“We borrowed it,” Phoebe said carefully, “from the Styrlax. It can travel much faster than anything humans have.”
“What’s a Styrlax?” said Liam.
“Another alien,” said Phoebe.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No. And they have these ships that can make wormholes. That’s how we—they—”
“You can just say we,” said Liam. “I get it.”
“Okay. Well, yeah, that’s how we got to Mars so fast. But like I said, I haven’t been with the rest of the team since I was ten years old. I’m sorry I don’t know more.”
“It seems logical,” said JEFF, “that with such a small force and only one ship, the Telphons bided their time to obtain the completed Phase Two data, and then waited until humanity was scattered in order to attack, utilizing the element of surprise. By attacking the fleet from the rear and disabling communications, they could create as much confusion as possible. Does that sound about right?”
“I guess,” said Phoebe.
Liam eyed Phoebe, thinking again about how if she had erased the backup recorder, that still fit with this plan JEFF was laying out. . . . He gazed back at the station. “We should have questioned those two.”
“They wouldn’t have told us anything,” said Phoebe. “They’d rather die.”
“What about you?”
“I made my choice, okay? We should just go.”
“I agree,” said JEFF. “Initiating launch sequence.”
The thrusters rumbled and the cruiser lurched from the ground. Its headlights swept over the dark station buildings, dead and frosted. Liam wondered how many years or centuries these ruins would sit here silently, looking exactly the same. He wondered if Barro and Tarra would die here, freezing to death or starving, or if they’d be able to get the Comet off the ground and escape. Liam thought that he hoped for the former, and yet his very next thought was that Phoebe would be sad, and also that it was cruel to just leave them here, and yet what other choice was there?
As they rose, he saw the baths beyond the casino dome. Steam was pluming out of those buildings now, catching the wind as it froze and leaping away in strange geometric clouds. The bases of the clouds glowed orange with the light from inside. It looked primal, like the videos Liam had seen of volcanoes back on Earth. There would be nothing warm in space. Thirty-three years of cold and dark awaited them.
The cruiser bucked and hopped in the whipping winds. JEFF accelerated beyond the station and out over the frozen expanse. Ice flashed and blurred in the ship’s lights. The hulking wreckage of the Scorpius core towered above, the arcing teeth of ice and rock. A rare gap had opened in the cloud layer, revealing a brilliant field of stars. Liam looked from the core to the stars and played with the radio beacon between his fingers, tapping it now and then. He wished it would blink, just once.
“Buckle up for escape thrust,” said JEFF. Liam and Phoebe got into their seats as JEFF angled the ship steeply toward the sky, and the frozen wastes of Delphi disappeared behind them.
The cruiser started to rattle and buck, almost like it was skidding on the air.
“Is that okay?” Liam called over the racket.
“It is not ideal,” said JEFF. “But we only have to ascend a little bit farther. . . .”
And a moment later they were up and out, the rumble of wind and their engines snuffing to silence, bodies floating against their restraints in zero gravity.
They circled the planet, a slingshot to increase their speed. Along the way they passed the spinning hulk of the starliner’s second fusion engine, glowing futilely as it tumbled along in orbit, as well as some other twisted debris, including the wrecks of at least one military cruiser. Liam felt fresh worry, imagining Mina, Shawn, all of them, floating in space. But thankfully, there was no sign of stasis pods.
“Switching off thrusters,” said JEFF. “Bringing the fusion engine online.”
Liam watched the scanner map with Delphi at the center of many circles. They were merely a dot now too, still nearly on top of the planet.
“Calculating final course vector. And . . . initiating primary burn.”
The engine lit up, and Liam felt the hard press back against his seat. The cruiser rumbled around them, making Liam’s teeth vibrate, and then shot away from Delphi, into the endless dark once more.
The map flashed off, replaced by a message: SIGNAL LOST.
“We are out of range of the backup scanner,” said JEFF.
“On our own again,” Liam said quietly.
The engine burned for thirty more minutes, a gradual increase until they’d reached their maximum velocity. Then JEFF cut it, and the silence of space engulfed them.
10
DISTANCE TO CENTAURI B: 3.3 LIGHT-YEARS
Liam gazed out into the empty dark, glittering with distant stars, and tried to keep his feelings steady. A pit had opened in his stomach and he felt himself welling up. Everything was so far away again. It would be thirty-three years before they saw another object that could trick them into believing in solid ground, thirty-three years without setting foot in a place that wouldn’t immediately kill them. Thirty-three years with what increasingly felt like merely a thin shell of technology between them and death. Of course it wouldn’t feel that long, being in stasis, and yet stasis did its own strange thing to time. He might have only been awake for what amounted to a week now since Mars, but it felt so much longer, like the ten years had seeped into him in some way that he couldn’t quite quantify. And this next journey was more than three times that long.
Phoebe unbuckled and left the cabin. Liam fished Mina’s link out of the seat pocket and sent her a message with the beacon.
we think you are headed to destina
we are coming
see you in thirty three years
Of course the beacon didn’t blink back. Of course she was in stasis. Hopefully on the Scorpius, not tumbling endlessly through the dark. Not among drifting starliner wreckage. If that was the case, he could only hope that her pod was fully functional, that at least she’d be peacefully asleep until her batteries ran out. . . .
Liam felt dizzy, his mouth dry. He shut his eyes tight. Tried to imagine him and Mina together somewhere, but he didn’t know where to put them. The balcony on Mars again . . . and yet he could only think of how that spot, that entire planet, didn’t even exist anymore.
“I would recommend we prepare for stasis shortly,” said JEFF.
Liam unbuckled. “Okay. Give me a minute to talk to Phoebe, okay?”
“Acknowledged.” JEFF swiveled around. “Liam, I hope you do not mind me inquiring: If Phoebe is part of the hostile force, have you calculated the odds that she is not being honest with you?”
“I believe her.”
“And what about the odds that she is telling you what you want to hear only until she can reunite with her people—”
“Yeah, JEFF!” Liam snapped. “I have calculated that, actually. And those odds are still better than any other chance we’ve got. She’s my friend. I don’t expect your circuit-board brain to understand, so do me a favor and leave it alone.” He thrust himself out of the cockpit.
“Liam,” JEFF called from behind him. “I did not intend to anger you—” but Liam just kept moving.
He found Phoebe in back, floating between her parents’ pods. “Hey.”
Phoebe didn’t turn around. “I’ve been getting up early at every stop and fixing their faces. The putty gets brittle over time.”
“You want to tell me more about it?”
Phoebe sighed and spun around. “I do. I’m so sorry . . . but also so mad, and sad. I don’t even know how to start.”
“I don’t either. Maybe tell me about Telos?”
Phoebe’s mouth scrunched. “Let’s go sit.” She pushed toward the door. They floated back to the main cabin and buckled into the couch.
Liam sat there, not sure what to say. Phoebe stared across the room. Finally she pinched her sleeve an
d pulled up the fabric tab in the crook of her elbow, where the fluid line went. She ran her finger over the three faded black circles there. The skin covering had cracked beneath them.
“We only put the putty on up to the shoulders,” she explained. She dug her fingernail into her elbow and scraped the covering away, exposing the purple and bristled skin beneath. Three permanent black dots were tattooed there.
“I told you my brother and grandparents died in an accident. It’s true. Nearly everyone on Telos died. Me and my parents and Barro and Tarra and only like two hundred other people survived.”
“That’s horrible. What happened?”
Phoebe bit her lip. “We weren’t violent people. I mean, there were wars on Telos. Not so much when I was growing up, but there had been big ones in the past. Telos was a little younger than Earth, but we were pretty similar, like our technology and stuff. I don’t know. Anyway, it was a mostly peaceful place at the end. There were whole cultures that we lost in the attack.”
“You were attacked?” said Liam.
“Sort of. It’s . . .” Phoebe rubbed her legs and started to cry. “Remembering is hard.”
Liam put his arm around her. He tensed as he did it; again, feeling that weird uncertainty about what she even was that he hated feeling. It was fear, wasn’t it? Because he couldn’t begin to understand her yet. Except that he knew her pretty well. Didn’t he?
“I wish you could see it,” said Phoebe. “I wish I could take you there and show you.”
Liam pulled his arm back.
“Sorry, am I leaking skin on you? This is why Mom was always so severe. Showing our emotions might literally give us away.”
“It’s not that.” Liam ran his finger over the watch dial. “I just wonder if you could show me with this. Like maybe the watch could take us both back.”
“I thought it only worked for the person wearing it.”
“Me too. I learned some new things about it when I went back to see what you were doing with the backup recorder. You did erase it, didn’t you?”
Phoebe nodded. “I was afraid if the details of the attack got out, colonial would somehow figure out that we were Telphons, and then they might not help my parents on the Scorpius, or they might just kill us when we got there or something.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“I swear as soon as we were safely off Delphi I was going to. That’s probably hard to believe.”
Liam shrugged. “So you weren’t, like, acting on orders?”
“No! The only orders I’ve ever gotten are to play along, stay out of the way, and not get found out.
“If you’d been able to see me down there, you would have seen me freaking out and yelling at myself and not knowing what to do.”
“I did see you,” said Liam. Phoebe looked at him oddly. “You looked like you were quietly working.”
“Well, yeah, but I was a mess inside. It’s been like that the whole time. I have to maintain this perfect exterior, while inside, I’m losing it. I’ve had to think three times about every single thing I’ve said, worrying who I’m betraying.”
“That sounds hard,” said Liam.
Phoebe just nodded. “How did you see me down there? We weren’t together.”
“I sorta broke from my own timeline. It didn’t go well. Turns out if I had followed you, it would have led to the recorder self-destructing. Also I guess I almost caused reality to collapse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I met that alien that we got the watch from, and she told me.”
“You mean the scientist alien? She wasn’t dead?”
“She’s called a chronologist. I guess for her, it was earlier in time.”
“That’s confusing.”
“It got worse. She was fixing a weak spot in space-time. She said it was already there, and I kinda ran into it when I pushed out of my own timeline.”
“How exactly did you leave your timeline?”
“I can’t really do it. Just sort of. She said I’ve been altered by using the watch, or something.”
“None of that sounds good, Liam. Maybe we shouldn’t use it anymore.”
“She just said I shouldn’t try to push out of my own timeline again. But it mainly had to do with being in that spot. Here’s the thing: she said what the watch does is create a time field around the person wearing it. So I wonder if we could get it to create a field around both of us. Then we could see things together.”
“How would we do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if we held hands or something.” Liam pulled off the watch and held it out to her.
Phoebe raised an eyebrow at him.
“It’s just a theory. But if it works, you could show me where you’re from.”
“All right.” Phoebe slipped on the watch and took his hand. Her fingers and skin still felt human.
“Here goes.” She turned the dial backward.
Liam felt something. A sort of nauseous swaying, like he’d suddenly lost his balance, or the belt holding him to the couch had come undone. Echoes in his head like backward voices, him and Phoebe talking, the shouting back on Delphi, and Liam thought he saw the steam baths kind of appear around him.
Then he rushed back to the present. Phoebe was blinking at him. “Did it work?”
“I think it almost did, but I only saw back a little ways.”
“I went all the way to Telos. It seemed like maybe you were there but then I couldn’t see you.” Phoebe unbuckled and floated up. She slid her toe under the edge of the couch so that she was in a standing position. “Maybe we need to be closer. Get up.”
Liam unbuckled. “What do you mean?” He hooked his toe like Phoebe so that he was standing, facing her.
“Hug me,” said Phoebe, glancing quickly away as she said it.
“Hug?” Liam’s mouth was instantly dry, his armpits sweating.
“Yes, duh, a hug. Don’t make it any more awkward than it already is, okay? But maybe if we’re that close, the watch will take us both.”
“Um . . .”
“Just come on.” Phoebe pushed toward him and wrapped her arms around him. “This is another thing that if you ever tell Shawn—”
“I know already, just try it.” Liam put his arms around her.
“Okay.” She craned to see over his shoulder and her chin rubbed past his neck and he thought of how her skin wasn’t her real skin and how he’d even thought it was strange when he’d kissed her that time. I kissed an alien. He could feel her fiddling with the watch, heard it click, and he held his breath—
They started moving, together.
The world slipped and lurched out of gear, into reverse. Liam could still see himself hugging Phoebe in the cabin, but he also saw a backward view first of the Delphi baths, then off the frozen planet into space.
“Ooh, shut your eyes!” said Phoebe, her voice breezy and distant but also seemingly inside his ear.
“Why?”
“I’m going to the bathroom!”
Liam saw the cruiser’s bathroom door close—he really was seeing Phoebe’s version of history around him—and he shut his eyes tight.
“Okay, you can open them.” Liam saw a long, gray period of just dull shadows, with little blooms of color here and there. “Just boring old stasis,” said Phoebe.
She pulled away and stood beside him.
“Wait—” Liam began, but then he saw that back in the cockpit, they were still hugging.
“I think it’s okay. Hang on, I’m going to speed things up.” She clicked the dial two more notches.
Liam winced, a headache slivering through his mind. He felt himself wobbling on his feet, but not really on his feet. More like wobbling in reality, and there was that hollow feeling again, like all the tiny spaces inside him, right down to his cells, were expanding. Outside, they left stasis, zipped around—Liam briefly saw them flying through the comet fragments, and then he saw the skim drone from a distance as Phoebe woul
d have seen it, but it was going by so fast he could barely tell—then back into stasis again.
He felt like he might throw up. “I’m closing my eyes,” he said. “Just tell me when we get there.”
The hollow wind of the timestream grew louder around him. Liam started to feel like he was a breeze, not quite all in one place, his thoughts having to cross wide distances.
“Phoebe, this is too fast!”
“I know,” Phoebe said dreamily. Liam peered out his squinted eyes and saw that the version of her here in the timestream had her arms out, her face serene: that same expression she’d had on the roof of Vista, back on Mars.
Liam felt spread out, dangerously so. He shut his eyes again, tried to focus on himself. Needed to stay in one piece, whatever that meant.
And then all at once, everything halted. There was a wild swirling sound, as if a dust devil had wrapped around them. Liam felt like he’d been stopped, crushed, and then everything became silent and still.
“We’re here,” said Phoebe.
Liam opened his eyes and saw that time had reversed, moving at a slight fast-forward.
Outside the timestream, they were standing in a patch of crimson-colored grass, its blades short and thick and rubbery. The sky was lavender colored, and a series of rings sparkled faintly like a rainbow high above sienna-colored clouds. It seemed to be evening, and yet the sun was directly overhead, a small orb the color of a penny, casting a mellow glow.
“This is Telos,” said Phoebe. The scene swayed back and forth, and Liam realized this view through Phoebe’s eyes was taking place from something like a playground swing that she was sitting on, except instead of hanging on chains, the seat was humming between two parallel bars that seemed to be magnetized.
Phoebe pointed across the wide lawn. It was crisscrossed by a series of gray stone paths, and surrounded on all sides by triangle-shaped buildings, their surfaces glittering in a black covering woven with gold circuitry. There were taller buildings in the distance, also in triangular shapes and glistening black. “That’s my house,” said Phoebe, singling out one of the closer structures.
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