Inheritance

by Malinda Lo

Genres: YA Action & Adventure; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Romance; YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

Reese and David are not normal teens-not since they were adapted with alien DNA by the Imria, an extraterrestrial race that has been secretly visiting Earth for decades. Now everyone is trying to get to them: the government, the Imria, and a mysterious corporation that would do anything for the upper hand against the aliens. Beyond the web of conspiracies, Reese can't reconcile her love for David with her feelings for her ex-girlfriend, Amber, an Imrian. But Reese's choice between two worlds will play a critical role in determining the future of humanity, the Imria's place in it, and the inheritance she and David will bring to the universe. In this gripping sequel to Adaptation, Malinda Lo brings a thoughtful exploration of adolescence, sexuality, and "the other" to a science-fiction thriller that is impossible to put down.

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 474

Sample

The triangular spaceship hovered motionless in the sky above Reese Holloway’s house, as inscrutable as a black hole. Military helicopters made large circles around the craft, the noise of their rotor blades conspicuously loud compared to the silence of the black ship.

Reese pulled her gaze away from the triangle and looked down at the crowd of reporters at the bottom of the front steps. They were as impatient as a nest full of baby birds, mouths gaping as they shouted question after question at her and David Li. His fingers squeezed hers, and through the connection that opened between them when they touched, she felt his emotions echoing her own. They both had that jittery, butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling that said: You’re about to do something that could either be a huge success or a crushing defeat.

It had seemed like a good idea when they were inside: to tell the truth about what happened to them at Area 51. With the reporters clamoring outside, they had the perfect audience. If they told the world, they thought, they would be safe from their government, which had abducted and locked them in a top secret military base in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

It didn’t seem like such a good idea now that they were outside.

Across the street a line of National Guard soldiers stood with rifles in hand, blockading a vehicle that looked like it had come out of a science fiction movie. Shaped roughly like a bird, it was about the size of a city bus and black as the triangle above. What looked like wings were folded against the vehicle’s muscular black walls, making it seem as if it could leap into the air at any moment. A crow had alighted on the roof, its black feathers gleaming in the August sunlight. It turned its head as if to watch the scene below, where several silver robots waited with snub-nosed weapons in their metal hands, facing the National Guard troops. The robots had humanlike bodies, but their heads had no eyes.

Reese’s hand was clammy with sweat and it slipped against David’s, but he tightened his grip as if he were holding on to the edge of a cliff. The reporters were a blur before her, their faces smudging into one another as waves of emotion rose up the front steps and slammed into her and David. She had experienced this unusual sensitivity to a crowd’s feelings before. It had happened when she and David got off the plane at Travis Air Force Base a few hours ago, where they’d been met by a different group of reporters. She knew it must be related to her adaptation—the alien DNA that had been added to hers—but the knowledge didn’t make the reality any easier to bear.

The crowd’s curiosity scraped like tiny claws against her skin. As they eyed the spaceship above, their agitation buffeted her in sharp bursts. Their emotions amplified her own nervousness. Objects in the sky weren’t supposed to be as still as that black triangle, and that was the most unnerving thing of all: its perfect unnaturalness.

She swayed on her feet, nauseated by the collective anxiety, and David’s fingernails dug into her hand. Maybe he wasn’t holding on for himself; maybe he was trying to prevent her from falling. She was about to give in to the nausea and drag David back inside when a hand gripped her shoulder and turned her around. It was Amber. Her face was almost as pale as her short blond hair, the only color the smudge of dark pink gloss on her mouth.

David turned too. Amber had one hand on Reese’s shoulder, the other on David’s, and her touch seemed to push away the encroaching emotions of the crowd below. Amber gazed intently at the two of them through steady gray eyes. Listen to me, she told them. It didn’t seem like English, exactly; it was more like she was projecting meaning without using any language at all.

Please let us help you. We can show you how to use your abilities, and we will keep you safe. Your government only seeks to use you. Please trust me.

Abruptly, Amber dropped her hands from their shoulders, and the urgent emotions of the crowd came back, pushing against Reese’s spine. Amber pulled something out of her pocket and pressed it into Reese’s hand. She leaned close to whisper in her ear: “Call us when you’re ready.” Reese shivered at the feel of Amber’s breath on her skin, and for a split second all she was aware of was Amber’s closeness, her lips a millimeter from her earlobe.

Then Amber brushed past both Reese and David and faced the reporters. “I can’t take your questions right now,” Amber said, her voice silencing the throng.

“Why not?” someone shouted.

“I’m not authorized,” Amber answered.

“Are you an alien?”

“Is your name Amber Gray? Are you the girl in the video?”

Reese saw Amber stiffen slightly, but her voice remained steady. “I’m an Imrian. And yes, my name is Amber Gray.”

“Who are you? Why do you look like us?”

“You’ll get answers soon,” Amber said.

“When?”

“Soon,” she repeated, and then she went down the steps to the sidewalk, where the robots cleared a path for her. They were called erim, Reese remembered. The reporters stayed several feet back as if they were afraid of them. Amber walked quickly through the crowd until she reached the black vehicle parked across the street. She glanced back at Reese and David before she climbed through the open hatch in the side of the vehicle. The erim followed silently. When the door closed, the crow that had been perched on top flew away, and the vehicle’s wings spread out, black metal unfurling smoothly. The National Guard troops on the ground fell back as the craft lifted into the air and headed for the black triangle.

When the smaller ship disappeared inside the larger one, the reporters turned back to Reese and David. He reached for her hand once more, and like hers, his feelings were a jumble of shock and uncertainty. The reporters began to shout questions again. She briefly closed her eyes, raising her free hand to press her fingers to the bridge of her nose, and realized she was still holding the device that Amber had given her. She looked at the object in her hand. It was an ordinary cell phone.

Startled, she put it in her pocket as the reporters continued to pepper them with questions. “Stop,” she said, but her voice was too low. “Stop!” she cried, looking down at the assembled crowd. They fell silent, and she heard the rapid click-click-click of camera shutters as she and David were photographed. “We’ll take one question at a time,” she said.

There was no hesitation. A woman at the front of the pack, holding out a mini digital recorder, asked, “Why is there a giant spaceship above your house? Is that the ship that was in the video?”

For the past five days, Reese and David had been locked in a military hospital on Area 51. They hadn’t been released until a video was leaked that showed them fleeing an underground bunker in the Nevada desert, running toward a black spaceship. Amber was on the video too. Reese had seen the grainy footage only once, but the image was burned into her mind forever: Amber shoving Reese onto the ground; a bullet striking Amber, her body jerking. Reese remembered what her best friend, Julian, had told her. The media thought Amber was the hero for saving her. Reese couldn’t square that with the fact that Amber had lied to her, repeatedly, about her identity.

Reese, David thought.

Hearing him think her name jolted her back into the present. The reporters were waiting for an answer. She glanced at David, and he gave her a tiny smile. She felt it inside him like the flicker of a flame in the dark. She wasn’t in this alone.

“Is that the ship in the video?” the reporter asked again.

“We don’t know,” Reese and David said together.

“Where did it come from? Why is it over your house?”

“We don’t know,” they said again.

“Was that girl one of the aliens? Why does she look human?”

David didn’t speak this time. “Yes, she’s one of the aliens,” Reese said. “I don’t know why she looks human.”

“Why are they here? Are they experimenting on humans?”

“Why did the president think they were gone? Did you see the press conference she gave an hour ago? She said the aliens had left our planet.”

“How are you connected to the aliens?”

Reese took a deep breath and interrupted the stream of questions. “We can’t answer you all at once, and we don’t know much more than you. We only know what happened to us.”

“What did happen to you?”

“We were taken by government agents to a secret military base in Nevada,” David said.

“Why?”

“They wanted to figure out what kind of medical procedure had been done on us earlier this summer,” Reese said, and then realized that none of this would make sense to the assembled reporters because they didn’t know about that.

“It’s a long story,” David said.

“Start from the beginning. What medical procedure?”

Reese glanced sideways at David, who nodded at her. Go ahead. “We had a car accident on the edge of Area 51 right after the June Disaster,” Reese said. “David and I were in Phoenix, Arizona, for a debate tournament. We were with our coach. When all flights were grounded after those planes crashes, we decided to rent a car to drive home. Our coach died in Las Vegas during a carjacking at a gas station—”

A murmur of surprise went through the reporters, and one interrupted to ask, “What was the name of your coach?”

“Joe Chapman,” David said. “We left the gas station because the gunman was shooting at us, but we couldn’t go back because of the roadblocks. So we kept driving.”

“That’s when we had the car accident,” Reese continued. “We didn’t know we had crashed on the edge of a military base.”

“We were treated at the hospital there,” David said, “with Imrian science.”

“You mean alien technology?”

“You could call it that,” David said. “They’ve told us that we went through an adaptation procedure. They said it was to save our lives. It combined our human DNA with their Imrian DNA.”

“How were the aliens able to do this to you on a US military base?” one of the reporters asked, sounding skeptical.

“We don’t think the government authorized this,” Reese said. “In fact, we don’t think the government knew what really happened to us at all. That’s why we were kidnapped and taken back to Area 51 two weeks ago. Our government wanted to figure out what had been done to us.”

“You say they kidnapped you, but it sounds like they were making an effort to get to the bottom of something done to you by aliens. Shouldn’t you be grateful for the government’s help?”

“Government agents broke into my house and drugged me,” Reese objected. “They took us against our will, and then they held us in an underground bunker and didn’t allow us to contact anyone, not even our parents. We’re not happy that the aliens did whatever they did to us, but that doesn’t make what our government did right.”

Her outburst had startled the gathered reporters. One called out, “Has the government apologized for what they did to you?”

“Senator Michaelson apologized,” Reese said. Senator Joyce Michaelson had helped get her and David out of the military facility after the video had leaked.

“We’re grateful to Senator Michaelson and our families,” David added.

“And my friend Julian Arens for getting that video up,” Reese said.

“You say alien DNA was added to yours? How does the alien DNA affect you?”

Someone began to push his way through the crowd, and several reporters made irritated noises.

“We’re able to heal more rapidly than normal,” Reese answered. An excited murmur traveled through the reporters.

“And we can communicate without speaking,” David said. “Sort of like telepathy.”

Reese felt an outburst of emotion like a puff of wind in her face: shock mingled with skepticism.

“Are you able to read minds now?” a reporter shouted.

“No,” Reese said. “It’s more limited than that.”

She was struggling to find the words to explain her and David’s new abilities when a man in a black suit broke free from the crowd and barreled up the steps. It was Agent Forrestal, one of the men in black who had taken them to Area 51 and brought them home earlier that day. Reese was beginning to think of Forrestal as her personal government bully.

“This press conference is over,” Agent Forrestal announced.

“What do you mean?” Reese said. “We’re just getting started.”

He ignored her and spoke loudly over the angry questions from the crowd. “We need you to disperse right now and leave this vicinity.”

Amid shouted comments about the freedom of the press and the right to assemble, David thought to Reese: He’s shutting us down.

“Please disperse right now,” Agent Forrestal ordered. Across the street, National Guard soldiers stood ready to move in.

“Who are you?” the reporters yelled.

Police officers began to enter the crowd, herding people away from the house, and Agent Forrestal didn’t answer the question. He turned to face Reese and David. “Let’s go. Back inside,” he said grimly, and tried to push them up the stairs.

They both recoiled. “You can’t do this,” Reese protested.

“You don’t understand what’s going on,” Agent Forrestal said. “This is for your own protection. Go inside right now.”

A few steps above them, Reese’s parents stood in the open front doorway, David’s parents right behind them. Reese saw Julian peering around her dad’s arm. Agent Forrestal grasped Reese’s shoulder and she jerked away.

“Don’t touch my daughter,” Reese’s mom snapped at the agent.

“Let’s go inside, ma’am, and we can discuss this properly,” Agent Forrestal said.

Reese’s mom ushered Reese and David inside, but she turned back to Agent Forrestal with an angry expression. “No. You’re not invited in.”

She slammed the door in his face and locked it.

Reese entered her bedroom and flicked the light switch that turned on her bedside lamp. Her mom paused in the doorway behind her. “You’re sure you’re all right, honey? Do you want a glass of water or something before you go to bed?”

“No, I’m fine, just tired,” Reese answered, walking over to the windows to peek through the blinds. Many of the reporters had left after Agent Forrestal ended the press conference, but they had been replaced by other onlookers who gazed up at the black triangle as if they were waiting for a divine message. She could see some of them now in the light of the streetlamp, their camera lenses pointed at the night sky.

“Okay,” her mom said. “You know where to find me if you need anything.” She came into the room and kissed Reese on the forehead, her hand sweeping gently over Reese’s hair. “I love you.”

After her mom left, closing the door behind her, Reese sat on the edge of her bed and pulled off the shoes that the government had given her that morning. Ugly white sneakers, already scuffed along the toes. A surge of fury swept through her and she kicked them across the room. They bounced against her laundry basket. She sighed and took off the government-issue khaki pants and long-sleeved T-shirt, shoving them into her trash bin. Then she got dressed in her oldest, most comfortable pair of pajama bottoms—red-and-white plaid—and a roomy, faded Cal T-shirt and climbed into bed.

She couldn’t sleep. Everything that had happened that day kept replaying through her mind. After the abrupt end of the press conference, Julian’s parents had rushed over to take him home. David and his family stayed another hour or so, waiting until Agent Forrestal retreated to his tan sedan parked halfway down the block. When she hugged David good-bye in the front hall, she suddenly didn’t want to let him go. Her fingers dug into David’s upper back even though she was conscious of their parents waiting nearby. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, loosening her grip.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. I know.

What they went through in Nevada had brought them closer together than Reese had ever anticipated. She knew David was only going to his home, but the idea of him leaving filled her with an embarrassing panic. She told herself she was being illogical—this was just some kind of posttraumatic stress thing. Besides, their parents were watching.

She pulled away before the burning behind her eyes manifested into tears. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

He gave her a small, crooked smile. “Definitely.”

Now Reese turned onto her side, drawing her knees up beneath the covers. David had kissed her that afternoon in this very room. The memory of it made a warm thrill snake through her, quickly followed by a surge of self-doubt. One kiss didn’t necessarily mean there was going to be another—and it might not mean anything other than kissing. But she wanted it to mean something. She just wasn’t sure what.

She gave up on sleeping and turned on the light again. Across the room, the red and gold paint that covered one entire wall of Reese’s bedroom took on a darker, warmer hue. It was like being inside a womb: soft gold skin and streaks of bloodred. This was what she remembered of the adaptation chamber, which Amber had described as being similar to an incubator.

Reese remembered painting that wall in a possessed rush, knowing only that she needed to get this image out of her brain. She had dreamed of a pliable yellow room with bleeding walls ever since she woke up from the accident in that strange hospital in Nevada, and spilling it onto the wall seemed to be the only way to exorcise it. Maybe that had worked—she hadn’t dreamed of it since she finished the painting—but she still didn’t understand the full repercussions of what had been done to her in that adaptation chamber.

She climbed out of bed and pulled the khaki pants out of the trash. She had forgotten about the phone Amber had given her. Call us when you’re ready, she had whispered in Reese’s ear. Reese dug the phone out of the pocket. It was a plain gray flip-phone, the kind sold to technology-phobic senior citizens. She flipped it open; there were no messages. She looked through the contacts and found one listing: Evelyn Brand.

Dr. Brand was Amber’s mother, as well as the Imrian who had overseen Reese’s and David’s recoveries at Project Plato in Nevada. Could Reese trust Dr. Brand to tell her the truth? She was doubtful.

She put the phone down and moved to her desk, opening her laptop to go online. She needed to find out what was being reported about her and David’s abduction and return. Maybe that would give her some indication of who to trust.

As soon as she logged into the Hub, news feeds from around the world showed that the entire globe was focused on the spaceship hovering over her house. If extraterrestrials appeared over your city, would you run for your lives or run to take a photo? one article asked. Thousands of people have chosen the latter in the last twenty-four hours, flooding into a normally quiet neighborhood in San Francisco to catch a glimpse of the black triangle from another planet. Meanwhile, others have been stocking up on supplies and taking to the back roads—just as they did earlier this summer after the June Disaster. “I’ll be prepared,” said Tom Maynard, en route to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe. When asked what he was preparing for, Maynard replied, “You want to talk about terrorists? That ship is scarier than all of those birds.”

Reese remembered the day after the planes were grounded, driving with Mr. Chapman and David down highways packed with people fleeing a threat they couldn’t identify. As far as she could tell, nobody had yet pinpointed the cause of that mass panic. Maybe it was only paranoia, amplified by the specter of terrorism. At least this Tom Maynard guy has something to be afraid of, Reese thought. The spaceship above her house was terrifying. She couldn’t understand why so many people were flocking here to see it, either.

She scrolled down the screen, scanning the other news reports. Nation after nation demanded to know why the United States had concealed its cooperation with the Imria for so long. Some called for a global summit; others called for economic sanctions on the US until it explained itself. Reese and David were the subject of plenty of interest, too, with many leaders asking that they submit themselves to an international scientific board for genetic testing. And in the comments at the end of the articles, things got nasty.

Strangers writing in broken sentences mocked Reese’s bedraggled appearance on television. Her hand holding with David caused commenters to speculate about their relationship. Some went so far as to guess how intimate she and David had been, writing things that made Reese cringe. Increasingly horrified but unable to stop, she kept reading as people criticized her for being too skinny, too fat, and for being desperate enough to hook up with a Chinese guy. The comments about David were equally awful. They made fun of his race, characterizing him as a nerd who only managed to land a white girl because of his new alien DNA. They called him names that Reese had never said aloud. There were some people who pushed back and flagged the worst comments as offensive, but the words that rang in Reese’s mind weren’t those of her supporters.

And then there were the posts about Amber. Perhaps because she had said very little and had previously been known as the heroic savior who prevented Reese from getting shot, most of the commentary about Amber was positive. But some of it was so full of lusty innuendo about what they wanted to do to that “hot alien chick” that Reese felt as if a bucket of scum had been dumped over her head.

She could brush off some of the nastiness—these people didn’t know her, and obviously some were trolls, but a few of the comments brought her up short. One person had written: There is no proof that anything these kids are saying is true. Telepathy? Fast-healing powers? These kids think they’re superheroes. Someone had responded: I’ll believe they’re telepaths when I see scientific evidence for it. Until then, why would I believe a couple of teens? She could see how people might doubt them, since she and David had provided no evidence of what had been done to them.

Another commenter stated: I don’t believe these Imrians are aliens at all. How could they be aliens when they look exactly like us? I think all the evidence points to time travelers. The Imrians must be humans from the future. Reese caught herself spending several minutes pondering the probability of time travel before she shook her head and moved on to another comment: This isn’t about aliens; this is about the government trying to contain a giant secret. They’ve clearly been developing advanced technology, and these kids are about to blow this wide open. Why do you think that MIB stopped the press conference?

She followed a link at the end of that comment to a post titled What is President Randall trying to hide? She began to skim the post and then glanced at the URL: www.bin42.com. This was the site that Julian wrote for, and it had been the first to post the video of her and David fleeing the underground bunker. The site’s header was an image of a green alien in a flying saucer. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence in terms of reporting excellence, but she knew that Julian took it seriously, and she trusted Julian. She went back to reading the post.


WHAT IS PRESIDENT RANDALL TRYING TO HIDE?

By Jason Briggs

Posted August 7, 2014 at 7:43 PM

Tags: aliens, UFOs, conspiracy, cover-up, Reese Holloway, David Li, Elizabeth Randall

During President Randall’s press conference earlier today, she stated the following:

“After the ship that you saw in the video lifted off, we have had no further contact from the Imria. At this point, we are alone, again, on our planet. So, I say this to the Imria: If you are watching, I invite you to make public contact with us. We will meet at a global summit. We will begin our relationship anew. And to my fellow Americans, I offer my heartfelt apologies. On behalf of all the administrations before mine that kept this secret from you: I am sorry. I hope we can move forward into a more truthful and open future.”

Let’s take this point by point:

1. Half an hour after her press conference ended, a black triangle appeared in the skies above San Francisco and came to rest over the Noe Valley neighborhood where Reese Holloway (one of the two teens recently returned to their families from Area 51) lives. Given all the advanced technology that the president has at her disposal, how could she not know that the Imria were still around? But let’s give Randall the benefit of the doubt (for once!). The Imria obviously have even more advanced tech than we do. They could have cloaked their spacecraft after they left Area 51 and Randall might truly have had no evidence that they were still on the planet. But the question that follows is: Why did they come back?

2. Though Randall’s apology might appease some people, it’s hardly enough to explain the decades of silence and denial the government has perpetrated. If they’ve been secretly in contact with aliens since 1947 (and let’s not even get into the crazy significance of that date), they can’t seriously expect one tiny apology to wipe away the last 67 years of lies. If the United States government really wants its citizens to trust them, they need to do way more than offer one throwaway apology. How about starting with full disclosure about what happened at Roswell? Some things might need to remain classified, but I think it’s safe for the government to admit that they covered up the truth about what happened in New Mexico. That would be a great first step toward rebuilding the American people’s trust in their government.

3. Moving forward into “a more truthful and open future” sounds good, but it won’t work if the government silences key witnesses like Reese Holloway and David Li. These two may be only teenagers, but they were trying to do right by telling the truth about what happened to them. It did not reflect well on the Randall Administration’s declaration of openness to have the teens’ press conference shut down by a man in black. It’s imperative that Holloway and Li be given a chance to tell their story. That’s why I’m inviting them to tell their story right here on Bin 42. I will do my best to make sure that their words won’t be edited or censored. Reese and David: call me!

4. Finally, to determine whether Holloway and Li really do have fast-healing and telepathic abilities, they need to submit to testing by an independent board of scientists. If they do have these abilities, it is totally revolutionary, and could mean amazing advancements in medicine. While I’m sure they’re not eager to become lab rats, they need to realize the incredible significance of their situation. I hope they’ll let science prove to the world what they’ve said they can do.

There were already 138 comments at the end of the post, but Reese didn’t scroll to the bottom of the screen. She saw a link in the sidebar to a video clip from the press conference, and despite the nervous twitch in her belly, she clicked on it.

There she was, standing with David on her front steps, their hands clasped. Her hair was tangled, and there were shadows under her eyes. The clothes she wore didn’t fit well. The long-sleeved blue tee was lumpy on her, and the pants made her look hippy. The outfit looked better on David, but he also showed signs of exhaustion. His face was ghostly pale, and his hair had a cowlick in the back and was plastered down in front as if he had tried to tame it with water. Through her computer’s speakers, she heard herself talking, and her voice sounded like a stranger’s.

That was when Amber came down the stairs and turned Reese and David around. Reese couldn’t see Amber’s face in the video—it was obscured by the back of David’s head—but she saw Amber lean into her, whispering in her ear. A moment later Amber walked around them to talk to the reporters. In comparison to Reese and David, Amber looked like a movie star. She was dressed casually in a red hoodie and jeans, but Reese knew that it didn’t matter what Amber wore; what mattered was the way she wore it. She had a face that was made for the camera, with her big gray eyes and glossy lips. When she walked through the reporters toward the erim and the small craft, the cameras followed her until the craft took off. Then, with a jerk, the video turned back to Reese and David. They looked shell-shocked, and it took a minute before the press conference returned to the subject of what had happened to them.

After the video ended, Reese shut off her computer, but Amber’s face lingered in her mind’s eye. Reese didn’t want to think about her. She was still angry about Amber’s lies—angry and hurt. How could Amber expect Reese to believe her offer of help? She couldn’t believe anything Amber said, even if she said it by whispering in her ear. Reese remembered lying on the beach with her, Amber’s mouth against her skin, breathing her name. All of that was a lie, Reese told herself, shoving away the curl of desire that awoke in her. You can’t trust her. It’s over. You don’t feel that way anymore. A nervous energy skittered through her limbs and she got up. She needed to get away from what people were saying online. She decided to get a drink of w