Inalienable: Book 7 of the Starstruck saga

by S E Anderson

  “So good to see you, Agent Foollegg.” I forced a smile I only hoped would be even half as dashing as Marcy’s. “Welcome to Earth, I suppose.”

  It was surreal to see her here in the flesh. Not that it could have truly been her, no. With her long, spindly neck as strong and supple as a giraffe’s, there was no way she could have gotten through the front door of the precinct without being flocked by alien truthers. That’s if she was able to fit underneath these short ceilings.

  “This is only a projection,” said the mousy man, who had still failed to introduce himself. “Agent Foollegg wouldn’t set a physical foot on this backwater planet. She is only gracing you with her digital presence because she has an offer that would benefit you both.”

  Foollegg let out a heavy breath. “I could have told her all that. What are you even good for?”

  “Getting you through the door.”

  “True.” Foollegg turned to me, her lips thin and taught like a clothesline. “So, what shall I be calling you today?”

  I frowned. “Seeing as how it says ‘Webber’ on my arrest warrant, well …”

  “You can’t blame me for that, Sally,” she said, revealing far too many teeth. “After all, I am not responsible for the downfall of Agent Cross.”

  “Exactly,” I growled, failing to imitate her stringent tone. “I did your dirty work. It was over. You could have left well enough alone.”

  “It is not my job to clean up all you Terrans’ messes.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s not our job to clean up the messes of the off-worlders you allow to enjoy free range across the planet. “

  She glared at me, those large, brown eyes staring so deep I thought they’d find fossils from the Neolithic era. Instead, they brought up only bubbling frustration.

  “We never issued him a visa.”

  “It doesn’t mean he wasn’t under your department’s jurisdiction. Otherwise, why would you be here, now, with me? I’m starting to believe you’re more interested in covering up the fallout of alien crimes than stopping them.”

  Foollegg pursed her lips. “What exactly do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Intimidation, I suppose.”

  “You don’t know me at all, Sally,” said Foollegg, shaking her bowling ball head. “I’m here to tell you what’s going to happen. It’s not a threat if it’s a fact.”

  I said nothing, pressing my sweaty palms together to keep them from shaking.

  “You have allied yourself with terrorists,” she continued. “Two beings the Alliance has been hunting for centuries. They need to be brought to justice.”

  “So, you had them arrested by a local PD,” I said. “Earth can’t be that much of a backwater planet if you trust them to hold the mighty siblings.”

  “Oh no. It’s not Earth that holds them here.” Foollegg grinned. Her teeth were each sharpened to a point, a piranha’s mouth. “It’s you. Why do you think they’re still in those holding cells?”

  “We could leave any time we want. I was just waiting for a friend.”

  “If you could have left, you would have. No, you’re staying right here for one single reason: You have ties to this planet. A lovely little family. You’re staying here for them, and the siblings are staying here for you. You don’t have to answer; we know it’s true.”

  I couldn’t help but squirm in my chair. “Your threats don’t scare me.”

  I’m a terrible liar.

  “I told you already these aren’t threats, only facts.” She leaned back in her chair, phasing through it slightly. A haunting reminder I was being threatened by photons. “You wouldn’t risk the truth about you coming out to dear Hal and Laurie. Better they think you’re a killer than whatever you are now.”

  My fear was being replaced by something else—anger. Boil the feeling down, distill it to fury. And she was really putting on the heat.

  “What do you want, Foollegg? You already have me in a cell. Stop wasting our time and get to the juicy bits.”

  “I like you better like this”—she flicked a finger at me—“as opposed to the meek being you were pretending to be when we had first met. You’re much more interesting now. Feisty. It’s a shame you’ve chosen the losing side.”

  This was getting tedious. She seemed to like seeing me squirm.

  “We’ve pulled some strings, rushed your case through the system. The evidence against you is unquestionable. You will not have bail. In a few days, your preliminary hearing will review your case and begin the process of your murder trial. There will be a convenient prison riot a few days after your incarceration, at which time you’ll be transferred into Agency hands. The justice of the Alliance will prevail.”

  Mere days? My confidence was draining with every passing microsecond.

  Chanel Blayde. Chanel Blayde.

  “Wow,” I said, rolling my eyes. “All this to get us off-planet?”

  “Consider it a mercy,” she said. “Behave, and your family will think you simply … passed away. Put up a fight, and much worse will happen to them than simply discovering the truth about their daughter and the people she aligned herself with. It might be the last thing they ever learn.”

  I shivered and blamed it on the out-of-control Florida air conditioning. “You can’t possibly say that’s not a threat.”

  She swiveled her spindly neck like a twisty straw, her equivalent of a shrug. “There’s no reason for us not to be friends. You haven’t been with the siblings long; you don’t know what they’re capable of. What they’ve done. The lives, the planets they’ve destroyed. Be reasonable. If your mouth stays shut here on Earth and loose on Pyrina, you do not have to suffer the same fate as them.”

  “What if I say no?”

  She stood as if to leave, all part of the show. “I’ve told you no threats, only facts, Sally Webber. Think it over. You have a few days to work out the details. Who would you rather be? We’re the good guys here. Your friend, the real Felling, has been given a similar ultimatum.”

  “She’s a good agent. She had nothing to do with this.”

  “We’ve had our eyes on her for years. She was searching for the siblings—and not covering her tracks very well, I might add—but as I said, we’re the good guys. She’ll be left alone, so long as you convince your friends to cooperate.”

  My family. My friends. No one was safe, and all because of the choices I made.

  “And what about the Lifeprint?”

  This halted her in whatever tracks she had started to take, her hand hovering over the bare table as if to adjust an invisible knob. “You want to know about the bot we recovered? Why?”

  “Sue me. I became attached. You said it yourself: attachments are my weakness.”

  “As was its,” she replied. “It was a faulty piece of programming. The bot was wiped.”

  And with that, her image faded from the interrogation room, leaving me to process how royally screwed I undoubtedly was.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Zander’s knowledge of dairy products is both impressive and tasty

  Orange is not my color, and if it’s yours, more power to you. I’ve only met one person who can pull of an orange jumpsuit, and she’s a slightly peeved extraterrestrial who wasn’t too thrilled to be put in handcuffs. Her brother was firmly in the washed-out group of jumpsuit wearers, though it might have been the shackles pulling his mood down. I tried to avoid catching my reflection anywhere—not that I should have been caring about how well I was pulling off the embarrassing outfit. I just wasn’t a big fan of the handcuffs.

  “This is nothing,” said Zander, forcing a smile when I had tried to make conversation with him in the corridor outside of the courtroom. “We’re lucky to even have a hearing. Can’t tell you how many times I was walked into what I had thought was a courtroom, only to find myself in a gladiatorial ring.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Blayde. “This orange is worse than the punishment itself. Most planets know how to give their prisoners a sense of style. Why am I no
t sparkling right now? Much easier to see if I try to make a run for it. What if I tried to run, huh?”

  I would have pointed out that orange was just as flashy as actual flashing lights and I was rather glad not to be covered in sequins, but my mouth was dry.

  “Stay calm, and don’t say anything unless I tell you to,” said our lawyer, Hargreaves. A friend of a friend of Dany’s, he said when he appeared before us just yesterday. Dany had been true to her word and hired someone who seemed incredibly well put together and much too prominent to pro-bono a lost cause. Her connections made no sense to me, but she never came to visit, so I couldn’t ask. Probably didn’t want to be seen with the likes of me.

  “Just say the word,” Blayde whispered as the bailiff lead us through the large wooden doors, “and we’re out of here.”

  “I’m not blowing up my bridges, and I’m certainly not putting my parents in danger.”

  This wasn’t some kind of surreal conviction on a world light-years away. This was my planet, my home. Anything that happened here would affect my life, my family, forever. One misstep, and Foollegg would have everyone I know and love destroyed. The Alliance had been hunting for the siblings for a very long time; they weren’t going to let them go so easily. They finally had leverage, and they were going to use it.

  I knew what Blayde was thinking: get it over with. I only had a few years left with my family anyway; just break the cord and get it over with.

  But she didn’t say anything. Maybe I was just putting words in her mouth. The mere fact she had let this all play out the way it had meant she didn’t want them to die prematurely.

  Seeing my parents in the back of the courtroom just made everything a thousand times worse. I had told them over our single phone call that I didn’t want them to see me like this, that we were going to throw out the mountain of evidence against us and be home before they knew it. But, still, they came. So had Felling: she sat at the front of the courtroom, right behind us. Marcy sat beside her, though Dany was still absent.

  Foollegg must have placed them there: a reminder of what I could lose if I slipped up or lost control of my friends.

  I had never been on this side of the courtroom. Or in any courtroom, for that matter. It probably would have been much more exciting if I wasn’t on trial for murder.

  “We’ll find our way out,” said Zander. “And I did mention I have a plan, right? We’ll be fine.”

  “You’ve said that about a hundred times.”

  “Because it’s true.” He grinned. “Come on, chin up. Let them get a good first impression.”

  I straightened my posture. “Better?”

  “Just don’t let them grin you down.”

  “Grind you down,” I corrected.

  “No, grin you down. Smile back and make a statement.”

  I wasn’t a huge fan of this. Grinning worked for him, with his dashing smile. If Blayde and I joined him, we’d look like a pack of cruel, murder-loving hyenas. That or a wannabe-edgy indie band.

  The first half hour was all given up to procedure and courtroom business, introducing the judge, the case, the evidence, and so on and so forth. It was hard to follow and too boring to bother committing to memory. Hard to think that I could be bored at my own hearing. Maybe it was all part of the process. Part of me wanted to stand up and shout for them to get this over; it was a sham. After all, what was the point of meticulous procedure?

  At least I wouldn’t have to sit through the actual trial. No, I’d be fake dead by then.

  “Let me just say, Mr. Smith”—our lawyer flipped through his notes—“it’s going to be hard to sway the judge to your side, what with your criminal record.”

  “Criminal record? My record’s spotless,” he said. Of course it would be. He didn’t even exist on this planet. Even his fake persona of Lysander Smith had died in the GrishamCorp cover-up. Whatever criminal past the judge and lawyer were going on was as fabricated as his identity.

  “Foollegg again,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “And probably for me too.” Blayde leaned back into her chair, all too jovial for the words coming out of her mouth. “We’re gonna get cru-ushed.”

  I shivered in my chair for the third time that morning, hating every minute of this hearing, knowing that every time we came up with a good argument, a new piece of evidence would conveniently arise to knock us back down again. As soon as they started listing off the evidence, it began to pile and pile and pile. The gun with my fingerprints all over it—another falsehood since Felling had been the one to pull the trigger that had killed her partner—and the security agent who swore he saw us breaking into the abandoned mall, who couldn’t have been anywhere near us. The bloodied, bullet-ridden holes in the clothing in the trunk of my car.

  “Just a big act. This is just a big act. Oh, I hate this,” Blayde snarled, not helping our case. So much for grinning them down. “Foollegg’s people know what they’re doing. They didn’t have to drag us through the dirt to get what they wanted.”

  I nodded slowly. “I feel like we’re on TV. You know, one of those courtroom shows. It’s just too absurd to be real.”

  “Bullet holes,” Zander spat, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “in our clothes. Do we look like Swiss cheese to you?”

  “Please, Mr. Smith, you’ve not been invited to speak,” said Hargreaves. He looked about as washed-out as the rest of us, and he wasn’t even wearing orange. I was more proud of the fact that Zander remembered local dairy products like a pro.

  “Well, I should be!” he said. “I declare, um, I want to go on the stand. Can I be a witness for myself?”

  “I highly recommend you don’t,” said Hargreaves, placing a gentle hand on Zander’s arm.

  “So, it is possible, then?”

  “Kid, the fifth amendment exists for a reason. You have the right to remain silent. It’s also a privilege, and right now, I’m seriously asking you to use that privilege and sit back down.”

  “I’d like to go on the stand. Say my piece.”

  “I’ll allow it,” said the judge. “If the defendant has something to say, then he should say it.”

  “Thank you,” said Zander. He marched over to the witness stand with his head high. Once up there, he leaned his head as far as it could go into the microphone. “Do I look like Swiss cheese to you?”

  “Your Honor.” The prosecutor stood. “The defendant is simply trying to waste our time.”

  “Hold on, let me show you something.” Zander stood straight, reaching for the collar of his jumpsuit, which was difficult seeing as how his hands were bound to his feet. Then, in one smooth move, he tugged.

  Loud murmurs rose from the crowd. Felling let out the heaviest sigh I had ever heard, as if our case wasn’t hopeless enough.

  “Oh lord.” Hargreaves dropped his head into his hands.

  “Stars above.” Blayde snorted. “Why does he always have to take off his shirt to prove a point?”

  “Not the first time, I take it.”

  “You should see his quantum geometry lectures.”

  “He teaches …?”

  She didn’t have time to answer before the judge banged his gavel.

  Cool. I didn’t think I was going to get to see that.

  “Who gave the defendant tearaway clothing?” judge Simpson roared.

  “He doesn’t need tearaway with muscles like that,” said Felling, loud enough for us to hear. “Damn. I should have brought popcorn.”

  “That’s my friend. Don’t be creepy,” said Marcy. “Though he looks incredibly fit for someone who had spent the past two years climbing out of a chasm eating military rations.”

  “He’s my friend too,” said Felling. “And I need to get myself some of those rations.”

  “Mr. Smith,” said the judge, too perplexed for anger, “I would kindly ask you to keep your clothing on during the course of this trial or I will hold you in contempt of the court.”

  “But it’s just to prove a point, You
r Honor,” he said as he exposed his bare torso to the crowd of onlookers. “If what you say is true, then where are the bullet holes?”

  He spun around, showing his naked skin to the court. Smooth as a baby’s bottom, front to back. I wasn’t sure if the gasps were from the bizarreness of the situation or his Hollywood-quality musculature.

  “Your Honor, he’s making a mockery of this court,” said the prosecutor. The bailiff started toward Zander, who closed his jumpsuit hastily.

  “Apparently, there are bullets with my blood on them, but, as you saw, I have no injuries,” he said. “So, where are they from, then? Is it possible someone got carried away with their frame job?”

  The prosecutor stepped forward. With Zander having thrown procedure in the air, it was hard to tell who was meant to be speaking. I guess the prosecutor was supposed to be questioning the witness. “And the bullet with Ms. Webber’s blood on it?”

  “Well, just ask her. I’m sure you could tell if she was walking around with gaping bullet holes in her. A wound like that left untreated could have her ripped in half in pain right now, not to mention leaving her unable to move properly. You would notice by smell alone right away. And that’s for a single wound. According to you, there were three at the scene.”

  “I, however, would prefer to keep my shirt on,” I muttered. How had Foollegg gotten a hold of our blood? My samples—the ones I had been unknowingly giving to the FBI since my accident—had been destroyed by Felling, or so I thought. And Zander wasn’t exactly known for giving up his blood all that easily.

  “So, Mr. Smith” —the prosecutor was back in his groove now—“can you explain where the blood did come from?”

  “Well, it’s a long story, John. I can call you John, right?”

  “No.” He flushed red. “That’s not even my name.”

  “Fine, then.” Zander crossed his hands over the table, putting on a grave expression. “Judge Simpson, members of the jury—”