Contents
Cover
Title Page
Part One: Earth: The Not-So-Distant Future (Spoiler: It Sucks)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two: Species of Aliens Ranked From Least to Most Horrific
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three: Denza (I Half Belong Here)
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Four: Ashfall
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
About the Author
Books by Pittacus Lore
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
Earth: The Not-So-Distant Future (Spoiler: It Sucks)
1
My last day on Earth started out pretty ordinary. My mom shook me awake at eight a.m. and told me she was driving into the city to sell some weed.
“The crop is ready, and I don’t want to sit on it with all those hippies hanging around,” she said, talking fast. Mom was already two cups of coffee deep. “Hope that farm-to-table dispensary is still open; they overpaid. We might need some bug-out money soon.”
I yawned and blinked sleep out of my eyes. “Good morning.”
“Oh, good morning, honey,” she said, brushing hair off my forehead.
I guess Mom hadn’t bothered to fire up the wood-burning stove yet, because my room in our little cabin was cold and damp. Gray light filtered through my curtains, rain pattering against the tin roof. It was late October and cold, that rain just dying to turn into snow. I hiked up my pajama pants and wrapped my comforter around my shoulders, then lurched over to check the bucket in the corner where the leak had sprung last week. It was dry, so I guessed my repair job on our rusty-ass roof had held. My library still smelled like damp paper, though, the damage done. I had like two hundred books stacked over there, so many that I couldn’t even see the shelf—mostly sci-fi novels but also some classics and a couple dozen math and science textbooks—all the pages I’d burned through in this cabin, a lot of them now swollen and moldy. Made me sad to see them ruined like that; they’d been good company. But, if we bugged out like Mom was talking about, they’d all get left behind anyway. Free books for whatever squatter came to this place next.
For almost a year we’d been hiding in this cabin in Washington State, just a short drive to the border of British Columbia. It was the longest we’d stayed in one place since we left Australia ten years ago, when we first went on the run. We had an actual home back then. Mom had a real job, and I had a dad.
I barely remembered any of that.
“Two hours to Tacoma, two hours back,” my mom recited as I followed her into our cramped kitchen/living room. “An hour for errands. Two hours flex time in case I hit traffic or need to shake a tail.” She pulled up the sleeve of her flannel to look at the two watches strapped to her birdlike wrist, faded scars crisscrossing her forearm. “Let’s call it sixteen hundred. If I’m not back by then . . .”
I knew this part. We had a version of this conversation every time Mom left me alone. “I grab my go-bag and hike to the campground at Ross Lake. There’s a pay phone there. If you don’t call in twenty-four hours, I’m on my own, and it’s best that you don’t know where I go.”
Mom nodded. Her brown hair was streaked with gray, the crow’s-feet around her eyes pronounced. She was thin like a marathon runner. The muscles on her neck stood out, and so did the veins on the backs of her hands. Sometimes I worried that she wasn’t eating enough, but she’d never slowed down in our ten years as fugitives. As I watched, she strapped on her holster under her left arm, carrying her Walther PPK. It seemed like such a small gun now, but I remembered needing both hands on the grip when she taught me how to shoot.
I was eight years old.
There was a Glock in my go-bag and a loaded shotgun next to our front door. Just in case.
My mom pulled on her leather jacket, hiding her weapon. “Current alias?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, a habit that I picked up from her. She did it whenever I broke a rule or annoyed her. She narrowed her eyes at me, recognizing her own mannerism used against her.
“Current alias, please, Sydney,” she said firmly. “I know we do this all the time, but it’s the repetition that keeps us safe.”
I sighed. “Wyatt Williams.”
I hated being Wyatt Williams. It made me sound like the world’s most generic country singer.
Our aliases were all the way up to “W” now. Mom kept the fake names alliterative, each new identity following the previous one in alphabetical order. Made them easier to keep track of, she said. I could trace our zigzagging path across North America by my discarded names. When we got off the plane in Los Angeles, I’d been Aaron Abrams. I’d been Darren Drake when we camped in Utah’s Red Rocks and Mom taught me how to make a fire and find my own water. I’d been Mike Martinez in Mexico City, where two guys in dark suits and darker sunglasses chased us through a street market. I was Vincent Vargas last year in Peoria, the last time I went to an actual school.
I wasn’t sure what we’d do with “X” looming on the horizon.
Xavier Xtreme? I planned to pitch that.
The only time I got to be myself—Sydney Chambers—was with my mom.
I was named after the city where my parents met. I’d spent my first few years on a ranch outside Sydney. My memories of the place were hazy, but I could picture the way the crispy green grass in our backyard hurt my bare feet and how once you left the range of our house’s sprinkler system the landscape turned to burned dirt and red rocks. I remembered there was a single road leading away from our house—not so different from our current hideout—and that we lived close to where my mom and dad worked. It was the outback, basically. Our place was cozy, and I don’t remember ever feeling afraid out there, although there was the time that a wild dog got loose in our living room. That was how my mom got the scars on her arm, actually. It happened right before we left Australia. I think she interpreted the dingo trying to eat me as a sign we should leave.
Anyway, I barely remembered Australia, and ten years in America had scrubbed any trace of an accent. I definitely wasn’t going to blow our cover by saying G’day, mate.
My mom motioned to our plastic dinner table, where she’d left me a stack of textbooks and a Pop-Tart still in the wrapper. “Today, I’d like you to complete two chapters in math and finish up your reading on East Asian history.”
I yawned into my shoulder. “Come on, Mom, it’s Saturday.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“Oh.” I paused. “Are you sure?”
“Did you get enough sleep last night, Syd?”
I had the dream last night, the one about my dad, but she didn’t need to know that. Talking about him always put my mom into a funk—half-melancholy and half–bloodthirsty guerrilla fighter without a mission.
“If I say no, can I go back to bed?”
My mom snorted and peeked out
through our front curtains. In the early light, the smoke from the Green Guard’s bonfires was visible through the trees. The ecological direct action group had shown up a few weeks ago to protest the oil pipeline getting built at the edge of the woods. There were like forty of them camped out there, although their members came and went, so even after spying on them for days it was difficult to get a perfect count. They were mostly high school–aged runaways and college kids, with a few middle-aged lifer protestors as leadership. They’d stopped by our cabin to check that it was cool if they camped next to our land. We’d fixed up the abandoned cabin, but we were just squatters, so what were we supposed to say?
“I’d like you to stay inside while I’m gone,” my mom said. “We know all we need to about our neighbors. No need for another operation.”
An operation. That’s what Mom called it whenever she sent me to be around people. Like the other day, when I’d popped by the Green Guard campsite to chat them up. It was important, Mom said, that I learn social skills. I’d been to eight different schools over the years, never for longer than a few months, though. When I made friends, I always knew I’d have to leave them behind.
Fugitives don’t get to have friends.
That used to bother me more. One time, in Florida, I flipped out pretty bad. That was when Mom and I had “the talk.”
I’d eased into being a friendless fugitive since then. But that didn’t mean I wanted to go through life as a hermit.
“I liked them,” I said, referring to my latest batch of temporary pals at Green Guard. “They were cool. They actually care about stuff.”
“They’re young. They have that luxury,” my mom replied, rolling her eyes.
“Wow. Did you sprinkle a little extra cynicism in your coffee this morning?” I craned my neck to look over her shoulder at the sleepy campsite. “I thought you’d be down with the cause. Aren’t you always saying that the capitalists have doomed this planet?”
She frowned. “Groups like that always have some undercover FBI scum attached to them. I don’t want you getting close. We don’t need them looking too hard at Wyatt Williams, you know?”
I tossed my blanket across my shoulders like a cape. “Mom, come on. I know the deal. I was careful.”
She dropped the curtain and eyed me. “Don’t get cocky, Syd,” she said. “This place has been good to us. I don’t want to burn it down unless we absolutely have to.”
Knowing my mom, she probably meant that literally. I glanced around our cabin—the cramped living room with its threadbare couch and antennae-equipped TV, two bedrooms that fit our lumpy twin mattresses, the bathroom with a curtain for a door, and a toilet that backed up biweekly. I had to be the only sixteen-year-old in a hundred miles who could unclog a septic tank. No internet, no landline, much less a cell phone. The finest in off-the-grid living, basically.
Still, it was home. Or the closest we’d come to one in a while.
“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll lie low,” I said, waving at the books she’d left out for me. “I’ll do my homework.”
“Good boy,” she said. “See you tonight.”
Once my mom rumbled down the dirt path that led away from our cabin in our beater of a pickup truck, I plopped down on the couch with my Pop-Tart and checked out what was on the four stations our TV picked up. Nothing but morning news shows.
Flooding in Venice had completely engulfed the city.
Border guards in Texas were letting loose attack dogs on refugees.
A six-month drought in Pakistan had led to the complete collapse of the government, with petty warlords now fighting over individual neighborhoods. The Indian army was massing on the border.
Not a lot of good news.
“They could fix all this,” I muttered.
That was Mom’s favorite line whenever she saw some horrific story on TV about our messed-up world.
They.
The same people chasing us.
Chasing me.
Thinking about them made me want to check myself for signs, so I headed into the bathroom, where I stared at myself in the mirror.
I was a few inches taller than average. Long-limbed and wiry. No pimples. Hair straight and black, longish for now, which I liked, although Mom would insist I cut it if we had to move on. In the dull overhead light, my hair looked so dark that it had an almost purple sheen. My eyes were large, almond-shaped, the irises an icy light blue.
“My dude,” I said to my reflection. “You are looking human as hell today.”
Most of the time, life as a half-alien fugitive was really freaking boring.
2
I was twelve years old when Mom told me. My alias at the time was Quentin Quill, probably my most ridiculous name of all time, but one that lent me a certain air of mystery in the halls of Dan Marino Middle School in Miami. I had my first girlfriend there. We nervously made out in the music room while some sophomores honked through saxophone practice.
I flipped out when Mom declared the operation was ending. We were moving on, leaving Miami. I think she was worried that if I fell too deep into preteen lust, I might let one of our secrets slip.
I tossed my plastic TV dinner tray against the wall of our apartment, splattering Salisbury steak gravy everywhere.
“You’re ruining my life!” I screamed.
My mom drummed her fingers on the table. “Calm down.”
“This is all bullshit,” I replied, pointing at her. “You’re a crazy person. There’s no one after us. It’s all in your head.”
“They almost caught us in Mexico,” she said. “Did you forget?”
“Maybe those guys were chasing us because of our fake passports,” I said. “Or because of those tourists you pickpocketed. Maybe they were after you because you’re a criminal. There’s no conspiracy!”
This was a theory I’d been developing for a while at the time, ever since I’d read this book about a kid whose parents kept him trapped in a bunker, convinced the apocalypse had happened, even though it was totally normal outside. My mom made a lot of wild claims about the government. She said they were after us, but she never elaborated on why. I’d gone along with her for years because, well, I was a kid and didn’t know any better. She was my mom, and I believed her. But that night, at the ripe age of twelve, I thought I was wising up. The things I’d witnessed—like those meatheads running after us in Mexico—were they really proof of some insidious government plot?
“Do you think I’m insane? Some kind of sadist? That I enjoy dragging my son around the country and making his life miserable?”
She asked these questions coolly, her voice flat.
I swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
My mom got up from the table, and I flinched when her chair squeaked across the floor. She came over to my side of the table and put her hands gently on my shoulders.
“It’s okay. I raised you to be skeptical. To be paranoid. I’m glad you’re suspicious. Even if it’s of me.” She looked into my eyes. “I wish you could have a normal life, Sydney. I really do. But that’s never going to be possible for you.”
“Why not?”
“They’ve taken so much from me already,” she grumbled, her lips curling, a private thought making her suddenly angry. “I won’t let them take you, too.”
“They,” I repeated, remembering my righteous anger from a moment ago. “You always talk about ‘them,’ but you don’t actually tell me anything. You don’t—”
“Your father came from a planet called Denza in a solar system millions of light-years away,” she said. “He was an extraterrestrial. You are half-alien.”
I blinked. Then I gently slid her hands off my shoulders.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “It’s true. You are nuts.”
My mom shook her head. “Go put your bathing suit on.”
“What?”
“Put your bathing suit on and fill up the bathtub,” she said, straightening up. “I’ll prove it to you.”
That nig
ht, my mom drowned me.
Most of the time, I followed my mom’s orders. But, after an hour reading about the Opium Wars, which weren’t nearly as cool as they sounded, I needed to stretch my legs. Our backyard was out of sight of the Green Guard campsite. I figured that would work as a compromise. Mom wouldn’t want me to stay inside all day if it meant suffocation or muscle atrophy, right?
Out back, I crouched over our garden, which was pretty sparse now that my mom had harvested all the weed. I peered under the plastic tarps to see if there were any carrots or zucchini in need of picking.
Footfalls crunched in the woods behind me. I jumped up and spun around. Thanks to my mom’s lifelong paranoia, I was trained to think anyone approaching me could be a potential danger.
“Hey,” Rebecca said, stopping in her tracks. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I thought you could be a bear,” I said quickly.
She made her fingers into claws. “Growl.”
I pretended to shriek.
Okay, so maybe I’d gone outside hoping that she would pop by.
Rebecca was with the Green Guard. We’d met the other day. In fact, I’d spent most of my time at the Green Guard’s campsite chatting with her. She claimed that she was eighteen, but I didn’t believe her. She seemed only a few months older than me. She’d dropped out of high school, she told me, because it all seemed pointless when the world was dying. She had wavy blond hair that looked like it’d been gone over with a pink highlighter. She wore ratty Converse sneakers and one of those puffy life preserver vests. She was cute. And I’m not just saying that because I’d been cooped up in the woods with my mom for a year.
“Wanted to let you know, some of us are going to sneak onto the despoilers’ work site tonight and siphon gas from their trucks,” Rebecca said, joining me by the garden. “Maybe slash some tires. If you want to come along.”
“Oh, uh, I probably can’t. My mom wouldn’t go for it.”
Rebecca raised an eyebrow. I cringed inwardly. Cool excuse, bro.
“Your mom’s not into ethical vandalism?” Rebecca asked with a smirk.
“No, actually, I think she is, but . . .” I shrugged. “It’s really hard to sneak out of our house.”
Ashfall Legacy Page 1
