Ashfall Legacy Read online

  “I get it,” she said, shuffling her feet. “Maybe next time. I’ve been looking for a new protest buddy.”

  Rebecca rubbed her arms in the damp air, leaning closer to me, her breath misting. My eyebrows popped as I realized this hot budding ecoterrorist might be a little bit into me. Inviting me along for some property destruction could be what passed for a first date with the Green Guard kids.

  “My mom’s out for the day,” I said, shooting my shot. “You want to chill inside?”

  “God, yes, I haven’t been under an actual roof in like weeks,” Rebecca replied. Then she took a moment to look me over. “You and your mom aren’t cannibals or something, are you?”

  I shot a look at our sparse little garden. “My mom’s more into cannabis.”

  “Nice,” Rebecca replied. “Pretty sure I could overpower you, anyway, if you try something. You’re pretty skinny. Has anyone ever told you that you look like an anime character? I wish I had big eyes like that. I could’ve been a model, gotten tight with Leo, and saved the rain forest.”

  “That’s always been my fallback plan, too,” I said.

  Slender. Long-limbed. Larger-than-normal eyes. These were some of my half-alien tells. Of course, no one I met on the street or in the woods would ever look at me and jump to a crazy conclusion about extraterrestrial life. I was just a little unusual-looking.

  I showed Rebecca into our cabin. My mom wouldn’t be happy about this if she found out, but it’s not like we left any evidence of our situation lying around. All our fake IDs and bundles of cash were hidden under a floorboard in Mom’s closet.

  Rebecca warmed her hands by the woodstove while her eyes roamed the interior. After a few seconds, she nodded to herself. “Okay. Everything looks normal.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Did you really think we were backwoods cannibals?”

  “I mean, no, not exactly,” she replied. “But the two of you living out here in the woods by yourselves . . . I was wondering if you were like a kidnap victim. Or if we were dealing with one of those syndromes, you know? Munchausen? Stockholm? Things look pretty wholesome around here, though.”

  I smiled. My mom would’ve liked Rebecca. She appreciated anyone who was suspicious by nature.

  “Usually I’m chained up in my room,” I said. “You caught me on a good day.”

  Rebecca thumbed her lip. “I was all set to help you escape captivity if you wanted. Was kinda excited about a jailbreak.”

  My heart would’ve swelled to hear that like ten identities ago. Now the thought of running away with this strange girl—well, it still seemed pretty exciting, but it wasn’t something I’d seriously consider. She didn’t want my kind of trouble.

  “I guess our life does look kind of strange from the outside,” I said noncommittally.

  “Nah, I’ve met weirdo homeschooled kids before,” Rebecca said, thumbing through the textbooks stacked on the table. “Whoa. Except you’re a really smart homeschooled kid. You actually do this stuff?”

  She held up my Advanced Multivariable Calculus textbook. I’d always been a prodigy when it came to math. Back in Miami, they’d talked about bumping me up to AP Trigonometry as a seventh grader and finding me an apprenticeship with a local engineer. That attention was another reason Mom had moved us out.

  I’d inherited my instincts with numbers from my dad. Math was like a language I could read without trying.

  With Rebecca I played it cool. “Oh, that—yeah, I’m trying it out. It’s hard.”

  It wasn’t.

  “I get it now,” she said. “You’re gifted, and your mom’s got you hidden out here so your big-ass brain doesn’t get corrupted by regular society.” She finally finished snooping through our cabin and flopped down on the couch next to me. “Maybe you can help me with something.”

  She reached into her vest and took out a Nintendo Switch. The handheld system was in rough shape—a corner of the screen was cracked, and one of the joysticks was secured with electrical tape—but the thing turned on okay. I’d had a few portables float in and out of my life, like a thrift-store Game Boy from the ’80s and a Neo Geo I’d found at a yard sale. Nothing modern. Nothing that could connect to the internet. That wasn’t allowed. Rebecca’s Switch was pulling a weak signal from a mobile hot spot at the Green Guard campsite. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Mom about any of this.

  “Do you ever play Dungeon?” she asked me.

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Oh, a nerd like you is going to love it,” Rebecca said. I was very aware of our shoulders touching as we leaned together to look at her screen.

  “I don’t know how you can infer I’m a nerd after hanging out with me twice, by the way.”

  “Well,” she replied, “you just said ‘infer,’ for starters.”

  Dungeon was a cross between an MMORPG and a level creator, Rebecca explained. The graphics were sixteen-bit pixels like old-school Japanese RPGs. Rebecca guided her avatar—a walking pine tree dressed in a leather miniskirt and wielding a chain saw—around a landscape littered with ominous caverns and castles.

  “See, those are all dungeons,” Rebecca said, pointing at the different locations. “Other players create them, and you get experience points for beating them, or the creators get XP if you lose.”

  “Experience points,” I repeated. “And I’m the nerd?”

  She elbowed me. “There’s some monster fighting involved, but the best dungeons are the ones with crazy puzzles. Hold on, let me find it . . .”

  Her avatar approached the entrance to a gleaming silver tower. The details of the dungeon appeared on-screen.

  THE INTERSTELLAR CONUNDRUM

  DIFFICULTY: MAXIMUM

  RAID ATTEMPTS: 1.2 million

  SUCCESSES: 0

  “This one appeared like three weeks ago and no one’s been able to beat it,” Rebecca said. “The hard-core Dungeon delvers usually beat everything in like twenty-four hours. People on the forums think some theoretical physicists at MIT made it. There’s also a rumor that if you beat it, you’ll win a million dollars and a trip to space.”

  I stifled a shiver. A trip to space. My grandfather had made one of those, then returned to Earth and died. My dad had also gone to space—where he was from—and never come back. Since then, my mom had devoted her whole life to making sure I never went up there.

  “You okay?” Rebecca asked. I’d fallen suddenly quiet.

  “Just thinking about what I’d do with the money,” I said.

  “I’d buy a new tent and then overthrow the government,” she replied.

  “Not sure you could pull that off with just half a mil.”

  “It’s a whole million,” Rebecca said.

  “Not when we beat this thing together and split the prize,” I replied.

  She grinned. “Big confidence from the shut-in. I like it.”

  Rebecca marched her avatar into the tower.

  In the first part of the dungeon, three bodyguards stood before a wrought-iron gate. A text box that appeared above their heads declared, We are the guardians. One of us always speaks truth, one of us always speaks false, and one of us speaks at random. You must figure out who is who . . .

  I was sucked in.

  First came the logic problem of identifying the bouncers by typing in yes-or-no questions.

  Once we got by them, the next room was tiled like a sudoku. Rebecca filled in the grid with her avatar, using only diagonal jumps.

  “I’ve done this level a bunch of times,” she said. “It’s the next floor that always kills me.”

  The following puzzle was an electrical grid of over a hundred nodes that needed to be seamlessly connected in less than three minutes. Rebecca raced her avatar across the board, but couldn’t make all the connections in time. I squinted. Her movement inefficiencies were pretty obvious to me.

  “Can I try?” I asked once she ran out of time.

  She handed me the Switch, and I breezed by the bodyguards, skipped around th
e sudoku, then blitzed across the electrical grid. I’d never handled the system before, but my thumbs seemed to know exactly what to do.

  “Whoa,” Rebecca said. “Keep going.”

  A floor of pattern recognition . . .

  After that, a room that was basically Minesweeper . . .

  A backgammon board . . .

  My hands were slick with sweat. At some point, Rebecca and I pretty much stopped talking. She knelt on the couch next to me so that she could peer directly over my shoulder, sometimes whispering some hint for using the controls or explaining when to whip out her avatar’s chain saw. Mostly, though, she let me slip into the zone.

  I was locked in.

  The puzzle . . . It was almost like it spoke to me.

  “Damn, how many levels does this thing have?” Rebecca asked. I didn’t answer. Her voice sounded faraway. “You okay?”

  “Just focused,” I managed to respond.

  “More like hypnotized,” she said.

  She got herself a glass of water. I barely noticed.

  I entered a room of total darkness. No walls, no floor, no graphics to speak of. A void. I sucked my teeth in frustration, thinking the game had glitched, feeling strangely sad that I was cut off from the puzzle.

  But no, I could still move my avatar around, could still see my full health bar and inventory icons.

  “This has to be the end,” Rebecca whispered.

  The Switch’s battery felt hot beneath my fingers. I think maybe an hour had gone by. Maybe more.

  I stared into the vast darkness, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

  Something moved in the black. A pinprick of light, almost as if a pixel had blown. My eyes went in and out of focus. I lost sight of my avatar. It felt like the screen of the console had swallowed me up, until the darkness wasn’t just in front of me but all around me.

  There were dozens of layers to the darkness. I could see them. No—sense them. Each layer was like a piece of silky black fabric with a tiny hole in it. None of the iotas of light lined up. But I could move the layers of shadow themselves, tugging and pushing until the tears sat on top of one another.

  I could make a path through the dark.

  I was vaguely aware of my thumbs moving the controls in complicated swivels and sudden jerks. My fingers were just following orders, though. It was my mind doing the real work here.

  No wonder no one had solved this puzzle. I doubted most people could even see it.

  That should’ve been a red flag. I should’ve known this wasn’t right. But I was too invested. The final puzzle called to me. With every layer I lined up, the pinprick of light got brighter and brighter.

  Until it exploded.

  The dot of light became the fire at the base of a rocket that blasted through the dark room, illuminating the whole space. I was being carried up . . . up . . .

  CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE SOLVED THE INTERSTELLAR CONUNDRUM! I blinked.

  Reality came rushing back. The Switch was white-hot and drained to like 2 percent battery. The dim light of my cabin hurt my eyes, even though I wasn’t even fully aware of it. A part of me was still stuck out there—in that strange in-between place that the video game had shown me.

  “Oh my god,” Rebecca said. “Oh my god! You really did it! I don’t even know what just happened!”

  She danced around in front of me, but I couldn’t focus on her.

  Rebecca shook me by the shoulders. “Wyatt, you did it!” she yelled. “We’re going to be rich!”

  My head hurt. I felt dizzy. The Switch felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but my fingers were clenched tight around it. They were cramped; I couldn’t let go. My knees bucked up and down, out of control, vibrating.

  Rebecca kissed my cheek—her lips red-hot against my clammy skin. She pulled back and stared at me.

  “Hey—,” she said, shaking me again, not in a playful way. “Hey, what’s wrong? You’re freaking me out.”

  That’s when I started having the seizure.

  A message appeared on the Switch’s screen. It flickered there for only a few seconds before the system winked out for good, but I noticed it. The words were the last thing I saw before my own battery went dead.

  HELLO, SYDNEY. DON’T BE AFRAID. I WILL SEE YOU SOON.

  3

  In the dream, I was back in Australia. Young. Three or four years old, my legs short and stumpy, splayed out on the hood of a parked car, the metal still warm from the engine.

  The car was parked on the side of a dirt road that cut between a sprawling field of overgrown grass and a looming chain-link fence. Beyond the fence were a half-dozen satellite dishes, all pointed at the sky, like metal flowers reaching for the sun. The sky was pink and blue, early morning.

  My dad sat next to me.

  His hair was dark, like mine, with a faint purple shine. He wore aviator sunglasses to hide his eyes, jeans, and a T-shirt. His limbs were long and lean.

  I had this dream on a weekly basis since we’d gone on the run. When I told her about it, my mom said it was nice that I could remember my father. But this was all I could remember. The same scene, over and over again. The only bit about him that stuck around.

  Before the night that my mom revealed I was half-alien, my dad looked completely normal to me. Like my mind had rationalized his appearance, protected me from details that didn’t make sense. I’d read that could happen with stuff beyond human understanding—our minds would warp reality to process the incomprehensible.

  Once my mom told me my dad was a Denzan, though, the details snapped into place.

  His big sunglasses hid huge dark eyes. His hair moved on its own, even though it wasn’t windy, almost as if each strand was a super-thin tentacle. His skin was gray like a shark’s belly. His hands each had six fingers.

  I wasn’t afraid of my dad, even once his appearance crystalized in my memory. I was always happy to see him.

  “You’re a very special young man,” he told me. “Our little rebellion.”

  Young me looked up at him. “What’s that mean?”

  “We weren’t supposed to have you, Syd, but we did anyway,” my dad said. “Because we love each other. And we love you.”

  There was a box of donuts on the hood between my dad and me. We’d gotten up early to snag them from the bakery as soon as they came out of the oven. My dumb-ass younger self was more interested in sugary treats than my dad’s heartfelt words.

  I plucked a donut out of the box. “Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome,” he said with a chuckle.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wooden box, offering it to me. I wiped my little hands on my pants and took it.

  “I want you to have this, Syd.”

  It was a ring. Polished gold with a gemstone at its center that was like nothing I’d ever seen. The stone sparkled and swirled like it contained a solar system inside of it—because it did. A vision of the Milky Way rippled beneath the facets of the gem.

  My dad slipped the ring out of the box because I was afraid to touch it.

  “I have to go on one of my trips for a little while, buddy,” my dad said.

  I frowned. “Aw, Dad. You just got back.”

  “I know. Trust me, I wouldn’t leave you and Mom unless it was really, really important.”

  “You’re going to help people,” I said.

  “That’s right,” my dad replied. “People like your grandpa.”

  If my dad was a ghost confined to my dreams, then my grandpa was like a half-remembered figment. I’d only ever met him once or twice, always in a hospital room, where I was afraid of all the wires sticking out of him. He was thin like a skeleton, and his skin felt like paper.

  “Grandpa died,” I said.

  “I want to keep other humans from dying, too. It’s something I have to do. But I’m sad to leave you.” He held the ring up so that it caught the light of the sun—that same sun reflected inside the jewel. “With this ring, you’ll always be able to
see where I am.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’ll keep us tied together, even when we’re far apart,” he said. “And if I ever get lost, you can come find me.”

  A distant rumble shook the ground and rattled the car beneath us. A flock of birds erupted from the tall grass, taking flight in response to the sudden din. On the horizon, a billowing plume of white smoke expanded and expanded.

  And there, thrusting forth from the smoke, its tail a burning dot of bright orange, was a rocket. My mouth was a tiny O of awe. Even in the dream, the feeling of wonderment was so vivid.

  I always woke up as the rocket got swallowed up by the blue.

  “Gone,” my mom told me when I asked her about my dad’s ring. “Just one more thing that they took from us.”

  “We were just playing video games, I swear! We weren’t doing drugs or anything! He collapsed, and I didn’t know what to do!”

  “Did you tell anyone? Call anyone?”

  “No! I, uh, I didn’t think you guys were 911 types.”

  “How long?”

  “Like an hour? Two? I don’t know! It’s hard to think when—when you’re—”

  I opened my eyes, feeling like I was coming up from a really replenishing nap. I was stretched across the couch, a pillow shoved under my head, a warm washcloth draped across my forehead. My mom stood over me, holding my wrist to check my pulse.

  She was pointing her gun at Rebecca, who was backed up against the wall with her hands up, looking terrified.

  So much for that relationship.

  It was almost dark outside. Late afternoon. I’d lost some time there.

  “We . . . we won a lot of money,” Rebecca said shakily.

  “You didn’t win shit,” my mom replied.

  Dungeon. The message. Someone knew I was here. I’d given away my location.

  We needed to get gone.

  “Mom,” I said, my voice scratchy. “Chill. I’m okay.”

  Rebecca breathed a sigh of relief as I pushed up onto my elbows. My mom dropped my arm and looked down at me, not taking her gun off Rebecca. Her face was stony.

  “What happened, Syd?”

  Using my real name in front of an outsider. Yeah. She was freaked.