passed below. He felt his breath catching in his
    throat in little bursts.
    "Don't think about it," he said. "Think of something else. The
    grove and the lake. Swinging in the trees..." As he recited his
    memories of the world