“Wow, I’m blushing, really, but I’m the only girl you know.”
He pointed at me emphatically. “That’s not true! I see girls everywhere—at the grocery store, at the library. A girl who works at the computer store asks for my phone number every time I go in. And then there’s TJ’s sister Anya, who always says hi.”
“Luther …”
“Don’t use that pitying tone.” His voice cracked. “That’s a parental tone, not a Maisie one.”
“Luther,” I said, trying to soften my tone. “Let’s pretend that didn’t just happen. Let’s say you slipped and we accidentally touched lips and it was awkward, so now we laugh about it and go back to being best friends, because that’s what we were made for.”
“That is so false, it’s alchemy. It’s phrenology. It’s terracentric theory! You aren’t wired for mathematics so you don’t understand—”
“Wait, are you trying to use math here? Have you assigned us symbols like N and Y and calculated our compatibility?”
He turned red.
“Repeat after me,” I said slowly. “Oops, I must have slipped. I didn’t mean to smoosh your lips.”
Luther looked at the ground. He turned and left.
That night I dreamed about Wilder. He was kissing me, and I wanted him to. When I woke up, I should have been logical again, but my thoughts wanted to linger on a dream moment, Wilder standing behind me, his arm around my waist, his lips against my neck …
Stop it.
I was still angry at myself for hanging onto the tattered corner of that dream when I walked into the lab. Howell was talking to a guy with dark hair and a set of shoulders and a chin that looked a lot like Wilder. But it couldn’t be.
Then he noticed me. Looked at me.
“Maisie, before you—” he started.
I leaped across the room and formed a havoc bind around his chest, pinning his arms. I turned him upside down, havocked his ankles together, his face pressed to the floor. I gripped one of his ankles, prepared to throw him against the wall.
“No, no, no!” said Howell. “That’s unnecessary. He only just got here. I sent Dragon to warn you.”
My mouth must have been hanging open. “You invited him?”
“I am officially harboring him.”
“You’re … harboring him?”
“Aiding and abetting. Such fun words.”
“Maisie,” Wilder said, breathless. I might have set his havoc binds a bit tight. “I can help. If you—”
“You recall, Howell, that he’s a murderer,” I said.
“Even without his token, there is still helpful information meshed with his gray matter.”
Wilder was making strangled sounds. I was about to break the havoc band off when I realized that he was laughing.
“Stop it.” I shook him.
“You don’t think this is a little funny?” he said.
I dropped him and walked out. It would take several hours for his binds to disintegrate. By then Dad, Luther, and I would be long gone.
Chapter 43
Dragon was by the front doors talking to the security guys.
“You promised to keep my family safe,” I said. “Our agreement is forfeit. We’ll be leaving in twenty minutes.”
“You saw Wilder.”
“I saw Wilder.” I turned away.
“Wait. Look, Howell made the call. I don’t trust Wilder, but I do trust her.”
“Why? How can you?”
“Take a stroll with me?” He opened the door, waited.
I frowned. I had no reason to trust Dragon any more than Howell. A robot wouldn’t. Yet I did.
“Please?” he said. Then he sang it in that squeaky falsetto. “Please? Oh please-o?” The security guys raised eyebrows, widened eyes, but Dragon kept singing to me.
“Shush already,” I said. “Put these guys on Wilder, make sure he doesn’t move.”
Dragon gave the order and held the door for me. He let me choose the direction and pace. The sun’s forehead rose over the horizon, glaring at us. Dragon took off his sunglasses and offered them to me.
“I’ve been working with Howell for twenty years,” he said. “I was in a boys’ home because my grandmother had passed, my parents were dead—probably—and my brother and I had caused some trouble. Howell visited me. She’d seen my test scores and psych profile and said she wanted me to work for her. I was fifteen. She got me released from the boys’ home, shipped me off to a prep school, then college, and by the time I graduated I was Howell Aerospace Chief of Operations. I’m not going to pretend she picked me out of the boys’ home because she’s a charitable angel. She doesn’t mean to do good, and yet she always does.”
“So you stay with the crazy lady because she accidentally does good sometimes?”
“That and she lets me set my own salary. I set it well.” He chuckled, and I smiled. Dragon chuckles like a baby, with a squeak at the end. “She’s a juggernaut. She misses a lot of the world around her but she also sees stuff no one else does. Big stuff, like an asteroid in orbit, and little stuff, like a smart kid in a boys’ home. And she’s going to save the world, whether she means to or not. So, yeah, I’d harbor a killer for her. I’d take a bullet for her.”
Aw, man! Dragon would take a bullet for her! Those words deflated my righteous indignation. I sighed again.
“You just drink some soda?” he asked. “We used to sigh to hide our belches from Grandma.”
So I belched. I could do that on cue now, some biological change gracias a los tokens. Dragon laughed, making me laugh too. And then suddenly the laugh turned into a cry. My chest wracked and coughed with a sob. I tensed everywhere, forcing the sobs to stop. I wiped my face and shook my head, meaning I had no idea what just happened.
But Dragon said, “Hey, you were shot into space and stuck with alien technology. Your body keeps changing in alarming ways. You watched a former friend cut off your father’s arm. Your mother is missing. You were an unwilling participant in two deaths. You’re carrying the burden of somehow defending the entire world. After all that, you shouldn’t have to see Wilder again. Ever.”
I nodded and thankfully didn’t explode into more sobs.
Dragon’s jaw muscle bulged as he bit down hard. “Know this, Maisie Brown—when the drama is over and Wilder’s usefulness is extinguished, say the word and I will kill him for you.”
I coughed a surprised kind of laugh. “I wouldn’t recommend killing in general. Devastates a good night’s sleep.”
He bent over so his face was at my level. “You see these eyes? Do you detect any laugh lines? I ain’t foolin’, girl.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “I wish … I wish I didn’t have to feel so much. I’d be better at all this.”
For my last birthday, Luther had made me a poster that read ROBOTS MAKE THE BEST SCIENTISTS, and he’d drawn a Dr. Frankenstein–esque robot building a scientist on an operating slab. It was the only thing taped up in my abandoned bedroom.
“You’re human,” said Dragon, “which is exactly what you should be.”
I took off the sunglasses and offered them back, but he lifted his hand. “Keep them. They make you look as fierce as you are.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling in better spirits than I thought I should. “Tell Howell to keep him locked up, okay?”
He pointed at me as we went back inside. “You’re going to do this, Brown. You’re going to save the world. And someday I’ll sing about it! How about that?”
Dragon moved my dad and Luther to a separate building where they had constant guards. And a large-screen TV with four hundred channels. I slept on their couch, cuddling with Laelaps, and kept the television buzzing all night to drown out the irritating reminder of the Purpose. The nagging was so raw and urgent, there were whole minutes when I forgot about Mom.
Dad was still asleep early the next morning when Luther shuffled out of his bedroom. He stopped when he saw me awake on the couch, and his cheeks and ears turned
red. It was the first time we’d made eye contact since our lip-smooshing fiasco.
“Hey,” I squeaked.
Luther looked away. He went into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. I slipped outside before he emerged.
Sunlight was already drinking up dew. I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the east. The sting of heat turned everything orange and gold. The breeze smelled of warm soil and sweet grass. Another day when maybe we would find Mom. Another day when aliens might invade. How had this become my life?
I made my way to the lab for breakfast and a workout. Since getting the shooter token, I preferred to go without Lady unless I was building. It’d also become habit to run my left hand along a wall as I walked, my body pulling in spare electrons. I believed that the shooter token acted as a kind of electron battery, storing those gathered electrons. When it was full, the tightness and crackling in my chest became uncomfortable. I’d relieve it by expelling some electrons down the nerves of my arm, where they burst warm from my fingers. As satisfying as scratching an itch—and harmless, if I wasn’t holding anything.
I was about to shoot off some electrons when I heard a pounding in the cafeteria. Wilder was alone with a couple dozen soccer balls, kicking them at the mended wall Ruth had once run through. The neck of his shirt was dark with sweat, his face glistening.
“You’re not locked up,” I said.
He didn’t stop kicking. “I was. I picked the lock after your bands disintegrated. So, are you going to kill me?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
He turned to me, his arms out, inviting. “Go ahead. I’m gutted anyway.”
The thought of losing my own tokens was terrifying. Feeling even a speck of empathy for this deliberate murderer made me uncomfortable. I started to leave.
“You cut your hair,” he said, tilting his head.
I’d been wearing a havoc helmet at our warehouse meeting. I fingered the ragged ends at my neck, then dropped my hand.
“Jacques did.”
“Oh. Right.” He nudged a ball onto his toes and kicked it up into his hands. “I do have some help to offer. If you’re not going to kill me immediately, that is.”
“You’d better,” I said. “I won’t let Howell keep you around just so I can admire your calves.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You admire my calves?”
Why had I said that? One of the soccer balls lay near my feet. I picked it up and blue shot it past Wilder. It zipped by near his head, its wind lifting his hair, and smacked against the wall. It hissed air and plopped to the floor. Wilder visibly swallowed.
“Let me show you one thing,” he said, his voice dry.
I started to shake my head no, but the Purpose nagged.
I followed Wilder into Howell’s office. He nudged her away from her computer, opened an Internet news site, and played the video that we’d watched back in the lair. A man in a black suit acting crazy outside a state capitol. He has a gun. A police officer shoots. The man falls.
Only this time, I saw something new. When the man hits the ground, a blurry, pinkish form rises out of him. The newscaster describing the scene, the headline, the text underneath—nothing acknowledges the pink shape that exits the man’s body.
“I don’t see it anymore,” Wilder said. “Only the thinker can.”
I stood up fast, knocking my chair over. “They’re here. Holy crap, they’re already here.”
Chapter 44
“They’re here?” said Howell. “As in, them?”
“As in, run away screaming—aah, aah, aah,” I confirmed. “But … but if they’re here, why isn’t Earth a smoldering black heap?”
“Black heap?” Wilder hadn’t seen the alien video.
“I didn’t give you permission to ask questions.”
I played the video again. Like a lion’s DNA spells out gazelle = food, my nanite-tinged cells were screaming, Hunt that thing!
Was the pink stuff an alien? Had it been inside the man’s body? I’d assumed the blackened planet meant the aliens had some frightening weapon that would zap life from Earth at the first opportunity. But perhaps the blackness was metaphorical, and the aliens had more subtle means of destruction.
“Their ship may be orbiting Earth right now,” I said to Howell. “Sending ghostmen down into people.”
“An invisible invasion,” she said.
I’d been toying with the idea of a laser mounted to Big Barda to shoot the spacecraft before it got to Earth, but whenever I’d tried to design it in earnest, a jet pack had felt more urgent. Maybe because the subconscious data from the thinker token indicated it was too late for that tactic.
“I don’t think the Jumper Virus is really a virus,” I said slowly.
Wilder raised his hand a little. I sighed.
“Yes?” I said.
“People assume its name came from the virus’s ability to infect one town but jump over others, spreading randomly. But originally ‘jumper’ referred to the first discovery of the virus in a village in Argentina. A visitor from Buenos Aires found the entire village except the very young and very old converged on a cliff, taking turns jumping off and employing an old parachute at the last moment. Over and over.”
“And you know this because …”
“I hacked into the CDC director’s computer. Back when I did that sort of thing.”
“Are they aliens that look like humans or humans who are infected with aliens? And why would they leap off cliffs?”
“I don’t know. That was the first quarantined town. Last I checked, there were over three hundred and fifty towns worldwide. One is just a couple of hours away by helicopter.”
He looked at me expectantly. It made sense to bring him, if only so I could be sure he was nowhere near my dad.
I put on my improved impact boots, and we ran to the helipad with Howell.
“You don’t need to come,” I told Howell. “I can figure out how to fly a helicopter. Besides, if it gets sketchy—”
“I’m not leaving you now,” she said. “This is all very exciting!”
“Don’t talk more than you have to,” I told Wilder as we climbed in. “I can’t guarantee I won’t toss you out the window.” I would not allow him to manipulate his way into my affections. I didn’t trust myself. Wilder’s words had always been evil-wizard dangerous.
Using short sentences, Wilder directed Howell to a small town west of HAL. Then he was quiet for the rest of the two-hour flight.
“Hey, does Ruth’s family know what happened?” I asked Howell over the headset.
“That she died in a regrettable scuba accident? Yes, and they were properly distressed and are suing me for negligence. I’ll pay them a hefty sum to settle out of court and close down the astronaut boot camp in a show of humble liability.”
“Wow, how noble of you,” I said. “Jacques and Mi-sun—”
“I’ve offered their families condolence money as well, but none of that matters, Miss Brown. You saw what is coming. We’re talking about the destruction of our entire planet. Green to black.”
I remembered Mi-sun had been plagued with dreams of “pink floaty things.” Had her nanites tried to upload data about the ghost-men into her brain? Perhaps if the tokens worked right in humans, the fireteam would have known about them from the beginning.
Howell landed the helicopter on a street near the edge of town. A barricade across the road said QUARANTINE.
“Fly off if anything happens,” I told Howell.
Wilder sat in back. He smiled at me—a sweet, friendly, go-get’em smile. I havocked his wrists and ankles together.
“Come on,” he said.
“Shut it or I do your mouth too,” I said.
“Promise?” he said, almost as if he couldn’t help himself.
I havocked his mouth.
Beside the barricade were us GOVERNMENT–branded crates, empty now. Food and supplies dropped for the quarantined town, I guessed. I walked farther in.
Flies twitched o
ver rancid piles of garbage in the gutters, front doors hung open. Dogs trotted around, sniffing the ground. One sat curled up around a bone, gnawing at its old meat. The bone looked a great deal like a human femur.
The dog with a bone growled when another got too close. The second trotted off with purpose. I followed. The sound of flies grew louder—an angry, mobbish buzzing. The gate to a backyard was broken off. I followed the dog through.
There were at least a dozen bodies. Small and large. Clothes eaten by weather and insects. I gasped, the smell struck the back of my throat, and I turned and stumbled off. The way the bodies lay in the dirt reminded me of laundry flung on the floor. Heaped together, cast aside.
I saw no one living till I passed a park where four adults occupied the swings, leaning back as they pumped as high as the chains would allow. I stood staring.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said a voice behind me.
A white man stood behind the screen door of a house. His face was as wrinkled as a fingerprint, his hair thin, white wisps.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“Viral epidemic. That’s what the government says. Overnight people changed. It passed over all us old folk and the youngest ones, but everyone else—”
“They changed how?” I asked.
“Just weren’t themselves anymore. Virus eats your brains, I guess. We got quarantined. But the old couldn’t take care of the babies by themselves for long, so they picked up the little ones and left.”
“You stayed,” I said.
“My daughter’s here. My grandson too, even if they don’t come home anymore.” He cried without noise, his eyes seeping water, making tiny rivers of his wrinkles. “But they might get better any day now. Are things out there still normal?” He stumbled over the last word, as if he hardly knew what it meant.
“Normalish. Why don’t you come with me? I have a helicopter—”
He took a step back. “I’ll be here when they get better. I see them when I go to the diner to get my meals. They know me still, I can tell, but they don’t talk to me. You should go. In the beginning doctors came into town in those yellow germ suits, but they got infected anyhow.”