by David Liss
Which, I ought to have known, is a sure sign that things are about to go incredibly wrong.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
By the time I came home with my first-semester progress report, I had become a completely normal seventh grader—or at least I was doing a good impersonation of one. Justin continued to lob insults at me in the hallway, but otherwise he left me alone. No one decided to step in and become a more active tormentor, which was a pleasant development. I made some other friends, but it was Alice I hung out with the most. She hardly ever asked me about my experiences, which I appreciated more than I could tell her, though once in a while she couldn’t help herself. To her credit, it wasn’t just to satisfy her own curiosity, but because she sensed that what had happened to me was still taking its toll.
She obviously had issues of her own. I suspected her father’s problems had to do with his service overseas, but Alice never spoke about it, and I somehow knew she didn’t want me to ask. I guess we got along because we had both been hit pretty hard by life.
Smelly still talked to me, insulted me, and complained about living inside my head, but it would also go for long periods of time without saying anything. Once, I noticed it hadn’t spoken in a couple of days, so I asked if it was all right.
Just reliving happier times, it told me. Remembering some marvelous centuries without having to inhabit organic slime pustules such as yourself, Zeke. It’s sad, really, having to exist in such close proximity to you and your kind.
“How’s the suit coming?” I asked him.
Slowly, it said. Please pity me.
Putting the suit on every day was becoming just a part of life. It was weird and awkward stepping into it, but once it was on and activated, I honestly didn’t feel it at all, and it was easy to forget I was walking around in a rubber suit hardwired with alien technology—or at least human technology in an alien configuration.
One day we were sitting outside during lunch period, and Alice said to me, “What’s her name?”
I hadn’t said anything to Alice about Tamret. I wasn’t prepared to say her name aloud. That would make it real, and whatever Tamret was going through was horrible, and I couldn’t help her until Smelly got that suit working.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I’m talking about how you’re walking around with a dog-eared copy of The Fault in Our Stars, and those look like tearstains on the cover. There’s got to be a girl you left behind, right?” She gestured vaguely upward.
When I didn’t answer, she let it go, for which I was grateful.
• • •
Alice and I were working on a joint project for English class on Tom Sawyer when my phone chimed. Usually whenever anyone called or sent a text, I feared the worst, but this time I was distracted and the message caught me entirely by surprise. I stared at it, feeling the cold stab of terror. It had happened. The thing I dreaded most had happened.
Can you please pick up a gallon of milk on the way home? Not at the usual place.
Alice must have seen me staring at my phone like it was a severed hand that had just dropped into my lap. “What’s the big deal?”
I said nothing for a long moment, and then I turned to her. “I have to get out of here.”
“It doesn’t say the milk is an emergency.”
I stood up and started putting things in my book bag. I had no idea where I was going to go, but I couldn’t go home.
Alice put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “Zeke, what is this?”
“It’s a code,” I said, hearing the robotic tone in my own voice. “They’re coming for me.”
When we’d set this one up, I’d laughed at my mom. Neither of us drank much milk, and we never bought more than a half gallon, but when I’d asked her what she would text if she really needed me to get milk, she’d smiled. “I won’t ask politely,” she’d said. “I’ll just tell you to get it, and you’ll obey like a good son.”
This code meant that people were at the house or coming to it, and they meant to take me away. This code meant run. I didn’t know if it was government agents or aliens, and we probably should have worked that out, but now it was too late.
“Who is after you?” Alice demanded.
“I’m not sure, but whoever it is will know who I associate with, or they’ll figure it out. They’ll come here looking for me, and I need to be gone before that happens.”
Alice let me finish packing my things. She went over to the computer and clicked onto the New York Times web page. Then she checked the pages for the local news channels and CNN. There were no major stories. Finally she sighed, as if she had no choice, and clicked onto one of the UFO sites she used to visit. There she found a screaming headline: MULTIPLE UFO SIGHTINGS OVER WESTERN U.S.
“I need to get away,” I said.
“Away from where?”
I swallowed hard. “Earth.”
• • •
I scanned the article as quickly as I could. Several people had reported seeing saucer-shaped UFOs in Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. When I first saw the headline, some part of me dared to hope that it was Urch or Captain Qwlessl or Dr. Roop, come to get me and help me rescue Tamret, but now there was no doubt. Only the Phands had saucer-shaped ships. They were my enemies, the aliens who still blamed me for destroying a cruiser that was trying to blow up a ship I happened to have been on at the time. I could not let them get me, and I could not let them use people I cared about against me. The only way to make sure that happened was to escape their grasp. That meant getting off this planet.
“Smelly, I haven’t checked in for a few days. How do things look with the suit?”
Alice looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but I held up a hand to indicate I needed quiet.
Integration with suit functions proceeds apace, you big whiner.
“I don’t need it to proceed apace,” I said. “I need it to find me a working spaceship.”
Certain functions appear to be fully operational, but I am having trouble getting the sensory data to collate and synch. That may require several more weeks.
“I don’t have several more weeks. I need a ship.”
I can discern that you have strong feelings on the subject, it said, because you are becoming irritatingly shrill, but shouting at me won’t help. It rarely does.
I turned to Alice. “I may have neglected to mention that I’ve got an artificial intelligence living in my head. It was created millions of years ago by precursor aliens, but now . . . here it is.”
I was not created! Smelly seemed to shout. I was formed by the natural conglomeration of semiautonomous algorithmic articulations gestured into non-nonexistence by the juxtaposition of multiple and contradictory quantum utterances.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
Tell it! I can’t have primitive animal things believing I’m some sort of program created by a biological mass of pulsating ooze. It’s humiliating.
I sighed. “It wants you to know it was not made. It’s some kind of naturally occurring quantum whatever. Okay, Smelly? Is that good enough?”
Alice, I realized, was staring at me like I was a raving lunatic, which was not even remotely unreasonable.
“I know I probably seem crazy right now, but I’m not. Which is probably a bad way to say good-bye to someone, but I need to get out of here before you get caught up in my problems.”
I figured that if Alice didn’t know where I was going, she couldn’t tell anyone. Of course, I didn’t know where I was going either. My mother and I had established a couple of meet-up places, and her code was supposed to tell me which one to go to. The not the usual place part of the message meant that our meeting spots had been compromised or that she felt that she was being too closely watched for her to join me. All of which meant I was now entirely on my own.
I needed to be long gone before the Phands showed up and started shooting. Ideally I would get off the planet today, but if my suit wasn
’t ready, I was going to have to come up with an alternative. Plan B, I figured, would be to hide for a few weeks until the suit did work, and then Smelly and I would find a Former ship, assuming one actually existed. I tried not to think about all the objections I’d raised when he first proposed the plan. Then it had been just a neat idea, but now it was necessary if I was going to survive and keep my mother and Alice out of the crossfire.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I guess an alien AI named Stinky isn’t any less believable than anything else.”
“Smelly,” I said. “And thanks.”
“So where will you go?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, trying not to deal with the enormity of what I was facing. If I couldn’t go to any of the meeting points my mother and I had arranged, I really had no idea what I was going to do “Right now the main thing is I have get away from anyone who knows me.”
“I’ll go with you.” She said it like she’d agreed to walk with me to the corner store to buy a soda. Without missing a beat, she picked up a backpack and began shoving things inside—a hairbrush, shirts, underwear. She moved one of her books from the shelf, grabbed an envelope stuffed with money, and shoved that in with the rest of her stuff.
She must have seen me looking at her with disbelief. “What?” she said. “You don’t have emergency money stashed away?”
As it happened, I kept emergency money on me at all times—it was another precaution my mother and I had come up with—but that wasn’t the point. “I’m not convinced you’ve been listening,” I said. “You can’t come with me.”
“What did you do, Zeke? Are you like a cosmic criminal or something?”
“As a matter of fact, there are beings who think that’s exactly what I am,” I told her. “I made a lot of powerful beings, a lot of bad powerful beings, angry, but only because I was trying to do the right thing.” I paused, hating how inept that sound. “You know what? I didn’t try to do the right thing. My friends and I did the right thing. Now there are beings who want to punish me because I didn’t let them get away with being evil. I’ll take my lumps, but I’m not going to let other people suffer, so if anyone comes asking, please don’t lie to them. Tell them I was here, and I told you nothing, and now I’m gone.”
“I’m going with you.” Her voice was cold and resolute. She slung her hastily filled backpack over her shoulder.
“I don’t think you’re listening to me.”
“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” she said. “I can help you.”
“Help me with what?”
“I heard you talking to your AI about a ship.”
“I’m wearing something that is supposed to help me find a hidden one, but it’s not working. It may not be working right for weeks. I don’t know how long I’m going to be on the run, and as long as you are with me, you’ll be in real danger. Like life-threatening, subject-to-torture danger. You can’t come.”
“I can, because you need me.”
“For what?”
She grinned. “That machine in your head says it can help you find a spaceship in a few week? Well, I know where you can find one right now.”
I am monitoring this meat bag’s vital signs, Smelly said, and it does not appear to be lying. I think you should listen to what it has to say.
I looked up and saw a dark sedan with tinted windows coming down the street. It didn’t necessarily mean anything—the street was busy enough that several cars passed by each minute—but even so, I had no way of knowing if this was a car full of people or aliens looking for me. I had to decide right then. It was wrong to get Alice involved, but if she could somehow lead me to a working spaceship, then I didn’t see that I had much of a choice.
I looked at her. “Do you really know where I can find a ship?”
She met my gaze. “I really do.”
I let out a breath. “Okay, then.”
She turned from me and ran back into her house. Through the open door I saw her give her dad a hug. He hardly seemed to notice it. She whispered something in his ear, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and then turned away. Keeping her eyes down, she ran the palm of her hand along one side of her face. Then she adjusted her glasses, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and stepped out of her house. “Let’s go,” she said, and she smiled, but it looked forced.
• • •
We ducked into an alley and rushed past the sounds of dogs barking and straining against their leashes as we emerged onto the next street. It was a commercial strip, with stores and restaurants, and when I passed a garbage can, I tossed my cell phone into it. I knew they could use it to track me, and dumping it had always been part of the plan if things became dangerous.
“Where is this spaceship?” I asked her. “How do we get to it?”
“First we have to go see my uncle.”
I stopped in the street and waited until she faced me. “I don’t think you get this. They’re going to come looking for me at your place, and when you’re not there, they’re going to check all likely contacts. Any relative of yours is going to be high on the list.”
“He’s not a real uncle,” she said, walking on and not bothering to see if I followed her. “He’s an old army buddy of my father’s. He really helped out my dad when my mom died, and since my dad’s, uh, problems, he’s been really good to me. I went down there to stay with him a few times when my dad got really bad, but I always took the bus, always paid in cash, so there’s nothing to connect me to him. We don’t really talk to the neighbors, and Dad doesn’t have friends anymore, so no one will have any idea where we’ve gone.”
“Your father will.”
“My dad has PTSD, he’s depressed, and he drinks too much,” Alice said with dead seriousness, “but he won’t betray his daughter.”
“Okay.” I didn’t love this plan, but it was the best one I had at the moment. “Where does this uncle live?”
“That’s the tricky part,” she said. “San Antonio.”
“Texas?” I almost shouted it.
“It’s only a little bit out of our way. I’ll tell you more once we get going.”
Alice took out her phone and called a cab, which she told to meet us at a nearby corner. When it pulled up, Alice sweetly explained that we wanted to go to downtown Denver, giving him the name of a hotel. I opened my mouth to ask, but then I realized what she was doing. If anyone questioned the cabbie, and I figured they would, he wouldn’t know we’d been planning on leaving the state.
The cabbie looked at us, like he was trying to figure out if we were going to bring him trouble. We smiled at him. We were just two ordinary kids in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts—nothing made us seem like we were on the run.
“That’s almost forty-miles. It’ll be at least a hundred bucks,” he said, like he was still debating whether or not he should take us.
Alice, however, was done discussing it. “Great!” she said cheerfully as she opened the door and hopped into the back. I glanced around to make sure there were no dark sedans or revenge-minded aliens lurking in the street and then followed Alice into the cab.
We didn’t say much on the way, mainly because the cabdriver kept glancing at us, trying to figure out our deal. When the cops or the aliens or whoever questioned him, I didn’t want him to have anything to say except that we were quiet and polite. I figured it never hurts to be well-mannered when you’re on the run.
When we pulled up in front of the hotel, Alice paid the driver, and we went into the lobby. Once he was gone, she gestured with her head, and we went back out onto the street and walked a few more blocks to the bus station. Alice kept checking the time on her phone, telling me to hurry.
We got there with about fifteen minutes to spare before the evening bus left for San Antonio. I didn’t know what we would have done if we’d missed it, but I was also happy to be cutting it so close. We’d be long gone before anyone thought to look for us, though if they guessed where we were going, they’d be waiting for us at the other
end.
We paid for our tickets, got on board, and took seats in the back. I stared out the window at the growing dark, waiting to see police cars, lights flashing, cutting off our path, but nothing like that happened. The bus pulled out and we were on our way.
When we hit the highway, Alice took out her phone and began to check the UFO blogs to see if there were any new sightings. There weren’t, which didn’t mean anything by itself.
“They’re going to figure out I’m with you,” I said. “You need to lose that phone.”
“On TV shows they just take the SIM card out,” she assured me, like I was being ridiculous.
“On TV shows they’re running from the FBI, not aliens with unimaginably advanced technology.”
She looked at her phone with a sad expression. It was an iPhone, the latest model, and it was going to hurt to let it go, but she nodded. Then she opened the window and let it drop. I turned in time to watch it shatter into fragments on the highway. An old woman a few seats up the half-full bus happened to be turning around at that moment, and she scowled at us. Alice looked at her with the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen. The woman turned away.
I couldn’t believe how calm Alice was about everything, how much she took things in stride. I’d lived for a long time with the knowledge that I might have to ditch my cell phone one day, I’d purposely bought a cheap model for that reason, and it had still been hard for me to drop it in the trash. Alice had tossed her cutting-edge piece of expensive technology out the window because I’d told her it was what I needed her to do.
“Clearly, I’m on board with you,” she told me. “I’m on the run, and I’ve smashed my phone, which had some great selfies and all of my favorite songs, so I think it’s time you told me everything you’ve been holding back.”