“TO DO BOTH,” I SAID doubtfully. “To help you and find our way home?”
“Yes.” Eden entered the room. She left the door open behind her, and I doubted it was an accident. The message was clear. We weren’t prisoners. If we wanted to leave, we could go … back aboveground, to where the aliens lurked, waiting to tear us apart.
A shudder went through me unbidden, and Cage slid his hand up my arm, soothing my fears. “And if we refuse whatever you have planned?” he asked.
Eden shrugged. “Then I suggest you wait awhile for the area to clear, and you can be on your way. In the meantime, would you like to hear me out?”
“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t about to let anyone else answer. The fact was, we were stranded on this planet. The food and water would only last so long, and with the aliens in the area, I didn’t think our apartment building would keep us safe much longer. We needed Eden’s help. And I didn’t trust the others to accept it.
Sure enough, I got a few glares, mostly from Hallam and Mia, who obviously didn’t appreciate me speaking on their behalf. But they also didn’t argue, which I took to mean they knew I was right. Besides, we owed Eden to at least hear her out. I remembered how the others had regarded me when they saw me as the enemy—suspiciously, with hatred blinding them. I wouldn’t do the same to her.
“If you don’t mind,” said Eden, “it’s easier to show you some of this than to explain it. Wendell? Wendell, don’t be afraid. Come in.”
A young boy, maybe five or six, clutching a ratty teddy bear, shuffled into the room. He was clinging to the hand of an older woman, possibly his grandmother. They both wore ragged clothes, and their faces were smeared with dirt and exhaustion. “Wendell has some psychic abilities,” Eden explained. She scooped him into her arms and bumped noses with him, and the boy chuckled. “He’s sort of a conduit. He can help me show you what happened.”
“Will it hurt him?” Imani’s voice held a low rumble of fire.
Eden shook her head. “Not a bit. He won’t even know what I’m showing you. I just need to be in contact with him to make it work. His abilities are entirely passive. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use them. I would never expose a child to some of the things I’m about to show you.”
The rest of us exchanged glances, and then, since no one else seemed ready to commit, I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “What do you need us to do?”
Eden had everyone sit around the room. Priya, Hallam, Mia, and Alexei took the four chairs, and the rest of us assumed positions on the floor, leaning against the lockers. I wound up with Cage on one side and Jasper on the other. Jasper was frowning, tugging on his hair, seeming more agitated than usual. “You okay?” I whispered.
“Don’t much like people in my head, that’s all.”
I shivered. I’d only experienced a psychic intrusion once before, and I hadn’t enjoyed it at all. But this was different. “This is information,” I told him, as much to reassure myself as anything. “And right now, information is power. The more we can get, the faster, the better.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s why I’m not fighting it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Eden settled herself on the floor, cross-legged, Wendell in her lap clutching his bear. His grandmother, if that was what she was, hovered in the doorway. “Close your eyes,” Eden told us. “And try to relax.”
“Will you be able to read our thoughts?” Mia demanded sharply.
Eden sighed. “No. It works one way. You’re entirely safe. Is there anything else, or can we get started?”
From Cage’s other side, Rune made a sound. I leaned around him to raise an eyebrow at her, but she shook her head, frowning, her lower lip working between her teeth.
“All right,” said Eden before I pressed further. “Then here we go.”
I closed my eyes, and for a moment, nothing happened. And then, all at once, a wave of dizziness overtook me. My eyes flew open, and I was standing on a crowded city street. People surrounded me—normal people like you’d see in any city on Earth—going about their business, enjoying what seemed like a summer day. “This was the city of Orrin before the attack,” Eden announced. I spun to find her walking toward me dressed in army fatigues, her dark hair glistening in the sun. I checked around but didn’t see any of my friends, only her. “It was a normal city in a hot area of the continent. Dry. A desert even then, but with irrigation and the like, we did all right. I lived here. I was stationed at a nearby base with …” She swallowed hard. “With my family. So was Gideon. We were in different sections of the military, but I knew him enough to say hello when we passed.”
All at once the sky turned dark. Someone screamed. In the distance, sirens went off, and shots rang out. “The zemdyut had attacked once or twice before,” Eden continued conversationally. “We first learned of them a few hundred years ago when they dropped the devices that transformed our DNA. Slowly but surely, each subsequent generation developed more and more powers until it was almost impossible to find someone without an ability. We didn’t mind much. There was some initial fear and resistance, but the abilities were useful, and as more and more people developed them, they just became a part of life.”
The sky shimmered overhead and formed into a familiar, hideous visage, an alien creature with milky-white eyes. I shuddered, clamping my hands into fists so hard my nails sank into my flesh. I’d seen the aliens before, of course. Faced them down. Stolen their ship, for God’s sake. But not this big, not this vivid.
It wasn’t real, though, and Eden continued to narrate. “The creatures appeared rarely at first, striking in quick raids, taking our people. We didn’t know why, and we never seemed to be able to predict when they’d appear or fight against them. We began work on planetary defenses, trying to anticipate their arrival. And they, for their part, visited more frequently. Soon they were coming every few years, harvesting in the millions, tearing us apart. Planetary defense became a military focus. The military focus. We poured all of our time and energy into researching space travel, figuring out who the creatures were and where they’d come from. But before we could finish, they returned—this time for good.”
The world shifted, like someone stirring coloring into a glass of water, and when it resettled, I was standing on the same street in a state of chaos. Fires raged unchecked. A few people huddled in alleys, sobbing or shouting for their families.
And through the streets prowled the aliens. Dozens of them, hundreds even, when I’d never seen more than a few together at a time. The creatures scaled buildings; they preyed on anyone in their path with relentless determination. And still Eden stood quietly in their midst. “This wasn’t a harvest,” she said. “It was a massacre. The aliens dragged the bodies underground, and we never saw them again, but it quickly became evident that this time, they’d come for only one reason: to kill anyone left over. Our scientists theorized they’d harvested anyone with compatible DNA, and they were doing a sweep of the remainder, wiping us off the planet, the last step in claiming our territory. And that’s pretty much what they did. It was only through the quick thinking of a few soldiers that some of us survived.”
In the streets, a man I recognized as a younger version of Gideon crept onto the scene, a few soldiers in tow. While others attacked the aliens with makeshift weapons, he and his crew slipped past them, gathering the injured, anyone they passed. They came to a pause in front of a large building plastered with yellow sale banners, and Gideon nodded his head, saying something to the woman beside him.
An alien lunged from the rooftop. Gideon moved so fast I barely saw him. He snatched the boy the alien had targeted, tossed him aside, pivoted, and leaped onto the creature’s back. It threw its head back and howled, and Gideon’s arm flashed.
Then Gideon was on the ground, coated in alien slime, and the creature was gurgling on its own blood. Gideon had shoved a knife right down its throat.
I glanced to his face and saw the same pale eyes, but this time they reflected an instant of fear before settling into the professional mask I’d seen Legion wear so often. He wiped his hand over his face and gestured for the others to follow him. They did, ducking under the banners and into the building.
The scene shifted again. Now I was looking at the city I recognized, the one I’d explored the day before. It was quiet and deserted, but closer examination showed the buildings weren’t in quite the state of decay they were now. This was some time after the alien attack, but not so long as I’d initially thought. “We survived,” said Eden grimly, and for the first time emotion entered her voice. “We gathered everyone we found, anyone the zemdyut missed in their decimation, and we collected them in the basement of a warehouse store. Gideon led us in fortifying the building. We blocked entranceways. We soundproofed. We created a warning system to alert people if the creatures approached. We cobbled together a rudimentary electrical system using people’s abilities. But we couldn’t rebuild. For one thing, we never knew when the zemdyut would appear. It was clear they hadn’t left, and we suspected they were somewhere in the desert.”
Then the planet suddenly flew away beneath my feet, setting my stomach lurching and reminding me of antigrav drills back at Omnistellar camps. I struggled to steady myself, but my feet hadn’t actually moved. The world had just withdrawn, giving me a bird’s-eye view of the city surrounded by desert. “We think there’s a group of the creatures living here, beneath the ground.” Eden was standing beside me. When she gestured, a flashing red light appeared in the desert, some distance from the city. “We’ve managed to send a few scouts, and when they returned—if they returned—they reported seeing the creatures slip beneath the surface.
“After a while, things started to return to … not normal, but more of an equilibrium. We’d go days without seeing the zemdyut. Weeks, even. When they did return, they usually stuck to the fringes of the city. Those areas had always been sparsely populated and, as I’m sure you noticed, weren’t as touched in the attacks.” The area surrounding the city, the outskirts, glowed yellow. “That’s why there were still supplies there. We left them for last, for when we got desperate. It was safer to raid the city center. It’s only in the last few months we’ve resorted to risking the outskirts. We’ve lost a few people. The zemdyut are aware of us now, if they weren’t before.” She hesitated a moment, inspecting the map spread out below us. “That’s why Gideon sent me to steal your supplies. I know what you must think of him, but … he was a good man. He took care of us all. He’d gotten scared over the last few years, paranoid he’d get everyone killed. Frustrated with life underground. Hell, we’re all there. Gideon simply felt it more. And yet … he was too scared to see what needed to be done. Convinced that if we moved a muscle, the zemdyut would somehow sense us, that they’d come after us, destroy us. He was willing to imprison everyone in this building for their entire lives as we slowly ran out of supplies, all in the name of security.”
A trace of bitterness had entered her voice, and in that moment I read her frustration as the commanding officer she’d once regarded with something like reverence deteriorated into a shell of his former self, brushing off her every attempt to make him see the obvious. In a way it was almost like my view of my parents: the blinders falling away, the caring people they’d once been still there but buried under layers of betrayal and confusion. When I’d realized the truth about Omnistellar, I’d been left with no choice but to turn my back on the corporation. I suspected Eden found herself in the same position.
She shook off the emotion and spread her arms. “I’m telling you this for a few reasons. First of all, I want you to understand who we are, where we’re coming from. Second, I need you to understand how desperate our situation is—and if you’re here, yours is too. Our supplies have almost vanished. Our only hope to find more outside of the city, and that’s impossible. The desert is a deathtrap.” She smiled. “But it’s not all doom and gloom. Because if you help us, well, I just might have a way to help you in return.”