Nova (22 page)

I stare at her, my beautiful, brilliant, amazing mother. My mother, who sabotaged three roamers during our escape, all the while thinking she was fixing them. My mother, who thinks her husband is suffering from cancer. My mother, who used to beg me to let her out of this cell, because in her mind she’s been wrongly imprisoned for some minor transgression. My beautiful, brilliant, amazing mother, whose open arms are the most wonderful and terrifying thing in the entire world.

And that’s when I finally flee.

Consciousness comes back in a rush. I jerk upright from my spot on the floor and almost bang into Shar where she crouches above me.

“What the h—” she starts to say.

“They’re here!”

“
What?
Who’s here?” Shar glances frantically down the length of the tunnel in either direction. “I don’t see anyone. Where are they?”

“Everywhere,” I whisper, horror dawning as I finally understand why I’m here. Why I can’t simply turn my back and walk away. “They’re everywhere.”

27
ALL THE PIECES ARE STARTING
to fall into place now. My broken memory, why no one ever came after me when I failed to go Nova, the information I uncovered on the nets about Tiersten, and my suspicions that a splinter faction exists within the Tellurian Alliance. Even that godawful smell that’s been getting worse with each passing day. While our two sides have been fighting it out in some petty war, an alien species has taken out half the human race without a single shot fired.

And now that they’ve burned through the Tellurian Alliance, they’re coming for the rest of us.

It seems crazy, unthinkable even, but I know it’s true. Those visions I had weren’t like my earlier dreams, a meld of truth and fantasy. They were actual memories. The scene in the clinic, the conversation with Jao, the meeting with my adoptive parents—they’re all real.

Painfully, frighteningly
real.

Beside me, Shar is looking at me like I’ve completely lost it, her eyes wide and her body instinctively pulling back from me. No, it’s more than that, I realize upon closer look. Her hands are trembling and the skin around her mouth is white.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m sat.”

“Sat?!” she bursts out. “You were
dead!
”

I blink. “Dead?”

“Yes, dead! As in, not breathing. No heartbeat. That sort of dead!”

It’s obvious now that Shar is close to hysteria, her earlier joke about disposing of my body out an airlock notwithstanding, and I hasten to reassure her again.

“It’s okay, I’m not dead. Just tell me what happened.”

“When? Before or after you started seizing?” Shar asks, a small bit of sarcasm creeping back into her voice now that her initial fear starts to subside.

“Both.”

Shar’s eyes widen at my matter-of-fact tone, but she answers. “One minute I’m trying to bust a path through the memory block, and the next I’m being blown out of your mind.” She involuntarily reaches up to rub her head. “I blacked out for a minute, I think, but when I came to you were writhing on the floor, stuttering nonsense syllables. I was about to link a medic when you suddenly stopped. I was relieved at first, but then you didn’t open your eyes or move, and I realized you weren’t breathing.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. It felt like forever, but in reality I think it was only a minute or two. I was about to start chest compressions when you suddenly rose from the dead.”

Two minutes? That’s all it took to experience all that? It felt so physical, like I was reliving the memories in real time. It seems amazing that I experienced it all in such a short span. Not that it matters. All that matters is that I know why I was sent here now. The question is: what am I going to do now that I know?

“So you want to tell me what’s going on? Who’s here, and
what happened?
”

Shar. That’s right, I’d forgotten about her for the moment. I don’t answer immediately, chewing on my lip as I think about what she told me. She was blown out of my mind; she has no idea what I remembered. She has no idea what I am or where I came from. Perhaps it’s better for her not to know.

“Don’t you dare, Johansen!”

I lift my head. “What?”

“I know that look. You’re thinking you’re not going to tell me, or you’re going to make up some bullslag lie. Well, I already know more than enough to get you in trouble. One anonymous link from me and PsyCorp will lock you up and throw away the key.”

“Then why don’t you call them?” I challenge, my temper rising at being threatened. Shar squirms a bit, not answering, and I laugh. She knows as well as I do that turning me in to PsyCorp would be the same as turning herself in. There’s no way they wouldn’t find out about her once they started mind-scanning me. My laughter doesn’t last long, though, tempered by the sudden realization that I actually
want
to tell her. It’s too big, this secret. It’s not meant to be kept, but shared. The Tellurians fell
because
nobody knew, not enough of them anyway, and not in time. For the Celestians to have a fighting chance, they
have
to know.

Something tickles my brain at the thought, and I snatch for it, sensing it’s something important, but the memory flees before I quite catch it. I frown but let it go. It’ll come back; I’m sure of it. Whatever Shar did, it opened a hole in the memory block, and like water seeping through a leak in a dam, the memories will trickle back a little at a time until the sheer force of my past breaks it down entirely. I just have to be patient.

“Fine! Don’t tell me. But then I won’t tell you what I
did
see when I was in your head.”

Shar starts to get up, and I grab her sleeve. “Wait.” Something in her voice tells me she really did see something important in my mind, and that she’s not just making it up as a ploy to get my attention. I need to know what it is. But can I trust her?

I open my nostrils wide and breathe in. Lean closer and sniff a few more times. Nothing. The air is completely odorless, with no sign of the telltale sour-and-sweet. Amusement bubbles up in me as I think of the good doc’s handiwork. They couldn’t figure out a way to see the aliens or hear them or touch them, but they found a way to smell them out. It would almost be funny if the situation weren’t so deadly serious. As it is, I’m grateful for this small tool of detection, even if it does mean I no longer get to enjoy the taste of ice cream.

Ice cream.
I got the wrong kind when I went to the park with Michael. I got Asteroid Chunk Chocolate when I should have gotten Rum Raisin. That’s my favorite.

I shake off the memory and focus on the situation. Shar. Letting go of her sleeve, I offer my hand. “You want to know? Then come see. Just remember, there’ll be no going back once you know.”

Shar hesitates. “You could just tell me what’s going on. I don’t need to see it.”

“Yes, you do. Your choice. Are you in or out?”

Just like before, she can’t resist the challenge. She takes my hand.

I show her everything. My mission to go Nova, my meltdown in the hygiene unit shortly after arriving, the subsequent loss of seconds culminating in my run for Michael’s life. I show her the conversation I overheard in the bar and my subsequent findings in the research center. Lastly, I take her into the past. To Doc Niven, to Jao, to my parents. By the time we finish, I’m exhausted and sweating. Shar is completely white-faced.

I drop her hand. “So now you know.”

Shar doesn’t say anything, not to me anyway. She’s mumbling nonsense under her breath, her head shaking slightly, her lips trembling. I’m starting to think it was a mistake to tell her when she lifts her head and catches my eye.

“Am . . . am I . . . ?”

Understanding dawns. “No! No, you’re not. I can smell them, you see. I wouldn’t have told you if you were infected. Besides, with your psychic abilities, I think you would be able to sense it if one bonded with you.”

“Is that why they didn’t infect me? Because of my abilities?”

I shrug. “Maybe. A strong enough psychic could fight their influence, could tell someone. Perhaps they didn’t want to risk it.”

Shar shudders. “What
are
they?” she asks, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“We usually just referred to them as the enemy, but we had many names for them. Soul-Suckers, Mind Stealers, the Dark Shadows.” The names tumble out of my mouth without me even having to think about it. My voice drops as the phrase comes back unbidden, “
In Spectris Intra
. The Spectres Within.”

“Where do they come from?”

I pause, the answer to this one not so automatic. I think back to my memory, to my mother’s question:
He wasn’t telling you that silly story about aliens from New Earth taking over the galaxy, was he?

“New Earth. They came from New Earth.”

As soon as I utter the words, I know they’re true. It’s why they found no sentient life there, though the planet was ideal for it; the Spectres would have eaten through any sentient life centuries ago. It’s how the Tellurians were infected. All it took was one survey team. They thought they were exploring the greatest treasure of the century, and all along they were bringing back the very plague that would destroy humankind.

“New Earth? It can’t be! That’s what we’ve been fighting for all this time,” Shar slowly finishes.

“That’s what the Celestians have been fighting for all along. The Tellurians, at least the ones I knew, weren’t fighting for a planet. They were fighting for the human race.”

I know that now. Everything the resistance did was to keep the war going, to keep the Celestians from touching down on New Earth, and to prevent the passage of Spectres across the border. The war was the resistance’s way of quarantining the alliance from the expanse. At least it was until the Spectres became so concentrated among the alliance’s population that even the resistance couldn’t stop the peace efforts. They couldn’t stop the ceasefire.

My, aren’t I a fount of information now?
The grim thought pops up from nowhere. All this time I’ve been desperate to know why I’m here, and now that I do, I almost wish I could go back to ignorance. No, not quite. If there’s one thing I’m glad of, it’s that at least I know I was given to loving people and raised as their own. What was it Niven said? I’d only been alive for two years? So it’s just as I always thought—I’m a genetically engineered bomb who was born and then rapidly aged to maturity. Waiting in the wings until finally the time came to slap Lia’s name on me and send me off to die. Maybe I was even engineered from the DNA of my adoptive parents, my embryo implanted and carried to term by my mom herself. I remember my dad’s gray eyes and my mom’s blonde hair, so like my own, and a pang of longing sweeps through me.

It’s okay, Starshine
, I hear my dad’s voice in my head.
It’s okay. Our time together has been so short, but I still love you more than anything in all the galaxy.

I feel a sudden stab in my chest. Just because we only had two years together doesn’t make me love them any less. My dad was right. Our time together
was
too short. Far too short!

My parents’ faces flash in my mind and suddenly all of my pain, all of my sorrow, all of my grief, locked away inside all these weeks while I wandered on this station without past or memory, well up in my chest at once. I gasp, all breath reft from me in a single instant. I clench my jaw, lips trembling as I struggle to push back the wall of pain, but one tear squeezes out of my eye before I can stop it, a single drop rolling down my cheek in a streak of gray.

As if reading my thoughts—and maybe she actually is—Shar suddenly says, “I’m sorry. About your parents, I mean.”

I’m sorry, too
, I say. Or at least, that’s what I would have said, if only my words weren’t held hostage by the noiseless sobs suddenly quaking in my chest.

No! I’ve already wept for my parents a hundred times. I can’t cry for them anymore, I won’t! Not this time.

So I don’t, dashing away every tear that runs down my face, while inside I force my sobs to swallow themselves up one by one, silenced and put away before they can ever reach the surface.

After a long time, Shar suddenly says, “All right, you told me. It’s only fair I tell you: there was something else in your head besides the memory block. I saw it right before I was blown out of your mind, just after I punched a hole in the block.”

I blink. “What, you mean like a second memory block?” I’d assumed Shar’s half-assed job of breaking the block was the reason I could only remember some things and not others, but a second block could explain it, too.

Shar shakes her head. “I don’t think so. This was different. Not a block, but a plant. I think someone implanted false memories in your head.”

I let out a wistful sigh, immediately realizing what she saw. Lia’s memories, implanted in me so that I might successfully pass as her long enough to fulfill the mission. I suddenly wonder what happened to her, if the real Lia is still alive and well, or dead and buried under the ground. I think back to my time on Tiersten, but if I ever knew her fate, I don’t know it now.

I shake my head. I suppose this is one mystery I’ll never know the answer to.

The stench hits me as soon as we step out of the tunnel and back into the hub—a sour-and-sweet reek so intense it’s enough to make my nostrils burn. I automatically pinch my nose in the hopes of heading off another nosebleed.

“What is it?” Shar asks in alarm.

“They’ve multiplied.”

The words slip out without conscious thought, my brain putting the pieces together without my having to think about it. The smell was present but faint when we arrived on the station, and mostly confined to the cargo bay where the refugees lived. Now it’s a burning odor pervading every section of the hub, even going so far as to spill over into sections of the ring. I look around, imagining their invisible bodies packed wall-to-wall, and I shiver. How many are there now? Thousands, tens of thousands? It’s a good thing Shar and I did our experiment in the tunnel. In here, I would never have been able to distinguish if she were infected. The smell is too powerful.