by Laura Pohl
I stand at my full height next to the spaceship, and I realize how large it really is. It’s more like a cruiser than a pursuer, definitely built for longer distances, and I think it could easily hold thirty people.
I walk around it, examining it. There’s no visible door on the outside, like all their other ships. I can’t figure out a way to get it open. I tap against the sides. Nothing happens.
I sigh, stepping away. My fingers are coated with dust. In fact, the whole spaceship is covered in a thick layer of dust—too thick to be from my wild crash. This ship looks like it hasn’t been moved in months.
No, not months. Years.
This ship was here before the invasion.
“Clover?” Adam asks. “What is it?”
I turn to him, shaking my head slightly. “This thing is old, Adam. Older than it should be.”
He frowns. “What do you mean?”
“This looks like it’s been sitting here for ten years. Maybe more.”
I turn to the wall to inspect the spot where I crashed. From here, it’s easier to see the crack that divides this room from the rest of the bunker. This wall was built later, to hide this ship. I pick up a small brick and shove it in my pocket.
“We’ve gotta tell them,” Adam says.
“We will,” I reassure him. “But not yet.”
“Why not?”
I sigh. “We have a plan to catch these things. And then we find one of their spaceships sitting right here under our noses. Something that isn’t supposed to be here.” I look at him expectantly.
“We don’t have enough information yet,” he says.
“And?”
He hesitates a little. “Violet will call it all off.”
I nod. The spaceship remains quiet in the room. It doesn’t even buzz.
“They’re going to find out anyway,” he argues. “Look at the size of this hole you’ve made. And the security cameras…”
I check the angles of the cameras in the bunker, and there’s no way that they could have caught my crash on video. They can’t see this room. Besides, this area is isolated enough that no one will find anything here unless they come looking.
“Help me keep this hidden until we know more about it,” I say.
Adam nods.
There are too many pieces to this puzzle, and none of them fit. The aliens, the blackout, the planes, and the spaceship. There’s some element that unites all of these together, I’m sure of it. But I’m missing it—the answer is just out of my reach.
I meet Adam’s eyes. “If I find anything useful, I promise I’ll tell them.”
He looks comforted by that. My word is not worth much, but it’s all we have. “I’ll hold you to that,” he says.
I nod. Adam looks at the spaceship again, as if waiting for it to answer our questions. It doesn’t move.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He nods, accompanying me back to the somehow undamaged truck. We work together to clean up the debris, and Adam parks the truck in front of the hole in the wall. I really don’t think that anyone is going to come all the way down here besides us, so our secret should be safe.
At least for now.
Chapter 28
We only have a few more days until we go through with our plan. I have to find answers, fast. I need to talk to Flint, and I know where he’ll be late at night.
Flint is sitting at the table in the kitchen, nursing his coffee and looking over some schematics for the cryogenic chamber. He was holed up in the lab all day helping Avani build it, making sure that everything would work.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“Boring. Yours?”
“Better stay boring,” he says, with a wink in my direction.
I smile, sitting down across from him.
“You do realize how stupid our plan is, right?” Flint shakes his head, looking back down at the schematics. “It’s just… There are a lot of flaws. There isn’t one single aspect of it that feels like a sure thing.”
“They can’t see us,” I remind him.
“You willing to bet your life on that?”
“What’s my life worth, anyway?”
He looks up sharply. “Your life is not worthless, Clover.”
“I know,” I answer evasively. “But I just think… My abuela used to say this to me all the time: ‘When our time comes, it comes. Don’t fight it.’”
“You think she meant the aliens?”
I laugh. “If I were with her when they attacked, she probably would’ve,” I answer. “She’d want to murder me for this plan.”
“So would my mum,” Flint replies, nodding his head. “‘Flint Nelson Rogers, who do you think you are to fight aliens?’” he says, imitating her voice. “‘Let the white folk go out there and fight those things. You stay right here and finish your chores.’”
I bark out a laugh. It’s too similar to what Abuela would say: Chores always come first. Be home by sundown. Don’t mess with stuff that ain’t your business.
“Yours too?” He raises an eyebrow.
I nod my head slightly, a smile crossing my lips. “You never think that’s going to be the stuff you miss, you know? Them ordering you around all the time.”
“With both my mother and my father in the compound, I couldn’t put a toe out of line.” He smiles, lost in the memories.
“Well, it hasn’t been our time to go yet,” I say. “There has to be a reason that we’ve survived this long. So I guess we might as well do something useful.”
“Might as well get ourselves killed, more like,” he replies, but his smile doesn’t fade. It’s like the spark of life in Flint hasn’t gone out, no matter how hard the last seven months have tried to take him down. It’s like Abuela told me when the aliens first landed: We do what we always do. Survive.
“What can I do for you, Clover?”
“How did you guess?”
“You might find this surprising, but people don’t usually seek me out unless they want something.”
“Shocking.”
“I know,” he replies, laughing easily. “What do you need?”
I pull the piece of brick out of my pocket. It isn’t damaged much, and it’s not recognizable as being from the bunker.
“A rock? You shouldn’t have.”
“I just want to know how old this is.” I hand it to him, and he picks it up, turning it in his hands.
“Is this an emotional rock? Are you attached to it?”
Without warning, Flint puts the brick near his mouth and licks it. My eyes widen, and I make a disgusted noise. Flint grins at my expression.
“Is that standard procedure?” I ask, bewildered.
“No. I just really wanted to see the look on your face. It was worth it.” He coughs and rubs his tongue with his finger, as tiny pieces of debris fall to the floor. “This is disgusting. But it tastes like a pretty regular brick to me.”
I’m half-disappointed, and it probably shows.
“What I could do,” he suggests, “is take it up to the lab. See if I can find anything specific on it. Can’t make any promises, though.”
“That would be awesome, actually.”
I just need a date. If he manages to analyze the age of the brick, then there’s a chance I can figure out when that wall was built, or when that spaceship arrived. It’s a long shot, but it’s all I’ve got.
“It’ll take some time,” he says. “But we have good lab equipment, and I should be able to do a radiocarbon-dating analysis.”
“That’s fine,” I answer. “I owe you one.”
“Oh, I’m counting on it.” He smiles, then shakes his head. “I suppose that whatever this is, Violet isn’t aware of it?”
I give him a very sweet smile.
“I thought so.” He sighs, rolling his
eyes.
“Thanks, Flint. I promise I’ll repay you.”
“Anytime.”
* * *
When I get to the laboratory the next day, Avani is flitting about, her hair flying everywhere, and it’s clear that she’s barely slept for days. Rayen and Flint managed to find the electromagnetic pulse in one of the labs, so the only thing we need to worry about is building the machine that will confine the alien. In the corner of the lab sits a prototype with a transparent ball full of electricity that blinks in different colors and buzzes like a hive of bees.
“Is that it?”
She nods.
The machine is like a glass coffin. It’s small enough that it will fit in the back of the smallest truck we have. There’s a piece on the side that looks like a scanner, a lit-up grid panel of some sort.
“What is this?”
Avani looks up, blinking and then frowning at the buzzing thing. “An idea I had about the aliens. Maybe they can’t see us because they perceive the world differently.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “What do you mean?”
“Like ants, who use their antennae,” Avani explains. “But in this case, I was wondering why they can’t see us specifically. Bats and snakes don’t use regular sight—their vision is built from the sounds they hear.”
“I made a big racket one of the times I encountered them,” I reply, not wanting to dismantle her theory, but not wanting to lie, either.
Avani smiles at me. “Me too. I tried to hide in a cabinet with a bunch of pots and pans, and they all came crashing out. Which doesn’t explain how they don’t see us. So I wondered if what they actually see might be brain waves, which they use to, you know, target humans. We vibrate in a specific frequency, and we can be differentiated from animals and static things like houses. Technically, the whole world is written in wave frequencies. Like a radio. Tune in to a different station…”
“And you can’t hear it anymore,” I say, catching on. “That’s actually a really good idea. So you’re basically saying that our brains are defective?”
Avani shrugs, raising her hands. “Maybe we vibrate in a frequency that they can’t read.”
“What about the blood samples you took?”
Avani groans. “They got us nowhere. The machine is broken, and they all showed up the same.”
“What?”
“All the scans are of Violet’s blood,” she tells me. “And we haven’t all got the same blood, obviously. So the machine probably just repeated the same DNA pattern for every sample. As I said, broken.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, not knowing what to say. This could be a big clue to what makes us different, why the aliens killed everyone but could never see us.
Avani smiles at me, putting her hands on her waist. “Anything else I can do for you?”
I remember why I came in here in the first place and nod. “Yeah. Adam. Is he here?”
“Yeah, in the back,” Avani says. “He’s fixing up the truck.”
* * *
I find Adam in a back corner of the lab trying to fix what looks like a bunch of giant metal ropes.
“Hey.”
He looks up and grins. “Hi. Come here looking for the handsomest guy in Area 51?”
“Yes. Where is Flint? I didn’t see him when I came in.”
Adam gives a hearty laugh, shaking his head. “It’s hard to win with you. So what do you need?”
“Your help breaking in somewhere.”
Adam’s face falls. “Is this about the spaceship?”
“Yes. C’mon. What are you afraid of?” I tease him. “There are no cops to arrest us for breaking and entering.”
Adam gets up with a sigh, rolling his eyes at me. He comes closer to the workbench I’m leaning against, and I can smell his sweat. He turns to me, and a faint blush creeps into his cheeks.
I should tell him that these feelings won’t be returned. I should just get it over with, but he might hate me if I tell him the truth, and right now, I’m tired of feeling alone.
“Meet me at midnight,” I say.
“You do realize that we should be sleeping,” Adam says. “We have an alien to catch in a few days.”
“Aren’t you curious at all to find out what happened in Area 51 and what they were trying to cover up?”
“I’m more curious to know when I’ll be able to act like a normal guy again,” he says, looking at me.
I know that look—it’s one that Noah used to give me sometimes, when he wanted to ask a question that he didn’t dare ask.
I decide that it’s best to brush it off. “You’re the last of the white boys, Adam. You’re going to save the world. Female survivors will be lining up to be with you.”
“One can dream, right?”
“Yeah. Hollywood did it all the time.”
He laughs at that. “Hypothetically, we’re the last humans on Earth,” he says. “We might be responsible for repopulating the whole planet.”
“We might. We could also just let humanity die. I mean, we put up a good fight.”
“Yeah. Still, we have a responsibility.”
“My family had diabetes for generations. My genes are no good. Might as well kill off humanity now.”
Adam chuckles. “We watched too many movies.”
“We did,” I agree. “Why did teenagers get to be the ones who survived? We have no sense of responsibility at all.”
“Speak for yourself.”
I narrow my eyes. “If you had a kid today, and you could exchange it for a brand-new Pokémon game, would you?”
Adam looks at me bewildered, opening his mouth in offense. Then he shuts it, unable to come up with a response that lets him keep his dignity.
“That’s low.”
I find myself smiling at Adam’s disappointment.
“Come on, Clover. You would sell out the human race for a game?”
I snort. “I’d sell all of you if the aliens told me they had Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I wouldn’t even blink.”
Adam tries to look hurt, but we both just end up with goofy smiles on our faces. It feels easy talking to him, and I wonder if this is what it’s like to have real friends.
The end of the world is cruel. But it can be kind with the smallest of things.
Chapter 29
Adam’s footsteps are surprisingly light for a guy his size. When I ask him about this, he says that his mom had really strict curfew rules. I can almost imagine him in a simple but tastefully decorated house, sneaking through the hallway while his mom sleeps. His high school experience must have been completely different from mine. And yet, we both ended up here.
“You sure about this?” he whispers as we approach the door to Violet’s office. “This is a bad idea.”
“You afraid of a little girl?”
“Hell yeah. And Violet isn’t little, she’s taller than me.” I consider this, and it’s true. She has a model’s body, very tall and lean. “And calling me a coward won’t get the job done.” He looks slightly irritated, putting his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah. But did I annoy you enough to do it?”
“You did. Congratulations, Martinez.”
“Just doing my job.”
The door, of course, is locked. I could break in by myself—after spending six months on the outside breaking and entering, I’m practically a professional. But this mission could take hours, and I think Adam is good company.
I break through the lock a moment later and quietly slip inside the old office.
The lights turn on automatically and I freeze, but the room is empty, and I force myself to relax. Adam comes in after me, clearly uncomfortable.
“What exactly are we looking for?” he asks as his eyes sweep the room.
I point to the badly concealed door near the r
ight corner of the room. I noticed it the first time I was here and have wanted to explore it ever since. It’s unlocked. We enter a confined space that feels a lot like a broom closet. I’m relieved to see that there are only four file cabinets inside, which should make our search easier than I thought.
“Any file that fits the time frame of twenty years ago is relevant,” I tell him. “In June, to be exact.”
“What happened twenty years ago?”
I shrug.
“So you don’t know what we’re looking for?”
“There’s an information gap in the archives that Violet got us. The reports from the first week of June are missing, and we know that there was a blackout around that time.”
He makes a face but doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking.
I frown at him and turn back to the files in front of me. I pull them out methodically, one by one, taking a quick look at the contents for anything that stands out. Most of the files are about half-finished projects that don’t interest me. But they all seem to have been signed by the same person: Melinda Deveraux. Violet’s mom.
After a few minutes, I realize that while I’ve gone through five files, Adam has just been staring at me.
“What?” I ask him irritably.
“Just you. It’s like you go looking for trouble. Why didn’t you just ask her about this?”
“Because I have a hunch.”
“Hunches can be shared.”
“I just don’t want to,” I tell him. “Not until I know for certain.”
“Why?” He’s staring at me with those gray-blue eyes that remind me uncomfortably of Noah.
“Because I hate being wrong,” I tell him. Mostly, I just really hate when people point out how wrong I am.
Adam looks incredulous. “Seriously?”
“It’s a character flaw. Sue me.”
Does this make me proud and arrogant? Sure. It also makes me smart. I turn back to the files.
Adam shakes his head like I’m a hopeless case and starts looking through files, too. I work faster than him, flipping through pages, scanning for dates. It’s a tedious job, but someone has to do it.
“What makes you think these reports are so important?” Adam asks.