Burn

by Sarah Fine

  “These things have eye tracking!” Sung calls out. “It brightens the part of the screen you’re focusing on.”

  Manuel scribbles something into a tablet, smiling. “Cool.”

  I growl with frustration as I try to turn my seat. I’m a fairly accurate shot, but only when I can aim my guns. This console works as a three-hundred-sixty-degree display, and I can’t get my freaking chair to spin. One of the Sicarii ships on my screen keeps flying to my starboard and firing from there. “You’re going to have to oil these seats, Manuel,” I call out. “It’s fighting me.”

  “You’re fighting it,” says Christina as hers turns smoothly. I glance over to see her eyes focused on the screen as she speaks, like she does this kind of thing every day. “I think the cuffs are connected to the seat swivel. Stop trying to control it yourself and let it do some of the work.”

  Boom. She hits a Sicarii ship right in its artillery hatch, and it explodes on my screen. Behind me, a handful of workers let out a cheer.

  A few minutes later, I’m out of the simulation after taking the requisite number of hits. Leo, Sung, and Christina battle it out while other factory workers and Core agents gather around to watch. Sung’s movements are a little jerky, and I think he’s doing the same thing I was, trying to force the chair to swivel instead of letting the cuffs detect his movements before he consciously thinks about it. But he’s a great shot, and he’s the one who figures out that the eye tracker is how to achieve weapon lock on a target.

  It doesn’t save him, though. Soon he’s out, too, and it’s down to Christina and Leo. Both of them are grinning, swiveling and firing both of their guns at once while they taunt each other like brother and sister. Leo’s faster, but Christina’s more accurate. No matter where those ships move, she tracks them, and she gets more deadly the longer she works at it. The spectators start to make bets on whether Christina or Leo will stay in the simulation longer. It’s a badly needed few minutes of lightness and even fun in what has been a day full of tragedy, and I think everybody needed a break from the tension. And as I watch Christina and Leo take on those silent, smooth scout ships, I find myself wondering if even six Archers might be enough to make a difference.

  “This looks like fun,” says a soft voice just behind me.

  I turn to see Ellie Alexander, her white-blond hair tucked behind her ears, watching the simulations. She’s taken a shower and cleaned off all the soot, but it wasn’t enough to wash away the heavy weight that seems to be pressing on her. Rufus gave her a pretty hard time earlier, but the worst thing she’s done is to be loyal to her dad, and I can’t blame her for that, even if I don’t like him at all. “Hey,” I say. “How’s Brayton? Still feverish?”

  She gives me a pained look. “He’s just worn out. These past few days have been awful for him.” She looks around, noting the hulk of the factory behind us, and hugs herself, rubbing her arms. “But I guess that’s true for everyone here.”

  I nod. “Just so you know, a Core agent is telling people he saw your dad in the administrative hallway just before the scanner was stolen. He said Brayton ran when he realized he was being watched.”

  She scoffs. “Does my dad really look like he could run anywhere? He’s completely drained.” Her fingers are bloodless as they clutch her biceps. She’s so protective of him. “Don’t tell me—they’re going to search his quarters.” She rolls her eyes. “They won’t find anything except painkillers. He’s being blamed for everything, when all he wanted to do was regain everybody’s trust.”

  “That’s going to take longer than a day, after what he did.” I say it gently, but I have to be honest with her.

  She presses her lips together and stares at the blacktop. “Everything takes longer than it should,” she whispers.

  I take a step back. As much as she needs it, I’m not the right person to stand here and sympathize with her over how her dad’s been mistreated. He brought it on himself, and no matter how hard he might be trying to make things right, I still don’t trust him. I believe Graham about seeing Brayton in Angus’s office before the fire. I just have no idea what Brayton was up to—and I hope Angus is planning to bring him in for questioning.

  “Look, Ellie, I need to help with getting these vehicles up and running. I hope Brayton feels better,” I say. When she gives me a nod, I retreat inside the back of one of the Archers as Ellie steps forward to watch Christina and Leo shooting down simulated spaceships.

  The interior of the vehicle smells of oil and iron. There’s a large open space where the weapons console will fit. Scraping above me draws my eyes upward in time to see two women lowering a giant lens over the hole cut in the roof between the rails of the autocannon. It fits into the opening with a muffled thunk, and their faces and bodies above the glass lens are instantly distorted, suddenly appearing miles away instead of only a few feet. I slide my finger along the curved underside. “What are these for, Dad?” I whisper.

  “Tate!” My mother’s voice is so sharp and urgent that I jump up and nearly crash my skull into the thick glass lens.

  “Yeah?” I climb out of the Archer to see her jogging toward me.

  Her dark hair flies around her face as she reaches me. “Race said you were here. I found something. I’m going to tell the others, but I wanted you to be part of it.”

  For a moment, we stare at each other, and I realize that she’s deliberately including me. Not because I have any real authority, but because she wanted to show that she respects me. “Thanks, Mom.”

  A shadow of a smile crosses her face. “You earned it, Tate,” she says softly, then heads for the atrium, and I follow her all the way to the administrative wing. By the time she reaches Angus’s office, her cheeks are pink and she’s out of breath.

  “The DNA doesn’t match,” she announces.

  Angus, Race, and Congers, who had all been clustered around Congers’s cell phone, which I assume is on speakerphone, turn to her.

  “Elaborate,” says Congers, holding the phone in front of him. “We have Dr. Okpara on the line from our Washington lab.”

  Mom glances at the phone and hesitates only a moment before continuing. “DNA from tissue samples matches what we had on file for George Fisher, Charles Willetts, and Devon Kerstein. But samples from their brains don’t match at all.”

  I blink at her. “Like . . . their bodies were actually them, but their brains belonged to someone else?”

  She gives me an odd look, and I can tell her scientist’s mind is struggling to find an alternative explanation. Congers looks down at his phone. “Did you hear that?” he says to it. “Now repeat what you just said to me, Dr. Okpara.”

  A tinny male voice on the other end begins to speak. “I have just completed an autopsy on a partially decomposed body found one day ago in the basement of the building at the University of Virginia, where Dr. Willetts resided. DNA samples—all DNA samples, mind you—confirm that the body lying on my exam table is, in fact, Charles Willetts.”

  Congers raises his gaze from the phone to look at my mother. His voice is dead calm as he says, “So who do you think you have on your exam table, Dr. Shirazi?”

  SEVENTEEN

  “UNTIL ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO, I WOULD HAVE told you it was definitely Charles,” my mother says slowly. “But at the moment, I’m unsure.”

  “So we have one body that appears to be Charles’s in Washington, and another here that is . . . mostly Charles,” says Race.

  “There are two of them,” I mutter, my brain churning to make sense of it. “I wish we could scan the body in DC.”

  “We already know the one in our possession scanned orange,” says Mom. Her brow furrows, and she leans forward to speak into Congers’s phone. “Any unusual findings in your autopsy, Doctor?”

  “Only that it was unrecognizable as Charles Willetts by simple visual exam,” says Dr. Okpara. “It was bound and hidden in a large antiq
ue trunk that was discovered when agents searched the basement. At first it seemed like an unrelated crime, because no one in the building had been reported missing and no one could provide a visual ID, but the body was brought to my lab anyway.”

  “Could they not tell who it was because it was decomposed?” asks Angus, looking faintly sick.

  “No, Dr. Willetts hadn’t been dead longer than twenty-four hours, though there were indications that he had been in the trunk for a good deal longer than that.”

  Angus pales. None of us want to contemplate what “indications” those might be.

  “Oh, God,” my mom whispers. “Tate, if he was in the basement for days—”

  “Then who were we staying with in Virginia?”

  She puts the back of her hand to her mouth, then speaks to the phone again. “If he hadn’t been dead for long, why was he unrecognizable?”

  “Charles Willetts was sixty-three years old at the time of his death,” says Dr. Okpara. “The body in the trunk appeared to be decades older than that. It’s hard to estimate, but I had thought I was doing an autopsy on a centenarian.”

  Angus’s eyes widen. “He looked over a hundred years old? Why would that happen?”

  Mom and I stare at each other. “Did you do any chromosomal analysis?” she asks in a weak voice. “Telomere length and telomerase levels specifically?”

  Race, Angus, and Congers all peer at her with keenly curious expressions while Dr. Okpara huffs into the phone. “Not yet,” he says. “I was just—”

  “Do it,” snaps Congers. “Do it now and call me as soon as you have results.” He ends the connection, and his hand falls to his side. “Now explain why that’s important, Dr. Shirazi.”

  Mom explains the telomerase findings in the bodies she’s autopsied as I ponder the fact that two versions of Charles’s body have been found, and one of them was tied up and stuffed in a trunk in the basement of the building where we were staying with Charles a few days ago.

  “There are two of them,” I mutter, rubbing my temple. “One with lots of telomerase—who you said had stopped aging . . . and one who looked over a hundred years old. Mom”—she pauses in her explanation and looks over at me—“what if the Sicarii aren’t parasites that invade a body? What if they leech something from the body?”

  Race’s eyebrows shoot upward. “How would they do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Though I’m betting those extra secretory glands Mom discovered have something to do with it. “I’m making a guess based on what we know, and one of the things we know is we have two copies of Charles, one of which has different DNA in his brain, and one of which is prematurely aged . . .” My heart pounds. “Brayton,” I say in a choked whisper, backing toward the door. “It’s Brayton.”

  Everyone looks at me like they haven’t quite connected the pieces. “He was unaccounted for a few days before he arrived here at Black Box,” I say. “He said he’d been in police custody and then traveling to Chicago, but we really don’t know, and his own daughter couldn’t reach him. And he’s been sick. Thrashed. Looking—”

  “Like he’s aged ten years in the last ten days,” says Angus. “But he scanned blue every time.”

  “What if he smuggled something else in, though?” I ask quietly. “Something that looked exactly like him . . . only healthier?”

  “Like when we saw him at breakfast,” confirms Angus.

  “This makes my son’s report of him sprinting away from this hallway while Rufus saw him get out of the elevators a lot more credible,” says Congers.

  “It also explains why Brayton’s hands were free of the B12 residue even after Graham saw him touching the keypad,” says Race. “It wasn’t actually him.”

  My mother shifts from foot to foot, like she wants to get back to her lab. “We may have a Sicarii on the compound after all.”

  Race and I move for the door at the same time. From behind us, I hear Congers and Angus barking into their respective phones, mobilizing agents and guards to patrol the compound in search of Brayton Alexander. We sprint down the hall and out of the main building, taking in the distant sounds of cheering still coming from the side lot where the Archers are sitting. “If Brayton is working with the Sicarii, he could have given it all kinds of information,” I say as we run toward the residential building. “He could have given it everything it needed to sabotage the factory floor and compromise the surveillance systems. And maybe that’s why the scout ships haven’t attacked yet—they had someone on the inside working to get the scanner.”

  “Why would he help them at all, though?” says Race between breaths. “Spite seems like a poor reason to facilitate a hostile alien invasion.”

  A man staggers out of the residential building through a side entrance. The sinking sun illuminates his dull blond hair and sallow face. Race and I run toward him and stop a few feet away. Race draws his gun and disengages the safety, but he keeps his finger off the trigger. “Mr. Alexander, we have some questions for you. Assuming you are, in fact, yourself.”

  Brayton, the circles under his eyes a hideous purple, the lines around his mouth deep creases, rubs his wrists as he works to hold himself upright. “I’m ready to answer any questions you have, but first—Ellie. I need to find Ellie.” He sinks to his knees. There are angry red welts on his wrists—like he was tied up. Just like Charles Willetts.

  Race holds the gun to Brayton’s temple, and Brayton doesn’t even flinch. “Did you allow a Sicarii to take on your appearance?”

  “Did I allow it?” He lets out a hoarse chuckle. “He found me in Princeton.”

  “Who found you?”

  “He said he was a Core agent who wanted to negotiate a truce with The Fifty, and he had identification. We went to a safe house to discuss what we could do for each other.” He closes his eyes and sways in place like he’s about to go down. “That’s all I remember from that night. And when I woke up, he . . . looked just like me. He told me he was part of an alien race, very advanced, and that they want to make contact with Earth. But he said he had to have the scanner.”

  “How did he take on your appearance?” I ask.

  Brayton shudders. “He puts his hands on me.” His face contorts with disgust, and he sinks to the pavement. “This . . . stuff oozes out of his skin.”

  Now the strange secretory glands my mom discovered in the Sicarii bodies totally make sense. “How long does it take?”

  “No idea about the first time,” he says, lowering his head until his cheek is against concrete. “But he’s done it every day since. It takes several minutes.” He winces. “And each time, I feel worse,” he whispers.

  Each time, it leeched more telomerase from Brayton’s body, stealing years from his life.

  Race stares coldly down at the crumpled man on the sidewalk. “Did you smuggle it onto this compound?”

  Brayton nods. “You have to understand. All it wanted was the scanner. It promised me that I would be their emissary when they began official communication with our planet.” He lets out a wretched, agonized sob. “None of this was supposed to happen. He said their intentions were peaceful, and he only wanted the technology. He said it would help the three species understand one another, but that it could be very dangerous if it wasn’t secured before they revealed themselves to the other inhabitants of this planet, especially the Core, who would treat them as enemies unless the first contact was handled carefully. He said he was trying to prevent loss of life!”

  “And you believed him?” Race asks.

  I tilt my head. “At the time Brayton brought the Sicarii onto the compound, he had none of the information we had, like what happened on the H2 planet. How they took over.”

  Brayton raises his head, but it looks like it takes a lot of effort. “I heard everything when I got here, but the Sicarii said it was H2 lies.” His watery blue eyes peer at Race with suspicion. “He said you d
estroyed his home planet before coming here.”

  Race glares at him. “Your misplaced trust in an alien who—by your own report—stole your appearance and hurt you in the process has resulted in heavy casualties.”

  Brayton grimaces at the gun still leveled at his head. “I wanted to tell Angus everything. I asked to speak with him earlier, and I would have—”

  “Too late.” Race looks more than willing to shoot him. “Does the Sicarii have the scanner now?”

  “He does.”

  “Did you tell it the satellite shield was live?” Race barks, and Brayton nods. I’ve never seen Race show this kind of emotion, but suddenly I’m wondering if he’s going to execute Brayton right here. Maybe it’s a good thing that I can already hear the running footsteps of a cadre of guards headed in our direction. “Where is the Sicarii now?” he shouts.

  Brayton shakes his head.

  Race’s finger closes over the trigger. “Where is the Sicarii?” he roars.

  “Kill me,” says Brayton, rolling onto his back. “But then find Ellie.”

  “She’s fine,” I say. “She’s with a bunch of factory workers testing the few Archers that . . .” I trail off as Brayton points to the residential building.

  “He took her away,” he whispers. “She thought he was me. You have to find her.”

  My stomach drops. “Race. We may be looking for the wrong person.”

  “Did it take her appearance?” he shouts, leaning down and pressing the barrel of his weapon against Brayton’s forehead.

  Brayton closes his eyes, sprawled on the pavement, looking like a drained, exhausted old man. “He took her away,” he says again. “He said I was useless. And he was right. I couldn’t protect her.”