Dark Energy

by Robison Wells

  “Where are the other ships?” I insisted. “There will be more.”

  Grandma came running, and the Elders swarmed us. I kept telling them that they needed to help the others more, and they assured me they would, but no one seemed to be moving. The man carried me to the back of Grandma’s truck, laying me on her blankets. She knelt beside me and pulled away the strands of torn cloth from my shoulder and chest.

  The man who was carrying me pointed with his chin toward the sky to the south. The sky was full of explosions and trails of smoke. “From Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.”

  “Alice,” a voice called. I turned away from Grandma’s face to see Kurt lying beside me. His leg was raised and was being bandaged.

  “Are you okay?” I said, tears starting to run.

  “Broken leg,” he said, his voice muffled. “Broken nose. Hopefully that’s all. You?”

  “It’ll be a while before I wear a strapless gown again,” I said, forcing a laugh. “Rachel’s hurt bad.” Soon, we were driven the few miles back to Shimasani’s hogan, and with every bump I felt like I was going to die.

  We were brought into the hogan, Rachel first—she looked bad—carried by Suski. Brynne had pulled off her own shirt and was using it to put pressure on Rachel’s wounds. Grandma pulled her away, gave her a shawl, and then began examining the deep gouges across Rachel’s body. She gave the men in the room a few orders in Navajo, and they rushed off to fulfill her demands.

  Brynne came to me and checked my cuts.

  “It’s not bad, right?” I asked.

  “It’s not bad,” she agreed, starting to cry herself. “So you can quit blubbering.”

  Grandma and two of the men worked on Rachel. I couldn’t see much except for her bare stomach and a whole lot of blood. She was going to be okay. I knew it. She had to be okay.

  Coya came into the room, followed by Suski.

  “They’re all dead,” Coya said. “All four of them. We checked the spaceship. It’s empty.”

  I looked at Suski. “What does this mean? Will they leave us alone now?”

  He shook his head. “I do not know.” He sat down on the blanket by my head. His fingers gingerly felt the slashes across my shoulder. “I doubt it.”

  I turned to Brynne. “Your phone worked down here. Can you get it for me?” She nodded and stood up, jogging out of the house.

  “You were very brave, Alice,” Suski said. “We heard you talking to the Master as we entered the pueblo.”

  “I was stalling for time,” I said.

  “It worked. It gave us the chance to surround them.”

  “You guys were the brave ones,” I said. “You fired the arrows.”

  “You defended your friends. And I didn’t shoot an arrow. I don’t know how.”

  I smiled, and he touched my face with the backs of his fingers. He was the brave one—he had come running into danger when I was in trouble. I don’t think he knew what that meant.

  A helicopter came for Rachel. It wasn’t until they were hauling me out, too, and then Kurt, that I realized it wasn’t a Life Flight medical helicopter—it was a large army helicopter, and there were two more of them that landed next to the spaceship. Brynne stayed with my grandma, and Coya and Suski, too. The helicopter took us to Albuquerque, where we landed on the roof of the hospital.

  I got stitches—a lot of them. Three claws’ worth. A plastic surgeon was called in to do the work, partially because of the location—across my chest—and partially because I was a VIP. Maybe normal people just had to deal with big alien scars on their chests, but not if you just helped fight off the War of the Worlds.

  Every doctor wanted to hear the story, and I didn’t know how much I was supposed to keep private. But I heard Rachel spilling everything under the effects of morphine, singing part of it, and talking a lot about Brynne, a ghost who only Rachel could see. So I figured I’d better give them some straight answers. I tried to get through the story, constantly interrupted by nurses doing this and that, and phlebotomists taking my blood and administrators coming in to give their VIP condolences.

  Kurt had a compound fracture to his tibia. I hadn’t realized it was compound—he was good at not freaking out. Better than I would have been if I’d been thrown over a two-story wall and had the bone sticking out of my leg. But the doctors set his leg and stitched him up, and then put a cast on. They wouldn’t bring him into my room, but I told them if I didn’t see him soon I was going to get up and go hobble to his room by myself. They either took me more seriously or increased my painkillers. Either way, I felt like I was getting results.

  It was Rachel I was most worried about. The shoulder wound, I was told, was all muscle. But the wound in her side included gouges in her liver and kidney and intestines. I was told the best trauma surgeons in the city were working on her, but I didn’t want the best trauma surgeons in the city—I wanted the best surgeons in the world.

  Eventually, Kurt’s bed was wheeled in next to mine.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. No more getting thrown around.”

  “Let’s try to stay away from all alien-oriented excitement for a while,” he said.

  “No more injuries,” I said. “Alien or not.”

  “So who were they tracing?” Kurt asked, staring at the ceiling. He seemed to be in a lot of pain.

  “Off the phones? Who knows. Maybe it was more Bluebell than the phones.”

  “Where did that name come from?” he asked, clenching his painkiller pump.

  “Bluebell? I wanted a dog.”

  “You want a dog and your dad buys you a sixty-thousand-dollar car?”

  “Try eighty,” I said. “And it wasn’t my dad. My grandparents. They thought I’d be a lonesome homebody if I got a dog.”

  “Someone should tell them about the trouble you get into with that car.”

  “Maybe someone should,” I said. “You want to meet them? I mean if you don’t already have plans for Christmas.”

  “You’re inviting me to the ancestral Goodwin homeland?”

  “Christmas is coming,” I said. “If you don’t have any other plans.”

  “I’ll cancel,” he said. “Christmas for me is a lot of cash presents, and then my parents have business meetings.”

  “It’s settled then.”

  I sat up in the bed, testing my balance in my drug haze. I seemed okay. I pulled my IV cart along with me and lay down in the bed next to him. It was probably at least as uncomfortable for him as it was for me. Some alarm started to go off—I’d knocked something loose.

  “This is an inauspicious beginning,” I said.

  “And just FYI,” he said. “My leg hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  I smiled. “I wasn’t planning to make out with you. I just want to lie down next to you. You’re comfortable.”

  He tried to put his arm around my shoulder, but that’s where all the stitches were. Instead he just took my hand.

  A nurse came in, looked on disapprovingly, and then moved my cart closer and reattached the wires that monitored my heart.

  “How long before your dad gets here?” she asked.

  “At least four hours,” I said.

  “Then I want you out of there in three. Nurse’s orders.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Rachel got out of surgery sometime while I was asleep, but when Kurt woke me up and told me that my dad would be here soon, we still hadn’t heard any news about her other than that the surgery was over for today and they had more surgery scheduled for tomorrow. I kissed Kurt—just quick and gentle (actually long and lingering)—and I climbed back into my bed, purposefully unhooking some of the cables attached to me, so the nurse at the nurses’ station would think I was dead. It brought her in quickly, and I pressed her for information about Rachel. She said that she couldn’t give that information out because of government regulations, but that Rachel was in stable condition and sleeping.

>   Kurt must have had some sixth sense for things, because my dad came running in the door less than ten minutes later.

  “Aly,” he said.

  “You came here,” I said. “Instead of going to see the spaceship.”

  “They’re all waiting for me out there,” he said. “But I’m a big important person with a big important daughter.” He inspected the bandages. “You got this from an alien?”

  “I did.”

  “Pretty cool. Exclusive club. Only you and the president and a couple Secret Service agents can claim that.”

  “And Rachel,” I said. “I need you to go flash your badge and find out how she is. Ask about her organs.” I started to cry. “If she gets to keep them or if she’s in real trouble.” Stop it, Goodwin. I wiped away the tears and said, “I’m fine.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said, and kissed my cheek, squeezing my hand until I could get myself back together again.

  Dad turned to Kurt. “You must be the boy I keep hearing about.”

  “I guess so,” Kurt said.

  “Well, Kurt,” Dad said, “just remember that I specialize in tying things to rockets and sending them into space. And sometimes they accidentally blow up.”

  “Dad.”

  “You’ll have no reason to kill me, sir.”

  “Kurt. You make sure she doesn’t cry, okay?”

  Dad smiled happily at Kurt and then sagely at me. “Let me go find out about Rachel for you.”

  It wasn’t long before Dad came back in with news of Rachel. She’d had major surgery on her abdomen, but it looked like everything could be saved, with the exception of a small portion of intestine that they’d had to remove. She was scheduled to have reconstructive surgery on her shoulder in the morning. So far, no complications.

  “She was tough, Dad,” I said.

  “It sounds like you all were.”

  EPILOGUE

  Brynne won the Bruner, of course. And she graduated early and got a full ride to Stanford. She turned it down and took a fellowship at the University of Minnesota where she could help them build their genetics program with fifty-five thousand test cases on their doorstep.

  In a move that created enormous controversy, the government stepped in and used eminent domain to take over somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand acres of prime farmland—much of it the land that had been churned over when the ship crashed—and built housing, schools, and technical colleges. I was glad I wasn’t in the middle of that debate.

  I did get a little press for a while, which was fun. I went on the talk show circuit. Ellen and Jimmy Fallon were a lot more fun than Rush Limbaugh, but that’s not any big surprise. I even got to go on that middle-of-the-night UFO conspiracy radio show. But things settled down for me eventually.

  Rachel recovered, and when the time came to award Bruners, they announced that she had achieved the first perfect math score ever. She wasn’t going to graduate early—she was still going to be my roomie for another year—but a lot of colleges were spending a lot of time and money wooing her. William broke his hand punching his dorm door.

  Rachel’s parents also paid to sponsor Coya and Suski as students at Minnetonka—and they even found a Keresan speaker who could be their personal translator and English tutor.

  That just leaves Kurt. And what is there to say about Kurt? We spend a lot of time sitting on the couch, studying or surfing the web, or enjoying a fire under a cozy blanket. Because it’s warmer. Get your mind out of the gutter.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every effort has been made to create a book that both tells a good story, but also is respectful of the tribes and ancestors of tribes mentioned in the book. I have spread the manuscript out to people, both Native American and other tribal experts, and I’ve received feedback, both positive and negative. It is my hope that I’ve corrected the things that were in error or offensive.

  I used to live on the Navajo Reservation. I bring this up not to say that gives me a free pass to write anything I want to that’s Indian-related, but rather to say that I have enormous respect for The People. You may have noticed in the book that many people have different words for Native Americans: Indians, Native Americans, or American Indians. I purposely didn’t choose a single description, even though I know some of these terms make some of the groups angry. Why? Because when I lived on the reservation, I heard Navajo men and women refer to themselves by all these labels. My preference is for the mostly Canadian term First Nations. It seems to be an all-around better, more respectful and honest term.

  The reason I decided to choose Keresan as the language the Guides spoke was artistic license—and also hedging my bets: Keresan is spoken by many people in many tribes. In other words, it gave me a little more leeway to work with the language.

  Speaking of Anasazi, that’s the curmudgeon in me. When I lived on the reservation, we called the ancient people Anasazi. When I went to college and briefly majored in anthropology, we were taught that Anasazi was offensive (some people say that Anasazi was a Navajo word for “ancient enemy,” which is offensive if you are the descendants of those people). So we used the Hopi word Hisatsinom. But then the other tribes balked at that, arguing that they all were descendants, not just the Hopi, so they needed a better word. The academic world settled on Ancestral Puebloans. This book calls them Anasazi, for clarity’s sake, although it does state that Ancestral Puebloans is more correct.

  The small amount we see of the ceremony and meeting with the Elders is a very whittled-down version of a real Navajo ceremony. Originally we saw all of it, but the Navajos I spoke to—with only one exception—said it was too sacred to depict. I cut it back and back until they were satisfied.

  I would like to thank Orlando Tsosie, Sammy Jim, Thomas Begay, Angelina Begay, Nadine Padilla, Susie Sandoval, and Thomasita Yazzie. Their advice ran the gambit, but I’ve tried to incorporate all of their feedback, especially the negative feedback, and make this a book that is respectful of all tribes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Despite being my shortest book, this has been the hardest book to get right. But there are a few people I want to thank for sticking with me.

  First of all: my editor, Erica Sussman. By rights, she must be so sick of this book. We’ve worked on it enough that she can probably quote it. But she has hung with it (and me) and always with a smile. Or at least a little emoticon smiley. Those little emoticons keep me going. :)

  And right there with her is Stephanie Stein, Erica’s associate editor. I’m always amazed at how these two ladies know my book better than I do, and can spot tiny continuity problems chapters and chapters apart. Anyway, they are an amazing team.

  I need to thank my wife, Erin, who has to walk the fine line of being honest in her critiques and living with me. She is critic, shoulder to cry on, psychologist, caregiver, religious counselor, best friend, love of my life, and so much more.

  Big thanks to Sara Crowe, my ever-confident agent.

  My readers: Patty Wells, Annette Lyon, Luisa Perkins, Krista Jensen, Jenny Moore, Josi Kilpack, Nancy Allen, Lu Ann Staheli, Sarah Eden, Jeff Savage, Michele Holmes, Heather Moore, Evelyn Hornbarger.

  And to Annie, who is the best. The best.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo credit Green Hills Photography

  ROBISON WELLS is the author of the acclaimed YA science-fiction thrillers Variant, Feedback, Blackout, and Dead Zone. Robison lives in the Rocky Mountains in a house not too far from elk pastures. His wife, Erin, is a better person than he will ever be, and their three kids cause mischief and/or joy. You can visit him online at www.robisonwe
lls.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  BOOKS BY ROBISON WELLS

  VARIANT

  FEEDBACK

  BLACKOUT

  DEAD ZONE

  GOING DARK: A BLACKOUT NOVELLA

  DARK ENERGY

  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2016 by Sebastien Hue

  Cover design by Michelle Taormina

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  DARK ENERGY. Copyright © 2016 by Robison Wells. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.epicreads.com

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938999

  ISBN 978-0-06-227505-9 (trade bdg.)

  EPub Edition © March 2016 ISBN 9780062275073

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