Atlanta’s recovered, and at just the wrong moment. “We were only fooling.”
Captain Abrantes switches his attention to her. “With this?” His nod takes in the shuttle behind us.
Atlanta nods. “We don’t want to give anyone hassle. We saw it fall, we thought it’d be lixo from a satellite, but it’s real.” Her eyes are wide, her tone panicked. She has serious game.
This girl knows how to act. And though her English is sharply accented, so is his. Andlixois a word originally from Spanish, or Portuguese, or probably even Catalan, come to that.
I see the moment that he starts to buy it.
The moment that her version of events starts to sound more reasonable than ours. The moment it starts to slip away, our chanceof convincing anyone with the power to stop the Undying that our planet is in danger.
“This is serious business,” he says. “This isnota place for children.”
“Yes!” The words burst out of me—I can’t help myself. “Yes, Captain Abrantes, itisserious business. This shuttle is from the ship in orbit.Theyare from the ship in orbit.” I’m jabbing a finger at Atlanta and Dex. “We have to—”
He cuts me off with a gesture, and the soldier beside him twitches his gun to indicate I should keep my hands still. “They’re just kids,” Abrantes says, looking Atlanta and Dex up and down. “And the IA operatives on Gaia’s surface verified that the ship was empty before launching it through the portal to Earth.”
“Except for us,” Mia breaks in. “Wewere on that ship, Captain Abrantes—how else do you explain this spacecraft landing in the middle of a field?”
Abrantes glances at the shuttle, which is still pinging and cooling after its descent through the atmosphere. “Space junk,” he says, although his voice carries the barest hint of uncertainty. “There’s been a lot more of it since the ship arrived. It’s knocking other satellites out of their orbits.”
“Does this look like a satellite to you?” I ask softly. “It has a parachute, for god’s sake!”
Abrantes’s brow lowers a little, and his eyes flick between the four of us.
Sensing, perhaps, that belief is starting to swing back toward me and Mia, Dex steps forward. “We’re very, very sorry, sir—we shouldn’t have come to spy the crash site. We pledge we’ll never do it again.”
Abrantes sighs and gestures to the soldiers, two of whom stow their weapons and move forward, reaching for restraints to take us into custody.
No. I’m not letting this happen. We didn’t survive all that time in hiding, survive all of Gaia, just to get home and have no one believe us.
Desperation flares, and in that moment, I abandon everything I’d do—and I do what Mia would do.
“My name is Jules Addison,” I blurt, voice cracking with intensity. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mia’s gaze jerk toward me, surprise stiffening her shoulders. “I was recruited by the IA to go to Gaia and lead them to the ship that’s now in orbit. If nothing else, youhaveto report to your superiors that you have Dr. Elliott Addison’s son in your custody.”
The soldiers hesitate, and I feel their eyes on me. I look like my father—I always have. But for my lighter skin and the difference in our ages, we could be brothers. And my father’s face is one of the most well-known in the world, following his humiliation at the hands of those who doubted the warnings he tried to give.
After a long,longsilence, Abrantes lets out his breath in a sigh. “It certainly doesn’t look like a satellite, and you certainly do look like … Either way, we’ll be keeping you in our custody until we receive orders on what to do with you.”
It’s there. Doubt. I see it in the shift of his eyes as he looks at the shuttle’s parachute, in the uncertain glance at the four teenagers before him. And that’s all we need—for him to report our arrest to someone whodoesknow that I was on Gaia. Someone who knows there could be some truth to what we’re saying.
We keep our hands up as the soldiers with the guns approach. I can see Dex eyeing what must be the self-destruct settings out the corner of his eye—he must want badly to incinerate the shuttle, rather than leave it for these soldiers to crawl all over. But the controls are out of his reach. There’s no way he’d get to them before someone stopped him, probably with considerable force.
He must draw the same conclusion. His expression is blank.
My gaze slides from him to Atlanta, and there’s poison waiting for me in her eyes. I can’t imagine IA detention played any part in their plans, whatever they were.
The four of us let them wrap zip ties around our wrists and pat us down, but despite the restraints, despite their rough handling,I can’t help but feel a wisp of relief wash over me, like a cool breeze on a still, hot summer day. As soon as someone more senior than Abrantes looks at our situation, someone who knows about Charlotte’s operation on Gaia and that we were there, they’ll know we’re telling the truth. Or they’ll know enough to take a closer look at the ship in orbit.
It’s only a matter of time now, and we’ve done our part. The authorities will know what we know, and the burden of stopping all this will be ontheirshoulders, not ours. Mia and I are safe. And soon—so soon I can almost feel his arms encircling me in one of his massive hugs—I’ll see my father again.
We’re home.
FOR ONCE,IDON’T MIND BEING GRILLED BY UNIFORMED OFFICERS.Or being poked and prodded by a medical examiner, the inside of my cheek swabbed, my fingerprints taken. For once, I have absolutely nothing to hide. Not that I haven’t done anything wrong—I’m a criminal by every definition of the word—but my crimes are nothing compared to the intel we’ve brought back to warn our race that we’re all in danger.
My heart lightens with every detail I give them: being captured by the IA’s secret-ops division under Mink’s command amid the ice back on Gaia, how the Undying ship took off with us on board, the moment we realized it was a Trojan Horse, the plan we half uncovered involving aliens masquerading as human teenagers. Less than twenty-four hours ago, I thought I would die on an alien ship in orbit around a world that would never know what was coming for them.
Now—now they have a chance.
