Invaded

by Melissa Landers

  “Well,” Aelyx said, trying to keep his tone light, “worst case scenario: we’ll put you in cryogenic storage until we get to the colony and find more drugs, then thaw you out.”

  He’d expected a sniff of dry laughter, but as they reached the top floor, David clasped Aelyx’s shoulder, keeping his eyes fixed on the gritty concrete floor. “I want to thank you. If it weren’t for you, Syrine never would’ve looked at me, let alone invited me to the colony.”

  “I didn’t do as much as you think. She’s crazy about you.”

  With his head hung low, David tugged open the heavy door leading out of the stairwell. “I’m going to take real good care of her. I promise.”

  Aelyx lowered a brow as he preceded his friend into the expansive space that would someday become a penthouse. Paint-splattered plastic tarps covered the floor, crinkling beneath his boots as he made his way toward the center of the room, but he was too distracted by David’s comment to notice anything more. The boy had spoken with such finality.

  The steel door clicked shut with an echo, and Aelyx turned to face David, who leaned back against the door with his pistol drawn and trembling in his grasp. Before Aelyx could process what his eyes were trying to tell him, the rustle of plastic sounded from the opposite end of the room, and he caught a glimpse of an eerily familiar soldier before the man’s fist slammed against Aelyx’s cheek.

  The force of the blow knocked him to the floor. Stars exploded behind his eyes, followed by a jolt of pain and ringing in his ears. He barely had time to blink before the soldier kicked him in the stomach, expelling all the air from his lungs with a whoosh.

  “Enough!” David shouted.

  At his command, the assault stopped. It was then that Aelyx understood his “friend” hadn’t brought him here to admire the view. Anthony Grimes—the man who’d failed twice to kill him—had been expecting his arrival.

  “He’s supposed to look roughed up,” Grimes said. “So his corpse matches that kid from Lanzhou.”

  “I said no more.”

  Aelyx sat up slowly, ignoring the ache in his gut, and swiveled his head toward David, who finally had the decency to look him in the eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” David said. His voice cracked and his gaze shone with unshed tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Grimes shook his head in disgust and glared at David’s trembling form. “Jesus, you’re pathetic. You’d have your meds by now if you weren’t such a pansy.”

  You’d have your meds by now…

  So the pair was working for Jaxen, who wanted Aelyx dead for some inexplicable reason. That probably meant they’d choreographed the attack on Christmas morning—the one in which David had thrown himself into the path of a bullet to “save” Aelyx’s life…thus gaining complete access to him as his bodyguard. Now that Aelyx thought about it, he realized the assassination attempts had increased once David joined the PR tour. The surprise meeting with Grimes in the stairwell, the letter bomb, the poisoned food.

  Had David facilitated them all?

  He stared at the boy he thought he’d known—the one he’d visited for advice and trusted like a brother. Molten rage surged through Aelyx’s veins, flushing his skin. He couldn’t believe he’d pushed Syrine into David’s arms. Had he ever cared for her, or was that a lie, too?

  “Syrine,” Aelyx said, remembering how she’d opened the tampered envelope and tried to eat from his plate—before David had stopped her. “She kept getting in the way.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” David insisted before emotion choked off his words. He swallowed hard and splayed his free hand. “Jaxen tricked me. At first, he said all I had to do was watch you, but then he changed his—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Grimes interrupted. “Just shoot him already.” Aelyx made a move to stand, and Grimes swung at him. The man’s knuckles caught the outside of Aelyx’s lip, and his head snapped back while the metallic tang of blood crossed his tongue. “Stay down!” Grimes ordered.

  David’s face contorted in anguish. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I wanted to tell Jaxen no, but Syrine finally gave me a reason to live. He’s the only one who can get the drugs. I kept stalling, hoping the meds would cure me and I wouldn’t need them anymore. But—”

  “But then he’d have no power over you,” Aelyx finished, then paused to spit blood onto the tarp-covered floor. “And he won’t give that up.”

  The flash of fear behind the boy’s eyes said he knew it, too.

  “Shoot him!” Grimes yelled.

  David raised his weapon and lowered it again. Clearly he didn’t want to carry out the murder, and Aelyx saw a sliver of opportunity to save himself. But he had to act quickly. Grimes was growing more agitated by the second, his breathing an audible hiss through his teeth.

  “Jaxen will never give you the full cure,” Aelyx said in a rush. “Not when he can keep you at his mercy with weekly injections. What will he force you to do next? When will it end?” Aelyx had to appeal to the boy’s dwindling sense of integrity while offering a chance for survival. “I was only half joking when I said we could freeze you and look for a cure. You don’t have to do this. You can change your mind, and nobody has to know.”

  While David hesitated, clearly tempted by the suggestion, Grimes pulled an ammunition clip and a pistol from his pocket. “Don’t even think about it,” Grimes spat. “Jaxen would kill us both, and you’re not the only one he made promises to.”

  “He’ll kill you anyway,” Aelyx said. Dead men told no tales. “Or you’ll die along with the whole planet when The Way ends the alliance, because your water supply is infected. You need our technology to decontaminate it.”

  Grimes paid no heed to the warning. He shoved the clip into his pistol, staring at David hard enough to set him aflame. “Jaxen’s gonna need all the muscle he can get to stay in control after the coup. That’s when governments are most vulnerable.”

  A coup? Aelyx refused to believe it. Jaxen was certifiable if he thought he could stage a takeover. The population of L’eihr, including the capital guard, would never support any faction other than The Way. Besides, Jaxen was already in a position of great power. What would he have to gain by throwing the planet into chaos? But despite the absurdity of it, Aelyx saw how he could use this information to his advantage.

  “You could be a hero,” he said to David. “If we go to Alona and tell her everything, she’ll reward your honesty and execute Jaxen for treason.” It would solve all of David’s problems. “It’s not too late,” he promised, hoping some molecule of their friendship had been genuine. “If you do the right thing, Syrine will forgive you, and so will I.”

  Grimes cocked his pistol and pointed it at Aelyx. “Forget it. I’ll kill him myself.”

  “No.” David adjusted his aim toward Grimes in a clear message to hold his fire. The other man gaped at the betrayal before his gaze turned to stone and he aimed at David in return. “Think for a minute,” David said. “It could work.”

  “You can’t trust him!” Grimes shouted, nodding at Aelyx. “You think he’s gonna let this go—just forget we’ve been trying to kill him for months? If Jaxen fries, we fry right along with him.”

  Aelyx faced David, the only man he had a chance of convincing. “I give you my word. Who do you think you can trust more—Jaxen or me?”

  David didn’t speak, but the set of his jaw and a nearly imperceptible nod of his head told Aelyx he’d won. The dynamic in the room shifted, and after that, everything happened in a flash. In an attempt to outmaneuver the other, David and Grimes simultaneously raised their weapons and fired.

  A deafening shot tore at Aelyx’s eardrums, and in the time it took him to cringe from the shock, both men lay crumpled on the splattered plastic tarp—Grimes with a disturbingly tidy hole in his forehead and David with his chest torn open like a package of raw meat.

  Instinctively, Aelyx’s hands flew to his coat pockets for his cell phone, but he’d left it in his bedroom along w
ith his com-sphere. He crawled to David’s side and gently patted him down for his cell, but the boy pushed away his hands, shaking his head to communicate what Aelyx knew deep inside: no medical intervention on Earth could save him.

  Stammering in denial, Aelyx watched the shreds of camouflage jacket turn from green to red as blood pumped out of David’s chest in time with his heart, each beat noticeably slower than the last. Aelyx had to do something. His hands moved to David’s blond head and down over his shoulders in useless desperation while the boy drew a strained, wet breath.

  “Please,” David whispered, blood rising to his mouth and coating his teeth. “Don’t tell…” Bubbles of air rose from inside his chest, stealing his last breath and, with it, his final words.

  But Aelyx understood.

  “I’ll tell Syrine you died protecting me. And that’s the truth.”

  David nodded his gratitude while tears welled in his eyes. For the next minute, Aelyx held his friend’s hand as the life flowed out of him, the terror in his brown gaze fading by slow degrees until his light extinguished completely.

  Aelyx gritted his teeth against the pain. His fists clenched in rage. If he had to die himself to make it happen, Jaxen would account for his crimes.

  Suddenly, the heavy door flew open and Troy Sweeney stormed inside, weapon drawn, scanning the carnage. “Are there more?” he asked Aelyx while darting glances up and down the hall.

  “No. This is it.”

  Cara ran in behind her brother and stopped short, gaping at all the blood. “Oh my God.”

  While Troy yelled at his sister for not staying in the stairwell like he’d ordered, Syrine drifted into view. Her eyes bulged when she found David, and she swayed on her feet. After clutching the wall for support, her face took on an eerie calm, even as she paled several shades. She didn’t cry out in anguish or ask what had happened. Instead, she sank to her knees at David’s side and took the boy’s free hand in both of hers.

  For a long minute, nobody spoke. When Syrine’s strangled whisper finally broke the silence, her tormented voice tore a gash in Aelyx’s heart.

  “I didn’t tell him,” she said. “He told me so many times, and I never said it back. Now he’ll never know.”

  While Syrine wept over her l’ihan’s body, Cara dropped to the floor beside Aelyx and gently took his battered face between her hands. Her blue eyes flooded with tears as she locked their gazes.

  I’m sorry, she told him. I’m sorry about David, and for everything I said before. I love you, and I want to go home—to the colony. She must have sensed his disbelief, because she opened her mind to him and shared her conversation with Syrine. That was why they had come here, because Cara couldn’t wait to tell him the news. That might have been you, Cara said with a nod at David. You might have died thinking we don’t belong together. I couldn’t live with myself if—

  She broke into a sob, and the connection between them closed.

  A conflicting surge of grief and euphoria crashed so violently over him that Aelyx stopped hearing anything. All he could do was wrap his arms around Cara and crush their bodies together while reminding himself to breathe. He rested his head against her shoulder, and they clung to each other until the wail of police sirens forced them apart.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When Cara was a sophomore, she’d won her first state debate championship by arguing against the paradox of traveling back in time to murder Hitler before his rise to power. Hers was an unpopular opinion, but she’d insisted that killing a man before he committed a crime—or even worse, during the innocence of his childhood—would be just as immoral as genocide, albeit on a smaller scale.

  She didn’t feel that way anymore.

  Faced with the knowledge that Jaxen aimed to destroy the alliance, she would end him in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. His death would save billions—a no-brainer, even for someone like Cara who opposed capital punishment. Plus, the bastard had it coming. For someone who claimed to love mankind, he had a sick way of showing it. What kind of person forced a terminally ill boy to murder his best friend?

  A twisted fasher, that’s who.

  But since he was a member of The Way, taking him down posed a challenge. Even thinking about killing him made her a traitor. And she still didn’t know why he would want to kill Aelyx or try to overthrow his government. The whole thing made no sense.

  “She’s finally asleep.” Aelyx returned to the living room, where torrential sleet pelted the windows. Judging by the smooth skin around his eyes and mouth, the L’eihr ointment had done its job. He rubbed a hand over his face and Cara noticed the remnants of dried blood beneath his fingernails. God, the blood. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget it. Or the sound of Syrine’s mewling cries when she’d finally broken down.

  The memory made Cara’s vision blurry. She blinked a few times to bring Aelyx into focus and wrapped her arms around his waist. “I hope the sedative lasts a while. It seems cruel to keep her awake.”

  Aelyx made a noise of agreement, resting his chin atop her head. “Once we’re home, we can rotate her among the emotional healers. It will help a little.”

  “Hey,” she said into Aelyx’s chest. “Look at me for a second.” When he glanced down at her, she said, “I love you.” She’d already told him several times, but if she’d learned one thing today, it was never to hold back those words.

  He took her cheek in his palm and gave a sad smile. “I love you, too.” For a long moment he simply studied her, his thumb lightly caressing her face. “Things are different now. I didn’t think we could make a home here because I still assumed the worst about your people. I never would’ve guessed it was one of my own kind who wanted me dead.” He brushed back her hair, looking into her eyes. “If you still want to stay on Earth, I’m willing to talk about it.”

  The offer warmed her heart. A few days ago, Cara would have taken him up on it, but not anymore. “Not a chance. The L’eihrs are stuck with me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” she said. “So let’s get back on track.”

  There was work to be done. She’d never thwarted a coup before, and when it came to cunning, she was out of Jaxen’s league. They still didn’t understand his end goal or why he’d tried killing Aelyx instead of Syrine or the ambassador. Their deaths would have ended alliance negotiations, too. She added to the list of things she didn’t know: why did Jaxen want to destroy the alliance at all? Was his apparent love for mankind just a front?

  “Alona didn’t respond to any of my summons,” Cara said.

  “Did you use priority code One?”

  She nodded, hoping it wasn’t too late. When rebel factions took control, they started by eliminating the old regime. Aelyx had alerted Colonel Rutter to a potential threat and requested extra security for The Way, but it might not be enough.

  “We need a plan,” she said. “If Jaxen pulls this off, both our worlds are toast.”

  Troy spoke up from his spot at the dining room table, a sandwich nestled between his palms. “I’ll bet his sister’s in on it, too.”

  “She’s not his sister.” Briefly as she could, Cara told Aelyx and Troy everything she’d learned about the Aribol-L’eihr genetics program.

  Aelyx swore under his breath. “So they really can manipulate minds?”

  “They can and they do.” Did he seriously think she’d made that up? “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more of them.”

  “Enough to replace eight members of The Way?” Aelyx asked.

  Cara shrugged. “Possibly. I’m guessing that Jaxen wanted The Way to think humans murdered you so the alliance would fail. Maybe he wants to take over both our planets. Either way, he’ll need a lot of support.”

  Aelyx swore under his breath. “I need an audience with Alona. If I can manage that, I can project what Grimes said to David about the coup.”

  “But that’s not proof,” Cara pointed out. “You can’t accuse Jaxen without evidence to bac
k it up, otherwise you’ll be the one facing execution.” There was also the issue of mind control. Cara didn’t know if Alona was immune to it. “I have an idea, but it won’t work unless I can get Jaxen alone.”

  “No,” Troy said with a firm shake of his head. “Not happening.”

  “Agreed,” Aelyx added.

  Cara took Aelyx’s hand and turned it over, studying his burgundy-stained cuticles. If Jaxen had won, it would be Aelyx’s blood beneath another boy’s fingernails. But since the morning’s deaths hadn’t made the news yet, Jaxen had no reason to believe his plans had gone astray. Cara decided to keep it that way. “We have to try,” she said.

  She hoped Aelyx was good at playing dead.

  It was chaos as the city scrambled to accommodate twice the capacity of the convention center, but an ice storm was the least of Cara’s worries. Surrounded by her security detail, she and Aelyx waded through the crowd and made their way to the lobby elevators, where Troy planned to help them slip past the soldiers and sneak off to the emergency stairwell.

  Within minutes, they’d achieved their first goal. Disappearing into the masses had been disturbingly easy. The three of them jogged up four flights of stairs, and when they reached the landing, Cara paused to prep herself—scrubbing her eyelids and nose with her fists, then squeezing a few drops of Visine along the corners of her eyes.

  Troy handed over his iPhone.

  “Do I look like I’ve been crying?” she asked.

  Aelyx nodded. “You sure he’s here?”

  Cara was certain—just like she’d known Jaxen would answer her hysterical transmission begging him to meet her. Whatever his end goal, he’d always been weirdly drawn to her. She turned on the phone’s voice recorder and slipped it in her tunic pocket so the microphone faced up.

  “Remember,” she told Aelyx and her brother before pulling open the stairwell door, “if Aisly tries to get inside, block her without looking her in the eyes.”