Ashfall Legacy Page 5

  I could sense the reverence in his voice when he talked about my grandfather. It was still hard for me to imagine the disintegrating old man I’d glimpsed as a child was some kind of intergalactic bad-ass.

  I thought back to the brief scuffle in the railyard. Tycius possessed technology that could swallow up bullets and fry cars. It didn’t make any sense that his people would need humans to fight for them.

  “Not to dog grandpa or anything, but I never understood this part,” I said. “What could a bunch of humans do for aliens that have like lightsabers? Those are real, right?”

  Ty’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Light what?”

  I waved a hand back and forth through the air and made a womp-womp noise.

  Tycius glanced at my mom. “He doesn’t know . . . ?”

  She shook her head, massaging her forehead so she didn’t have to look at me.

  “Sydney, humans are the most dangerous species in the galaxy,” Tycius said with a completely straight face. “Away from Earth, they are nearly invulnerable to harm and possess unrivaled physical strength. Just twelve of them fought off the Etherazi and saved countless lives.”

  I blinked. “Oh.”

  At that exact moment, our waitress trundled over. “Sorry for the wait, folks. Ready to order?”

  I caught myself staring at our waitress. This lady was the apex predator of the galaxy, apparently. If given the chance, she could toss off that dirty apron and go battle space monsters. I looked down at my own narrow bicep and surreptitiously flexed. There were multiple times I’d eaten plain peanut butter sandwiches because I couldn’t get a new jelly jar open.

  My mom ordered a black coffee. A Greek salad for Ty.

  “The lumberjack breakfast, please,” I said. “I need to bulk up.”

  As soon as the waitress was gone, I braced both my hands on the table. “So you’re telling me that on Earth I’m Clark Kent, but up there I could be . . . ?”

  “This is why I didn’t tell you,” my mom said sharply, finally looking at me. “These promises of unlimited power. What teenage boy wouldn’t want to run off to be a hero? But there are sacrifices. The strength changes you, alters your DNA. Coming back to Earth causes those changes to unravel. The strength leaves, and your body can’t handle it. That’s the Wasting. This planet is our home, Sydney. It’s where we belong. Your grandfather wanted to come back to be with his family, his people—and it killed him.”

  “I’m only half-human, though,” I said quietly. “Maybe I’d only get half, uh, wasted?”

  “Our projections do show that the effects would be slower to progress on a hybrid,” Tycius offered. “But, ultimately, still terminal.”

  One of the truckers at the counter coughed raggedly into his shoulder. I glanced over at him, then at our waitress, who was currently leaned against the register, stretching out her sore calves.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like anyone in here would choose superstrength and invulnerability over . . . over this.”

  My mom shook her head. I could tell she was disappointed in me, although I couldn’t understand why she would be so pro-Earth. As we traveled North America, all she ever did was complain about how screwed up our planet had gotten.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a narrowed-eyed glance at Tycius. “It’s not like the Denzans are offering to build us an ark.”

  “But you’re still bringing humans to your planet, right?” I asked Tycius, trying to keep the hope out of my voice considering how it would probably offend my mom. “Even though your war—er, invasion—is over?”

  “Yes, of course. And they know, going in, that returning to Earth will be deadly,” Tycius replied. “There are now more than a thousand humans living on Denza or on ships in service of the Serpo Institute.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. “Space college?”

  “Essentially,” Tycius replied. “The Serpo Institute was founded on Denza. Its goal is to foster understanding and cooperation among all species throughout the galaxy, to protect those beings who cannot yet protect themselves, and to explore and map the endless Vastness of space. The institute accepts only the best and brightest from Denza and our allies. Interspecies crews train together and eventually graduate to serve on exploratory vessels in the institute’s fleet. Humans are an important part of that.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back in the booth, trying to think this all through. On Denza, I’d be stronger than what was humanly possible on Earth. I could be part of some real-world Starfleet shit, scanning fuzzy little aliens for fungal infections and getting into ray-gun fights. My mom had kept all that from me, preferring instead to teach me college math from secondhand textbooks and sending me off on the occasional monthslong stretch in a public school whenever I started getting too mopey. There was a whole life—a brand-new identity, with no need for alliteration—out there waiting for me. All those years on the run. I suddenly felt like I’d been cheated.

  Even considering all that, when I looked at her, I couldn’t feel any anger toward my mom. The way she slouched in the booth, staring at her own reflection in the window instead of making eye contact—I’d never seen her so defeated. For her, this was the end she’d spent all those years running from. It hadn’t come in some explosive confrontation but had crept up on her in a sad little diner.

  “Why did you quit working with the Denzans?” I asked my mom, wanting to understand her side. “Is this all because of Dad?”

  “No,” my mom said, then went quiet as the waitress dropped off her coffee. “I worked for the Consulate first to save your grandfather and the others like him, and then because I thought the Denzans would eventually get off their asses and help us. They have the technology to save our planet. All they have to do is give it to us.”

  Ty’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an oversimplification.”

  I turned to Tycius, feeling like the moderator at an interstellar presidential debate. “You have noticed that our planet is kind of a mess, though, right?”

  “I’ve been here for more than a decade, Sydney. Of course I’ve noticed humanity’s slow murder of their home.”

  “You’ve got a zero-emissions spaceship that can shut down cars with beams of light,” I replied. “You’ve got to have the technology to help with, like, climate change.”

  Tycius unflinchingly met my eyes. “I’ll be the first to admit that the Denzan Senate moves slowly, but they haven’t ignored humanity’s plight. The electric car, for instance. The Denzans leaked that technology to your people some forty years ago, and what happened? Your corporations buried it.”

  “Is that true?” I asked my mom.

  My mom sighed and squeezed the bridge of her nose, ignoring me—which meant that Tycius was telling the truth. “Is this really why you’ve stalked us for the last decade, Ty? To rehash these same old arguments?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then cut to the chase, would you? Get to your offer. Tell my son he’s got a bright future at the Serpo Institute. Tell him he can leave this dying planet behind . . .”

  “Beth . . . ,” Tycius said with a sad smile. “It’s so much more than that.”

  He reached into his trench coat and produced a small wooden box, sliding it across the table to me. Of course, I recognized the case right away; I’d seen it a hundred times in my dreams. It was the one that contained my dad’s ring, which my mom had told me we’d lost long ago. She obviously recognized the box too, because I heard her breath catch in her throat. She sat up a bit, more alert now, more coiled. Her hand gripped her fork like she might try to stab Ty.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked through her teeth.

  “You know where,” Tycius responded frankly. “Off the dead body of a Vulpin in Australia.”

  “So I did kill her,” my mom said. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Hold up,” I interrupted. “You killed an alien? In Australia?”

  My mom pointed her fork at Ty. “A Vulpin mercenary that h
is people sent.”

  “No,” Tycius said. “Not true.”

  “The Vulpin stole that from me,” my mom said, looking down at the ring box. “From us.”

  “Open it,” Ty told me. “But be careful. Don’t let anyone see.”

  I nodded and cracked the box just enough to catch a glimpse of the blue glow of the cosmos, suspended there in the ring’s gemstone. Exactly the way I’d dreamed it. My mom’s shoulder pressed against mine as she, too, peeked into the box. She clapped a hand over her mouth to suppress a noise—something between a scream and a sob—like nothing I’d ever heard from her.

  “The light,” she said, her voice brittle, shaky with disbelief and something else. “The light hasn’t gone out.”

  That was hope in her voice.

  “Because he’s alive,” Tycius said, focusing on me now. “That ring is what we call a cosmological tether. It’s tied to a beacon implanted in your father’s brain. If Marcius were dead, this ring would go dark,” he said. “But it hasn’t. All these years and he’s still out there. Waiting for us. Waiting for you.”

  6

  What did I remember about the night we left Australia? The incident with the dingo, when my mom got those scars on her arm. I was only five years old then. I’d buried that memory, choosing to accept my mom’s version.

  My mind protecting me from stuff I wasn’t ready to deal with.

  I remembered waking up to the sound of growling. It came through the wall that I shared with my parents’ room. The snarling almost seemed to form words.

  “I want the boy . . . I’m here for the boy . . .”

  That had to be my imagination.

  Broken glass crunched. Bodies slammed against the wall, vibrating my bed frame.

  I don’t know where I found the courage to get out of bed. It felt almost like I was on rails. I heard a sharp cry of pain from my mom and couldn’t help but press forward.

  Then a muffled pop. A gunshot.

  I peeked in from the hallway. My mom wrestled on the floor with a furry shape, the creature clawing and snapping at her. The beast’s claws tore up our carpet where they missed my mom.

  Pop. Another gunshot.

  The monster pinning down my mom recoiled and rolled away from her. My mom’s pistol gleamed in the moonlight. She’d fired a round point-blank into the beast’s belly.

  The creature lurched toward the window and dove out. My mom sprang to her feet after it, firing two more shots into the night.

  “Give it back!” she yelled out the window. Her knees bent like she might hurdle out the window herself. “Give—!”

  “M-mom?” I stammered.

  She spun around and saw me there. Hiding her gun in the back of her jeans, she knelt down in front of me. Dark blood dripped down from her forearm onto the carpet.

  “It’s okay, Syd,” she said. “It’s okay. A bad dream.”

  I rubbed tears out of my eyes. “What was that thing?”

  “A wild dog,” my mom said quickly. “A dingo.”

  Strange. I could’ve sworn that the thing attacking my mom had run off into the night on two legs.

  Like I said, the mind has a way of rationalizing the impossible.

  “We can’t stay here tonight,” my mom said, standing up. She put a hand on my shoulder, guiding me out of her bedroom. “Come on. Let’s pack some things.”

  When we left that night, with the first-ever version of my go-bag slung over my shoulder, I thought eventually we’d come back to our little house in the outback. It all seemed like we were just on a grand adventure. Eventually, we’d go home and Dad would be there waiting for us. It wasn’t until later—when we’d already escaped to America—that Mom told me we couldn’t go back. My dad was gone. There were people after us.

  A few years later, she’d reveal to me that I wasn’t entirely human.

  Against all of that—the running and the ever-changing identities and the constant threat of enemies lurking in the shadows—the monster in the outback seemed to me like something I’d partially dreamed up. Sure, my mom had scars on her arm that proved it happened, but that rampaging dingo was ultimately just a scary Australia story.

  Until it wasn’t.

  My mom rubbed the faded scars that crisscrossed her forearm. “It was a Vulpin. She broke into our home and found . . .” She looked at my dad’s ring box. I’d closed it up so our waitress didn’t spot the glow when she brought our food, but I kept my hand resting atop it. “She would’ve taken you, too, if I hadn’t—”

  “Shot her,” I said.

  My mom nodded.

  I tapped the box. “She stole this.”

  “I couldn’t go chasing after her, not with you. I couldn’t risk that,” my mom replied. “Your father was supposed to return months before. No one from the Consulate would tell me anything, but I knew something must have gone wrong. I spent every night staring at that ring, Sydney. Waiting for the light to go out.”

  “It never did,” I said quietly.

  My mom opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and sat there like that, her shoulders shaking. She’d given up on my dad to keep me safe. At some point in the last ten years, she’d decided that he was dead. He had to be, she always told me. If he were alive, my dad would’ve come back.

  She was wrong. And now she knew it.

  “You shouldn’t have run,” Tycius said coolly.

  “A Vulpin broke into my house, stole my husband’s cosmological tether, and tried to kidnap my son,” my mom replied, her voice hoarse. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “The Consulate would’ve protected you.”

  “Or maybe the Consulate sent her,” my mom replied. “I know how you Denzans hate getting your hands dirty.”

  “They would never—”

  “Please, Ty,” my mom interrupted. “Tell me what happened to Mars.”

  “Tell us,” I put in, tired of being left out of all the family secrets.

  “Your father believed that he’d found a cure for the Wasting,” Tycius began. “He commissioned an exploratory mission on the ISV—interstellar space vessel—Clarity. Your father served on the Clarity before coming to Earth. He was friends with the crew. They filed a mission plan with the Serpo Institute. But, at some point, they veered off course. This wasn’t necessarily unusual for an exploration; travel between uncharted systems can be a tricky business, but . . .”

  I found myself leaning forward. My mom was too, I realized. She didn’t know these details either.

  “Two weeks after they were supposed to have reached their desitnation, the ISV Clarity sent a message back to Serpo command. But it wasn’t a message, it was an attack. A pulse of concentrated data that scrambled our archives and erased their flight path, essentially rendering us unable to track them. Someone on the crew wanted the Clarity to stay lost.”

  “Sabotage,” my mom whispered.

  “Most of the Clarity’s crew was equipped with cosmological tethers,” Tycius continued, nodding at the ring box. “All of them went dark. The crew was presumed dead except for . . .”

  “Except for my dad,” I said.

  “Australian park rangers found the body of that Vulpin and recovered the cosmological tether,” Tycius said gently. “The Consulate covered it up, yes, but you have to know, Beth, that we would never send someone to hurt you and Syd. I’d never stand for it.”

  My mom couldn’t speak, so I asked the question I knew she’d want answered.

  “Then who did?”

  “We don’t know,” Tycius responded. “Nonhumans aren’t allowed to visit Earth without approval from the Consulate. That Vulpin managed to get here without our knowledge. There was an investigation afterward, but we hit a dead end. We don’t know who she was working for or what her plan was if she got you and the cosmological tether.” He paused. “But when we go looking for your father, I bet we’ll find out.”

  When we go looking. Not if.

  “Why haven’t you
already gone looking for him?” I asked, tapping the ring box. “You’ve had this for like ten years . . .”

  “Before he left, Marcius locked his tether. He granted access to only one person. That’s you, Sydney.”

  I blinked, then turned to my mom. “Why would he do that? I was just a kid when he left.”

  My mom shook her head. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me that.” She sighed. “Marcius could be paranoid. Maybe he thought a five-year-old was the only person he could trust.”

  “I have a standing arrangement with a captain at the institute,” Tycius continued. “You and I will join her crew. You’ll be enrolled at the Serpo Institute to study and learn, but, when the time is right, we will use her ship to go searching for your father.”

  I leaned back, hugging myself. I felt a bit like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Who is this captain you’ve got in your pocket?” my mom asked, hitting Tycius with the practical questions that I couldn’t or didn’t know to ask.

  “Marie Reno.”

  The name didn’t ring any bells for me, but my mom wrinkled her nose like she’d smelled something rotten. “And the institute authorized this mission of yours? The Denzan Senate?”

  Tycius hesitated. “No,” he said finally. “It’s off the record.”

  My mom’s eyes widened. “Wow, Tycius, a decade goes by and suddenly you’re a rule breaker.”

  “I want to find him, Beth. I need to know what happened,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  While they talked, I stared down at my untouched plate, the two sunny-side up eggs, the yolks bright orange and gelatinous, flanked by greasy hash browns, pancakes, and two slabs of sausage. I suddenly felt queasy. My entire world had been turned upside down in the last twenty-four hours. Breakfast for dinner now seemed like an awful idea.

  I was being offered a chance to go to space, experience the wonders of the galaxy as only a handful of human beings had, and enjoy godlike power while I was there. I could see where my father was from. I could find him.