Dark Energy

  “Okay,” I said, and plopped down in the front seat. The backseat shuffled again. “If you’ve got my back, I’m going to open her up and see what she’ll do.”

  “I’ve got your back,” the cop said. “Be safe.”

  Come on, 445 horses, don’t fail me now. I wanted to show off Bluebell’s zero-to-sixty power, but a momentary flash of compassion kicked in and I decided not to spray the cop with gravel.

  I looked in the rearview for oncoming vehicles and, seeing none, pulled off the shoulder and onto the pavement. Then I punched it. The engine purred deliciously as it guzzled fuel and rocketed forward. In five seconds we were going sixty. In thirteen seconds we’d gone a quarter mile. There was a limiter on the car that topped out the speed at one fifty-five. I’d never hit that before, but I intended to try.

  As I drove I kept my hands at ten and two, just like I’d been taught in driver’s ed—no point getting sloppy now. But I kept having the urge to look through the sunroof, just to see if we were being followed by a spaceship.

  They couldn’t be scanning all communications everywhere, could they? They probably only found us the first time because they knew Brynne shared a room with Coya so they were targeting her phone. Or maybe they’d been targeting my car because they knew I shared a room with Coya, too. But none of that meant they were checking the police radios.

  I had to keep telling myself that to stop from hyperventilating. There was nothing especially safe about Grandma’s house. There was nothing at Grandma’s house. The only safety came from being off the map. We had to get back off the map. Once we hit New Mexico, I’d slow to the speed limit. No more possible slipups.

  I handed my phone and memory card back to Kurt. “Call my dad. Tell him where we are and ask him to get some air cover.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked, putting the phone back together. “I’m calling to order fighter planes?” He found the number and dialed. “Next time we go on a date, you’re planning it.”

  I glanced over at Suski. He was gripping the door handle tightly. He looked almost normal in his sweatshirt and cap—like any other high school boy.

  I focused on the road and listened to Kurt relay the message to my dad. In a minute he hung up.

  “Why are you doing this?” Suski asked, his voice quiet even though the translator spoke at the same volume all the time.

  “Driving fast? Because I’m trying to get the hell out of Colorado.”

  “No,” he said. “Why are you helping us? You could have left it for the guards at the school to protect us. Or the military.”

  Good questions. Stupid questions. Or maybe good questions and stupid answers.

  “Because I like you guys,” I said, and it sounded lame. “From the day you first arrived, I’ve felt a kinship with you. Maybe it’s because we’re both different, or maybe it’s because we’re both new.”

  “I don’t know ‘kinship,’” he said.

  “It means you feel like family. Maybe you don’t know family either. It means you feel like my brother and sister.”

  What was I doing? Focus on the road, Goodwin.

  “Brother and sister,” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. “No.”

  “What do you mean by ‘yes no’?”

  “I mean that I’m driving,” I said. “I need to concentrate on driving.”

  We crossed into New Mexico, and I immediately slowed the car down to what felt like a snail’s pace. We were still on the interstate, and a Colorado state trooper waved at us as we passed him at the border.

  There was no fast way to get to my grandma’s house. That was one of the problems with living on the reservation—the roads were few and far between, and the roads that I was willing to take Bluebell on were even fewer. The fastest route would be to go south through Santa Fe, but the quicker we could get off main highways, the better. So we turned west after Raton and headed into the mountains. The thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit through twists and turns of forested roads seemed harder to maintain than the blistering pace we’d been traveling at for the last day.

  I glanced over at Suski and laughed a little to myself.

  “What?”

  “You’re a little green man,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what we always thought aliens would look like,” I said. “Little green men.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  Brynne spoke up. “She means you look sick. Drink more Mountain Dew. It’ll settle your stomach.”

  “Is that true?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brynne said with a simple shrug. “I’ve heard that before—that carbonation settles your stomach.”

  “No one is allowed to puke in my car,” I said. “And, Brynne, aren’t you supposed to be a doctor or something?”

  “I’m seventeen,” she said. “Don’t trust me.”

  We stopped for gas again in a little resort town called Eagle Nest. It was amazing how much warmer it was here than in Minnesota. We were in the mountains, but it was easily in the fifties, if not pushing sixty. I decided that I was going to find a new boarding school somewhere in New Mexico.

  After filling up, I went in the store and tried to snoop, wondering if anyone would recognize Bluebell from any descriptions on the news or police scanners. There was nothing in the flimsy local paper, but it didn’t publish every day. I struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter—just idle chat about the weather and the big lake that was across the valley. She seemed disinterested, which was what I wanted. Disinterest. Boredom. No panic or curiosity. As far as she could tell, we were just a bunch of regular teenagers on a regular road trip.

  Finally, I asked her specifically if she’d heard anything about the aliens, and she said that someone else had come in and told her that four fighter jets from Kirtland Air Force Base had shot down an alien ship in Colorado just a couple hours ago. She didn’t have more details than that, but that was enough for me. For now, at least.

  I bought Suski a baseball cap for Philmont Scout Ranch and an Eagle Nest T-shirt. He switched it in the parking lot, and I tried not to lose all feeling in my extremities when I saw his abs as I stuffed the Sioux Falls gear into the trunk. I explained what the writing on his new clothes meant and then we got back into the car.

  It was stupid. I knew that the Masters knew we’d been in Sioux Falls, so I wanted to hide anything that said Sioux Falls. They wouldn’t be trying to identify Suski by the writing on his hat, but still, it was something I could do, and I wanted to do everything I could, no matter how small.

  The next city we drove through was Taos, but the highway didn’t take us near Taos Pueblo—probably the most famous pueblo in the world. It was gorgeous and had been photographed and painted and drawn by every artist who had passed through here for a hundred fifty years. I told Coya and Suski about it, though. “It’s like your ship, kind of. It’s a place where people have lived in the same buildings for a long time—I don’t know how long, but I want to say it’s something like a thousand years.”

  “I still have trouble understanding years,” Coya said.

  “You’re somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old,” I said to her. “I’m guessing. So imagine a building that’s been there for a thousand years—Rachel, how many lifetimes is that?”

  “Fifty or sixty,” she said, almost without thinking.

  “We don’t know how long we were on the ship,” Suski said. “It may be longer than that. Or less. There are stories of a time we didn’t live on the ship. My father told them to me. Times when my people were happy.”

  “You’ll be happy again,” I said.

  “Not with the Masters here. No one will be happy again.”

  “What if there aren’t many Masters here?” I asked. “What if it’s only a couple of ships? What if they’re scouts? We’ve been able to successfully fight them off—the National Guard killed two of the shi
ps just at the school. And a few more have been successfully shot down, one at the White House, and another one at the tent city. So, scouting ships.”

  Suski pointed to the Boy Scout logo on his hat, which I’d just spent five minutes explaining to him.

  “No,” I said with a laugh. “Not like that. I mean, what if they were sent ahead to find out what happened to all of you.”

  “Then the others will follow.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “This has never happened before. You’ve never been off the ship.”

  “They need us,” Coya said. “For breeding. They need bodies to host the parasite.”

  Kurt spoke up. “That doesn’t seem to be their mission. They’re out for revenge. That little ship they have can’t abduct many humans—it’s too small.”

  “Then others will follow,” Suski said again. He seemed so certain of it. But he had lived a life of fear and slavery—of course he’d be certain of it. It would be impossible to believe a world where these monsters didn’t control everything. It made me wonder if he always knew they’d be followed. Maybe that was why he never smiled.

  I refused to believe it. Maybe their reality was like that, but my reality was that the good guys won and the bad guys lost. Maybe the bad guys did some really horrible stuff first, but the good guys fixed it. Was I naive? Probably. Almost certainly. But I didn’t care. The good guys were going to win this time.

  Eff you, Masters.

  New Mexico was the Land of Enchantment. What I loved about it was that the nickname didn’t refer to enchanting beauty or enchanting charms. It referred to real enchantment, like magic. There were twenty-three Native American tribes in New Mexico, and I’d been to many of their dances and feast days—especially when I was little and my mom was still alive. And there was something otherworldly about the state, something that made you wonder if it wasn’t like any other place on Earth—if it was connected to something deeper. The people here lived simpler lives—my dad’s parents often called the reservation a Third World country because so many people didn’t have electricity or running water. To me it was peaceful, quiet, and—dare I say—spiritual. My grandmother’s reservation was like a little string attached to my heart that never untied, that never let me forget that part of my heritage lived off the land.

  I have always felt totally at home in the barrenness of New Mexico, despite the fact that I lived my whole life in lush, green Florida. There’s something about sitting outside in the shade of a juniper, watching a stinkbug waddle across dry desert sand, while the buffeting wind is blowing through the sage behind you and the salt grass in front of you, and the horizon stretches out into the distance to some far-off monuments of sandstone. It makes you feel human.

  There was more to New Mexico than that, of course. There was the food, which, next to seafood, was my favorite food on Earth. Green chile and mutton stew—I know that sounds gross, but that’s because you’ve never been sick in a hogan, a traditional Navajo house, and had your grandma cook you a pot of stew while you lay on a stack of blankets.

  And, yes, it’s chile with an e. I don’t know why that bothers so many people, but it’s how it’s spelled. Look it up.

  We made a final pit stop at a grocery store in Cuba, New Mexico, just before entering the reservation. It was dinnertime, and we were all hungry—even Suski. After picking up a week’s worth of groceries—mostly as a payment to my grandma for the surprise visit—we bought some fried chicken and potatoes at the deli. We sat at the picnic table outside the store and ate, mostly in silence. We were all exhausted and sore from almost a full twenty-four-hour drive.

  “What if they’re tracing our credit cards?” Rachel asked, chewing slowly.

  “I thought about that, too,” Kurt said. “But then why wouldn’t they have found us by now? Just follow the gas receipts and look for a BMW. It’s not like that car blends in.”

  “Maybe they’re waiting till dark,” Brynne said. “I mean, they attacked the Governor’s Residence during the night. Sioux Falls, too. Maybe they like to be in the dark.”

  “This is the last place we’ll use the credit cards,” I said. “And we’ve probably got another seventy miles to Grandma’s house. We’ll do our best to hide the car when we get there.” I thought of the shade houses that Grandma used to build during the summer, with canopies made of juniper boughs. We could do something like that to hide Bluebell. She’d probably get scratched, but that was better than the alternative.

  Which meant, of course, that I was terrified. If I was willing to scratch my baby with pine needles, I had to be going out of my freaking mind.

  I looked across the table at Kurt, who looked back at me and smiled through a full mouth. There was the tiniest wink—an indication that he knew I was having a rough time and he wanted to comfort me. He couldn’t hold my hand right now, but he could wink.

  I winked back.

  Rachel held a newspaper and read while the rest of us ate.

  “There was another attack,” she said, finishing chewing a potato and swallowing it.

  She suddenly had all our attention, as though a car hit its brakes and squealed to a stop.

  “The Utah Data Center,” she said. “They have video—I bet it’s all over TV.”

  “What’s the Utah Data Center?” Kurt asked, a half second before the rest of us asked it.

  “National Security Agency,” Rachel answered. “Remember when there was that big scandal about how the NSA was listening in on everyone’s phone calls?”

  Coya looked at me. “NSA is not NASA?”

  “No. NASA deals with outer space. NSA deals with communication.”

  “So what happened?” Brynne asked.

  “The Masters shot up the place,” Rachel said, and then looked at Coya and Suski. “Three ships, small ones. They demanded records about you two. The place went into lockdown. One thing can be said in the NSA’s favor: they have cameras everywhere. So, when they couldn’t get what they wanted, they left, but they gave us a really good look at their ships. It’s the same kind that hit the Governor’s Residence and included the same aliens—they’ve identified four.”

  “Four ships?” Kurt said.

  “They’ve got to be scouts,” I said. “Or they’re just here to get revenge. Those ships are too small to abduct more than a dozen people.”

  “A missile put a hole in one,” Brynne said, reading over Rachel’s shoulder. “It was bombing the tent city. It was also identified as one of the ships that hit the NSA.”

  “Well,” Kurt said, “this store has security cameras, and it looks like the Masters are trying to read our mail. I vote we get out of here.”

  We all took a bathroom break and I warned them that it was the last time they’d have running water for . . . I didn’t know. How long were we going to be hiding out here? Until my dad came to get us—that’s what he had said.

  Back in the car, I turned on the radio, scanning through AM radio stations until I found one that came in clearly. We listened as we drove out west onto the reservation, gleaning what news we could. There hadn’t been any attacks on the tent city today, but the air force had the skies over Lakeville filled with aircraft. While we’d been driving away from Minnesota, antiair missiles had been driven to Minnesota, and they were being set up all around the site. No one had seen any sign of the Masters’ spaceships since Utah.

  None of that filled me with confidence. They had to be somewhere. They couldn’t have just fallen off the edge of the world. I mean, yes, that was exactly what a spaceship could do, but why? Why make threats and then disappear?

  “They’re not as powerful as they want us to believe,” Brynne said, suddenly outraged. She was sitting on Suski’s lap in the front seat (and probably loving every minute of it). “Maybe that’s the whole reason they’re hiding—they’re in little ships that can get shot down. Maybe they know they’ll lose if they try to attack the crash site.”

  “They are very strong,” Suski said.

  Bryn
ne spoke. “You’ve only seen them being very strong—you haven’t seen their spaceships. Rachel, what is the deal with our spaceships? They say that parts of them are as thin as tinfoil?”

  “Right,” Rachel said. “The one space shuttle crashed just because a piece of foam hit the shielding. And the other blew up because an O-ring got too cold.”

  “So I’m saying: what if their spaceships aren’t very strong?” Brynne said.

  “But in the news,” I said, “they said one of them got hit by some kind of rocket, and they just took off and flew away.”

  “But maybe they’re damaged,” Kurt said, getting excited now. “Remember: they started with six ships—that we know about—and it sounds like they’re down to only one.”

  Coya held her hands up. “You’re all forgetting. We know these monsters. They are very strong. If they find us, we will die. There are not enough of us.”

  The car was silent for a long moment. I tried to guess how many aliens we were actually talking about—we saw two for sure. But maybe they’d left another in the ship? A pilot? And there had been some fighting taking place off camera. So were there four of them? There really could be as many as they could cram into that ship, but betting on at least four seemed reasonable.

  “Guys,” I said, letting out a long breath. “I’m sorry I brought you this way. We should have gone to the crash site. We’d be safer there.”

  “No,” Suski said. “You are a good leader.”

  “No,” I said. “I asked for you to come with me because I thought it would be better, safer. I thought I could protect you better than the FBI could. It’s not working out that way.”

  “I think you’re a remarkable person, Alice Goodwin,” he said. “I don’t think many humans would do what you have done. I don’t think many of my people would do what you have done.”

  “They would have done something better, that didn’t get us caught.”

  “No,” he said. “You have done a good thing.”

  I took a deep breath and then let out a long sigh. “I don’t know what the good thing is anymore. I’m scared.”