“We’re a team now, you and me. Whatever we get into, we get out of together. Period. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”
He gave a half-hearted laugh. “I can’t guarantee that.”
Stubborn son of a … I amassed all my anger, wrestled it into a ball, and shoved it through our bond.
He jerked back, eyes wide.
Had I hurt him?
I redirected my energy, feeding off the agony of almost losing him. Never again. You’re part of me, now. I’m not letting you go. Ever. I calmed, and allowed the sensation to ease through our link.
Our bond trembled. David’s eyes quaked. His emotions swirled: stronger, but still unsure. A dim light flickered at the edge of his soul, mingling with the fear of letting me down … of letting everyone down.
No. Not again. Not ever. It wasn’t just him or me anymore. We were one.
You made it rain. You did it! You’ve become more important than you realize. To me, and to the world—to both our worlds.
My father had told me once that confidence wasn’t inherent. It was taught. Self-assurance was one thing I’d never lacked. It got me into trouble sometimes. Mom always said I had confidence to spare, and I couldn’t think of a better person to share it with. Every lesson I’d learned, every battle I’d won, every loss I’d endured, everything that made me the sometimes arrogant, sure person I’d become rose to the surface of my mind. I packaged each experience up and shoved them through our bond.
David inhaled as if taking his first breath, then steadied himself. “W-what was that?”
“I just gave you something I have plenty of. My mom used to call it good old fashioned chutzpah.”
He stared at his hands, flexing his fingers as if seeing them for the first time. His eyes brightened back to a crisp, bright turquoise.
Damn. I looked pretty good on him.
I hopped up and pulled David to his feet. “Enough slacking, soldier. We still have a planet to save.”
34
Clouds gave way to space and sparkling stars as David and I helped each other to the front of the ship.
Nematali directed David to the control chair and helped him sit. “Are you well enough to pilot?”
“I think so.”
“Excellent.” She stepped back, not even looking at me. “I have sent an emergency transmission on all frequencies informing the Caretakers of your progress. They have confirmed the precipitation is genuine, and naturally occurring.”
A smile burst across David’s face. His eyes glossed with tears.
Finally, after all this time, the recognition he deserved. My heart swelled for him.
I fell into the co-pilot’s chair. A whoosh of adrenaline wafted from my frame. It was over. Earth was safe. We’d saved the world. Again.
Hopefully it would stay saved a little while.
“But there is a problem.” Nematali lowered her gaze. Her brow tightened. Her lips thinned.
“It’s already started, hasn’t it?” David asked.
A chill coated my veins. “What’s already started?”
Nematali folded her arms. “The scourge was scheduled to begin approximately three hours ago.”
What? I scrambled to my knees and leaned on the back of my chair. “But, they never attacked. They called it off in time, right?”
Nematali shifted her weight. “It takes approximately an hour for a transmission to reach Earth, and an hour back to confirm. As of yet, they have not confirmed.”
Ice curdled my veins. I fisted the back of my chair.
“There is a great deal of intergalactic static between our worlds,” she said.
David sighed. “From what? An ion storm?”
“Unknown. The nearest space anomaly on record is a nine-mile wide celestial projectile Earth’s scholars refer to as Halley’s Comet, but the static has made even an object of that size unreadable.”
“Have they tried displacing the signal off the outer lying stars?” David rubbed his temples. “It’s archaic, but at least they will know we’re trying to get a message through.”
She nodded. “All avenues have been explored.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I pushed back from my chair. “There has to be a way to get through to them.”
“Possibly,” Nematali said.
David turned to her. “What are you thinking?”
“Our people will continue transmitting the ceasefire, but in the meantime, this ship can travel between our worlds in one day. It is probable that you will reach Earth before any of our communications do.”
David scratched the bridge of his nose. “They’ll never believe us. The Caretakers will have to encode a message into our logs.”
“Excellent thinking,” she said. “I will stay behind, just to make sure the communication remains a priority.”
I hugged myself. “So, we’ll still be able to stop it, right?”
They both turned to face me.
They could have said anything. Mary had a little lamb, recited the A B C’s. Something. Their blank stares tore through my soul.
Nematali turned away. “Go. Quickly. I will take an escape pod.”
35
The ship jarred as Nematali’s pod shot from our hull. David waved his palm over the console, and our view in the windows slipped to the left, past Mars. The liquescent black orbs that had attacked us on arrival spun, catching the light of the sun, looking more like small moons than warships protecting the planet.
“Ready?” David asked.
I nodded, and a small white square formed over a little blue dot in the distance.
Earth. It seemed so insignificant from here, but it was everything. My world. My home. It was hard to even imagine out there in the quiet of space that something horrible could be happening within our sight.
“Do you think the attack started already?” I asked.
“With communications down, there’s no way of knowing.”
“If it did start, how long would it take, to … you know?”
“Scourge a planet?” He massaged the back of his neck. “Not long enough.”
I spun back to my little blue marble. My hands clenched the armrests. What would I do if we didn’t get there in time?
No. We would get there in time. We had to.
David’s chair turned toward mine. “They just uploaded the ceasefire protocols to our ship, and I’ve plotted a course. There isn’t anything else we can do until we get there.” He leaned his elbows on his knees. “Do you want to try to get some sleep?”
“I don’t think I could.” Earth. So beautiful, and so far away.
His hand slid beneath mine, prying my fingers from the supports. “I could help you rest, if you wanted me to.”
“You mean doing your mental mojo thing? No thanks.” It just didn’t seem right, sleeping while … I really didn’t want to think about it. It was easier to shut it out and pretend none of this was happening.
Edgar popped out of one wall, scurried across the floor, and jumped into the opposite partition.
A smile spread across my lips. “He’s a busy little bug, isn’t he?”
“Grassen always seem to have something to do, but I think half of it is hoarding food.”
I laughed, but cut myself off, ashamed for the outburst while my dad might be back home facing the fight of his life—the fight of everyone’s lives.
I tightened my grip on David’s hand. “Do you really think we can stop this?”
He shrugged. “I’d like to say the odds are in our favor, but they’re not.”
My stomach clenched. “Sometimes I just wish you’d lie to me.”
He spun my chair toward him and grabbed my other hand. “One thing I’m sure of is that anything is possible when we’re together. We have been through some insane stuff.”
“Tell me about it.” The stars twinkled outside the window. So serene. So beautiful. “Sometimes I wish I could just press a pau
se button and stop time, just to give us a few minutes where we didn’t have to worry. You know what I mean?”
He nodded, tightening his grip on my fingers.
My chair jolted.
“What was that?”
“I’m not sure.” David waved his hands over the controls. “It felt like something hit us.”
“Please tell me someone just chucked an empty can out their spaceship window or something.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“What? Aliens don’t litter?”
We jolted again.
“Okay, that was sooo not funny. Are you messing with me?”
“I wish I was.”
The walls flashed yellow twice.
“Is that Edgar? What did he say?”
David turned to the window.
My chair came to life, towing me back and tightening. “What’s going on?”
David settled into his own seat as his gaze remained fixed on the controls. “Meteor shower.”
Meteor shower? Yeah, cause that was probably the only thing that hadn’t happened to us yet.
A roar echoed through the ship and a white fog filled the window screens. We shook like maracas before the fog dissipated and the roar faded to nothing.
“That was a little too close,” David said.
“Can’t we fly around them?”
“Too many, and the field is too wide. We either keep going through, or we add an extra week to the trip.”
That’s a week we didn’t have. “Didn’t you know this was here? Don’t you alien guys keep maps of things like this?”
“Yes, if I was an astrological alien guy, but I’m not. Eco-biologist alien guys don’t pay attention to things like meteor showers.” He wiped his face with his palms. “Besides, I’m not a complete idiot. I did check the maps and this wasn’t here.”
“I never said you were an idiot.” I tensed as a white, fluffy, smoking bowling ball soared past the window. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared, and I want to go home.”
He flashed me a half-hearted grin and returned his attention to the screen. “We’ll get there. I promise.”
I let his words soak in, trying to find comfort in them.
We’re coming, Dad. We’re coming.
Thunk. Something crashed against the window and skidded over the top of the ship.
“This thing is ultra-smash proof, right?”
“To an extent.”
A bright puff appeared in the distance, getting bigger by the second.
“Do I even want to know what that is?”
“Probably not.” He tapped the edge of the panel to his left. “You know, stuff like this didn’t happen to me before I met you.”
“Are you saying I’m bad luck?”
“No, I’m saying you make life more interesting. Much, much, much more interesting.”
The blurry dot cleared, looking like a miniature sun.
“What is that?”
“A spherical meteor, class seven.”
“Does that mean it’s really big?”
“We’ve recorded larger, but this one still outweighs us by about four hundred tons.” We jolted to the left. “I’m trying to get around it, but there are too many smaller ones to dodge.” David tapped the panel. “Edgar, what kind of weapons is this ship armed with?”
The walls flashed.
“I guess that will have to do.” He stared into the screen. “You might want to hold on.”
Yeah, like I had a choice.
The restraints on my chair tightened as the windows filled with brilliant white. A glowing silver star throttled from below us, rocketing toward the miniature sun bearing down on our little ship.
I held my breath as the star’s tail sparked to nothing, while the sun grew.
The flash seared my eyes and I gasped. The comet detonated like the Death Star exploding, minus the theatrical flames.
“Yes!” I screamed.
David’s chair released and he leaned toward the console. “This is not good.”
“Aw, come on. You blew it up!”
“Yes. But now one big hurling object is a few thousand high-speed explosion-launched objects.”
Of course it is, because it’s us. Captain Kirk never had these kinds of problems! Kirk got scenarios where everything was always over neat and tidy at the end of every show. But Jess? Noooo, Jess got a thousand projectile objects hurling at her at high speeds!
David flopped back into his seat. The ship rattled. A searing noise sounded overhead, and something the size of a cantaloupe cut through the roof and landed between us. The sizzling noise echoed through the chamber. We weren’t dead, so the liquidic hull must have instantly closed over.
“Edgar,” David shouted, “we need some help up here!”
The lights flashed and the sizzling stopped. We jolted, jerked, and shimmied. A blast hit the windows and sparks blanketed the glass.
Space became dark again—silent, except for the stars twinkling in the distance and a bright white pebble beside my beautiful blue golf ball.
“We’re through.” David stood and sunk his hands into the control panel, sighing. “We’re okay. We lost some air when a few smaller meteors sliced through our hull, but we’re fine.”
My chair released and I threw my arms around him. His embrace made me feel safer than any demonic chair could. “Please tell me there are no more meteor showers.”
A laugh barely escaped his lips. He rubbed his puffy eyes. “No more meteors.”
“You look exhausted.”
“Of course I do, I’ve been hanging out with you.”
I smiled and returned my attention to Earth. “How long until we get home?”
“About fifteen hours.”
My little marble twinkled in the distance. A sense of serenity coated me, knowing I’d be back with Dad soon. “Maybe it would be a good idea to get some sleep, then.”
Edgar popped out of the floor and jumped onto the control panel. The illumination dimmed. He must have been listening in on us, the little stinker.
The long, deep couch oozed up out of the floor.
David steered me to the cushions. “Edgar can wake us if he needs anything.”
He laid on his back, and I cuddled up to his shoulder. The tension drained from his face, replaced by something deeper. His gaze centered on the roof of the ship as his lips tensed just on the edge of a grimace.
I drew a line down the edge of his chin. “Please don’t say there’s something you’re not telling me.”
He took in a deep breath. “No. You know everything I do, but that isn’t much. I hate not knowing what we’re flying into.”
His gaze remained fixed on the ceiling. A profound dread trickled along our tether, but quickly abated. I cringed. What was he hiding?
Swirls of tingling emotions passed between us. I reached deeper. The dread I had felt hid below veiled fears of his father’s continual rejection, and the occupation of Earth. There was something worse, something he wanted hidden from me.
I imagined my hands sifting through layers of his thoughts. I rammed aside his terror of confronting his father, and sieved through his uncertainty about saving Earth. The shroud within him parted, leaving behind a dull, lifeless ball.
“Don’t,” David whispered.
“I want to see. No secrets anymore, right?”
He shuddered as the chilly ball of sadness rose above the clutter of other concerns and floated free. The sphere signified something more important than anything else—something he tried to hide, but could never escape from. I imagined my fingers easing along our bond, stroking and relaxing every fiber of his body as he’d done to me so many times before.
He opened up, the ball shattered, and the sense of my own conscience swept through our bond.
It was me.
His deepest, most secret concern was me.
He’d always wanted me safe—that worry always churned acro
ss the surface of the others. This was something more.
I tensed as the sense of duty injected itself—the need to do the right thing—to sacrifice.
An image of me, shrouded in green and sleeping, penciled through our intermingled psyche. Inside the vision, he dragged his fingers though my hair. A deep desire to hold, keep, and conceal consumed everything. Warmth seeped into me, a deep sense of comfort.
We were in the alcove on the green planet. Alone, with no way to get home. He was happy. Was it possible that maybe I was happy there, too?
Duty drilled its way through, a bar of incessant brown nagging at the comforting green, pummeling until the tranquility faded away.
I gasped. David had been happy on the green planet. His only concern was me. There was no responsibility, no one to answer to. But we’d escaped, and threw ourselves back into what David feared the most—a life of seemingly unending obligations.
We hadn’t escaped from the green planet, we’d allowed ourselves to be caught again. Caught by reality.
I stiffened. I’d been angry because David left me for so long. He’d always known he would have to leave, but he hadn’t realized until he returned how upset I’d be.
The brown bar looming in David’s mind flexed and jabbed within him. Now he was more afraid, because he was planning on leaving again.
Duty.
He was more like my father than I wanted to admit.
I leaned on David’s chest. “You know, you don’t have to go right home when all this is over. You can stay with me a little bit.”
Or maybe a lot of bit. I smiled, circling a pattern on his chest with my fingers. I could make tacos again. We could watch that movie he wanted to see. Be a normal couple for a few days.
For once I wanted to spend some time with David that didn’t involve us running for our lives or racing against the clock for some reason. Was that too much to ask?
David closed his eyes and huffed a deep breath that lifted me up on his chest. “That would be nice,” he said, but the undertone in his inflection said “fat chance of that ever happening.”
Embers in the Sea Page 26