Ashfall Legacy Read online

  “We have to go,” I said, sitting all the way up. “I did . . . I did something bad.”

  She nodded once. There wasn’t any discussion necessary between us. If I said we needed to go, then we needed to go. She looked me over and must’ve been able to tell that I still felt a little woozy.

  “I’ll get the bags,” my mom said, taking long strides to her bedroom.

  Before she left the room, my mom handed me the gun. I pointed it at the floor instead of at Rebecca—that would’ve been too messed up—but that didn’t seem to make her any less scared.

  “Really wish we’d done something else instead of video games,” I said, frowning. “Anything else.”

  “Dude,” she whispered so my mom wouldn’t overhear. “What the fuck?”

  “I know.” I shook my head. “Look, don’t worry. We aren’t going to kill you or any—”

  Rebecca bolted out the front door. I didn’t blame her, and I obviously didn’t make any move to stop her. We’d be gone in a few seconds, anyway. A bizarre story for her to tell her friends around the campfire.

  “It was fun,” I said, as the door slammed shut behind her.

  I’d ghosted on every friend I’d ever had—disappeared in the middle of the night, identity erased, never to be heard from again. Rebecca was the first person I’d known who actually saw a bit of my real life.

  Except for the holding-her-at-gunpoint stuff, it was kind of nice to be seen.

  Mom came back with our go-bags—two duffels stuffed with essentials that we kept packed at all times.

  “Your girlfriend ran away,” she observed.

  “You didn’t have to threaten her,” I replied. “It wasn’t her fault.”

  I stood up to take one of the bags, but still felt wobbly.

  My mom touched my cheek. “Honey? Are you okay?”

  “Something weird happened to me.”

  “Tell me on the road.”

  We didn’t bother locking the cabin behind us. We’d never be coming back.

  It was sunset. The roads were empty leaving the woods. It was always dead out here—that’s why we picked it. But now the lack of traffic worked against us.

  “We’re conspicuous,” my mom said, banking around a curve at a speed that made our truck groan. “We need to get around people. Switch cars. Blend in.”

  “They’ve got hours on us,” I replied, trying to piece together exactly how long it’d been since I fell into Dungeon’s trap. “There’s been enough time for them to get checkpoints on the highway.”

  “Only if they’ve involved local law enforcement,” my mom replied. “Maybe the Consulate won’t bother.”

  The Consulate. A facility in Australia outside of Sydney (not me, the place) co-run by NASA and Earth’s other big space programs. It was the place I’d seen in my dream, sitting outside its fence with my dad, watching a launch. The Consulate’s public mission was to monitor deep space for signs of life, but that was all bull. In reality, they were the Denzan embassy on Earth. The aliens monitored us from there, made sure we didn’t steal any of their technology, and selected candidates worthy of leaving Earth for Denza. They liked humans up there and wanted to keep them around, but as far as saving Earth went, we’d need to find our own way. Basically, the place was the heart of a worldwide conspiracy with moles in all the major intelligence agencies.

  I knew all that because my mom told me. She used to work there.

  It’s where she met my dad.

  My mom turned on our police scanner. We listened in silence as we shot down the back roads. If the Consulate had gotten to the local cops, we’d probably hear talk about a kidnapping—that’s the story they would use to get local cops hunting a mom and her son without raising any red flags. The radio was quiet, though. Maybe we’d get lucky.

  “Tell me what happened,” my mom finally said.

  Buckled into the passenger seat, I took a deep breath and went over the details. That I’d broken a number of her rules didn’t matter now. I started with inviting Rebecca inside. Told Mom about the game. The mysterious puzzle. The message.

  As I thought back to the Dungeon’s final puzzle, a shiver went through me. The truth was, I’d kind of liked it. I was scared, but also curious. Something in me had awakened.

  “It was like a jigsaw puzzle made out of space, and I had to align the stars,” I told my mom. “It felt like it was put there for me to find.”

  “Because it was,” my mom said. “It sounds like a rudimentary version of a Wayscope.”

  “A what?”

  “A tool that Denzans use to navigate the universe,” she said. “Beyond any technology that we have on Earth. Not something that they could fit into a common video game system, but . . .” She thought for a moment. “Maybe a training module of some kind? Something that would interact with your half-Denzan side while being impossible for a human mind to comprehend.”

  Of course it was my malnourished Denzan half that had gotten the warm fuzzies. “It was . . . interesting.”

  “You liked it,” my mom said, her voice neutral.

  I got the feeling that I was supposed to say no. But I rarely got to exercise the part of me that was half-alien. That head trip in Dungeon was one of the first chances I’d ever had to satisfy a hunger that I couldn’t ever really explain.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Sorry.”

  She shook her head. “It’s okay. I knew college-level trigonometry wouldn’t do the trick forever.”

  We sped out of the woods and drove parallel to a railyard. There were a bunch of rusty warehouses and old timber sheds from when there used to be more logging up here. I noticed a couple of train cars stamped with the logo of the corporation Green Guard was protesting, probably transporting in heavy equipment for their pipeline. I rubbed my temples, feeling bad that I wouldn’t be there to see that through.

  “I blew it,” I said.

  “Not yet,” she replied, reassuring herself more than me. “We have time. As long as they don’t send . . .”

  She leaned forward, her chest against the steering wheel, and peered up at the sky. Night had fallen while we drove, the sky purple and cloudy.

  “As long as they don’t send what?” I asked.

  Before she could respond, the moon fell out of the sky.

  At least, that’s what I thought happened at first.

  A white disc of light swooped down from the heavens and hovered over our truck, flooding the interior with cold illumination. This wasn’t like a spotlight shot down from a helicopter—for starters, there was no sound at all. On top of that, the light seemed . . . purer, somehow. Cleaner. I was frozen beneath the beam, shocked into stillness.

  Not my mom. She slammed her foot down on the gas. Her teeth were gritted, and she started weaving across the lanes, our old truck groaning in response. Her evasive maneuvers didn’t seem to have any effect on whatever was shining down on us. She couldn’t shake the spotlight.

  And then, as quickly as it appeared, the light was gone. My eyes stung from the sudden return to darkness. Mom swerved back into our lane and started slowing down.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said.

  “Was that them?” I yelled, embarrassed by the way my voice cracked. “The Denzans?”

  Mom wasn’t slowing down on purpose. There was something wrong with the truck. The lights on the console were all dark, the electrical system fried.

  We coasted to a gentle stop in the middle of the road.

  “Come on,” my mom barked, lunging out of the truck. “We need to run.”

  I followed her out of the truck and looked at the sky, spinning around. It was empty now. No strange lights, no pursuers. I could only remember my dad from that dream; I’d never actually seen another Denzan or their alien technology. All these years on the run from them and—well, it’s not like I wanted to get caught. But I did want to know. I wanted to understand where I’d come from. Who I’d come from.

  “They have flying saucers?” I asked.

&n
bsp; “Not exactly,” she replied, surprisingly blasé as she grabbed my shoulders and pointed me toward the railyard. “We can lose them in there if we’re quick enough. Find a new car. Get back on the road. It’s possible. If we can get around people, find a crowd, they won’t want to make a move. Won’t want to expose themselves.” She took a breath. “And we still have one advantage.”

  “We do?”

  She had her gun out.

  “Denzans don’t believe in violence,” my mom said. “But I do.”

  4

  When you’re a kid, you’ll believe anything your parents tell you.

  Dead teeth that fall out of your face are worth money? Cool!

  Fat bearded guy commits annual reverse burglary? Sure!

  The government is after us and we can never have normal lives? Secret identities are neat!

  But then you—well, me, I’m talking about me here—get a little older and start to question things. Like maybe all that shit is made up and your mom is just a crazy person. But even when that skepticism started to take root, I couldn’t fully shake my mom’s authority. Years on the run, packing up whenever she said, lying whenever she said—it was hard for me not to listen and obey.

  That’s why, that night when she first claimed I was half-alien, I did what she told me. I put on my bathing suit and sat in a warm bath, feeling like this was all completely ridiculous but that I had to let it play out.

  “You’re going to hate this at first,” my mom said, standing over the tub. “You’re going to be scared. But I promise you’re going to be fine. Do you trust me?”

  “At this moment?” I asked. “Not really, no.”

  She nodded. “In a few minutes, you will.”

  Then my mom rammed her knee into my chest, pushed down on both my shoulders, and held me under the water.

  At first, I was too shocked to do anything. I let her dunk me like we were playing a game. But then, from the way her fingers dug into my shoulders, it became clear that she wasn’t going to let me up. I started to thrash. My heels couldn’t get any purchase against the smooth bottom of the tub. I shoved at my mom’s forearms, but she was stronger than me, and I couldn’t shake her grip. The air in my lungs burned as I tried to hold my breath—not easy with my mom’s knee dug into my sternum. I couldn’t see her face through the choppy surface of the water, but I could tell my mom had her head turned away like she couldn’t bear to watch. Stupidly, I opened my mouth to shout at her—the words bubbling out.

  And then something clicked.

  I realized that I didn’t need to breathe.

  It’s not like I’d started gulping down lungfuls of water or spontaneously developed gills. I was just fine. Normal. The panic I’d been feeling subsided; my brain relaxed. Breathing was suddenly optional. My body had found another way to sustain me. My mom must have felt me stop struggling, because she loosened her grip. I could get up if I wanted to.

  Underwater, I laughed like an insane person. Like a person who’d just learned that they weren’t fully human.

  I sat up. As soon as I burst from the water, my lungs started working again. Good old breathing was still my main way of getting oxygen. My mom sat on the edge of the tub, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Holy shit. What—?”

  “Spontaneous nutrient absorption,” she replied. “Denzan biology can adapt to almost any atmosphere. One of the side effects, though, which you’ll have to be careful about here on Earth, is the luminescing.”

  “Lumi-what-now?”

  “Your skin pulled oxygen from the water to keep you alive. Meanwhile, nonessential elements were excreted through your . . .” She gestured to the bathroom mirror. “Well, see for yourself.”

  I stood up, feeling profoundly energized, and looked at my reflection. The roots of my hair had turned light blue in color. So had the fuzz on my arms and legs.

  I’m not sure how long I stared at my reflection. A long-ass time, I think. Long enough that my mom tiptoed back to our kitchen, leaving me alone to come to terms with my new reality. I ran my fingers through my hair and watched as the color spread a little farther, each strand feeling a little slippery and squirmy, even when I’d dried off.

  I was half-alien.

  A Denzan.

  Just what the fuck was a Denzan?

  When I finally emerged from the bathroom, my mom had a bunch of pictures and documents spread out on our kitchen table. I’d never seen this file before; she must have kept it hidden away in her go-bag. An hour before, I’d thought she was a crazy person and been super pissed at her dragging me around the world, screwing up any chance I had at a normal life. Now I understood her—that I couldn’t be normal because I wasn’t normal. But the stuff that I still didn’t know, it was dizzying and frustrating. She’d dunked me underwater, but there was still a little ember of anger burning alongside my curiosity.

  “Mom,” I said, “you have so much explaining to do right now.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “Half-Denzan,” I said, trying out the name of my new species. I waved back at the bathroom. “How did you know that would work? That I would luminesce like that? I’ve never done that before. You could’ve killed me.”

  “You were born a month early,” my mom replied. “Your little lungs weren’t quite ready. The first time I held you, you were glowing. That’s how I knew.”

  I swallowed and sat down across from her, eyeing the documents. “Tell me everything.”

  “First contact happened in the seventies,” she said matter-of-factly. “We aren’t sure how long the Denzans were watching Earth before they made themselves known. The way they work, probably a long time. They have a strict policy of noninterference when it comes to primitive societies.”

  I scratched the back of my neck. “We’re a primitive society now?”

  “To the Denzans, any species that hasn’t achieved interstellar travel is primitive.”

  “Kind of a high bar,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  My eyes combed across the documents. A star chart that mapped systems beyond the Milky Way. A bunch of partly redacted medical reports from some organization called the Consulate—my mom would tell me more about her old coworkers later. Blurry satellite images of what could be UFOs or flocks of geese. Basically, the kind of stuff you might find taped to the walls and connected by strings in a conspiracy theorist’s basement.

  “The Denzans recruited twelve astronauts from around the world. Turns out, they needed humanity’s help.”

  “With what?”

  “Fighting a war.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “If we’re a bunch of dumb cavemen, what could we do for some highly advanced ETs?”

  My mom hesitated. “I guess our aptitude for violence is unique in the universe.”

  That seemed a bit like a dodge, but before I could follow up, she pushed an old photograph toward me. Three people—two men and a woman—posed together in their flight suits. The woman was pretty, with a mane of curly blond hair, the sleeves of her suit rolled up to show off her biceps. The man next to her was short and hairy with a devilish grin. And, next to him, a generic handsome dude with a flask poking out of his pocket. They stood in front of a ship like nothing I’d ever seen on Earth—sleek, circular, floating without any visible propulsion. The photo could’ve been a still shot from some old science fiction movie.

  I blinked and took a closer look at the All-American on the end. “Whoa. Is that Grandpa?”

  My mom nodded. “One of the First Twelve.”

  The man in the picture was so much healthier than the withered skeleton I barely remembered from dimly lit hospital rooms. For years, my mom had claimed the government killed him, that some experiment had made him deathly ill. Apparently, that experiment was traveling to an alien planet.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “What really happened?”
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  “He went to Denza when I was little. For the longest time, I thought he was just some deadbeat. That was until the Denzans recruited me, too. My dad was a hero to them, so I guess they figured I’d be a safe bet.” She snorted. “I went to work for them—here, on Earth—after your grandpa returned. He’d helped win their war, and his reward was illness. They call it the Wasting. A disease that affected all of the astronauts that tried to come home. A gradual breakdown at the cellular level that they can’t find a cure for. And yet the Denzans are still recruiting humans, just in case we ever need to fight for them again. They’ll want to send you, if they ever find us.”

  “The war made him sick?” I asked.

  “Coming back to Earth triggered the Wasting. No one’s sure exactly why. Maybe something from the war. Maybe the change in atmosphere. Maybe space travel. Their very DNA breaks down. The body can’t support itself, a slow disintegration over years . . .” Her eyes were dark as she spoke, staring down at the picture of her dad. She cleared her throat. “To their credit, I guess, the Denzans didn’t completely abandon your grandfather and the others. They sent some of their best minds to Earth to try to cure them. They failed, but . . .”

  “But?”

  My mom looked up at me with a sad smile. “But that’s how I met your father.”

  We grabbed our bug-out bags and sprinted into the cover of the railyard. I tripped over a wooden slat that had come loose on one of the train tracks, and Mom caught me firmly under the armpit, pushing me onward. She had her gun out, cocked and ready.

  We reached a metal fence, not realizing until it was too late that it was topped with coils of barbed wire.

  “Which way?” I asked, peeking again at the sky.

  My mom pointed farther down the tracks, where dozens of rusty boxcars sat idle.

  “There!”

  Our sneakers crunched over gravel. Maybe we’d get lucky and one of these trains would start moving. They all looked broken down, but I wasn’t ready to give up on a hobo-style escape. I was about to suggest as much to my mom when I spotted him.

  A thin man in a trench coat watched us from atop the nearest train car. We were running right toward him. I skidded to a stop.