Mothership Read online

  “Loud and clear, Archer,” James Dean says. “What frequency are you on?”

  “Shit,” Cole says, before switching to a secure frequency. “Home One, this is Archer . . . again. Do you read?”

  “Good to hear your voice, kid,” Dean says. “What’s your status?”

  Cole looks back at all of us crammed around the console, and smiles.

  “Byron, do we have a story for you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IN WHICH EVERYTHING WRAPS UP NICELY WITH ABSOLUTELY NO LOOSE ENDS

  The first thing I do when we land is literally kiss the soil.

  The second thing I do is retch a little bit. Because it’s been a long day, and because, well, dirt tastes gross.

  Dad and Ducky are already here, waiting for me. Which is kinda nuts since we had to land way out in the middle of farm country, a good four-hour drive from home. I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t even remember to put up the parking brake. He hugs me so tight, I would remind him not to block my airways if, you know, my airways weren’t blocked.

  “Dearheart,” he sighs. “I missed you so much.”

  I squeeze him back. “I missed you too, Dad.”

  Ducky is next. He walks over shyly at first, as though he almost isn’t sure he recognizes me. I reach out a hand and, ever so gently, tug on his earlobe.

  That’s when he loses it.

  “Good to have you back,” he says, falling into an enormous bear hug.

  “God, you cry like a girl,” I tell him. But I’m crying too.

  I say my good-byes to the others quickly. Most are easy, but saying good-bye to Ramona and Natty gives me a little extra phlegm in the chest.

  “Make sure those Almiri bastards take good care of you,” I instruct Natty. “Don’t let them give you any shit.”

  She nods as she sniffles into my shoulder. “I won’t,” she replies. She looks up and gets this naughty little grin on her face. “You think maybe I could convince them to pose for a series of nudes?”

  “That’s one art class I might actually show up for,” Ramona says.

  I make to hug Ramona, but she punches me in the shoulder instead. “I . . .,” I begin, but she stops me.

  “Here,” she says, and she hands me a brand-new pack of cigarettes. Seriously, I don’t know where she keeps those things. “You might need them,” she tells me. “For the baby. You know, in case you decide to keep it.”

  I must inadvertently raise an eyebrow at that, because she just snorts. “They’re medicated,” she replies. “See?” I look at the label. Sure enough, Ramona is right—Immunity-Boosting Mist Sticks: 100 percent tar and nicotine free. It’s right there on the box. “Jeez, you think I’m some kind of chromer or something?”

  “I . . .”

  She tucks the cigarettes into my pants pocket and punches me in the other shoulder. “I know you have to make up your own mind,” she says. She’s quiet, so no one else can hear. “But if you ask me, you’d make one hell of a mom. Even if the thing has antennae.”

  And with that she strolls off to the van that Cole has procured to take those that want to go to the Poconos. Every girl—besides me, that is—has agreed to go and at least find out more about the Almiri. Even Britta, though I don’t know why. Maybe she’s hoping they’ll “deal” with her little Jin’Kai issue. She’s slouched by the door of the van. I wave to her, a meager olive branch, perhaps, after all we’ve been through, but a heartfelt one. Britta’s look, however, makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle, and then she turns away, her arms wrapped almost protectively over her stomach.

  Cole is standing awkwardly beside me, shuffling his feet, so I give him a tight hug. “Are you worried?” I whisper, and I don’t clarify, but I think he understands what I don’t say. Are you worried that Britta will rat you out about the Code? Are you worried what will happen to you when they discover you let me go? Are you worried what I’ll do with this baby?

  “You just worry about you,” he replies. “Whatever happens to me . . .” He stares at the ground. “I think I probably deserve it.”

  I give him a quick kiss then, right on his starkiss. “I’ll be in touch,” I say. “I promise.”

  He squeezes my hand tightly as I climb into the front seat of my dad’s car. And I think he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t.

  As Dad pulls onto the street, I decide to break the silence. You know, bring us all back to what’s truly important. “Can we make a stop on the way home?” I ask. “I need a new phone. Mine sort of maybe exploded.”

  • • •

  Four days later—my due date looming ever closer—Ducky and I are in my room playing Jetman. Ducky claims he read a study that video games are good for calming the nerves of pregnant women, but I’m pretty sure he made that up. To our everlasting surprise, Ducky’s normally douchy stepdad seemed more than agreeable to the idea of Ducky playing hooky from school to hang out with me nearly full-time. Zeke even convinced Ducky’s mom to write him two weeks’ worth of sick notes. Ducky says it’s the most pleasant case of pneumonia he’s ever experienced.

  “So . . .,” Ducky starts, and just from his tone I know he’s going to ask me another in a long line of questions about my experience with the Almiri and Jin’Kai. It’s like he was given a front-row seat to his utmost nerd fantasy. He’s been asking questions nonstop since the car ride home. He hands me the tub of peach yogurt, as if that’s going to soften the interrogation. “These Almiri guys, they live to be, like, hundreds of years old?”

  “So it seems,” I say as I pour the yogurt generously over my bowl of black olives.

  “And they’re all, like, completely famous.”

  “Not all of them. Just some, I think. Like, apparently Mozart was an Almiri. And James Dean, obvi.”

  Ducky scratches his chin quickly before returning his hand to the controller.

  “That’s so messed up, faking your own death and then getting to be famous again doing something else if you want to. Are the bad ones, the Jin . . .”

  “Jin’Kai.”

  “Right, are any of the Jin’Kai famous too?”

  “I don’t think so. They haven’t been on Earth nearly as long. And they seem to be trying to lay low, you know, while they conquer the world. So they’re probably not auditioning for America’s Next Top Botanist or anything.”

  “But they’re all superpretty like Cole?” The moment the words are out of his mouth, he scrunches up his face. “You know what I mean.”

  “Mmm,” I say, trying to find the most succinct way to describe it so that hopefully Ducky will stop with the twenty questions. “The Jin’Kai are hot too, but kinda, like, burlier than the Almiri. More Jax Richter, less Hansel Wintergarden.”

  “Those dudes I saw on your phone up there were not good-looking, Elvie.”

  “The Devastators? I never got a good look at them.”

  Ducky shivers. “Lucky you.”

  “I think the definition of ‘studmuffin’ is different on the planet where they come from.”

  Ducky raises an eyebrow. “Wait, so is Hansel Wintergarden . . .”

  “Not to my knowledge,” I say as I pull a tornado kick out of nowhere for a double critical bonus hit. “Can you imagine the horror of getting stuck on a spaceship with him while he’s singing ‘Baby, Let’s Go to the Prom with All Our Friends’?” I follow up my tornado kick with a nuke-fist to the face, and Ducky throws down his controller in mock disgust.

  “No more pregnancy handicaps,” he tells me. “You are trouncing me, and it’s not fun anymore.”

  “Suck it up, Pence,” I reply. “And stop trying to distract me with your stupid questions.”

  Ducky thinks about that. “Just one more,” he promises. I groan, focusing on the screen, but Ducky is undeterred. “How do the Almiri pick who to impregnate?” he asks. “Is there some sort of system, or what? Who tells them who they can sleep with? And how come the Almiri and Jin’Kai always have to be dudes? That’s just patently unfair. Why can’t there be
a whole army of redheaded bombshells out there who need me for a good roll in the hay? And why did they—”

  “Ducky!” I shout with a laugh. “Just give it a rest, all right? Isn’t the fact that I survived a big alien throw-down in space enough for you?”

  Ducky smiles at that. He picks up one of the yogurt-laden olives before thinking better of it and putting it back in the bowl. “Fine,” he says, “I’m done.”

  “Thank you,” I reply. And then I blast his avatar to smithereens.

  We’ve just started our rematch when I finally decide to tell him. “Cole called this morning,” I say slowly. I glance sideways to see how Ducky will respond to the news, but I’m having trouble reading his expression.

  Today was the first I’d heard from Cole since I got back, so there was quite a bit of catching up to do. Apparently he told Byron—aka James Dean—that I miscarried on the Echidna during all the excitement, to explain my absence from the Poconos pregnancy party. “The girls all seem to be doing well,” I continue. “Cole said that Ramona’s old boyfriend Kyran was there. I guess she gave him quite an ass-whooping.” Ducky smiles. “And Natty’s going to start some sort of weekly art review going up there. Seems she’s fitting in pretty well. No word about Britta, though.”

  “Yeah, Cole didn’t mention her to me, either,” Ducky replies with a shrug, and I’m so startled that I drop my controller. Ducky doesn’t miss a beat, giving my avatar a roundhouse kick to the face.

  KO!

  “You talked to Cole?” I ask, incredulous. “When? How? Why?”

  Another shrug from the master shrugger. “He gave me his number when we picked you up. Figured it would be good to have, I dunno, like, an emergency contact or something.”

  I am not at all sure if I like the idea of Cole and Ducky talking behind my back. Between the two of them, they know just about every secret I have. If they pooled their info, I could really be done for.

  “So . . . you talked with Cole . . ..” The words taste funny in my mouth.

  “Only once or twice. It’s not like we’re PIPs or anything. He was just checking in. He was curious.”

  “About?” I prod.

  “About whether you’d made a decision yet.”

  “He could ask me himself.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Ducky looks up from the screen for just a split second. “Anyway,” he says, more serious, “have you?”

  I shake my head. “Nope.” The days are ticking away, and I know I need to make up my mind soon, but . . . Have an Almiri or terminate the pregnancy? The pros and cons of each choice have been swirling around in my brain nonstop, and I’m no closer to deciding anything. I reach for the yogurt and take a deep scoop.

  “If you could,” Ducky asks, back to plugging away at the game, “would you change it? Would you go back in time and do things differently? You know, with Cole? Would you not . . .”

  I close my eyes and think that through. If I had known, in that moment, that that one tiny decision would change my whole life, would I have decided differently? Would I have chosen not to do the dirty with Cole? I want to say yes. But honestly, I don’t know. Try as I might to do otherwise, I might make the same choice again.

  “You’ll make the right decision, you know,” Ducky says. He looks at the TV when he says it, not at me, but I know he means it. “Whatever you do will be the right thing.”

  “Thanks, Duck.”

  There is a soft knock on my bedroom door. “Dearheart?”

  I look up from the game. “Come on in, Dad.” He steps into the room. “You want to join us? You can sub for Ducky.”

  Dad laughs. “No, just wanted to see how you two were doing up here. I was setting up the new filing cabinet, and I needed a break.” He rubs his shoulder.

  “New filing cabinet?” Ducky asks.

  “I needed one with extra drawers,” Dad says with a nod. “Can you believe I only had one crisis folder on alien invasions?”

  Before I can respond to that, the front doorbell rings downstairs.

  “That must be the new crew of construction workers,” Dad says. I’d have thought, with the whole daughter-in-a-space-emergency thing, that maybe he’d give up on his plans for the solar deck, but it’s been going full-throttle. The sawing and banging outside the window has really put a damper on my afternoon naps. “I got a call yesterday that my normal crew was all reassigned. Can you believe that, right in the middle of the job? Anyways. Donald, would you mind letting them inside? Tell them I’ll be there in just a second?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Nara,” he replies. As he gets up, he pauses the game and looks at me. “No cheating while I’m gone,” he says, and leaves the room.

  After Ducky’s footsteps fade down the stairs, Dad pulls something out of his pocket. An LED. “I wanted to give you this,” he says, handing it to me.

  I put down the yogurt and take it. Slowly I read the words on the page.

  It is an official doctor’s note, claiming that, after administration of the Gatling test, the fetus I am carrying has been determined to have CMS. My all-access pass to a legal late-stage termination with a certified physician. “How did you . . .” I ask.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replies, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “And before you say anything, I know you haven’t made up your mind yet, and I’m not trying to force you one way or the other. I think you know what my opinion is, but in the end it doesn’t matter. I just want you to have everything you need for whatever decision you make.”

  I snuffle back a sudden wave of tears. “Thanks, Dad,” I whisper. My mind is roller-coastering out of control again, with the same thoughts that have been banging around in there ever since I learned about my situation. Do I really want to give up a baby, even if it isn’t mine? Do I really want to have a baby, especially if it isn’t mine? If I have this Almiri, that’s it for me. I can never have a child of my own after that. Period. And could it really be considered a termination? I mean, there was no fertilization of any egg going on here. The thing is a parasite inside me. Cole’s parasite . . .

  Dad reaches across the space between us, to where I’m sitting curled in the armchair in front of the TV, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “What are you thinking?” he asks gently.

  I sigh. “I’m thinking . . .” One thing I know for sure is, if I do have this baby—and I don’t know at all that I will—there’s no way I’d ever let it be raised by James Dean and his merry band of babe magnets in the Poconos. The brief conversation I had with Cole in the bathroom of the Echidna was enough to convince me of that. This kid, even if it weren’t mine, would need a more fair and balanced view of the human race than you can get from the top of North Knob. “All I keep thinking,” I tell my dad, “is how, if I have this baby, I’ll never go to Mars.” I am definitely crying now. I swipe at a tear before it can escape down my cheek. “I mean, I don’t want to be selfish, but . . . That’s what I’ve wanted forever. How can I give up my whole life for a baby? For someone else’s baby? For a parasite?” Dad presses his thumb against the line of my nose, blotting out another tear. “There’s no way I’ll be able to get into the Ares Project, because I’ll have this thing with me, slowing me down every step of the way. And I’ll never get to see the world, the universe, anything. I’ll end up . . .” Yep, it’s turning into a sob fest. “I’ll be just like Mom.”

  My father cocks his head to the side, curious. “Like Mom?” he asks.

  “How . . .” I do my best to gather the words to explain. “How she marked all those places she wanted to go in her stupid book of maps”—I swing an arm in the direction of the book, propped up as always on my bookshelf—“and she never got to go to any of them because she . . . because she had me.”

  “Elvie.” Dad waits until I’m looking into his eyes, and then he gives me the most soulful look I’ve ever seen. “Dearheart. Is that what you think?”

  Sniffle. “What do you mean?”

  “I suppose it’s my fault. Talking abo
ut your mother—well, you know that it’s very difficult for me. Very painful. I guess I just figured that if I buried the memories, they wouldn’t sting so much. But I never meant to rob you of your mother. For that I am truly sorry.”

  Dad stands up and kisses my forehead gently. Then he walks to the bookshelf and takes down Mom’s book of maps. He sits back gingerly on the bed and turns a page to show me.

  It’s my favorite map. Antarctica. I don’t even have to look at it to know exactly where it is marked in red, right over Cape Crozier.

  “Your mother fed penguins, right here,” he tells me with a wistful smile. His finger lands directly on the dot that marks Cape Crozier. “They walked right up to her and ate out of her hand.” He laughs to himself. “She must’ve told me the story a dozen times. Her group nearly died of starvation on the trek there, but she still hid a package of granola just for those damn birds.”

  “Dad?” I say, confused. “But . . .”

  He turns to another page. Peru. “Your mother rode a burro all the way up the Inca trail.” Another map. He points to a dot off the coast of New Zealand. “And here’s where she solar surfed for the first time.” He flips to another page, but before he can continue on, I rest a hand across the book. He looks up at me. “Your mother was a remarkable woman, Elvie. Olivia did a lot of things in her few short years on Earth.”

  “But . . . I thought the book was . . . Why did she keep all these maps? I thought they were places she wanted to see.”

  “They were places she loved,” Dad replies. “Your mother was quite the explorer. I should’ve told you more about her, I know I should have. I always thought it’d be easier to do when you were older.” He looks at my baby bump and laughs weakly. “I guess you’re old enough now.”

  Inside me the Goober kicks. It’s the first time I’ve felt his presence in I don’t know how many days, and the feeling is strange, jarring.

  “Dearheart,” my dad continues. “Your mom kept this book of maps for you. She was so excited that . . .” I think for a second that I hear his voice break, but he swallows it down and begins again. “She was so happy when she found out she was having a little girl. She said she wanted to share the world with you.” He closes the book of maps and places it in my lap. “I guess in some small way she did.”