by Laura Pohl
As soon as I say it, I hear that clicking sound. One of its legs tries to pin me down. For a moment, I think that it can see me, but it screeches again, opening its arms aimlessly, trying to blindly grab me.
Another scream pierces the air and I tumble to the floor, my gun falling from my grip. One of its metal claws slams down on my leg, stabbing right through my flesh. The pain is intense, and I let out a scream as I try to get out from under it, my blood splattering the concrete.
Then I hear Rayen. I freeze, and she aims her gun at the alien and shoots.
Its skin goes up in a burst of dust. It looks like the blast has burned off its skin and face, revealing a structured skeleton—exposed organs, cradled by metal and wires.
The alien screeches, but Rayen doesn’t give it any time to react. She shoots again, aiming for the strange pulsating organ in the middle of its belly. There’s a burst of green, and then it falls back on the floor, motionless.
The alien’s metal legs don’t fit with its upper half—the cage around the green blob has a strange, constructed look. Its organs spill onto the floor, tainting it with a gross, thick liquid, but all the other parts look like they’ve been made. It looks like Frankenstein’s monster, if the monster had been built from a hundred different species.
Rayen looks at me. “You okay?”
I touch my leg and the wound, then I nod. Blood is still flowing freely, so I tear a piece off my shirt and wrap it around my leg. I can fix this later. Rayen picks up the alien’s gun and hands it to me.
“There’s another one in this direction,” she says.
“Let’s go.”
I make my way past the dead alien. Rayen signals for me to go right while she heads the opposite direction. I turn at the end of the aisle, my leg throbbing.
I hear shots behind me, and there’s no time to lose. I raise the alien gun and keep it aimed as I turn around and come face-to-face with another one. It looks around, as if it can feel a presence near it, and I risk a glance up, where I see Andy sitting, fifteen feet high on the top rack, wedged between cardboard boxes and storage material.
I don’t have time to tell her to get her ass down here or even to scream at her to ask her what the hell she’s doing. I point my gun at the alien and pull the trigger. Its skin bursts into a cloud of dust, and I’m reminded of the people who I’ve seen burst like that. Its skeleton is exposed, and I see that pulsating organ again. I know exactly what I have to hit. The alien screeches, an inhuman noise that chills me to the bone. But it can’t see me to retaliate. I am its invisible enemy, and it should be the one to fear me.
It runs forward, legs clicking on the concrete as it raises itself up to its full height and opens its monstrous mouth. I freeze in place as I aim my gun and shoot straight at that little green spot between the metal. The organ bursts. The alien drops dead at my feet, and it’s not so scary now.
“What the hell?” Andy says from up high. “How did you do that?”
“Get the fuck down from there,” I tell her, but she’s already making her way down. “Rayen has the other three.”
And the one that is supposedly in a coma. I don’t let myself think about that.
I run toward the other end of the warehouse. Andy is close behind me. We’re the only things echoing around the old compound now, and I shut down any thoughts of what might have happened. Nothing happened. Nobody is dead.
We find Rayen backed up against a wall, the remaining three aliens surrounding her. She has no way out. They can’t see her, but she’s been backed into a corner. If she moves, they’ll know she’s there, and they’ll shoot in her direction. At least the captive alien is nowhere to be seen.
Rayen sees me coming and we lock eyes. She looks at the gun in my hand and nods. From here, I could hit her just as easily as I could hit one of them.
I don’t stop to think about it.
I raise the gun and shoot.
The alien nearest to Rayen explodes in a flash of dead skin and dust, and for a second, I’m stunned. Two inches to the right and I would have hit her.
The distraction gives Rayen enough time to get away and shoot one of the other aliens between the eyes. It staggers back, and Rayen and I move to back each other up.
We have to hurry—they’re bigger and faster than us, and now they’re scrambling together, trying to find their targets. I hear one of their guns charging up and point my own at the third alien, before it manages to shoot. Its skin blows to pieces, and I take aim at the green spot. The alien approaches, and I shoot without thinking twice. The blast ricochets off its metal cage and hits the wall. I curse. Rayen hits the one near her, and its green organ explodes. I turn my back, and the second alien comes hurtling toward me.
“No!” I hear a shout as Andy launches herself onto the alien’s back and it throws her off.
Suddenly, the alien isn’t interested in me. It turns to Andy, all metal and organs, and freezes.
I shoot it. The green blob explodes, tainting the walls. Rayen has finished off the third alien, and Andy lies on the floor. The impact from being thrown off has clearly knocked the wind out of her.
“Where’s the other one?” I ask.
Rayen runs and wheels it over. It seems to still be asleep, shackled to its chamber, but it’s not fooling me. Its brain is fully active, sending a homing signal right on us. I hope that the aliens are idiotic enough to think that if the signal stops, it means that the others have found him.
I shoot its skin off and the green organ appears behind the cage. But before I can shoot it, Rayen stops me, holding her arm up. I look at her, confused, and she silently takes a syringe out of her pocket. It’s full of a transparent liquid, and she screws the needle in. Slowly, she puts the needle between the metal bars of the cage, pierces the organ, and injects the whole thing. It stops glowing and gray tissue spreads all over. The green blob shrivels up.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
“Morphine,” she says. I wait for her to explain why she’s carrying a full dose of morphine around in her pocket.
She looks up and meets my eyes. “You’re not the only one who thinks about the end, Clover,” she says.
I look at her thoughtfully, then avert my eyes. Rayen didn’t need to be told why I slept with a gun. The others probably thought that it was for protection. I had only told the truth to Violet.
But Rayen knows. There’s some sadness in her eyes, but she’s survived, too. It gives me hope. Maybe we’ll keep surviving together.
“You think it’s dead?” I ask.
“As dead as it can get.”
Andy mumbles something from the floor, and we turn toward her. As I approach her, my alien gun beeps.
Andy opens her eyes and looks at it. It beeps again. And then it keeps beeping, faster and faster, as if it wants me to recognize something. Andy widens her eyes, and suddenly, I know how all the pieces of the puzzle fit.
I crack the gun against Andy’s skull and she slumps down, unconscious.
Chapter 39
The first thing that Andy does when she comes to is fight against her shackles. Rayen and I watch her desperation as she rattles them incessantly. It’s no use. Her hands are chained to the table, and the table and chair are firmly bolted to the ground.
“Okay. Who’s the bad cop and who’s the good cop?” Andy asks. There’s something different about her face. She’s not scared or wincing, like usual. She’s defiant, like we’re the bad guys in all this. I’m not sure if the change comes from being found out, or if she’s just trying to be brave.
“You’re out of luck,” Rayen says dryly. “Neither of us is feeling very nice right now.”
Rayen leans against a wall, her pistol in her hands. I sit down in front of Andy, who sets her jaw in anger.
“You think this is fair?” She looks up at Rayen, then furrows her eyebrows. “Let me go.”
R
ayen doesn’t move.
“Please. You don’t realize what you’re doing.”
She could almost convince me that she’s human, if it weren’t for the glint in her eyes, that multicolored shine. It’s exactly like the spaceship in the bunker, and it makes my arms tingle with goose bumps. The hidden spaceship, the fact that they hunt at night, the reason why Andy is so afraid of them. It all makes sense now.
“I haven’t done anything,” she says.
“I know what you are, Andrea,” I reply. “Or is that even your real name?”
Andy looks up. Her eyes are pink, shining like a dying star. It would almost be beautiful to watch, if I didn’t know what she was.
Outsider.
Alien.
“You know nothing,” she says, her voice becoming stronger. It’s like the Andy we knew was just an act. She sits up, and her posture is straight for the first time since I met her. Without her huge glasses, I can see her properly. “Let. Me. Go.”
I pull out my gun and lay it on the table, just out of her reach.
“It’s your choice,” I tell her. “Either you start talking, or I start shooting.”
“You can’t shoot me,” she says.
I pick up the gun, click the safety off, and shoot her in the foot. Andy screams. She looks at me incredulously, like I’m some kind of monster.
Rayen doesn’t even blink.
“So that’s the kind of thing humans do?” She almost spits. “I was right to hide.”
“No,” I say. “That’s the kind of thing we’re driven to do when freaking aliens come knocking on our door and bring total destruction with them.”
The hole in her foot has already disappeared. I look up at her again, and she’s smiling.
“You can’t kill me.”
“Well, it still hurts, doesn’t it?” I sit back in my chair again, gun in hand. “I’ve got plenty of bullets.”
“I never took you for a torturer.”
“You didn’t take me for a lot of things, Andy,” I say, eyeing her. “You killed Adam. Doesn’t that make you a murderer?”
She looks away. Her cheeks burn a bright red. “I didn’t kill him.”
“You knew what would happen. You knew what they were after. You had information that could have saved him.”
“Violet is going to get me out of this.”
“She’ll be a little angry, yes. But she won’t be back until tonight. That gives us plenty of time.”
Andy doesn’t move.
“I’m not letting you out until you tell me what the hell you are.”
“I owe you nothing.”
“I hope you enjoy staying locked up here. Because until we have answers, I’m not moving. You lied to us, Andy.”
She looks away.
“You lied to us, and you manipulated us,” I tell her. “You were the one who messed with the blood-analysis machine so your alien blood wouldn’t show. You were the one manipulating Violet so she wouldn’t send us out there. So you wouldn’t have to fight.”
She refuses to look at me and Rayen. Beneath her skin, I see the tainted glint of blue and pink, and her eyes burn bright like a supernova. Andy’s never looked more beautiful, but she’s also never looked more distant. She was never one of us.
“The blackout. That was you, too, wasn’t it? Twenty years ago. You arrived on a spaceship. The one hidden in the bunker.”
At that, she looks up again, eyes wide. “In the bunker?”
I smile. “Yeah. You blacked out the information from your arrival and hid the ship so nobody would know. But I found out, and all the pieces fit.”
“It’s in the bunker?” she asks again.
I narrow my eyes and, of course, now I see. If Andy knew that the spaceship was there, she wouldn’t be acting like this.
She didn’t know.
“Yes,” I say, annoyed that I’ve given away this piece of information. I still don’t know Andy’s abilities. “So, do you want to tell me how you ended up here?”
Rayen crosses her arms, her jaw set. Just observing.
“Or would you prefer to tell me why the aliens are here?”
Andy stays silent. I see her anger growing like a burning ember in the fire, her expression fierce. But there are also tears in her eyes, and I’m not sure which to trust.
But I know that I can’t trust her at all.
“They came for me,” she finally says. “Me and my species—we’re what they’ve been looking for. We fled our planet,” she says, her voice distant. She doesn’t look at me. “We found refuge on Earth, where we could hide among a species that looked like us. But they came, too.”
That explains why they chose to kill humans one by one. That way, they could figure out who was human and who was alien. Dropping bombs would risk killing one of Andy’s species. They were needles in a haystack—almost impossible to find.
And the easiest way to find a needle is to burn the whole haystack.
It all fits, why the spaceships had come and why the aliens had wiped us out. They destroyed our planet, but it had never been about Earth at all.
“Do you even realize what you’ve taken from us?” I ask her. I’m exhausted. Killing Andy won’t bring justice. It won’t bring back my family. That’s what hurts the most. “Do you?”
There’s no repairing this. There is no changing the past.
“Are we in danger?” I ask her. “Do you think that they had time to recognize you? That they’ll come back for you?”
For a minute, she looks panicked, like she hadn’t thought about that possibility. “You can’t…” she starts. “I don’t think so.”
“We can’t what?” Rayen looks up and stares at Andy. There’s something unwavering about Rayen’s look. It scares the hell out of the girl sitting across from me. “We can’t give you to them?”
“They will kill you.”
“What does it matter anyway? We’re all dead. Our planet is finished. There’s nothing left to lose.”
“They won’t leave Earth. And they will kill the rest of you. You can’t exchange me like a war prisoner. They have no mercy.”
“And neither do you.”
Andy doesn’t have an answer to that. We’re not going to try to exchange her for anything—we’re not that crazy. I hate those aliens as much as I hate Andy.
“Let’s start again,” I say. “This time, from the beginning.”
“And God help us, if you leave anything out…” says Rayen. She means that seriously, and I can’t help but think that no one is ever going to say “Holy Mother of Sweetened Peas” again.
Andy looks at us, and I can see the change in her eyes.
“We are not your friends,” I say, my voice beginning to show the rage that I feel climbing up my throat. “You destroyed our home.”
“And you’re willing to hurt someone who’s innocent,” Andy fires back.
“Innocent of what?” Rayen spits. “What are you so innocent of, Andy? Tell me. Enlighten me, please! Innocent because you did nothing to prevent the destruction of an entire planet? Of an entire race, who had nothing to do with this fight?”
Andy is quiet for a minute, then she asks, “If I tell you everything, you’ll release me?”
“We’ll think about it,” I say evenly, but I have no intention of doing so. Not now, not ever. “When did you arrive on Earth?”
Andy sighs. “Twenty years ago,” she starts. “I was very small. I barely remember the crossing. We arrived the first week of June. There were twenty-three of us.”
“How many are left?”
“Only me.”
“And why did you destroy the records?”
“We couldn’t let anybody know about us. We had to hide the ship,” Andy says. “I didn’t know what had happened to it. The only person whose memories we didn’t w
ipe was Violet’s mom. She was in charge of the project.”
“And how do you know that the other ones are dead?” Rayen asks.
“I felt it,” she says quietly, looking at me in the eye. “I know that I’m the last one.”
Her tone is something like a plea, but it’s Rayen who answers it. “Do you want us to pity you? That you’re the last one?”
Andy’s lower lip quivers. She looks at Rayen, tears forming in her eyes. “I am the last of them all,” she repeats, almost whispering. “The last.”
“And so are we,” Rayen says, her tone harsh. “Thanks to you.”
“You knew that they were going to come after you,” I say angrily. I couldn’t care less about her species. They had killed mine. “How did this happen? When did it all start?”
Andy tries to wipe her tears away, but her hands are shackled to the table.
“Thousands of years ago,” she says. “Millions, maybe. Our species prospered in our system. We were known for our knowledge, which we passed down to all species. We were the most powerful beings in the universe.”
“You don’t look so powerful now,” Rayen points out.
Andy doesn’t respond.
“Why the war here?” I ask. “What do you have that made them willing to decimate an entire planet to get to you?”
Andy breathes deeply, taking her time. “It’s a power, inherent in my species. We can…change things.”
“Change things?” Rayen asks. “Be specific.”
“Change things in time,” Andy says, looking me in the eye. “Wipe out the past. Rewrite the events of the universe.”
I am stunned into silence. I don’t need to ask Rayen what she’s thinking, because I know that we’re both focusing on the same idea—maybe we could rewrite Earth. Bring everyone back.
“That’s not how it works,” Andy says, as if she can read my thoughts. “Most of us can’t access that kind of power under normal circumstances. And the death of billions of people is too much for me to change.”
“So they came after you.”
Andy nods. “Years and years ago. They destroyed our planet, made us slaves. The ones who couldn’t be enslaved were killed.”