AS THE DRIVER PARKS ON THE STREET OUTSIDE THE Upper West Side building where I’ve lived my entire life, Mom turns to me. “Are you ready for this?” she asks me in a low voice.
“No,” I say honestly. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”
She gives me a pained smile and gets out of the vehicle. The others disembark, too. Race and Congers stand stiffly near the front stoop while the other agents remain near the two SUVs and one truck, scanning the sidewalk warily. It’s Saturday, four in the morning, but our neighbors are mostly middle-aged professionals. Not a lot of night owls, so the street is pretty quiet.
The last few hours have been a flurry of phone calls and planning.
I’m still not happy about taking Core agents into Dad’s lab. But I know what I saw on that road in Jersey. I know the avarice I saw on the faces of Willetts and George as they worked in concert to steal the scanner. I know how I feel when I think of a parasitic alien trying to take over the body of the girl standing next to me, or anybody, for that matter. And I believe the Sicarii are already in the early stages of an invasion that could come as soon as they disable the threats to their plan. Including us.
For all those reasons, I want to find out what my dad was doing, and why he called the scanner the key to our survival. The Sicarii wanted it, and that makes me wonder more than ever what the device can do, what might happen if they turned it against us, and what we could do to them if we could figure it out.
Leo touches my arm as everyone else gathers on the sidewalk. “Can I go in with you?” he asks, his voice just above a whisper. He gives Graham a nervous glance as the guy glowers at us.
I return Graham’s glare. I’m hoping he’s decided we’re even, but I know the last few hours have been rough for him. “Absolutely, Leo. I need you.”
Leo’s eyebrows rise, and I see the question there. “You knew my dad, Leo. And you notice things others don’t.”
His eyes brighten. “I do?”
“Yeah. So keep an eye out, and speak up. I need people I trust in there.” I reach for Christina’s hand as she joins us near the steps.
“Thanks,” Leo says, scuffing the toe of his oversized soccer cleat against the sidewalk.
We all file into the building. My body aches as we climb the stairs to the apartment, but I grit my teeth and resist the urge to lean against the banister and catch my breath. Standing behind me are Race, Congers, Graham, and another young agent named Daniel Sung, an Asian guy with black hair buzzed high and tight—the only Core member thus far who has politely introduced himself. My mom, Christina, and Leo follow them cautiously. All are tight-lipped and tense as I stride to the keypad and type in the entry code. The door swings open. “You guys really made yourselves at home last time you were here,” I growl at Congers, striding into my living room and taking in the disarray. “Where’s my cat?”
“Agents delivered the cat to a kennel under your name,” Congers responds.
I squint at him. “They did?”
He shrugs. “It was going to starve if it was left here.”
I should say “thanks,” but instead I say, “I hope you didn’t destroy the one thing that’s gonna get us into his lab.”
“You keep talking to me like you expect an apology,” says Congers, following me back to my room with the others trailing behind. “Stopping an invasion of this planet far outweighs the invasion of your home.”
“Dude, shut up,” I grumble, eyeing the mess they made of my space. I mean, it was always messy, but now it’s total chaos. I don’t know what they thought they were looking for, since the lab is in the basement, but they tossed my shit all over the place. Congers and Race stand in the hall. My mother peeks in and makes a noise that tells me she can probably smell my dirty socks. I go over to a pile of laundry and kick it aside, then pull up the loose corner of carpet. My dad—and the Core agents, apparently—never thought to look under it because of the pile of stinky workout clothes that was always there. Beneath the loose carpet is the little compartment I dug into the floorboards, and out of it, I pull the small plastic case containing my dad’s fingerprint. “Let’s go downstairs,” I say.
A few minutes later, I’m doing what I’ve done so many times before: slipping the film containing the fingerprint onto my finger and pressing it to the tab while typing in my dad’s password. It makes my chest ache. The last time I did this, he was alive.
The door opens, and it feels like we’re unsealing a tomb. Congers tells Sung and Graham to stay in the hallway, and both look unhappy but obey without arguing. The rest of them file in behind me, looking around as I flick on the lights. “Don’t touch anything,” I tell them. “Trust me. Some of this stuff looks harmless, but none of it is.” Race appears at my shoulder, and even though his face doesn’t give much away, I can tell he’s impressed by the eager sweep of his eyes across the weapons racks. “Look at this,” I say, walking over to the black screen that shows the population count. “This is what I was telling you guys about.”
The numbers on the screen read:
2,943,287,964
4,122,239,895
12 (?)
“So you think the bottom number denotes the Sicarii scouts,” Race says.
“I do. Like I told you, it was fourteen before George and Willetts were killed,” I reply as Congers and my mother join us while Christina hovers near the door.
Race peers at the screen. “I’d say that’s a preponderance of the evidence.”
“It’s a good hypothesis,” my mother replies, always the scientist.
I touch the screen, and it flashes with a bunch of blueprints and plans before going red and asking for the password, just as it did before. I take a deep breath. Please let this be right. I’ve tried it in other places, and I’m scared to hope that it’s going to work now, especially because I’m not alone in that hope—everyone else is tense and silent with anticipation. My fingers shake as I type. When the time comes, it’s Josephus . . . As soon as I type that name, the red dissolves, and I let out a shaky, relieved laugh as the plans are revealed. For what, I have no idea, but since that password was the last thing my dad ever said, I know I’m looking at something important. And relentlessly complicated. The agents and my mother narrow their eyes as they try to read the tiny words and equations. “Do you guys have any idea what it is?”
“I might,” says Race. “And if I’m right, your father was much further along than we anticipated—we thought he’d just made a single device, but he seems to have built his own system. Bill, look at this.”
Congers leans in, and he might have a good poker face, but he can’t hide his surprise. His eyes get wider as he zooms in on the lower left quadrant of the plans. “This . . . could be it.” He tears his gaze from the screen to look at me. “You mentioned that your father had scaled up the technology. Did he utilize its full potential?”
“You’re gonna have to rewind and tell me what you’re thinking.”
“The scanner technology differentiates the species. Human. H2. Sicarii. And if those numbers you showed us are indeed from a population counter, he’s scaled up the technology using a satellite, as you said. But these plans are for a network of satellites.”
Race points to a list of names, all pharaohs—Amenhotep, Thutmose, Hatshepsut, and so on. “These designate each one.”
“You might be right.” I walk over to the shelf and grab the mobile satellite controller, the size of a small cell phone, the one I found the same day I stole the scanner from this lab. I enter the password—Mom’s middle name—and show them the display. “This one is for Ramses.” We look back at the screen’s listing of pharaoh names designating each satellite. Ramses is the only name listed in red. The others are white. “Maybe Ramses is the only one in the air?”
“Or the only one scanning,” suggests my mom. “If all of these are activated and working in concert, they’ll form a field. Anything passing through the field will be scanned.”
“Like incoming Sicarii,” I say. “So it’s like an early warning system? How much good will that do us?”
“Look at that,” says Leo from behind me, reaching around to poke the screen.
I stare at the small diagram of the satellite. “Is that a . . . laser?” If so, it’s more complex and advanced than any kind of laser tech I’m aware of.
“Sounds like the satellites can do more than scan,” Leo comments.
“These are like giant weaponized scanners,” I say. Somehow, my dad knew we were under threat. He’d already planned ahead. I nudge my mom’s shoulder. “Why do you think he hadn’t activated the entire satellite shield yet? He’d figured out so much.”
Her brow furrows, and she presses her lips together for a moment, then says, “He assumed he’d be alive, Tate. He may have wanted to consult with The Fifty once he was certain there was a threat, or once he’d confirmed what it was. We’ll never know.”
Congers clears his throat in the heavy silence that follows. “We need to transfer these schematics so we can examine them,” he says. “As much as Archer built and discovered, we don’t even know if the additional satellites are aloft or what it would take to construct them.”
I shake my head. “You’re not transferring plans to an unknown machine.”
“Tate.” Mom touches my arm. “We could manage all of this at Black Box. In fact, it’s likely that Black Box actually supplied the Ramses satellite. They may have the information about the others, even if they didn’t know how they were being used.”
I chuckle. “Knowing Dad, that’s entirely possible.” We spend a few minutes preparing the plans for remote retrieval. It involves removing a few layers of security, but now that I’m inside, it’s nothing I haven’t done before. The others wait quietly; it’s clear they took my warnings about Dad’s weapons seriously, though Leo is eyeing the seizure bags and Race is watching my computer maneuvers with interest. When I’m finished, we search the other computers for any sign of where Dad hid the actual H2 wreckage.
What I find instead is his weapon design files—and specifically a set marked “SIC.” Race respectfully stands back as I explore. There are plans here for the lasers on the satellites, but also for a combat vehicle. It resembles the eight-wheeled Stryker used by the US Army, but with a ton of modifications, including double autocannons—along with additional plans for the custom artillery shells—and a giant lens on the roof of the vehicle. I look back at Race. “I have no idea what that lens is for, but I kind of wish we’d had these when we met the Sicarii on the road.”
Race looks at the plans and nods. “Does Black Box have these schematics?”
“No idea.”
“Perhaps we should take them.”
I smile grimly. “Definitely.”
He glances around us. “Any idea where your dad kept the actual wreckage? He wouldn’t have placed it in storage elsewhere, would he?”
“Unlikely,” mutters Leo before I can say the same thing. My dad didn’t trust anyone but himself.
“But we don’t know whether we’re looking for plane-sized wreckage or shoe-box-type wreckage,” I say. “Mom, did he ever talk about it?”
She wraps her arms around her slender body and stares at his desk, the only place in the room that’s even a little bit cluttered. And by “cluttered,” I mean there are three pencils, a ream of printer paper, and his old black Princeton Tigers mug sitting on its otherwise clean surface. “No,” she says quietly. “He showed me files, but never the artifacts themselves.” And I can tell it hurts her.
Leo looks back and forth from my mom to the desk. He walks slowly across the room and looks down into the mug. I shake my head—I didn’t really see it, because it’s always been there. I join him as he squats in front of it. “He didn’t drink tea,” Leo says quietly.
“Or coffee,” I add, glancing at my mom.
She frowns, and I can tell she’s realizing how odd it is, too. Now that I really think about it, I’ve never seen him with it upstairs, never seen it in the dishwasher, never seen it anywhere but right there. “Maybe we should—”
Before I can finish my thought, Leo snatches it from the desk. As soon as he does, there’s a soft click that I hear like cannon fire. I brace, expecting some kind of lethal onslaught . . . but all I feel is a hum beneath the soles of my shoes.
A panel in the floor slides away smoothly, forcing Leo—who’s holding the mug and grinning like an idiot—to jump aside. What’s revealed is a small chamber beneath the lab, with a set of rungs set into the wall. White cloths cover several irregularly shaped objects sitting on the floor. I stare at Leo for a moment, trying to suppress a smile and failing because his is contagious. “You could have gotten us all killed, dude.”
He bounces on his heels. “But I didn’t.”
I catch Race’s eye. He’s shown respect, and it’s time for me to do the same. “Let’s take a look.”
He looks mildly surprised at the invitation. I descend the rungs and wait for him at the bottom while my mom and the others watch from above. With my heart thumping heavily, I slowly pull the cloth off the largest object, which is about the size of a bicycle. It’s a twisted, charred jumble of metal and wire and circuitry, with smooth panels and cracked display screens. And it happens to be over four hundred years old. It’s traveled countless light-years. It came from another planet. Another galaxy.
“Where did he get this?” Congers asks in a hushed voice, leaning over the edge.
“His ancestor witnessed the crash. It’s been in the Archer family for centuries. But my dad was the one to figure out the technology, and he used it to make the scanner.”
Race tears his gaze away from the wreckage. For the first time, I see true regret in his eyes. “I’m sorry he’s not here. I’m sorry for the part I played in that. If I could bring him back, I would.”
“Me too,” I say. Because I played a part in it, too. I haven’t forgiven myself, and I probably never will. “He’d want us to focus on the task at hand, though.”
Race nods. “Let’s do it, then.”
“Hey, Tate?” Christina calls in an oddly quavering voice. “Sorry to interrupt, but I think you should see this.”
Race and I climb out of the chamber to see her staring at the screen that a minute ago contained the plans for the satellite shield. Now it’s back to the screen saver—the population counter. Except now the numbers read:
2,943,287,962
4,122,239,896
16 (?)
Sometime in the last ten minutes, four more Sicarii have arrived on our planet.