But then the last thing I’m expecting to see appears outside the glass—it’s Dex and Atlanta, under the same kind of friendly escort as we’ve been enjoying so far. They both look tired and sullen—Dex has his head down, his braid out now, hair hanging around his face—but I can see the light of triumph in Atlanta’s eyes. Facing toward me and away from her armed guard, she permits herself just the tiniest smirk.
Then the glass door is opened, rousing Mia, and the two of them are pushed inside. They take up positions facing us, leaning against the wall at the opposite end of our little cell, seating themselves with their legs stretched out.
For a long moment, we stare at each other across the empty space of the room. A million questions and accusations fly through my thoughts, so crowded I can’t make sense of any of them.
“Well?” I say finally, and I can hear how belligerent it sounds.
“Well what?” Dex’s eyes on us are cool, but there’s a spark in them—whereas Atlanta’s are full of ill-concealed hostility.
“Who are you?” Mia blurts, before I can try to form a coherent sentence. “Your people—what do you want with Earth?”
Atlanta holds up her hands, placating, palms out. “We don’t want hassle,” she says. “We just want to go homewards. This was a piece of lixo idea. I pledge, we ever get out, I’m gonna shift back to school and stay there.”
Mia splutters in response, and I lay a hand on her arm. When she looks my way, I lift my chin, indicating the dark pinhole of a camera in the corner of the cell.
Whether Dex and Atlanta recognize it or not, they’re too smart not to assume we’re being watched. They’re still playing the part ofthe repentant pranksters, and why not? All they have to do is hold on. Even though nobody here ever bloody sayslixoorI pledge, unless they’re declaring allegiance to their bloody country.
And it’s working. The very fact that they’ve been brought back here, to be kept with the other “teens” tells me there’s no lingering suspicion on the part of the IA. As De Luca pointed out, they could very well be our co-conspirators in the elaborate hoax De Luca sketched out for us.
Everyone on Earth hasknown, ever since the Undying broadcast first reached us, that we were dealing with an extinct race. The idea that they could not only be alive, but wearing human faces and plotting to take our home for themselves, is ludicrous. It sounds ludicrous tome, and I’m living it.
I wouldn’t believe us either.
It’s one more blow in a long, steady beatdown—so much so that I barely feel it land.
Mia’s tone is sharp. “If you’re such terrible kids, why hasn’t someone called your parents already?”
Atlanta smiles, rueful. “We don’t have parents,” she replies with the ease of prior rehearsal. “Orphans, yeh?” Her veneer of woefulness is a slap in the face.
I clench my jaw to make myself stay silent. She’s playing to the camera mounted above us, and if Mia can’t trip her up, I know I certainly can’t.
I slide my gaze across to Dex instead. He meets my eyes for a moment, then looks away.I wish I knew what to make of him.He knew who we were—what we were—on the way down in the shuttle. Certainly he had every opportunity to figure it out or confirm his suspicions after we landed. And yet he was silent.
Does that mean he could be an ally?
I wish I could make my mind stop searching for hope. I wish I could make it go quiet, let me rest. But my mind chases the question in circles, around and around and around …
Eventually I must’ve fallen asleep, because I wake to a sharppain in my neck, which has lolled to one side for too long, and the sound of a guard’s voice.
“You’re wanted,” he says roughly, not making eye contact with either of us, but rather studying our legs where they’re stretched out in front of us.Not promising, when no one wants to meet your eyes.
Dex straightens where he’d been leaning against the wall next to Atlanta, who’s stretching out her limbs one at a time as if warming up for some sort of marathon—Do aliens sleep?—but the guard takes a step back, eyes flicking across them nervously. “Not you two, the others.” His gesture is for Mia and me.
Despite De Luca’s dismissal, the guard is still nervous around the Undying teens—still watching them, still looking as though he’s seen something he wishes he hadn’t.
Maybe it isn’t hopeless after all.The thought is tiny and quiet and part of me tries to drown it out. But the rest of me clings to the idea, holding it close and sheltering it like a fledgling bird.Maybe we aren’t the only ones who see what they really are.
Mia and I climb stiffly to our feet, and we’re escorted down a pair of unremarkable, anonymous hallways, brightly lit but otherwise featureless.
The room we’re headed for contains a long metal table flanked by six chairs, three down either side. Three of the walls are a pale gray, and the fourth finishes at waist height, with a sheet of some transparent—and no doubt practically bombproof—material sealing it the rest of the way. Down one wall a series of pages are tacked up, a sequence of meaningless letters—some kind of code, I guess. I glance at the window, fingering my watch, and then when I look back at the pages, they snap into focus. AGCT. I recognize those letters.
Itiscode: DNA code.
And there are four printouts—one for each of us? I straighten, moving my arm so I can surreptitiously photograph the pages, one after the other. Maybe, justmaybe,these pages are Atlanta’s andDex’s results. Which means they dohavesomething like DNA, enough to pass a cursory glance, but no one’s processed these results thoroughly enough to see the reality. If they had, there’d be alarm bells going off everywhere about the two blatantly nonhuman entities sitting in our cell.
This is a language I never learned. To me, it’s a seemingly randomized list of endless combinations of those four letters. But if I could somehow smuggle these results out, maybe I could get them to someone back at Oxford who could analyze them. Maybe.
Mia and I wordlessly take a couple of chairs, settling in to face that window by unspoken agreement, so we can see what’s coming. On another table at the far end of the room are the few belongings we had with us when we were taken into custody, laid out like clues in a murder mystery. A few empty wrappers from the Undying sponge rations. Mia’s multi-tool. My journal. Under the table I find Mia’s hand and squeeze it. She squeezes back.
