by Mary Weber
Which was when Sofi started banging on the hollow-sounding walls and swearing every naughty word her ten-year-old self knew for the Delonese traffickers to release them. They responded by pumping in a gas that nearly knocked the air and lights out of her.
She brushed a hand through her brother’s damp hair and covered his shoulders. Stay with me, Shi. He moved, then coughed and lifted his head. “Dad?” Then must’ve remembered where they were because Sofi felt his voice break into silent, fighting-to-be-tough sobs. And it was all she could do not to start sobbing with him.
“It’s alright. I’m here.” Sofi gripped him and did her best to infuse his body with her heat as his arms constricted around her stomach.
“Sofi, I wanna go home.”
“I know, bud. I’m working on it.”
“What do you think they’re gonna do with us?”
“I don’t know. Probably just . . .” She couldn’t answer. She didn’t have an honest one to give. So she just held Shilo tighter and wondered if Mom was watching the news right now, searching for clues about them. Please come find us.
She pressed her nose to his scalp to inhale the scent of farm fields and dirt and sunshine, wishing she could tell him they were back home and this was just one of the games he liked to play. They were superheroes captured by bad guys today.
Shilo shivered and squirmed as the shuttle dropped and took her stomach with it. And the kids whimpered, “What’s going on?” “Why’ve we stopped?” “Where are we?”
Sofi grabbed Shilo tighter and waited.
Fifteen minutes went by and the ship shifted beneath them and settled with a clunk. A huge bay door shot open amid icy air and bright lights and people speaking in a foreign language that sent a chill down her spine. She’d heard it on the news the few times Papa had let her watch. It was Delonese.
There they were, stepping closer. And in her still-adjusting vision they looked like big blobs and squiggly lines that began rounding up the kids and shoving them out the door.
“Sofi.”
“Sofi.”
She blinked and choked and then leaned over to gag as Shilo’s face flickered before her, then disappeared.
“Focus, Sof. You’re not even close to finished yet. Figure out what you can use here.”
She slowed her breathing and waited for the visceral reaction to pass. She could almost feel Miguel’s hand on her skin and breath in her hair, reassuring her that she was still here and she was alright. Even as she was aware the silent Delonese surrounding her were staring.
The shuttle shuddered and lifted higher.
Ethos called her over once again to where he stood against the spacious wall of glass.
Sofi narrowed her brow. Then stepped around the other Delonese and strode in front of the lead ambassador. “Where are the ambassadors and the kids?”
“We have sent them to rest for now. But for you . . .” Ethos tipped his head at her as if analyzing a lab rat. “We offer you an encounter with truth.”
The quiet hover abruptly dipped, then zoomed low through the massive bay doorway, leaving behind the main building. Out of her peripheral, Sofi could see Heller’s frozen body, still lying outside as the poisonous plumes floated up and licked the glass around them. The ten Delonese took this as their cue to stand against the far wall, with those sleek faces still watching her.
The light from the sun hit the ship’s glass ceiling, illuminating the interior with cheeriness that was almost laughable. Sofi snorted. What truth? And whose truth—because clearly that term was relative here.
“Ah, here we go.” Ethos pointed to the ground where the fog was receding the same way it’d come in, leaving the frosted ground clean and sparkling, reflecting off the ship as it flew through the compound, like a glass bubble, past the barracks and trapdoor she’d used, and headed for the tree line.
The farther they got, the more exquisite the scene became. “Engineered to perfection,” Sofi recalled the ambassadors once saying. But for someone used to the natural dirt and imperfections of good Old North Carolina land, this was too much engineering.
Like everything else here.
The ambassador narrowed his gaze at her. “Alis informed me of visions from your brother these past few days. That you claim he’s somehow spoken to you. Is this true?”
“Don’t answer him.”
Sofi blinked. The words were coming from that voice in her ear, like before.
“You will answer,” Ethos pressed.
Stretching her neck, Sofi tilted her head to remind herself the reason she couldn’t feel her earcom was because it wasn’t there.
“The more you say, the more we can help you,” Ethos continued, the sunlight glowing off his smooth face that many on Earth had found handsome.
“If you’ve spoken with my mother, you’ll know my memories of this place emerged as nightmares. And in recent days those memories come even when I’m awake,” she said, dodging the full answer. Because while she might be losing her mind under the intense scrutiny of Ethos and those unblinking Delonese eyes, she knew good intuition when she sensed it. And if they were going to kill her and the kids, she’d go down without giving anything crucial away.
She turned her gaze to hide her deception. Even as a nudging in the back of her head said there was another option besides death.
A worse option.
The shuttle flew faster while that caution told her she was about to find out.
“Breathe, Sofi,” the voice in her ear said.
Are you joking? She mentally cussed the voice out. Stop talking to me.
The shuttle rocked, forcing Sofi to steady herself on the window and making the nausea flare. She shoved it down and tried to stay focused, tried to stay clearheaded, tried to stay any blasted way at all that didn’t involve her scratching Ambassador Ethos’s face off.
The next moment Ethos was pointing out the window. “Below us are the remnants of a city peeking up from the snow. One of many that used to rise high like your Earth ones.”
Against her will, Sofi tilted into the curved glass to peer down.
Straight metal lines were laid out in octagonal shapes across a massive area, spread out on the flat plain between the mountains. Whatever had originally stood on the braces was long decayed, but the edges still poked up as far as the eye could see, like bones marking their territory. So why hadn’t they seen this on any of the virtual comps yesterday? And how long ago had the city been discarded?
She glanced at the group of Delonese behind them. Had their civilization lived on their surface before they moved below?
“While your people prefer excess,” Ethos said, “mine discovered streamlining led to quicker technological advancements. More than that, it created unity.”
The shuttle dipped and moved on, going quicker now, toward a deeper valley Sofi had only seen from miles above when first entering the atmosphere on Miguel and Claudius’s shuttle. The closer they drew, she noted the swells looked distinctly similar to Old Europe burial mounds. The shuttle flew faster as strange caves with animal statues carved into the valley sides came into view.
“This is our gravity ground. Our mass graves, as your kind would call them,” Ethos said. “From our most disastrous planetary war.”
“Your people are buried in those?”
“Not here. They were on our original planet. This is a replica—a surface re-creation of what our planet used to be. The entire globe is a visual historical model, if you will.”
“More specifically, this is our way of remembering and honoring where and who we’ve come from.”
“And who have you come from?” Sofi asked, her tone steady.
The Delonese ambassador looked at her. And didn’t reply.
Right. She glanced about the glass shuttle, then through the ceiling to the planet’s thick atmospheric shield barely visible to the eye. How often through the years had she stared up at this globe from Earth, despising it while simultaneously wondering what it looked like and wh
at it was made of?
History, apparently. And more recently, the blood of humans. But maybe what she should’ve been asking was what exactly the Delonese were made of . . .
She rubbed her neck. “Considering you’re using my people to reboot your race, I feel it only appropriate to ask—is Earth your first interaction with another race? Or have you gone through others before us?” She glared into Ethos’s eyes. “Have you already tried using others for rebooting the reproduction of your people?”
The ambassador stared at her, unflinching. With a look akin to someone who’d just been grilled about other women on a date, and again said nothing.
Right. Which communicated everything. She wanted to smack him.
How many others had there been? And why hadn’t they worked? “In that case, what about your home planet?” Sofi asked. “What about your people still there?”
“We blew it up. So no others would be able to find it or use it.”
Sofi actually laughed, though her tone was filled with disgust. “Of course you did.”
Ethos swept his hand around the sunlit crystal ship, like he was encompassing his entire people beyond it. “And now we arrive at the crux of the issue.” He smiled, and everything about it pricked her spine.
The shuttle dipped.
Or maybe her focus dipped. Because her vision went black along with the shuttle, and the next thing she knew they were inside the planet—flying through its core.
She swung around, then peered back at Ethos.
The alien hadn’t moved a muscle. Neither had the other Delonese—as if they’d not even noticed the transition.
What in—? What just happened?
The shuttle slowed and soared alone throughout the layered sections of a black underground city. Black towers of various heights passed by, with rooms and windows—some lit up, some dark. Bulbs around the buildings flickered on, though, as if sensing the shuttle before it approached each section and blossoming into yellow-lit pathways, apartments, and even rooftop areas as well as odd-angled statues of beasts Sofi had no recognition of.
Something was missing here. Something was . . .
Wrong.
She froze. Where were all the Delonese?
“Is this how your home planet looked too?” Sofi asked, her tone careful. “As empty as this one?”
The ship lurched and the image around them abruptly changed—or shoved them forward—into a new section made of solid white.
White buildings, white ground, white lights, white space surrounded their flying glass bubble. Yet again, if Ethos or the others noticed the intense way the scenery had changed, none acknowledged it.
“Allow me to show you our labs.” Ethos indicated the tall white buildings stretching in front of them.
The shuttle jerked, then glitched in the weird skipping-forward movement before reappearing—flying inside one of the buildings of an enormous medical facility.
Again with the white walls. Except these held med machinery. Sofi curled her fingers into fists and refused to look at Ethos lest she follow through on killing him before this fool tour ended and she could figure out a new attack to wreck their system. She’d have to plant a virus to weaken them. One she could control. The problem was, any advantage she’d had was pretty much gone. Unless she took an alien hostage . . .
She lifted a brow and turned to the ten Delonese just as the ambassador started explaining what they did in the labs. She stopped listening. She didn’t want to hear any more. Especially with the Delonese members staring again. Their eyes and faces suddenly seemed closer, or larger. Sofi blinked and inhaled as the shuttle air felt heavy and the colors tilted off scale. She quitly bent over and made a slight gagging sound.
Sofi was lying on the med cot—stiff, like a butterfly pinned beneath a magnifying glass for people to dissect and analyze whether or not she was okay. Was she okay? It felt like she’d been asking that her entire life.
She wiggled and strained to break the straps, her heart beat, beat, beating like wings in time to the music in her head.
“Sofi, leave. Fly! Fly!” she heard Shilo say.
The microscope moved nearer. The Delonese faces peered harder. Their bodies closing in as their hive minds pondered.
Just before they pulled out their knives.
When she blinked again all was as before. She gripped a window brace. This was ridiculous. She was done being calm and playing their head games. She’d had enough of those on her own lately.
Narrowing her gaze, she studied which of the Delonese would be the easiest to take. The one third to the right. Just a hair thinner and shorter than the others. And not quite so confident looking. Question was, how would she do it? She offered him a smile suggesting he’d soon wish he’d never heard of Earth. Or the drama she was capable of inflicting.
A scream outside the shuttle yanked her attention. The sound was followed by another, then combined with laughter and squeals. Children reached up and waved as the ship floated past in this building that seemed to stretch on forever. They were the children.
All twenty of them. The kids locked eyes with her and watched with funny expressions, and then she was catching her breath because the shuttle had jerked forward again and was suddenly somehow landing.
The door opened, and Delonese guards were waiting in a short hall where music vibrated through the floors and walls, echoing as the door farther ahead opened and the melody grew louder. And then they were deplaning and walking quickly down that hall—only to step into the same domed room as last night, where the air was light and the aliens were infusing the very atmosphere with perfect harmonies.
“Sofi!”
Claudius and Danya were strolling toward her, arms outstretched, smiles from ear to ear in the vast room of layered balconies, and glittering air, and elegant Delonese everywhere.
And behind them was Miguel.
15
MIGUEL
The night Miguel met Sofi, he’d been at a party celebrating the successful, newly established FanFight Games—which were the latest in cross virtual and live entertainment created by the thirty ruling United World Corporations.
“To feed humanity’s blood-enthrallment while testing our Corp inventions,” they’d joked behind closed doors.
And as Earth’s most popular, wildly misbehaving ambassador, Miguel had been in lavish attendance at the after gala, to enjoy all the rewards that came with youthful popularity and his skills of seduction—especially when one had an uncanny ability to utilize both. He’d used every move to obtain his ambassador position.
He just hadn’t been prepared for the summer storm that was Sofi Snow.
“Who knew Inola’s sixteen-year-old kid was a bloody genius?” a senator at the glittering party muttered beside him. “Girl and her team should’ve won.”
“Not just won,” said another. “She and her brother should’ve creamed them all and claimed the winning title.”
“You think someone purposefully gamed the system against them?” Miguel swerved an already curious eye Sofi’s direction. And smirked at the pair of old-skool headphones around her neck alongside a tiny owl necklace beneath an expression that declared she despised being there as much as he was enjoying it. Interesante. “Forgive me, but I thought gaming was the whole point. However it’s accomplished.”
“The game-heads, sure, but not the Corps. At least not once the players hit the arena. Trust me, that girl should’ve won.”
Is that so?
“Don’t even think about it,” Claudius had said as soon as the senators had strolled away. “She’s not your type.”
Miguel lifted a brow.
“She has morals, Miguel.”
Ah. Got it. He’d nodded politely and promptly lost interest.
Not that he disagreed with the senators’ assessment of Sofi. He was quite aware her tech brilliance was deemed phenomenal. It’s just that he’d assumed everything was always rigged—especially if you were the limelight’s current highest bidder.
And if she was honestly trying to pretend she was any different . . . He snorted. Then she was a liar. More than that—she was hiding it behind the pretense of morality, which was the worst kind in his experience.
Only thing was . . .
When her mother insisted on introducing them a half hour later, he’d discovered a girl with no interest in the limelight or pretending whatsoever.
Nor in him, for that matter.
It was shocking, really. In the midst of the universe’s political games, the star of the underground gaming world had somehow maintained an innocent ideal of becoming what he believed in. And making the person he was more than the puppets the world played. And it intrigued him body and spirit until the point that, over the following month, conviction had altered everything. As if one day he’d been fine, and the next, the entire planet had tilted and he’d lost his grip on the external world he loved and the internal world he loathed. Because the girl with the black eyes and brown limbs—who smelled of sun and fields, and whose heart he broke barely four weeks later, by being so pathetically broken himself—believed in the goodness of people’s humanity.
He’d spent the next seventeen months trying to become worthy of that belief.
Because somehow he’d begun to believe it about people too.
And now here she stood in a party room on Delon. This girl who was a summer moon on a winter eve, whom he’d watched walk back into his world and wreck him all over again just three days ago.
And she was not finished yet. With any of it.
Miguel watched the tilt of her head as she lifted her face to this golden glass-domed room that was turning in a slow circle in between the massive day-lit moon above and the white snow-tipped landscape below. Filled with hundreds of white-robed Delonese. And caught the glint in her eye that said she was going to burn this place down.
“Miguel, what do you know of Sofi’s tech skills?” Alis asked him.