[Scion 13 stands.]
ARBITER: Scion 13, proceed.
SCION 13: I have been studying Earth’s contributions to issues of significance since our last recess.
SCION 7: What have you found of note?
SCION 13: The recorded history of humankind is only six thousand years old. It is short. The human life span is even shorter—laughably so in comparison to our own species’. Despite this, on a grand scale, the speed of humanity’s intellectual evolution is exponential. Their history reflects this.
ARBITER: Continue.
SCION 13: But our own species has had over two hundred fifty thousand years of evolution. Imagine what humanity could be capable of, if only given a little more time.
DEREK
Doko the fuck are you, my Deemodatchi??
Your parents keep asking me, as if you actually *tell me* stuff
And it’s stressing out boku no kokoro
ADEEM
Is that Japanese
Are you marathoning anime again
DEREK
OH THANK GOD HE’S ALIVE
Yes lulz, Goku has saved the universe like 42 times, he’s the only thing giving me hope right now
BUT THAT’S BESIDES THE POINT
Answer my question: Where tf ARE YOU??????
Did you find Leyla yet?
ADEEM
. . . lol
Lololololololol
LOLOLOLOLLODOFDFJSHFDJHFDJ
Abandon all hope, ye who are Adeem.
DEREK
Damn son
That bad huh
Just hurry, okay?
The computer lab at school got trashed by looters
My parents want us to hide out at our church
I can’t hold off your parents forever, they’re worried as hell
And keep us updated, you freaking clam
Hello? Hi? You dead yet?
ADEEM
T_T Sorry, service sucks right now.
I’ll text more when my phone’s not running on 2%
and I actually have proper phone service
I think my texts keep getting lost
DEREK
Apology accepted
May the force be with you and your power always be over 9000
ADEEM
Omfg why are you like this.
DEREK
Lulz love u too bro~
19
Adeem
“Cate, wake up.” Adeem shook her hard, but she was a deep sleeper, even worse than Derek at their sleepovers back in middle school. “Wake up.”
Finally, her eyes fluttered open. When she realized Adeem was hanging over her, she shot up, startled.
“What? What happened?” She was breathing heavily. Her bangs were sticking up at full mast, like they’d been shocked into awareness, too. In any other circumstances, Adeem might have found it a little funny.
If it were Derek, he would have answered with something snarky like An Unexpected Error Occurred, but it wasn’t Derek because Adeem was in the middle of a desert with some girl he barely knew.
He squeezed his fists to his sides. Somewhere along the way, Adeem’s knuckles had cracked and begun to bleed, but he could barely feel it because every part of him hurt. He was so sure sleeping in the desert wouldn’t be so bad; the desert always looked so soft and pillowy in Dad’s National Geographic mags, but that was the Sahara and this was the Boonies, USA. God-freaking-dammit.
“They’re gone. Alice and Ty—they’re gone. They took the van and left us behind.”
They’d probably stolen a lot of their stuff off unsuspecting people like them—their food, their phone chargers, their van, who knows what else. The thought made Adeem’s veins throb. If Derek were here, he would have pointed out that Adeem looked like that angry Arthur meme right about now, but again, Cate was not Derek. So instead, she stared back at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“They took my wallet.” He was trembling, and he couldn’t stop. The inside of his chest was on fire. “At least a hundred bucks, gone.” Not to mention his debit card, his school ID, his Amateur Radio Quick Reference Card, and his driver’s license.
“Please tell me you still have yours.”
Cate threw off the top of her sleeping bag. With a loud jangle, her keys, a bottle of pepper spray, and her weird blackbird key chain flung to the other side of the tent. Her wallet—teal with a gold strap—was still there, too, tucked safely inside her sleeping bag. She fanned open the wallet: she only had a couple one-dollar bills, some crumpled pieces of paper, and a few different business cards of various doctors.
“I didn’t have much to begin with,” Cate said apologetically. “I didn’t think we wouldn’t find a single working ATM. Did they really take everything?”
“No, I had my radio on me, and I had my phone in my pocket.” He flexed his fingers; for some reason, he couldn’t feel them. “I went to go pee for, like, two seconds.” His phone died trying to text back Derek and Reza, who’d been frantically trying to reach him, so he’d used the last of the radio’s battery to see if he could get a signal. But of course, he couldn’t, and he’d returned to their camp, trying his best to stay calm even though it’d been the longest he’d gone without being connected.
Then he’d heard the van pull away. Gone so fast, they’d left their tent behind.
“What about your phone? Any bars? Maybe we can call, I don’t know, someone.”
She clicked on her phone; the battery symbol glowed threateningly red, and her bars were nonexistent.
“I’m sorry—I spent half the night trying to send texts to my mom, and I guess it drained my battery.” Cate shuddered, as if cold. “I thought I’d be able to use Alice’s charger again in the morning.”
Adeem could practically hear his heart fall into his empty stomach and shatter into a million pieces.
They only had three days left until Alma made its announcement about humanity’s fate. Three days. He could barely wrap his head around the thought. This was supposed to have been a day trip. He was supposed to have brought Leyla home by now; they would have pulled into the driveway last night, talking as if nothing had changed. A big, tearful reunion over big, heaping bowls of steaming daal chawal with raw onions, Leyla’s favorite. Then Adeem could have shown her the office, all the modifications he’d made to the radios, all the weird messages he’d plucked from the airwaves over the years. Spent all night playing Mario Kart while puzzling through codes from the broadcast recordings. Maybe it was stupid to think everything would have been the same—Leyla had been gone for almost three years now—but he could hope, and that wasn’t stupid. Was it?
Cate suddenly started giggling.
“What’s so funny?” Adeem asked, exasperated.
“It’s so stupid,” she said, barely composing herself. “Technically, stealing something was on my bucket list, and so far, we’ve somehow managed to be stolen from twice.” She wiped one of her eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s . . . absurd. Like, how can things get any worse?”
“How is that even remotely funny?” Adeem ran his hand down his sweaty face. “And why the hell is stealing on your bucket list? Why not plant a tree, adopt a puppy? Like a decent human being?”
She snorted. “For your information, petting more puppies was also on my bucket list.”
Adeem felt a rush of blood to his head so sudden it made him dizzy. He closed his eyes. It had crossed his mind to at least try and get his phone charged before bed—he’d seen Alice’s portable charger—but then he’d let his pride get in the way. So now they had nothing. He’d been so careless. And somehow, Cate found it hilarious.
If they made it out of here alive and if, by some miracle, Alma decided to spare Earth or humanity or whatever in three days, he would definitely start praying five times a day and apply to the MIT robotics program and listen to every damn thing Ms. Takemoto and his parents told him.
“Screw this. I have to get home,” Adeem blurted out. It was the only thi
ng that made sense. It would take half a day just to reach Roswell from where they were in Corn Creek, assuming they found a car this second. But they had no money, no mode of transportation, and most important, no time. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to bring Cate back to San Francisco before the end.
His parents must have been worried sick. It was bad enough they’d lost one child. Did they think he’d left them, too?
He squeezed the radio in the palm of his sweaty hand, though the chance of him finding Leyla now was slipping through his fingers like sand.
Cate stared. “What about Roswell?” She wasn’t laughing anymore.
Adeem’s head hung. “It’s over. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What do you mean?” she pressed.
“It doesn’t matter,” he snapped, his voice raised. “We’re stranded in the middle of nowhere.” And, really, it was nowhere: besides Alice and Ty—if they even counted—Adeem hadn’t seen another soul for miles. Almost like Alma had already struck.
“It’s game over. Bucket lists be damned. I just wanted to find my sister and survive, but at this rate, it’ll be a miracle if we live long enough to hear Alma blow us all up or whatever the hell it is they plan to do to us all.”
He felt sorry for practically yelling at her, but right now, his nerves were frayed, and he was pretty sure he had grit burrowed in every corner of his body. He wanted to dry heave all his frustrations out. And it was technically her fault for hitchhiking and relying on a bunch of batshit, alien-worshipping Extraterrestrialists. Why did Cate have to be so damn trusting of everyone?
Shit, she’d trusted him to get her to Roswell, even though she barely knew him.
“So we just turn around? Go home?” Cate’s big brown eyes trembled. “After everything?”
“Unless you have another great idea,” he said, not bothering to stave off the sarcasm from his voice. “Maybe we can hitchhike again. Maybe this time with some axe murderers.”
“We can’t go back. I—I left my mom and Ivy for this,” Cate argued, clutching her stomach like his words physically hurt. “We’ve already come this far. We still have a chance. Please.”
She had a point. But relying on mere chance wasn’t good enough. Leaving his parents all alone during the end of the world was not the plan. He hadn’t even said goodbye to Derek yet. Hell, none of this was the plan.
“What about all that stuff about actually trying to do something?” she continued. “You can’t tell me how great it is that I’m trying to bring my family back together and then just ditch me out here!”
The hurt on her face reminded him so much of Ms. Takemoto, the look she gave him every time he lied through his teeth to avoid Coding Club.
“I’m sorry.” And he meant it. But now he could barely stand to look at her. He backed quickly out of the tent, letting the flap drop behind him.
He’d known those weirdos who called themselves something as ridiculous as the Star Voyeurs weren’t to be trusted. This was their fault. Hell, if humanity was destroyed, it would be because of people like them. Adeem had gotten nothing but bad vibes the moment they opened the van door: Alice kept speaking in that creepy baby voice, and Ty was a sanctimonious little shit. People like Ty were the very reason that Adeem stayed inside with his radios. If he overheard something annoying, he could just flip a switch and change the channel.
Now his radio was dead, and his phone was almost out of batteries, too—barely at two percent, after he’d managed to send a couple texts to Derek. But it might be enough to find a station, find someone nearby, find someone who could help.
Poor Cate. She’d sounded so determined. He shouldn’t have said all that stuff to her last night about finding her dad. But he’d wanted to believe she could. That it would be worth it just to bring her family together again, no matter what the cost.
Well, they tried, right? That still counted for something, right?
Or maybe he was even more naïve than Cate. This plan to get Leyla back? It wasn’t like a broken code: he couldn’t just throw a semicolon somewhere and a car would suddenly materialize and all their problems would be miraculously fixed. There was no debugger for real life.
if (meant To Be) {
findLeyla ( );
} else {
goHome ( );
}
Sometimes, it was better to reset the code altogether, Ms. Takemoto had once told him. It didn’t mean your code was a failure.
It just meant it was time to cut your losses.
20
Jesse
Jesse’s lip throbbed from the new stitches. He should have taken the doctor up on his offer of the good painkillers. Even his mom was urging him to, although that would have cost them more money.
But everything hurt: his ribs, his back, his head, where a bump the size of a peach had begun to form—almost as much as it had hurt to take out his wallet at urgent care and dish out over one thousand dollars to pay for the split lip and lacerations on his cheek. And the bruises to his skull, of course. Can’t forget that.
All that money, gone. A good chunk of the profits he’d painstakingly collected, the money they needed to load up and get the hell out of Roswell. He couldn’t see they had much choice, with Samuel pumping him for money he had no chance of getting. But if Samuel wanted the money so badly, then why beat Jesse to a pulp and make it that much harder to get?
It made no sense. Nothing made sense.
The urgent care facility was only a little over a mile from his house, but the wait just to be seen took ages. His mom even had to take a shift off from the diner just to wait with him. Roswell General Hospital wasn’t even an option; the last time he’d been there was the night he’d gotten the scars on his wrist, after his mom found him bleeding out on the bathroom floor.
The same night he’d met Ms. K.
Now that tourists were flocking back to the town, more people were surging the health-care centers. It didn’t help that most of these tourists, unlike the family-friendly ones of a few years ago, were high off the apocalypse and had begun a small but steadily growing tent city, rows of propped-up blankets and cardboard boxes around an abandoned grain warehouse in the old Railroad District. They’d brought little more than their pets in carriers, stolen red shopping carts filled with necessities to last the next two and a half days. The rest of their worldly possessions they’d given up in a desperate attempt to convince Alma they were worth sparing, and passed the time with songs and prayer circles that lasted long into every night. There were just too many of them, and police had outright given up on trying to control them. Jesse was almost certain his real neighbors had fled town before things got any wilder, their abandoned house now replaced by at least five shroom dealers offering “temporary escapes”—they were probably responsible for a quarter of the hospitalizations in town.
In a way, this was supposed to be what Jesse wanted. Roswell was now bustling, thriving in the discord; people were more than willing to throw away money they might not need in a couple days. Even Pluto’s Diner, where Mom worked, with its shitty, tacky, alien-themed food, had become something of a hot spot.
But the frenetic high of seeing Corbin, of things finally going his way even just slightly, had been pounded out of him. Where he’d been a money-making genius yesterday, today he was just Jesse, a beat-up kid who had to wait in the urgent care waiting room with his mom for hours and hours just to be seen by an exhausted doc, along with a bunch of idiots who’d nearly drunk themselves to death and some meth-heads.
They needed out. Out of the house, and out of this circus of a town. Away from Roswell, away from the ghost of Jesse’s father.
Maybe Marco’s friend was right. Once all the Alma bullshit blew over, Jesse could buy plane tickets to California for him and his mom and never look back.
His mom now heaved open the door of the urgent care center. “I still think you should have told the doc about a possible concussion.”
Jesse lunged for his mom’s arm and pulled
her out of the way of a breathless nurse, running with a child in a wheelchair.
“And yet my reflexes have never worked better.” His vision, though, had seen better days.
His mom gently tugged her arm out of Jesse’s grasp. He looked at her, hurt.
But she looked away. “I saw Ms. K by the front desk,” she said. “You should talk to her before we go.”
“What?” Jesse suddenly felt light-headed. Since when did Ms. K work at the urgent care center, too? No wonder she’d looked so beat. Counselors all over must have been stretched thin. “Oh. Well, I don’t really have anything to talk to her about.” He tried to ignore the urge to scratch at his wrist.
His mom’s jaw tensed, emphasizing her hollow cheeks. He could see the disappointment clear as day all over her face. “Fine,” she said. “I’m gonna go bring the car around. Don’t want you wading through these shady crowds. People keep . . . eyeing you, more than usual.”
Her eyes flicked up at a trio of whispering townies; Jesse recognized one of them as his old algebra teacher, who he was pretty sure hated his guts to begin with. Now, most locals seemed to want to punch Jesse out. After all, it was his fault all these weirdos had come scurrying into Roswell, making trouble.
If he felt like he was being watched all the time, it was probably because he was.
They finally arrived home late in the afternoon. He and his mom had to beeline through the eager, trespassing crowd of would-be customers lining up behind the old velvet stanchion he’d nicked from a garbage dump a couple days ago. The crowd would have been gone by now, normally, but since he’d been out all day, he imagined all of these people had been waiting for him to finally show.
But instead of the usual excitement at the prospect of more money, he felt a flare of annoyance. All kinds of garbage had been strewn across his front lawn—chip bags, plastic wrap, a perfectly good half-eaten sandwich, which really set him off.
So it was easy to part through the crowd like a stone-faced Moses and ignore the calling and pleading to use the Hewitt Electronic Communication Center.
All those people carrying regret around, as if life were one big bramble patch and every regret they’d collected clung to their skin like a prickly bur. But instead of nursing vodkas at the bar, like most people Jesse knew who shouldered regrets, they were here. Waiting for him and his stupid machine.
I Hope You Get This Message Page 17
