VARYING DEGREES OF SHOCK GREETED Liam’s comment. We’d known we weren’t the only ones the aliens had attacked. When I’d scanned the files on their ship, I’d found plenty of evidence that they’d done this before: injected their DNA into a planet, allowed it to fester a few generations, and then harvested the results as a sort of genetic terraforming. But that meant . . .
“You’re an alien?” Jasper demanded bluntly.
Liam shrugged. “Depends on your perspective, I guess.”
“How’d you get here?” I challenged.
“Not sure of that, either.”
“So, you just woke up. On Mars.”
“On Obsidian,” he corrected. “Otherwise, that’s more or less accurate. The zemdyut attacked our planet in force. They started small, like they did with you: a few outposts here and there, harvesting a few hundred people at a time. We’d barely start to recover from an attack and they’d return and take more. After a few generations, we were at war. My people had powerful weapons, but they weren’t any use. Yours won’t be either. The zemdyut are fast. Unpredictable. Adaptable. Much smarter than you think.”
Zemdyut. I mentally repeated the unfamiliar word, committing it to memory.
Reed chewed his bottom lip. “But, dude . . . I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look exactly like us.”
“What did you expect? Tentacles? Horns?”
“Well, the other aliens we met weren’t exactly humanoid,” Jasper pointed out. Mentally, I agreed, but looking at Liam, I picked up little differences I hadn’t identified before. The sparks in his eyes. A pointed, defiant edge to his chin. A slight extra length in his arms. None of it screamed alien, but there were differences if you looked hard enough.
Now he chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought when I woke up here: that you looked just like me.”
“And your world?” Cage demanded. “Is that just like ours too?”
Liam hesitated. “I still don’t know much about your solar system,” he hedged, obvious deception in his voice. “I’m a stranger here, even after all this time.” Prickles stood along my spine. For all his bluster, Liam was a rotten liar.
“Then tell us about yours,” demanded Alexei and Mia in unison. Reed pulled a face, but he was careful to do it out of their line of sight.
“Similar to Mars, I suppose. It’s dry and dusty. Has an atmosphere without any fancy tech, but we’d managed to destroy a lot of the surface before the last century. Most of the vegetation and water are artificial. Or were. I suppose it’s gone now.”
He was still hiding something, but the pain in his voice rang true, and I took pity on him. “The creatures destroyed your entire planet? How did you escape?”
Liam hesitated, then shrugged again, an almost defiant look settling over his features. “I abandoned my family when the zemdyut came through our front door. There was nothing I could have done for them. My mother and brother were already screaming. I went out the back window, stole a ship, and called up every ounce of power I had.”
Mia jumped on that. “You have powers?”
“The alien DNA has a different effect on everyone, but it always does something. Yeah, I have an ability. I can open portals through space . . . or at least, I used to be able to. I’d never transported anything so far before, and certainly never anything alive. I mostly used my ability to win games of valjorvakk.”
“Of what?” Imani asked a second before I could.
Liam frowned. “A sport I played in school. Uses a valvakk, a big yellow ball.”
“Like basketball?” I asked, ignoring that Reed was making faces at me now. I didn’t mean to sound so eager, but it had been a while since I’d done anything normal. I missed basketball. And Robo Mecha Dream Girl 5. And since I was compiling a wish list, regular showers, clothes that fit, and parents who loved me.
Liam nodded. “I’ve seen your basketball played. It’s not dissimilar. Maybe a cross between basketball and hockey. We use sticks. Anyway, prior to the alien attack, that was the most I’d ever managed. But I stole a shuttle in the chaos.” He passed a hand over his face, his strange eyes flickering. “It was . . . fire and screaming and . . . the aliens had abandoned any pretense of subtlety. They attacked to harvest and kill. Everywhere you turned, there they were.”
My brain rebelled at the description and the images it evoked, and Rune threaded her arm through mine, clutching me as if I was the only thing keeping her upright. Liam’s words evoked every moment of the horror on Sanctuary. We all felt it. Tension settled over the room, physical in its intensity, until the slightest sound might have pushed someone over the edge.
Liam’s gaze refocused, and he cleared his throat. “I stole a shuttle,” he repeated with false bravado. “I got it into space, and I saw one of those ships. Just like yours. It was . . . I knew if I stayed I would die just like everything else, so I pulled every ounce of power I could manage. The doctors on Obsidian said I bit through my own tongue, I was concentrating so hard. I didn’t even notice. I pushed that ship so hard and so far, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was in the Obsidian infirmary, and I’ve been on the station for the last five years.”
Liam sank his teeth into his lower lip. “I abused my powers that day,” he said slowly. “They’ve never worked the same since. Not reliably. Maybe I don’t want them to. I don’t know. I’m scared to try. Anyway. Is that what you wanted to know?”
An uncomfortable silence followed. After a moment, Imani leaned forward and offered him a smile and a change of topic. “But you must know where you came from. I mean, after five years, you must have seen charts. You must have wondered how far you traveled.”
His devil-may-care attitude settled back into place. “Far enough that I can’t find it on any of your maps. You know how many stars there are, sweetheart? Lots. It’s anyone’s guess which one is mine. Anyone’s guess for the zemdyut, too. We never did figure out where they’d come from. I tried to guess where my planet was, but . . . well, if I showed you a map of a random star system, do you think you could point to the pinprick that was Earth?”
Alexei’s eyes narrowed. “Five years on Obsidian,” he said in a conversational tone I recognized as his most dangerous. “Doing work that earned you a flashy ship and the freedom to come and go as you please. You must rank very high.”
Liam scowled in response. “Yeah, I know what you’re getting at, Alexei Danshov. And believe me, I damn near left you on Mars because of it.”
Alexei Danshov. Did these two know each other somehow? I glanced at Mia, but she was staring at the floor. Cage, the only other person Alexei might have confided in, shook his head in confusion. Liam, meanwhile, drew himself up and faced off against Alexei, ignoring the bigger boy’s clear malice.
Why had Liam pulled us off Mars? Trying to make up for abandoning his family? And where had he come from? How far away? How fast did the aliens travel? Rune and I hadn’t uncovered anything faster than our typical engines on the alien ship, but that didn’t mean much. We hadn’t been on it long enough to decode all its secrets. “Hey,” I said, before Alexei and Liam started chest thumping or something, “you still haven’t explained the most important thing.”
For a moment I didn’t think it would work, but then Liam shook his head and broke Alexei’s stare. “What’s that?” he asked, gathering the remnants of his persona around him like a cloak.
“Why are you dressed like a nineteenth-century pirate?”
Liam burst into laughter. “I’m a fashion icon,” he said, grinning.
“You have a cutlass,” replied Imani pointedly.
“It’s useful.”
At that moment, Alexei shot to his feet and stomped up the staircase. Liam moved as if to follow, but Mia rose at the same time. “I wouldn’t,” she advised, chasing after Alexei.
Liam scowled after them. “What if they wreck something?”
“They won’t,” Cage assured him. “I mean, probably. Almost definitely.” He hesitated, taking in our dubious expressions, and raised his hands in defeat. “All right. Maybe I’d better go too.”