As soon as he got his hand around the hilt of the knife, the door to the holding facility flew open, and three armed guards rushed in. With a grin larger than Gavin had seen on him yet, Jesse rolled what looked like a grenade at the oncoming guards.
“Hold your breath!” Abe called as a gas emerged from the canister. “It’s neutralizer!”
Are you insane? Gavin wanted to shout, but he had to hold his breath. Neutralizer causes a violent reaction in ten to twenty percent of cases!
He was thus not surprised when one of the guards got a crazed look in his eye and ran toward Jesse. Still not breathing, Gavin moved in behind the guard and knocked him out in the same way he had taken out the guard by the force field. He glowered at Abe and Jesse, but they ignored him and ran out into the clear, fresh air.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourselves,” Gavin said after a deep inhalation once he had joined them outside.
Abe and Jesse laughed and gasped simultaneously.
“That was awesome!” Abe said. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
Gavin wished he could explain, but he wasn’t sure. He took the strange new memories as they came, but once the contest was over, he suspected he would have some deep thinking to do. Windla would help him sort it out.
Except… When he thought of Windla, his feelings for her paled in comparison to his memories of the Roslyn girl. Though Old Gavin had known he could never keep her, his attachment to her made every relationship Gavin thought he’d had in this life feel weak.
Of course, I also feel strongly about Jack, though those feelings aren’t nearly so positive. He couldn’t continue down that line of thought at the moment, though. He needed to focus on getting away from the guardhouse before reinforcements arrived. He could worry about Jack and Roslyn another time.
“Hey, Gavin, wait.” Abe jogged over to him. “Why’d you let us out? Jesse told you all you needed was in his bag. You could have left us to rot.”
Gavin looked Abe straight in the eye. “Because you deserve a shot at winning as much as I do.” He moved a few steps away then turned back. “And when I win this thing, you’ll know it’s not because I cheated or had an advantage in knowing how to disable a force field. You’ll know it’s because I deserved to win.” And with that, he disappeared into the forest.
Chapter 29
Present Day
Bliss Bhanushali didn’t understand anything anymore. She had come to Chora as the celebrated daughter of a megacorp CFO, destined to take his place in the business world. Only a few weeks later, she had all but flunked out of her business classes, felt something akin to love for her roommate’s boyfriend, had lost her best friend, and might be an alien who reincarnated.
When Lexi had run back down the stairs from the tabloid office—just as Bliss had found a parking spot, of course—she had told Bliss what Will had said about them. Bliss wanted to chalk it up to Will being some stupid tabloid journalist, but she couldn’t.
Once, a long time ago, she had done a genealogy project for school and learned that her family used to be Buddhist. They believed in reincarnation and that the soul was ever on a quest for Nirvana. No one believed anything like that anymore, but Bliss had always thought the idea sounded rather nice. She wondered sometimes if maybe it was true. It would explain why she felt so close to Roslyn, Will, and Lexi before she even knew them.
As she had slept in the car, she had dreamt of something more real than a spiritual closeness. She had witnessed a different time, one in which she knew Roslyn, Will, and Lexi for real. They were still the same people, with the same names and faces, which wasn’t how reincarnation was supposed to work. She tried to dismiss the vision as just a dream, but she felt in her bones that they were real.
Bliss had skipped her management class to sit in her car outside a dilapidated apartment building in a run-down-but-not-too-bad part of town. She had done research on Will Turin, investigative reporter for the most disreputable tabloid in the system, and found his address, and she had been outside his building for an hour, trying to gather the courage to get out and knock on his door. Contacting him on the datasphere would have been safer and easier, but she needed to talk to him in person.
She stepped outside of her car and made her way to the building. Though she was a little surprised that she was able to get past the building’s nonexistent security, she supposed that she shouldn’t be, given the neighborhood. She was less amused by the lack of an elevator since Will lived on the fifth floor, but she made her way up the stairs.
When she reached his floor, she took a moment to catch her breath. The hallway hosted only four doors, so apartment 5B was easy to find. She raised her hand to knock on the door then pulled her fist back against her mouth. Do I really want to do this? Whatever I find out, it’s going to change everything. She took what felt like the hundredth deep breath of the day. I have to. Whoever I really am is on the other side of that door.
She knocked. The person who opened the door did not look like the Will who had visited Bliss and Lexi at the university, but the Bliss growing in her head every moment, the one who was somehow more than a megacorp CFO’s daughter, recognized the disheveled hair and offbeat attire of the real Will Turin.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.
She looked past him into the apartment and could make out a sofa and a coffee table and behind them, a small kitchen. They were, if not clean, at least tidy. “Yes, you did,” she said.
Will ran his fingers through his hair, mussing it even further. “Maybe I did. Or at least, I hoped. But I figured it would be a couple of weeks until enough of the memories came back. I just—”
“Look, can I come in?” Bliss had the distinct impression Will would be happy to ramble in the hallway forever, and she wanted to have the conversation in private.
Will stepped back and held out his hand, indicating that she could walk past. “I’m going to need some coffee for this,” he muttered, making his way to the kitchen.
Bliss started when she saw the wall of his living room. A giant screen covered the surface, and it could have come out of any conspiracy theorist’s wall in a vid, except usually, fictional conspiracy nuts hid their walls in secret rooms. News articles had red circles with lines pointing to photographs, which pointed back to other stories. “ZimmerCorp to Purchase Land on Bellerophon” one headline read, and it had a line connecting it to a story about ImriCorp sponsoring a dance school on Ariadne.
If anyone else had such a wall, she would make excuses to leave right then and there, but it was Will. She didn’t know him or understand him, not really—or at least, not yet—but something inside her knew she could trust him.
“You aren’t going to offer me any?” she asked as he poured himself a mug of steaming brown sludge. He makes it strong, she thought, or maybe remembered.
“You don’t like coffee,” he said. “And I don’t have any tea. I can get you some water.”
“No, thanks.” Bliss took deep breath number one hundred one.
Will looked at her expectantly. Apparently, she had to start the conversation.
“So here’s the thing. You told some guy that Lexi and I were aliens who reincarnate—”
“Which Demitrius is going to kill me for,” Will muttered.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.” Will took a sip of his coffee then cringed as if it was too hot, though Bliss realized it was probably cold since he had brewed it before she arrived. “George latched onto the idea is all. Actually wants to see the story. I tried backpedaling, reminding him I didn’t write alien kind of stuff, but he paid for two weeks of university to finance an alien story, so he wants to see it. Fortunately, no one will believe it.”
“It’s true, though,” Bliss said in a very small voice. “Isn’t it?”
Will looked her straight in the eye. “Yes, it is.”
Un
sure where to look, she felt something heavy rise in her chest and try to burst out of her, except it had nowhere to go. “Oh Cronos. Oh ancestors. How can that be true? How can I be one person now, have been another person before, and—?”
Will came over and put a hand on her arm. “Let’s sit down, and we’ll talk about this. I’ll tell you from the beginning.”
Somehow, Bliss let Will lead her to the couch, because before she realized she had moved, she was running her fingers along the red corduroy of the sofa. The grooves in the material felt rough under her fingers, and for some reason, that calmed her.
“Humans have yet to find life on other planets, but it exists, somewhere out there. A few thousand years ago, by human reckoning, an alien ship went on a mission near Earth, and something went horribly wrong. The engines of the ship failed, and the one person on the ship who knew how to fix them died in the accident. The aliens decided to kill themselves in order to return to their planet.”
“Because they reincarnate,” Bliss said. “We reincarnate.”
“Exactly.” Will gave her a bright smile. “What they didn’t realize was that they were only a few systems away from a species they had a lot in common with.”
“Humans.”
“Right. Instead of being reborn light years away on their planet, they were reborn on Earth to human parents.”
“It’s not just regular reincarnation, though, right?” Bliss asked. “I mean, I’ve started having memories of my past lives, and we look exactly the same and have the same names. That’s not how reincarnation is supposed to work.”
“Not as humans understand it, no. But we’re not human. Or at least, only half. Our bodies re-form in the same appearance as our old bodies, and our names project themselves onto our parents. We’re even born into families with the same last names. There’s some mystical explanation for it, but Demitrius won’t tell us what it is.”
“I have so many questions,” Bliss said. “Like who is this Demitrius you keep mentioning?”
“He was the captain of the vessel the aliens came on, and now he’s our leader. He likes to make rules, and ordinarily, I’m not one for rules, but Demitrius is kind of scary.”
“So that’s who we are. The people from that ship.”
“Not exactly,” Will said. “You see, Demitrius has rules, and one of them is that Transients—that’s what we call ourselves—aren’t allowed to have children. But he broke that rule himself once, and consequently, he relaxed the rule for the others for a while. But after nine children were born to the original Transients, he reinstated the rule. You’re the daughter of the science officer, Astrid.”
“And who are you?”
Will laughed. “My story’s a little more complicated. One of the women on the ship, Domina, was pregnant when they set off on the voyage, and she gave birth right around the time they realized the ship was stuck. She killed her baby along with the rest of them, and her baby ended up reborn on Earth too. Unlike we half bloods, she remembers her time on that alien planet, but unlike the rest of the crew, she has no idea what kind of mission they were on. Another of Demitrius’s rules, you see, is silence on that topic. The baby’s name was Phedre, and she’s been obsessed with finding out what separated her from her people for longer than I’ve known her, longer than I’ve been alive, since she’s my mother.”
“And the other children?”
“Well, I told you Demitrius had one child. In her obsession, Phedre seduced Demitrius, hoping he would tell his lover everything. She really should have known better. Demitrius told exactly one person any of our secrets—his and Phedre’s daughter, Roslyn.”
“My Roslyn?”
Will nodded. “You’re always born near one of us, and you tend to gravitate toward the rest. It’s why you elected to die twenty years ago.”
“I—I chose to die?” What in the worlds happened twenty years ago?
Will gave her a sad smile. “I’ll get to that part later. For now, you wanted to know who all of us were. And when I say ‘us,’ I mean the nine of us who were born on Earth and don’t remember the alien world at all, because we were never there. We don’t even know its name. There are Phedre’s children, Roslyn and me, though my father was human. Roslyn’s the only full-blooded Transient among us. First Officer Obseverus had twins, Jack and Cobalt, and they’ve been a profound disappointment to him for hundreds of years. Dr. Camarilla had two children: Lexi, whom you know, and Gavin, whom you may have seen starring in the Bellerophon Games.”
“Wow, my mother loves those. She keeps calling me and telling me that someone named Gavin is going to win. He’s one of us?”
“Yes. Then there’s you, of course, and finally, pilot Inktari’s children, Detrick and Tegan.”
Bliss concentrated for a moment, trying to bring up memories of those people. “Jack is… in love with Roslyn? And Gavin is too? I don’t remember the others.”
“The others will come back to you. Roslyn tends to get her memories back the fastest because she’s full-blooded. The rest of us usually require cues. Now that I’ve told you all of this, the rest should come back pretty quickly.”
“Oh Cronos!” Bliss put her hands over her face. “No wonder Roslyn hates me right now. I told the school administrators that she must have cheated on the university entrance exams. There was no way she could have known all that stuff about art history and archaeology. But she remembered from past lives, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, art and archaeology have always been Roslyn’s fields of expertise.” Will twisted his lips. “I don’t suppose you could tell me about her. I haven’t talked to her in twenty years, except that moment in your room.”
“She’s a server.” Bliss cringed even saying those words. “She was born into my family and assigned to serve me personally. I always saw her more as my sister, but I guess that doesn’t make it any better for her.”
“Cronos, she must hate being a servant.” Will smiled. “But it won’t last forever. We’re going to have to figure out a way to get her out of there before everyone realizes she’s not aging.”
“Are we immortal, then?”
“Yep.” Will’s smile broadened. “I’ve been alive for three hundred ninety-three years this time around. I think that’s the longest of any of us at the moment.”
Bliss wanted to return his smile but found she couldn’t. “Will, you said you would explain later, but I think I need to know now. Why did we all die twenty years ago?”
Will’s smile faded as well. “I don’t know all the details. I’ve been trying to find out more for twenty years, but Phedre and Tegan have kept a close wrap on everything.”
“Didn’t you say Tegan was one of us?”
“Yeah, she is. Or at least, she was. I’m not entirely sure what happened. What I do know is that Roslyn, Gavin, Jack, and Cobalt went on an archaeological mission to Arachne. They found something there related to us, to why we’re all here and not on our home planet. Phedre found out about it and somehow recruited Tegan to her side, and where Tegan goes, Detrick follows. Tegan killed the four of them that were there, all in service to some discovery Phedre was trying to make. Since Phedre’s still on Arachne, I suspect she hasn’t found it and may well want to kill us again.”
“Wait, if she didn’t kill me or Lexi, why are we here? You said I killed myself?”
“Lexi flipped out and said she didn’t want to wait around for Tegan to kill her. You hoped that your special power to find the rest of us might help us avoid Tegan this time around.”
Bliss leaned back against the sofa, taking everything in. Will had given her a million things to worry about—Demitrius’s rules, her betrayal of Roslyn, Tegan and Phedre’s desire to kill them—but all she could think about was the man beside her. He had told her the most amazing, mind-blowing things about who she was and how she knew people. She wondered why he wasn’t rushing to save the world o
r all of them from Phedre and Tegan. As their memories came back, they must be more at risk.
It’s Lexi, came a certain voice from the back of her mind. He wants to save us but not as much as he wants to save Lexi.
She stared at Will, with his mussed dark hair and shining hazel eyes, and understood why she had felt drawn to him since she had met him. She’d been in love with him for thousands of years, and always, in all that time, he’d been in love with Lexi. She couldn’t begrudge him choosing Lexi over his fellow Transients when she wanted to choose him over them.
He’s not with Lexi right now. Lexi made that very clear. And I don’t have years of rejection weighing down my soul yet. This may be my only chance.
“Thank you,” Bliss said. She leaned over and kissed Will.
Chapter 30
Present Day
Tegan swore. She couldn’t believe she’d lost Jack and Cobalt again.
Yes, you can. They had always been smarter than she was. What she couldn’t believe was that she had blown a hole in a police cruiser to get to them. When Detrick had told her the police had found the Zhaos and were closing in on them, she had lost it. No way was she letting the Ariadne police capture them again. Those barely-better-than-rent-a-cops had proven how incapable they were of holding onto the twins.
Turns out I’m not any better. Tegan banged her hand against the dashboard of the Spirit. She needed to get out of Ariadne space. No doubt more police cruisers would come looking for her. Jack and Cobalt were almost certainly following the train to Bellerophon, so she wouldn’t be able to pick up their signal until they arrived. She considered heading in that direction anyway but decided to head back to Orpheus instead so she could bring Detrick his accursed gun and regroup.
Once she had set her autopilot, she called up the most recent highlights of the Bellerophon Games. The first image that popped up was one of Gavin in a holding cell. She inhaled through her teeth. Not good. If Gavin won the competition, he would get shipped out to Orpheus, where she might stand a chance of capturing him, but from the looks of things, he had lost his chance.
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