Not for the first time, he wished he'd never been born.
It was absurd how much could hinge on a single decision. Terrifying. Every one of Ness' instincts screamed out for him to run, to hide away while Hanford died under a raging storm of radiation, to put it behind him and move on. He could drive off right now. No one would know his part in this except the aliens, and no human would ever ask them. A crime was only a crime when it was known.
But he couldn't leave Shawn—and Kristin—to die.
"You have to stop it," he wrote. He didn't know if it could feel guilt, but it had told him about the meltdown for a reason. It had to be vulnerable somehow.
The alien's tentacle wriggled above its black pad. "NO"
"My brother's there and I can't get him out. You're going to kill my gutbrother."
"DON'T USE WORD"
"He's my gutbrother!" Ness wrote. "I will always go back for him! And you are going to kill him!"
Its claws rolled in fast and tiny circles. "NO NO NO"
"He's the reason I survived your plague." Ness looked up from his pad and met the thing's dead-puppet stare. "Now stop the attack."
"CAN'T"
"Then help me get him out!"
The alien went still. Slowly as a toppling boulder, it turned its face to the sky. Ness didn't bother to try to read its face, or even to guess its thoughts. That could only mislead him. Whatever logic it was arranging in its swollen brain, it wouldn't follow any human pattern.
It moved its tentacle with clear reluctance. The pad lit up. "I HELP"
Ness blinked against sudden tears. "What do we do?"
"I COME TONIGHT"
"There's a girl, too." Ness paused his pen over his pad. Did these creatures even date? Marry? Mate? "She is also like a gutbrother."
"WE WILL ALL LEAVE TOGETHER"
Ness' smile overwhelmed his face. "Thank you." It only stared. "What's your name?"
It rotated one of its claws side to side. "NO WORD"
"I just thought there might be something you'd like me to call you."
It clacked its claws, then tapped its tentacle through an intricate succession of motions. "SEBASTIAN"
"Sebastian?"
"YES CALL SEBASTIAN"
"Like from The Little—" Ness stopped and scribbled that out. He didn't want to know. "Where will you come? To my room?"
"YES HAVE MAP"
"There are guards."
"YES GUARDS DIE"
"What should I do?"
"GO BACK WAIT FOR SEBASTIAN" It lurched toward the river. After several leaf-skewering steps, it turned and held up the pad. "TONIGHT BYE"
Ness drove back to the plant. He sought permission to see Shawn, but Roan was out, and the guard refused to make the decision on his own. Ness supposed it didn't matter. What would Shawn do with a few extra hours when Ness didn't even know how to tell him to prepare?
He wandered the dusty grounds, watching the steam rise from the clusters of round vents. The rumble of the reactor felt no different than normal. Had the aliens already begun their work? Would Daniel know? Would the old physicist have any hope of stopping it? Sebastian made it sound inevitable. What would Daniel and Roan do if Ness came to them right now? At the very least, he would have to reveal he'd been in contact with the aliens. His imagination played the sequence of events as deterministically as a movie. Once he explained, they would lock him up. The reactor would melt down, killing him in his cell, or they would somehow avert it. Then Roan would come to his cell, shoot him, find Shawn, and shoot him, too. They would not brook a second betrayal. They'd made him take notes on the entire ethanol process. It would be simple enough to divert Brandon to the task. To promote someone from the farm. It didn't take a nuclear scientist to mash up corn and boil it a couple times.
That was why he didn't go to Kristin. She would just try to stop it. Questions would arise; fingers would point. Roan was too canny to miss all the time he'd spent outside the fence. The alien artifacts he still had in his lab. She would follow the links back to him.
Anyway, he didn't want to stop it. These people deserved to die. Daniel as the despot, Roan as his enforcer, the scientists and engineers and techs as his enablers and willing minions. The workers at the farm would be collateral damage. They'd had their chance to stand up after he'd given his speech. They'd sat back down as soon as Daniel bothered to cross the river. Because of them, Nick was dead.
Ness sat silent in his room and waited for the alien to deliver him.
He woke to the sound of something scrabbling at his lock. He leapt up, looking around for a weapon. The best he could do was his pen. He clenched it like a dagger. The door swung open. Moonlight lined Sebastian's many limbs. A guard struggled at the alien's feet. Its tentacle coiled around his throat like an eyeless anaconda. The man's face was purple; he made small sputtering sounds. Sebastian lifted one of its pointed legs and stabbed down through the man's open mouth.
Ness went for his notepad. He'd fallen asleep in his shoes. "Is it happening?"
"YES"
"How long do we have?"
"HOUR"
"Until it starts? Or finishes?"
"FINISHES"
Enough time to get several miles away even if they couldn't find a car or bikes beyond the fence. Ness grabbed the machine gun from the dead guard. The grounds were silent except the omnipresent grumble of the reactor. His heart raced, but he found it oddly comforting to have Sebastian beside him. The alien gazed down at him expectantly. Ness gestured it forward. He jogged to the shadow of the next building, a high, dark warehouse, and paused to stare across the empty space between them and the next patch of cover, a concrete bunker he suspected was used to store spent nuclear fuel. Shawn was housed just beyond it in another cluster of storage sheds. He still hadn't seen any more guards; either Sebastian had killed them all, or they were elsewhere on the sprawling grounds.
He circled around the light ringing the bunker, then angled straight for the sheds, Sebastian skittering beside him. Ness drew up beside Shawn's door, gestured at the padlock. Sebastian raised a blunt black pistol to the lock and crowded around it. Blue light flared, bright enough for Ness to write by.
The padlock thumped to the dust. Ness held up his pad to the creature. "Stay out here. I need to explain."
Sebastian wagged his bulbous head. Ness swung open the door, painting the cramped space with moonlight. Shawn waited just inside, half-crouched in the darkness, fists held out from his body.
"Ness!" Shawn straightened, grinning in disbelief. "We out of here? Where'd you get the gun, Rambo?"
"Shawn, we're not alone."
"Yeah. Mercs everywhere. I'll shut my damn mouth."
Ness glanced to his side. Sebastian waited beside the wall, perfectly still and surprisingly compact. "I mean, I have help."
Shawn moved for the door. "Your girlfriend? About time I got a look at her up close. Was starting to think she was another Canadian internet thing."
Ness grabbed his brother's arm, stopping him cold. Shawn frowned down at Ness' hand. "Shawn—I made contact with a group of aliens. One of them is right outside this door. It's going to help us get out."
"Ness."
"I'm not joking. I'm telling you this so you won't scream or punch it or ruin things with any other typical Shawn business. There's an alien outside, and it's my friend."
Shawn peered at him for any hint of a put-on. "You know what, I believe you. And I am unsurprised."
Ness took a deep breath and stepped back from the door. Shawn followed in his wake, glancing left, then right. Sebastian turned its head to meet his gaze. Shawn hopped straight in the air, eyes bugging as hard as the alien's, but to his credit, he didn't scream.
"Jesus," he breathed. "Fucking. Christ."
"Nope, its name's Sebastian," Ness said. "Come on."
He led them around the bunker back to his shed. Kristin's converted apartment building rose past the roof of another warehouse. As Ness halted in the shadow of his former home, ligh
t flicked from the wall of the warehouse. A black-dressed security man lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the cold night.
Slowly, Sebastian leveled its pistol. The man spat, gazed across the dust, and turned back the way he'd come. While Ness considered how best to circle around him to Kristin's, Sebastian burst forward, feet hardly stirring the dirt, and disappeared after the mercenary. Something grunted in the darkness. Sebastian backed around the corner, dragging the body behind him.
"Glad that dude's on our side," Shawn murmured.
"It told me why they attacked," Ness said.
"Human babes?"
"I'll tell you after we're clear."
Sebastian beckoned them forward with a lithe tentacle. They moved in fits and starts to Kristin's building, pausing often to watch for security men. The front door was unlocked. Ness crept up the metal staircase to the third floor. Harsh bulbs glared down the empty hall. He sidled to Kristin's door, directed Sebastian to the side, and knocked softly. He waited three seconds, skin itching, and knocked again.
Her voice was sleepy, annoyed. "Who is it?"
"Ness."
The lock clicked. She cracked the door, grinned at him, and opened it wide. She was dressed in a thigh-length nightgown whose gauzy fabric did little to conceal her nipples. She saw Shawn and closed the door to an inch-wide crack.
"Hey!"
"Wait till she sees the other guy," Shawn said.
"This is my brother Shawn," Ness said. "Can we come in?"
She glared through the crack. "A little notice would have been nice. Hang on."
Her footsteps withdrew into the room. Shawn elbowed him in the ribs. "Nice pick."
She returned in a t-shirt and sweatpants and introduced herself to Shawn. "Aren't you guys supposed to be locked up?"
"Get your shoes on," Ness said. "We have to run."
"Oh yeah? Is the video store about to close?"
"The plant is about to melt down."
She blinked at him, eyes skipping between his. "Glad to see you've picked up your Ph.D in nuclear physics."
Ness laughed helplessly. "Somehow that's more believable than the truth. The reactor has been sabotaged by aliens."
"And they gave you a heads-up? Did you help one of their grandmothers across the street or something?"
"I told them Daniel and Roan killed their friends. One of them likes me, I don't know." He gestured at her bare feet. "Shoes. Now."
She crossed her arms. "Ness, modern nuclear reactors don't just melt down. There are a billion safeguards."
"And how many of them are devoted to stopping terrorists with tentacles?"
"Ness—"
He pursed his lips, stepped out the door, and gestured Sebastian inside. Kristin gasped and choked. She fell and scrabbled on the rug, heels kicking, driving herself away.
"Ness!"
"Shh!" He ran to her, crouched down, and hugged her. "It's my friend. It's going to get us out of here."
Kristin tried to speak and choked on her own spit. She pounded her chest, voice strained. "We have to stop it."
"I said it's here to help."
"The meltdown. I know how to shut down the reactor. Sort of. It could still overheat, but—"
Ness snorted. "Why?"
"Why would you want to stop a nuclear leak that could kill hundreds of people? I don't know, because we're not Satan?"
"You didn't say shit about a meltdown," Shawn said.
"Because it's totally out of my hands," Ness said. "And we've only got like forty minutes before it's too late."
"Well, that's more than enough time to drop the rods and shut it down," Kristin said.
"I don't care about any of these people!" Ness said. "They shot my friend in the head! Right in front of me. They're keeping hundreds of slaves. Goddamn slaves. The government died and these people went straight to selling each other as property. The future looks bad enough as it is. We don't need them around to make it worse."
"I have friends here," Kristin said. "A meltdown will leave this whole area unlivable for thousands of years. It could kill anyone who wanders through town. We have to stop it."
Sebastian's tentacle wriggled over its pad. Kristin and Shawn flinched back; Kristin rolled her eyes, Shawn chuckled. It held out the pad: "WHY TALK MUST LEAVE"
"What!" Shawn said. "You taught the lobster English?"
"It learned on its own," Ness said. "Some gestures, too. Freaky, right?"
"Make it flip me off."
Ness got out his pad, wrote, "Hold on."
Sebastian rolled its claws in a tight circle. "RADIATION KILLS HUMANS"
"Thanks for the intergalactic wisdom," Ness muttered. He turned to Kristin. "Unless you'd like to test its claim, we need to leave. We can have this argument ten miles from now."
"Leave away," she said. "I'm going to go stop our personal Chernobyl."
"Need a hand?" Shawn said.
Ness' mouth fell open. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Shawn shot him an annoyed look. "I ain't some monster, Ness. I don't have tentacles and big stupid googly-eyes. I'm not gonna let all these people die."
"But this place is horrible!"
"Seems to me that's because of Daniel and that bra-wearing pit bull who does his bidding. Mercs won't care who's paying their checks. We take the two of them out, we run this place however we please." Shawn held out his hand. "Run away or come with, Ness. But if you're leaving, give me your gun."
32
Alden hung on and didn't let go. "Where have you been?"
Tristan laughed, squeezing him tighter. "Where have I been? What about you?"
"I thought you were dead." He pulled back, turning away to wipe his tears, as if she hadn't already seen them. "Did they take you, too?"
"Spent months in a slimy orange box. Practiced my kung fu the whole time."
"Me too!" he laughed. "What if we were right next to each other? We could have just punched our way through!"
Tristan smiled. "God knows I tried. Anyway, we were at separate facilities. No kids at mine."
Alden glanced at the other corner of the dining area, where a man in a black uniform and a shouldered rifle watched them dully. "How did you find me?"
"I just kept searching."
He frowned at the dust, then glanced at her face. "Is that how that happened?"
Her smile tightened. "You should see the other guy."
"No way," Alden laughed. "Bet you killed him. He'd be all rotten and wormy."
"I just sent him to his room without pizza. What about you? Have you been okay?"
His smile emptied; she hoped hers had been less visibly hollow. "Yeah. Fine. Bored."
"How long have you been here?"
"Like a month."
"Has anyone hurt you?"
Alden's smile recovered some of its enthusiasm. "Why? Would you beat their ass?"
"And whatever else that ass is attached to."
"They've been fine," he said quickly. "Just strict."
He was still so young. Too young to lie well: he looked away, grinning nervously, some part of his childhood still resisting the idea of telling his parents anything but the truth. She supposed he'd get the chance to learn with her. A large part of her still couldn't believe that he was here, that she could reach out and run her fingers through his hair, could lean in and smell his skin. In terms of absolute time, they'd only been apart what, nine months?—the length of a school year, a pregnancy—but in terms of relative experience, it felt like a lifetime. She didn't fight her grin.
And now was not the time to ruin their reunion with talk of what happened to him during that separate lifetime. That could come later. When they were gone. When they were safe. Anyway, if something had happened to him here, she couldn't afford to let her anger compromise their escape.
They sat together and ate. Her breakfast had gone cold in the chilly morning. Too soon, one of the armed men rose from their own table of Lucky Charms and coffee and called the residents out to work. T
ristan was directed to a column of several dozen people assigned to a pile of lumber at the edge of a fallow field. Apparently housing was running low on this side of the river; while others cut pieces, she was assigned to sand the rough edges. The sandpaper rubbed her fingertips raw and red. They were granted two short breaks, including lunch, then wrapped up with the sun inches from the western hills, its pink light interrupted by the steam rising from the power plant.
The day had not given her much to work with. After dinner, Hollister, the red-eyed captain who'd processed her arrival, pulled her from the mingling crowd.
He nodded at Alden. "You know that boy?"
"Why?"
"This morning, he called you Tristan. Before you'd said a word to him."
She raised her brows. "Is that a crime here?"
"Of course not. But signing a false name to your work contract is."
She nearly asked him why it mattered; there were no more drivers licenses, no Social Security numbers, no databases of debt and credit and citizenship. In this era, you were whoever you said you were.
"I used to babysit him," she said instead. "In my hometown. I hadn't seen him since I left for college."
"I see." A shrewd light pierced the fog of whatever drugs he was on. "And if I asked him, he'd say the same thing?"
"I couldn't believe it when I saw him. Everyone else I know died in the Panhandler or the collapse. I thought everyone on Earth was a stranger. Then I come here and the first thing I see is the little blond kid who used to hide fruit snacks in the toilet tank."
"And he called you Tristan because?"
"That's my first name," she said. "I started using my middle name in college. Do you need to change it for the forms?"
Hollister rubbed his puffy eyes, frowning at Alden, who sat at another table giggling with a girl a year old than himself.
"Better," he said. "Roan runs this ship just like her asshole: tight and squeaky-clean."
"Person like that probably wouldn't be happy to hear you speaking that way."
The man shot her a fierce look, fog clearing from his eyes. "Are you threatening me?"
Tristan pushed out her lower lip. "That depends on whether you think she'd be mad."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 65