I still miss Faye every day.
Every time my family’s grounded, my parents consider tidying this place. Cataloging it. Throwing out the old, sagging heirloom armchairs and turning the family vault into a galleria. But I love this whimsical, loco space; it’s home to thousands of stories and so many good memories.
“C’mon,” Tuck says as I come around the corner. “The mourners weren’t aliens.”
“They weren’t human, either,” I say, joining him at the shelves. He nudges me with his elbow. I nudge him back, harder. The film reels are organized by year, more or less, on shelves. Dad’s collected hundreds of them over the years, trading reels with other shipraiders. He and Tuck set up a projector in an unused workroom down here, then carried a bunch of old couches and chairs inside.
“Hell yes,” Tuck says, pulling a reel marked DIE HARD in faded letters. “You’re going to love this one.”
“That’s what you said about They Live,” I say, lifting a brow.
Grinning, he takes my hand, pulling me away from the shelves. It’s been almost three months since the disaster on the John Muir, but in the last few weeks or so, I’ve caught him smiling often. Laughing more. He’s been playing soccer with Alex and my brother Gael in the park on weeknights, which helps him pick up more Spanish and some color in his skin. Don’t get me wrong, Tuck’s still the palest person in any room he walks into—but at least I can’t trace the blue veins in his arms with my fingertips anymore.
As for me? The Panamerican Heritage Organization gave me a primary discoverer credit for my work in salvaging the John Muir, making me the youngest shipraider in Panamerican history to hold that honor. Fortuna y gloria, indeed.
To be honest, glory’s turned out to not be as fulfilling as I’d imagined.
The fortune’s not too shabby, though.
No, not just the fortune, I think, touching the scar where my subjugator used to be.
The freedom.
I flop on the couch as Tuck loads the film reel onto the projector. “When was this made?” I ask.
“The eighties,” Tuck replies. I groan. He chuckles, threading the thin analog film into the machine. The flesh around his new bioware nodes still looks pink and tender.
“I will never understand the midmodern obsession with the 1980s,” I say. “The hair was big, the special effects were bad—”
“Your taste is bad—hey!” He ducks as I toss a pillow off the couch at his head, before switching the projector on. It throws light up on a bare wall. The audio crackles as the film begins rolling. My bioware rumbles as Tuck settles down next to me, putting an arm around my shoulders. I lean into him, lifting my wrist and clicking on the floating notification from Alex.
Did you see this? he writes, attaching an article about Dr. Smithson’s trial, which starts tomorrow. I already know about that, of course—I provided testimony during her preliminary hearings. My parents asked me if I wanted to attend the criminal trial as well, but I have no desire to see Dr. Smithson or her son ever again.
And hey, Alex continues, I need to borrow your boyfriend around nine for a game. That okay?
Tuck doesn’t need my permission to go places with you, I type back as the movie’s credits begin to roll. He’s not my boyfriend. I’ve found it hard to use the boyfriend word, ever since my last one decided to shove a subjugator down my throat. The label seems tainted now, like it’s not good enough or not clear enough for what Tuck means to me. He knows this, and Alex too, but the boys have formed an alliance and they love to tease.
With the way you two orbit each other? Alex writes back. Mentirosa.
“That means liar, Laurita,” Tuck says, grinning.
“Snoop much?”
“Someone doesn’t have their ioScreen’s privacy filter on,” he retorts.
“Because I should be able to trust my boy—” I grin at him, pretending to catch myself before the boyfriend word pops past my lips. “Ooh, sorry, I meant random guy I sometimes kiss?”
“Random guy, huh?” Tuck presses a kiss into the back of my hand, grinning. “Nice save … mentirosa.”
* * *
The movie isn’t as bad as I expected it to be—but I’m not sure it’s as good as Tuck thinks it is, either.
About halfway through the film, Tuck starts getting twitchy. Antsy, almost, shifting his weight, tapping his fingers on his knee. I glance up at him, surprised to see a deep furrow in his brow.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he replies.
I rub my index finger between his brows, as if I could erase his worries with a touch. “Then what’s this?”
He faux-scowls, deepening the lines in his face and puckering his lips. “It’s nothing.”
“Órale pues,” I tell him. Yeah, right. Tuck smirks—he hears it all the time from Alex, so he knows exactly what it means.
Five minutes pass. Tuck jounces his left leg, probably unconsciously.
Getting up from the couch, I pause the movie projector. I cross my arms over my chest, content to wait until he’s ready to talk. I’ve only had a few conversations with Dr. Morgan since we arrived back in the Colonies—now that she’s a digital force, she works twenty-four hours a day with Panamerican scientists to help with the Martian transition—but ay, ay, ay, she was right about how much her son hates to open up.
Tuck spreads his arms along the back of the couch, holding my gaze intently. “This a staring contest?” he asks, cocking his head to the left.
“Unless you want to talk to me about what’s bothering you, sure.”
“There’s nothing bothering me,” he says, lifting his palms, faceup, off the couch.
If I raised my brows any higher, they would disappear into my hairline.
“What more could I want?” he asks me. “I’m off that damned ship. I spend my days helping my mom prepare the park for the transition, and my nights watching retro movies with a girl who’s pretty damn great. I’m playing soccer again. Doctors fixed my bum knee. Panamerica has incredible tacos. I’m a simple guy, Laura. I don’t need much to be happy.”
“But?” I ask, because it sounds like he’s burying something important beneath all those words.
He tsks, turning his head to look at the wall.
“But?”
He grinds his teeth, making the tendons in his jaw pop, and drums his fingers along the top of the couch.
“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I ask.
He pushes to his feet in a burst of kinetic motion. “But I can’t do this anymore,” he says, pressing his palms against his eyes. He drops his hands, letting them smack against his thighs. “All the meetings and the people who want to come up and thank me, and the endless interviews and the biographers and the photographers who just want a moment of my time.” He looks away, shoulders heaving, the muscles bunched and tight. “It’s like the deepdowns all over again—I can’t escape, I can’t breathe. All I want to do is run, but there’s nowhere to run to.”
I step close to him, taking his face between my hands and running my thumbs over his cheekbones. He leans his forehead on mine. When I take a deep breath, he follows suit until our inhalations and exhalations synchronize. We started doing this a week after he woke up in the hospital, when we’d spend long nights talking about what happened to him on the John Muir. It probably doesn’t sound very romantic to most, but I’ve never felt more connected to another human being than I do in these moments. Standing with Tuck. Just breathing.
“All I can think about is what if?” he says softly, reaching up to take hold of my wrists, grounding himself.
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
He straightens. I slide my hands down to his muscular shoulders, bracing him. “What if someone else survived?” he asks. “What if there’s another jettisoned ship out there, with a crew who’s given up on it all? What if I’m wasting precious minutes in interviews, when I could be searching for them?”
“You’re starting to sound like a shipraider,”
I say, standing on my toes to kiss him. Tuck gathers me close, gripping my hips with his fingers. He’s gentle with me, so naturally generous with his affection I often wonder how he ever starved himself of human touch for so long. When he runs a hand through my hair, he leaves the best kind of goose bumps in his wake.
When we break apart, I take his hand, threading my fingers through his. I walk backward for a few steps, tugging him along. “Come on, then.”
“Where are we going?”
“The IGP’s incident report referenced ‘dark sites’ in Faye’s files and her father’s computer systems, areas they think may potentially harbor additional Exodus ships. I doubt it would be hard to obtain those locations, and accidentally”—I tap the end of his nose with my index finger—“leave them somewhere ‘convenient’ for my parents to find.”
“You serious?” he asks, a bit of light rekindling in his eyes.
“Ping Alex and let him know you’re going to miss your fútbol game, querido,” I say, turning with a little laugh. “We’ve got a database to hack.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I started this book four years ago, in the middle of the night.
Had I known back then how difficult this novel would be to write, I wonder if I would have abandoned the effort to write something easier. In its earliest form, this novel wasn’t supposed to be so personally meaningful, so infused with my own frustrations and fears. But in the midst of the second draft, I heard a candidate for the office of president of the United States call Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” and something inside me broke.
Now, I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with my mixed European and Mexican heritage since I was a child. My white mother didn’t know what to do with the dark curls I’d inherited from my father’s mother—my hair has always been a personal metaphor for my struggle with my identity. My father told me to check the “Hispanic—Not White” boxes on standardized state exams, while my mother insisted I check the “White” ones instead. (To my teachers’ chagrin, I checked both.) Strangers called me “exotic” looking, or insisted I explain, point by point, my ethnic background because I looked “off” to them. Where are you from? they would ask, especially once I moved away from my Bay Area home. When I responded California, they would often respond, No, where are you from from? as if they knew the actual question they were asking was too intensely personal to be polite. And I never wore the “exotic” label comfortably—it always made me feel like I was some breed of spotted cat—beautiful, perhaps, but less than human. It took a long time for me to realize why these frequent exchanges made me uncomfortable, and to find the language to express that discomfort.
I will be the first to point out the privilege of my white-passing skin. I have not experienced the same oppression and vitriol some of my friends of color or family members have—and my road through life has been made smoother because I am so pale. However, when I hear my friends speak about their experiences with racism and oppression in this county, I hear notes of my own history in the echoes of their words. I empathize with them. To oppress one is to oppress all, so I stand at their backs in this modern struggle for equality. They belong at the forefront of this movement, but I am proud to stand in its ranks.
And so, when that man called Mexican immigrants horrid things in such a loud voice, this book took a turn I never expected it to take. I kept working on it through a very dark night of the soul, one that impacted me in profound and indisputable ways. The novel’s mourners took on a specific metaphorical meaning. The ships’ names changed. The subjugator surfaced. The Eurocentric globe flipped. Laura took the Declaration of Independence with her when she fled the Conquistador. The worse things became on the national stage, the more my frustrations appeared on the page. It is difficult to separate a writer’s heart from her work. Every artistic choice started to become an act of protest, a way to look at my own attitudes and dissect them, and to think deeply about the lessons my parents taught me. Because when I started to list the things my mother and father taught me growing up, a subtle cultural divide between them became apparent. What they valued, at their cores, was different—but the lesson to be learned here is that it did not also make them incompatible.
More than anything else, we must understand that our voices have great power. We can use words to build bridges and ships and crews and families, or we can use them to oppress one another, or to rip each other to shreds. Whoever said, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” obviously never had a drink with the person who said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I side with the latter sentiment. Civilizations rise and fall by the written word. The United States certainly rose by these ones: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and if we truly believe the spirit of those words, we as Americans will work together until we have achieved them in their fullness.
Use your words to liberate, not subjugate.
Do what is right, even when they tell you to “stop.”
Build a better history for tomorrow, today.
Quisieron enterrarnos, no sabían que éramos semillas.
They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.
Courtney Alameda
P.S. In the original concept for the Tomb Raider video games, Lara Croft was Laura Cruz, a Latina archeologist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a small army of brave souls to write a book. My gratitude, first and foremost, always belongs to my masterful agent, John M. Cusick. It’s been five great years, John. Thanks for being the Iron Man to my Ms. Marvel. I don’t know what sorts of adventures are ahead of us, but I have a feeling they’re going to be awesome.
To Liz Szabla and the entire team at Feiwel & Friends and Macmillan—thank you, thank you, thank you, not only for your support of this work, but your fathomless patience, guidance, and great passion for books. I made the words, but you gave them a home. For that, my gratitude is deep and eternal. Thank you for your excellent work, on all fronts, on this book.
To Yamile Saied Méndez, warrior woman and friend—you are a great light to this world. I cannot wait to see how brilliantly you will shine in the future. Thank you for your guidance and translations for this work.
To Chersti Stapley Nieveen—nobody critiques me and pushes me harder than you do, and for that, you have my deep gratitude. I am a better writer for it, and am proud to call myself your friend. Thank you for always being brave enough to be honest with me.
To my long-suffering, kickass, and wonderful husband, Bo—I heard you singing, “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” the day I turned this novel in for the final time. No book of mine has been more difficult to write than this; thank you for your unwavering support through every step of the process. Every writer should be so lucky to have a spouse like you in their corner. Love you.
And finally, to my great-grandparents who crossed borders and continents and seas to come to the United States … thank you. I cannot fathom the bravery the act of leaving your home countries must have taken, but I am grateful for your sacrifices, for your courage, and for the stories that you have left to me.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Courtney Alameda is the author of Shutter, which SLJ praised as “a standout in the genre.” A former teen librarian, she lives and writes full-time in Utah. Visit her online at Courtneyalameda.com and on Twitter: @courtalameda. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyrigh
t Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Tuck
Part One: The Crash
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Part Two: The Deepdowns
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Part Three: The Bridge
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Tuck
Part Four: The Colony
Laura
Tuck
Laura
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Pitch Dark Page 29