Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  If she ate fast…

  “How was school today?” he asked, the same question he asked every day at dinner.

  “Mrs. Jeffries has the flu so there was a sub in math. We played a game.”

  He smiled and nodded, then shot her a serious look. “Those kids giving you any more trouble on the bus?” He asked that every day too. Both her parents worried about her being bullied. They lived in a multiethnic, multiracial area of the city, which minimized the chances of racism rearing its ugly head but didn’t eliminate the possibility. There was nowhere entirely safe from that.

  She felt her expression fall but then screwed it up quickly into a semblance of nonchalance. “No, Daddy.”

  The truth was they still taunted her or slapped her butt or flicked her in the head when they entered or exited the bus, especially if she was unlucky enough to have to sit on the aisle, but the worst of them were separated from her now by eight rows and had other kids to harass thanks to her parents’ intervention with the bus driver. It did make her day a little easier, but didn’t really eliminate the constant anxiety. There was nothing they could do about that, so there was no reason to bring it up. It was just something to bear.

  She’d never told anyone how it had started. She’d been a target before and had learned to keep her head down. Her preference was to sit by the window, scoot down, and brace her knees on the back of the seat in front of her so that she could just barely see out the window. Keeping out of sight kept her from being noticed, mostly. She normally read during the trip home, looking up occasionally to see where they were on the route and only sitting up and rushing off the bus seconds before her stop.

  One day she’d been taken by surprise—by her first menstrual period.

  She hadn’t even realized what had happened until she got home, though she knew her pants felt oddly damp. She’d assumed it was sweat because the bus was hot and the seats were vinyl. It hadn’t been sweat. A rusty red stain had spread across the seat of her faded jeans, drawn there by gravity in that slouched position. Now kids offered her tampons regularly, asked her when her moon party was going to be, or called her Bloody Mary. She was a target once again.

  Growing breasts was hard enough to deal with, but this humiliation was nearly unbearable. She hardly spoke to anyone but her parents and online friends. It seemed like everyone was just waiting to find some way to torment her.

  Her body had betrayed her once. She didn’t trust it not to do it again. She felt tight inside and out. Muscles, jaw, stomach. So tight sometimes it felt like she was fraying around the edges. It seemed like that feeling would never go away.

  Both her parents said that being her age was hard. Kids didn’t have the self-control that grown-ups eventually mastered, but based on overheard conversations, Zara guessed that grown-ups still had to deal with this junk. It just wasn’t as overt when a person got older.

  And it wasn’t just bullies. Her friends were moody, capricious, and could be equally vicious. If they thought they had a shot at hanging out with the more popular kids, she was dead to them. It could be as simple as the color of shirt she wore on any given day. She might say the wrong words, talk to the wrong person, or admit to liking something they thought was dumb. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it sometimes. She just tried to get by.

  She suppressed a sigh and spooned some rice onto her plate. She had to be careful or her parents would make her talk about it. She had to act as normal as possible or they’d bring up seeing a counselor again, and she couldn’t imagine telling all this junk to some adult do-gooder with a plastic smile and fake caring attitude.

  She had a ton of online friends who understood a whole lot better than any adult seemed to. These other kids were living the same kinds of lives. They didn’t give her platitudes. They said, “Ikr? Ppl are so LAME.” Then they told her about their stupid friends. That meant more. They were her real peeps. For life.

  “Your shirt looks a little tight, Z. We should probably go shopping for clothes this weekend with Grandma,” her mom observed tiredly as she poured iced tea for herself.

  Zara frowned and looked down at herself. She thought she looked fine, but her mom wasn’t necessarily wrong. Baggier shirts would definitely make her oddly shaped, A-cup-sized bulges less noticeable, which would probably be more comfortable. It was gross how people’s eyes lingered on her chest, trying to see her budding baby boobies.

  Her dad cleared his throat and added another dash of sriracha to his plate. “Growing like a weed, baby girl.”

  Both her parents looked exhausted. Mom would go into the hospital for a night shift soon, but had been up and reading when Zara got home from school. She took that shift so she could maximize her time with Zara despite its drawbacks. Dad would probably work up until his very late bedtime.

  “How’s work going, Dad?” she asked. “Solved that tough problem yet?”

  Her dad didn’t talk about work anymore. She didn’t think he was allowed to. Not since Jane Holloway’s Global Announcement. But she knew what he was working on. Everyone with any sense did. Every scientist at NASA had to be working on decrypting Jane’s mysterious sectilian download, no matter what Tom Rather said on the six o’clock news about it being a hoax.

  The download was all anyone talked about. The rumors called it the Second Space Race. They said that every country had put all their smartest scientists on it, competing to be the first to break into the files, put the puzzle pieces together, or at least find the blueprints Jane Holloway had mentioned in her message. The online media said that no one had a clue where to start with the massive file. It was all gibberish. Jane had apparently forgotten to give them a key in her eagerness to start her adventure.

  Her dad sighed deeply and rubbed his face, shaking his head. Her mother’s eyes flashed a warning at her. She’d been asked more than once not to talk about Dad’s work.

  Dad wouldn’t admit that he was working on the sectilian download. She guessed he wasn’t supposed to. It was classified. He wasn’t allowed to admit it was real, not even to his own family.

  Jane’s message was supposed to be for everyone on Earth, had been broadcast across the planet on television simultaneously in lots of different languages, but few had the capability during the first viewing to download the accompanying transmission of data. Then the satellites transmitting it were shut down so they couldn’t keep broadcasting it like Jane had intended for them to. At least that was what some people thought had happened. The consensus seemed to be that it was mainly governments and possibly some universities that had it. There was all kinds of speculation about who had what and how close they were to decrypting it.

  Zara believed all of this was true. Her dad had changed after the Global Announcement. He’d always worked hard, but now he did nothing but work. He was worried all the time, preoccupied. Maybe it was just her imagination, but to her it seemed like he really wanted to tell them something important, but couldn’t.

  It was all so messed up.

  It was really contrary to the spirit of Jane’s message too—that humanity’s first contact with an alien race over a lifetime ago was supposed to have given them amazing technological gifts in a spirit of peace and cooperation. The sectilians had just all gotten killed by some mysterious plague. That wasn’t humanity’s fault.

  Zara believed in Jane. She just knew Jane really was an astronaut who’d been sent to an alien spaceship in the asteroid belt. She believed that Jane really had sent a download full of important information and blueprints of advanced alien technology to help the human race survive an uncertain future. The way the government had screwed all of this up was disrespectful to the people who had risked their lives to go on that mission.

  But she could guess why they’d done it. They didn’t want people to panic when they realized that there were other planets out there in the galaxy, all full of different kinds of alien people. And Jane had said some of them might have bad intentions. Earth might be in danger. They wanted to spare
people that fear, but they hadn’t. They’d only made it all so much worse.

  The proof was on her dad’s laptop.

  Her fingers crept to the lump in her jeans’ pocket. The thumb drive.

  Subsequent airings of the Global Announcement online and on television were video only, always aired with a disclaimer or a theory or a crackpot scheme. So far the data file hadn’t been leaked to the public as far as she knew. So far. It had only been a little over two weeks.

  Two weeks since the world had changed completely.

  Since that initial broadcast people had gone flippin’ crazy. The new president had given an address claiming it was a hoax created by a mentally ill crackpot determined to disrupt the world economy and the welfare of Americans. Saturday Night Out had created a Jane Half-the-Way character who was a sexy, clownish oaf, often tipsy, and always frolicking with little green guys, little gray guys, guys with pointy ears, Jabba the Hutt, etc., etc. The clips were all over YouTV, but Zara didn’t think they were funny.

  A lot of smart people had gone on record saying they believed the announcement was real—that the mission to Mars had really been a mission to an alien ship in the Greater Asteroid Belt. And they gave out a lot of convincing evidence to prove their points.

  As a result, the average person didn’t know what to believe. Everyone seemed on edge, waiting for something to happen. Social media was blanketed with outraged people calling for the government to tell the truth or to punish Jane Holloway. Some people went straight-up religious, preaching about the end of times. A kid at school had told her she was going to hell because she didn’t go to church every Sunday. It was nutty. And scary.

  There’d been riots and looting in big cities across the globe. The media were constantly talking about how crime was up. Usage of mental-health services was up. Accidents were up. Suicide rates were up. Per-capita alcohol consumption was up. A lot of people were walking around like zombies. Human beings liked being the center of the universe and all this uncertainty about whether they were or weren’t was driving everyone batshit.

  Her school had closed for two days after the first broadcast. When they went back, her teachers had been very grave, and many still were. Her math teacher’s hands shook and her voice warbled. Sometimes tears streaked down her cheeks as she worked through a long problem on the whiteboard. Zara heard Mrs. Jeffries had broken down in front of an algebra class the day before. That was probably the real reason why she hadn’t shown up today, not the flu. Zara wished people would just hold it together, work together, instead of all this fear.

  Jane had told them not to be afraid. Jane believed in them. She’d said so.

  Zara agreed with Jane. The government should tell the truth, and they should just let everyone have the download. There were tons of stories out there of non-expert people figuring things out. Even kids. Finding quasars, inventing cancer-screening tests, or figuring out a way to clean up the floating islands of plastic junk in the oceans cheaply and efficiently. They should let everyone work on the sectilian data. They just should.

  Yeah, it was kinda scary. But if people felt like they were helping in some way, it might make them feel better and not act so flippin’ crazy.

  She was trying to shovel down her meal as fast as possible so she could get to her dad’s computer while he and Mom lingered over dinner. In her haste, Zara swallowed a hunk of dry chicken breast without chewing it, and it got stuck. She gulped some water then coughed as she aspirated some chewed-up chicken and water.

  Her mom leaned toward her. Her dad reached over and put his hand on her back. “You okay, Zara?”

  She nodded, eyes watering, and drank some more water. “Just went down wrong,” she croaked. She looked at her plate. Only two pieces of soggy broccoli left in a sea of salty brown sauce. “May I be excused?”

  Her mother raised her eyebrows and looked pointedly at the broccoli.

  Zara stabbed both pieces with a fork, and stuffed them in her mouth.

  Her mother nodded and smiled at her father.

  Zara got up, still chewing, and pushed in her chair. Her parents’ conversation continued in muted tones as she walked her plate into the kitchen, scraped and rinsed it, then put it in the dishwasher. Then she stepped over to her dad’s laptop, her hand already in her pocket, wrapped around the thumb drive.

  Blood rushed in her ears. Her face felt hot.

  Zara slid the drive home and tapped the touchpad. A special screen came up. She knew exactly what to do. She leaned over, wrapped her fingers around her dad’s keys to keep them silent, and quickly swiped his ID card through the reader. A prompt for a password came up on the screen. She paged through the little black notebook to find the page where he’d neatly crossed off an old password and handwritten the most recent one.

  Zara placed her fingers on the keyboard, ears straining for any hint of movement from the next room. She pressed the keys gently, so they were silent, carefully so she would get it right the first time. Her nerves couldn’t take much more of this. Dinner was roiling around in her stomach and threatening to come back up.

  She was in.

  The screen went dark. Bizarre multilayer symbols in drab green flowed in different directions all over the place. When her finger landed on the touchpad, the symbol streams zoomed in and out of focus, like they were a flowing three-dimensional model and she was moving it around or moving through it or something. If she hadn’t been terrified of discovery, she might have been entranced. Was this what she was looking for? Was this a sectilian computer language?

  She alt-tabbed out of the crazy soup of symbols, navigated to a directory, found the biggest folder on the laptop, called TargetData, and clicked on it. There were tons of smaller files inside it. She barely looked at them, except to notice they were named with the same kinds of weird symbols she’d just seen. That had to be the right file. If it wasn’t, she’d try again another day. She highlighted the first twenty files and saved them to the thumb drive. She’d guessed well. It filled the thumb drive almost to capacity, but she got all twenty. The download took only a few moments, though it felt like forever. She held her breath until she was lightheaded.

  Finally it was done. She ejected the thumb drive and slid it free, closed everything she’d opened, and restored the application he’d been using.

  A chair scraped in the dining room.

  She froze.

  Oh, no. She was dead. She was so dead.

  The screensaver hadn’t had time to come back on. If she ran out of the room, they’d hear or see her. She put the notebook and keys exactly where they’d been before, and waved her hands around, conflicted about what to do next.

  “Want some coffee if I make a pot?” her mom said in the dining room. Dishes clanked together.

  During the moment that her father hesitated, Zara shut the laptop, grabbed a magazine from the counter, and climbed onto a stool to look at it. She opened it to a random page and focused on breathing evenly.

  “Sure,” he answered. They both came into the room carrying dirty dishes.

  Her mom looked at her quizzically. “What are you doing?”

  Zara looked as innocent as she could. “Just reading this.”

  Her mom cocked an eyebrow. “Time magazine?”

  Zara scowled. “Yeah.”

  Her dad slid the magazine out from under her fingertips, closer to himself, and turned it so he could see it better. “Reading up on the president’s new proposed policy for health-care reform, are you?”

  “Well, I just turned the page. I haven’t read it yet.”

  “Your homework done?”

  “Yes.”

  Her dad shooed her toward the living room. “Go smite some digital evil for an hour.”

  Zara forced a smile. “All right. You wanna play too?”

  He looked wistfully back at her for a moment, like he really wanted to. Her hopes rose just a little, sending her emotions off-balance. She loved playing games with him, but she felt so guilty. “I wish I could
, baby girl. Too much work.”

  She let her dejection show and trudged off for the living room, her hand hovering over her bulging pocket and the thumb drive inside with its contraband data.

  4

  AS JANE and her crew moved past the baffles at the entrance of the Tree, the sound of the gale died away to just dull white noise in the background. This was one of many similar columns that dropped down between the massive tree trunks, allowing contact with the ground for entry and egress, though most pligans rarely used them. Typically they traveled from trunk to trunk via the complex network of skywalks. They rarely had need to go down to the ground.

  They regularly offered to build a skywalk directly to a Speroancora hatch, but Jane consistently refused the proposal as politely as possible because she’d found out the materials required would use the same manufacturing system as the scales they were applying to the hull of the ship. She didn’t want to delay their departure any more than necessary or add to the debt she owed the pligans.

  Being detained this long was stressful, but necessary. They wouldn’t get very far in a ship that couldn’t hold air, and the extra shielding the pligans were providing seemed paramount, given the encounters they’d had thus far. But sometimes all she could think about was the Swarm, the havoc it might be wreaking on some innocent people before she could properly warn the United Sentient Races at Terac. At times it felt unbearable to have these pleasant cultural exchanges, as though they didn’t have anything pressing to do.

  But pligans simply didn’t experience urgency. It was maddening when work on the ships stalled. They just didn’t seem to understand what was at stake. It was doubly frustrating that Jane had no material way to repay them. Even if Jane had had money, Pliga didn’t have a money-based economy as far as she could tell. They didn’t participate in galactic commerce or even communicate with the galaxy at large. Everything they needed, they made. Regardless, the short walk outside wasn’t bad enough to warrant the time or materials it would take to build a skywalk.