“We’ll be there soon,” Luka said.
I opened my eyes to see the Houston skyline on the horizon, doused with evening sun. Luka’s hand was on my arm, gently waking me.
The car was still driving itself. Luka pulled his hand back and crossed his arms over his chest. Mitsuko was dozing behind me, and Emilio was gazing out the window.
My stomach felt hollow. I’d eaten nothing but cheese crackers and mixed nuts all day. My legs ached with disuse. The danger we were headed into didn’t feel real.
Luka was still facing the road, as though he didn’t trust the car to keep us safe, but he snuck a cautious glance at me. “I would be lying if I did not tell you I considered leaving this place and taking you with me.”
That made me sit up straighter. “I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t leave my family, or them,” I said, jerking my head to the back seat. “I couldn’t.”
He didn’t seem surprised, only a little sad. “I know. I’ve been wondering . . . if we’re successful . . . if I should be allowed to stay here. Much less with you.”
Now I regarded him with more gentleness. “Of course you should stay,” I whispered, mindful that our bubble of privacy was both transient and permeable. “This is where you belong.”
“I can’t help but wonder what kind of life we may have . . . together. Should we succeed. And survive.”
The fact that he noted those two things separately was disconcerting. “Me too,” I admitted. “Though I think we can save that conversation for later. We’ll figure it out, okay? Cross that bridge when we come to it.” I emphasized the when a little too much. “Wait, but—you’re not seriously considering leaving with the megobari?”
“The megobari need to leave Earth alone. We’ve meddled enough.” His voice dropped. “You deserve to be left alone, if you choose.”
I reached over for his hand. “I can’t speak for the rest of Earth, but that’s not what I choose.”
He squeezed my hand and relaxed a little more in his seat, beginning to smile. “Thank you. I—”
Mitsuko screamed.
Luka reacted instantly. He grabbed the wheel, jamming it to the right, as proximity alarms screamed from all four corners of the car. We jerked, swerved hard onto the shoulder, Luka’s body crushing mine into the car door with the force of his momentum.
“What the hell was that?” Emilio asked. He wasn’t talking about Luka’s driving.
Fiery debris littered the interstate. Most were small—the size of basketballs, maybe. But a piece of warped metal twice the size of our car had embedded itself into the asphalt, right in the middle of the lanes. The light traffic had come to a standstill; cars had skittered across the road like toys scattered by a child’s tantrum.
At least one of the cars had been hit, a rock denting its hood. The owners stood safely outside, horror-struck and dazed.
Out, out, OUT, my brain chanted, my hands scrambling to free myself from my seat belt. Luka disentangled himself from me, following me out of the car seconds after. But our car was fine—we hadn’t been hit. Luka had disengaged the auto-pilot and swerved us out of the way of the twisted metal sculpture that now protruded, smoking, from the asphalt.
Houston’s skyline was no longer lit and glittering by the setting sun. It was shadowed by a mass of smoke, high in the atmosphere, like Houston had its own personal rain cloud.
Fire rained like falling stars for miles, streaks of orange trailed by smoke, like fireworks gone wrong. We were far enough away that we’d only gotten a minor drizzle of fire—the destruction was raining down for hundreds of miles. Something indescribably massive had exploded.
It’s the end of the world, I thought, my insides quaking. Then—Skyfall. Had Crane already activated the device?
I wasn’t aware Mitsuko and Emilio had joined us until she swore under her breath. “We’re too late. That damned idiot.”
We were dead, then. I would never get to see my family again.
“No,” Luka said. He was wincing as he stared at the destruction, as though it hurt his eyes. “I don’t think this is the result of the Skyfall device. The smoke is dissipating. And look—the debris is scattered over a very large area. Most of the debris is very small. It will do damage, yes, but it is meant to appear as more of a threat than it is.” He cocked his head as if a thought just occurred to him. “Get back in the car.”
We piled in. My limbs felt jerky and uncoordinated, like I was operating them from a distance. Mitsuko started the car.
“Pull up the newsfeeds,” Luka said.
We went silent as the car’s windows lit with video clips, breaking news clips, firsthand accounts of witnesses live-tweeting and retweeting the events. Events, plural.
“This is happening all over the country,” Emilio said, awestruck and full of dread.
“It looks like just in the major cities,” I said. Something in my chest held taut. I scanned, gathering names. “Houston, Dallas, New York, Chicago, LA . . .” Nothing about Huntsville. We were small, compared to these places. My parents should be safe—for now. I hoped.
“Just the US?” Luka demanded. He flipped through the increasingly panicked accounts—full of all caps and question marks and exclamation points. Most major outlets hadn’t picked it up yet—these were raw feeds from people recording on their phones, going online with their panic and questions and reports, building on each other’s info. “All I can see are American cities. Nowhere else?”
My eyes blurred.
“Nowhere in Japan are they talking about this,” Mitsuko said, eyes roving over digital pages full of Japanese characters.
“This is not Skyfall,” Luka said. “This is the work of my people.”
We turned to stare at him.
“This is a provocation. This is to scare your country into a rash, violent reaction.”
“They couldn’t have picked a better country for that,” Mitsuko muttered.
“Goading Crane into activating Skyfall when he otherwise wouldn’t,” Emilio said with a humorless laugh. “It’s crudely brilliant.”
“They’ll make him use it,” I said quietly. “The government will go to SEE for help. NASA’s been using their technology for years, they don’t have anything on their own to defend us from something like this, something from space. They’re totally reliant on corporations like SEE for all their space tech. I bet the president has a direct line to Crane’s office.”
“Then our plans haven’t changed,” Mitsuko said as Luka put the car into gear and maneuvered it manually back onto the road, carefully navigating around the stopped cars, stunned pedestrians, and smoldering potholes. “Stop Crane. Stop the sky from falling.”
The deeper we drove into Houston, the darker the sky grew. Sirens punctuated the air, and police were visible at every intersection, like they thought they should make an appearance but weren’t sure exactly what to do about the cataclysm in the sky.
A few pieces of debris were still falling in smoking trails. There were ambulances, honking to get by in the crowded streets, blaring their emergencies. People were standing outside, looking stricken, looking up. Others were speeding out of the city as fast as their mph-controlled engines would take them.
We slowed to a crawl, unable to avoid seeing the damage: wrecked cars, cars pulled up on sidewalks, people sobbing openly, people on their phones, wandering the sidewalks, angling to get a better look at what had exploded over their heads.
“Fragmentation grenades,” Luka murmured, as though to himself.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I was trying to figure out what was detonated. I thought perhaps a ship, but . . . we don’t have enough of those to spare. And there would be more larger pieces, closer together. These seemed designed for massive smoke and fire, and just enough debris for light casualties.”
“Light casualties?” I looked out the window at a bloody and grim-faced family on the sidewalk, their apartment complex ablaze, four fire engines pouring water jets into the windows.
But I kept those words inside. They weren’t constructive, and they wouldn’t help get us out of our current situation.
“When we finish here,” I said under my breath, leaning in toward Luka’s ear, “I’m going to need to discuss some things with these megobari commandos.”
Luka’s jaw clenched, and he did not answer.
When the streets grew so congested that people walking on the sidewalk were moving faster than us, we abandoned the SUV on a residential street and walked the last few blocks.
Though the smoke was too far above our heads to really cause any harm, the few people we passed had started wearing medical face masks. The last news report we’d heard on the radio had asked people to stay inside if at all possible. The air was acrid, bitter, thick with the scent of burning ash and saltpeter.
The crowds thinned to nothing the closer we came to downtown. People had either abandoned their workplaces or were sheltering in place. The towering headquarters of the Society for Extrasolar Exploration took up an entire desolate block.
“So . . . we just walk in?” Emilio said, his voice low.
“You two don’t,” I said. “Not with the guard on the door.”
“I don’t see a guard,” Mitsuko said.
“On the other side of the glass. They’ll be checking IDs, and I’m sure right now they’ve got some extra security.”
“Then none of us are getting in,” Mitsuko said. “None of us have badges.”
“Hanna does.” Emilio’s eyes were set. He’d lost his humor on the burning interstate.
“And we’re just gonna call her? We might as well call Crane and tell him to let us in.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” I asked. “He is looking for us.”
“Then that’s our in,” Mitsuko said decisively. She grabbed my wrist. “Come on. Emilio, Luka, take the car back to my place. We can’t have them grabbing Luka on top of all of this.”
“No way are we hiding out at home,” Emilio protested. “We’ll lie low somewhere nearby, be your backup if something goes wrong.”
“Fine.” Mitsuko hadn’t let go of my hand. She was dragging me away even as she spoke. “But if you don’t hear from us by dark, get to my place and Michael will be able to help. This shit’s bound to go sideways sooner rather than later.”
I glanced at Luka one last time before Mitsuko was opening the glass door and pulling me into the air-conditioned lobby of SEE’s headquarters.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust; the smoke outside had dimmed the daylight. My eyes barely took in the lobby, gathering only vague brushstrokes of marble, flowers in towering vases, swaths of slick architecture and modern, sparse furniture. The air smelled slightly of exotic perfume and lemon floor cleaner.
Immediately there were two men in black uniforms, sidearms holstered at their hips, blocking our way. “This building is currently closed to nonemployees. Please exit the building.”
Mitsuko played the wide-eyed innocent act. “Look a little closer, buddy. This is Cassie Gupta. She’s, like, turning herself in.”
The man who’d spoken changed his expression only slightly—a single crease in the middle of his forehead. The other one gave me a quick, incredulous up-and-down. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. My hair was loose and tangled, and I’d just walked my way through a hot and humid city filled with smoke.
They didn’t believe us. I could see it on their faces. I was so much thinner than in my old driver’s license photograph, not to mention two years older. I’d changed my hair. I’d been through hell. I started to deflate, trying to come up with an alternate plan.
“Wait! Stop!” a loud feminine voice shouted from across the lobby.
“Ho-ly—” Mitsuko started.
Ms. Krieger, unmistakable blond hair in its high tease, was click-clacking her way across the marble floor at double time, her narrow calves a blur. Everything about her was off-kilter: her hair frizzy and loose from its updo, long strands wafting near her face, eye makeup looking racoonish. Even her ruby-red lipstick had faded. “Don’t let her go,” she shouted. “Stop her!”
All four of us were stilled. And now that she actually wanted me, I was beginning to think the best thing for me to do was run.
But before I could, the guards each closed a hand around both my and Mitsuko’s elbows, apparently not knowing which of us the female pronoun applied to.
As Ms. Krieger joined us, she huffed, “The Indian girl is the one we need. Take the other one outside.”
Both of us bristled at that, but we didn’t have time to call her out as the guard who held Mitsuko shoved her out into the smoky air. “Hey—!”
But her complaint was cut off as the guard closed the door on her.
And then I was alone, entombed within the walls of the Society for Extrasolar Exploration.
And trying hard to remember why this was, in fact, our end goal.
Thirty-Six
MS. KRIEGER TOOK me, along with a third guard who met us in the hall, up into an elevator that required an ID card to access. My heart was blinking rapidly in my chest, everything moving too quickly for me to hold out a hand to stop it.
But maybe I shouldn’t stop it. This was what I’d come here for, wasn’t it? My own safety versus the safety of the human race: it was no contest. And what was Crane going to do to me, anyway?
I tried to use that rationale to banish the fear. It didn’t work.
Krieger took me into a room. Stark white. In the middle of the floor was a person reclined in a chair, helmet obscuring her head, wires connecting her to a computer. She didn’t seem to be moving aside from slow, deep breaths.
The room was more sparsely populated than I’d expected. Soldiers were stationed at intervals alongside men and women in white coats or polo shirts with IDs swinging on lanyards. No one seemed to be paying much attention to the human in the chair.
One entire wall was a screen. Nearly every face in the room was pointed at it. And nothing on it made sense to me. I couldn’t even focus my eyes; I kept staring at the girl.
I didn’t need to see her face to know that it was Hanna. Hanna, connected to Pinnacle. Hanna, awakening Skyfall, dooming us, killing us all.
I wondered if I could disconnect Hanna from Pinnacle without killing her. I wondered if I could even make it to the wires that connected her to Pinnacle before one of the soldiers in the room shot me.
I wondered if it was too late.
Someone was coming toward us. I tore my eyes from Hanna to see Crane, his age-spotted, crypt-keeper face even more deathly pale than usual. At his shoulder was a woman in a military dress uniform, four stars on her lapel, graying blond hair in a tight, low bun.
My limited time working at Marshall—having to show my ID badge every day to an armed guard at the gate, reading the local news, seeing soldiers in uniform at the weekly farmers’ market in the parking lot—had given me basic working knowledge of military rank.
Four stars was the highest you’d get in peacetime. And this wasn’t just any four-star.
This was the army chief of staff.
Crane didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “You found her?”
“She came here,” Krieger said. “Willingly.”
Yep. Definitely a mistake.
Crane’s gaze centered on me, questioning, suspicious, desperate. “You came because you knew we couldn’t operate it?”
They couldn’t? “I didn’t know. Wait, what do you know about Skyfall?”
“Schulz showed up here out of the blue towing this alien relic, told us we could use it to fight back. This one,” he said, jerking his thumb accusatorily back at Hanna, “thought she could control it. Now we can’t get her, or the droneship, to respond.” His eyes bored into mine like icicles, trying
to read me.
“Where is it now?”
“On the helipad, on the roof,” the general said, also eying me with suspicion. “What is Skyfall, exactly? What does it do?”
I groaned and exploded at Crane. “You’re trying to turn it on without even knowing what it is?”
“She said she got it from you and that it was our only shot. Where the hell have you been, Gupta?”
So Crane hadn’t sent Hanna to pick me up? She hadn’t been working with him all along?
There was too much to explain and not enough time. “Across the galaxy and back,” I said arrogantly. “We can’t activate Skyfall. We’re being set up—the vrag aren’t attacking us, and the weapon isn’t going to protect us.”
That didn’t have quite the effect I was hoping for. The four-star narrowed her dark eyes at me, and Crane hardly seemed to have heard.
I waved a hand in front of his face. “Hello? I’m telling you to stop this! Pull the plug! This thing is a bomb that we can’t control, and it’s going to blow up in our faces!”
That seemed to register. The four-star barked at a soldier stationed nearby. “Taylor! What’s our threat status?”
He ran the short distance over to us. “The vrag ship is quiet, ma’am. We’ve been trying to trace the origin of the blast, but it’s odd—we’ve been watching the ship in orbit nonstop, and our sensors didn’t pick up any motion from it just before the blast.”
“See?” My breath was coming hard. Maybe I could convince them. Maybe this would actually work, and nobody would have to get hurt after all.
“Means nothing,” Crane said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand. “They could already be on the ground—they could have weapon capabilities that we don’t have the technology to detect.”
The soldier glanced nervously between the highest-ranking officer in the army and the old man. I couldn’t read his rank, but he seemed out of his depth here.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You have no idea what’s going on. You’re playing with things that are way beyond you.”
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