Ashfall Legacy Page 4

  “What are you doing?” my mom snapped, overtaking me.

  I pointed. “We’ve got company.”

  In an instant, my mom leveled her gun at the shadowy figure.

  “Get away from us or I’ll shoot,” my mom called out, her voice hard. There was no doubt in my mind that she meant it.

  The man cocked his head in response. Finding himself down-barrel didn’t seem to be an immediate cause for alarm.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you, Beth,” the figure replied, using my mom’s first name. “Well, maybe a little bit. It’s been a frustrating ten years.”

  The gun trembled in my mom’s hand. “Tycius? Is that you?”

  “Long time, no see.”

  Tycius leaped down from atop the train. That was a fifteen-foot drop, and it barely registered for the guy; he hardly even bent his knees when he landed. Weird, because he didn’t look like the athletic type. He was a middle-aged man with slicked-back black hair and a five-o’clock shadow that spread down his throat. He wore a trench coat with the collar flipped up, his hands shoved in the pockets. He looked like one of those hard-boiled detectives from a black-and-white movie.

  “You look like an idiot,” my mom said.

  “Really? I thought this worked for me,” he replied, sounding sincerely wounded.

  It was more than just the inappropriate grace of Tycius’s movements that seemed off. The more I looked at him, the harder it got to bring him into focus. He was a ghostly shimmer in the moonlit railyard. My mind went back to Dungeon’s final level, where secrets lurked beneath the surface. It was like there was another layer to Tycius that I couldn’t quite see.

  “I can’t believe the Consulate would send you,” my mom said. “I can’t believe you would accept.”

  Tycius snorted. “Who else but me?”

  “Some of your FBI goons.”

  “It’s been years since we used them,” Tycius replied. “They asked too many questions. Fact is, the Consulate likes to pretend you and the boy don’t exist. They figure if you were going to go public, you would’ve done it already. They’re satisfied they’ve penetrated enough of the media to bury any publicity. At worst, the kid’s autopsy gets passed around the dark web by the usual yahoos. In other words, who cares?”

  Who cares? I didn’t expect to hear that from someone who’d been doggedly pursuing us for the last decade. I glanced at my mom who seemed equally taken aback.

  “Bullshit,” my mom said.

  “No bullshit. The Consulate was happy that you disappeared,” Tycius replied, bitterness in his voice. “I’m the only one still looking, Beth. You’ve been my shame to carry for the last ten years.”

  I edged forward, squinting at this out-of-place detective, still trying to figure out what exactly seemed so off about him. “Who are you?” I asked, finally able to get a word in. “Mom, who is he?”

  “You don’t remember me?” Tycius asked, then shook his head. “No, of course you wouldn’t. You were in diapers the last time I saw you. And I didn’t look like this.” He grimaced—no, actually, that was what a smile looked like on his hangdog face. “I’m your uncle, Sydney.”

  “My . . .” I turned to my mom. “You told me all our family was dead.”

  “Dead? That’s pretty rude, Beth.” Tycius rubbed his stubbly cheek, shaking his head in wonderment. “Meeting you, Syd, finding out what you look like, getting to talk to you—it’s what’s kept me going. Do you know how many video games I implanted puzzles in for you to find? I never gave up on you. Never stopped searching.”

  “Um.” I glanced at my mom, not sure what to say. “Well, here I am.”

  “Chasing,” my mom corrected Tycius, stepping in front of me. “You never stopped chasing us.”

  “How could I?” Tycius asked. “With Marcius still lost out there?”

  “He’s dead,” my mom snapped. “Accept that and move on with your life. Leave us alone.”

  “He’s alive,” Tycius countered, his voice hardening with conviction. “He’s alive, and Sydney can find him.”

  My dad. They were talking about my dad.

  “Mom, come on,” I said. I put my hand on her forearm, trying to ease the weapon down. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

  “No,” she whispered, and there was suddenly something wild in her eyes, like a cornered animal. She shook loose from me and sneered at Tycius. “I do know he’s dead. Because if he were alive, Marcius would’ve come back to us, you bastard.”

  She pulled the trigger.

  I flinched at the bang. It was thunderous in the empty railyard.

  As soon as the gun went off, a silver mass appeared at chest level in front of Tycius. It looked almost like Tycius had opened a silk umbrella, a rippling octagon of quicksilver floating before him. It soundlessly absorbed the bullet.

  “Mom, don’t—!” I yelled as she prepared to take another shot.

  The mass zipped through the air toward my mom. It looked like some cheap Halloween decoration, like a paper ghost on an invisible wire. The silver blob enveloped my mom’s hand before she could fire, covering her from barrel to wrist, sticking to her like glue.

  “Damn it,” she said, deflated.

  My first reaction was to lunge forward and pry at the thing on my mom’s hand. I didn’t really appreciate her hair-trigger temper or how she’d tried to gun down an uncle I’d only just met, but I wasn’t about to let some magic goo eat her arm. The stuff was cool to the touch and completely smooth, hugging tight enough to her skin that I couldn’t work my fingernails into the seam.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled. “Is it dissolving your flesh?”

  “No, I’m fine, it’s—ow, Syd, you’re scratching me.”

  Relieved that she wasn’t dying, I took a step back and glared at her.

  “Jesus, Mom, you tried to kill him!”

  “Not really,” Tycius interrupted, coming closer. “She knew she couldn’t. Your mom, I think, was just expressing her emotions in a way very common to her people. Right, Beth?”

  Her nostrils flared, but the wildness had gone out of my mom’s eyes, leaving behind a deep sadness and resignation. Her shoulders sagged. “Piss off, Ty.”

  I couldn’t resist once again poking the wrap on my mom’s hand. “What the hell is that thing?”

  “Portable bodyguard,” Tycius replied offhandedly. He said something in a language I couldn’t understand, and the quicksilver unfurled from around my mom. Her hand was perfectly fine. In fact, her skin glowed like it’d been freshly moisturized. But the gun was bent back on itself, crumpled like it was made of tinfoil. She tossed it aside. The portable bodyguard shrank down to a tennis-ball-size orb and floated back to Tycius, disappearing into his trench coat.

  I stared at him. The closer he got, the more I could sense something wrong with his appearance. It was like a mirage, blurring at the edges.

  I blinked. “Wait a second,” I said. “My uncle on whose side?”

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I was a little slow on the uptake there.

  He pressed a trigger hidden inside his coat and the hologram—that’s what it was, I realized, a really advanced projection—flickered off.

  I had never seen a Denzan in person before. Only my father in my recurring dream, and the finer details there always escaped me.

  Tycius was tall, his limbs long and thin, his torso narrow and tapered. His true face was a rounded triangle—a broad forehead, high cheekbones, and a pointed chin. His hair looked like mine after Mom’s attempted drowning; the dark emerald tendrils started far back on his scalp and writhed in every direction, like tall grass blown by a breeze. Ty’s eyes were almond-shaped and huge, colorless, shadowy pits. He didn’t have a nose so much as a bump with two slits, his granite-colored skin smooth and flat above his small, thin-lipped mouth.

  Tycius smiled at me. “Whose side do you think?”

  5

  When I was twelve, after Miami, where my mom told me everything—or, well, it turned out, almost everything—I
went through a phase where I stared up at the sky a lot. Gazing into space. Trying to imagine what was out there.

  There was part of me—a half of me, really—that was from a place beyond. I’d always had this feeling like I was searching for something, but I’d chalked that up to us being on the road so much, never settling down, never getting a normal life. Now I realized there was more to it. I was addicted to sci-fi novels. Ship battles and alien warriors and laser swords—that was cool shit. But maybe I liked that stuff so much because, without even realizing it, I was drawn toward the unknown.

  I couldn’t tell any of that to my mom. She painted a picture of the Denzans as cold and dispassionate, looking down on humanity as we destroyed our own planet, unwilling to help. They’d used my grandfather until the day he died. My dad had disappeared while searching for a way to cure the Wasting, and, according to my mom, the rest of his people didn’t even care. Our little rebellion, my parents called me. Just by existing—a cross-species person—I violated the Denzan policy against noninterference with so-called primitive races. If they found us, Mom was convinced the Denzans would want to take me back to their planet and we’d never see each other again. I didn’t want to leave her all alone.

  And yet a part of me was still so, so curious.

  We drove north from Florida. The plan was Kansas. I’d become Robert Ritter there. I remember the sky was blue and cloudless and I hung my arm out the window. It was one of those days when you could already see the moon in the afternoon.

  “Can you tell me about him?” I asked out of the blue. “About my dad?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything.”

  My mom thought for a moment, then chuckled at some private memory. “Marcius was so stubborn. He worked so hard. I was the same way, I suppose. We butted heads over the silliest things. When we met, he was just discovering Earth culture and had the worst taste in books—dime-store Westerns and novels about the Mafia. He hated the term ‘Martians’ as a catchall for extraterrestial life, so I started calling him Mars for short. I was always trying to prove that I was as smart as them—the Denzans—that humanity wasn’t all primitives. He never thought that, though. Not your father.”

  “He could still be out there, couldn’t he?” I asked, gazing up at the sky. “We’re so good at hiding. Maybe he came back and couldn’t find us.”

  My mom’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “He’d find us,” she said. “That’s what your dad was best at.”

  We drove through what used to be a town but was now reduced to scattered piles of brick, only the foundations of homes left standing. There were pictures of missing people stapled to telephone poles that had been sheared in half, not a soul around to look at them. Tornados had ripped through this part of the Midwest last summer. The weather was getting worse and worse every year.

  “Why didn’t you guys just go back to his planet?” I asked.

  “We talked about it, especially once we had you,” my mom replied. “I didn’t want to abandon Earth, though, and neither did your father. He’d made a vow to help the astronauts who returned home, to cure the Wasting. The Denzans take their vows seriously. Your grandpa had died years before, but a couple of the others were still hanging on. Your dad had some far-out ideas. He’d located an unexplored planet that he thought might have answers. Something about a lost species that had evolved to thrive in different conditions . . .” My mom shook her head, like the whole thing was a fairy tale. “God, we were both so naïve. Thinking we could change things.”

  An unexplored planet. The words sent a tingle down my spine. I wondered if that was how my dad felt before he left. I peered up at the sky again, imagining how much bigger my existence could be than just our crappy car and these small-town hideouts.

  “Maybe he found what he was looking for,” I suggested. “Maybe . . .”

  “No,” my mom said firmly. “I’m sorry, Sydney, but no. Hope is a distraction. What your father was looking for—a way to help humanity—the Denzans didn’t want it to be found. They made sure he’d never come back.” She rubbed her forearm where her scars were. “They made sure we’d never be able to find him.”

  “I love places like this,” Tycius declared as we walked into a twenty-four-hour diner attached to a highway rest stop. “The gigantic menus, so full of possibilities. And yet most of those options are barely edible, the cooks only capable of a few flashes of competence. It’s so human.”

  I gave Tycius a look. He’d reactivated his holographic projector and appeared human again. There were dark circles around his eyes, but the pupils shone happily as he eyed the pies in the spinning dessert case.

  “Do you program your face to look like that? Or does your tech, like, sync your Denzan expressions to human mode?” I asked, wondering if he was really that haggard or if it was all for show.

  “Both,” he replied, winking at me. “The face is based on Bogart.”

  “Who?”

  “Humphrey Bogart?” When I gave him a blank look, he turned to my mom. “I thought you’d at least be eductating the boy.”

  My mom responded with an icy look. She’d barely said two words since we left the railyard, all of us packed into the front seat of our truck, which Tycius was able to get working again thanks to a quick battery jump from a device he kept in his pocket. My mom drove with her hands strangling the steering wheel. Even now, I could see her assessing the diner’s windows and exits, maybe considering one last-ditch escape effort.

  The diner had been my idea. I wanted to hear what my uncle had to say. We’d all sit down together, eat some breakfast for dinner, and hash out the family secrets.

  A gumdrop-shaped waitress approached us. “You folks can take that booth by the window.”

  “Here’s looking at you, kid,” Tycius said and tipped an imaginary hat. The waitress giggled, mostly out of bewilderment.

  She’d never know that was an extraterrestrial badly flirting with her.

  The little diner was populated by a couple burly long-haul truckers, hunched over the coffees that would get them through the night. They had no clue there was basically an interplanetary summit happening right under their noses. I almost wished that Ty would turn his cloak off, not to freak everybody out, but so I could keep staring at him like I had back at the railyard.

  My first Denzan, live and in person. It was mind-blowing and frightening and awesome. It’s one thing to know about aliens, to have a fuzzy vision of one of them in your dreams. It’s entirely different to actually see one. It’s like—I know about whales, I’ve seen them in nature documentaries, but I’ve never been on a boat and had one of those behemoths surface alongside me. Tycius was person-size, but he still made me feel like my universe had just gotten bigger.

  I slid into the booth next to my mom, Tycius on the other side. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.

  “I understand your excitement,” Tycius said, eyeing me back. “But can you maybe stop staring quite so much? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

  “Okay, dude,” I said, leaning back. “I’m sure you were totally chill when you met your first alien.”

  “No, actually. I asked a Vulpin diplomat if I could touch her mane. She allowed this indiscretion.” Ty closed one of his eyes. “Later, I learned that she’d laced her fur with a hallucinogen just in case she encountered such ignorance. For a week, I thought I was a tree.”

  “Cool story,” I said. “What the hell is a Vulpin? Are those the guys you’re at war with?”

  “We aren’t at war with anyone.” Ty glanced at my mom. “How much have you told him?”

  Everything. That’s what I hoped she’d say. I really wanted her to have been honest with me, at least after Miami and the bathtub incident.

  My mom sighed, looking away from me. “He knows enough.”

  A bitter lump of disappointment formed in my throat. Of course there were still secrets. Hell, I was sitting across the table from one of them.

  Tycius patiently
laced his fingers in front of him. “Tell me, Syd, what do you know about the universe and your family’s place in it?”

  I took a deep breath. This was like a quiz and I wanted to impress him. “You’re from Denza, a planet way more advanced than ours. But you guys aren’t fighters, so you needed beefy humans to back you up in some war. You recruited my grandpa and a bunch of others. You won the war thanks to us. Then the humans tried to come home, but they got sick when they did. My dad, a Denzan, came here to try to cure the Wasting. He met my mom. Romance ensued, fast-forward through that part, thanks. I was born. My dad got a lead on a cure, but he disappeared. The other Denzans were happy about that because they don’t actually want to help humanity. They just want to use us, keeping humans around in case they need to win another fight.” I inhaled. “That’s what I know.”

  While I blitzed through my recap of the universe, Tycius slowly turned his gaze from me to my mom. She wouldn’t look at him, instead staring out the window at the parking lot.

  “First of all, it wasn’t simply some war,” Tycius said when I’d finished. “It was an unprovoked invasion of our planet.”

  “But not by those Vulpin guys who made you trip balls.”

  “No. The Vulpin are our allies.”

  My mom chuckled derisively at that, but I pressed on with my questions.

  “Goddamn, how many aliens are there?”

  “Including Denzans, there are six known species capable of interstellar travel,” Tycius replied. “And there are fourteen other life-forms that have achieved a level of sentience that we project will one day allow them to reach the stars. Including humanity.”

  “That . . .” I scratched the back of my neck. “That’s a lot of aliens.”

  “The species who attacked us are called the Etherazi,” Ty continued. “They are monsters whose very appearance is toxic to my people. In a war, each side wants something—there can be dialogue and peace. Not with the Etherazi. They wanted nothing but destruction and chaos. Our entire civilization would’ve been wiped away if we hadn’t made contact with humanity. Your grandfather and the others were great heroes, Syd. They’re worshipped on Denza. Legends. After all they did for us, to learn about the Wasting—it broke our peoples’ hearts. Your father and I, along with many others, came here to do whatever we could to help.”