Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Pittacus Lore finished telling the story of the Lorien Nine in the New York Times bestselling I Am Number Four and Lorien Legacies Reborn series. Now he’s back to recount an all-new adventure rooted in the real mysteries surrounding Roswell, New Mexico, that will enthrall fans of Brandon Sanderson, Jay Kristoff, and Amie Kaufman.

We have waited generations for you…

Syd Chambers knows that there’s life on other planets because he’s descended from it. His father was from a distant world called Denza and has been missing—presumed dead—for years.

When Syd discovers a device his father left behind which shows not only that he’s alive, but where he is, Syd must set out on a mission of his own. But along the way, he discovers a deadly, unbearable secret that could destroy Denza, Earth, and the universe.

Release date: August 17, 2021

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 432

Sample

1

My last day on Earth started out pretty ordinary. My mom shook me awake at eight a.m. and told me she was driving into the city to sell some weed.

“The crop is ready, and I don’t want to sit on it with all those hippies hanging around,” she said, talking fast. Mom was already two cups of coffee deep. “Hope that farm-to-table dispensary is still open; they overpaid. We might need some bug-out money soon.”

I yawned and blinked sleep out of my eyes. “Good morning.”

“Oh, good morning, honey,” she said, brushing hair off my forehead.

I guess Mom hadn’t bothered to fire up the wood-burning stove yet, because my room in our little cabin was cold and damp. Gray light filtered through my curtains, rain pattering against the tin roof. It was late October and cold, that rain just dying to turn into snow. I hiked up my pajama pants and wrapped my comforter around my shoulders, then lurched over to check the bucket in the corner where the leak had sprung last week. It was dry, so I guessed my repair job on our rusty-ass roof had held. My library still smelled like damp paper, though, the damage done. I had like two hundred books stacked over there, so many that I couldn’t even see the shelf—mostly sci-fi novels but also some classics and a couple dozen math and science textbooks—all the pages I’d burned through in this cabin, a lot of them now swollen and moldy. Made me sad to see them ruined like that; they’d been good company. But, if we bugged out like Mom was talking about, they’d all get left behind anyway. Free books for whatever squatter came to this place next.

For almost a year we’d been hiding in this cabin in Washington State, just a short drive to the border of British Columbia. It was the longest we’d stayed in one place since we left Australia ten years ago, when we first went on the run. We had an actual home back then. Mom had a real job, and I had a dad.

I barely remembered any of that.

“Two hours to Tacoma, two hours back,” my mom recited as I followed her into our cramped kitchen/living room. “An hour for errands. Two hours flex time in case I hit traffic or need to shake a tail.” She pulled up the sleeve of her flannel to look at the two watches strapped to her birdlike wrist, faded scars crisscrossing her forearm. “Let’s call it sixteen hundred. If I’m not back by then . . .”

I knew this part. We had a version of this conversation every time Mom left me alone. “I grab my go-bag and hike to the campground at Ross Lake. There’s a pay phone there. If you don’t call in twenty-four hours, I’m on my own, and it’s best that you don’t know where I go.”

Mom nodded. Her brown hair was streaked with gray, the crow’s-feet around her eyes pronounced. She was thin like a marathon runner. The muscles on her neck stood out, and so did the veins on the backs of her hands. Sometimes I worried that she wasn’t eating enough, but she’d never slowed down in our ten years as fugitives. As I watched, she strapped on her holster under her left arm, carrying her Walther PPK. It seemed like such a small gun now, but I remembered needing both hands on the grip when she taught me how to shoot.

I was eight years old.

There was a Glock in my go-bag and a loaded shotgun next to our front door. Just in case.

My mom pulled on her leather jacket, hiding her weapon. “Current alias?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, a habit that I picked up from her. She did it whenever I broke a rule or annoyed her. She narrowed her eyes at me, recognizing her own mannerism used against her.

“Current alias, please, Sydney,” she said firmly. “I know we do this all the time, but it’s the repetition that keeps us safe.”

I sighed. “Wyatt Williams.”

I hated being Wyatt Williams. It made me sound like the world’s most generic country singer.

Our aliases were all the way up to “W” now. Mom kept the fake names alliterative, each new identity following the previous one in alphabetical order. Made them easier to keep track of, she said. I could trace our zigzagging path across North America by my discarded names. When we got off the plane in Los Angeles, I’d been Aaron Abrams. I’d been Darren Drake when we camped in Utah’s Red Rocks and Mom taught me how to make a fire and find my own water. I’d been Mike Martinez in Mexico City, where two guys in dark suits and darker sunglasses chased us through a street market. I was Vincent Vargas last year in Peoria, the last time I went to an actual school.

I wasn’t sure what we’d do with “X” looming on the horizon.

Xavier Xtreme? I planned to pitch that.

The only time I got to be myself—Sydney Chambers—was with my mom.

I was named after the city where my parents met. I’d spent my first few years on a ranch outside Sydney. My memories of the place were hazy, but I could picture the way the crispy green grass in our backyard hurt my bare feet and how once you left the range of our house’s sprinkler system the landscape turned to burned dirt and red rocks. I remembered there was a single road leading away from our house—not so different from our current hideout—and that we lived close to where my mom and dad worked. It was the outback, basically. Our place was cozy, and I don’t remember ever feeling afraid out there, although there was the time that a wild dog got loose in our living room. That was how my mom got the scars on her arm, actually. It happened right before we left Australia. I think she interpreted the dingo trying to eat me as a sign we should leave.

Anyway, I barely remembered Australia, and ten years in America had scrubbed any trace of an accent. I definitely wasn’t going to blow our cover by saying G’day, mate.

My mom motioned to our plastic dinner table, where she’d left me a stack of textbooks and a Pop-Tart still in the wrapper. “Today, I’d like you to complete two chapters in math and finish up your reading on East Asian history.”

I yawned into my shoulder. “Come on, Mom, it’s Saturday.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Oh.” I paused. “Are you sure?”

“Did you get enough sleep last night, Syd?”

I had the dream last night, the one about my dad, but she didn’t need to know that. Talking about him always put my mom into a funk—half-melancholy and half–bloodthirsty guerrilla fighter without a mission.

“If I say no, can I go back to bed?”

My mom snorted and peeked out through our front curtains. In the early light, the smoke from the Green Guard’s bonfires was visible through the trees. The ecological direct action group had shown up a few weeks ago to protest the oil pipeline getting built at the edge of the woods. There were like forty of them camped out there, although their members came and went, so even after spying on them for days it was difficult to get a perfect count. They were mostly high school–aged runaways and college kids, with a few middle-aged lifer protestors as leadership. They’d stopped by our cabin to check that it was cool if they camped next to our land. We’d fixed up the abandoned cabin, but we were just squatters, so what were we supposed to say?

“I’d like you to stay inside while I’m gone,” my mom said. “We know all we need to about our neighbors. No need for another operation.”

An operation. That’s what Mom called it whenever she sent me to be around people. Like the other day, when I’d popped by the Green Guard campsite to chat them up. It was important, Mom said, that I learn social skills. I’d been to eight different schools over the years, never for longer than a few months, though. When I made friends, I always knew I’d have to leave them behind.

Fugitives don’t get to have friends.

That used to bother me more. One time, in Florida, I flipped out pretty bad. That was when Mom and I had “the talk.”

I’d eased into being a friendless fugitive since then. But that didn’t mean I wanted to go through life as a hermit.

“I liked them,” I said, referring to my latest batch of temporary pals at Green Guard. “They were cool. They actually care about stuff.”

“They’re young. They have that luxury,” my mom replied, rolling her eyes.

“Wow. Did you sprinkle a little extra cynicism in your coffee this morning?” I craned my neck to look over her shoulder at the sleepy campsite. “I thought you’d be down with the cause. Aren’t you always saying that the capitalists have doomed this planet?”

She frowned. “Groups like that always have some undercover FBI scum attached to them. I don’t want you getting close. We don’t need them looking too hard at Wyatt Williams, you know?”

I tossed my blanket across my shoulders like a cape. “Mom, come on. I know the deal. I was careful.”

She dropped the curtain and eyed me. “Don’t get cocky, Syd,” she said. “This place has been good to us. I don’t want to burn it down unless we absolutely have to.”

Knowing my mom, she probably meant that literally. I glanced around our cabin—the cramped living room with its threadbare couch and antennae-equipped TV, two bedrooms that fit our lumpy twin mattresses, the bathroom with a curtain for a door, and a toilet that backed up biweekly. I had to be the only sixteen-year-old in a hundred miles who could unclog a septic tank. No internet, no landline, much less a cell phone. The finest in off-the-grid living, basically.

Still, it was home. Or the closest we’d come to one in a while.

“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll lie low,” I said, waving at the books she’d left out for me. “I’ll do my homework.”

“Good boy,” she said. “See you tonight.”

Once my mom rumbled down the dirt path that led away from our cabin in our beater of a pickup truck, I plopped down on the couch with my Pop-Tart and checked out what was on the four stations our TV picked up. Nothing but morning news shows.

Flooding in Venice had completely engulfed the city.

Border guards in Texas were letting loose attack dogs on refugees.

A six-month drought in Pakistan had led to the complete collapse of the government, with petty warlords now fighting over individual neighborhoods. The Indian army was massing on the border.

Not a lot of good news.

“They could fix all this,” I muttered.

That was Mom’s favorite line whenever she saw some horrific story on TV about our messed-up world.

They.

The same people chasing us.

Chasing me.

Thinking about them made me want to check myself for signs, so I headed into the bathroom, where I stared at myself in the mirror.

I was a few inches taller than average. Long-limbed and wiry. No pimples. Hair straight and black, longish for now, which I liked, although Mom would insist I cut it if we had to move on. In the dull overhead light, my hair looked so dark that it had an almost purple sheen. My eyes were large, almond-shaped, the irises an icy light blue.

“My dude,” I said to my reflection. “You are looking human as hell today.”

Most of the time, life as a half-alien fugitive was really freaking boring.

2

I was twelve years old when Mom told me. My alias at the time was Quentin Quill, probably my most ridiculous name of all time, but one that lent me a certain air of mystery in the halls of Dan Marino Middle School in Miami. I had my first girlfriend there. We nervously made out in the music room while some sophomores honked through saxophone practice.

I flipped out when Mom declared the operation was ending. We were moving on, leaving Miami. I think she was worried that if I fell too deep into preteen lust, I might let one of our secrets slip.

I tossed my plastic TV dinner tray against the wall of our apartment, splattering Salisbury steak gravy everywhere.

“You’re ruining my life!” I screamed.

My mom drummed her fingers on the table. “Calm down.”

“This is all bullshit,” I replied, pointing at her. “You’re a crazy person. There’s no one after us. It’s all in your head.”

“They almost caught us in Mexico,” she said. “Did you forget?”

“Maybe those guys were chasing us because of our fake passports,” I said. “Or because of those tourists you pickpocketed. Maybe they were after you because you’re a criminal. There’s no conspiracy!”

This was a theory I’d been developing for a while at the time, ever since I’d read this book about a kid whose parents kept him trapped in a bunker, convinced the apocalypse had happened, even though it was totally normal outside. My mom made a lot of wild claims about the government. She said they were after us, but she never elaborated on why. I’d gone along with her for years because, well, I was a kid and didn’t know any better. She was my mom, and I believed her. But that night, at the ripe age of twelve, I thought I was wising up. The things I’d witnessed—like those meatheads running after us in Mexico—were they really proof of some insidious government plot?

“Do you think I’m insane? Some kind of sadist? That I enjoy dragging my son around the country and making his life miserable?”

She asked these questions coolly, her voice flat.

I swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

My mom got up from the table, and I flinched when her chair squeaked across the floor. She came over to my side of the table and put her hands gently on my shoulders.

“It’s okay. I raised you to be skeptical. To be paranoid. I’m glad you’re suspicious. Even if it’s of me.” She looked into my eyes. “I wish you could have a normal life, Sydney. I really do. But that’s never going to be possible for you.”

“Why not?”

“They’ve taken so much from me already,” she grumbled, her lips curling, a private thought making her suddenly angry. “I won’t let them take you, too.”

“They,” I repeated, remembering my righteous anger from a moment ago. “You always talk about ‘them,’ but you don’t actually tell me anything. You don’t—”

“Your father came from a planet called Denza in a solar system millions of light-years away,” she said. “He was an extraterrestrial. You are half-alien.”

I blinked. Then I gently slid her hands off my shoulders.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “It’s true. You are nuts.”

My mom shook her head. “Go put your bathing suit on.”

“What?”

“Put your bathing suit on and fill up the bathtub,” she said, straightening up. “I’ll prove it to you.”

That night, my mom drowned me.

Most of the time, I followed my mom’s orders. But, after an hour reading about the Opium Wars, which weren’t nearly as cool as they sounded, I needed to stretch my legs. Our backyard was out of sight of the Green Guard campsite. I figured that would work as a compromise. Mom wouldn’t want me to stay inside all day if it meant suffocation or muscle atrophy, right?

Out back, I crouched over our garden, which was pretty sparse now that my mom had harvested all the weed. I peered under the plastic tarps to see if there were any carrots or zucchini in need of picking.

Footfalls crunched in the woods behind me. I jumped up and spun around. Thanks to my mom’s lifelong paranoia, I was trained to think anyone approaching me could be a potential danger.

“Hey,” Rebecca said, stopping in her tracks. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I thought you could be a bear,” I said quickly.

She made her fingers into claws. “Growl.”

I pretended to shriek.

Okay, so maybe I’d gone outside hoping that she would pop by.

Rebecca was with the Green Guard. We’d met the other day. In fact, I’d spent most of my time at the Green Guard’s campsite chatting with her. She claimed that she was eighteen, but I didn’t believe her. She seemed only a few months older than me. She’d dropped out of high school, she told me, because it all seemed pointless when the world was dying. She had wavy blond hair that looked like it’d been gone over with a pink highlighter. She wore ratty Converse sneakers and one of those puffy life preserver vests. She was cute. And I’m not just saying that because I’d been cooped up in the woods with my mom for a year.

“Wanted to let you know, some of us are going to sneak onto the despoilers’ work site tonight and siphon gas from their trucks,” Rebecca said, joining me by the garden. “Maybe slash some tires. If you want to come along.”

“Oh, uh, I probably can’t. My mom wouldn’t go for it.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. I cringed inwardly. Cool excuse, bro.

“Your mom’s not into ethical vandalism?” Rebecca asked with a smirk.

“No, actually, I think she is, but . . .” I shrugged. “It’s really hard to sneak out of our house.”

“I get it,” she said, shuffling her feet. “Maybe next time. I’ve been looking for a new protest buddy.”

Rebecca rubbed her arms in the damp air, leaning closer to me, her breath misting. My eyebrows popped as I realized this hot budding ecoterrorist might be a little bit into me. Inviting me along for some property destruction could be what passed for a first date with the Green Guard kids.

“My mom’s out for the day,” I said, shooting my shot. “You want to chill inside?”

“God, yes, I haven’t been under an actual roof in like weeks,” Rebecca replied. Then she took a moment to look me over. “You and your mom aren’t cannibals or something, are you?”

I shot a look at our sparse little garden. “My mom’s more into cannabis.”

“Nice,” Rebecca replied. “Pretty sure I could overpower you, anyway, if you try something. You’re pretty skinny. Has anyone ever told you that you look like an anime character? I wish I had big eyes like that. I could’ve been a model, gotten tight with Leo, and saved the rain forest.”

“That’s always been my fallback plan, too,” I said.

Slender. Long-limbed. Larger-than-normal eyes. These were some of my half-alien tells. Of course, no one I met on the street or in the woods would ever look at me and jump to a crazy conclusion about extraterrestrial life. I was just a little unusual-looking.

I showed Rebecca into our cabin. My mom wouldn’t be happy about this if she found out, but it’s not like we left any evidence of our situation lying around. All our fake IDs and bundles of cash were hidden under a floorboard in Mom’s closet.

Rebecca warmed her hands by the woodstove while her eyes roamed the interior. After a few seconds, she nodded to herself. “Okay. Everything looks normal.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did you really think we were backwoods cannibals?”

“I mean, no, not exactly,” she replied. “But the two of you living out here in the woods by yourselves . . . I was wondering if you were like a kidnap victim. Or if we were dealing with one of those syndromes, you know? Munchausen? Stockholm? Things look pretty wholesome around here, though.”

I smiled. My mom would’ve liked Rebecca. She appreciated anyone who was suspicious by nature.

“Usually I’m chained up in my room,” I said. “You caught me on a good day.”

Rebecca thumbed her lip. “I was all set to help you escape captivity if you wanted. Was kinda excited about a jailbreak.”

My heart would’ve swelled to hear that like ten identities ago. Now the thought of running away with this strange girl—well, it still seemed pretty exciting, but it wasn’t something I’d seriously consider. She didn’t want my kind of trouble.

“I guess our life does look kind of strange from the outside,” I said noncommittally.

“Nah, I’ve met weirdo homeschooled kids before,” Rebecca said, thumbing through the textbooks stacked on the table. “Whoa. Except you’re a really smarthomeschooled kid. You actually do this stuff?”

She held up my Advanced Multivariable Calculus textbook. I’d always been a prodigy when it came to math. Back in Miami, they’d talked about bumping me up to AP Trigonometry as a seventh grader and finding me an apprenticeship with a local engineer. That attention was another reason Mom had moved us out.

I’d inherited my instincts with numbers from my dad. Math was like a language I could read without trying.

With Rebecca I played it cool. “Oh, that—yeah, I’m trying it out. It’s hard.”

It wasn’t.

“I get it now,” she said. “You’re gifted, and your mom’s got you hidden out here so your big-ass brain doesn’t get corrupted by regular society.” She finally finished snooping through our cabin and flopped down on the couch next to me. “Maybe you can help me with something.”

She reached into her vest and took out a Nintendo Switch. The handheld system was in rough shape—a corner of the screen was cracked, and one of the joysticks was secured with electrical tape—but the thing turned on okay. I’d had a few portables float in and out of my life, like a thrift-store Game Boy from the ’80s and a Neo Geo I’d found at a yard sale. Nothing modern. Nothing that could connect to the internet. That wasn’t allowed. Rebecca’s Switch was pulling a weak signal from a mobile hot spot at the Green Guard campsite. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Mom about any of this.

“Do you ever play Dungeon?” she asked me.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Oh, a nerd like you is going to love it,” Rebecca said. I was very aware of our shoulders touching as we leaned together to look at her screen.

“I don’t know how you can infer I’m a nerd after hanging out with me twice, by the way.”

“Well,” she replied, “you just said ‘infer,’ for starters.”

Dungeon was a cross between an MMORPG and a level creator, Rebecca explained. The graphics were sixteen-bit pixels like old-school Japanese RPGs. Rebecca guided her avatar—a walking pine tree dressed in a leather miniskirt and wielding a chain saw—around a landscape littered with ominous caverns and castles.

“See, those are all dungeons,” Rebecca said, pointing at the different locations. “Other players create them, and you get experience points for beating them, or the creators get XP if you lose.”

“Experience points,” I repeated. “And I’m the nerd?”

She elbowed me. “There’s some monster fighting involved, but the best dungeons are the ones with crazy puzzles. Hold on, let me find it . . .”

Her avatar approached the entrance to a gleaming silver tower. The details of the dungeon appeared on-screen.

THE INTERSTELLAR CONUNDRUM

DIFFICULTY: MAXIMUM

RAID ATTEMPTS: 1.2 million

SUCCESSES: 0

“This one appeared like three weeks ago and no one’s been able to beat it,” Rebecca said. “The hard-core Dungeon delvers usually beat everything in like twenty-four hours. People on the forums think some theoretical physicists at MIT made it. There’s also a rumor that if you beat it, you’ll win a million dollars and a trip to space.”

I stifled a shiver. A trip to space. My grandfather had made one of those, then returned to Earth and died. My dad had also gone to space—where he was from—and never come back. Since then, my mom had devoted her whole life to making sure I never went up there.

“You okay?” Rebecca asked. I’d fallen suddenly quiet.

“Just thinking about what I’d do with the money,” I said.

“I’d buy a new tent and then overthrow the government,” she replied.

“Not sure you could pull that off with just half a mil.”

“It’s a whole million,” Rebecca said.

“Not when we beat this thing together and split the prize,” I replied.

She grinned. “Big confidence from the shut-in. I like it.”

Rebecca marched her avatar into the tower.

In the first part of the dungeon, three bodyguards stood before a wrought-iron gate. A text box that appeared above their heads declared, We are the guardians. One of us always speaks truth, one of us always speaks false, and one of us speaks at random. You must figure out who is who . . .

I was sucked in.

First came the logic problem of identifying the bouncers by typing in yes-or-no questions.

Once we got by them, the next room was tiled like a sudoku. Rebecca filled in the grid with her avatar, using only diagonal jumps.

“I’ve done this level a bunch of times,” she said. “It’s the next floor that always kills me.”

The following puzzle was an electrical grid of over a hundred nodes that needed to be seamlessly connected in less than three minutes. Rebecca raced her avatar across the board, but couldn’t make all the connections in time. I squinted. Her movement inefficiencies were pretty obvious to me.

“Can I try?” I asked once she ran out of time.

She handed me the Switch, and I breezed by the bodyguards, skipped around the sudoku, then blitzed across the electrical grid. I’d never handled the system before, but my thumbs seemed to know exactly what to do.

“Whoa,” Rebecca said. “Keep going.”

A floor of pattern recognition . . .

After that, a room that was basically Minesweeper . . .

A backgammon board . . .

My hands were slick with sweat. At some point, Rebecca and I pretty much stopped talking. She knelt on the couch next to me so that she could peer directly over my shoulder, sometimes whispering some hint for using the controls or explaining when to whip out her avatar’s chain saw. Mostly, though, she let me slip into the zone.

I was locked in.

The puzzle . . . It was almost like it spoke to me.

“Damn, how many levels does this thing have?” Rebecca asked. I didn’t answer. Her voice sounded faraway. “You okay?”

“Just focused,” I managed to respond.

“More like hypnotized,” she said.

She got herself a glass of water. I barely noticed.

I entered a room of total darkness. No walls, no floor, no graphics to speak of. A void. I sucked my teeth in frustration, thinking the game had glitched, feeling strangely sad that I was cut off from the puzzle.

But no, I could still move my avatar around, could still see my full health bar and inventory icons.

“This has to be the end,” Rebecca whispered.

The Switch’s battery felt hot beneath my fingers. I think maybe an hour had gone by. Maybe more.

I stared into the vast darkness, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

Something moved in the black. A pinprick of light, almost as if a pixel had blown. My eyes went in and out of focus. I lost sight of my avatar. It felt like the screen of the console had swallowed me up, until the darkness wasn’t just in front of me but all around me.

There were dozens of layers to the darkness. I could see them. No—sense them. Each layer was like a piece of silky black fabric with a tiny hole in it. None of the iotas of light lined up. But I could move the layers of shadow themselves, tugging and pushing until the tears sat on top of one another.

I could make a path through the dark.

I was vaguely aware of my thumbs moving the controls in complicated swivels and sudden jerks. My fingers were just following orders, though. It was my mind doing the real work here.

No wonder no one had solved this puzzle. I doubted most people could even see it.

That should’ve been a red flag. I should’ve known this wasn’t right. But I was too invested. The final puzzle called to me. With every layer I lined up, the pinprick of light got brighter and brighter.

Until it exploded.

The dot of light became the fire at the base of a rocket that blasted through the dark room, illuminating the whole space. I was being carried up . . . up . . .

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE SOLVED THE INTERSTELLAR CONUNDRUM! I blinked.

Reality came rushing back. The Switch was white-hot and drained to like 2 percent battery. The dim light of my cabin hurt my eyes, even though I wasn’t even fully aware of it. A part of me was still stuck out there—in that strange in-between place that the video game had shown me.

“Oh my god,” Rebecca said. “Oh my god! You really did it! I don’t even know what just happened!”

She danced around in front of me, ...