by Page Morgan
“What did you do?” I ask, but then seal my lips, remembering I shouldn’t be speaking at all.
“It’s a defensive maneuver. The transport projects an image of itself traveling away at a high rate of speed, while a cloaking device renders the craft invisible.”
My jaw hangs open. The two guys below believe they’ve chased off an alien pod while we still sit, invisible above the intersection? I stop struggling against the podium. Rowan could have killed them. But he hadn’t.
“We must hurry. Others will be drawn by the weapons fire,” he says. “The cloaking device cannot mask the sound of the transport. Soon, those two humans will begin to suspect something is still here.”
“Let me out up there, on Grove Street,” I say, barely moving my lips.
My home is only a few houses away. I can walk there easily. Though, let’s be honest: I’d run.
“I will see you into your mother’s presence.”
I growl. This honor-bound crap is really starting to rub. I stay quiet, still hesitant. Rowan’s helmet is the only part of him that turns toward me.
“I promise that no harm will come to your mother, Penelope.”
He says it with the same level of intensity he’d shown when he’d promised my death if I touched him in front of the artificers. I believe him.
“Four houses ahead, on the left.”
Chapter Ten
We barrel forward, through the mouth of Grove Street. He follows the road as if this transport is a car, and he even makes a neat ninety-degree turn to hover over my driveway. The transport lowers onto the asphalt with more finesse this time.
My mom’s car is in the driveway, the driver’s side door cracked open. The slackened seat belt hangs out through the gap, like she’d tried to shut the door but had been in too much of a rush to notice it hadn’t latched. The unfinished task makes my stomach coil tight.
My suctioned feet are set free, and I get to the exit doors before Rowan, but they don’t open until he approaches from behind. He must have some kind of chip or something on his suit to coax the doors open. The air hits me; the bitter, rancid odor of something toxic burning. A fine haze hangs in the air as I step out onto the familiar, cracked asphalt of my driveway. The only noise is the incessant clang of a rope and pulley smacking off Mrs. Donald’s metal flagpole across the street, and a dog barking down the block.
I know this terrain. It’s where I’ve grown up. Yet, in that second, I don’t know it anymore. Everything feels…wrong.
I run to the small, enclosed entry porch, digging into my back jeans pocket for my house key. But I don’t need it. The front door is already open a few inches. It hadn’t been closed completely, just like my mom’s car.
“She always locks up,” I say, creeping inside. I drop my messenger bag onto the floor in the front hallway. “Mom?”
There’s no response, and my pulse picks up speed.
Rowan closes the door behind us. He looks enormous in my house, the crown of his head only a few inches from the ceiling. He doesn’t have his helmet, and I figure he’s left it in the transport on purpose. He inspects the living room as I go up the first handful of stairs. “Mom!”
Silence is the only answer. I jump back down into the entrance hall and jog toward the kitchen, but I already know it’s going to be empty.
She isn’t here.
The landline phone sits in its cradle on the kitchen counter. I pick it up, but there isn’t a dial tone, of course. There also isn’t a message scrawled on the top Post-It note, the fluorescent pink block being our family’s high-tech messaging center.
I hear Rowan walk into the kitchen behind me, but I’m still staring at the top Post-It, willing a message to appear.
“She was scheduled to work today,” I say.
“Could she be there?”
I shake my head. “Maybe. The EMP must have hit before she left for work, so I guess she could have walked there. I don’t know…”
If she’d left in such a hurry that she’d forgotten to lock the house or even shut the front door, I can’t imagine the emergency was to get to work.
“I think she would have gone to the high school to try and find me.”
She’d known about my trip to the water treatment plant, but she might have gone to the school anyway.
“Then we will go there,” Rowan says, turning for the front hallway again.
“Wait,” I say. He stops and faces me. “You’ve brought me home, okay? You can go. I can find my mom on my own from here.”
He hitches his chin. “I thought I made myself clear. My duty is to see you into your mother’s presence. I have promised not to harm her. Do you not trust me?”
“Trust you? Your people are killing mine, so no I don’t trust you. But if you really must know, it’s not about that. You have things to take care of up in the cityship. Things I want you to take care of. If the other fleets aren’t attacking other cities across the world the way this one is attacking New York, it would be really great if you could put a stop to it.”
Maybe the other invasions are more peaceful than this one. Maybe this fleet commandant guy really has gone rogue.
Rowan’s boots click across the linoleum floor as he walks toward me. His hair, disheveled from wearing the helmet, has a static thing happening, and my eyes stick to the golden amber strands floating just over his forehead. “I am not certain I can stop anything.”
“Yeah, well, like every kindergarten teacher’s always said, you won’t know until you try.”
He looks away, the chest of his exosuit ballooning as he takes a long, deep breath. He seems to take stock of my kitchen—my mom’s collection of roosters and anything having to do with Paris lining the walls. Those strange eyes of his coast to the sliding doors that lead to the back porch and our fenced-in yard. They then coast back to me.
“We will go to your school. If we do not find your mother there, then that is where I will leave you.”
I feel a little crimp in my chest. I wish he’d leave me here and now, but he isn’t going to budge. “Fine.”
“Fine,” he echoes.
Neither of us moves. He just continues to look at me. If there was breathable air in the kitchen a few moments ago, it’s gone now. We should go. I should move and usher him out of the kitchen, but I’m frozen in place. Here, in my own house, in my own kitchen, I feel safe. Once we’re back outside, that feeling will disappear. But I can’t hide away. I need to find my mom.
“Penelope—” Rowan begins, but thankfully, a gray ball of fur appears on the back porch and begins to paw at the glass.
It gives me a reason to move. “Mister Mister!”
I unlock the door and slide it open. My cat darts inside, meowing as he rubs against my calf. I scoop him up and bury my face in the thick gray fur of his stomach. He smells like grass and dirt, and he purrs like a lawnmower, something Mister Mister never does. He’s probably been outside during all the chaos. Clearly, he knows something is wrong.
“That is a feline,” Rowan says. I pull my face out of the cat’s belly fur to catch Rowan frowning.
“Yeah. A cat. We keep them as pets,” I say. Of course he knows this. He has the freaking Internet on his spaceship.
“Volkranians do not keep pets,” he says.
Mister Mister begins to squirm, so I drop him onto his feet. He pads toward Rowan, and darts directly between his legs to get to his bowl of food.
“Why am I not surprised?” I ask as I write a quick note on the top Post-It, telling my mom where I’m going and that I’m looking for her, just in case she comes home. Rowan has already moved into the front hall, and when I get there, he’s inspecting the framed school pictures that hang on the wall.
“Is this your sibling?” His eyes are hitched on Ollie’s third grade school photo. His last one. He’s wearing a navy-and-white-striped shirt, and his front tooth is hours away from falling out, all crooked and gross-looking.
My dad took the picture down a few months after the ac
cident, saying it was too painful to look at every day, but my mom screamed and railed and hung it back up. His picture does feel like a punch to the gut whenever I look at it. But I agree with my mom—I’m not ready to take it down, to pretend he’d never been here. I don’t think I ever will be.
“Yes,” I say, crouching to pick up my messenger bag.
“You have not mentioned him.”
I shrug. “Because he’s dead.”
It’s as simple as that, really.
“You also have not mentioned a father,” Rowan adds, bypassing the usual I’m sorry that I’ve come to expect from people. “Is he dead as well?”
I stand up, hauling my messenger bag into my shoulder. “No, he’s alive. He’s just...not around much anymore.”
Rowan frowns, and I hold my breath, hoping he doesn’t say anything nice or well-meaning. He doesn’t care about my brother or dad, or anything at all about my family, and I don’t want him to pretend he does.
“We should go,” I say, opening the front door and stepping onto the porch.
My feet crash to a halt.
A black transport slides into view, hovering over my lawn, the reflective glass windshield aimed right at my house.
“Penelope, get back!” Rowan hauls me inside and slams the door just as the first white flares shatter the front porch windows.
Chapter Eleven
I scream as pair of huge arms wraps around me and drags me to the floor. The hard exterior of Rowan’s suit shields me as the windows along the front of my house explode, glass, insulation, and wood splintering into clouds of debris. The bay windows implode, and a flare destroys our television in one shot, smoke and electrical static shivering over the remains. More flashes of white pop and sear, smashing every framed print in my living room and punching black-singed holes in the walls and furniture.
Miraculously, I’m still breathing and pain free when the barrage of flares stops. Rowan shifts away from me.
“Are you injured?” He rolls into a crouch and grips my hand as he scurries toward the kitchen.
“No,” I croak, panic a glacial stone in my throat. My feet don’t want to work; they trip over the shattered glass of the school pictures lying on the hallway floor. The top of Ollie’s is burned right to his hairline, and my heart clenches as Rowan drags me past it.
“Your people are still trying to kill you,” I gasp. “But the chloromagnate...it’s on the ship.”
He leaps over Mister Mister as the cat darts toward the sliding glass doors to the porch. Rowan tugs me in the same direction. “They don’t want the chloromagnate.”
“What?”
Nothing makes sense. I can smell ozone and burning wood, and the knowledge that my house is probably on fire knocks around the back of my head like a distant alarm.
Rowan tries to slide the door open, but the lock is still engaged. He struggles with it another second before stepping back and aiming his weaponed arm at the glass.
“Stop!” I leap forward and spring the lock, then send him an exasperated glare. He ignores it and rushes onto the back porch, immediately on guard as he looks up at the sky. I follow, even though what I really want to do is hunker down in my basement and wait for the transport to leave.
But something tells me the pilot is gunning for both Rowan and me.
I stay on his heels, leaping off the back porch, onto the lawn—and then I collide with his unyielding back. He’s stopped. The reason why steps into view from behind the garage.
My knees turn into wet sand as the warden raises his arm, placing us in the crosshairs of his exosuit’s weapon. Rowan shifts me behind him, his body large enough to shield me completely. I peer around his shoulder.
The warden’s sharp, purple eyes land on Rowan with unbridled intensity. His finger swipes the panel of buttons at his throat—and he doesn’t waste a breath of his English words on preamble.
“I have recovered the chloromagnate from your private chamber. You should know that your team of guards that were charged with releasing the vessels into the other water treatment facilities were all stopped and silenced. Those vessels of chloromagnate are now in my possession as well.”
Rowan flexes his hands, the black gloves creaking. “You killed my guard and sent the other one to kill me.”
There isn’t a flicker of regret on the warden’s expression.
“The fleet commandant is in violation of the Sovereign’s original directives. We were to subdue the humans, not annihilate them. We were not to unleash the chloromagnate until we secured separate water facilities from the humans.”
My head goes feather-light. It’s true, then. And the warden had switched to English for a reason: He wants me to know.
“What proof do you have of these directives?” Rowan asks. “For as long as my memory serves, we have been under orders to take the planet’s largest cities and scrub out half the population.”
My stomach lurches. Scrub out. Like a stain. I clench my jaw, my anger quickly rekindling.
“Your memory is short compared to the length of time we have been traveling the Band,” the warden says, moving closer. “Mine, however, remembers our original directives. Directives the commandant claimed the Sovereign altered at some point along our journey.”
He matches Rowan in height, but the warden outweighs him in ferocity. “Have you never questioned why he is the only Volkranian on Volkron Six permitted to communicate with our auxiliary fleets?”
“Why would he want to kill the humans here?” I ask. Rowan doesn’t move his head, but he still tenses.
“To ease our settlement. To be the first fleet commandant to take smooth control of his sector,” the warden answers. “Once global communications are restored, the humans will see one city that has been cleansed entirely and made ready for occupation. While the rest of the fleets attempt to make peaceful contact with the confused, angry, and scared citizens beneath them, there will be one shining example of how simple it would be for Volkranians to rid themselves of the hassle completely. Human populations will submit out of fear, and our fleet commandant will appear to be the most powerful and feared Volkranian on the planet.”
It makes sense, I suppose…if anything makes sense right now. The other fleets trying to settle around the globe using discussion and politics—and perhaps failing at it—might be inspired to divert from the Sovereign’s directive as well. They might try things a different way. The violent, but quick, way the New York fleet commandant had.
“You don’t know anything about humans if you think we’re going to submit,” I say.
“It is the fleet commandant who has miscalculated, as well as those who are loyal to him,” the warden replies, his attention sliding to Rowan. “Like his son.”
Silence drops. So does my stomach.
I stare at the back of Rowan’s head. “He’s your father?”
Holy Skywalker plot twist.
The way all the Volkranians had averted their eyes and bowed their heads pops into my mind. It wasn’t just because of Rowan’s rank.
“My father is loyal to the Sovereign,” Rowan says, ignoring me. “He is loyal to his Volkranian subjects.”
The warden scoffs. “He is loyal to himself and the power he has given himself. The power he wants to take from the Sovereign.”
“Perhaps that is what you seek,” Rowan says. “Overthrowing the fleet commandant and eliminating his heir will deliver you straight into the role of commandant yourself.”
The heir. I’m trying to roll with it, but somehow, everything has changed now that I know who Rowan really is. When he gets back to the cityship, how hard is he really going to try to prove his father is breaking their Sovereign’s instructions? He wouldn’t want to prove his dad is lying. Would he?
“I did not expect you to believe me, commanding sentinel,” the warden says. “You are loyal to your father, and you are a fine soldier, but you cannot think beyond the orders you are given.”
“Then your instincts aren’t as sharp as yo
u’d like to believe, Warden,” Rowan replied, bristling.
“It’s true.” I say it before I can think. My ears burn from the surprised stares from the two aliens standing in front of me. Weighing in could be dangerous, but really, everything is right now.
“Rowan’s already gone against his orders. He kept the chloromagnate because he knew something wasn’t right.”
He turns his ear to me, keeping his eyes on the warden. The half of his face I can see shows a slight downturn of his lips. He doesn’t need me to defend him, and his frown says I’ve only made things worse. Enough with the Stockholm Syndrome, already. I promise myself I won’t say another word.
The warden takes a step forward and to the side, as if he’s going to try and approach me. Rowan swiftly moves to block his path.
Amusement lights the warden’s eyes. “The commanding sentinel has not told you how he is to conclude this mission with you, has he?”
Rowan parts his lips to say something, but the warden is faster.
“He is to deliver you to your mother, as bound by honor—and then eliminate you both.”
The ground isn’t moving, but right then my lawn feels like it’s rolling in a shock wave.
“That’s—” I’m about to say not true, but then, the memory of the fleet commandant’s final words to Rowan in their Volkranian language hits. Rowan’s shock and anger had stood out, but he’d said nothing. Just like he says nothing now.
“You told me you wouldn’t hurt her,” I whisper. He’d promised.
God, I’ve been so stupid.
He turns to face me completely. His irises are a placid blue, without a hint of green. The difference shocks my heart to a near stop. “I had no intention of seeing the order through. I am not lying to you, Penelope.”
“He is,” the warden says. “He would never betray his father. And that is why he has no place on the new Volkron Six.”
A white streak of electricity explodes from the Warden’s raised weapon. With a breath-stealing shove, Rowan pushes me aside a millisecond before electricity wraps around him like a net. I land on the small pile of bricks that my dad’s been promising to lay a path down with, jamming my knee and scraping my hand. I don’t feel it though. My whole body goes numb as Rowan throws his head back and arches his spine, a shivering groan climbing from his throat.
