Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (17 page)

“Shut up,” he says.

I smile. He’s so easy to upset. I realize how much I’ve missed upsetting him.

“They say it’s like going to sleep,” I continue, “but who goes to sleep that way? Being slowly strangled by water.”

“You should have just left me back there,” he says. “The torture was nothing compared to this.”

“I missed you, too,” I say.

“Right.”

“And I thought about it,” I say. “I thought about leaving you there.”

I can see his smile in the moonlight. “No, you didn’t.”

Catlin is still working on Zack, but I tell her we have to go. We pile into the ship, and Catlin flies up the river. We rise into the night sky, flying higher than the aliens like to. I’m sure the Hunter knows by now that the ship he’s been following (or has destroyed) doesn’t have anyone in it, but Dallas is north and we’re traveling west; we’ve got a good head start. But just to add whatever help I can, I try cloaking us.

I don’t have the ability Catlin and I have together, but I can still make it harder for them to find us. I make us a shadow in the night sky.

After everything that’s happened, it’s still the same night as it was when we left Taos. The sky above us still has all those stars dotting it, all those points of light. It seems kind of silly now to think we ever believed we were the only beings in the universe.

After ten or fifteen minutes, Catlin sets the ship course for Taos and then gets back to working on Zack. He still doesn’t wake up, but at least he seems a little more stable, a little more comfortable, than he was.

Then Catlin turns her attention to Michael, who puts up a weak protest but quickly lets her do her healer thing. He’s pretty beat up, and I know I can’t even see the worst of it. I’m sure Michael didn’t give his memories up easily.

I can see some of those memories as Catlin works on him. He remembers being killed, then waking and realizing he wasn’t killed. He remembers Lindsey dying. He remembers me and Catlin and Lauren and some of our days as slaves. He doesn’t remember escaping, though. And he can’t remember whole sections of his life before he was a slave, either. All of that is gone.

He remembers the Hunter questioning him, getting inside him.

“He was too strong for me to keep out,” Michael says. “But I couldn’t tell him what he really wanted to know, which was where you’d gone.”

His expression darkens, and he starts asking us where his mother’s gone. His mother? I’m confused, and then I realize he’s the one who’s confused. He knows he should know this. He can’t remember. He gets agitated, and he struggles to get up, rocking the ship.

Catlin does something that calms him. She sends me a message asking me to put him to sleep. I touch his brow. He slumps in his chair.

“What just happened?” I ask.

“When they ‘borrowed’ his memories, they weren’t careful about returning them. They did some damage.”

“But you can fix him, right?”

“Maybe,” she says. “I have to see how extensive the damage is.”

“And Zack?”

“I don’t know,” she says again. “We’ll see when we get back. Maybe with Running Bird’s help . . .”

Her attention fractures, and at first I think it’s because she’s upset about Zack, but then I feel it, too — what’s taken her attention — headed right toward us. We weren’t being careful enough. And now it’s too late.

I tell Catlin to go higher and see if we can get above the ship, but she says it’s no use. They’ve already locked onto us.

I swear (sorry, Mom) and try to join with Catlin to create a shield. But a voice interrupts us. I expect it to say,
We’re sorry for your loss.
Instead it says,
You’re in big trouble, Chosen One. Land your frickin’ ship.

We land, and the other ship lands, and Sam rushes over. She tells us we’re idiots. She lists our shortcomings: stupid, selfish, reckless, foolish — and did she mention selfish?

Catlin interrupts the lecture to say that we need to get back to camp ASAP. “Zack is with us, and he’s hurt, and we still have a long flight home.”

But Sam says that Zack will have to wait. She says Catlin can work on him in the ship, but we’re going to complete the mission. She didn’t come all this way for nothing.

Catlin looks panicked. I’m not sure whether it’s because of Zack or because she really, really doesn’t want to head back to Lord Vertenomous’s.
Again.

“I can fly Zack and Michael back,” she says. “You and Jesse can take your ship and go to Austin.”

“No way,” Sam says. “We need your ship, and we need you in case something happens.”

“Why is it so important now?”

“You stirred them up, right? You had to fight to get your boy out.”

“Yeah.”

“They’ll be on alert everywhere after tonight, but they won’t expect us now. We need to build on what you did. We need to get their attention, let them know this invasion isn’t over with yet, make them think twice. You two made a choice. Now I’m making one.”

I think again about the man at the circus who may have been more than a man and his talk about choices. Could he have meant my choice to save Michael would cause Zack’s death? But he said the beginning or end of choices. This isn’t that. There’s something up ahead (though Running Bird would say it’s behind and beside at the same time) that will be a difficult and probably terrible choice.
Great,
I think,
another thing to worry about.

Catlin isn’t happy about going back, but it’s pretty clear Sam is determined, so she walks back to the ship to try to make Zack as comfortable as possible. Michael steps out of the ship at the same time and stretches. I’m relieved to see him awake.

“What’s the holdup?” he asks, eyeing Sam.

“This your friend?” Sam asks. “The one you risked all of New America for?”

“That’s him,” I say.

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“I grow on you,” Michael says, an old, familiar grin splitting his face.

“Okay, Jesse’s friend, come on, then. The least you can do is die for your new country. We’re going to blow up some alien ships now.”

“Awesome,” Michael says.

“We’ll see,” she says.

“I always liked the Fourth of July,” Michael says.

Am I seeing right? Is Sam actually smiling at Michael?

“It’s not the Fourth of July,” I say.

“Could be for all we know,” Michael says, still smiling at Sam.

“Nope.” I pull Betty’s calendar out of my pocket. “It’s not even the right month.” I show them the marked-off days.

They both look at me like I’ve just spoken in tongues or something.

“You kept that?” Michael says. I can tell he remembers the day I got it. I wish for his sake that that was one of the memories the Hunter hadn’t given back.

“That’s strange,” Sam says, looking at me through narrowed eyes.

“What?”

“One of the names for the Warrior is the Keeper of Days.”

“It’s just a homemade calendar,” I say. “Besides, it was somebody else’s before it was mine.”

“Still,” she says. “Strange coincidence.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“There are too many coincidences when you’re around,” she says. “Now, let’s go blow some things up.”

Sam has Michael fly with her. I fly with Catlin. We fly in a tight formation, side by side. Catlin tries to instruct me on how to help Zack sleep and fight the injury. I’m clumsy, but I do my best.

When we get close to Austin, Michael sends a message that Sam is worried about us being seen. He asks if Catlin and I can cloak. We cloak our ship and theirs.

I can hear Sam thinking,
This is unbelievable.
But there it is again. The unbelievable is just one step from the believable.

My boy can’t run worth a damn, but he’s good at the alien stuff,
Michael mindspeaks.

I run better than you can swim,
I respond.

How do you do it?
Sam mindspeaks.

They’re like the ultimate power couple,
Michael mindspeaks.

We aren’t a couple,
Catlin and I mindspeak together.

We land a few blocks away from the ships. Catlin and I stay joined and keep a cloak over us. The lot doesn’t appear to be guarded. Everyone except Zack piles out of the ships.

We don’t have any problem setting up the explosives. It becomes clear pretty fast that no one is guarding the ships. Who would attack them? The aliens are already back inside the palace, asleep.

We’re safely back in our ships and hovering well above the parking lot when Sam detonates the explosives. They fire in a chain reaction, just like out of a movie. It’s pretty awesome — lots of noise and fire and smoke. I keep expecting something bad to happen, the aliens to surround us or something, but this time everything is perfect. And it really is almost like the Fourth of July.

I fly back with Catlin, and we join and make a strong shield. It isn’t long before we’re out in the empty land of West Texas. The enormous night is all around us. Then Michael starts to snore. I swear I can hear it all the way from inside the other ship. The old snorer guy back in New America will have an ally in his “Give me the right to snore or give me death!” campaign.

A few hours later, we reach the mountains. The sky is lightening, and the landscape is starting to take shape. By the time the sun shows itself, a bright orange orb rising in the east, we’re passing over the adobe buildings of downtown Taos and the empty, narrow streets. We follow the windy highway up into the mountains toward the barn where we park the ships. Our whole trip has taken one night.

I look over at Catlin, exhausted from flying the ship and healing Michael and Zack and the battle at Lord Vertenomous’s palace. She’s done the most, pulled the most weight tonight. A lot more than me. Her hair has a definite lake-water fashion that I doubt will catch on but somehow makes her more beautiful. And what I think as I look at her is that I want to take away some of her burdens. To make things easier for her.

“He scares me,” she says. “Darth Vader. He’s as strong as Lord Vertenomous. We were lucky to get away from him. I’m afraid we won’t be that lucky again.”

“If we can get away from him once, we can do it again,” I say. Sometimes you just have to say things you don’t believe. I’ve learned that much.

“How’d you know how to do all that — make the decoys, I mean?”

“We did it together.”

She shakes her head. “I followed what you did. I couldn’t do it until I saw you do it.”

I shrug. “It felt like both of us.”

“You taught me. And something else happened, something before we joined, before you reached out for me.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I felt you do something or change in some way.”

I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about, mostly because I don’t understand it myself and I don’t want to tell her about it and watch her expression get somber like she’s adding this new talent to a list she’s making. Did I really step ahead and back in time? Did I really see many possible futures? I couldn’t. It’s not something a human can do, even a talented human. But maybe a Warrior Spirit can. I can’t pretend nothing is happening. Either I’m really going crazy (a definite possibility) or something beyond me took me to a place beyond me.

We take two cars up the mountain. I drive an old Oldsmobile, big as a tank. Michael rides shotgun, and Catlin falls asleep almost immediately in the back next to Zack. Sam’s behind us in her truck. We follow the stream. It rushes down the mountain like it knows where it’s going and is in a hurry to get there. Its energy makes me more tired. I can hardly keep my eyes open. Finally, we get to the ski lodge.

I park the car, and Sam pulls her truck up behind me. We all make the weary climb up the trail. I carry Zack part of the way, but Sam takes over after a while. She won’t let Michael carry him, though he offers.

Michael asks questions about the rebels and the camp. He’s surprised when he learns there have been those with talents all along and that Catlin is one of them.

“I did know there was something different about you, girl. I knew that much.”

Zelda is in the big tent when we arrive. She comes running when she sees Sam carrying Zack.

“What have you done to him?” she shouts at me.