I type the letters in slowly, R A V E N B A I L E Y, and hit enter. The computer hums as its prehistoric processor retrieves the right file, the screen lighting up with blue and white columns.
At first I think I’ve done something wrong, because instead of a nearly blank page with just the few details I entered about Raven, what comes up is a full page with multiple connections linked to Raven’s entry.
“Holy…”
The boxes pop up one by one, each with a line connecting them to Raven. Her mom; her stepdad, Jack; an aunt on Quadra Island; a few cousins. All added to the registry since the last time I checked.
And all alive.
My hands shake as I open a text box so I can leave a note on her listing. Jesus, what do I say? Glancing up at the clock, I see it’s nearly time to find the patrol truck and go back to the camp.
My name is Xander Liu, I type quickly. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Raven’s friend from the dojo and camp. We survived for ten months after the invasion, but…
I press my eyes closed for a moment, just letting my brain replay the scene for the millionth time. Blood pulsing out of Raven’s stomach. Liam dead in a heap nearby. Topher walking away from her, from us, because I don’t think his heart could take it.
And August, a Nahx. August holding her and trembling so hard I think I felt the mountain shake. The Nahx can cry, and they can grieve. If people knew that, I wonder if things would be different.
… I was with Raven when she died, I type. If you want, I can tell you about it.
RAVEN
It seems I pass a thousand years like this, floating alone and silent in a sea of nothingness, with only thoughts and remorse to keep me company. The first sign that something might be changing is a faint sense of danger, as though I can no longer trust my thoughts, that perhaps they might be a threat to me. And as soon as that coalesces into its own coherent idea, I analyze it and prepare.
Some of my thoughts might be neither real nor memories, I realize. I need to account for that. So I do. I steel myself against whatever my mind can cook up, and as soon as some unknowable measure deems me strong enough, he appears.
August.
Standing before me in full armor, as tall and graceful and intimidating and mysterious as he ever was. And beautiful. If I had a beating heart, it would flutter at the sight of him.
“I’ve missed you so much,” I say, but no sound comes out. My words are just neurons firing in the dark tangle of my brain. August doesn’t appear to notice me. He turns his face up, and the sky appears. A broken sky.
“No…” I feel myself say it more than hear it. “NO!” Then I’m screaming it because I know what is coming. My weightless nothingness becomes heavy, but rather than sinking down I’m being pulled—upward, out in every direction, apart—as though all my cells are tearing themselves in two.
The desire to speak coils around me like a tremulous vine until I feel my very atoms vibrate. “August, run.” It comes out as a whisper, though I try to scream. “Run away.…”
The shattered sky falls and I open up, splitting, and a rift spreads from my body and mind to the ground, the earth beneath us, the air; everything cracks open, revealing the shadows and death under the surface, the abyss behind the veil of life. The crack spreads along the ground, a jagged fissure creeping toward August, who remains still, as though unmoved or unknowing. Not real, my thoughts remind me, soothingly. It doesn’t make a difference.
“Move…” I say, but my voice is fragmented too, gaping wide open, tearing down through me. “August!”
The fissure takes him, streaking up one leg to split open his armor through his thigh, his groin, his abdomen, chest, neck, and finally his mask and helmet, which bisect as neatly as a nutshell. There is nothing inside. Only smoke.
I try to scream as the smoke pours out of him, billowing over the fractured world and filling me, choking me. Choking…
My body seems to inflate like a balloon animal—head, torso, legs, feet, arms—as I’m launched out of the dream. I feel pressure on my face, as though someone is forcing something into my mouth.
I try to pull my head away but the grip on my jaw intensifies. My eyes shoot open. A dark shape looms over me, with a field of gray behind it. Now my heart pops to life, pumping hard enough to make my ribs ache. I try to yell but whatever is in my mouth prevents it. As I writhe, the dark shape moves, and something in my throat slithers out, making me cough and convulse. The dark figure ignores me, moving to the side.
Nahx. It’s a Nahx. It moves over someone next to me, a boy, pushing him onto his back. A dull gray light from a featureless night sky illuminates the Nahx as it pries the boy’s mouth open. His head flops to the side, facing me.
“T… T…” I struggle to find the word, the boy’s name. It’s rumbling somewhere, hidden until it’s as if I drive a bolt of rage through a wall and it crumbles and suddenly the name is there, along with every other thing I ever knew. “Topher,” I say at last, but that’s wrong. The other name comes to me instantly, even though I know it’s impossible. “Tucker… Tucker!” Everything rushes back with that word.
It’s Tucker. Is this real? How can it be Tucker?
His body moves, his chest expanding as the Nahx inflates his lungs with a small pump. But his eyes remain closed. The Nahx prods him, shaking him roughly.
“Wake up,” I say. “Wake up, Tucker.” I yank on the shackles binding me to him with a long wire attached at our wrists. “Come on, wake up. Wake up.”
The Nahx smacks him hard on the chest once, then again. After the third smack Tucker makes a noise—a muffled cough. Then he starts to twitch and writhe. The Nahx grabs the tube in his throat and tugs it out. He pulls Tucker up by the shirt. I slide over and support him, my arm behind his back.
“Wake up, please, wake up.”
Tucker convulses and explosively coughs out a spray of gray goo. His eyes open, widening as he looks down at his bare feet. The Nahx hisses and makes a hand gesture.
Good.
Yes. Signs. They speak with signs. I know this. I watch it… her walk a short distance away, noticing her wheezing breath. The night is deep and heavy but my vision is starting to clear as though the darkness is siphoning out of my eyes. The Nahx bends over another lifeless body, repeating the treatment with the tube and pump. She’s reviving someone else.
Tucker slumps into me, breathing heavily and moving slowly, testing his limbs. I put my free hand on his head, feeling the softness of his wavy brown hair, the stubble on his chin. He’s wearing the camp T-shirt and shorts we buried him in, and mud and grime are worn into his clothes, his hair, in between his toes and fingers. Even his lips are smeared with it. But he’s alive.
We buried him alive. Oh God.
I try to think back, to put events in the proper order, and find facts and images spread out in sharp formations, like a precisely disciplined army. The Nahx invaded. One of them killed Tucker with a dart. We buried him. We hid from the Nahx for a long time, and then…
“August,” I say. And before I have a chance to think it might not be wise, I yell out into the dark. “AUGUST! AUGUST?!”
The female Nahx turns from her patient, ten feet away. She hisses lightly, as though telling me to be quiet.
He’s not here. August is not here. If he were nearby, he would be at my side.
August saved my life, and then?
I look down at my body. I don’t recognize any of the clothes I’m wearing. A silky green dress over black jeans? A leather jacket? High lace-up boots? None of this is even familiar. I look around. I don’t think we’re in the mountains anymore. Reaching down, I feel the ground we sit on, gathering a handful to inspect.
It’s snow mixed with sand.
Where are we? A sandy desert covered with snow? Are we even on earth?
My thoughts are racing, which is something I should be used to, but this is nothing like my normal agitated mind. Everything has somewhere to go suddenly, as though a tangle of wires in an
old trunk has finally been untangled, and everything has been plugged in, and megawatts of electricity are surging through the wires, lighting up my brain like Las Vegas.
New clothes. Sand. Snow. Night. Tucker. Nahx. August…
The Nahx makes a noise, like a wheeze, but when I turn I realize it’s another Nahx, farther away. There are several, I now see, all of them bending over prone humans, trying to revive them. Above us, in the deep gray sky, dark ships appear, hissing as they descend.
I turn back to Tuck, who blinks and twitches his head from side to side. He looks down at our bound wrists, shaking them a bit.
I recognize the shackles. The Nahx carry them tucked away in their armor. They are light, with slightly sharp edges to deter pulling at them. The lightness doesn’t reflect their strength, though. I remember tugging and biting at them, one wrist shackled to a bedpost. The thought fills me fleetingly with rage, even though I know August was only trying to help me. He saved my life, again and again. August came for me at the base in the mountains. He was taken prisoner. He killed someone—Emily.
Emily. Who… yeah. Tucker was my boyfriend. He cheated on me with Emily. And lied about it, over and over. Emily is dead.
August killed her.
August and I escaped the base, and some people followed us. Who? Topher, of course. Of course Topher would come after me. And Xander. Xander hardly left Topher’s side if he could help it.
And Liam. Who is dead. Really dead.
A replay of that moment surfaces in my memories like it’s nothing to watch someone get shot in the head. I can see each individual droplet of blood spray as though it happened in super-slow-motion.
August blew Liam’s brains out.
And he did it for me. It was revenge after Liam shot me with an arrow, which went through my spine. I lay in August’s arms, my blood pouring out of me, barely able to move, an inferno of pain consuming me.
I died. I died in his arms.
So what am I doing here? Sometime between that moment and now August changed my clothes, dug up Tucker, and shackled me to him? Why?
Tucker tugs at the shackles connecting us. “Who are you?” he asks.
The flurry of reorganization in my thoughts seems to glitch. “I’m… you don’t know me?”
He shakes his head, looking down at his muddy clothes. It occurs to me how cold it is, and he’s only in a T-shirt and shorts. Even I’m not dressed for cold like this, but somehow it doesn’t seem to affect either of us. I feel my face and reach over to feel Tucker’s. We feel warm. Tucker puts his hand over mine, his gaze fixing on me.
“Oh, Tucker…” I can’t help saying it. I dreamed of this for so long, of seeing him alive and breathing again, and he looks almost exactly like I remember, beautiful and wild, his long matted hair falling into his dusky eyes, though he’s different too. I don’t know whether it’s the light, maybe the reflection of the sky on the snow, but he looks metallic, almost as though…
Behind us I hear coughing as another human is revived. And around us, others get shakily to their feet.
“Does anyone know what is going on?” I yell, and many faces turn to me, looking more annoyed than concerned that we’ve all just been raised from the dead on what appears to be another planet. There are Nahx everywhere, though they are moving slowly, dolefully, their wheezing, rattling breath and the crunch of their boots in the snow and sand the only sound.
“Does anyone know where we are?” More blank looks.
Suddenly a series of lights flashes on, illuminating the large ships now hovering low over the rolling terrain. I stand, pulling Tucker up with me. He tugs away, moving toward one of the lights as the other humans around us head in the same direction. As my eyes adjust to the glare I see that the lights are outlining the cargo bay doors of the large Nahx transports. Humans are obediently marching up the gangplanks in neat lines.
“Oh, hell no…” I turn and run in the other direction, barely aware that Tucker is still attached to me.
“Stop!” he says, tugging me back.
I keep running, Tucker dragging after me, until the crowds of humans start to thin. When we reach a small clearing Tucker leaps forward and tackles me. We roll down a dune, tangled in the wire that connects us, coming to a stop in a thicket of scrub.
“What are you doing?!” I say, shoving him off me.
“We need to go with the others.”
“Go? Go where? Do you even know?”
He looks lost for a moment. “No.”
“So you were just going to get on a spaceship and hope for the best?”
He stands with me, shaking snow and sand off his clothes and body. I can see he’s confused, but I know stubborn, know-it-all Tucker is in there somewhere, because rather than just going along with me, he’s going to argue.
“What was your idea, then? Just run off?”
“Damn right it is. You’ve lost the plot, obviously. You need to trust me.”
“No. I need to get on one of those ships.” His voice sounds hollow, like he’s medicated.
“With the Nahx? Do you even remember what the Nahx are?”
He looks back at the ships in the distance, at the Nahx herding the humans on board like cattle, and shakes his head a little.
“Aliens, Tucker,” I say, even though I know that’s not quite right. It seems simplest for now. “They are aliens. Look at me.”
He turns back to look at me, his eyebrows now furrowed with worry.
“We’re humans. They attacked our planet. You don’t remember that?”
He shakes his head, but I can see that his discomfort is growing, his chest rising and falling with deep, panicked breaths. I don’t really think we have time for a lesson in Nahx-era earth history, but if that’s what it takes to get him to come with me…
Suddenly a Nahx appears over the crest of a dune, their weapon raised.
“Oh no…” I spin to run in the other direction, but two more Nahx have us encircled. I edge us downhill. Out of the corner of my eye I can see darkness at the bottom of the hill. Trees? A forest? That would improve our chances of getting away.
The first Nahx leaps at me. A kind of shimmer flows at light speed through my cells and I react instinctively, spinning fast, the green dress swirling around me as I whack him in the head with a flying kick like I’ve never landed in my life. He goes sailing back, landing about ten feet away, his armor clattering as he falls. A kick like that would have knocked even a big human out cold, or killed him, but the Nahx rolls over with a hiss and jumps to his feet. When he lands he has sharp black Nahx knives in each hand. The defensive blades in his face quiver, one of them now bent by my boot into a permanent sneer.
“Oh fuck.”
Behind him more Nahx emerge over the rise. Seeing us, they barrel down the hill. Two of them have nasty-looking rifles—not dart rifles, something else.
“Run!” I scream.
This time Tucker doesn’t hesitate. We half run and half fall down the hill, dodging between two Nahx who come at us from either side. Seconds later we’re in the trees, running unbelievably fast, leaping over debris, the branches flying past us. I don’t have to time to think on this, on my newfound strength and speed and what it might mean. All I’m thinking of is getting away from the Nahx. And finding August. A small part of my brain, maybe just a few neurons, is thinking about August. Every other time I’ve gotten out of a fight with the Nahx alive it was partly because of him. I don’t understand why he’s not here.
Behind us Nahx weapons start to whine as I yank Tucker to the side, around trees, under branches, weaving back and forth to make us a moving target and hard to hit. There’s a whoomph sound and something flies past our heads, smacking into a tree in front of us. I was expecting a Nahx dart, the kind that dispatched and apparently preserved the thousands of humans we left on the dunes. But it’s not a dart; it’s a cylindrical metal object about the size of a soda can that smokes and rolls toward us.
“Ah shit, get down!”
&nbs
p; Tucker seems to blur momentarily. Then he grabs me around the waist and jumps a good thirty feet through the air as whatever the thing was explodes, blowing trees to smithereens, spraying snow and wood everywhere.
Nahx grenades. Fantastic.
We hit the ground running, not looking back until the trees clear and suddenly we’re on a huge expanse of flat white snow. And ice.
“Is this a lake?” I hesitate until the sound of the Nahx crashing through the trees makes me move again. Dragging Tucker over rocks and driftwood, we step onto the lake ice, finding it solid enough to keep running. I can’t see the other side, but how big can a lake be, anyway?
Another Nahx grenade thunks down next to us. We veer to the side, sliding away from the explosion of water and ice. It leaves a gaping hole. Soon grenades are falling all around us, blowing apart the surface of the lake
The sky has lightened. The ice ahead of us reflects the cold white light of the overcast dawn, and there’s enough dry snow for us to run reasonably well. I look back. The Nahx are just gray smudges in the distance now, not following us. The grenades have stopped.
Tucker slows a bit, grabbing my arm. I wrench it away. Now that I’ve got my rhythm, I feel like I could run for hours. There’s no reason we can’t run all the way to the other side of the lake.
The ground collapses underneath us.
“Tucker!”
He disappears first, the surface of the lake shattering and instantly turning into a churning froth of ice and water. The thin wire connecting us stretches out as I try to keep my footing on the slippery ice. Tucker surfaces, spluttering.
“Climb out!” I scream, yanking back on the wire. My feet slip as Tucker is sucked under again. “Tucker!”
Tumbling forward to my stomach I lie on the ice, my fingers slipping on the wire as Tucker surfaces once more, scrambling, grabbing at the shattering ice. His face is blue.
“Help me!” he screams, before disappearing again. The wire slips out of my fingers and I slide forward over the ice until it opens under me and I’m sucked in, sinking into the dark, disoriented by the cold and the sudden heaviness of my limbs. Turning frantically, I search for the light, the sky, or Tucker, something to swim back to, but now I don’t know which way is up anymore.
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