We all clung to each other, forming a human chain, then a circle, wrapping arms around each other to make the connection as small and tight as we could. Anything to make it easier for Damien to carry us all.
“Ten seconds remaining.”
“Hang on, ladies,” Damien said.
I closed my eyes.
And in a blink, we were home.
It was going to be a hot day. Already now, at ten o’clock, the fog had burned away completely, and the sun was beating down like a heat lamp. The air was thick with the scent of eucalyptus trees, sweet and homey. It was only the end of March, but if the weather kept up like this, summer would be here before we knew it.
I looked down at the park below us, watching the tiny speck of a jogger running up the trail, passing a couple walking leisurely with a big, fluffy sheepdog. No one seemed to notice the two figures high above them, nestled between the flames of Firebelle Tower.
A week had passed, but I still hadn’t quite come down from all that had happened aboard the Okeanos. I’d somehow miraculously managed to make it through the first few days of classes without passing out—though I was pretty sure I’d bombed my Public Speaking presentation. (I probably would have done that anyway, though.)
“Have you heard from your big at all?” Shailene asked from her perch amid the flames.
“Yeah. Well, not directly. But I talked to Damien last night. They’ll be back on Tuesday.”
I hadn’t been able to convince Ana not to go, in the end. Before Damien had left, after he finished transporting the Strikers and me back to Earth, I’d pulled him aside.
“Wait, Damien,” I’d said. “What about Ana?”
“What about her?”
“I mean, isn’t she coming back?”
Damien hesitated, looking at me guardedly. “She already told you, Laura.”
“Yeah, but things are different now. Just let me talk to her, one more time.”
He looked at me like I was bonkers. “I can’t bring you back aboard the Okeanos, Laura. That would be suicide. I’m sure Andronicus is going to figure out what I’ve done, but I’d rather it be later rather than sooner, you know?”
“Then bring her here,” I urged.
“I can’t do that.” He looked at me, his expression softening. “But if you insist, I can let you talk to her.” As I watched, he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He swiped a couple times, then handed it to me. FaceTime with Bae, connecting, the screen read. I tried to resist the urge to barf.
“Hey,” I said when she answered.
“Laura!” Ana exclaimed. “Are you okay? What’s going on? The ship was shaking, and then Damien left and I had no clue where either of you had gone.”
“I’m fine. Damien brought me back home. He’s here with me now.” He leaned over and waved at her over my shoulder, and I rolled my eyes.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened earlier, with your parents. I didn’t know you didn’t know. I feel so stupid.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said sincerely. “I’m just sorry it all blew up in front of you.”
She smiled at me, and I knew if she’d been beside me, she would have reached out to pat my arm or give me a hug. It made me feel hollow.
“What about Shailene?” Ana asked. “Is that going to be okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said. “Damien got her and the other Strikers out, too. I guess”—I sighed in a long-suffering way—“I guess he’s all right.”
Beside me, Damien beamed, flashing his disgustingly-white teeth at me. On the phone screen, Ana grinned too.
“I wanted to make sure,” I said slowly, hesitantly, “you know, maybe… maybe you might want him to bring you home, too?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I made up my mind. I want to help the Anesidorans.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to be… changed in order to help, right?” I reasoned. After all, they couldn’t change everyone on Earth.
“Regular humans can’t survive on Nibiru,” Damien said. “They need the modifications to be strong enough to survive the climate, the amount of high-speed space travel we have to do to get back and forth between the two worlds. A regular human can only make the trip once or twice before their body starts breaking down.”
I exhaled slowly. This wasn’t going to work, was it? She was going and that was that.
“It’s okay, little. I’ll be back before you know it. The procedure just takes a day, and they’ll have me stay a few days longer to monitor me, but then I can come home. I already cleared it with my professors. Well. That I’d be gone, anyway. They don’t know where I’m going.” She smiled, and the phone shook slightly, the image blurring from a moment before going clear again. “And then I’ll be like you, right? We’ll have no more secrets.”
I sniffled. “I like you how you are.”
“I’ll still be me, Laura,” she said with an incredulous laugh. I didn’t look at her, and she folded her arms. “This is my choice to make. I can do with my own body what I want.”
I knew she was right. But I couldn’t make myself be happy about it. Even now, with her just a few days from returning, I didn’t know how to feel. Would things really be the same when she got back? Everything was changing. I just wanted one thing to stay how it had been.
But I supposed that was too much to ask.
“I’m glad she’ll be back soon,” Shailene said now. She smiled, but I noticed she looked distinctly uncomfortable. I knew she was thinking about herself. Her own change hadn’t been a pleasant, regularly-scheduled-visit-to-Nibiru-with-a-set-return-date. And that had been the I.G.A.’s doing. As uncomfortable as the thought of Ana… evolving was to me, she’d at least had a choice in the matter. I still felt that the Anesidorans were manipulating her, but it was nowhere near the level that the I.G.A. had manipulated the Strikers.
She stood, brushing off her bare knees and coming over to the concrete balcony where I sat. “What are you guys going to do about the I.G.A.?” I asked, watching her. Now that Shailene and Janice knew the truth about the I.G.A., I didn’t see how they could continue to work for them.
“I don’t know. We’ve talked about it, but… it’s hard to get away from them. Your dad was able to get a dispensation because of what had happened to his partner. I don’t know if we qualify for one, or what we’d have to do to break away. I don’t want to change my name again, and I don’t want to leave the City. Maybe we’re better off staying where we are, fighting from the inside.”
My stomach knotted. I didn’t like that, but was it really any worse than my own situation? Maybe that’s all any of us could do. Fight with what we had.
I still remembered what Andronicus had said to me when he’d let us go. “You’ve made your choice, Laura. Now you’re going to have to live with the consequences.” And I remembered what Damien had said, just an instant before he’d disappeared:
“He didn’t want to leave you out there, Laura. Regardless of what you think of Andronicus, he’s really not that way. But he didn’t have a choice. He had orders. If anything were to compromise the Strikers, they had to be destroyed. The Nibiru high council was firm on that. We couldn’t risk them coming back to Earth.”
But we’d brought them back to Earth anyway, Damien and I. And what would the consequences be? One thing I knew for certain: I’d thrown away my family’s neutrality. Whatever happened in the coming war, we’d be involved. And if the Nibiru high council wanted to punish us for what I’d done, I didn’t know if there was any way I could stop them.
But I was sure as hell going to try.
“Let’s not worry about it right now,” I said. “The future is going to be a mess, and all we can do is face it as it comes. Let’s just think about the present.” Like right now—the fact that after all these years, we were whole again. No more buried memories. No more secrets, no more lies. She laced her fingers through mine, squeezing my hand, and I thrilled at the contact. It still felt unreal, that we could
touch each other with no pain. That alone made everything we’d gone through worth it.
This was one change I didn’t mind in the least.
We sat together quietly for a long while, her fingers laced through mine and her head on my shoulder. The sun climbed higher in the morning sky.
“Hey,” I said at last. “I was thinking… My sorority formal’s coming up at the beginning of May. Do you think you might… wanna be my date? Providing the world hasn’t ended by then, of course.”
She sat up, looking at me with her eyebrow arched. “You sure it won’t give Claudia the vapors?”
I snorted. “Hey, as long as ‘paramours’ stay out of the upstairs area, she doesn’t give a shit what we do outside the house. Besides”—I grinned—“she’s not my mom.”
My mom, on the other hand, had given me her blessing. My dad had been furious when he’d found out about the trick, but I think he understood why Mom had gone along with it. He just worried, for all of us. He wanted to protect us. To keep us out of the crosshairs of the Anesidorans’ conflict with the I.G.A. And I appreciated it. But some things were worth the sacrifice.
This was worth the sacrifice.
Shailene grinned, her eyes crinkling adorably at the corners, making my heart skip a beat. “Then I guess I’m going to have to figure out what one wears to a sorority formal. God, I hope not a prom dress.”
“You can show up in your cheerleading uniform for all I care,” I said.
The two of us laughed, and she looked at me sideways. “So, Laura Clark: Is this a date date? Does this mean you’re asking me out?”
My face flushed. We hadn’t really talked about it—we hadn’t even really discussed the kiss on the Okeanos, actually. I wasn’t sure if she remembered what had happened on the ship. “I mean, only if you want it to be,” I said shyly.
She leaned close to me, her breath feathering across my cheeks, and I got the very distinct feeling that she did, in fact, remember. “I do,” she whispered.
I closed my eyes, and her lips pressed against mine, gently, tentatively. Like she had the very first time, all those years ago. It was like a fairytale kiss, soft and delicate. She pulled away far too quickly, leaving me empty and longing for more. Then she looked at me quizzically, tilting her head, as if asking permission, if that had been okay.
It had been more than okay.
I cupped her cheek in my hand and pulled her in again, and I felt her laugh against my mouth. She kissed me harder, deeper, until I felt dizzy. I leaned back against the hot concrete balustrade for support, and she followed me down. The warmth of her body pressed over the top of me, her legs tangled with mine, my fingers wrapped in her hair, hers roaming across my skin in tantalizing circles. Her lips were like fire, as blazing as the sun glinting bright off the flames around us. I drank her in, letting that fire engulf me.
At last she drew away, leaving the two of us gasping for breath. She grinned impishly down at me, her hands braced on either side of my shoulders, the sun behind her head forming a halo of light that glimmered through her hair, casting her features in soft shadows. I never wanted to tear my eyes away from that face. She looked like some kind of otherworldly being, glowing like that.
And she was. We both were.
“I’ve dreamed of doing that for years,” she whispered. “I just never realized that I was dreaming of you all along.”
I pulled her down to me and kissed her again, her mouth, her cheeks—smiling as my lips brushed against the soft curve of her jaw.
“Me too,” I said. k12
THE END
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review on a retailer. Every review, no matter how short, helps indie authors succeed.
Looking for more? Sign up for my mailing list to receive a free short story and be the first to know when I have a new release. You can also find me on Patreon, where I share exclusive short stories and behind-the-scenes looks at my upcoming novels.
At its heart this book is really about family, so I have to start out by thanking my own, by chance and choice. You guys were very much the inspiration for Laura’s own quirky family. From the beginning, this story grew out of a dream I had where we were all together in Shirley’s backyard, laughing and yelling and pigging out on shrimp lumpia (the best kind!). AND THEN THE ALIENS ATTACKED. Haha. Thank you all for everything.
I also want to thank my sorority sisters, particularly my big, Sara, for being such an integral part of my life and this story. Too often I see fictional depictions of sororities being catty or cliquey or cultish—but for me, it was the opposite. For years, I had inadvertently surrounded myself with people who made me feel less-than and unworthy. My sorority sisters were the ones who made me see my own value, and gave me the strength to break away from those abusive “friendships” and truly find myself. Thank you all and Beta Phi!
A huge thank you to my wonderful editor, Amy McNulty, for helping me make this book the best it can be. Enormous thanks also to RoAnna Sylver for being Laura’s voice and bringing her to life in a way I’d never imagined before!
Thank you to the individuals who supported this book and who helped make it a reality, especially Claudie Arseneault, B R Sanders, Kiran Oliver, Lynn O’Connacht, Mary Fan, G.L. Tomas, Jaylee James, and all of the early readers who encouraged me as I worked on the project.
And finally, thank you to my readers, for all your support and encouragement during my ups and downs over the last year, and for being so kind and patient with me while I finished this book. I hope that it was worth the wait.
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