The 17 (14 page)

“What are you staring at?” she whispered.

“Um,” Zack said, looking straight ahead again. “Nothing.”

Finally, the click-clacking stopped.

“We have not decided. What would you have us do with them?”

“They’re not what you are looking for?”

“No.”

“Send them home.”

“We will take that under advisement, Zack. Mizuki will take you to your proper quarters.”

Mizuki waved her hand for Zack to follow and he did, walking closely behind her. As he was about to leave the chamber, he glanced over his shoulder at the shadows. They were gone.

Mizuki said nothing as they again snaked through drab corridors, until they reached a large set of double doors. She stopped, turned, and smiled. “Be prepared to be amazed.”

She swung the doors open and warm light bathed him. The hallway was long and the floor checker-board in pattern. Large chandeliers hung from the high ceilings and tables with antique sculptures lined the walls.

Mizuki tapped Zack on the shoulder, breaking his trance. “I’ll show you to your room.”

Zack followed her, walking past paintings that hung on the wall, past old opened books that rested on marble lecterns, and past doors that he counted silently. The sum reached seventeen as they stopped in front of a door that was slightly ajar. “This is it.”

Zack slowly pushed the door open. It was just like his room back in Maine, right down to the Star Trek pillowcases.

“They want us to be comfortable. It was a little weird at first, but I got used to it. The familiarity helps, you know.” Mizuki patted him on the shoulder and walked away.

Zack was too stunned to stop her.

He entered the room and closed the door behind him. He walked to the window and opened it, feeling that crisp Northeast breeze smack him in the face. The air smelled just like home. He sat on the bed, rubbed his hand over the soft comforter, and then laid on it. It smelled like the dryer sheets his mother used.

For a moment, maybe just a jiffy, Zack felt content. Then, the realization hit: This was no more real than his faux trip home.

He was being placated and manipulated, made to feel special and wanted. In a way, that was true. The aliens certainly did want and need him. Zack, though, wasn’t so sure he could trust them.

They had brought Jenai back, only to take her away. They had tricked and fooled him at every turn. They had tortured him in battles. They had injured him in almost every way.

How, then, can I trust them? How, then, can I help them?

That was a question to be answered at another time, Zack concluded. Now, he simply needed sleep.

Part II

Chapter One

Stanger in a Strange Land

A shaft of sunlight slanted through the window and across Zack’s eyes as he blinked them open.

It was morning, but it didn’t come with the usual sounds.
It never came with the usual sounds here.
That was just another reminder he was simply an animal in an elaborate cage.

He wondered if there was a nameplate on his door that read
Homo sapien boy.

He thought it wise not to look.

It also occurred to Zack how much a place was in its noises. Without the familiar ones, the barking of dogs, the laughter of children playing, the revving of a car engine, it all just seemed amiss. He even longed to hear his mother’s abrasive bellows from downstairs to inform him his eggs were ready.

He rolled out of bed, still wearing his favorite jeans and YOLO T-shirt, and flung himself through the door into the hallway.

He had some exploring to do.

He walked the long corridor and stopped at the books perched on lecterns. He leafed through its pages, written in long-dead languages he could not comprehend and scrawled in letters and symbols so foreign to him they could just have well been ink blots scattered at random on the thick, ancient pulp.

The only symbol the books had in common was an ankh.

It seemed that was all anyone here had in common.

He turned his examinations to the sculptures, which were of entities of various biological forms. Some looked very much human, while others had heads, eyes and limbs of disparate amounts. Some were just blobs, but he could tell all were based on a life that had a soul.

Perhaps this was a shrine to all they had captured. Perhaps this was an ode to all who had come before Zack. Either way, it was spooky.

As he reached the end of the long corridor, his exploration at an end, Mizuki emerged from another room, quickly shut the door behind her and stared at Zack.

Zack cocked his head and gave her and inquisitive look. “What … are you?”

Mizuki rolled her eyes and muttered “mercy of the Gods” before she glowered and said, “Well, what are
you
?”

“Human.”

She rolled her eyes again. “I know that. Jeez. So gullible.”

Mizuki began to walk away and Zack scrambled to catch up to her. “Wait. I have a million questions.”

Mizuki maintained her brisk walk. “I only have time for about two. The other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight will have to wait.”

She didn’t seem like an enlightened being to Zack. She seemed very combative. “How long have you been here?”

She stopped, twirled to face him and said, “A long time. So long I’ve lost track,” before resuming her determined amble through the steel maze again.

“Wait,” Zack pleaded. “I’m sure you had a ton of questions at first, too.”

Mizuki stopped, her shoulders slumped. “Fine. Ask away.”

“Where do you come from?”

She wheeled to face him. “A planet you have never heard of, just like I have never heard of yours. Your planet and my planet are thousands of light years apart.”

Zack was perplexed. “But you look like me, well, look human. And you speak English.”

Mizuki smiled. “There are billions and billions and billions of planets just in this galaxy alone. You don’t think life could evolve pretty close to the same way on more than one of them? And you are speaking my language.”

“Huh?”

“They’ve made it possible for you and me to understand each other. I hear you speak in my language and you hear me speak in yours.”

Zack smirked. “Like a universal translator?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever that is.”

“So, you were with my group?”

“Not for long. I couldn’t stand you. Well, not you in particular—you were the only palatable one—but the rest of your sorry lot. To tell you the truth, I’m shocked, absolutely stunned, they found a Spark out of your mess of a planet.” Mizuki patted him on the shoulder. “Look, I have stuff to do. Can you ask your questions later? Besides, they’re gonna have something for you to do soon. They always have something for us to do.”

Before Zack could ask Mizuki a very important follow-up question about the task they would have for him, the wall behind her rippled and a door appeared. She slipped through it, winked and the wall warped and rippled out of existence. Zack rubbed the smooth steel wall in amazement.

Zack had no idea what to do next, so he stood there awkwardly.

Some things never change.

Before he could slink back to his room, a humanoid man with a sunken and wan face, long gangly arms, bald head and a huge Adam’s apple walked toward him. He was wearing gray slacks and a checkered flannel shirt and he stopped a few feet away.

“Zack Earnest?” the man asked, and then smiled and chuckled. “Of course you are Zack Earnest. Who else would you be? So stupid. Please, come with me.”

The man led him into a room bathed in bright florescent light. There was a white table sitting in the middle of an uneven linoleum floor, huge cracks between the tiles. Two folding chairs were set up across from each other and in the middle of the table was a large stack of papers at least six inches tall.

The man offered him a seat and Zack reluctantly took it. The legs of the chair screeched over the warped floor as he slid closer to the table. The man sat across from him, grabbed what looked like an ordinary ink pen out of the pocket of his flannel shirt and covered his mouth as he coughed.

“These are just a few documents you need to sign, just a formality to cement your status as a Deucalion. You know. The usual boring stuff. Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

Zack’s mouth was agape. The man noticed and smiled politely. “Please. It’s just a formality.”

Zack had so many questions. He decided to start with the most pressing one. “What’s a Deucalion?”

“You don’t know? It’s from your own ancient texts. The son of Prometheus. Regenerated the human race by tossing stones—of all things—over his shoulder? I’m sure that was a metaphor. I’m sure the stones didn’t actually turn into people. But maybe they did. Must have been some sight to be there, huh? Stones turning into people. Does that ring a bell?”

“I must have missed that day in mythology class.”

“Well, the Ankhs don’t really have a lot of words in their vocabulary that can be easily translated to your planet’s many languages. This was the closest they could come to something that fit the legalese.”

“The Ankhs?”

“Yeah. The beings that brought us all here. We call them the Ankhs because they took your planet’s symbol for eternal life as sort of their logo. Weird, huh?”

“I thought they were looking for Sparks, not what did you call me? A Deucalion?”

Apparat puckered his lips, held up a boney index finger and waved it from side to side. “Don’t say ‘Sparks,’” he said in a hush. “Mizuki calls it that, but the Ankhs loathe the term. It’s impossible to reduce what they need to one word and they prefer precision at all costs.”

Zack nodded, and then asked another question. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, you can call me Apparat.”

“Where are you from?”

“Oh, a boring planet. The Ankhs brought me here eons ago. I didn’t meet their rigid criteria for their Save Our Race From Withering and Dying campaign, but they liked the organizational skills and needed someone to administrate. Awesome, huh?”

Apparat grabbed another pen out of his pocket and rolled it across the table to Zack, who caught it just before it plummeted over the edge. Apparat then snatched a paper off the stack, scribbled on it emphatically, and then pushed it across the table.

“Just initial and sign where indicated.”

Zack peered down at the paper. It was gibberish with letters and symbols and even some squiggly lines mashed together in an incomprehensible swirl.

“What is this? I can’t read any of it.”

“What?” Apparat seemed appalled. He reached his long, pale, boney fingers out for the paper and spun it back toward him. His large, sunken black eyes rolled over each line. “I can read it just fine.”

“Well, Apparat, I can’t.”

Apparat huffed. “I apologize, Zack. The guys in linguistics messed up. I’ll get this fixed. Don’t you worry. So embarrassing. So stupid.”

Apparat quickly rose from his chair and scurried toward the door. Just as he was about the push through it, he turned to Zack. “Go join Mizuki in the dining hall. You’re probably famished. I’ll get this fixed. Oh, heads will roll on this one, you can be sure.”

†††

It took Zack far too long to find the dining hall in a maze of hallways that all looked the same. On his journey there he saw several different alien races, some quite human-like, and some not at all. They all stopped to stare and gawk at him as he passed.

Finally, the smell of sizzling eggs drew him to the cafeteria, a spacious room with rows of shiny metallic tables and chairs. Mizuki was the only one seated, sipping a broth out of what looked like an old, wooden mug.

Her eyes bounced up to him and she waved him over.

“Have a seat,” she said between slurps.

As Zack sat down, a large woman with ridges over her eyebrows brought him a plate of eggs with hash browns, perfectly caramelized, and a slice of bacon. Mizuki looked at his dish with a turned up nose. “You eat that? You realize that egg came out of a chicken’s ass, right?”

“Well, if you put it that way …” Zack said as he sunk his fork into the eggs and scooped them into his mouth before he continued through a chew. “… no, still good. So, how do you know so much about my food and my species?”

“Lots and lots of study. Ugh. They wanted me to spy on you because we look alike. Kind of racist of them if you ask me.”

Zack chuckled and he shoveled another bite of eggs into his mouth. He let the eggs sit in his mouth for a few seconds before he chewed, enjoying the taste. He had to admit these were the best eggs he had ever eaten. “So, you passed their test.”

Mizuki nodded as she sipped what was left of her broth from the mug. “It took them long enough to decide. I must have died like a million times before they felt like I had died enough. I gave it to them, too, when they dragged me in front of the council.”

Zack eyed a man with scales who propped himself up against a wall and gazed blankly ahead. “I didn’t realize they used other species to work for them.”

“They’re quite the collectors, if you hadn’t already noticed. I think they collect because they can’t create anything themselves anymore. That requires a skill they have lost or something. They can only mimic.”

Zack took a bite of bacon and smiled at the splendid taste before he asked, “Ever wonder why us?”

“Lucky, I guess. I have to say, they are particularly fascinated with your planet. I think you remind them of what they used to be like when they weren’t so stodgy. They have more material on your species than any other. They were thrilled, or as thrilled as they could get, when they found you. Now it’s us; two down and fifteen to go.”

Zack grinned. “They need seventeen—so random.”

Mizuki leaned forward over the table and chortled. “I know, right?”

“What happens when they get the seventeen?”

Mizuki shrugged her narrow shoulders, which were bare under her white tank-top. “They haven’t told me that yet. I hope we don’t have to have sex. No offense.”

Zack had no idea how to take that. He hemmed and hawed and coughed; he nearly verped his eggs.