Before today, she had never killed anyone. Now, she had spilled blood repeatedly, even if most of it was colored black—which was beyond surreal. She had also been responsible for spilling red blood, even if only indirectly. While she hadn’t pulled the trigger, she had made sure Jimmy had a gun to do so, and had known what he would do with it.
Self-defense, no doubt, but still a heavy burden.
Worse, her life had been ripped away, only to be replaced by . . . what? She had no idea.
Yesterday her life had meaning. She was helping to put bad people behind bars, so they couldn’t hurt others, the way those closest to her had been hurt. Now she was doing nothing but trying to stay alive and out of jail. The only person she had a chance of helping was herself, and even that had grown increasingly unlikely.
Anna clenched her jaw. Enough! she screamed at herself. It was time to stop thinking about how everything had gone wrong, and start thinking about how to make it right.
“Okay, Tom,” she said with a fierce, no-nonsense demeanor, “let’s talk. Start by telling me what destination you have in mind.”
“Huntington, Utah. According to my phone, it’s about a nine-hour drive, almost all of it on the 15. I have a colleague there who has a safe house. I can tell you all about her, and why this is an important destination, but I’d rather wait. There’s a lot you need to know first.”
Anna thought about this, keeping her eyes on the road. “Understood,” she said finally. “I’ll keep heading toward Huntington while you fill me in. It’s as good a destination as any, I guess.”
Anna paused. She had killed three men-like things with laser eyes and black blood, and even had one in the trunk. She was dying to know what the hell was going on. But her instincts insisted she first follow up on the preposterous statement Vega had just made.
“But before you begin,” she said, “I need you to convince me you aren’t stark, raving mad. You just told me that I might be the most important person who ever lived. I tried to laugh it off, but my gut tells me that you believe it. This isn’t just hyperbole for you, is it?”
Vega shook his head. “No. Anything but.”
“Come on, Tom, what am I supposed to do with that? Most important person ever? I mean, you’ve heard of Plato, Moses, and Jesus Christ, right? Or scientists like Darwin, Newton, and Einstein?” Anna shook her head vigorously. “Hell, I’m not even the most important person in my yoga class.”
“You don’t take a yoga class,” said Vega evenly.
“See! How do you know that? You’ve studied me a lot more than you’ve let on. No way you’d be this convinced that I’m clairvoyant otherwise. No way you’d think I’m so important based only on my solve rate and an hour or so of conversation. So what do you know about me?”
He sighed. “Everything I could possibly learn. Which is a lot, given my expertise with computers. Your past was critical for me to explore. To really understand what you’re made of. And I was certain that proof of your abilities didn’t just manifest itself the moment you became a detective. I knew there had to be additional evidence in your background.”
“You hacked my juvie records, didn’t you?” said Anna, her intuition now sure this was the case.
“Sorry,” he said, and looked genuinely apologetic. “I sealed them back up. And I had nothing to do with putting them on your home computer. But yes.”
Anna shook her head and frowned, but didn’t say anything. She was long past being surprised about anything.
“Do you want to talk about what’s in them?” said Vega.
“Talk about what? I was a mess when my parents died. And then I bounced around foster homes for years, resenting the world. So I lashed out. I was the ultimate juvenile delinquent. I abused drugs, and alcohol, and sex, and did anything else I could do to drown my sorrows—before I was even fourteen. I broke the law. Repeatedly. I skipped school, and stole cars and robbed homes. I was wild and untamable and angry.”
“And yet you were still studying what you could about the subconscious and intuition, even then.”
“Yes.”
“Which is why nothing ever really stuck to you. Not like others your same age, with your same record. Tell me that had nothing to do with your abilities.”
She blew out a long breath. “You’re right. I was able to use my intuition to minimize the trouble I got into. Read cops and judges. Predict the right things to say. I always found a way out of every mess. And let me tell you, I got into some epic messes.”
“And you used the money you stole as seed money to amass a small fortune by the time you were sixteen.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. “Very good,” she said. “That’s not even in the juvie records. As far as I know, you’re the first to discover it. But yes, I falsified an identity so I could trade stocks online. And I made millions.”
“Just lucky, huh.”
“Not clairvoyance, that’s for sure. I told you the subconscious is the best pattern-recognizing machine ever created. I read every book I could get my hands on having to do with economics, foreign currencies, trade, worldwide trends, and so on. I understood almost none of it.”
“But you were loading up your subconscious.”
“That’s right. And it worked. My intuition was able to see correlations, opportunities, that my conscious mind could not. I only traded in the riskiest instruments, futures and options, which could see huge swings in value in a very short time. And I only traded when I came across a bet that my instincts screamed at me to take.”
“So with no experience,” said Vega, “as a kid, you turned peanuts into millions. All the while pulling off one Houdini act after another to get yourself out of trouble. And you still wonder why I’m convinced you can see the future.”
“My success is fully explainable by the known abilities of the subconscious. Along with my much better than average ability to cultivate it, and my willingness to listen. No superpowers needed.”
Vega eyed her with just the hint of a smile, but didn’t respond.
“So I’m sure you know the rest, also,” said Anna. “How my closest and only friend at the boarding school, Isabella Gutierrez, was found dead, after having been raped and murdered. I had finally let someone in, and once again they were taken from me. So I had my second Bruce Wayne moment, at the age of sixteen.”
“I knew she had been killed, but very little else about what happened.”
“The detective assigned to the case interviewed me, of course,” said Anna. “Interviewed everyone who had known Izzy. But he got nowhere. I thought he was pathetic and incompetent. So I conducted my own investigation.”
“And caught the killer, I’m sure.”
“Yes. But the idiot detective wouldn’t believe me,” said Anna in disgust. “So I set a trap for the asshole who did it, and got him to reveal incriminating evidence. Then I negotiated a deal with authorities. In exchange for delivering this monster on a silver platter, I got my juvie record sealed away forever. As if none of it ever happened. A slate clean enough to eat off of.” She shook her head. “Or so I thought. Now I’m wondering if there’s anyone who hasn’t hacked it.”
“So after you found Isabella’s killer,” guessed Vega, “you turned your life around.”
“Yes. I had never killed anyone, but I was guilty of just about everything else. And I was done lashing out. I could generate all the money I wanted at any time, so I didn’t need to break any laws. I had a clean slate. And I was so tired of criminals destroying my life. It was time I started destroying theirs. So I turned over a new leaf and vowed to become a detective.”
Vega shook his head and smiled. “Without your future department ever knowing you had closed your friend’s case as a teen,” he said. “So your solve rate is even better than I thought.”
“Look,” said Anna, suddenly becoming irritated, “this isn’t supposed to be a trip down memory lane. The bottom line is that I was right. You’ve been invading my privacy in a big way, and have told me nothing
but lies about what you’ve been up to.”
She took her eyes off the road and stared at him intently. “So what do you say, Tom? Are you ready to tell me the truth for a change?”
19
“I’ll tell you what’s really going on,” said Vega. “But I warn you, it’s going to be a lot to digest.”
“What a nice change of pace,” said Anna sarcastically. “Because it’s been a really boring, uneventful day so far.”
Vega actually smiled at this, a rarity.
But Anna was frowning deeply. She was exhausted. What the day had really been was never-ending. She had worked a long shift even before her dinner with Vega, and that seemed like ages ago. Adrenaline was pushing her through her blood loss and fatigue, but this would not be true forever. And she wanted to give her full attention to the man beside her.
She glanced at the car’s touchscreen, which read, “Hello, my name is Daisy” at the top in small letters. “Give me just another minute, and you can begin,” she told Vega.
Anna lowered her speed from a hundred to the posted speed limit of sixty-five for the first time. LA was now seventy miles behind them, which had taken well under an hour to accomplish.
“Daisy,” she called out.
“I’m listening,” said the voice of the car’s computer.
“Go to full self-driving mode now, always at maximum allowable speed.”
“Understood,” said the car. “What is my destination?”
“Huntington, Utah.”
“Self-driving mode engaged. Following route to Huntington, Utah now.”
“As you’re proceeding,” said Anna, “check your maps program for a cheap motel within a mile of a used car lot. If you find such a motel within twenty miles of our route, this will be your new destination. Understood?”
“Define cheap motel,” said the pleasant, feminine voice of the car.
Anna realized the qualifier, cheap, was needlessly ambiguous. “Change ‘cheap motel’ to the following,” she said after a moment’s thought. “A one- or two-story motel at which guests can park in front of their rooms.”
“Understood,” said Daisy.
“Good. Please return to dormancy.”
“Going dormant now,” announced the car.
Anna tilted her body and head to face Vega now that she didn’t need to drive.
Her fellow passenger looked confused. “I get that you want to find a good spot to stop for the night,” he said. “And I get why you want to switch to a used car, so we can’t be tracked. But how are we going to pay for it?”
Anna smiled wearily. “That brown paper bag in my duffel, which I’m sure you’ve seen, is filled with hundred-dollar bills.”
Vega raised his eyebrows. “Okay, then. Cash it is.”
“Now that that’s settled,” said Anna, “let’s get on with it. What are those things that I killed back there?”
Vega took a deep breath and let it out. “Alien beings from a planet named Tartar,” he said simply, “located in the central region of the galaxy. This Shane Frey is likely to be one of them, as well.”
Anna couldn’t help but roll her eyes, even though she knew she shouldn’t. This was preposterous. On the other hand, given what she had seen, it was also strangely believable. The men she had killed weren’t human, so this was an obvious explanation, as hard as she had tried to resist going there.
“A planet named Tartar?” she said. “Like in tartar sauce?”
“Close enough,” said Vega.
“And how far away is the central region of the galaxy?” she asked. “I’m guessing we’d need to fill up the gas tank to get there,” she added, trying to inject levity as she often did when things got too real. Or, in this case, when her brain was about to melt.
“Twenty-five thousand light-years, give or take.”
Any number of questions popped into Anna’s head at once. How had these aliens gotten here? What did they want? How could they pass as human? But one question seemed most pressing of all. “How can you possibly know all this?” she asked him.
Vega took a deep breath once again. “Because I’m from that region of the galaxy as well,” he said evenly.
20
Anna gasped and gripped the car’s center console for support. Once again, this statement was utterly preposterous, but her intuition knew that it was true.
Which explained why her instincts about the being calling himself Tom Vega had been so fuzzy. Because neither her conscious nor subconscious had any experience with non-humans. And there had always been something off about him. His face a little too young and androgynous. His skin a little too perfect and hairless. He was like a well-made facsimile of a man, with perfect English and expressions, but with eyes a little too big, and mannerisms that weren’t quite right.
“I know how crazy this sounds,” continued Vega, “but I can prove it to you in multiple ways. For example, if you press hard on my stomach, you’ll feel several bony plates inside. Which humans don’t have.”
“Yeah, thanks for the anatomy lesson,” said Anna sarcastically. “I’m pretty sure I knew that. But I’m going to pass. I believe you. And I have no interest in pressing on any part of your body.”
Anna considered where to go from here. “Okay,” she said finally, “my mind is officially blown. I have too many questions to even know where to begin. So I’ll let you start at the beginning—wherever that is. Bring me up to speed in whatever way you think makes sense. I won’t be shy about asking questions.”
Vega nodded, and then paused in thought. As he did, Anna scanned the road behind them to ensure they didn’t have a tail, something she intended to do periodically no matter how engrossing the conversation might become. Not that her prolonged speeding hadn’t ruled out any followers long ago.
“I’m from a planet we call Vor,” said the alien in the passenger’s seat, “and my real name isn’t Tom Vega. Since no human can pronounce my actual name, let’s stick with that one.”
“Any other alien species here that you want to tell me about?”
“Not to my knowledge. Just a small group of Tartarians, and a small group of Vorians.”
Anna made a face. “Tartarians and Vorians?” she repeated, finding these words clumsy. She paused for a moment in thought. “How about we call them Tarts and Vors?”
Vega shrugged. “Whatever you prefer,” he replied.
“Okay, so you were saying . . .”
“There are twenty-eight known intelligent species in the galaxy,” he continued, “counting humans. But your species seems to be unique among all twenty-eight in a way that I’ll tell you about later. And you’re the only one of the twenty-eight civilizations to emerge on a planet located way out in the boonies of the galaxy.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. Earth was considered a backwater planet? Who knew?
Regardless, she was impressed by Vega’s use of the word boonies. He seemed to have a solid command of English dialect. “I didn’t know that the galaxy had a boondocks,” she said, vaguely aware of an ambulance wailing in the distance, far from the freeway.
He nodded. “The other twenty-seven known species all live at the center of the galaxy. Within a few dozen light-years of where we and the, ah . . . Tarts live.”
“Why would that be?” asked Anna. “Is there something troubling about the outskirts of the galaxy I don’t know about?”
“Not at all. It’s just that the vast majority of stars reside in the center, which means that so do the vast majority of planets. The galactic center is teeming with suns, and in many systems they are binary, meaning two stars revolve around each other. Vor is in a binary star system—really almost a trinary—and so is Tartar. But the temperatures on both planets are similar to Earth’s, since they’re much farther away from their suns than you are to Sol.”
Vega paused to let this sink in.
“On Vor,” he continued, “night is a rare occurrence. When it does happen, though, the night sky is spectacular beyond words. Thicke
r with stars than you can possibly imagine, and anything but dark. Earth’s nearest stellar neighbor is 4.3 light-years away. In my neighborhood, almost four hundred thousand stars are within this distance of us.”
Anna nodded. “Now it makes sense,” she said. “Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where all the money is.”
Vega looked confused. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m saying that you’ve made your point. I never thought about our stellar neighborhood as sparsely populated, but I guess it is. And I guess the odds of intelligence sprouting up are very low, so this makes sense. It’s like sampling a square mile on Earth looking to find a human being. Take a square mile sample around Times Square and you’re sure to find one. Take a square mile sample in the mountains of Wyoming and . . . not so much.”
“Exactly.”
Anna took a moment to imagine how glorious the night sky must be for these alien civilizations, each living on the galactic equivalent of the Las Vegas Strip. “But wouldn’t you and the Tarts find our planet awfully dim, even during the day? And find darkness terrifying?”
“Yes on both counts,” replied Vega. “Even after many years of training in these conditions, darkness is highly . . . unsettling. But both species also have technology we can have surgically implanted in our eyes to amplify light.”
“Which must be why the Tarts’ eyes glow red like they do.”
“Exactly.”
“So why don’t yours?” asked the detective.
“Our scientists worked hard over many decades to perfect a version that we could use without being detected,” said Vega. “This wasn’t nearly as important to the Tarts for reasons I’ll get to later. Mine are in constant use, even now. Especially now,” he added anxiously, glancing out at the darkness that was enveloping the road.
Anna considered. “Okay,” she said thoughtfully, “so there are twenty-eight species, and twenty-seven of them are fairly near to each other geographically, at least on a cosmic scale. So how did you find us way out here? You’ve obviously figured out how to travel faster than light.”
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