One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  “Okay, Dadi.” I hid my smile somewhere behind a heart aching with homesickness. “I hope I can come home soon, but there are things I have to do here first. I just wanted to call and let you know not to worry about me. I’m safe. Tell Mama and Papa for me, okay? Tell them I love them and will see them soon?”

  “Bah! Tell them yourself when you get here!” And she disconnected the call.

  I sat there a moment in shock, laughing a little to myself incredulously. It could’ve been worse, I thought. At least it wasn’t Mama, crying and begging me to come home.

  “Your grandma is amazing,” Mitsuko said. “I want to be friends with her.”

  I smiled to cover up my grief. I hoped that wasn’t the last time I spoke to her.

  With Mitsuko and Emilio both engrossed in their own business on their terminals, the car went quiet again.

  Having poured a little guilt out of my cup, I proceeded to devour the internet, speed-reading the news for the past six months, catching myself up with everything I had missed. Then I scanned pages and pages of new headlines, looking for anything that could lead to Luka. There was nothing.

  I searched for anything and everything related to SEE, but their information was largely relegated to a corporate website with nothing but a list of the board of directors and CEO.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I also looked up the bios of the astronauts from my crew. I don’t know what I was looking for. The names of family members, where they lived. Someone should tell their families what had happened to them. They needed to be put to rest, to be remembered.

  But I didn’t know how to go about finding their next of kin. Or if that news should even come from me at all. NASA would do a much better job at that than me.

  NASA had worked with SEE on Project Adastra. How much did they know about Crane and his intentions? The entire project must’ve been covered up, erased from records. Did NASA know I was back?

  Maybe with Sunny’s records to back me up, they would believe me. But first, we had to make sure the records were still there, and see what was actually on them.

  Outside, the interstate still spun past the windows, the car barreling us west on its predetermined course. For a nanosecond, I felt it all: The helplessness of our situation. The movement of us inside the car, crawling across the surface of a planet that was rotating a thousand miles an hour, and at the same time, speeding around the sun at eighteen miles per second, chasing it as the star shot through space, spinning its way around the center of the galaxy.

  Running, running, always running, always chasing and being chased. But we couldn’t escape. We were small and power-less, ants trapped on our paradise of a planet, surrounded by the void, shooting endlessly through a vast and terrible universe. We had to protect our fragile home.

  “T-minus six hours till we reach our destination,” Emilio said, turning around in his seat toward me. “That’s where you gotta be, chica.”

  He was right. Of all the places in the world, that was where Luka could find me. I held my grandma’s elephant-head Ganesh necklace in my palm until it warmed from my heat, and prayed like I rarely had before.

  All I could do now was wait, and hope that the world did not ignite before I could find a way to stop it.

  I closed my eyes so I would stop looking at the clock.

  We drove through San Antonio. We got fast food for lunch and filled the gas tank. Soon, there was nothing to look at out the windows but farm fences and cacti, and little to read but the status updates on the warrant out for my arrest. They’d added Hanna as a possible accomplice.

  So Mitsuko bought us baseball caps, scissors, and hair dye, and at the next rest stop I chopped off my hair and Hanna gave herself a quick dye job in the sink.

  Then we got back on the road—Hanna with fresh brown locks, still wet, and me with a sloppy bob that Mitsuko fussed over until it was even on both sides.

  The whole world was looking for me. My parents might be hearing about me on the news, worrying and wondering. My old classmates, what might they think? Even the other competitors from the selection. Seeing me and Hanna together six months after the competition ended; surely they’d find that suspicious.

  And there was a leftover thread my brain kept tugging at, an unresolved worry—who had sabotaged our training mission inside the secure facility at Johnson and almost killed us all?

  Sure, they’d said it had been an unfortunate error—a glitch. But no glitch on Earth could lock the hatch to our simulated space station environment, cut off our radio communications, and turn off our oxygen. Colonel Pierce hadn’t believed it, and neither had I.

  That mystery had never been solved, the perpetrators never caught. Could they be out here looking for me, too?

  What other dangers were lurking, waiting for me? I didn’t have the full picture yet. I had to be ready for anything.

  When the others shook me out of my reverie, the sky had dimmed to a dusky orange, and we were the only car visible on the road.

  Nothing, not even livestock or farms, was visible out the windows now, only sandy scrub and the jagged edges of red-rock mountains. We were truly in the middle of nowhere.

  “Turn here,” Emilio said.

  “That’s not what the GPS says,” Mitsuko pointed out. I leaned forward to see the screen on the dashboard. And she was right. The map was telling her to go straight. There wasn’t a road to turn onto for miles.

  “No, it’s wrong,” Emilio said. “I plotted it out before we left.”

  “Well, there’s no street there now,” Mitsuko grumbled.

  I was hyperalert, leaning forward in my seat, seat belt cutting a diagonal indent across my body.

  The car made a sharp, sudden left, the steering wheel tearing itself out of Mitsuko’s hands. Wheels grinding over gravel and dirt now, the vibrations shaking up all the way from my feet to my skull.

  “What the hell? Autopilot just took over. GPS, what is my destination?” Mitsuko asked.

  The computer-generated voice repeated our coordinates. The GPS display showed us veering off the single green line of the highway, heading off on our own into unmarked territory.

  “What? I can’t change it. I can’t take over. What the hell’s wrong with this rental?” Mitsuko punched buttons on the display in frustration until Emilio took over.

  They kept trying to disengage the GPS. The manual override didn’t respond. The steering wheel fought against Mitsuko’s attempts to take over. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to succeed. I didn’t believe in coincidences, not anymore.

  The car had a mind of its own, and unless we wanted to jump out of a moving vehicle, our only choice was to see where it led.

  The lady voice of the GPS crooned, “You have arrived at your destination.”

  We all sat dumbfounded. There was nothing in front of us that was different in any way from the miles of empty scrubland we’d already been staring at for hours, except that the ground swelled slightly in front of us in a small hill, or dune.

  A GPS couldn’t malfunction like that. The doors unlocked themselves, and I reached over to unlatch mine, pulling off my seat belt with the other hand.

  “Hey—” Emilio protested as the rush of dry heat replaced the air-conditioning.

  I crawled out and my sneakers hit dirt, legs trembling a little as I approached the dune.

  The closer I approached, the more the hill looked less like a quirk of nature and more like something purposeful. It was larger than it appeared from the car; it even cast a shadow on the surrounding sand.

  I heard car doors slam shut behind me and the crunch of sneakers as my friends followed, but I didn’t slow down.

  As I approached the northern face of the hill, I stumbled to a stop, causing Mitsuko to collide into my back and then grab my elbow before I could fall.

  Etched into the north face of the hill was a curve of glass and stone—windows, with a wooden door in the middle.

  “What the hell? Is this some kind of . . . government . . . b
unker?” Emilio sputtered beside me.

  “It’s an Earth-sheltered house,” I said, my mouth already dry from the desert air, its heat pushing into me like a physical force. “Back in high school, I had a teacher who lived in one. He told us about it—it’s eco-friendly, temperature controlled due to being half buried. He had goats that grazed on the roof.” I had no doubt I was right. There was even a garden plot lined with wire fence not far from the entrance, clean and maintained. “This is the safe house.”

  “Out here in the heat—so far off the grid—it makes sense,” Hanna said, but quietly.

  We were all staring at it like it was an alien thing, even though it was obviously human in design and construction.

  Isolated, undetectable, self-sustainable. It made sense, but suddenly I doubted. Who knew who could be living here? Maybe it was some survivalist nut. Maybe our GPS really had glitched and we were nowhere near where we were supposed to be. I’d read reports of that happening more since the vrag ship’s appearance—satellites jamming, GPS sending people on wild-goose chases.

  “Should we knock?” Emilio asked.

  There was no need. A shadow moved behind one of the windows, and then the door began to open.

  Twenty-One

  SUDDENLY, IMPOSSIBLY, LUKA was standing in front of us. He looked clean, uninjured, and only somewhat surprised to see all of us.

  I approached him cautiously at first, as though he were a wild animal, not quite believing.

  And then before I realized what I was doing, the distance between us was gone and I was hugging him, as though to reassure myself he was real and whole. “I thought you were dead.”

  He returned the embrace with gentle pressure, and when he pulled away, the light was back on in his eyes. “I saw your car approaching. I had hoped . . .” He gave a wry half smile. “I apologize for sabotaging your vehicle’s navigation system.”

  “Are you okay? When I couldn’t get you on the communicator . . .”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t answer. I couldn’t know if you and the device had been taken. Perhaps I was too cautious, but I couldn’t allow anyone to find this place.”

  “What happened? How did you even get here?”

  His gaze shifted behind me, taking in the others I’d brought without comment. “First, we need to get out of the open. And get your car into the garage.” His eyes darted to the empty space around us. Even knowing we were alone, I shared his paranoia. He stepped back inside and held open the door for me. “Please, come in.”

  “I’ll take care of the car,” Mitsuko said behind me, but I barely heard her.

  I walked past Luka, my eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. As everyone else filed in behind me and Luka closed the door, I realized we were in an airlock of sorts. Another set of doors lay behind the first, and when Luka unlocked this one, it opened into a beautiful circular room with a high, rounded ceiling and rustic wood furnishings. Well-lit and cozy even while feeling open, the room was half kitchen, half living space. Everything seemed fairly new, the appliances modern.

  “Welcome,” Luka said, eyeing the group a bit uncomfortably.

  I turned my eyes on Luka and absorbed every detail of him. It was him: alive and breathing, his skin and hair a little more bronzed, maybe from working that plot of land out front. It’d been a day since I’d seen him. His clothes were basic, nondescript, but clean and new.

  Luka tilted his head meaningfully toward the kitchen and I followed him there, away from the others. I heard Emilio whistle and Hanna entered cautiously, settling on the couch, trying not to be obvious in her spying on Luka and me.

  Luka spoke low and quickly. “Were you followed?”

  “Not unless it was by an invisible car. We haven’t seen another for miles.”

  Still tense, he asked, “Your friends—can we trust them?”

  “You know them, too. They’re not strangers.”

  The grim line of his mouth was telling. He didn’t trust anyone.

  “I wouldn’t have brought them if I didn’t trust them. I thought we could use all the help we can get. What happened after you shot me into space?”

  He seemed to relax by a fraction, hand raking through his hair. “I could not lose the vrag ship; it is surprisingly fast. I launched all the escape pods and detonated them. I ran dark, auxiliary power only. In the field of debris near the asteroid belt, they lost my signature. I waited them out and then returned to Earth, landed nearby, hid the weapon and the ship in separate locations, and walked the rest of the way here.” He said it all quickly, quietly, without emotion. But I knew enough of him to understand that when he seemed emotionless, he was simply disguising something he felt deeply.

  “What is it?” I asked, when I could bear the silence no longer.

  He exhaled slowly, troubled. His hands gripped into fists and he looked away, voice growing even quieter. “I could have ended it. I could have activated the weapon. I could have saved us and avenged my family, and I let cowardice stop me. And now we are here, and the vrag know it. When I arrived here and did not find you, I feared for your safety. I thought perhaps you had been detained.”

  “I almost was,” I said, finding myself wanting to touch his shoulder, comfort him. So I did. His eyes alighted on me, cool and blue and concerned. “Hanna picked me up instead. It could have been . . . a lot worse.”

  His gaze flicked to her, sitting with her back to us, and then met my eyes again with a solemnity I didn’t understand. “I’m glad.”

  “Anyway,” I continued, clearing my throat. “The vrag have already been in touch with certain Earth governments. Apparently everyone, Crane included, thinks that the vrag and the aliens who sent us the Odysseus message are one and the same.”

  The quiet anger contorted his face slowly, like someone turning a crank: narrowing his eyes, furrowing his brow, setting his mouth in a bloodless line, tensing his jaw. A smaller crank churned in my chest as I wondered if I had said the wrong thing, equating his enemy and his people as interchangeable.

  For a moment he didn’t look at me. His gaze was far away. But then he snapped himself out of it. “I’m glad you made it here when you did.”

  “Why—what’s happened?”

  A muscle in his jaw jumped and he nodded to the others. “There is something everyone should know.”

  “How did you hack our car?” were the first words Hanna spoke when we returned to the group. Mitsuko had returned with our bags. They had all settled into the brown leather couches arranged in a square, facing a fireplace and a flat-screen TV, which was tuned to a news network and muted.

  Luka and I sat beside each other on the unoccupied couch, Luka sitting stiffly on the edge. Without blinking, he replied, “My people developed faster-than-light travel. I can manage accessing a simple satellite-powered global positioning system.”

  “And you knew ours was the correct car because . . . ?” Mitsuko asked.

  “Because you keyed the GPS to the coordinates I gave you. It is highly improbable that anyone who is not you would have randomly inputted those numbers.”

  “Damn. I’m glad we’re on the same side,” Emilio said.

  Mitsuko had been watching Luka’s expression carefully. “What is it?” she asked, afraid. “What’s going on?”

  “So you have not heard?” he asked quietly.

  “We didn’t have Wi-Fi the last few miles,” I said. “This area is a dead zone.”

  He nodded grimly. “The vrag have issued an ultimatum,” he said. “They know that we landed, and roughly where. Your government must turn you and me over to the vrag by noon tomorrow, or the vrag ship will begin leveling American cities at a rate of one per day.”

  Twenty-Two

  I’D NEVER HEARD so many profanities uttered by so many mouths at once.

  “I’m afraid it gets worse,” he said over the rising tide of outrage. “They have offered a reward to anyone who captures us alive. Our names and faces are being broadcast over the news nationwide.” He nodded to the TV scree
n to illustrate his point.

  A stab of fear went through me. And there we were—my smirking driver’s license photograph and Luka’s solemn passport photo, side by side.

  “They’re saying you’re armed and dangerous? What a crock of bullshit,” Mitsuko spat.

  I felt sick. My parents were seeing this. That call I’d made earlier would only seem that much more suspicious now. The amount of pressure they must be under from police, from the government . . . what if they got arrested, too? I’d made them a target.

  “Well, at least you picked a good place to hide out,” Emilio muttered. “There’s nobody around for miles.”

  Letting them blow up innocent people wasn’t an option. We’d have to give ourselves up. We probably wouldn’t live long after that. Someone else would have to figure out how to use the weapon. How much time did we have to get the truth out before that happened?

  “Why now? Why would they instigate war with a very nuke-loving country over two people? That seems counterintuitive,” Emilio said.

  “They aren’t afraid of us,” Hanna said simply. “Or America’s nuclear weapons. Don’t you see?”

  I searched Luka’s gaze. His eyes were haunted. He’d come to the same conclusion I had. This was it. We couldn’t run anymore.

  I knew, just as deeply as I knew we’d have to turn ourselves in, that my friends wouldn’t let me do it. They hadn’t even let me come here alone. But I’d dragged them through enough.

  Don’t think about that last conversation with Dadi. Just don’t.

  “What’s the plan, E.T.?” Emilio asked Luka cautiously.

  I hadn’t realized, but this was the first time they’d seen him after learning the truth. They were seeing him with new eyes, as I once had.

  Luka glanced at me, eyebrows raised.

  What was my plan? That I would go on local news with the mission video footage and announce to the world that I had visited an alien planet, I had seen the vrag’s violent nature firsthand, and that we had to fight back? That I had the answer right here, an alien superweapon that could destroy them all?