We stared across the kitchen table at the shadowy figure in the living room.
Charcoal space suit, tinted face mask.
Patrick grabbed for his shotgun, but I said, “No, it’s okay. It’s him.”
Alex twirled her hockey stick. “Looks just like a Drone.”
“That’s what I told you guys.”
“Patrick Rain. Chance Rain. And … Girl.” Amplitude bars wobbled on the face mask with each word as it translated, a blue glow that widened and closed like a mouth.
“Really?” Alex said. “That’s all I get? Unnamed Girl?”
I moved toward him. “It’s us.”
Patrick and Alex came reluctantly, keeping their weapons. I brought my baling hooks, too, because—why not?
We stood in a loose ring on the carpet.
It was all so surreal. Standing in our living room, talking to a Rebel from another planet, a planet that had been overtaken by the Harvesters just like they were trying to overtake Earth now. The few surviving Rebels had tried to fight back, had come here to warn us before the Harvesters wiped out another people and notched another planet in their win column.
I cleared my throat uncomfortably. I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience dealing with saviors from other worlds, but I imagined there was some kind of etiquette for it. “Would you like to … um, sit down?”
“Why?” The digitized masculine voice sounded not so much robotic as perfect, all the flaws and irregularities smoothed out.
“I don’t know,” I said. “To relax.”
“Why would I want to relax?”
“It’s just what people do here,” I said. “When we talk.”
The Rebel sat abruptly on the carpet. Alex stifled a laugh.
“I meant on the couch or an armchair or whatever,” I said.
He repositioned himself, and then we all sat around the low glass table like we were having tea. Moonlight seeped through the closed metal slats of the venetian blinds in the big front window, laying patterns across the carpet and our faces.
I could sense Patrick and Alex studying him. They hadn’t seen a Rebel up close like I had. His suit was airtight and seamless like those of the Drones, but in contrast to their sleek, polished armor his was chipped and scuffed up. The color was different, too, a matte charcoal compared to the shiny black of the Drones’.
Patrick leaned forward, elbows on knees, folding his hands. “This mission I keep hearing about. You came here looking for us.”
“Yes,” the Rebel said.
“Why did you know who we were already?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “we put you here.”
I tried to swallow. “Uh, what?”
Patrick pulled back, his spine straightening one vertebra at a time. Alex’s mouth was hanging open.
The amplitude waves flared back to life. “We managed to smuggle a group of genetically modified human ova into the fertility banks here.”
A blue light shot out from his chest plate, projecting a hologram above the glass table between us. We watched, captivated.
It showed a guy in an old-fashioned-looking biohazard suit, like something from one of those atomic-bomb documentaries. We couldn’t see his face behind the tinted eye shield. He lumbered down a cold tile corridor in a building that had been shut down for the night. In his puffy glove, he held a medical canister made of surgical steel. He pressed a code into a keypad, and two doors to a freezer unit opened with a hiss. He disappeared into the wisps of cool air.
Just as quickly as it had materialized, the moving image vanished.
“It was a dangerous endeavor with very low odds of success,” the Rebel said. “We tried this at myriad fertility banks around the planet. Only two ova made it through the entire birthing process and took.”
I was breathless. “Only two,” I repeated. “Me and my brother.” My throat was so dry that the words barely came out.
“Yes. Both at the Stark Peak Fertility Bank. It seems conditions were more favorable there.”
“So you’ve been following us ever since?”
“We were only able to track you through your birth. The risks were too great to continue monitoring you from there. But we are pleased you are both healthy and viable.”
My spinning mind caught on an image of Patrick breathing in the spore-infected air. His genetic immunity hadn’t been luck or chance. It had been carefully engineered. We had been carefully engineered. There was too much to process. Part of us had been designed?
“Wait a sec. We’re one of you? From there?” I jabbed a finger at the roof.
“We do not have much time,” the Rebel began.
“No,” Patrick said. “Wait a minute. We just found out we’re friggin’ alien, so we get a question or two, okay?”
The blue light glowed in the mask: “You are not one of us. But you are not entirely human either.”
I had no idea what to do with that information. Not right now. There was too much to consider. So many ramifications.
“This means you knew years ago,” I said. “You knew that there would be an invasion before we were born—”
“Yes. And the Harvesters already suspect where you were born. That is why the first asteroid hit near your town.” The soothing voice seemed so at odds with the information being conveyed.
“So we should go on the run,” Patrick said. “Get as far away from here as we can.”
“No. Being out in the open is more dangerous. It is imperative that you remain hidden.”
“We need to hide so the Harvesters can’t capture us?” I asked.
“Now that the Hatchlings have successfully been birthed, they no longer need to,” the Rebel said.
“Why’s that?” Alex asked.
The Rebel said, “Because if the Hatchlings find you, they will devour you. As they will all other humans they come into contact with.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat was like sandpaper.
“The Hatchlings,” Alex said. “They’ll take over from the Drones?”
“Yes. Since the Hatchlings are adapted to live here, the Drones and Queens will eventually leave this planet in their hands. And they’ll go search out new galaxies to Harvest. They are not well equipped for this world.”
Alex held up a hand. “Because they’re made of gas, right? The Harvester Drones and Queens? Like you?”
The Rebel’s head dipped in something resembling a nod. He pressed his palm to his chest, and his charcoal armor ignited with a network of thin blue tendrils, like the circuitry of a computer chip. The glowing filaments flickered in and out, and then suddenly the suit turned clear and we could see what was inside.
I felt the blood rush to my face. Alex gasped.
Clouds of gas swirled inside the airtight suit, floating around organs. But the organs were as translucent as the mist, and I could see through them like holograms. My anatomy knowledge wasn’t great, but I could make out a heart and a lung. What looked like two livers. A spinning brain that drifted down a leg and bounced back up, levitating through the stomach, the chest.
“Our bodies evolved under a different atmospheric and gravitational system,” the Rebel said.
“You evolved to live in metallic hydrogen,” I said.
“Not precisely metallic hydrogen, but similar.”
“Like on Jupiter or Saturn.”
“Jupiter, yes,” he told me. “Saturn, no.”
“Oh,” I said.
I was learning things people hadn’t known since the beginning of time. Scratch that. Since ever.
“Chance,” Patrick said. “Let’s just—”
“So the Harvesters,” I said, “their whole invasion, it’s all designed for them to birth a generation suited to Earth’s environment?”
“Yes. The first phase of a Harvesting comes in the form of plants seeded by asteroids.”
“The Dusting,” Alex said.
“Yes, the…” The mask darkened, and I realized that he—or the mask’s translation feature—was searching for a word.
“Spores?” I said.
“Pollen. The pollen enters certain members of the indigenous population.”
“Like McCafferty,” Patrick said.
The Rebel continued, “It penetrates their very cells, scours the twisting ladders of DNA to pluck out specific letters it requires. Then it mutates and releases a different version of the pollen with keys fitted precisely for stretches of the host species’ genetic code.”
“And that’s the second phase,” Alex said. “The one that turned all the grown-ups into Hosts. Chasers and Mappers.”
“It makes use of the adults of the indigenous population to pave the way for the Harvesters’ occupation.”
“By stealing kids and turning them into egg sacs,” Alex said.
“By turning the young into Husks, yes. During the pupal stage, Harvester offspring absorb bits and pieces of the indigenous DNA from their Husks, stealing traits more suitable to the new environment and integrating them into their genetic makeup.”
“The Harvesters…” Alex coughed into her fist. “They’ve done this before?”
The tinted face mask swiveled to address her. “Yes.”
“How many?” she whispered. “How many worlds?”
The Rebel’s chest plate created a new hologram. I recognized our solar system immediately because of Saturn and Jupiter. Except Jupiter was blinking red, and so was Earth. Then the solar system dwindled to a point, one blinking red dot in the swirling Milky Way. And shot through the galaxy were rivers of blinking red stars, veins of infection.
The hologram zoomed out again. Now the Milky Way itself was a single red dot in an ocean of other galaxies. A universe of blinking red dots.
The hologram vanished.
No one said anything for a minute.
Then I rallied.
“And that’s where we come in, right?” I said, pride swelling in my chest. “Me and Patrick. It’s why you gave us immunity. For our super-important mission. Because we’re the saviors of the planet.”
Now the blank screen rotated to me. For a moment it was as black as midnight. If it had a face, it might’ve looked puzzled. Then the amplitude waves spoke again.
“We did not put you here as saviors,” the Rebel said. “We put you here to sacrifice.”