Shailene had her legs wrapped around the sentry’s torso, holding his mandibles closed with her hands, keeping him from making any noise apart from a muffled grunt. The creature fought to buck her off him, and his gun went skittering across the floor.
“Grab that!” Shailene ordered, and I darted to obey. I jumped upright, aiming the weapon at the sentry, unsure if I was holding it correctly, or even where the trigger was. “Are you trying to kill me?” she shrieked. “Give me that thing!” In a fluid motion, she snatched the gun out of my hands and kicked the sentry away from herself. He staggered backward and she brandished the weapon. There was a flash of light, and he collapsed.
I blinked at her. “Since when can you do that?”
“Since always?” She tossed her head, her hair flying out of her face. “I’m an I.G.A. Striker. Or did you forget that?”
“Well, why didn’t you do it earlier?”
She gawked at me. “When, in the train station? With two dozen other sentries around us, hiding in plain sight? I’m a Striker, not a one-woman army.”
I rolled my eyes and poked the sentry with my foot. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so. It was set to stun.” She looked the weapon over. “I think.”
“Okay. Let’s get the hell out of here before he or Andronicus wakes up, then.” I shoved his crumpled form into one of the empty cells, then crouched, placing my hand on him and shifting quickly. It felt less strange the more often I did it.
Shailene watched me. “I wish I could do that,” she said as I closed the cell door. “It would make getting out of here a whole lot easier.”
I wanted to smile at her, but once again my mutated facial muscles wouldn’t cooperate. I wondered how sentries were able to disguise themselves as humans so easily. Was it something like my own power? That thought made me queasy, so I pushed it aside. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You’ll protect me?”
“Fine. We’ll protect each other.”
That made her smile. She brandished the gun and nodded. “All right. We’ll protect each other.”
I opened the door, looking around to make sure it was clear. “Okay, let’s go. Where are we going?”
“This facility is built into the side of the mountain. That hangar door”—she gestured—“opens out to the air. But there are a few ground-level exits up here. They brought us in through one of them. You were… not awake.” She shuddered and shook her head. “Um, anyway, there’s a large storage room, and there’s a driveway to let trucks in and out.”
“I know where that is. Come on.”
We hurried across the balcony. This level was mostly deserted, but I tried to block Shailene’s form from the hangar level as best I could with my body. Nerves racked me, but beside me, gripping that gun, Shailene looked confident, unflappable.
I opened the door to the storage room I’d seen before, the one the two sentries had emerged from. It looked empty. I waved Shailene in. “Stay behind those boxes,” I said, gesturing to a stack of crates along the wall. “I’ll make sure that our exit route is clear.”
The room was a maze of storage containers. Huge crates, big enough to hold a person, towered up to the ceiling. I wound my way between boxes, peering around cautiously. I could hear voices somewhere in the room. If we were going to get out of here undetected, we’d have to get rid of them first.
I rounded a corner to see three sentries unloading crates from the back of a truck. One of them looked up. “L-193, what are you doing here?” he asked in their bizarre language.
“Andronicus took charge of the Striker,” I replied.
“Good. You can help us unload these. We need them brought down to C-level.”
I hesitated, unsure what to do. We didn’t have time to waste on me moving boxes for the Anesidorans. But if I protested now, the others would be suspicious. The sentry stared at me expectantly, and I moved forward to take a box off the back of the truck.
Before I had a chance to worry about where, exactly, C-level was, I heard a door bang open back where we’d come from. My heart leapt into my throat. Where was Shailene? They hadn’t caught her, had they?
Footsteps approached rapidly, and then he came around the corner. The guy in the hood from earlier—but his hood was off now.
It took all the strength I had not to lose my transformation. I could feel my skin crawling, threatening to ripple back to human flesh, and I closed my eyes, screaming at every cell in my body to stay right where it was.
“All of you, come with me,” he barked. “We need all the sentries from this quadrant in the medical wing. Laura Clark has gone missing. She hasn’t had her implant modified yet. We have to find her before she leaves the facility.”
“Yes, sir,” the other sentries around me said, and I joined them in the salute I’d seen them use earlier. The other three hurried after him, and I followed. But when they turned a corner in the labyrinth of boxes, I pulled back, my heart pounding as I shrank into the shadows of a stack of crates. My tenuous hold on the transformation slipped, and I curled into myself, trying to calm the panic racing through my veins, the utter rejection of seeing yet another freaking person I knew in this goddamned facility.
Tall, muscular, olive-skinned. Impeccably handsome with sleek, gelled hair. Just as much a movie star as Andronicus and his Cary Grant-style debonair. I’d sensed him the morning Erikka had been captured, and again when he’d confronted us on the train, and I still hadn’t been able to connect the dots. But now it seemed so obvious I wanted to kick myself.
Damien. Damien was an alien.
Someone tapped my shoulder, and I almost screamed. I jerked my head back and saw Shailene standing over me, the gun still clenched in her hand.
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered back when I’d caught my breath. “They didn’t find you.”
“Are you okay?” she asked, peering at my bloodless face.
“That guy. I know him.” I struggled back up to my feet. “That’s my big’s boyfriend.”
“Your ‘big’?”
“Big sister. In my sorority. See, when you join a sorority, they assign you an upperclassman to show you the ropes and stuff. They call it bigs and littles.” I shook my head. “Never mind. It’s not important. We need to get out of here, and I have to warn Ana.”
The storage room was deserted. We hurried back over to the truck the sentries had been unloading and Shailene scrambled up into the cab. We needed to get out of here before somebody figured out what was going on and caught up with us. I couldn’t let this rattle me. If I could handle the fact that my own freaking mother was involved with an alien invasion, I could deal with Ana’s douchebag boyfriend.
“The key’s in the ignition,” Shailene called down to me.
“We need to get this open,” I called back, looking up at the heavy metal door in front of us. There was a control panel with a touch screen attached to it.
“If that’s anything like the ones in their other facilities, it only responds to Anesidoran DNA,” Shailene said, following my gaze. “If a human tries to activate it, an alarm will go off.” She brandished the gun. “Should I shoot it out?”
“Will that keep the alarm from going off?” I asked.
“Probably not.”
I cursed under my breath. Then I looked down at my hand, and thought about how I’d been able to respond when the sentries had talked to me in that weird, other language. The fact that I could shapeshift when none of the other human experiments could.
But the sentries could.
For some reason, I’d felt weirder about seeing Damien here than seeing my mom. I figured that was because I’d already begun to guess my family was wrapped up in this. But what if it was more than that?
Maybe it was those repressed memories lurking beneath my skin. Maybe they weren’t buried as deep as I’d thought—maybe they lurked just beneath the surface of my subconscious.
Maybe I’d known this all along.
I pressed my
hand against the panel. Shailene made a noise of protest behind me, but no alarm came. The door shuddered, then started to rumble open.
There it was. The answer. The one that had been staring me in the face this whole time. That I’d tried to deny, to block from my mind.
I was involved. Because I was one of them. My mom was talking to Andronicus… because she was one of them.
I was Anesidoran.
“Laura,” Shailene said, still leaning out of the cab of the truck. I couldn’t look at her.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said.
We drove the truck halfway down the hillside before abandoning it. We couldn’t take the risk of the Anesidorans being able to track the vehicle. When we left the base, the sun was shining brightly overhead—a night and half a day had passed while I’d been unconscious in that doctor’s office, while Shailene had rotted in that prison cell. By the time we made it out of the hills and into a small farmtown nestled along a country highway, the sun was already starting to set.
We followed the main street until we found a small café. The sign said they were open until eight o’clock. When we stepped inside, a clock on the wall showed we had forty-five minutes left until then.
“Excuse me,” Shailene said, approaching one of the baristas standing behind the counter wiping off mugs with a dishrag. “Our car broke down…”
I shuffled over to a table, sinking into the worn wooden chair. Every bone in my body ached. I wanted to go home and take a nice, hot bubble bath. Then I wanted to go to sleep in my own bed—my bed, in my house, not the hard dorm-style bed at the Gam-Lam house—and wake up in the morning and have my mom there, and my dad, and Lola and Tonio, and have everything be back to normal. No aliens. No missing memories. No lies. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to cry.
“Can I get you something, hon?” The other barista had come over to the table, a notepad in her hand.
I shook my head, shoving a strand of hair behind my ear. “I lost my wallet.”
She looked at me sympathetically. “You two have had a day. It’s on the house.”
“Really?” I smiled tightly. “Thank you. Can I have a cinnamon latte?”
She patted my shoulder and left to make my drink. I watched as Shailene talked to the barista behind the counter. At one point, he handed her his cell phone. I slumped forward, resting my face on the cool table until the woman came back with my latte.
It was almost gone by the time Shailene made it over to the table. “He let me use his phone to log in to Lyft. I got us a ride back to your sorority house. They should be here before the café closes. We’ll check on your big, and then we can figure out to do from there.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
Shailene sat down across from me. “Laura,” she said.
“Please don’t.” I couldn’t look at her. I clutched the ceramic mug tightly between my hands, swishing the remnants of my coffee around and feeling sick to my stomach.
“No. I have to.” She reached over, folding her fingers over the top of the cup, just centimeters from mine. It sent jolts through me, as if she’d laid her hand over mine. “Laura, whoever you are… it’s okay.”
“It’s okay?” I looked up at her, my eyes stinging. I swallowed the tears back, burning my throat. “I’m Anesidoran, Shailene. And that’s okay?”
“Yes.” Her gaze didn’t waver from mine. “Everything we’ve gone through has proved that. I don’t know what’s going on with you or your family, but it’s not important. I trust you.”
I blinked, and a hot tear coursed down my face. It couldn’t be okay, just like that. But she said it was, and she meant it. More than anything in the world, I wanted to take her hand in mine. But I couldn’t even do that, thanks to my mom. I squeezed the mug even tighter instead.
My family had caused this. What had happened to Shailene and hundreds of other people around the world. And now even Ana was in danger, and it was all my fault. She had asked me to go to dinner with them last night, and I hadn’t even answered her. I could have been there as a buffer, tried to protect her from Damien somehow. But instead I’d ignored her. And now I didn’t even have my phone to check and see if she was all right.
Our Lyft driver pulled up just as the café was closing for the evening. He was chatty and chipper, but I wasn’t in the mood for talking. Shailene gave him the same story that she’d given the baristas—that our car had broken down outside of town, and we needed a ride back to campus while it was in the shop.
“That’s the worst. You guys look like you’ve had a hell of a day,” the driver said sympathetically. He was the second one to say something to that effect. I was scared to look at myself in the mirror now. When I didn’t respond, he carried on enthusiastically, “So, you go to St. Francis, too?”
“She does. I go to Bayview,” said Shailene.
“Ooooh,” the driver roared. “I don’t know if I can ferry a Swordsman in my car. Nah, just kidding. You’re okay. But you better watch out, with two Mariners here with you. I was just heading back over to campus. Sucks that spring break is over already. Did you guys do anything fun?”
He carried on like that until we made it back to City East. By the time we pulled up in front of the Gam-Lam house, my stomach was tied up in tight, nervous knots. I raced up the walkway, hurriedly typed in my passcode to the front lock, and flung the door open.
Immediately I was greeted by pandemonium. I realized belatedly that if we’d spent the night in the Anesidoran base, today was Sunday—everyone was back from spring break now. Classes started again tomorrow. The front entryway echoed with laughter and squealing voices.
“Wow,” Shailene said, taken aback. “How many girls are in this sorority?”
“A hundred and twenty. The house sleeps about ninety of us. The seniors usually like to get apartments off-campus, and the rest are studying abroad this semester.”
Shailene didn’t say anything. Her mouth was frozen in an O-shape. I looked around the entrance to my house, trying to remember how I’d felt the first time I’d come through these doors. It had only been eight months ago, but it felt like a lifetime. I supposed it could seem imposing if you weren’t used to it. The house had been built right after the Great Fire had wiped out half the city, and the dark, heavy wood beams that held up the ceiling had been salvaged from a mansion that had burned down. To the right, our formal living room where alumnae held their association meetings was currently overflowing with girls back from vacation, who hadn’t even bothered to take their suitcases upstairs before congregating together to gossip and share what had gone on over the week and a half they’d been away. The doors to the date room were open in front of us, though the room was empty—back in the day, girls would bring their dates to that room, and the high threshold of the doors would let the house mom check to make sure that everyone’s feet were still on the floor and no hanky panky was going on. Nowadays, we used the room as a library, and a display case between the shelves held the awards our chapter had received over the years.
To the left was a hallway leading to the main staircase, the kitchen and dining area, and the house mom’s room. I gestured to Shailene to follow me that way now. We’d made it up all of three steps when I heard Claudia, our house mom, call my name.
“Laura, there you are.”
“Oh, hey, Claudia,” I said, turning to face her. Plump, cheery-faced and in her mid-thirties, she was less of a mom and more of… well, not quite a sister. Maybe a relatively chill aunt? “Did you have a nice vacation?”
“I did. Who’s that with you?”
Shailene, who’d frozen on the steps beside me, put on her polite face. “Hey, nice to meet you,” she said, coming back down the stairs to shake Claudia’s hand. “I’m Shailene. I’m a friend of Laura’s.”
“A friend?” Claudia repeated, a loaded tone in her voice, and I felt my face turn three different shades of red. She couldn’t be serious here.
Oh, but she was.
“Laur
a, dear,” she said, “is she just a friend friend? Or is she a… special friend? Because, you know, rules are rules. No paramours upstairs, regardless of gender—”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I shrieked, wanting the stairs to open up like a crocodile jaw and just swallow me down. “She’s just a friend!”
“Okay, okay,” Claudia replied, holding her hands up. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Fine, whatever. Have you seen my big?” I couldn’t bring myself to look in Shailene’s direction.
“No, I haven’t. But it’s been helter skelter around here. Try her room?”
I bolted up the stairs without another word, Shailene following behind. “That was interesting,” she said, the hint of a laugh in her voice.
“If by ‘interesting’ you mean ‘the most mortifying experience of my life’, then sure.”
“Oh, come on, Laura,” she said. “You have to admit it was a little funny.”
Funny that she thought we’d be a couple? I wondered. Or just funny in a cosmic sort of way? Shailene’s face didn’t give away anything, but her ears looked the slightest bit pink.
Probably a sunburn, I told myself, and hurried down the hallway.
“Which room is yours?” Shailene asked as we squeezed past a group of sophomores whose names I didn’t know. One thing about having a hundred-plus girls in a club, there was no way you could get to know everyone.
“Oh, I’m in one of the porches,” I answered.
She blinked. “You sleep on a porch?”
“Well, it’s not actually a porch.” I laughed. “They just call them sleeping porches. I’m not sure why. It’s more like… Here, I’ll show you.” I detoured away from the staircase I’d been heading toward and gestured her into my room.
“Laura!” Gail, one of my roommates, squealed, jumping up from her bed and running over to give me a hug. She, Marisleysis, and Sierra were the only ones in the room, the three of them piled up on Mari’s bed watching a movie on her laptop. But I could see from the mess of open suitcases and clothes strewn over everyone else’s beds that all my roommates were back.
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