I want to soak up the sound of his voice, drink in every second I can stare at him, because when they come and find us here, I probably won’t see him again for … well. I probably won’t see him again. Or Evie.
But despite this, I find my gaze twitching across to Dex, taking in his lean height, the dark hair, the skin a shade somewhere between mine and Jules’s, and the droop of his shoulders where he stands.I’m in a room with a member of a race that’s trying to wipe out humanity.
It was a lot easier to just hate him when I thought he was an alien. Now, knowing he’s as human as I am … somehow, it makes everything worse. Complex and nuanced, Jules would say.Messy, say my own thoughts.
“Thank you for helping us.” Neal, surprising me with his gravity, is watching Dex with his eyes full of sympathy. “I could see she meant a lot to you.”
“She’s my other half.” Dex clenches his jaw, and a tear streaksdown one cheek as he turns his face away. “We grew up together. We’ve been partners since before we could read and write.”
“What kind of partners?” Neal rummages through his pockets until he produces a mangled, crushed plastic packet of tissues. He rises to his feet and walks over to Dex, offering them to him. Trying to understand this boy who’s suddenly in our midst.
Dex looks between him and the tissues, a trickle of confusion momentarily eclipsing his misery.
“For when your nose starts running,” Neal provides helpfully. “Or your eyes.”
Dex, brow furrowed, takes the packet and extracts one of the tissues, then carefully wipes at his face. He looks up to meet Neal’s eyes briefly, and though he doesn’t smile, there’s a shift around his eyes. “Thanks. We’re … I don’t know how to describe it. We’re supposed to be together. We always are.” And, judging by his tone, it hurts right now that they’re not.
“Whatiswith the partners thing anyway?” I ask, making Dex twitch and look my way. “On the ship, in Lyon, you and Atlanta … why do you all go around in twos?”
Dex lifts a shoulder. “All of us on the retrieval team have partners. A partner keeps you focused, has your back, isn’t afraid to challenge you, comprens your thinking and your capabilities better than you compren yourself. And if you ever start to doubt your convictions …” Dex’s eyes go distant again. “Then a partner keeps you on track.”
“Retrieval team?” Jules echoes. “Retrieval of what?”
Dex’s eyes flicker toward Jules and stay there. “Of our home.”
Gently, carefully, each word like a cautious step through a minefield, Jules speaks into the quiet. “Your people are from the Centauri mission.”
Though there’s no lift at the end of his sentence, the words are a question anyway. Dex watches him, hints of anguish showing about his eyes and lips, and then drops his head.
When Jules looks my way, I can only lift my shoulders helplessly. If Dex doesn’t want to answer our questions, we can’t force him. We’re not killers or torturers, and anyway, he helped us. But this could be our last chance to understand everything that’s happened.
The silence stretches until Neal turns to retrieve his uncle’s chair, wheeling it across the room and offering it to Dex, then sinking down to sit on the floor. “Are you regretting what you did? Stopping her from killing us?”
Dex’s tight lips relax a fraction, and then he ducks his head. “I should’ve tried harder to shift her. I should’ve explained somehow—I should’ve …” He makes a strange, swooping gesture that, while utterly foreign to me, conveys an all-encompassing helplessness that makes my own heart ping with unexpected sympathy.
“Of course you regret hurting your partner.” Neal’s voice is gentle. “But do you regret the choice you made?”
Dex just sinks down slowly into the chair. “I chose what I chose.” He’s quiet and still for a few seconds longer, and then he draws his shoulders back and takes a long, bracing breath. The tissue’s still clutched in his hand as it curls into a fist. “And yeh. My ancestors were the crew and colonists on the Centauri mission.”
“But how?” The words spill out of me before I can stop them. “Your tech is so much more advanced than ours, and the ship only left Earth like sixty years ago, and the temple on Gaia’s a zillion years old, not to mention a zillion light-years away, and …”
I’m braced for my torrent of questions to send Dex back into lockdown, but he’s just watching me, an odd almost-warmth in his eyes, like some part of him is amused. “Looking at it yourways, the ship did leave only sixty years ago. But ourways, it’s been over three centuries.”
Jules pushes off from where he’s been leaning against his father’s desk, sending a stack of papers fluttering violently to the floor. “Time travel?” he blurts, his skin going several shades darker, his own hands clenched into fists. “All this time we’ve been trying tofigure out this absurd riddle with no answer, and all this time it was something that’s—that’s—impossible! Time travel isn’t possible. It isn’t.”
Every face in the room turns toward him, shocked by his uncharacteristic outburst. Standing there with fists clenched, lungs heaving, face flooded with ire and eyes blazing, he looks like he’s ready to fight someone.
If ever there was something Jules would be ready to knock someone down over, it’d be an academic discussion about abstract concepts of quantum astro-whatever …
Despite myself, I burst into helpless laughter.
This time all eyes in the room go to me, including Jules, his fists relaxing in surprise. I lift my head to explain what was so funny, that he’s objecting to the concept of time travel while sitting in a detention cell in Prague with an ancient time-traveling space-human turncoat-alien whose people want to steal our planet. I want to tell Jules I’m fine, but I can’t stop laughing, my whole body seizing and quaking, spots forming before my eyes as my lungs struggle to get enough air. I reach for the wall behind me and slide down onto the ground, shaking.
As soon as I realize I can’t stop, my brain short-circuits. It’s not funny anymore, but I’m still laughing, like the wires have gotten crossed and I want to cry or scream or explode into bits all over the inside of the room, but all I know how to do is keep laughing.
Jules is on the floor next to me in seconds, wrapping his arms around me as I gasp, tears running from my eyes. He draws me in against him, one hand cradling the back of my head. For some reason it’s the feel of his fingers running through my newly cut hair that reminds me that my body’s a thing I can control, and with his arm around me, I take a long, shuddering breath.
When I can look around again, the other boys are staring at me. I cough, twinges of embarrassment rising up now that the panic-laughter, whatever it was, is fading. I cough, and try to draw a breath, and itsnorksthrough my clogged nose and makes me realize I must have snot just absolutelyeverywhere.
