“Hey, Jesse?” asked Corbin as he passed.
Jesse looked over his shoulder. “Hmm?”
“You gonna tell me what really happened to your lip?”
Jesse was so startled by this question, he froze. But, hidden safely behind his chest, his heart began to race all over again.
Corbin, he realized, wasn’t smiling anymore. And the way he was staring at Jesse’s face, at his mouth, at the swollen parts and the not-swollen parts, sent a thousand different feelings pushing up through him.
Jesse turned back and pulled his jacket closer over his body. “Maybe later.”
And as Jesse began to head to his front porch, he tried to drown out the most terrifying thought of all: If Corbin could read him so easily, what else did he know?
23
Cate
As far as jail cells went, this one wasn’t so bad—not that Cate had much experience, of course. But she’d always imagined jail cells as dark, cold, cement blocks; windowless walls and, above, dripping ceilings that could barely contain the shouts of frustrated prisoners.
Sure, the metal toilet fastened to the wall gave off a sour, murky smell, and the flickering light bulb gave off the worst lighting in all of existence—the kind of light that tugged at your eyes until they hurt—and she’d watched a long, ruddy bug too big to be anything but a cockroach scurry beneath a wall.
But getting thrown in jail definitely wasn’t on the bucket list.
At least she was having new experiences, and at least they’d been brought to a sheriff’s station just outside Las Vegas, which meant Roswell was only an eleven-hour drive away.
It also meant that, when they got out of here, she’d probably have to part with Adeem soon.
But at least he’d be happy—at least he could go home.
She thought to point it out to Adeem, but his face was scrunched in a scowl and she was too afraid to look into his eyes.
When the local sheriff showed up at the Sunfree mini-mart, Adeem had adamantly refused to let Cate be taken alone, and started making such a scene that the sheriff had finally shrugged and nudged both of them into his vehicle. She was touched by the gesture. But, of course, that meant they were now stuck here together, and Adeem made it clear he blamed her: he hadn’t spoken a word to Cate since she’d gotten them both in trouble. Worse, he didn’t seem to have his radio anymore; in his rush to help her, he must have forgotten it in the office. Yet another thing that was her fault.
God, he must have hated her right now.
Sheriff Beeson, the “second cousin to the obnoxious mini-mart owner, and definitely not his personal on-call muscle,” as he’d bitterly corrected them in the patrol car, led Cate and Adeem into the only free cell in the Clark County Sheriff’s Office; the others had been filled to capacity. Every phone on every sheriff’s desk seemed to be ringing off the hook.
He unlocked the cell and gestured them on in; Cate reluctantly shuffled inside, and, to her relief, Adeem joined her. If they were obedient, for now, it’d be easier to talk herself out of the situation later. She just had to think of a plan.
The sheriff closed the cell door. But he didn’t lock it. “Now before you start panicking, you can both breathe easy. I’m not going to charge ya. Legally speaking—and yes, the law still reigns in my book despite what those Alma worshippers might tell ya—you do not have to get in there if you don’t want to.”
Adeem jerked his head up, his expression confused.
“Then why’d you bring us here?” Cate asked.
Sheriff Beeson looked at her from beneath his thick ginger brows. With his whiskery sideburns, he looked a little like a walrus. “To keep you safe. I can’t in good conscience let ya out there, and trust me, you’re safer in here than ya are out there. I’ve got people stealing trucks of supplies. Just yesterday, I had to help bust a damn drug party at Kingston Peak—pardon my French. But we had twenty-two ODs and one bus to ship them thirty miles to the hospital. People are losing their goddamn minds, and I do not”—he wagged his finger at them—“need a couple of lovesick kids getting caught up in it.”
Cate couldn’t help it; she made a face. “We’re not . . .” she started. “It’s not like that.” Of course, she liked Adeem, but not that way. She was relieved that Adeem seemed to feel the same way, relatively speaking. He looked like he was trying to swallow a brick. “We’re friends,” she assured the sheriff.
He folded his arms across his chest. “Either way, I’d strongly advise you both to stay here until your folks get here. If I had a nicer place to put ya, I would, but, seeing as the way things are . . .”
Behind him, two other sheriffs were leading a man with long, greasy hair, draped in nothing but a towel. “I didn’t do anything wrong! Your authority means nothing!” the man shrieked. The all-too-familiar smell of smoke wafting off his body burned Cate’s nose.
She was beginning to doubt Sheriff Beeson on the relative safety of the sheriff’s office. Just how long would they have to sit here? She’d already wasted three days. Three days that should have been one.
Her stomach still hurt, even more now, and her heart hammered in her chest. Even if she could call Mom, there was no way she could pick them up. And what would it do to Mom’s state of mind to hear her daughter was calling from a jail cell in the middle of nowhere? As if Mom needed more bad news on top of everything else.
She wasn’t even close to finding her dad yet.
The sheriff scratched his chin, ignoring the toweled man’s hollering. “Now, our phone lines are still in operation. I can call the station nearest home for you to track your family down, let your parents know we found ya.”
“Actually, could you maybe give us a minute?” Cate asked, hoping he couldn’t hear the panic in her voice.
Beeson pushed away from the bars. “Sure. Just think about who you need to contact. You have IDs? I want to see if anyone’s filed a missing persons report.”
“Both of ours got stolen,” Cate quickly lied. “But I’m Catherine, ah, Holloway, and he’s Adeem”—she swallowed—“uh, Minhaj.”
Sheriff Beeson nodded, satisfied. “Great. I’ll let you know what we can do on our end,” he said, before disappearing into the throngs of people crowding the station.
Adeem raised an eyebrow. “Why would you lie to a cop who can actually reach our parents for us?” he hissed out of earshot. “And Minhaj? Really?”
“I know, I know.” It wasn’t exactly the first time she’d lied to a cop, but it was still terrifying. “I panicked. I can’t have him looking me up in his system and finding out where I live. He’s acting like he won’t keep us here against our will, but if he finds out just how far away from home we are, I highly doubt he’ll just let us go out on our own. He said he’d make us sit here and wait for our parents to show up.” As if that would happen. As if it could happen.
The radio in the background switched to a report on riots breaking out in financial districts in cities all over the country, big corporate buildings targeted by arsonists. San Francisco was one of them. Cate’s stomach lurched. Lickity Split Creamery was close to the Financial District. She’d just been there a few days ago, scooping ice cream into waffle cones.
She couldn’t even check if Bethany had made it out okay. She couldn’t do anything, as long as they were stuck in here.
Since she’d gotten them into this mess, she had to help find a way out.
“Look, before we do anything, I think I owe you an apology,” she said. “I honestly didn’t think that guy’d react so freaking violently over a couple toiletries.” She could barely hear herself over the bustle in the station: sheriffs shouting orders, people protesting their arrests in the jail cells beside them, and a loud, crackly radio in the corner of the office broadcasting safety warnings about traffic conditions in Las Vegas.
Adeem let out a derisive snort. “Welcome to the life of every brown and black kid in America.” His voice was like a bucket of cold water.
She clenched her teeth. Yep,
he hated her. So much for talking him into continuing the trip to Roswell together.
“You should have waited. We could have asked someone for help. Stealing aspirin? Really?” His eyes narrowed. “Was it really worth it?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, it was,” she said defensively. Because of course, on top of everything else, Cate just had to get her period with a side of cramps during the end of the world. Apparently, the end of days wasn’t enough to fend off the wrath of Aunt Flo. “And . . . I kind of had to take a couple tampons. So. There you have it.” She swallowed, awaiting his reaction.
“Oh.” His eyes widened. He understood. “You got your . . . ?”
“Yep,” said Cate, her face growing hot.
Adeem’s head slowly fell. And then his shoulders began to tremble.
He was laughing.
Her jaw fell in horror. She didn’t exactly find her period a laughing matter.
“Man,” he choked. “Your body doesn’t give a shit about timing, does it? That’s why we’re in jail? Seriously? Did it not get the memo about the impending alien attack?”
“Are you . . .” Cate blinked back her disbelief. “Adeem, are you asking me if my uterus knows about Alma?”
Somehow, this only made Adeem laugh harder.
Relief flooded Cate in an instant. She had hated the idea of Adeem being angry with her, even if she still barely knew him. More than that, though, whether he realized it or not, Adeem had reminded her of something substantially important that she’d forgotten: her body was still functioning, preparing for the future. She was still breathing. Which meant that despite everything she’d gone through, and all the bad luck that had followed them, she was still alive.
“So you forgive me?” she asked quietly.
He looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed but watery. He smiled. “Jesus, I’m not going to be mad at you for that.”
A squad of helicopters thundered above the sheriff’s office. The chatter from the cells next door quieted down to an uncomfortable silence. Everyone knew what it all meant: the coming storm, the one no one wanted to talk about, but everyone could feel in the air.
“Well?” asked Adeem. “I need to figure out a way home, but what do you want to do?”
“I’m still trying to figure that one out.” Cate pulled out her dead cell phone out of habit, and with it slipped out her blackbird key chain.
“Is it so bad to ask your mom for help? She can convince him to let us out. I know you said she’s sick, but it’s kind of an emergency.”
“She can’t help.”
“She can’t or she won’t?”
“Both. It’s . . . complicated.” Cate shoved her phone back in her pocket but held on to the key chain. If her dad really was a shape-shifting magic pirate, then his stupid bird key chain should have magically changed into a real bird by now and offered to fly off, carrying her mom’s letter for her in its chipped beak. Wishful thinking. Maybe this whole trip had been driven by wishful thinking.
It was unfair, really, to live in a world where aliens were real but magic was not.
Adeem gave an exaggerated shrug. “Guess we’ll die.”
“What?” She was surprised by the unusual lifelessness in his voice. “Why? Don’t you have someone we can call?”
“Nope.”
Cate stared at him. “There must be someone. Your parents?”
“Look,” Adeem began tiredly, “if I know my parents—and trust me, I do—they are definitely freaking out, and probably have the rest of the Muslim community freaking out with them in our mosque basement in a never-ending cycle of panic. I haven’t even had a chance to let them know I’m okay. Imagine a couple of freaked-out brown Muslims trying to get cops to help their son come home. They’ll be totally ignored, at best. But my parents have enough to deal with as it is without me telling them I screwed up so bad trying to find my sister that I ended up in a freaking jail cell in Las Vegas. I got myself into this; I need to find out how to get home like a big boy.”
Cate bit her dry, chafing lips. So he really had given up on finding his sister. Which meant she’d been right: as soon as they got out of here, their journey to Roswell together would be over.
Not that she could blame him for calling it quits. They’d traveled almost five hundred miles together, and she knew as much about him now as she did the night she crawled into his car. She hadn’t known he was Muslim, for one thing, not that it really mattered. But she especially hadn’t thought of all the things he must have gone through before she’d even shown up in his car. All the things that must have led up to him planning this journey alone.
Cate didn’t even know why he was out here trying to find his sister in the first place.
She’d been content with knowing they both were heading to Roswell. That had been enough. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Even if she wanted to keep moving forward, Adeem had a family back home.
But she had a promise to keep to her mom. And maybe she was doing this for herself, after all. Meeting her dad, having him know she existed, would make her not feel so alone anymore. And that was the last thing she wanted to feel at the end of the world: alone.
Either way, she was not going back to San Francisco without delivering the letter.
And yet, why did the idea of going to Roswell without Adeem feel so wrong?
Cate squeezed the key chain hard, its sharp edges digging into the palm of her hand, grateful for the hot pinch of pain against her skin. Another reminder she was alive, that Alma hadn’t killed her yet.
She took a deep breath. “I can’t call my mom because she’s in the hospital,” she said slowly, tasting the sound of her secret for the first time.
Adeem’s eyes widened in surprise. But he said nothing. She continued.
“She has schizophrenia. She’s been dealing with it for years. We’ve been dealing with it for years. Barely. For better or worse, the last thing she asked me before she was taken to the hospital was to go find my dad.” Cate looked down, surprised to find that she felt like crying. “I don’t know why it’s so important to her—why it’s so important to me. Maybe . . . maybe after so many years of stories, I just wanted the truth.”
For a long second, there was silence. Even the din of the sheriff’s office sounded so far away. And then:
“I can’t even begin to understand what you both have gone through. But wanting to find the truth . . .” He clasped his hands together and stared at the dark space between them, as if contemplating hiding inside.
“My sister,” Adeem began slowly, “ran away from home after she came out to me and my parents. Left with no warning. And I’m her only sibling. Her little brother. I used to tell her everything. I practically worshipped her—and she just up and left without even talking to me about it. And, I get it, it’s not easy to come out, and I can’t even imagine how scary it must have been when none of us knew what to say, but . . .” His voice cracked, and he swallowed. “She didn’t even give me a chance.”
Seeing him suddenly spill all the pain he’d kept locked inside—all the pain he’d kept covered with his geeky sense of humor—wrenched at her chest, tight like a fist. Her eyes grew hot and cloudy, making Adeem appear to be drowning behind a watery film.
“I told my parents I’d be the one to bring her home, but I just don’t even know why I’m bothering anymore.” He shut his eyes tightly for a moment before opening them again. “I wanted answers so freaking badly, but I should just have left her alone. It’s obvious what she wanted. She could have found me a long time ago. She could have come back anytime. But the world’s ending, and she still hasn’t reached out. I only happened to catch some obscure radio message that she might have sent from Roswell, but I don’t even know for sure.” He held his head in his hands, squeezed tightly. “I had a chance to send her a message, you know. Back at the office at Sunfree. But I didn’t. Because I realized right then and there that I’d already gotten the truth I needed. She obviously doesn’t give a shit about me, so w
hy should I expect anything to change?”
Cate’s breath stilled. Was that why Adeem had clung so desperately to his radio all this time? She’d caught him trying to use it so many times, randomly checking into frequencies, scouring the invisible threads of sound and light, before she’d made him leave it behind.
Cate didn’t have a sibling, but she imagined losing one would feel like losing an irreplaceable piece of your history, your home. Yourself.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was shaking, too.
Adeem rubbed his nose. “I want her back,” he said quietly. “I always have.”
She felt heat rise through her fingertips. Like she’d suddenly received some sort of missing piece of the puzzle, understood something crucial—a sudden, immeasurable desire to help Adeem. And in some way, help herself.
“Then screw the details,” she said. “This is literally your only chance to find her.” At least I don’t need to explain what “literally” means to him, she thought, almost laughing in her delirium. God, had it only been a week since she’d been living her normal life—a week since she’d kissed Jake? It felt like lifetimes had passed since then.
He smiled sadly. “If only it were that easy.”
Cate felt herself deflate. It can be that easy, she wanted to scream. But he’d already made up his mind.
Suddenly, Adeem stood.
“I still can’t call my parents,” Adeem said finally. “But I think I know someone who could help.”
24
Adeem
Back at the old house in Albuquerque, when Adeem was nine and Leyla was fifteen, black thunderclouds rolled in so fiercely, the power went out for two long, miserable days. He’d lost count, but by around the twentieth time Adeem had complained about being bored out of his mind, his mom finally slammed her book onto the kitchen table, the force of which blew out a nearby candle. “Only boring people are bored,” she snapped. But before Adeem could retort with something stupid, Leyla—who was taller then—grabbed him by the back of his hoodie with her free hand, snatched a still-lit candle off the counter with the other, and dragged him to the library.
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