Burn

by Sarah Fine

  Then I realize what I have to do. My heart simultaneously pounding and aching, I slide the handcuff key under the door, knowing the two of them will be able to find a way to help each other out. And then I back a few steps down the hall, seeking partial cover against another closed office door, and aim. It’s a Glock 19, so assuming Graham is operating with a full magazine, I have fifteen shots plus the one in the chamber. If this is it, I’ll take as many out as I can and hope that Christina and Leo can take it from there.

  My finger closes over the trigger as my first target swings the door wide.

  Race Lavin, his face severe and cleanly shaven but bruised, his eyes bloodred, jerks to a stop when he sees me there. The corner of his mouth twitches. “I told you,” he calls over his shoulder.

  My mother appears behind him. “So did I,” she says to the man at her side.

  Congers frowns. “So you did.”

  SEVEN

  I DON’T LOWER MY WEAPON AS MY MOM EMERGES from the stairwell, flanked by Congers and Race. I look her over for signs of injury. Her arm is in a sling and she’s streaked with soot and dirt, but she seems okay otherwise. Except she looks really unhappy.

  “There is research to show that physical abuse and torture is an ineffective means of interrogation,” she says, glaring at Congers.

  He doesn’t answer. He’s got something behind his back, maybe a weapon, and he starts to bring it out but freezes as soon as my finger tightens on the trigger. I’m sorely tempted to shoot him out of sheer aggravation and hatred.

  Race raises his hands. “We’ve come to negotiate.”

  I ignore him and look at my mom, waiting for a signal. Her gaze is steady on mine. “Tate, we have new information. Things have changed.”

  I’m still aiming at Congers’s head. “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

  “We need to help one another,” Race says. “And if we don’t, the outcome will be catastrophic.”

  Congers’s nostrils flare. “You are, for the time being, no longer our prisoners. We need you as allies.” Each word seems to heighten the bad taste in his mouth. “If you’ll permit me to move, you’ll see I am holding the scanner, not a weapon.”

  “Show me.”

  Slowly, he brings his arm out to the side, revealing the sleek, black scanner, which he switches on. It reflects red off his leg, then blue as he angles it toward my mother, then red as the light crosses Race’s chest. I move my finger off the trigger.

  From behind me comes a muffled shout. Graham’s awake. Congers’s eyes flick toward the closed door where his son is shackled, and then back to me. He gestures toward the room where Leo and Christina are being kept. “I assume you’ll want to free your friends before we talk.”

  Leo pounds on the door. “Already done. Just let us out.”

  I lower the gun and pull the keys from my pocket. As I unlock the door, I say, “You might want to let your son out. He’s probably uncomfortable.”

  Race looks down the hallway, concern shadowing his features.

  “He deserves whatever you’ve done to him,” says Congers in a clipped voice, and for a minute, I feel bad for Graham. Then I remember how many times he punched me.

  As soon as I open the door, Christina flies into my arms, knocking me back against the wall. Her face is pressed to my neck as she says, “I didn’t know what they were going to do to you,” in a strained whisper.

  “I’m fine,” I say, trying to keep my focus on Race and Congers even as her scent fills me up. I wrap my arm around Christina’s waist and edge her to the side, keeping my body between her and the agents. “You?”

  She’s pale, and her eyes are red. So are her wrists, which makes my skin heat with rage. She’s been through so goddamn much, and it’s my fault. She touches my face. “I’m all right, Tate.”

  There are so many things I want to say to her. You shouldn’t have come after me is the first one. But this is not the time, especially because Congers is moving forward, scanner raised. Race steps away from my mother, his hand near his waist, where his weapon is holstered. I tense, but as soon as the scanner’s light flashes blue over me and red over Christina, both agents relax. I give my mom a questioning look, but her focus is on Christina.

  Leo is standing in the doorway of the room, and he winces as Congers waves the scanner over him, making him look cyanotic for a moment. Behind him are two chairs, cuffs hanging from the sides and legs. His wrists are red, too—and swollen. The too-big soccer jersey is dotted with blood, though he doesn’t look badly hurt. He squints at the agents and my mom; he must need those glasses pretty badly.

  My mother takes a step forward. “We need to talk.”

  Leo backs up and sinks onto one of the chairs in the room where he and Christina were being held. I keep my weapon ready as I back into the room, and Christina sticks close by my side. Race and Congers come in and stand against the wall, and my mom enters and closes the door behind her.

  “I’ve just come from Virginia,” Race says, confirming what I’d heard from Congers earlier—he came on a helicopter from Charlottesville . . . accompanied by a body. He was supposed to arrive around eleven p.m. The whites of his eyes are a creepy scarlet. I choked him so hard yesterday morning that the blood vessels burst. “I brought the corpse of Charles Willetts.”

  “When did he die?” I ask.

  “About five minutes before I boarded a helicopter to the Walmart,” he replies. “He fired on my agents as they came through the door of his apartment.”

  Next to me, Christina shudders. She’d escaped from Willetts only moments before.

  “When did you guys become enemies?” I remember how determined Willetts was to keep the scanner out of H2 hands. “Was he human?” Was that why he was working with George? Why wouldn’t he have told my mom?

  “He was neither human nor H2,” Congers says. “We’ve just scanned him.”

  Neither . . . My stomach tightens. He’d avoided scanning himself. “He scanned orange, didn’t he?”

  Congers and Race both nod. Neither looks all that surprised at my question.

  My mom does, though. “How did you know?”

  I’m not ready to give that away yet. “What does scanning orange mean?”

  Race glances at Congers. “Bill?”

  Congers nods, though he looks pretty pissed. “Tell them.”

  “It means this planet is going to be invaded,” Race continues. “It means the process has already begun.”

  “And it means that if we don’t work together, the same thing that happened to our planet four hundred years ago will happen to Earth,” Congers adds.

  “Then you’d better tell us what happened,” my mother says. She looks tired and angry, but also . . . scared. Her petite frame is practically vibrating with tension as she stands with her injured left arm folded against her body.

  Congers looks down at the scanner in his hand. He switches it off and lets his arm fall to his side. “The H2 planet was peaceful, somewhat similar to this one in terms of climate and resources, but much more advanced, even hundreds of years ago. They were engaging in deep-space exploration.” He stares steadily at my mother. “They’d discovered Earth but had not made contact because it was so primitive. They’d started studying humans, though.”

  “But I bet humans weren’t the only thing they discovered,” Leo comments.

  Congers doesn’t even look at him. “The leaders of the unified world government announced that they’d made contact with another advanced race within our galaxy, one that had endured a serious environmental disaster on its own planet. Our leaders decided that this race of beings would be sheltered on our planet. Permanently.”

  My mouth drops open. “They invited another race to invade?”

  “It wasn’t framed like that, of course. These aliens were supposedly refugees. The unified government cleared all airspac
e to let the Sicarii in and granted them legal status as well.”

  “Sicarii?” I ask, remembering my dad’s hastily scrawled note in his safe house—Race: “Sicarii.” He must have heard Race say it at some point, maybe during one of the multiple interrogation sessions Race put him through. Or maybe he had some surveillance set up that no one else knew about. But did he know what “Sicarii” meant?

  “That’s what we call them now,” Congers says. “Just like you call us H2.” The bitter twist to his mouth has returned. “But they were called something else, just as we were, in a language that is now known and spoken only by a few—because of what they did to our people.”

  “But you just told us you guys laid out a welcome mat,” Leo says.

  Race rubs at his temple. “The H2 planet was not like Earth, a patchwork of barely developed nations, chaotic leadership, and constantly shifting power bases and conflicts. It was peaceful and unified—but that made it vulnerable to a centralized infiltration. Here, they may not try to get to world leaders until they control those with power and weapons.”

  The Core. The Fifty. My stomach drops. Mom gives me an uneasy look.

  Leo scowls. “I still don’t think—”

  “The process has already started.” Race’s voice is like a whip, and Christina flinches.

  “That ship that attacked us on the road—” I begin.

  “Was not H2 technology. It was a Sicarii scout ship.”

  “Why would they need to scout if we were just going to invite them in?” Leo asks, folding his arms over his bony chest.

  “Because everything that happened on our planet was orchestrated from the inside,” says Congers, “probably by scouts who arrived to pave the way for the rest. When the government announced that all citizens worldwide were to open their homes to the incoming refugees, there were protests, but it was all moving so quickly, because the infiltration had already happened. The laws were changed overnight. The Sicarii mass-transport ships arrived a short time after that, though we have no record of what the exact timetable was. We only know that by that time, few were resisting, because all formal communication structures on the planet were consistently broadcasting support for the arrival of our new ‘friends.’”

  “No one put up a fight?” I ask.

  “Some did,” Race replies. “But the loudest and most prominent voices of opposition fell silent—then came out in support of the Sicarii.”

  I think back to Willetts, who my mother had said was H2, but who seemed to have turned against them. And to George, who scanned orange and in those last moments cared more about the scanner than he cared about me, which wasn’t like him at all. “You just said these Sicarii took over from the inside,” I say, my heart pounding as I look at Christina. As a terrible thought occurs to me, my gaze roams her face, her body. She was so close to Willetts. “Do you mean that literally?”

  “We do,” Race says in a flat voice.

  “That’s why you scanned us just now.”

  Christina folds her arms over her middle. “You thought one of those Sicarii had . . . what, gotten inside one of us?” She glances at Race’s holstered weapon. “Were you going to shoot whoever scanned orange?”

  Race doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “You believe this alien race is parasitic,” Mom says. “Do you know what kind? What’s the method of invasion?”

  “Is it instant, or does it . . . take a while?” Christina asks in a tiny voice. Her breaths are shallow and sharp now. “Because Willetts was—he was trying to touch me. He wanted to touch my bare skin.”

  “Did he succeed?” Race asks.

  “No,” she whispers. “At least, I don’t think so.” Her eyes shine with tears, and I pull her close.

  “It’s been nearly two days since we were with Charles,” Mom says in a gentle voice. “It seems unlikely that whatever these Sicarii do would be that delayed.” She turns to Congers and Race for confirmation, but they don’t look like they have many answers.

  “The Sicarii are insidious,” Congers says, eyeing Christina. “They’re very difficult to detect. It helps to know touch may be part of how they take over a host.”

  Christina shivers against me. “Like . . . germs? I was really close to him.”

  “It’s one possibility, but not the only one. But however the Sicarii take over, our ancestors discovered what they were doing too late to organize escape for more than a few.”

  “How did they discover it?”

  Congers holds up the scanner. “I am a direct descendant of the man who invented the technology used in this device. He had a position in the government’s space-exploration program, working on a team identifying other sentient life in the universe. It was his job to analyze all samples and data transmitted from the explorers’ ships and probes, and he was able to differentiate the species on a molecular level.”

  Race stares at the device. “By that time, the Sicarii were arriving en masse. Many welcomed them, expecting peace. But that was only because the Sicarii themselves had somehow taken over the bodies of our leaders, and they were spinning that lie.”

  “My ancestor surreptitiously scanned some of the government ministers when they came to inspect his lab,” says Congers. “They scanned orange, not red. He told some of his team members what was happening, that this peaceful cohabitation was actually an invasion, facilitated by leaders who had been taken over by alien entities. He said he had a plan to stop those leaders in a meeting he’d been called to in order to discuss the team’s technology and discoveries. Something happened in that meeting, though, and that triggered a contingency plan—the members of his team escaped the planet using the space-exploration vehicles.”

  “Did the Sicarii discover your ancestor had scanned them?” my mother asks.

  “He may have tried to do more than that. There were rumors that he had weaponized the scanning device itself.”

  Leo leans forward, rapt. “Did he try to assassinate them or something?”

  “Possibly. He never made it out of the meeting, but he had anticipated he might not survive. When he did not make contact at the designated time, his team knew something had gone wrong, and they fled with their families and anyone else who could be persuaded to come.”

  “Which means no one who escaped the planet knew what actually went down,” says Leo.

  Race nods. “Someone else flew the ship Bill’s ancestor had intended to pilot, the one on which he’d uploaded the means to construct a defense system against future invasions,” he says. “But after the small fleet entered Earth’s atmosphere, that ship disappeared. The others could only assume it had crashed. We’ve been looking for that ship for a very long time.” His eyes meet mine. “And earlier this week, for the first time in four hundred years, that technology surfaced.”

  “You weren’t after it merely to prevent it from being used to reveal the presence of the H2,” my mother says.

  “That is an important objective,” Race replies. “But you are correct—it wasn’t the only one. Until last night, however, we were unaware of how urgent the situation had become. And now that we’ve scanned the body of Charles Willetts, we know it’s dire.”

  My mother looks stricken. “What did the Sicarii do to him?”

  “As I said, they are parasites,” says Congers. “We don’t know how they move from host to host, or even if they can exist outside of the bodies of their hosts. We do know that they crawl inside a person and take over.”

  “But when they landed on the H2 planet, what did they look like? Wouldn’t they have had to look humanoid?” Mom asks.

  “Or they’d already obtained humanoid hosts,” says Race. “We don’t know that the H2 planet was the first to be invaded.”

  “But how exactly do you know that they’re parasites?” I ask. “Have you seen one invade a host? Have you done an autopsy on Willetts? Did you find someth
ing inside him?”

  “Now that we’ve confirmed he had been taken over by a Sicarii, we will autopsy the body as soon as we are in an appropriate facility.” Congers once again rubs his finger along the ridge of his beaky nose, the only nervous mannerism I’ve seen from him. “Right now, we only have what we witnessed in the last few days, the information recovered from the ship wreckage of our ancestors, and the stories passed down through generations. We’ve already told you most of what we know to this point.”

  I squint at him. “Sounds like most of what you know is based on a multigenerational game of telephone.”

  “We’re constructing plausible hypotheses from the information we have,” says Race. “We know the leaders of the government on our home planet turned on their own people. We know they paved the way for the full invasion force and that they scanned orange, which means we know they were Sicarii, because of the technology developed by Bill’s ancestor.”

  “And we know they’re here,” Congers continues. “And that this is only the beginning of something much worse.”

  “Why do they need to sneak around, though?” asks Leo. “That scout ship thing destroyed Mitra’s van like nothing. If they were so much more advanced hundreds of years ago than we are now, it seems like they could come in and blow us all away without breaking a sweat.”

  “Then we should conclude that they don’t want to blow us away. They want to invade peacefully because we have something they need,” says my mother. “That’s it, isn’t it? They need the people on the planet.”

  “Like . . . for food?” Christina asks, her voice breaking.

  “Or for a hospitable biological environment that enables them to adapt to the microorganisms here,” says my mother.

  “Their behavior is consistent with either hypothesis,” says Race.

  “No, it’s not,” blurts Leo. “They came right out in the open a few hours ago. If their strategy really is stealthy infiltration, why fly a spaceship over Jersey?”