HIS FACE WAS etched in concern. Hair longer than I remembered, messy and dark gold. Lines by his eyes. Looking older than I remembered.
He held a packet of water up to my lips. One of the pouches from Odysseus’s stores. The liquid soothed my parched throat.
I pushed away his hand so I could speak. “Luka?” My voice was harsh, gravelly. “What . . . how?”
“Please, save your voice.”
I tried to shake my head, but I only succeeded in losing the delicate balance I’d gained. My head slumped uncomfortably to one shoulder.
Gingerly, Luka cradled the back of my skull and held me upright.
“You’re not real,” I whispered. My voice was broken like it’d been run over by a truck, more scratch than sound.
“Do I not look real?” A ghost of a smile, one corner of his mouth perked up wryly.
“You could be . . . not you. Something else, data mining my memories. Showing me a friendly face to . . . gain my trust.” That had been too many words. I swallowed a few times to moisten my throat. “Tell me it’s you.”
The smile dropped away. “It’s me.”
“Prove it.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you something only I know. Something you couldn’t make up.”
He released the back of my head, and to my relief I managed to hold it up without his help. His gaze locked with mine, steady and grim and resolute. “I knew I was never going to be selected for this mission. My entire aim in participating in the competition was to monitor the other candidates. From the moment I saw your skill at manipulating your brain waves, I knew it was going to be you.” His voice dropped. “From the beginning, I had hoped it would be you, Cassie.”
My lungs were working extra hard to bring in oxygen. My voice was more breath than sound. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Cassie. That message that Crane’s satellites received? The blueprints for Odysseus? We sent that message. My father designed this ship. We invited you here. This is our home planet.” His jaw clenched. Then he added, with venom so unlike him it made me shiver, “What’s left of it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting him to stop. Unwilling for this to be reality. Unable to digest it.
When I opened them again, the world hadn’t even begun to make sense. I couldn’t look at his face. Instead I scanned the room, looking for some semblance of normal, something that would make this okay.
Around us stood the four silver pods, each of my crew members still fast asleep within, their heart-rate monitors beeping peacefully from the control pads. They were all still there. Still breathing. Copeland’s shorn hair had grown at least six inches, floating around her skull like a dark halo. Bolshakov’s face had a scruff of grizzly beard, where he’d been clean-shaven the last I’d seen him.
I reached a hand up to my hair. It’d been long to begin with, but now it came down nearly to my waist.
I turned my eyes back to Luka. He was waiting for me to accept it, his expression bleak. Like he expected me to take this badly.
My eyes blinked away what felt like many months’ worth of sleep, and the details of his face came into high-definition focus. The ruddiness of his cheeks. The perspiration at his hairline, hinting at some exertion. All impossible, impossible.
“How long has it been?” I whispered.
“Six months. Please forgive me for being blunt,” he said. “I know you are still recovering from the stasis. But there is much I must tell you, and we have little time. The rest of your crew will soon begin their waking sequences.”
I gaped at him.
I couldn’t understand what was happening. If it wasn’t for the fact that my muscles obviously hadn’t been used in months, and the impossible fact that Luka was sitting in front of me, on a spacecraft presumably five hundred light-years from Earth, there would have been no way for me to believe it.
The months I’d known him flashed before my eyes.
He’d never been anything but number one, ensuring he lasted until the final round. He understood every concept in class better and faster than I did. He’d never been able to alter his brain waves. He’d always been a little set apart from the rest, a little awkward. I’d attributed that to him being a fish out of water—being foreign.
He took a breath and began to speak, quickly, more words than I’d ever heard him say at once. “When the rest of your crew awaken, you’ll learn that you are in an underground bunker. The planet above our heads is empty and barren and long abandoned. The surface is too irradiated for life to exist. Right now, we’re the only living things in this entire system. My people have returned here only to show you that we mean no harm, and that we are telling the truth. Cassie, we are here because we need your help.”
He was speaking fast, as though forcing himself to say everything as quickly as possible. I could only stare at his moving mouth, watching him form the words that fell like so many discordant piano notes in my ears. Noise. Random, nonsensical noise.
My brain was still stuck on the first impossible thing. “You’re not . . . Luka, you look human. You speak English!”
He sighed in frustration and ran his hand through his hair, mussing it up even more. “Yes. As ambassadors, we have chosen to appear human. We took on your form, permanently, to be recognizable and nonthreatening. We wanted to assimilate.”
“Why were you at the competition to begin with if you had set this all up? What were you even doing there?”
His face was grim, but he answered dutifully. “My job was to monitor the progress of the candidates, attempt to discern who among them would be most amenable to our proposal, and try to sway the selection in our favor.”
“You . . .” I coughed, sat back away from him, as my emotions twisted from disbelief to realization to anger. “You were trying to tip the scales in your favor.” Then, as realization fully dawned: “You were trying to get me on your side! The whole time, everything you were doing, you were trying to win me over so I could . . .” Something nagged at me. “Is this why someone tried to sabotage the mission? Could someone on Earth . . . know about you?”
A dark cloud passed over his face. “I don’t know. It could have nothing to do with us, or everything.”
I was so angry I couldn’t even find words to finish my thought. Memories of kissing him washed over me. All our time in the wilderness, in the SLH, every moment now flashed in my mind with a new and sinister angle. My mind struggled to process. “You deliberately tried to make me . . . like you? So I’d try to convince the others that you were trustworthy. You played me like a chess piece.”
Hurt filled his eyes. “That was not my intent.”
“Oh, yes, it was.” I tried to move away from him, but slipped and fell on my knees. He reached forward to help and I twisted away. At the first hint of my resistance, his hands released me. “Don’t. Don’t presume that we’re friends. You aren’t . . . I don’t know who you are.”
“Cassie, what could I have said?” There was a note of exasperation in his voice. “I had no choice. How could I have told you the truth?”
“Just—stop.” I was hurt, furious, unreasonable.
He reached out to me, holding my forearms gingerly. “Let me tell you why you are here. And then I will leave you alone.”
I met his eyes. Gave him a nod.
“It was a surprise to you to discover you were not alone in the universe. It was not so for my people. One of our moons was, in fact, as teeming with life as our own planet. It was our failing that we did not deduce the intelligence of the dominant species. It was, in fact, our downfall. We underestimated them; their intelligence, their intentions. These aliens—the vrag—they turned against us. They killed our scientists, stole our spacecraft, and within no time at all were rampaging across our planet.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but he shook his head and went on.
“I was not alive to witness this. My family just barely escaped the destruction of our planet. Our only chance at long-term survival was to find a livable planet to colonize. They traveled for years upon years, despairing at ever finding another. Until Earth.”
I was beginning to see where this would lead. “But it was already inhabited.”
He nodded, releasing my arms. “My people are desperate. We were willing to share our knowledge, come to humans in good faith, and ask for refuge.”
“You want to . . . share Earth?” And then I realized. “You’re using past tense.”
“Our numbers are few; it could have been done. We planned to invite you here, giving you Odysseus as a show of good faith and to show what we had lost. To meet here in a neutral place, where we would not risk a volatile response.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean, it could have been done? Aren’t we here? Wasn’t this exactly what you wanted? You hold us hostage until we agree to your terms?”
His eyes went wide in alarm. “No, no, not at all.” His eyes darted over to the pods and back again. “Cassie, circumstances have changed. The alien species that destroyed my planet and my people—they have found us. They have discovered Earth. And we fear it is only a matter of time before Earth shares in our planet’s fate.” He held on to my shoulders. “My people escaped because we had the means to disappear into the galaxy. There will be no such escape for humanity.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach, a black hole forming where it had been.
I thought of Earth, the only color in the black void. Alone and vulnerable.
“What can we do?” I whispered.
Luka squeezed my shoulders, his handsome face resolute. “My family believes there is a weapon hidden somewhere inside this bunker that may challenge the vrag. Something my people never got a chance to use. We plan to retrieve it, and to return to Earth, with you as our allies, to defend the planet.”
His hands fell away, putting space between us. “By the time your crewmates awake, I will be gone. You need to regain your strength, and they will need time to recover. But you’re safe here, for now.” He glanced down at a screen embedded in the suit at his wrist, then met my eyes. “When you’re ready, we will meet to discuss our mutual survival. I ask only that you consider what I’ve told you. Take what you know of me, Cassie. I never lied except to protect myself. I have only ever tried to help you. Please, help me now.”
My voice was a cautious whisper. “What do you want from me?”
He took half a step closer, his voice going soft. “I want you to be on our side.”
I considered him. How I’d misjudged him so severely in the beginning—how I’d misjudged everyone, really, on sight, and how I’d been proven wrong each and every time.
He was right. He’d only ever been a friend. And now he needed me to trust him.
“One last thing.” I cleared my throat. “What . . . what’s your name?”
He tilted his head, as though confused I would choose that question out of the infinite others. “You know my name.”
“Your real name.”
He took a step closer. We were now breathing the same air. My heart pounded in my ears. “I have always been Luka. I was born on Earth. I have been human since my earliest memories.” He smiled distantly. “I believe I told you once—that I understood how it felt to feel like a stranger in your own land.”
I blinked at him, remembering.
“But my people, my family, we call ourselves megobari.”
Despite everything, despite knowing the truth beneath the surface, he was still Luka. The planes of his face were so familiar and so dear to me. And beneath the anger and confusion and fear, I still cared about him. Still trusted him.
A beat of silence. And then one of the pods began to beep.
“My people wish to help yours,” Luka said, backing slowly away, leaving me propped against the bulkhead. “I ask only that you help convince your people that we are telling the truth. There’s no time to waste with arguing.”
Looking into his eyes, I saw no deceit. “I’ll do what I can. But I want to know all the details first. Everything. No more deceit.”
“Agreed.” He smiled. The hatch opened into the airlock. He glanced out at it and then at me. “It was . . . good to see you again.”
If I hadn’t been dehydrated, my eyes might’ve filled with tears. “I didn’t know if I ever would.”
“It won’t do for me to be aboard when your crew awakens. But when they do, we’ll be waiting.” A loud vacuum sound broke the silence as Bolshakov’s pod began to empty of gel, and Luka shot a quick look back before meeting my eyes again. “Remember what we promised.”
I sat straighter, finding my body’s strength returning. “Yes.”
With a solemn nod, Luka exited the hatch, the door closing behind him.
We’d promised each other—a long time ago now, but recent in my memory—that no matter what, we would not let anything that might be between us jeopardize the mission.
I understood that now.
Think of all the things that motivate you. My family. Earth. And now, my friends. This was why we’d come. This was why we were here.
My job wasn’t over because we’d arrived safely; it had only just begun.
I faced the pods of my crew as, one by one, they began their waking sequences. I squared my shoulders and forced air into my lungs until the pain was only background noise. Time to be strong.
Time to get to work.