So why couldn’t Jesse pull away?
Jesse cleared his throat. “So, you work a lot? At your grandma’s bakery?”
“Yeah,” answered Corbin, “when I’m not at the hospital. I really like it. I’ve always had fun messing around in the kitchen, even when I was little.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Believe it or not, I used to be a pretty bad kid, actually.”
“No freaking way.”
“I know, I know.” Corbin chuckled. “Grandma said I needed a hobby to refocus my anger. I turned to baking.”
“Is that the secret ingredient to your empanadas? Anger?”
“Nah, only love now.”
There was a lilt of suggestion hanging on Corbin’s words, one that Jesse couldn’t quite grasp. Like a secret wink from an attractive stranger across a crowded room. It brought an unexplainable momentary flush to Jesse’s cheeks.
“Come on.” Abruptly, Corbin turned away from Jesse. “Now that we’re here, we might as well enjoy it.”
Jesse immediately felt the absence of Corbin’s nearby warmth. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed as Corbin took off into the vast gymnasium space, which had played host to generations of Roswell children. Jesse trailed after him, full of an uneasy mixture of longing and regret.
Corbin hesitated in front of the spiny architecture of a massive jungle gym complete with enclosed tunnels—built in part to resemble an alien ship, and exuding the faintly nauseating smell of plastic and sweaty feet.
“What. Is. That?” Corbin asked.
“That,” Jesse said, “is a relic.”
But Corbin was already disappearing toward it. Soon, the thump of footsteps against plastic cut through the silence of the main room of the Alien Zone. Apparently, Corbin had found the entrance into the winding tunnels.
“It’s gonna break,” warned Jesse. The jungle gym was archaic—it had practically fallen apart even at Andrea Roos’s birthday, a full eight years ago.
“O ye of little faith.” Corbin’s voice was slightly muffled; he must have been deep inside the jungle gym already, that beautiful idiot. Jesse squeezed his wrist again; his own veins felt hot against his fingertips.
“Come on!” Corbin shouted. “It’s no fun if it’s just me in here.”
“Pass,” Jesse shouted back. For a moment, he heard the faint sound of rustling.
Then silence.
And Corbin screamed.
“Corbin?” Nothing. “Corbin? Are you okay?” Still nothing.
Jesse waded through the dark and found the entrance into the jungle gym. His heart raced as he crawled inside and climbed through the tunnels, his palms sweaty. His weight sank against the plastic precariously as he moved higher and higher into the structure. A faint whiff of Corbin’s familiar cedarwood-and-vanilla scent pulled him farther in.
Finally, he found Corbin, lying on his back.
“Are you okay?” Jesse was breathless. He dropped to his knees next to Corbin.
“I . . .” Corbin slowly rolled over to face Jesse. “I thought I saw an alien.”
It took Jesse a second to register that he was kidding. “You fucking idiot!” Jesse punched Corbin’s shoulder as Corbin began to laugh. “Dammit, you actually scared me.”
“Sorry, I’m sorry—I had to get you in here somehow.”
Jesse looked away so that he wouldn’t be tempted to smile. He refused to let Corbin off the hook that easily. “I guess it worked,” he said.
“I’m really sorry. Seriously. But look.” He pointed ahead. They’d reached the top of the jungle gym and together were crouched inside a yellow plastic bubble with clear windows across its surface, letting them overlook the vast dark of the Alien Zone, studded with speckles and threads of neon. “Kinda feels like we’re zooming through hyperspace, doesn’t it?”
Jesse eyed him from the side, taking in the stubble across Corbin’s sharp jawline, his black curls. Jesse had to fight the urge to bury his face against Corbin’s neck, to imagine what his lips would taste like.
He was grateful for the dark—he could feel the heat spreading across his cheeks, and he’d rather not let Corbin see him blush like a goddamn idiot.
“See?” said Corbin. “Totally worth it.”
Where Jesse had felt empty, something steely and tightly wound in his chest was allowed, for just a moment, to unfurl.
He was getting too close. Too close . . .
Jesse swallowed and shuffled back toward the tunnel, putting a few feet of distance between them, but something had caught his arm: his leather cuff had gotten snagged on the cheap black rope netting that encompassed the outside of the jungle gym.
“Shit. I’m stuck.”
Corbin took out his phone again, turned on the flashlight, and angled it toward Jesse’s wrist. “Oh, here, let me help . . .”
“No!” Jesse yelled without meaning to. He covered his wrist with a hand. He was sure the light from Corbin’s phone would illuminate the scars his cuff kept hidden. “No.”
Corbin’s round, dark eyes bore into Jesse’s face, and he could feel the gentle, featherlight weight of them, the questions that lingered there. But Corbin said nothing.
Jesse’s chest shuddered. Shake it off, Jesse. The voice in his head was Ms. K’s—it always was these days—but somehow, it calmed him.
Corbin left his phone’s flashlight on, directing it toward Jesse but politely averting his eyes, as if to give Jesse some space. As if there were a cold, colorless glass between them, delicate, on the verge of shattering.
Jesse tugged his cuff free of the nettings.
“Come on,” Jesse mumbled. “It’s too hot in here.”
17
Cate
It was around 10:00 p.m., the most normal hour Cate had been to bed in the past few days, when the campfire dwindled to a few measly embers. She hadn’t sat by a campfire since that summer at Camp Escondido.
Except Camp Escondido’s counselors were a lot less creepy than Ty, and now Cate found herself missing Mom all over again.
She’d asked Alice to borrow a portable phone charger, and as soon as her phone came back to life, she inhaled, let out a shaky exhale, and wrote her mom a long text. It didn’t matter if the signal was totally unreliable—a bar or two one second, none the next—and it didn’t matter if her mom probably didn’t have her phone on her in the hospital. Writing to her was therapeutic, and Cate wrote as though she were talking to her mom on the family room couch like any other night, over a single mint chocolate chip brownie sundae they’d share before clambering into their beds.
You wouldn’t believe where I am right now, or the incredible views out here, she typed. Maybe one day, we should try movie night outside at the pier instead of the couch. Maybe save up for an outdoor movie screen, borrow Ivy’s projector.
Ivy. Another voice she missed.
I don’t know why we never did it before, she continued. But I’ll invite my friends. You’re always saying you want to hang out with them more.
I think you’d love it.
When the text bounced back, Cate shoved her phone in her pocket, and let her head fall back against her aching neck. She’d never understood what people meant by being worried sick, but now, as her anxiousness rolled in her stomach like a barbed metal ball, she was beginning to.
If they left here by dawn, they could make it to Roswell by 3:00 p.m. Which would leave her with a little over three days to get back home. All hope wasn’t lost, not yet.
Alice and Ty agreed. “We’ll make sure you get to where you should be,” Ty promised.
After they told her they would stay up a little longer to keep a lookout, Cate found a fat Joshua tree to relieve herself behind—another new and weird experience for her—and crawled into the safety of her tent. As helpful as they’d been, after Ty’s gloomy pronouncement that they all deserved to die, frankly, Cate was more than happy to get away from them.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the tent, where Adeem had pulled a sleeping bag u
p and over his head like a cocoon, his glasses tucked safely in a corner and the rectangle of his radio peering from beneath the covers. But the tent was small, and Alice and Ty had only prepared one for them to share. Trusting Adeem to get her to Roswell was one thing, but sleeping next to him wasn’t exactly something she was comfortable with. They’d technically slept side by side before already, last night behind the gas station, but that was different: they’d had quite a few feet separating them, and sleeping beneath the vast openness of the night sky hadn’t felt so . . . intimate.
She bit her lip, unsure of what to do.
“Adeem?” she whispered.
No response.
“Are you asleep?”
Still nothing. She’d just have to catch him up on the plan to leave first thing in the morning, and if his reaction to Ty was any indication, he’d be just as eager to get out of here as she was.
Cate clambered deeper inside the tent, unfolded the spare sleeping bag, and laid herself down. Screw self-consciousness; she was too tired, and, strangely enough, she did feel . . . safe. Maybe there was something about having a little more than three days till the end of the world that was making all her walls come down. Or maybe there was something about Adeem. She wanted to trust him—how could she not? He was the one who’d offered to take her to Roswell, after all. Ivy would have called it fate.
There were no pillows, so she settled on folding her hands behind her head after huddling deep inside her warm sleeping bag, safe from the desert chill. Her stomach hurt—from dehydration or cramps or sheer worry, or maybe all three, but she closed her eyes, grateful that, at the very least, Adeem didn’t snore.
She was drifting into sleep when Adeem mumbled.
“It’s your turn.”
She rubbed her eyes and saw stars. “My turn for what?”
“To give a reason. I’ve given you two already.”
A reason? Her mind was slow to stir awake, but she vaguely remembered: she’d asked him for one before. Give me another reason why Alma won’t kill us. Why we won’t die.
Cate propped her head up with her hand. “I thought we established pizza was the be all, end all.”
“Pizza is up there, but alien court’s still in session, so.” Adeem rolled over to look at her, careful not to flatten the radio lying next to him. “Give me another argument, counselor.” He knocked the ground with a fist as though it was a gavel.
Cate cracked a smile. Adeem’s voice was raspy from sleep. Still, his voice carried the sound of a barely repressed smile. She liked that about him.
“Okay . . .” she said slowly, thinking. “The library. The atrium in the San Francisco Public Library.”
Adeem said nothing for a beat, but his eyebrows furrowed. “So you’re from San Francisco. That explains the ridiculous Cali girl accent you’ve got.”
“Oh my God, I do not!” Cate’s fingers itched for a pillow to throw at his face. The thought made her miss Ivy even more. It was strange now to think that just a few days ago, she was sitting in Ivy’s room, telling her about Mom’s letter. San Francisco felt hopelessly far away.
Adeem sat up, grinning. “But seriously, the library?”
“You almost sound like Ivy.” Cate rubbed her goose-pimpled arms and pulled up the sides of her sleeping bag; she hated that the desert could get so cold. “I have a lot of memories there, so maybe I’m biased. But the atrium at the library always felt so welcoming. Sunlight would beam through the ceiling windows, and everything was this beautiful pearly white. It felt like being inside a giant snail shell.” Her bangs grazed the tops of her eyes. She pushed them out of the way. “My mom used to take me a lot when I was little.”
But they hadn’t been able to go for a long time. Cate wasn’t sure what the hushed voices echoing through the atrium would do to her. Now whenever Mom offered to take her, she refused, opting instead for movie night on the couch and Chinese takeout. Safer options.
Still, she missed it. She missed a lot of things.
The letter suddenly felt so heavy in her pocket. A reminder that she’d only left her mom’s side for a damn good reason.
“So you’ve mentioned your mom, but . . .” Adeem’s voice trailed. “What about your dad?”
She shook her head slowly. “I’ve never met him.”
Even in the dark, Cate could see Adeem’s eyes widen. “Is that why you’re going to Roswell? To find him?”
She looked away, opening her mouth and closing it again. She didn’t even know where to begin.
“It doesn’t have to be a secret,” he said, with the smug smile of a kid who’d just been proven right. She imagined he made that face a lot. “Want to talk about it?”
She turned her head and looked at him in surprise. It was the first time Adeem had ever asked a personal question, a genuine one. Talking felt good. It felt ordinary, despite everything happening above them. Her heart swelled a little at the thought, dulling her stomachache, even if the question did make her throat tighten.
“It’s a long one, but . . .” She pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin. “Basically, my dad left Mom before I was born. Or something like that. I don’t think he even knew about me. When the news about Alma broke out, I think Mom started to regret that she never told him.”
“So you have to be the one to drop the news? That’s . . . awkward.”
Cate hesitated, pushed her stubborn bangs aside again. She trusted Adeem on some level, but her mom’s schizophrenia and her letter seemed too big a secret to spill. Too painful. She didn’t want to begin to imagine what he’d think if he knew. “My mom couldn’t come,” she said finally. “She’s been . . . sick. Sometimes, I think Mom is worried she failed me somehow, by raising me herself. But I know finding my dad—getting that closure—will make her feel better. But if we all die, well, at least I’ll know I tried.”
“You mean if Alma doesn’t accept our ongoing legal arguments for our continued existence.”
“Exactly.”
Cate’s throat felt swollen. It hurt, talking about Mom, telling Adeem the things that she’d wanted to tell Ivy that night in the casino, before she’d lost her temper. The night breeze rustled the tent. Crickets sang, only just concealing the sounds of Alice and Ty’s muffled whispers from afar.
“I kind of wonder if Ty is right, in some ways,” she continued. “Half the time, I have no idea what I’m doing. Life does feel small in the grand scheme of things, and sometimes it feels like I don’t have control over anything. I get mad at everyone and everything because it feels like I have to do everything alone. Like, where the hell is God, you know?
“But I’m so freaking tired of living like that.”
Adeem went quiet, and his eyes were trained on the ceiling of their tent. She wondered if bringing up Ty was a mistake.
“Ty,” Adeem announced loudly, “is a grade-A douche bag.”
“Adeem!” Cate shrieked, barely able to swallow her laughter.
“It’s convenient to sit back and do nothing when everything goes to hell,” continued Adeem, only a little quieter. “People like him blame the problems we face on the natural order. Or God. Or a lack thereof. But the moment we sit back and do nothing while everything falls apart—that’s why we have problems in the first place. That’s why this is happening.” He gestured vaguely to their tent, to outer space, to Alma. “But you are actually trying to do something. Even if it’s just for your mom, you’re still trying to bring your family back together. Even when everything feels hopeless. That can only be a good thing. And people see that, Cate. I see that.”
Cate’s eyes prickled. She hugged her knees to her chest, feeling a little shy beneath his genuine praise. “Is that why you agreed to take me to Roswell? Was that your way of trying to do some good in the world?”
“Now, that,” he said, lying back down on his sleeping bag, “was a total coincidence.”
“You never told me why you were heading to Roswell in the first place.” Her question tiptoed: she’d been a little too n
ervous to outright ask him earlier—it was almost as though they’d had a silent pact to avoid personal questions. Until now.
“You really want to know?” He grinned mischievously.
Cate nodded.
“I’m on a quest,” he began in hushed tones, “to find the seven Dragonballs—”
Of course. She should have known he’d turn it into a joke. “I’m going to throw my phone at you now.”
“Okay, okay, the truth—listen now—the truth is that I’m on my way to Area Fifty-One so I can hack into Alma’s mainframe—”
Cate pulled out her phone and raised it threateningly.
Adeem flinched. “Okay, fine, I’m serious, I’ll tell you!” He sighed. “I’m looking for someone, too. My sister.”
“You have a sister?”
“Yep, one runaway sister.” He ran his hands down his cheeks. “One who apparently couldn’t be bothered to say goodbye when she left.”
Cate’s arm fell. His words were cold, veiled by sarcasm, but she could feel the pain behind them.
“In other news, Earth is round and water is wet. Anyway, we should get some sleep,” he said quickly. Dismissively.
He tugged his radio closer to him and rolled again, showing only his back. She had the urge to reach out and wrap her arms around him, to do anything to make this sudden coldness go away, but she had no idea how he would react, so instead, she rolled away.
Outside, the cool breeze grazed the sides of their tents, and Alice and Ty’s whispering had been replaced by the hollow droning of the desert.
That’s when it hit her:
All that big stuff he’d said about reuniting her family. About doing something despite how small she felt.
Had he only been telling her what he needed to hear?
18
Jesse
Fresh, crisp night air flooded Jesse’s lungs. Main Street was empty; the Military Institute students were gone, and Jesse could hear nothing but the scrape of an empty Takis bag against asphalt and the rustle of dust in the breeze. Corbin was quiet, too. He’d been quiet since Jesse’s little outburst in Alien Zone.
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