by Adam Holt
“Every time we chop wood, we get a little stronger,” I said.
Sunjay chopped the air a few times with his axe. “Yes, for when the Ascendant attack! Second contact. We’ve got to keep training. I’ve been thinking up new moves.”
“Right now we need to keep chopping baby logs, dude. My aunt said it’s getting cold tonight.”
“If it gets any colder, I’ll be pooping ice cubes, Tully.”
“Happy New Year,” I said, grabbing a few logs and hauling them across my aunt’s yard. Sunjay was distracted by his own sound effects, so I sneaked around the side of the house for a few moments of peace, watching the sun’s first rays on Mt. Denali, a shark tooth gnawing on the Alaskan sky.
It was January 1, 2070. We had been there for two months.
I wondered what my dad was doing at that moment. He promised to inform us of what the Space Alliance had planned. I had kept my promises, but we hadn’t heard from him in over a week.
The cold bit at my aching hands, so I rubbed them together and watched the north wind blow snow from the peak of Mt. Denali.
The front door of the cabin swung open, and my aunt called for us. “How’s that wood pile treatin’ you, Tchochtke?” My aunt had a new name for Sunjay every hour.
“Like it wants to kill me, Auntie.”
“Well, you and Tullyboy better get in here.”
From the tone of her voice, I picked up something was wrong. I sprinted around the house to her front door. “Is it news from dad?”
“No, it’s breakfast, and it’s getting cold.”
False alarm.
We ate our caribou steak and egg breakfast. “Breakfast of champions,” I said, picking at my food.
“And I am the champion of breakfast!” Sunjay said, inhaling his food like it was air.
“You know, caribou is just another word for reindeer,” I said. “You’re eating Rudolph right now.”
He stopped inhaling for a moment. “Stop messing with me.”
“No, it’s true,” I said. “He had a very shiny nose and you’re probably eating it.” After that, Sunjay slowed down a little and frowned at his food. It was early and I was cranky. I’m a holstered gun. A weapon that no one can aim.
We listened to the news on my aunt’s ancient flat screen television. Every once in a while public service announcement appeared. It began with #FindTabithaTirelli and ended with a picture of the abducted girl: that dark hair, make-me-nervous perfect smile, and lovely green eyes.
We stopped eating. My aunt noticed. She popped a cassette tape into her stereo.
“What the heck is that?” Sunjay asked.
“It’s a mix tape,” my aunt explained.
“A what?”
“They were used for recording music back in the day. You’ve never heard of that?” she asked, turning up the music.
“Oh, I saw one in a museum last year. There’s actual tape in that plastic box and the stereo reads it, right?”
“Yes, then you rewind it and flip it over. It holds about a dozen songs.”
“That’s hilarious,” he said. “You’d have to carry a suitcase full of those if you wanted any kind of variety. Oh, and what about playlists?”
“A mix tape is a playlist. My mother always talked about how she met a boy at summer camp. She liked him, and he mailed her a mix tape later that year. It was full of love songs from the 1980’s. Matter of fact, that was Tully’s grandfather. She married that boy five years later.” Aunt Selma showed Sunjay the mix tape, which had a big heart drawn on the front. It reminded me of one of Tabitha’s doodles. Sunjay laughed hysterically.
“Stars, people used to do dire cheesy things!” Sunjay said. “But, you know, maybe I should make one for Queen Envy and send it to her. Do you think she would like it? Oh, I miss her.”
“Speaking of dire cheesy,” I said. For some reason the thought of mix tapes made me feel black inside, like a heavy weight settled into the pit of my stomach. I excused myself and wandered into my aunt’s study. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror. All feet five, one hundred pounds of me, with brown hair spilling out of my baseball hat. I needed to put on some muscle if I was going to fight the Ascendant. Beside the mirror there was a chest beneath a cot. I opened the chest and pulled out a tattered grey cloth. The moment I touched it, the cloth glowed faintly red. My half of Tabitha’s mood scarf.
If I could send a mix tape to anyone in the universe, I would send it to you, but who knows where you are. The Sacred’s words came back to me like a response: You must pass through shadow and flame before you see her again. I let my thoughts ramble and stared at the scarf in my scarred hands. It seemed to melt into a blur of color and image—from red to blue to purple, and then to a figure standing in a distant tower. Ever since the Sacred touched the scarf, it seemed to have a mind of its own, making images where only colors used to be. I wondered if it was real, if Tabitha really stood there in the purple tower, waiting for us to find her. And I wondered if she could see me kneeling beside the cot with half of her scarf in my hands. Somebody show me to the nearest shadow and flame and let’s get started. This is why I left the scarf in the cabin. It was too tempting to touch.
“Yes, I have created a monster!” When Sunjay cheered it woke me up. I had nodded off with my head on the cot and the scarf in my hand. I wandered back into the room to find him holding his mix tape overhead in triumph.
“When Queen Envy hears this, she will forget all about Commander Harper,” Sunjay beamed.
“Man, I hope so,” I said.
“The sooner I get this into her hands, the quicker she will fall in love with me!”
And then it struck me.
“You’re absolutely right. The time is now. Let’s drive into town and mail Sunjay’s tape!”
“Oh, please, Aunt Selma,” said Sunjay. “You can’t deny true love. I will kill every baby log in the whole forest if you will take us to town.”
“Well, that weather will blow in by tonight,” she said. My head fell, but she wasn’t done. “I guess we’d better make this a quicker trip than usual. Let’s take the plane.”
“The what?” I asked.
Looking back on it, the fact that Aunt Selma had a plane was the least surprising thing that happened that day.
AWAY TEAM BETA –
THE DAY IS UPON US.
EXPECT UPDATES ON LOCATION SOON.
REMAIN IN SHADOW MODE.
-GT
PROFILE: SUNJAY CHAKRAVORTY
Height: 5’8” Weight: ~150LBS. Black curly hair, brown eyes.
CAPTURE DEAD OR ALIVE
Subject has some training in martial arts.
Immature; easily frightened.
Stronger than Tully but ineffective in battle.
Await further updates.
WE ARE ASCENDANT. WE ALWAYS RISE.
SECOND CONTACT
“You have a plane?” I said. “Why do we always take your crappy truck to town?”
“That’s no way to talk about your Auntie’s Jeep. I just prefer ground transportation is all,” she said.
“Stars, I guess we should get some better breakfast food while we’re there,” I said.
“If you want to,” she replied.
“But, but, but...”
“But you never asked politely like your pal Funday,” she said. All that time eating caribou and asparagus and stale biscuits. Stars, all I had to do was ask?
Sure enough, on the far side of the lake from her house Aunt Selma had a hangar, and in the hangar a plane. “It’s called a Piper Cub,” she said, churning the old motor. “It’s a pontoon plane. Your daddy and mamma used to love to fly this old thing when they visited.” My dad flew spaceships. It was hard to picture him in this cramped cockpit. And with my mom? She was only a ghost to me.
We piled into the Piper. It smelled like grease, leather, and rust, but it worked. We taxied onto the lake, and in no time were bouncing through the air just as much as we would have on the road. Aunt Selma
let us take turns at the controls. If the mix tape made his day, flying the plane made Sunjay’s year. If there’s anything he loves more than flying—well, it’s Queen Envy and food, but flying is high on the list.
Aunt Selma took control close to town, she docked the plane, and we popped into the general store to mail the tape and pick up breakfast options. I hadn’t thought about the Ascendant or Tabitha for hours, not until Sunjay and I sat down at the counter in the general store for a root beer float with a bag of gummy worms beside us.
The store had a LiveWall like the one at my house in Houston. It was huge, dusty, and wedged between two narrow mirrors. The college football championships were playing on the LiveWall. Then the screen went black.
Everyone, probably thirty people, mostly burly bearded men, groaned. Sunjay and I just shrugged and drank our floats. He started giving me advice on how to best fly a plane.
“Did you see how I did it, Tully? You’ve got to make little adjustments on the stick, even when it’s bumpy. That’s the key, my friend.” I took a sip of my root beer and looked back at the screen in front of me. That’s when I stopped him mid-thought.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Look at that LiveWall,” I said.
There on the screen was a logo I had not seen since we returned from space—a crown with three rubies hovering over the Earth.
“What is that?” he asked. Everyone else murmured the same question. I turned my eyes from the LiveWall and in the dusty mirror saw my reflection—straight brown hair, tired brown eyes, and my face suddenly gone white. So this is what I look like when the universe changes. It wasn’t any better than looking at the image, so I turned toward it again. That crown, with three sharp points and three blood red jewels, was a symbol of everything evil in the universe and everyone who betrayed me. The last time I had seen it was on a disembodied hand, cut from its owner when I closed the portal.
“Wait, is that?” but I stopped him cold. “Wasn’t that on…?”
“—Gallant Trackman’s ring,” I whispered. “That’s the Ascendant symbol.”
“Second contact,” he whispered.
“Second contact,” I repeated.
But when the screen went gray and a face appeared, it was not the beady-eyed Gallant Trackman or the tattooed Ascendant Lord. It was the smiling face of a girl whose green eyes lit up the screen.
NO TIME FOR SMOOTH LANDINGS
She spoke.
“To the People of Earth, I greet you in the name of the Ascendant. My name is Tabitha Tirelli, and I am one of you. You may recognize me. You probably heard that someone in the Florida Everglades abducted me. This was widely reported; however, it is not true. The real story is more complicated: I boarded the spacecraft Adversity, piloted by Commander Mike Harper, along with Tully Harper and Sunjay Chakravorty, my classmates. They all returned from that journey into space, except for me. What I am about to tell you will change the history of the solar system.”
Our school pictures appeared in the corner of the screen; our actual faces reflected beside them in the mirror. Sunjay and I froze. We needed to get out of there, but the crowd packed in tightly behind us at the bar.
Tabitha continued. “After we escaped into space, I was abducted by the Ascendant, a superior race of beings. Commander Harper sabotaged their ship while in space. Their ship, with me on board, hardly made it back to their home world, but we survived, and now I have a message to deliver to the world.
“For many centuries, the Ascendant observed us from afar. They admire our desires to better ourselves, to reach for the stars. And so the time has come: the Ascendant have decided to reveal themselves to us. And what’s even better, they intend to live among us on the Earth.”
All the gruff men at the bar looked confused. “Is this some movie trailer?” I wished that it were. The storeowner flipped the channel, but Tabitha’s face appeared on every channel.
“I guess this is the real deal, gentleman.”
“Time to stock up on food and ammo.”
“Dangit, aliens. I knew it. I always told you they were out there, Bo.”
“Shut up, Mark. The girl’s still talking.”
How is she keeping it together? Half this stuff is the truth and half is a lie—well, sort of. Tabitha seemed so calm and composed. Her acting skills saved us in space, and they only seemed to be getting better.
“The Ascendant asked me to speak on their behalf, and I agreed to speak for one reason: I believe they can help us build a better world.”
Build a better world or be better slaves? They’ve threatened her, made her say this. I almost jumped off my stool. That would have blown our cover for sure, but Sunjay put a hand on my arm, whispering, “We need to hear this.”
“The Ascendant know that it will be hard to find a place for them. The Earth is a crowded planet, but they come bearing gifts that will make it easier. Here are some samples.” Tabitha described them—gene therapies for cancer, superfoods to end world hunger, all the electricity we would ever need. It was a perfect infomercial for the Ascendant, and like most informercials, it was too good to be true.
“The Ascendant will bring us all these good things, but they need something first—as a show of good faith from the people of Earth.” A purple tower in a tall city appeared on the screen. In my visions I had seen this place! Lighting the top of the tower was a glowing red sphere. “You know this object as the Harper Device. By now many of you have already guessed the truth: it belongs to the Ascendant. Commander Harper took it from the surface of Mars, and he planned to hide it forever. The Space Alliance did not want you to know about this, but the Ascendant do. People of Earth, it is dangerous in the wrong hands, and so are the people who have handled it.”
Our pictures appeared on the screen again. Everyone leaned forward to look at our photos. I put a hand on my forehead and looked down.
“So please,” she continued, “before the Ascendant arrive, they request the Harper Device be returned to them, as well as Commander Harper and his son. They came into contact with the Device, and it has infected them with an alien virus. They are a danger to themselves and to those around them. If you know their whereabouts, please text or call us at the number on your screen. You will be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.”
It was Sunjay’s turn to jump. He bumped the man beside him, and the man elbowed him back. At that moment I actually felt radioactive, like I was contaminating everything around me, making these people guilty of crimes they did not commit, making them sick with an illness that no one understood. But another feeling rose to the surface: fear. I was smashed between fifty hunters in a general store, and now there was a bounty on my head.
“In the name of the Ascendant, I am signing off. To my mom and dad and brothers, and all my friends, I look forward to seeing you when the Ascendant bring me back to our shared home, the Earth. And to Tully, for all our sakes, return the Device. I know that you are mad and confused, but I still have faith...that you will turn yourself over to the Ascendant for help.”
I still have faith. Her only pause. In the midst of all those lies, one glimmer of truth. Those were your last words to me, Tabitha, but not that I would turn myself over. That I would fulfill my promise, and that’s what I’m going to do... if I don’t get captured first.
Tabitha faded away: the crown and rubies appeared on the screen again. Then, like nothing ever happened, the football game appeared on the screen. Something had happened though. The people around us turned to their neighbors and began to talk. Sunjay and I huddled together.
“We’re trapped,” he whispered back.
“I noticed,” I said.
“Looks like State scored,” someone else said.
“Who gives a rip about State, Richard. Aliens are coming for Alaska.”
“And they’ll pay a bounty beyond your wildest dreams for that virus boy,” said another.
“I dunno. My dreams are pretty wild.”
The burly man beside Sunjay ta
pped him on the shoulder. Sunjay turned toward him, on instinct, and the man frowned. “You aren’t from around here, are you?” But before he had time to ask any more questions, I heard several loud booms followed by dozens of high-pitched cracks like gunshots. Everyone in the bar ducked for cover. We looked out the window and in the middle of the street were about ten boxes of fireworks. They were exploding, Roman candles launching in all directions. Some people in the bar hit the floor. Some started laughing. A few ran outside to put them out with an extinguisher.
From behind I felt a strong hand on my shoulder grab me and tug me past the end of the bar and out a side door. In the other hand was Sunjay. We fought for a moment until we realized that Aunt Selma was dragging us down an alley and out to the dock where we landed the plane. Her boots thudded, heavy and quick, on the dock.
“Sorry, boys, but we may have to leave without getting that extra cereal,” she said over her shoulder. We hopped into the plane. “And just to be clear, you owe me one hundred dollars for all those fireworks. I hate wasting money, but it seemed like the only way to get you outta there. You can explain about Tabitha and your alien problems on the way home.”
On the flight back to her house we did our best to explain. It was a lot for Aunt Selma to take in. She nodded, frowned, but in the end simply said, “Well, that all makes sense. When I saw that video you all made about going camping in Florida, I thought, ‘Tully isn’t the camping type. Sunjay and Tabitha either.’ Your daddy’s not much of a liar, either. I knew you were up to something. Stars, you devilish boys, you went to space and your girl Tabitha joined up with some aliens. Now all I need to know is this: are you okay, Tully?”
“Of course not,” I said. “The entire world is on a manhunt for me and I need to figure out how to save Tabitha, and I don’t think Tabitha really believes—”
“No, not all that. I mean the virus thing. I don’t care if you infected me, and I guess Sunjay would be just as bad off, too, but I just want to know if we need to get you some medicine. You drive me crazy sometime, Tully, but you’re blood. I’d fly this plane to a proper hospital in Anchorage for you right now if you asked.”
