CHAPTER ONE
JAKOB
Everything in front of Jakob Shao was dark.
His eyes adjusted after several seconds, turning the void into a black sheet laced with brilliant white dots, countless stars coming into focus. Jakob raised a finger and poked at the nothingness, only to feel a magnetic pushback from deflective impulses. Force fields, really, as Jakob still used the Earth terminology gained from a childhood of movies and comic books. Whatever they were called, they kept the vacuum of space from sucking him out, freezing him, possibly imploding him.
The atmosphere dock of the Awakened ship wasn’t much more welcoming than deep space. It didn’t help that he stood barefoot and nearly naked, only an ill-fitting cloth halfway between a burlap sack and a poncho draped over him. The Awakened probably used it more to maintain their hostage’s body temperature than comfort, and definitely not for fashion. But where were his captors?
Where was anyone?
Then a voice called out.
A familiar voice, a not-human one that strained to yell his name in a vocalization that came out halfway between a crow’s caw and an electronic blip. The implanted chips between Seven Bells soldiers constantly translated for species, but nothing came through here. Something must have burned out the chip, leaving only natural expression, a human word forced into alien physiology.
It called Jakob’s name.
Jakob ran to the voice, tracing the sound while rumbles vibrated the floor. Spouts of steam and vapor burst onto him, and his bare feet crunched on jagged debris. He turned a corner, and though different lights flashed and fluctuated through the dim space, he saw a familiar figure.
Henry.
The unmistakable silhouette of curling horns and humanoid frame of Henry’s native species stood out against beams of light, and Jakob called out, “Henry!”—the simplest name he could assign to his friend, given the physical impossibility of pronouncing their culture’s names. A harsh draft blew dust in his face, fragments hitting his bare shoulders as he charged forward. “Henry! We need to go right—”
Except Henry would not be able to go anywhere.
Stripped of his standard armor and clothing, his friend’s set of eight eyes all focused on him, their face angling away. One arm reached out to Jakob, straining to move.
The other remained frozen, a statue pose as the crystallization took over, organic matter gradually desiccating from the bottom up. Jakob paused, slowly putting together what it all meant.
Jakob was in the Seven Bells’s first wave of defense, but his power-armor mech had been damaged, and he was captured in space. Henry was to lead the second wave, an on-the-ground defense squad that took advantage of their native planetary knowledge.
They must have failed. Which meant Henry’s home world had fallen to the Awakened, their technology analyzed and usurped, their population and wildlife crystallized to be used as building material.
Jakob took his friend’s hand, a pincerlike claw with small sensory tentacles in the palm. “I’m so sorry. So sorry,” Jakob said repeatedly, taking far too much time given the exploding craft around him. Henry’s shoulder froze, body solidifying from elbow to forearm to claws until the whole appendage stiffened and the sensory tentacles stopped moving. Jakob leaned forward as an invisible weight suddenly pushed on his skull, a pressure from the center outward. He looked at Henry, only their head and neck remaining, eyes closed, but tilted his way.
Jakob knew what to do, what Henry wanted. It was the way their species passed on generational knowledge during their final moments.
He let Henry in.
And several seconds later, Jakob absorbed information, secrets, devastation, all of the things that Henry saw and felt while Jakob had been captured. And a number.
A sixteen-digit number that could change everything.
“Go,” Henry managed in their unearthly voice before the crystallization process inched upward, eventually taking over their entire head with a sparkly, dead texture.
Then his friend collapsed, their transformed body falling apart like a sandcastle imploding under its own weight. Henry’s remains scattered, spilling everywhere and getting between Jakob’s toes. When he turned, he felt it grind beneath his feet.
But there was no time to mourn or be disgusted. He needed to go. But where?
Jakob sprinted, checking all corners and hallways. But whatever had happened before he had come to had caused the ship to be evacuated, mostly ransacked of anything useful. At a hangar bay, his captured, half-wrecked mech sat, stripped of any useful tools. The only thing intact was a decryptor—a tool for espionage, not escape.
That wouldn’t help here, though he grabbed the device, anyway—technically, a neural encryptor/decryptor—and looked for a way out. In the corner, a holographic interface flickered on and off.
That just might do it.
A closer look had Jakob laughing at his luck: the half-functioning interface was the ship’s compressed-matter transporter system, something he was familiar with, since the Seven Bells regularly scavenged them from downed Awakened craft. He craned his neck up at the too-tall interface next to him, fingers flying over controls he understood just enough to operate. It hummed to life, a low vibration nearly eclipsed by the ongoing rumbles of various decks exploding above him. A white glow signified it was ready to fire him across space.
Him, and the knowledge he’d stolen.
But what destination would provide safety until the Seven Bells could recover him?
A star chart glowed in front of him, and the vast pool of space lay at his fingertips. One of those tiny dots represented a chance. He just had to figure out which one—fast.
Jakob scanned the possibilities, already tensing for the brutal gauntlet of compressed-matter transport: an invisible bubble sealing around the body, then throttling it through a newly generated wormhole that collapsed upon exit. He needed somewhere safe, somewhere primitive that the Awakened would completely overlook. Only then could he track his fleet without putting them in danger. Solar system upon solar system whirred in front of him, the options coming and going until he paused at one choice.
One obvious, hilarious, completely impossible choice.
Earth. The place he’d departed fifteen years ago.
Jakob zoomed in on the image, examining its projected rotation. Pure dumb luck handed him a win here; they were passing through within three light-years, perfectly within the edge of the transporter’s radius. The holographic light pulsed, indicating the system was ready to go.
But what if the Awakened chased him, captured him again? He could hide his body, yet his mind still represented a risk: specifically, the device implanted in his head that connected him to the Seven Bells command fleet, activated only when speaking the right words. The Awakened were known for torturing to the point of unconsciousness, trying to pry secrets that might tip the war one way or another, except he’d been trained to protect the activation phrase with his life.
His life for the entire fleet’s life.
But did the Awakened have other ways to extract that information, something more strategic than pain? If they tracked him down, could they try some type of mental probe or memory scanner?
Jakob turned to think, his bare foot kicking against a smooth object that suddenly caught his attention.
The decryptor he’d salvaged—a basketball-sized device that could scramble certain parts of his memory. A way to blank out the activation phrase from his mind, guaranteeing its safety—and thus, the fleet’s safety—in any situation until the Seven Bells located him. Jakob calculated the risks. As one of the Seven Bells’s leading engineers, patching up damaged equipment in the heat of battle was standard procedure. But scrambling and patching up his own mind?
There was a first time for everything.
Jakob held the decryptor to his forehead, pressing it firmly and thinking as hard as he could about the specific phrase to activate the skull implant’s emergency communications signal. A very quick, very sharp zap hit him and, with it, scrambled that memory, now unlockable solely with this very device.
But he suddenly realized that if the zap’s blast radius scrambled tangential memories, he might lose more: what had happened, what he needed, his whole mission. Jakob’s eyes darted around, searching the broken space for something that might provide a way to give himself tangible backup clues.
The pipes on the walls.
Whatever liquid they contained might be as good as ink.
He grabbed jagged shrapnel off the floor and smashed the line, neon-blue dripping out. It didn’t produce steam or eat through the floor. Good enough. His finger stung a little under the viscous liquid, and with it, he wrote words on his exposed skin.
SIGNAL. WEAPON.
Dizziness and nausea struck as details blurred out of existence, and Jakob knew disorientation would hit soon enough. He held the decryptor close, hugging it while activating the scan sequence of the transporter. A thin beam of light trickled over him, a tingle crawling over his skin while the transporter calculated the shape and strength of its protective bubble. It had nearly finished when sparks flew from the far side of the room, another shake knocking him off balance.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he said while reinitiating the scan, uttering Earth curses that still stayed with him. The scanning beam reappeared, only to stop halfway down his body. He tried again and then again, but each time, it refused to move past the decryptor.
Jakob squinted at the repeated message on the transporter’s interface, but without the supporting communications tech from Seven Bells on him, it was incomprehensible. He looked at the decryptor in his hand, then back at the interface, then over at the message.
Maybe that was it. Jakob with the device might be too much.
He set the decryptor on the floor and retargeted the scan beam. Several seconds later, a planetary image indicated a target destination. The decryptor shot off across space, a simple white flash as it vanished.
He’d have to find it. But what if the decryptor’s memory fallout erased those details? What if the transporter veered him off course on his own journey? How would he even know where to start?
Jakob turned back to the holographic map: the decryptor had been sent somewhere on the west coast of the North American continent. The Bay Area. Images flashed through his mind, faces surfacing after so many years of disconnecting from that life.
Mom. Dad. Kassie. Evie.
Home.
Such a word felt weightless, devoid of any meaning now. But it gave a shorthand to the decryptor’s location.
He jabbed his finger into the smashed pipeline, dipping into enough alien goo to write one more message. GO HOME, he wrote across his left shoulder. That would point him in the right direction, no matter where on Earth he started.
Jakob took in a deep breath, then hit the controls again on the transporter. The beam returned, scanning him up and down. Seconds passed and the air changed, like he was encased in a layer of plastic—pressurized energy protecting him across the vacuum of space. Around him, various hums and vibrations indicated the system would activate in moments.
The room shook as a hole tore open in the ceiling, fire and shrapnel showering him.
“Signal. Weapon. Go home,” he told himself, repeating the words. If all the writing dissolved or washed off, he could try to remember these few words. He readied himself, and only now did he notice bits of crystalline sand stuck to his legs and feet. Nausea hit Jakob, but whether it came from the decryptor process or seeing Henry’s remains, he wasn’t sure. Fists formed with tight fingers and tensed arms, and he forced himself to picture Henry’s crumbling body, a reminder of why he needed to do this.
“Signal. Weapon.”
He had to make it to Earth safely. He had to retrieve the decryptor and contact the fleet.
Because he wasn’t just a Seven Bells soldier trying to find a way back. Those sixteen digits Henry had chiseled into his mind would win the war.
He just needed to tell them first.
“Go home.”
CHAPTER TWOEVIE
We need to talk. This is huge.
Evie Shao tried her best to look slyly at her phone. She’d done so plenty of times during shifts, pulling it from her back pocket and returning it swiftly enough that most people failed to notice. The antsy cat owner across the exam table from her probably assumed it was all part of the job, a way for staff to communicate with each other.
It was a part of Evie’s job. Just not this job. Not that she disliked her work as a veterinary technician; it paid the bills while her mental energy went to a much more urgent issue.
Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life.
And how it all connected to her brother Jakob’s disappearance fifteen years ago.
Evie lingered on her phone, mind wandering from the exam room of the small Buffalo veterinary clinic. Usually a quick glance was enough; most things could be addressed later. And she had an unhappy cat to attend to. But this text from Layla wouldn’t let her go.
We need to talk. This is huge. It’s so electric that it’s lightning the mood.
Evie ignored the terrible pun, Layla’s trademark form of communication. Huge. The word implied so much, so many possibilities from the normally calm, normally data-driven Layla. Her phone vibrated again, still in her hand.
Seriously, call me ASAP.
The buzzing must have startled the nervous cat. At least based on the sudden “Oh no, I’m so sorry” from her owner and the sound of liquid dripping on the exam table.
Maxine yowled, the overweight dilute-colored tortie clearly upset about the situation. “Oh gosh,” said Maxine’s owner, a pale woman with a splash of purple in her short blond hair. “I’m so sorry.” Maxine hissed at no one in particular, then dashed into the open cat carrier sitting on the exam table.
Evie froze, suddenly caught between two worlds. On one hand, the exam table was covered in cat pee, and Maxine had dashed back into the carrier after taking long minutes to be coaxed out. On the other, Layla from the Red Network had said to call ASAP. That in itself was unusual. Usually the Reds sent emails, maybe a text if Evie flubbed an edit on their web show or if their viewing metrics spiked. Unscheduled discussion was rare. Broadcasting hours of scientific theory behind alien abduction already involved a lot of time and talking, and they all had day jobs. This level of persistence meant something significant.
From the carrier, Maxine mewed again, pulling Evie back to her responsibilities. Yes, she was there to help animals, but something urgent from the Reds might indicate something way, way, way bigger than an annual physical for a sweet-but-nervous cat.
Thin paper towels quickly absorbed the mess as Evie weighed her options. “Let me grab some real towels,” she said, exiting the exam room before Maxine’s owner responded. “‘Huge,’” she muttered under her breath. She bit down on her lip, the possibilities balancing in her mind. No one in the vet clinic was freaking out about news announcing alien life. So huge had to be relative.
“Evie, could you download the blood results for a dog named Leonardo from this morning?” Dr. Firenze asked while passing her in the hall. “Please forward it to my email. I have to review it for a follow-up.”
“Sure. Got it.” She waited for Dr. Firenze to enter an exam room, then pulled out her phone. At work. Give me a few.Her reply did not include a pun in return. Puns belonged only to Layla.
“Evie, can you give me a hand in X-ray when you get a sec?” another technician asked. “This Great Dane is huge.”
Huge. But a different type of huge compared to what Layla had.
“Yeah, okay. I’m in Exam Room B first,” Evie called, trotting to the linen closet, making an artful dodge around a patient nudging a nervous brindle greyhound onto the weighing scale. She grabbed a handful of towels and dashed back to Maxine. “Maxine, then blood work, then X-ray,” she said under her breath before catching her habit of thinking aloud. Doing that in her apartment was fine; at work was something else. She walked at a brisk pace, reminding herself to focus every few seconds—not because she skirted her responsibilities but because the sooner they were crossed off her list, the sooner she could call Layla.
Fifteen minutes later, Evie emerged out of the X-ray room and charged forward, even as the office admin tried to grab her. “Evie, can you—” he started, but Evie shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said. “Family thing. I’m taking my ten-minute break.”
“Wait, are you swapping with...” Even though the words registered, Evie didn’t stick around long enough to hear them. Her thoughts already turned to the messages on her phone.
The office’s back door opened, slamming her face with the frigid Upstate New York air, a light snow coming down, though the snowflakes melted into droplets before they graced the pavement with anything picturesque. The phone trilled in her ear as she waited for Layla to pick up, and a burst of wind caused her to shiver, tickling the shaved areas of her head enough to consider running inside and grabbing her coat.
“Hey! Where’ve you been?” Layla asked upon picking up.
“Working,” she said, her voice far more playful than how she felt. “Some of us can’t get by on puns alone.”
“Hey, I save my best for you. They’re sodium funny I slap my neon.” Layla laughed, and Evie pictured her tossing back her long brown curls as she did.
“And you say I have more followers? Not with that material. Anyway, define huge. I’m on a time limit.”
“Okay.” She sucked in a breath loud enough for Evie to hear. “So there was an event that happened a few hours ago. The data scraper just caught it.”
“All right. But we get an event every month or two. What’s so special about this one?”
“Evie...” The longer Layla hesitated, the more Evie’s nerves electrified. “I, uh...Look, I know why you started doing this. You know, why you’re so involved with the Red Network.”
“Yeah, yeah, to find my brother. Look, I’ve only got a few minutes and—” Before another word formed, the different puzzle pieces of the past few minutes suddenly snapped together.
It couldn’t be.
“Jakob?” she whispered.
“Now, we’re not sure—”
“Don’t even joke about something like this. You cannot. I swear to you, I will one-hundred-percent stop being your friend if you do.”
“I’m not joking. No puns.”
Sprinkles of snow fell onto the top of Evie’s head as she stood still, the tiny bits of ice eventually melting and making her short jagged hair damp while freezing the shaved undercut. The pounding in her chest intensified, each beat rippling from head to toe.
“Evie?”
Air caught in her throat, not allowing her to get any words out. Or was it her brain, unable to fully comprehend a one-in-a-million shot possibly coming true? “How do—”
“Look. Let’s be clear. We’re not certain it’s him. All we can tell you is that the measurements are the same.”
Not certain. Two little words caused Evie to deflate. “Which measurements?” she asked, though she knew the standard measurements of the Red Network. Their entire methodology was based on them.
“Temperature. Magnetic-field fluctuations. Atmospheric pressure. A sudden electrical storm—”
“Okay, okay,” Evie spit out, in a tone harsher than she intended. “Sorry. It’s just...a bit much. They’re exactly the same?”
“Well, not exactly in the traditional sense.” Every word made Evie’s stomach twist and tie, her mind several steps ahead trying to interpret meaning before everything came together. “But the differentials are the same. It’s a different time of year, so the starting conditions are different. But the amount they dropped and surged, even the time deltas on it, those are exactly the same.”
“How exact?”
“Like, exact. Fluctuations are in the tenth of percentage points. But if all of these numbers are based on the volume of energy it takes to transport someone—”
“And their specific weight,” Evie said. “And their specific body chemistry and typical body temperature.” And all the other things that calibrated exactly to a person’s physiology.
“We think it means something. Especially because...”
Layla’s voice trailed off in a way that didn’t imply good or bad but simply more. And more, Evie figured, meant something of significance rather than doubt.
“Spit it out.”
“It’s in Reno.”
Reno. A short trip from where they’d camped the night when Jakob and Dad had disappeared.
From the lake where they found Dad a few days later.
As if on cue, Layla continued. “It’s worth noting that the data curves from your dad’s return follow very similar slope patterns as well. Enough to mean something. I think. And there was another event. Different metrics, but still. Detected minutes apart. In a city called Half Moon Bay. You know it?”
The beach town’s name conjured up memories of cold, gray skies over beach bonfires, the smell of burning kindling mixed with s’mores. “Yeah. Half Moon Bay’s like an hour from where I grew up.” A decision snapped into Evie’s mind, words escaping without thought or filter. “I’m going home.”
“Wait, what? When?”
“I don’t know. Next flight out. I’ll figure it out. Look, I gotta get back to work.”
“Edward is monitoring social media in the region. He’s got some cool new tools. Apparently he’s got a side gig freelancing for the FBI. Someone there likes our work.”
“FBI, huh? Edward is big-time now?”
“Don’t tell him that. It’ll go to his head.”
“Look, I gotta take care of a scared cat. But if Edward wants to use fancy FBI tools on Reno...Well, you know?”
“Hint taken. We’ll let you know if anything pops up. I’m texting you the charts now.”
The line went dead, and Evie checked the clock. Two minutes left on her break. Her fingers flew over the virtual buttons, loading an airline app for all flights to the Bay Area out of Buffalo Niagara.
And, of course, her bank account. That created a bit of a problem.
The phone buzzed, loading up five different graphs. The fine details were illegible on the device’s small screen, but the dips and curves of the graphs lined up exactly with data she’d pored over, large printouts scrutinized in Layla’s dim basement studio after a drive across the border to the west end of Toronto. Those shapes and slopes were burned into her memory: the gradual ramp-up in atmospheric pressure before snapping back to normal, the drop—then spike—in temperature, the shift in magnetic fields, the high-altitude electrical storm that lasted for only seventeen minutes. She saw it: the exact way each curve bent, dropped, rose, and plateaued in exact same proportions to the historic numbers.
Still enveloped by the chill air, Evie closed her eyes, and thoughts of Jakob flashed of the last time she saw him. Not just shared space with him but actually saw him for who he was.
The night before they left for Lake Kinbote. On that evening, she’d stepped into his childhood bedroom, which Mom and Dad had preserved despite Jakob and Kassie being at UC Davis. It started off simple, to quickly remind Jakob of Dad’s plan for leaving in morning. Jakob stood, his unkempt hair bouncing as he sorted through a paper bag from his backpack, ultimately pulling out a tiny wad of plastic wrap in his hand.
She’d called him on it—with her usual teenaged self-righteousness, talking about his potential and why Kassie always called him a loser and how doing drugs proved it—and he’d smirked.
He always smirked, one side of his mouth going upward just enough to project genuine amusement, a warmth that felt totally foreign elsewhere in the family. Jakob had joked about how it was a science experiment, and of course Evie was a scientist even back then, as a freshman physics major in college, nearly fifteen years ago. His words stuck with her in startling clarity, every pause and inflection etched in permanence, a big speech equal parts charm and obfuscation that also appealed to her sense of order and logic and numbers. Jakob’s default skill was explaining his own lack of drive and commitment as some sort of universal right, a fact similar to how every single facet of existence boiled down to one plus one.
But deep down, Evie always knew Jakob’s happy-go-lucky bullcrap was a facade. And on that day, everything had shifted when he saw her concern, as though her discomfort activated his big-brother mode: the same gregarious vibe that disarmed people, except synthesized with a genuine bit of sibling protectiveness.
That afternoon, the cavalier braggart changed for twenty minutes, cockiness swapped out for empathy, an open mind about Evie’s concerns. Jakob would still take the drugs, sure, but he wanted to ease her worries.
And the surprising thing was that it wasn’t surprising. At least not to Evie. Kassie called her twin a deadbeat, never taking him seriously. But maybe if she had, if Mom and Dad had, they would have understood Jakob better too. In the end, it didn’t matter, though. Once Jakob vanished, Mom sank into work, Kassie became frigid. And Dad... Evie just hoped Dad would be proud of the way she carried on her promise.
Snow stung on her nose and cheeks, reminding her of the task at hand. Evie shook her head, chastising herself for indulging in the past when there was work to do.
This moment needed her phone. She turned the camera to Selfie mode, then stared right at the image of herself before tapping the button. No smile, no grin, nothing worth posting on social media. Simply a moment captured in time, a single frame showing who she was when she learned that Jakob might have come home. And then she told herself to put those memories away for now, to keep them at bay until she had more data.
She returned to the small facility, ear pressing to the various exam rooms until she heard Dr. Firenze finishing up. The door swung open, and first stepped a girthy and smiling corgi, its back leg with a noticeable limp. Little tufts of hair swirled in the wind as it tugged on the leash, pulling an Asian man out the door. Dr. Firenze followed, meeting eyes with Evie. “Oh. Excuse me.”
“Hi. Sorry, I wanted to catch you. I’ve had a bit of a family emergency, and I need to head out right now. I might need to have someone cover me for a few days. I’ll use my vacation time, of course. Oh, and I forwarded you the blood work from earlier.”
“Oh,” he said, concerned creases on his face. “No, no. No worries about that. Family first. You take care of them, we’ll take care of you.” Dr. Firenze smiled, and a small voice within Evie chastised her for the fib.
Reno. Just a few hours from home. If this was by the Bay Area, if this was possibly related to Jakob, if this meant going across the country, then only one option made sense. Evie shrugged into her parka, then scrolled through her contact list until it highlighted the name Kassie Shao.
The last time Evie had gotten in touch with her older sister was probably about six months ago, and in the most undignified way—asking for money, of all things. This might be better, asking to talk about their family’s past while slipping in a request to crash in her old bedroom. Or maybe it was worse. Given Kassie’s penchant for cold stoicism, anything involving family might be quickly shut down. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
