There were other kids around Phoebe on a collection of playground equipment. Each device moved like it was powered by magnets: spinning, spiraling, and looping.
“This is the place you always come to,” said Liam.
“Yeah.” Now a younger Telphon ran up in front of them and spoke. He had the same lavender skin and bristles and cloud-blue eyes with black irises and gold pupils like Phoebe’s, only his silver hair was short and gathered into spikes sticking this way and that. Like all the kids around, including Phoebe, he wore a short-sleeved shirt made of some kind of metallic fabric. His was white, with a design of arcs and symbols that Liam guessed might be Telphon language.
The little boy waved his arms and spoke in sped-up bursts.
Beside Liam in the timestream, Phoebe started to cry.
“Is that your brother?”
Phoebe nodded. “Mica.”
He tugged briefly on Phoebe’s hand, and then he zipped off toward their house. The Phoebe in the past kept swinging, stubborn as ever.
Liam felt an awe like he never had before, his heart pounding, his eyes wide. He’d tried to imagine another planet, that there really could be other places in the universe, livable places, and here was one, right here. Vehicles hummed by on a distant street. They were wider and flatter than ground transports had been on Mars, more like the “cars” back on Earth. An airship shaped like an H slid by overhead. “It’s amazing,” said Liam.
Phoebe watched a little longer, as her past self finally leaped off the swing and hurried inside. Liam saw Paolo and Ariana as their normal Telphon selves, busying themselves around a wide, open room with fantastic gadgets and appliances that Liam wanted to examine for hours.
“I can’t take any more right now,” said Phoebe, sniffing at tears. She twisted the dial and sped up. Things blurred, making Liam’s head hurt again, and then there was a series of flashes and wild motions—fire, people screaming—and something massive and orange and glowing that Liam caught only a glimpse of—
Phoebe slowed time again, and they were looking out a large window from space. Below, past the spectacular rings of metal and crystal, Telos was awash in some kind of firestorm. Phoebe seemed to be viewing it from a spaceship, along with a small crowd of weeping Telphons.
“What happened?” Liam asked.
Phoebe turned to him, her eyes brimming with tears. “You did.”
11
COSMIC CRUISER: EARTH YEAR 2223 / TELOS: EARTH YEAR 2209
“Our people called it the Tears of Ana,” said Phoebe, “because it looked like a rain of fire, but it wasn’t from our star. It was Phase One.”
“Phase One?” A pit formed in Liam’s stomach. “Telos . . . is Aaru-5?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . I thought Phase One was just a bunch of satellites and stuff?”
“To prepare the planet for our arrival,” said Phoebe. “What do you do when you prepare to have guests? You clean up. Make the place nice and neat.”
“Oh no.”
“It was a fleet of tiny, specialized bombs designed to erase every speck of life. That way, when humans arrived, they wouldn’t be killed by some toxic plant or bacteria or dinosaur or, you know, a civilization of sentient beings who already had their own planet.”
Liam struggled to find words. “Maybe they didn’t even know you were there. Aaru was so far away. They would have scanned for radio waves—”
“We didn’t use radio waves.”
“Or whatever. My parents worked on Phase One . . . they would never do anything like this.”
Phoebe shook her head. “Wouldn’t they? If there’s anything I learned in all those history lessons I had to sit through on Mars, it’s that your species doesn’t have the best track record when somebody else is living on the land that you want.”
“Phoebe, I don’t . . .” Liam could barely wrap his mind around it. “We’re murderers. All of us.”
“The only reason any of us survived was because we had access to the Styrlax technology. I should have been killed, along with my brother and everyone else.”
“So you’re trying to stop us. From invading your home world.”
“You already invaded.” She pointed to the flames below. “We’re trying to stop you from colonizing. And then we’d use the terraforming data to see if we could fix Telos ourselves.”
“And part of your plan is to destroy the entire human race?”
“Would our planet be safe if we left any of you alive?”
“I guess not,” said Liam. He couldn’t look at her. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Phoebe snapped. “But the people working on Phase One could have. I’m sure there was a way to escape the supernova and then find out more about Telos before you bombed it.”
“We were facing extinction.”
“And now so are we.”
The smoldering planet went dark. Phoebe of the past was sleeping.
Liam felt a great pit inside. All his life he’d thought of the mission to Aaru as a great accomplishment, even an adventure. He’d been told by everyone that it was such an amazing feat: all of humanity coming together under one flag, finally putting aside thousands of years of conflict, working together and setting off on a great journey across the universe for survival. Everyone was so proud. He was supposed to be proud. There had been a movie; two actors played his parents in the background of a scene. Even when everyone had been making him feel like his emotions about leaving Mars, his only home, had been silly, he could remind himself that they were all part of this noble endeavor.
But they’d been wrong. It wasn’t noble. Liam had always just assumed—everybody had—that Aaru was theirs, that all they had to do was get there. But it had been someone else’s all along. They weren’t pioneers; they were conquerers.
“I wish you’d told me sooner,” said Liam.
“I wanted to, but . . . if I told you, even that morning before we left, you would have told your parents, and my parents and I would have been captured and maybe killed ourselves.”
Liam didn’t answer. Would he have told them? Probably. “But how could you stand living with us? Pretending you were human, when you knew what we did?”
“Sometimes I wanted to blow up the school,” said Phoebe. “I nearly jumped up in class and punched kids a couple times. They would say such arrogant things. I knew they didn’t know, but still. . . . Back here, on this ship right after the Tears happened, I wanted to kill you all.”
Liam nodded. “I get it.”
“No, I’m serious, I really did.”
“But you don’t want to kill us now, do you?”
“Not as much. Not you. I don’t know. I did spend three years being a human. You have some good points: grav-ball.” She shot Liam the briefest smile. “On the one hand, I don’t think you’re murderous invaders. And it’s like, if the situations were reversed, I’m not sure that my people would have done it differently.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you actually did it. When I’m hanging out with just you, or Shawn, our parents, I can almost forget, but even then, a part of me always knows that you murdered us all, and . . . I don’t know if you’d even care if you knew.”
“I care.”
“Liam, duh! Each of you, individually, would probably care. But I’m not sure humanity would, and I still don’t think you’d leave Telos alone.”
Liam wondered if she had a point: Aaru-5 had been humanity’s target. There had been other possible planets, but they were so much farther, and every kilometer added to the uncertainty. He really wasn’t sure that some alien race would have changed their plans.
“Maybe we could live there together,” he said. “I mean, like you said, we have the terraforming data.”
Phoebe laughed. “What, like we’re just going to get along? You’ll give us, like, our own little island or something? There’s only two hundred and thirty-eight of us left. Thirty-seven now, after that body at Delphi. And that’s the be
st case. That’s it. You can’t even imagine what it feels like. Plus, we’re not the same. When you terraform Telos for what a human needs, that’s not necessarily going to work for a Telphon.”
“So—I don’t get it,” said Liam. “Do you still believe in the plan to kill us all or not?”
“Liam!” Phoebe balled her fists. “I just saved your life. Multiple times! Do you know how it felt to fire on Barro’s ship? Or to make those course changes, knowing it would mean I wouldn’t see my people? Do you know how lonely it was doing all that by myself?” Her eyes welled up.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know. It’s just, I’ve been wearing this mask and shaving my own bristles off for a quarter of my life. Did I mention we had tails? We had to cut them off. And then . . .” Phoebe pulled down the collar of her shirt. The putty gave way to her natural purple skin. Liam saw the top of a large black scar that began just below her collarbone. “Because of the different atmosphere and gravity on Mars, they gave me a backup pump attached below my heart to compensate. We only have three chambers. You know that Martian cough I had? It was because of my pump, trying to keep up.”
“So it’s like a second heart?” said Liam.
Phoebe nodded. “Sometimes when I’m lying in the dark I can hear it sort of wheezing inside me. And sometimes it gets out of rhythm with my real heart and there’s this vibration that feels like my chest is going to break. And that’s kind of how the whole thing has been. It was our planet, our only home. We’re never going to get that back, even if we kill every human in the galaxy. And that would mean losing my best friend. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. Part of me kept hoping I wouldn’t have to, and another part of me kept looking for a way. If things hadn’t gone sideways on Mars, I don’t know if I ever would have gotten the chance. But they did. And here we are.”
“So what do we do?”
Phoebe shrugged and wiped away tears. “I have no idea. This is as far as I ever imagined. I mean, I’m not even sure my people are wrong, but I—I just don’t want any more of them, or you, to die.”
Liam felt a surge of frustration. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why. “Back on Mars, when we found the chronologist’s lab and learned about the Drove, you said it changed everything. And at Saturn you told Barro that the Drove were the real enemy. But it sounds like you still sort of think we’re the enemy.”
“I thought that finding out about the Drove might convince my people to call off the attack, at least for a little while. I mean, anybody going around blowing up stars is pretty dangerous, and for a minute, I could imagine taking our vengeance out on them instead.”
“You mean like humans and Telphons, side by side?”
“It sounded nice, but then . . . there are trillions of stars. We might never run into the Drove again. And even if we did, and even managed to stop them, what then? We’d turn to face each other, and you’d still be the ones who slaughtered us. Barro was right: it wouldn’t really change what happened.”
“See? It sounds like you still agree with them.”
Phoebe threw up her hands. “What else do I have to do to show you that I’m on your side?”
“But that doesn’t mean humanity’s side.”
“No. I’m not sure that it does. . . . And I don’t know how you could expect it to.”
Liam shrugged. “So what do we do next?”
“All I can think to do is catch the Scorpius, and get our parents treated and woken up. Hopefully, our cover hasn’t been blown yet. Then we can get our parents together and talk to them. They might listen to us. For mine, it would be a first, but they might.”
“There has to be a way to convince them to call, like, a cease-fire or something,” said Liam. “And to convince humans that we need to think about this some more. Like, maybe we can share the terraforming data and everyone can go their separate ways. If your ship can make wormholes, you guys could go start over anywhere.” Phoebe’s eyes narrowed at him. “Right, or we could find another spot and you could have Telos back, I don’t know.”
“It’s a solid plan,” said Phoebe. “Except we’d never see each other again.”
“Yeah. . . .” He wanted to refute that, except he couldn’t think of any way it would work.
Outside of the timestream, the red dwarf star, Ana, was rising over the ashen rim of Telos.
“We should go back,” said Phoebe.
“Thanks for showing me,” said Liam. “It was beautiful. Telos, I mean. Your home.”
“Thanks.” Phoebe sniffled.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how I can ever make it better.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’ve made it better.”
Phoebe turned the dial two clicks forward. Time sped up in a blur, becoming little more than flashes of color, and the feeling of a wind blowing through Liam grew—
Suddenly something crackled and buzzed, like when heat lightning would strike the colony dome. There was a blinding flash of white light, and all at once Liam felt like he’d been crushed, and also turned upside down, then like he was falling, but then it all stopped.
Bright spots dotted his vision. He winced and looked around and saw that he and Phoebe were still in the timestream. Outside, he saw her view of their Mars classroom, with Ms. Avi and all the kids, and there was Liam himself, sitting a few seats over, only this moment was frozen, as if Phoebe was holding down the watch symbol. But she wasn’t.
“What happened?” Phoebe rubbed her head.
Liam looked down at himself and realized that there was no more sense of his physical form, the one that was hugging Phoebe on the cruiser. There was only this timestream version of himself, and he felt dizzy and nauseated, as if he’d finished a time trip and was actually back in the present. “I don’t know. We stopped. What does the watch say?”
Phoebe held up her wrist. The symbols in both hemispheres were blinking, back and forth and out of sync with each other. And the dial was blinking red again.
“That’s not good,” said Liam.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” Had the chronologist come back? Or was this the Drove? They had been moving forward.
He spun around, looking up and down the strange cloudy hall of the timestream—and froze.
“Behind you,” he said to Phoebe. She turned and her eyes grew wide.
A doorway.
Here, somehow in the timestream, a trapezoid of black metal, narrow but quite tall. It was solid, heavy-looking, threaded with circuitry that glowed liquid silver, and it led into an inky darkness.
“What is it?” Phoebe whispered.
“I have no idea,” said Liam. How could this be here? A door in the quiet of paused time—no, not quiet, exactly. There was a grinding sound, like power cycling in deep, humming rotations. It was coming from through that doorway.
“Try the watch,” said Liam.
“I’m turning the dial but nothing’s happening,” Phoebe hissed. “The buttons don’t do anything either. Are we stuck here?”
Liam shrugged, and yet his first thought was yes.
Phoebe stepped toward the doorway. “Well, where does this go?”
“Wait—” Liam followed her.
They crept up to it and stood just outside it.
That humming sound had grown, rumbling Liam’s gut and vibrating his teeth. It seemed to be coming up from Liam’s feet, but when he looked down, he still saw himself standing in a sort of undefined fog.
Phoebe leaned into the shadow of the doorway. “Do you hear that?”
Liam held his breath and listened.
Voices. Faint, echoing, like you might hear at the far end of a hallway with no one else around.
Phoebe stepped into the doorway.
“Hold on,” said Liam.
She held up the malfunctioning watch and raised her eyebrows at him. “Maybe it’s a way out of here.”
“We can’t be sure about that,” said Liam. “This might have to do with the chronologist.
She did say she would see us later. Maybe we should wait and see if she shows up.”
“I’m going to take a look.”
“It’s a door in a timestream. We don’t even know what that means.”
Phoebe stepped farther into the shadow. “It’s cold.” The space seemed to ripple, almost like liquid. It coalesced around her, and just like that, she vanished into it.
“Phoebe?” No answer. “Phoebe!” Liam held his breath and stepped into the doorway. He noticed that same rippling happening in the corner of his vision, but he didn’t feel it. There was a sense of cold, though, deep, dark cold.
“Phoebe!” He took another step, and felt a sort of rushing movement. All at once it was pulling him, or pushing him, or both, Liam couldn’t quite tell, but he couldn’t fight it, and then he was rushing forward and the dark closed around him and it was dotted with stars, as if he was adrift in space itself—
The wind grew inside him, louder than ever before, and he started to fall.
INTERLUDE
SALVAGE FREIGHTER CARRION
0.3 LIGHT-YEARS FROM ACCESS PORTAL FOUR
Just under nine and a half trillion kilometers from Delphi, inside a sleek black ship with a mirrored surface that made it seem like merely a ripple among the stars, a light began to blink. The light was on a console in the ship’s cabin, and it caught the attention of a young woman. She wore a gray jumpsuit uniform, and her hair had been shaved except for two thin bands that began just above her temples and arced over her scalp, meeting at the back of her neck. The remaining hair was long and dyed blue, such that it appeared as if she had two small waterfalls, one on either side of her head. This woman, Kyla, didn’t love the style, but it had been a trend that had swept through the crew and such things were good for morale. In fact, she was often kind of chilly, though she did enjoy rubbing the shaved areas and feeling the stubbly promise of the rest of her hair returning. The sound and feel against her fingertips also soothed her during this stressful operation, and that was what she’d been doing when the light began blinking. The sight of it caused a nervous skip in her heart.
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