She’d kissed him, and he had kissed her back. The kiss had only lasted a few seconds before Bliss pulled back and looked up at him, brown eyes glowing through black lashes, and he’d looked away. She’d let out a disappointed sigh, and he couldn’t bear to look back at her and know what her expression was. He hadn’t been able to explain that he’d enjoyed the kiss, but he didn’t know how to process the well of emotions it had released in him.
He’d expected her to run out of the room, face afire, and refuse to talk to him for a few weeks or years, but again she’d surprised him with her boldness. “Can I stay here tonight? Just on the couch!” she’d hurried to add. “I can’t go back and face Lexi, knowing everything I know. I have to tell her, and she won’t understand, but tomorrow.”
“Of course!” he had said. “Here, you can have the bed, and I’ll take the couch.” He’d glanced into his bedroom, at the stained sheets on his unmade bed, and realized she could see them as well.
“That’s okay. I’ll take the couch. Do you have a blanket?”
“Yes!” He’d rushed over to the closet and pulled out an orange blanket covered in dust. “I’m sorry. I don’t have guests often.”
Or ever. He’d been alone for so long. Six of his generation were essentially dead, and the other two had become his enemies. He hadn’t spent time with anyone he trusted in so long.
Maybe that’s why I’m watching her. I’m just grateful to have someone who knows me. A tightness gripped his heart as he watched her chest rise and fall, and he felt so much more than mere gratitude. He had never taken Bliss seriously before, but as her eyelids fluttered, he realized he wanted to grab hold of her and never let go.
Okay, now I’m definitely being creepy. He got up and went to the kitchen to make coffee. I should go out and get tea. Bliss will want some. Will she disappear if she wakes to find me gone? He needed to talk to her, and not just because he wanted to. They needed to discuss how they were going to break the news to Lexi.
He didn’t have to decide, because Bliss was already awake and sitting up by the time the coffee was ready. Her eyes were surprisingly clear, given the amount of sleep she must not have gotten on the lumpy couch.
“Morning,” he said, and he noticed a bit of shyness in his tone.
She looked him straight in the eye and smiled. “Morning.”
He sat down across from her on the coffee table, steaming mug in hand. “I was going to get some tea for you, but—”
She waved off his excuse. “It doesn’t matter. I can get some at the coffee shop. Lexi’s got an early-morning performance. We should probably go catch the end of it then tell her about… everything.”
Will cringed. “Do we have to? She never takes it well.”
Bliss gave him a level look. “Yes, we have to. She deserves to know. But we’ve got a few minutes, and I have a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“You said the engineer of Demitrius’s ship died, so they couldn’t repair it. But if he died, wouldn’t he have been reborn like the others? Wouldn’t they have been able to repair the ship in the next generation?”
“Well, I—huh. I never thought of that. I suppose they would have, unless… Demitrius always threatens us with permadeath when we get out of line, though he’s never said how he could accomplish that. Maybe the engineer somehow ticked off Demitrius?”
Bliss pursed her lips. “Enough that he would give up his only ride home?” She shook her head. “I don’t know. It seems like there’s something Demitrius isn’t telling us.”
Will chuckled. “There’s more than one thing Demitrius isn’t telling us. He doesn’t tell us anything about his planet, but it doesn’t matter. For the nine of us, home is and always has been with humans, not with whatever race of people Demitrius and the others left.”
“I suppose. But don’t you want to know where we came from?”
Will took a sip of his coffee. “Not really. The desire to know who we are has driven my mother to some heinous acts. I would prefer to keep my ignorance and my soul.”
“Do we have souls?”
“I wouldn’t know. Certainly, the righteousness of our past behavior doesn’t influence if and where we’re reborn. I guess we have souls in the sense that our consciousnesses transfer to new bodies.”
Bliss looked disappointed. She’d always been the most religious of them. After a moment, she gave him a small smile. “Shall we go then?”
He grimaced. “No?”
She laughed and grabbed his hand. “Come on! The sooner we tell Lexi, the sooner she’ll get done ranting at us.”
He didn’t let go of her hand until they got out to her car.
“And the song goes, ‘Baby, do you know who I am?
Cuz if I can’t get no respect, then I’ll be gone without a trace,’
But the cold, hard fact is we can never go home,
And so the only song I sing is ‘Cronos, I hate this place.’”
Lexi’s voice rang through the coffee shop, which was full of guests even at that early hour. Sure, some of them are just coming in for their morning caffeine fix, but most of them are here to see me. I’m making a name for myself, and it’s only up, up, up from here!
As she strummed the last few chords of the song, she looked up to see two people entering the shop. She recognized both her roommate, Bliss, who had failed to come home the night before, and that traitor Will. I can put two and two together. Looks like they’ve both betrayed me. She didn’t know what made her more angry—that Bliss had spent the night with the guy who’d called them aliens or that Bliss had spent the night with Lexi’s boyfriend. Sure, I don’t want him anymore, but that doesn’t make him any less mine.
“Excuse me,” Lexi said to the audience with a smile she didn’t feel. “I need to take a fifteen-minute break.”
As she strode past the bar, the barista on duty said, “Hey, you just took a break.” Lexi let some of the wrath she had reserved for Bliss and Will pour out of her eyes, and the barista backed down.
When she caught up to them, Lexi crossed her arms and thrust her hip out in a defiant stance. “Neither of you is welcome here.”
Lexi expected a humble “What did I do?” followed by endless groveling from her mousey roommate. Instead, Bliss met Lexi’s gaze and said, “We need to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t need to talk to you.”
“Yes, you do, Lex,” Will said, the soft way he said her name reminding her of how sweet he had been when they’d been together.
Lexi stuck out her lower lip, pretending not to be confused by Will’s tone. She’d known what to expect of Bliss—though she hadn’t gotten it—but she had no idea what to expect of Will. The man was clearly crazy if he thought she was an alien, but he had been showing up in her dreams like they were destined for each other for eternity.
“Fine. But outside.” She stomped all the way out the door and almost missed Bliss rolling her eyes at Will. The autumn air was chilly, so Lexi hugged her arms around herself and leaned against the window. “What?”
“Have you been having weird dreams lately?” Bliss asked. “Ones where you’re you and someone else all at the same time?”
A weird feeling crawled down Lexi’s spine. Maybe they’re not just dreams. “You’re describing every dream ever.” But no way am I admitting that to Bliss.
“These are different,” Will said. “These are real. I’m probably in some of them—”
“Oh, you wish!”
“And Bliss too. Maybe some other people. You have a brother named Gavin, perhaps?”
Lexi mustered all her self-control not to let her eyes bug out. She hadn’t told anyone about Gavin. “Maybe I have been having some dreams, but they’re just my self-doubt talking, telling me the best I can get out of life is wandering the galaxy with a conspiracy nut and a do-gooder brother. But they’re
not real.”
Bliss gently placed a hand on Lexi’s arm. “That’s what I thought, too, at first. But when you told me Will said we were aliens, it struck a chord. You know he was telling the truth.”
“I am not an alien!” Lexi realized she’d said that louder than she’d intended, so she looked around to make sure no one had heard. One random passerby was giving her a weird look, and she gave him her most winning smile. Then she turned to glare at Will. “I am not. And I refuse to listen to this kind of talk any longer.” She wrenched her arm away from Bliss and stormed back into the café.
“That could have gone better,” Bliss said.
“Don’t worry. She always takes it badly at fir—” The closing door cut off Will’s words.
Lexi walked back over to her stool and picked up her guitar. “Sorry about that, folks. Just needed to have a quick conversation. Now, where was I?”
“Don’t you go walking away.
Apparently, I’m not free to speak my mind.
Well, if you think I should just acquiesce,
Then, darling, think a little less,
Cuz you’re falling behind.”
Chapter 35
Twenty Years Ago
Tegan was alone in the cockpit when the Spirit came into orbit around Arachne. The moon didn’t look like much—a rugged black rock stuck out on the edge of the system. But Phedre was convinced the answers to their past lay on that moon, so Tegan mustered some hope that it was more than it seemed.
Speaking of Phedre, now that we’re here, it’s time to remove her voice from the system memory. With greater glee than was probably necessary, Tegan entered the sequence to remove Phedre’s authorization.
The computer made a blip-bloop noise then flashed bright-red letters: ACCESS DENIED.
Wait, what? Tegan entered the code again and received the same response. She read the fine print under the big letters: “Only the system administrator has permissions to remove voice authentication authorization. Please check with your system administrator.”
“I am the system administrator!” Something was clearly wrong with the computer, but she couldn’t reboot while in orbit. She would have to wait until they landed, and if restarting it didn’t work, maybe Jack or Cobalt could look at it.
A soft laugh rang out behind Tegan, and she whipped around to see Phedre standing in the doorway. “Tried to remove me from the system, did you?” Phedre asked. “I was wondering when you would do that.”
Realization dawned on Tegan. “What did you do to my ship, you hag?”
Phedre chuckled again. “Don’t you mean my ship, Tegan? It does answer to my commands now.”
“It’s not your ship! I never sold it to you! Put it back the way it was! Now!”
“Oh, don’t worry, Tegan.” Phedre slipped into the copilot’s seat. “I have no interest in taking your little ship from you. After all, my new minion needs a mode of transportation.”
“Pardon me?”
“I control your little ship now, which means I control you. Behave, and you can keep it. Act out, and you won’t believe the information I’ve found on the hard drive.”
Phedre had probably found some incriminating logs. Tegan had a habit of ranting at her ship about her fellow Transients when they annoyed her, but their secrecy wasn’t worth losing her freedom over. “Do what you want to me. I’m not your puppet.”
“Then there’s your brother. He’s nice and safe in that little apartment of his you know he’ll never leave. Would you believe this ship has secondary controls for all the guns he likes to keep? It would be a shame if one of them misfired.” Phedre’s features morphed into an expression of mock sympathy. “Why, Tegan, whatever is the matter? You’re looking quite pale.”
“What do you want?” Tegan had planned for the words to come out tough and angry, but instead they sounded small.
“I told you, I want you to be my new minion. You’re so good at running and doing favors for others without thinking for yourself. I think you’ll find that working for me is the best of all possible options. Now, bring us down to the surface.”
As Tegan followed Phedre’s commands, she couldn’t help but think her new mistress was about to rain hell on the Transients on Arachne. This is all Roslyn’s fault, anyway. If she and Jack and Cobalt and Gavin had just told me about Arachne, I never would have had to turn to Phedre. They deserve whatever’s coming to them.
Chapter 36
Twenty Years Ago
“Let me show you what we’ve found so far.” Jack all but bounced up and down with excitement.
Two days had passed since he had proposed to Roslyn, and since then, she’d been on a strict recuperation schedule. Jack had spent as much time with her as he could, but he hadn’t pressured her about marriage. He’d gone back to work with Hannah, but since he completely ignored her advances in public, Roslyn suspected that any illicit romance between them was over.
Roslyn hadn’t given Jack a yes or no yet, but she kept the ring he’d offered her on a string around her neck and under her clothes. Maybe he really has changed. Or maybe I’m a fool for believing that’s possible.
“You know I can’t look at what you’ve discovered,” she said, a hint of frustration in her tone. She felt better enough to be useful, but she couldn’t do much if she couldn’t analyze the artifacts. “My brain might explode.”
Jack grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the dig site. “Nah, I talked to Gavin about it. He said if I tell you stuff, you should be fine. Just don’t try to remember anything.”
“Did you remind him that memory is automatic?” Sarcasm filled her tone, but she allowed him to lead her to the source of the artifacts. She didn’t know what to say when she got there, except that she had expected something bigger. From the way Hannah had talked, Roslyn expected evidence of an alien settlement, but the space wasn’t big enough for one person to live in, much less a colony. A circular indentation about twenty feet in diameter had been carved into the black rock. Large green sigils filled the circle, and similar script covered the walls of the circumference. At the north end, some kind of podium or control panel covered in the same symbols rose from the rock.
“I think I’ve figured out most of what it says,” Jack said. “I didn’t tell Hannah the truth, but I can tell you. Some of these indentations are the flaps for a giant box.”
Roslyn looked at the circle again and realized he was right. A straight line through the middle and angled-out lines at each end looked like they might open.
“What’s inside?” Roslyn asked. That seemed a wiser question than “How do we open it?”
“We don’t know,” Jack said. “There are instructions about opening it but nothing about what’s inside.”
“That seems short-sighted.”
Jack tossed a rock back and forth in his hands. Roslyn hoped it wasn’t one of the artifacts. “Well, if Demitrius and the others did leave this box here, they probably didn’t think anyone would find it. They used some kind of tech to hide the moon from discovery for ages. Someone had to literally run into it to discover it.”
“It still seems short-sighted.”
“Well, I haven’t told you how to open it yet.” Jack held out the rock he had tossed around. It was an artifact, the one that had sent Roslyn into spasms her first day in camp. “We have to activate this device, which we have no idea how to do, then stick it in that”—he pointed at the control panel—“and ‘pour the blood of three Ringati’ into these sigils. Whatever a Ringati is.”
Roslyn swiped the artifact from Jack’s hand. “Does Hannah know you have this? She wouldn’t like you tossing it around like a toy.”
“I don’t really care what Hannah thinks.”
She bit back the urge to say something sarcastic and instead focused on the device. Three of the symbols stood out to her. “Jack, you remember those words I
said on the first day? The ones that made me pass out?”
“I remember you saying words that made you pass out. But honestly, I was more worried about the blood dripping from your nose than the nonsense you were spouting.”
“It wasn’t nonsense!” She thrust the device in his face. “I think it was the activation sequence. Elleks. Tsufo. Kel.” She pressed the symbols she somehow knew said elleks, and they blinked green. She pressed tsufo next, and the rock vibrated. Finally, kel made the top quarter of the device spin. Roslyn made her way over to the control panel and put the spinning rock in the indentation.
Jack ran over to her. “Rosie! You solved it!”
“Demitrius must have told me—” She looked at Jack. “Why hasn’t Demitrius stopped us from exploring here? This is exactly the kind of stuff he doesn’t want us to know.”
Jack shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe he’s decided it’s time we found out. Maybe he wanted us to figure it out for ourselves.”
Roslyn raised her eyebrows at him. “Does that sound anything like the Demitrius you know?”
“I guess not. Maybe he blocked his memories so he wouldn’t remember the place. He likes blocking memories.”
“He would have to have heard about the Arachne investigation. It’s all over the news.” Roslyn pulled the device from the control panel and turned the top piece the opposite of the way it was spinning. The lights stopped blinking, and it became an ordinary rock again. They weren’t going to open the alien box that day unless they learned what a Ringati was. “Unless the memory blocks stop him from forming new memories too.”
“Well, there’s an easy way to test that theory,” Jack said. “We’ll see if you remember this conversation tomorrow.”
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