by S. A. Beck
The photo of one disk caught Otto’s eye. It had been taken from above, the east coast of North America clearly visible far below. Edward pointed at that image.
“Look familiar?” Edward asked.
Nobody answered.
Edward raised his hands in the air in frustration. “Anyone hear of Roswell?”
“That’s where a UFO crashed in New Mexico, right?” Otto said.
“Yeah,” Edward said, nodding. “It’s the most famous crash site, but it sure isn’t the only one. This disk is an exact match of the craft that crashed at Roswell in 1947. I have the secret Roswell files right here.”
He punched a few keys on the keyboard and brought up some fuzzy scans of old documents. Several black-and-white photographs showed a disk-shaped craft broken up in a field, only the back half remaining in one piece. Edward scrolled down to images of various parts of the debris.
“I haven’t seen these photos before,” Jim Running Horse said. “I thought I had all the files.”
“I just cracked this a week ago. The Pentagon only recently put this report on their server. They’ve been scanning a lot of old documents lately. I’ll send it to your Tor account,” Edward said.
“Tor isn’t invulnerable,” the Tohono O’odham said. “Give it to me on a memory stick. If General Meade is that careful, then I’m going to be that careful too.”
“Smart man,” Edward said with a nod as he continued to scroll down. Otto sensed Edward had been testing him.
Otto looked from the Native American to the computer hacker and back again. Once more, he felt as though he was being left out.
Edward stopped scrolling and zoomed in on a small strip of material, its edge jagged from where it had been torn from a larger piece. Strange markings were on it, a series of lines and dots that almost looked like writing. Soon Otto saw a pattern of four different symbols—a short line, a long line, a single dot, and a double dot.
Jim Running Horse leaned in and took a closer look. “This is different from the other script.”
“What other script?” Otto asked.
“Several pieces like this were found at the Roswell crash,” the Tohono O’odham replied. “They had writing on them. Linguistic experts have been trying to decipher them ever since, but it’s a hard job because there isn’t enough material to make the usual comparisons. I’ve stared at the stuff myself for years and can’t make head or tail of it. This sample, though, is totally different from the other texts I’ve seen.”
Otto looked Jim Running Horse up and down. Dusty boots, worn-out jeans, a checked shirt, the deep-brown, wrinkled face of someone who had spent a lifetime working outside, and a battered but clean old rifle. The guy looked like a rancher and talked like a professor.
“Who are you?” Otto asked.
Jim Running Horse’s face didn’t change. “I’m Jim Running Horse, I told you.”
Otto shook his head and turned back to Edward. “So is this script the piece of the puzzle you need to decipher the alien language?”
The fact that he asked that question in all seriousness and expected a believable answer told Otto that he had positively, definitely been hanging out with those people too long.
Suddenly, Yuhle shouldered him aside and stared at the screen, his mouth hanging open. Edward looked at the scientist and smiled.
“Not exactly,” the computer hacker said.
He punched another key, and a genetic sequence came up on the screen.
“There,” Yuhle said, pointing at one part of the double helix.
“Right you are,” Edward said, tapping away at his keyboard.
The screen zoomed in on the part of the DNA sequence Yuhle had indicated and then cut it into a separate image. As Edward worked, Yuhle adjusted his glasses and explained.
“As some of you may know, most of the genetic sequence for any animal has things in common with other animals. We are all descended from the same protoplasmic organism billions of years ago, and things like mammals or primates are a blink in the eye in the time of evolution, so it’s not surprising that, for example, a chimpanzee and a human share 96 percent of the same genes. Not only that, but their DNA is made up of the same four building blocks—adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. You can see them marked here on the computer as A, T, G, and C. It’s the same with the Atlantis gene and human genes. Atlanteans are almost entirely human, their genetic code almost indistinguishable from that of an ordinary human being.
“Almost, but not quite. They have a few extra sequences, still with the same four building blocks you find in all genomes, and these sequences are what we call the Atlantis genes. There aren’t very many of them, and I’ve been studying them so intensely that I know them by sight. The one I pointed out is one of them, but I never thought Edward was going to show it to me in this context.”
Edward took the cue and brought up the image of the strip of alien material with the markings on it. He overlaid the image of the Atlantis genes on it.
They made a perfect match. Each of the four different types of gene building blocks matched up with a different symbol on the piece of alien craft from Roswell.
Everyone stared in silence for a minute. Edward chuckled.
“No prize for guessing the significance of this,” he said.
Otto shook his head in wonder. “Edward, I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve turned me into a conspiracy theorist.”
Chapter 7
JUNE 19, 2016, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
7:10 AM
“You’re getting much better,” said Jaxon’s martial arts instructor, Marquis. “You’re much more focused than you used to be.”
“I figured out this stuff might come in handy someday,” Jaxon replied.
They faced off in the exercise room of the Grants’ home. As usual, Marquis had laid down mats on the floor, and the two were dressed in traditional aikido training uniforms—a white cotton top similar to ones used in karate classes, and a pair of pleated black cotton pants.
“Let’s try another move,” Marquis said.
He showed her how someone might grab her around the neck from behind and demonstrated how to put that person off balance, flip them, and strike them with her foot. Then it was Jaxon’s turn, and she executed the move perfectly.
“Well done!” Marquis said as he got up from the mat.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jaxon saw Isadore standing in the doorway, nodding. Her foster mother took a close interest in her martial arts education. Jaxon wasn’t sure why. She’d given up trying to figure out Stephen and Isadore.
“Let’s do it again,” Marquis said. “My own teacher once said that you don’t truly know a move until you’ve practiced it a thousand times.”
“Then this is going to be a long class,” Jaxon said with a smile.
“Your whole life is a class,” Marquis said. Without warning, he grabbed her from behind, putting an arm around her throat. She twisted, knocked his feet out from under him, and flipped him over her body.
Marquis landed on the mat with a thump.
“Well done again!”
“Only nine hundred ninety-eight more to go,” Jaxon said.
They continued to practice, Jaxon asking the occasional question and Marquis showing her more techniques, while Isadore watched, silent, through the entire class.
Despite having spent most of the night wandering around Los Angeles, Jaxon didn’t feel at all tired. She wondered if superhuman endurance was another of her powers or if the rush of finally doing something interesting had given her a day’s worth of adrenaline.
She couldn’t believe she had gotten away with it. Grant and Isadore hadn’t heard her leap out of her window, had slept through her entire absence, and hadn’t even woken up during her noisy climb up the drainpipe and back through her bedroom window.
Jaxon had wandered around unfamiliar neighborhoods for several hours, strolling down dark, lonely residential streets and along a blaring highway. Nothing much had happene
d, but the thrill of being out and free had lifted her spirits. She hated being forced into someone else’s mold. Some foster parent or counselor or group home director was always telling her how to behave and trying to make her into what they wanted her to be. Just sneaking out for a walk was an act of rebellion, and it made her feel great.
Of course it was insane for a sixteen-year-old girl to walk alone through LA at night, but she was no ordinary sixteen-year-old girl. To her surprise, she wasn’t attacked. A couple of times, guys shouted from passing cars, and a police car had slowed down across the street from her, forcing her to duck out of sight down an alley, but otherwise, she was left alone.
She felt strangely disappointed at that, as though she had wanted to get into a fight. She’d been holding in her emotions for so long, resisting the urge to knock out bullies like Courtney, she would have invited the excuse to lay some pervert flat out on the pavement.
“Okay, Jaxon,” Isadore finally said as Marquis was showing her another technique. “It’s time to get ready for school.”
No sweat, Jaxon thought. If I can handle walking alone at night, I can handle that too.
She reminded herself to be careful. Someone out there was looking for her, hunting her, and she didn’t know why. They had found out about her powers somehow, and she had to lie low. Getting away from their notice was the whole reason she wanted to leave the group home in the first place. She could enjoy her moonlit walks, but she still needed to play the part of the good little girl at home and school.
She went through her day in a haze, ignoring the taunts of Courtney and her crew, struggling with her coursework as usual, and all the while waiting for sunset so she could go out and explore some more.
Jaxon didn’t get her chance until late in the night. While Isadore had gone to bed at her usual early hour, Stephen had stayed up late to work in the greenhouse. Jaxon had pretended to go to bed too and kept her light off as she waited for him to turn in. After an hour, she grew impatient and parted her curtain a little to watch him. It was hard to see through all the greenery, but she could tell Stephen was bustling around the greenhouse with a notepad in his hand, writing furiously. He kept going over to the spot where Jaxon had planted her vegetables.
She frowned. What could he want with those? They weren’t part of his experiments. He worked on plant toxins. Jaxon’s vegetables were the only plants in the whole greenhouse that couldn’t kill you.
At last, Stephen turned off the light, and Jaxon heard him come inside, go upstairs, and go to bed. Jaxon decided to wait half an hour to make sure he was asleep before sneaking out.
In the meantime, she decided to try a little experiment of her own. A few days ago, she had been reaching for something, and it had leaped into her hand without her having to touch it. That had scared her to death, and she hadn’t tried it again. It was even stranger than her ability to make plants grow.
Her heart beating fast, she sat down at her desk. She parted the curtains a little again so the light from the moon and the city dimly illuminated her room. All was quiet. Her desk was tidy and organized as her foster parents insisted, textbooks to one side, notebooks to the other, and a pen sitting in between.
She opened her hand and held it close to the pen. Focusing her mind, she tensed her hand and willed the pen to come to her. It didn’t move.
Frowning, she tried again, harder that time, her hand straining. Nothing happened.
“This worked before,” Jaxon muttered. “Why isn’t it working now?”
What was it Juliette, her yoga and meditation instructor, had said? You had to empty your mind. Some religion called Taoism said that not trying often produced more results than trying. Juliette had given the example of water running over a stone. Water was soft, but over time it would wear a stone smooth and eventually wear it away entirely.
Juliette had given her that lesson as life advice, hinting that too often, Jaxon flailed away at her problems, trying to solve them through brute force before quickly giving up in frustration. The better way, Juliette had suggested, was to work at them softly, persistently.
Jaxon chuckled. It was as if Juliette had access to every therapist’s report that had ever been written about her.
She held out her hand, trying to relax her muscles and empty her mind. She closed her hand as though she was going to pick up the pen the normal way. That was what had happened when she had moved an object by accident the first time. She had reached for it, and it had come to her.
But she hadn’t even been trying to move the object. And why hadn’t it happened by accident since then? How could she control that power if it happened only when it felt like it?
She tried again, holding her hand for a full five minutes and feeling a little foolish. She put her hand on her lap then brought it back up again. That didn’t work either.
Jaxon bit her lip. What should she try next?
She brought her finger down next to the tip of the pen and pushed it in a circle, moving it around and around like a propeller. That was getting boring. What was the point of having a power if she couldn’t turn it on or off? She couldn’t make that work, and she couldn’t turn off her ability to grow plants. She had to wear double gloves in order to touch seeds without them sprouting.
She was missing something. Both of those powers had come about only recently, unlike her strength, which had manifested at age nine. Did the powers develop as the body developed? Was that part of her growing up? Maybe she’d develop even more of them.
Or perhaps they developed as she needed them. She was still a kid when she first showed her strength, and that had been to stop a grown man from messing with her. Perhaps those powers were a response to danger too. But what danger? The plant thing had come around well before those guys attacked her in the greenhouse, and she wasn’t in danger at the moment.
Jaxon stared out the window, absentmindedly spinning the pen in circles. She saw no point in developing more of those weird abilities if she couldn’t control them. They’d only make her life even more complicated than it already was.
She took her finger away from the pen to scratch her ear. A sound from the desk made her look down.
The pen was still spinning.
Jaxon blinked. Okay, maybe it would still spin for a second or two, but it hadn’t even slowed down.
Jaxon brought her finger to just above the pen and started twirling it around without touching the pen. The pen’s movement sped up. She spun her finger in the other direction. The pen stopped and started spinning in the same direction as her finger.
She cupped her hand as though she was going to pick the pen up, and it flew into her grasp. Startled, she dropped the pen, then reached out again.
It flew into her hand a second time.
She carefully put the pen down and tried to move it again. That time, it didn’t budge.
Jaxon’s brow furrowed. What was wrong? She kept trying and found her power had left her again.
Perhaps it’s only developing just now, kind of like a baby learning to walk, Jaxon thought. A baby keeps falling down until it learns what to do. The pen started moving when I was distracted, so Juliette was right about that. Trying to force something isn’t the right way.
She chuckled. If only she could convince the bullies, foster parents, teachers, and counselors of that philosophy.
Jaxon stood, deciding to work on it more tomorrow. Right then, the city beckoned. She wanted to get out there and explore. It was the only freedom she had.
It took her only a moment to get out the window and jump to the ground. As with the previous time, she landed without hurting herself.
Putting her hood up, she looked around, wondering where to go. She’d gone out back before, cutting across a residential area before making it to the highway. That night, she’d explore somewhere different.
She circled the house, instinctively staying close to the wall so that if Grant or Isadore happened to look out an upstairs window, they wouldn’t see her, and she cut
across the front lawn. The neighborhood was a bit of a mystery to her. The Grants never spoke to the neighbors, and no one ever walked along the perfectly kept sidewalk that ran along one side of the street. It was a cul-de-sac and had hardly any traffic, even during the day. But at the moment, it was abandoned, and the only sounds she could hear besides the distant rush of the city all around were the chirping of crickets.
The houses in that area were big, some even bigger than the Grants’ place. All were set back from the road, behind fences and broad lawns. Some were hidden behind a screen of hedges or trees. No lights shone except for the occasional front porch light left on and one or two upstairs lights. It was a strange feeling to be in so much darkness and isolation in the middle of a huge, sprawling city.
Jaxon strolled down the sidewalk, hands in her pockets, enjoying the isolation and quiet. Too bad the Grants didn’t have a country home. That would be even better. She had lived in cities all her life and enjoyed the fun they had to offer, but if she was going to be cut off from the world as the Grants wanted her to be, it would be nice to enjoy some nature and quiet.
A few bright stars twinkled through the haze. Jaxon smiled. Not many neighborhoods in Los Angeles where residents could see stars at night.
But that neighborhood was too peaceful, too respectable. She was never going to find any excitement there.
A noise up ahead told her she was wrong.
She heard a muffled cry, mocking laughter, and the scuff of a shoe on pavement. Curious, she picked up her pace.
Coming around a bend in the road, she saw three figures struggling by the sidewalk next to a parked car. The car’s door was open, and light from inside illuminated the scene. Two well-dressed middle-aged men, one with a big paunch and the other bald except for a thin fringe of hair around the sides and back, were struggling with a young woman dressed in a short leather skirt, halter top, and high heels.
