Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

  “I know we’re supposed to be family and all, but I’m not ready to pee in front of you.”

  He sighed. “This is just an interplanetary skiff. We’ll only be in here for a short ride to Jupiter, then the ISV Eastwood will scoop us up.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s only until Jupiter.”

  Ty touched the wall in front of him, and it lit up, a digital control array fanning out beneath his fingertips. The entrance sealed up behind us without a sound. I swiveled around in my chair, bumping knees with Tycius. It was tight in there.

  The space tent was only dark for a split second before all three walls went completely transparent. I had a 360-degree view of the ruined ski lodge and the woods. The only things that remained solid were the floor and our chairs.

  “I think you’re going to dig this part,” Ty said.

  “How were you passing as human, saying stuff like ‘dig this’?”

  Ty gave me a look. “This liftoff is going to be lit, my dude.”

  “Please stop.”

  Smiling, he hit a button, and up we went.

  The skiff soundlessly shot into the sky. I rocked back in my chair as we floated into the night, first above the trees, then to the point where I could make out headlights on the highways and the patchwork of buildings beyond. I wondered if my mom was in one of those cars down there.

  Strapped into that little chair with nothing but dark sky on every side of me, I felt like I’d been flung out of a plane in an ejector seat, and what little I’d eaten at the diner squirmed up my esophagus. I felt like if I tipped the wrong way, I’d go tumbling right off what now felt like little more than a platform. I squeezed Ty’s shoulder.

  “Maybe, uh, some smaller windows?”

  He took one look at me, saw that I was turning green, and hit the outline of a button on the transparent wall. The ship regained its solidity, keeping a porthole in each side so that we could see out, as well as the point of the ship above us for some literal moonroof action.

  “Better?”

  I exhaled as the nausea subsided. “I’ve only been in an airplane the one time, and I was really little,” I told him. “Space travel is a new frontier. This is all pretty new, actually.”

  Ty paused for a moment, considering me. “I’m sorry. I thought it would be exciting for you, but I can understand how this would be overwhelming. You’re going to miss Earth, your mother . . .” He sighed and smoothed back his hair. “And here I’m trying to be the fun uncle.”

  I looked out one of the portholes. Higher and higher we went, passing through gray wisps of clouds. I could see the ocean now, the Pacific like a sheet of black silk rippling on the horizon, an embroidery of lights stitched along its edge.

  “Hey, it’s a pretty amazing view,” I said. Glancing over at my uncle, I saw the slits on his nose area flare happily, his eyes slackening. Even though his features were unfamiliar, I read relief in that expression. “Are you happy to be leaving?”

  “Yes,” he answered quickly.

  “Wow. Earth is that bad, huh?”

  “No offense intended,” Ty replied. “But I was never supposed to stay for as long as I did. I could never bring myself to take even a short return trip home and risk missing a clue to your whereabouts. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homesick.”

  Homesick. That wasn’t so far from the feeling I’d had all those years on the run, especially once my mom told me I was half-Denzan. Except I wasn’t homesick for any place in particular. It was just a general emptiness, like Earth wasn’t enough.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to miss it either,” I said quietly.

  Ty looked at me but didn’t respond.

  The clouds thinned out around us. Washington was long gone now, and so were all the other places that Mom and I had hid out. All of North America was just a blob beneath us, a tiny blemish on an otherwise navy-blue marble. As we glided farther and farther away, the planet began to seem so small, half of it swallowed up by the shadow of space. The moon floated to my right, pale and solitary. And beyond that flared the sun, a furnace, tongues of flame leaping out from the darkness. I knew you weren’t supposed to look right at it, but I looked right at it. Through the windows of our skiff, the brightness didn’t hurt my eyes.

  “Wow,” I breathed. “Wow.”

  “Welcome to the Vastness,” Ty said.

  My mom always said how easy it was for us to get lost in the US, how the two of us could just disappear. If I’d felt small then, like a needle in a haystack, now I felt infinitesimally tinier, like a dust mote on a mountain. Earth itself was so small and fragile, surrounded by so much nothing. Hard to believe there were billions of people back there, all of them with stories and problems, none of them realizing how they were just tiny specks with only gravity keeping them from spiraling off into an endless cold expanse.

  “You okay?” Tycius asked.

  I shook my head. “Having some deep-ass thoughts over here.”

  “There’s an entire genre of Denzan poetry dedicated to the feelings inspired by floating free in the Vastness,” Tycius told me. Then he recited something in his own language, the words rhythmic and singsong.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “Loosely translated, it says I hunger for your touch with the increasing velocity of a magnesium fragment caught in orbital decay.”

  “So your poets are thirsty dorks.”

  “You’d be surprised how many young women appreciate a well-timed zero-gravity haiku.”

  “Yes, cool uncle,” I replied. “I would be surprised by that.”

  He smirked at me, then tapped some buttons on his display. “It’s about thirty-six hours to Jupiter.”

  “I thought you said this was a short ride.”

  “In terms of interplanetary travel, that’s incredibly short.”

  A sharp vibration rattled our skiff’s smooth ride.

  “What was that?” I asked, trying not to sound panicked.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Ty replied. “The sails extended.”

  I leaned against the window to get a better look. Two protrusions had unfurled from the seams of the skiff. I guess you could call them sails, but they looked more like bat wings to me.

  “The panels harness the solar winds,” Ty explained. “We’ll be picking up speed soon. Lean back. You’re going to feel a pinch.”

  “What do you mean, a pin—ow!”

  A needle of liquid metal extended from my headrest and jabbed me in the back of the neck. The same thing happened to Tycius.

  “It’s an organic serum that will make the speed we’re traveling at bearable,” Ty said. “It will safely suppress your excretory system, thin your blood to prevent clotting, and relax your muscles.”

  I gingerly touched the back of my neck. The needle still connected me to my seat. When I leaned forward, it moved with me, like an IV bag. “Too weird.”

  “The ship will continue monitoring your health throughout our voyage,” Tycius said. “You’ll probably experience some drowsiness. Some lost time. We both will.”

  I could already feel it, a stoned sort of melty-ness to my whole body. There was an extraterrestrial ice pick jabbing into my neck, and I couldn’t remember if I’d ever gotten a tetanus shot, but that didn’t seem to matter. I was chill.

  There was a sudden pressure on my chest. We’d picked up speed. The weight gradually eased as the drugs kicked in. The stars ahead of us blurred, some of them flashing blue or red as our velocity wreaked havoc on the light spectrum. I waved a hand back and forth in front of my face, watching light from the blurring stars split between my fingers.

  “Rad,” I murmured.

  I’m not sure how long I played with the light, but at some point I started clenching my fingers to make a fist. I studied my knuckles, the fine lines there, the little hairs. I’d thrown a few punches over the years—we’d moved around a lot, and bullies always sought out the new kid. But soon, that fist of mine was going to be one of the most dangerous weap
ons in the universe.

  “I don’t feel stronger yet,” I said drowsily.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Ty replied. “It’ll take some time for the DNA changes to begin.”

  “My dad . . .” I wasn’t sure where I was going with that statement. The hyper-speed drugs had me feeling loopy.

  “Yes?” Tycius said.

  “Does he—I mean, do you—I mean, do we have other family on Denza?”

  “No. After the Etherazi invasion, it was just me and your father.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  So my dad and I were the only family that Ty had left. It made more sense to me now that he’d spend ten years on Earth looking for me, especially since I could potentially lead him to his brother.

  “Are you older than my dad or . . . ?”

  “Younger,” Tycius answered.

  I felt sleep settling over me, and I grooved back in the chair, getting comfortable, hugging myself.

  “Can you tell me about him?” I asked. “I hardly remember anything.”

  There was a long pause, and for a moment I thought Tycius might have lost consciousness. When he did finally speak, he kept his eyes closed.

  “Marcius, your father, he . . .” Ty trailed off. “I looked up to him. I followed him into service at the Serpo Institute.”

  “You guys were doctors, right?” I asked. “You came to Earth to try healing my grandfather.”

  Ty shook his head. “Neither of us were doctors, actually. Your father’s primary role in Denzan society was as a theoretician. He’s a bit eccentric. Outside-the-box. Such traits are respected on Denza. He was expected to formulate hypotheses, no matter how absurd, and chase them down. Even his failures brought us illumination.”

  “Sounds like a cool gig,” I said. “Are you a bad idea tester, too?”

  “No. I was on Earth to observe the progress of humanity and report back to my people.”

  “A spy.”

  “Basically,” Ty agreed. “Marcius was obsessed with the Lost People. All the theoreticians are, to some extent.”

  “The Lost People?”

  “A species that predates ours. The Serpo Institute has found relics of their civilization scattered throughout the galaxy, but nothing useful, nothing that tells us anything about who they were or where they’ve gone.”

  “Oh cool, there are precursors,” I said, stifling a yawn against the back of my hand. “That’s like my favorite sci-fi trope.”

  “Yes, your Earth writers truly thought of everything,” Ty said with a snort. “The planets where we’ve found their artifacts share nothing in common. Your father theorized that this might mean the Lost People were capable of surviving in a wide variety of climates and atmospheres. From there, he reasoned that perhaps studying how they evolved such traits might shed light on why humans flourish away from Earth but waste away upon their return. He believed he’d found the home world of the Lost People when he . . .”

  I tried to picture my dad—the hazy memory I had of him, anyway—exploring the ruins of an ancient alien civilization. Did he find what he was after out there? Why would someone want to stop him? How was he the only member of his crew to survive?

  I wanted to follow him. In the drugged haze, I realized that’s what I’d been feeling all that time.

  Like my dad, I wanted to dive into the unknown.

  I couldn’t tell if I’d dozed off or if Tycius had, but it seemed like we hadn’t spoken in a while.

  My fingers felt clumsy and heavy, but I managed to maneuver them into my pocket and retrieve the box containing my dad’s cosmological tether. I took out the ring, turning it over in my fingers, examining the swirling cosmos contained in its jewel.

  I glanced over at my uncle. His eyes were closed. “Ty? You awake?”

  “Hmm?” he replied, in a drugged haze of his own.

  “How does this thing even work?” I asked.

  “What thing?” he asked, opening one eye, then the other. “Be careful with that—”

  My leaden fingers slipped off the ring’s delicate gold band. It floated in the air in front of me for a moment, then zipped at my face with the speed of a bullet.

  “Whoa—!”

  A tentacle of ultonate from my seat belt lanced out and speared the ring just centimeters from my cheek. Gently, the ultonate secured both the ring and its box against my hip. My heart pounded, but that only lasted a second as the ship corrected my dosage to calm me down.

  “We’re moving at a very high speed,” Tycius said calmly. “Holding loose objects in front of your face is not recommended.”

  “Noted,” I replied. I’d been in space for only a few hours and had already nearly killed myself. Great.

  “To answer your question,” Ty continued, “you’ll need to use a Wayscope to access the information on the cosmological tether.”

  I thought back to the conversation I’d had with my mom when we were fleeing the cabin. “A Wayscope . . . that’s like what you put into Dungeon to track me down?”

  “A very rudimentary version, yes. Your mind unraveled that puzzle simply because it could. Because it came naturally to you. I assume you’ve always been good at math, yes?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Not to brag, but like multiple high school teachers said I could be a national champion mathlete.”

  “Ah, listen to my cool nephew,” Tycius said with a smile.

  “Ouch.”

  “You see, we Denzans have evolved in such a way that we are capable of seeing spectrums beyond what other species can process. We can sense values like chemical composition, light wavelengths, and units of measure with the same ease that a human nose identifies which variety of butchered livestock is cooking on their stove. A Wayscope is a device used to magnify our vision into the Vastness.”

  “I’m only half-Denzan, though,” I said. “You’re sure I’ll be able to do it?”

  “Yes, after you receive the proper training,” Tycius replied. “Hybrids like you are exceedingly rare, but you aren’t the only one in existence.”

  My eyes widened. “There’s other people like me?”

  “A few,” Tycius replied. “In fact, there will be a hybrid your age on the Eastwood’s crew with us. A young woman.”

  “Our little rebellion.” I said the words as they popped into my head, thinking back to the day when my dad told me he was leaving.

  Ty’s smile was tight and melancholy. “Your dad used to call you that,” he said. “There’s no law against humans and Denzans getting together, but some people on our planet look at it as meddling with a primitive species. Marcius thought that was idiotic.”

  I turned to look out the window. We were alongside Mars. I wondered how many times my dad had made this same voyage, how many times he’d had this same impossible view.

  I wondered if he would even recognize me when we found him.

  I zoned out and must have slipped into unconsciousness. When I blinked awake, Mars was well behind us. We’d gone more than halfway—at least twenty hours I’d been literally pinned to this seat—but it felt like I was just coming up from a very peaceful catnap.

  Next to me, Tycius had taken off his trench coat and peeled up the sleeve of his shirt. There were three bands of obsidian metal stretched around his bicep, tight enough that they must have dug into his muscle anytime he lifted something. Tycius murmured what sounded like a prayer in his own language. As he did, he ran his finger around the edge of the band closest to his elbow.

  When he finished his whispered incantation, the band gave off a hiss like water on a hot pan and dissolved into Ty’s skin. Although Ty didn’t react like it hurt, I still winced on his behalf—the band left a dark gray scar on his slate-colored skin. My uncle rubbed the new marking with a look of relief.

  “Dude,” I said. “What was that?”

  I waited for a response. And waited. Either Ty was pretending not to hear me, or he’d passed out immediately after doing his weird ritual.

  I blinked, and time slipped awa
y again. When I came to, Ty’s coat was back on.

  “Are you awake?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said, smacking my lips. “I think so.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  Jupiter loomed before us, a titanic orb of swirling crimson and silver bands. On the surface—or whatever you called the uppermost layer of ever-shifting ammonia and sulfur—was a dark red cyclone that moved counter to the planet’s rotation. It looked like a violent lipstick kiss, turning across Jupiter’s atmosphere. Our skiff was heading right for its center—right into a chemical storm that was bigger than Earth itself.

  My fingers gripped the armrests. “We’re safe in here, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” Tycius replied dismissively. “Listen. There are some things we should discuss before you meet the others.”

  “Okay,” I said, wary of the edge in Ty’s voice.

  “The captain of the Eastwood is Marie Reno. One of the First Twelve. I’ve been in contact with her and believe we can trust her.”

  My mom had said pretty much the same thing. They meant different things, though. Tycius was strictly thinking of the off-the-books mission to find my father, which we’d be keeping secret in case the people who wanted to disappear him and kidnap me were still paying attention after a decade. My mom, on the other hand, wanted me to know that Reno was down with my parents’ plan to bring enhanced humans back to Earth.

  “I’ll be the first mate once we’re aboard,” Tycius continued. “There will also be a ship’s proctor and a chief engineer. I don’t know who they’ll be, but I imagine Reno will have chosen people we can trust.”

  I nodded. “Sounds cool so far.”

  “The variable that we can’t account for is your crewmates,” Ty said. “Reno already had a crew assigned to her when I notified her that you’d been found. They aren’t aware of your real purpose here. The Serpo Institute recruits the best and brightest from across the universe. You’ll have to be careful around them. You should keep the cosmological tether hidden at all times.”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’ve got a lot of experience being sneaky.”

  “Good,” Ty replied. “Also, you should know that the institute makes sure each crew in the training fleet is diverse with at least one representative from all the member species.”