Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3) (10 page)

I wanted to keep reading.

She had a quirky charm, and her diary had sucked me right in. I wanted to get to know her . . .
all
of her. It was weird, but already I really liked Ashley Lacroix. We could fight dark matter together.

Except she was dead.

Ashley Lacroix was dead, and had been for almost four months. For a split-second, I’d almost forgotten, and now a sudden, stabbing guilt flared in my chest.

I’d killed her on July 1.

Fifteen-year-old Ashley—who had a personality, who had hopes and fears and dreams, who was
real
—was dead because of me.

My vision blurred. I blinked, and a tear hit the page. It was a different kind of torture this time. Not guilt or shame or self-loathing, but a terrible heartache, like I’d killed someone I loved.

Because now I knew her.

We were not the same. We would never be the same. Ashley was innocent, kindhearted, brave. I was none of those things. I was cowardly, rotten, unforgiveable . . .
Evil.

Her death was my fault, all my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t been speeding, or smoking, or driving Megan during the probationary period, maybe I would have seen her standing in the middle of the road. Maybe I could have braked in time, or honked, or swerved. Or maybe if I had called the police instead of dumping her body, if I had gotten help, maybe they could have resuscitated her. Maybe she would be alive today—

No one knows.
I sucked in a sharp breath, suddenly remembering. No one knew I killed her, no one knew I hid the body. I never confessed. I’d missed my one chance. Emory . . . he still didn’t know.

I’d gotten trapped in this underworld, and I’d taken my secret with me. But . . . but if I never made it home—I raised my trembling hand to my mouth and bit my fingernails, slipping into panic—if I never made it home, if I never got the chance to confess . . .

Dread pooled deep in my belly.

No, dying on this ash planet was not an option. I
had
to get back, had to set this right. I had to tell Emory, confess everything. I was the only one who could. I had to fall to my knees with a broken heart and plead guilty, kneel before him in penitence. My soul would never be free until I did. 

Somehow, I had to escape this hell. For
him
. For her brother. Because I was in love with him and he needed my confession.

I rolled over in my sheets, jaw clamped.

I was getting off this fucking rock if it was the last thing I did.

And I’d start
by searching Major Connor’s house.

In the morning after Sarah went back to work—the generator fired up in the garage with a thunderous roar, startling me awake—I set out to find a way home, still haunted by last night’s resolution.

A second blast door exited the rear of the bomb shelter. Beyond it, stairs climbed to a pair of slanted cellar doors, which I threw open to dazzling sunlight—his backyard, a paradise of landscaped terraces lined with ferns and palm trees.

But not the way back to Earth.

I headed back inside through the bomb shelter, running my hands along crates of supplies, blankets, food pallets, a rack of assault rifles. My fingers came away coated in dust.

Supplies for a whole year.

Rod Connor had known what to expect here—tainted food and water, no electricity, no fire—he’d prepared for everything.

Maybe he’d also prepared an escape.

He was an Air Force Major, after all. He was the guy in charge of cleaning up dark matter. He’d know how to get back. He
had
to know.

There’d be a binder explaining everything.

I grabbed my bottle of Fiji water and headed up to the ground floor, peeking through doorways. A bathroom, a spare guest room, a library—I paused at the photos of a young black soldier in full Marine regalia. His son.

Flanking the photos, a series of rich wood frames exhibited medals and military ribbons, each one the focus of a different halogen spotlight recessed in the exposed timber ceiling, lenses dark.

Killed in action.

Somehow, I just knew.

People only paid this kind of reverence to the deceased.

The scream of a power saw broke my trance, and dust sprinkled off the ceiling.

What the hell was she building out there?

I tore my eyes off his dead son and continued through the rest of the house. At last, I located a study at the end of the hall upstairs.

With a tug, the filing cabinet clanged open. Breathing faster, I thumbed through the hanging folders, scanned the labels—
Receipts, Finances, Bathroom Renovation, Home Insurance
,
Lexus Service History
 . . .

These weren’t work related. Damn.

I slammed it shut. The desk surface was bare too, except for a fine layer of dust. Nothing here. Anything sensitive had no doubt ended up as confetti in the paper shredder bin. I scooped out a handful and began picking through it hopefully, but not even individual letters remained intact. I threw the scraps down in frustration, and my eyes narrowed on the shelves sagging under the weight of worn photo albums. He didn’t even do work here.

A dead end.

Back in the hallway, I pushed into the master bedroom. Nothing here, either. Come on, the guy was Air Force Security Forces. He wasn’t going to leave confidential military documents lying around next to his bathrobe. Downstairs, the drone of the generator cut off. I was about to back out and go talk to Sarah about escape when something by the bed caught my eye.

A leather briefcase slumped against the bedside table.

He didn’t do work in his house, but maybe he carried it home with him. I seized the briefcase, which felt disappointingly light, and overturned it on the bed.

A tablet computer slid out, followed by a pen and a legal pad, a tin of leather shoe polish, and a manila envelope, torn open at the end. My gaze flicked to the label printed in red ink, and my pulse hiked.

TOP SECRET

Department of the Air Force

Office of Air Force Space Command

Vandenberg AFB, California

The envelope was empty.

I dug around the bottom of the briefcase, but whatever its contents had been, they were gone. Likewise, the legal pad had been ripped down to a blank page, leaving nothing. I tried the tablet, held down the power button. It didn’t turn on. Big surprise.

Discouraged, I rummaged through the side pockets.

My fingers brushed a plastic edge. I slid out a lanyard attached to an identification card, which I studied as I uncapped my water bottle. Issued by Vandenberg, the card gave him security clearance for something called Space Launch Complex 6. I tilted the Fiji bottle back and took a long drink. The liquid pooled heavily in my stomach. I flipped the ID card over and tossed it aside. Maybe inside the tin of shoe polish—

The lid popped off, and my thumb gouged into the waxy, foul-smelling paste.
Eugh
. Still feeling uncomfortably full from the water, I wiped the polish off on the legal pad, caking the stuff onto the paper and leaving thick black fingerprints.

And letters.

I lifted my hand back, scarcely believing my eyes. Where I’d wiped off my fingers, imprints of letters showed up. Curious, I took another dollop from the tin and smeared it across the pad. More ghostly words formed as if by magic.

The waxy shoe polish was rubbing into the indentations of what had been written on the previous page. Using my fingertip as a paintbrush, I rubbed polish into every last corner, at last revealing the palimpsest’s message.

Much of it was illegible—too many overlapping letters, incomplete sentences, unfamiliar acronyms—but one phrase stood out at the top of the page.

Project Trojan Horse

Chewing my lip, I readjusted and tucked my legs under me. The motion rocked the liquid back and forth in my stomach, unleashing a tiny wave of queasiness. Project Trojan Horse . . . I’d seen that before. In John Lacroix’s office—

My stomach spasmed painfully, unleashing a wave of violent shivers. Gasping, I clutched my abs and scrambled to the edge of the bed, crumpling the forgotten legal pad under my palm.

I barely made it into the master bathroom in time to puke. My stomach clenched and unclenched, and everything I had just drunk came right back up.

“What the hell?” I wheezed, coughing into the bowl.

“It’s turning,” said a voice behind me. Sarah stepped into the bathroom, and a towel landed on my back.

I spit out more sour saliva and mumbled, “What?”

“The water . . . it’s turning. Food is too, I think.”

“Turning?” I dragged the towel across my mouth and wiped the moisture from my eyes before looking up at her. “What do you mean
turning?
”

“Turning bad,” she said grimly, perching on the edge of the Jacuzzi tub to watch me. “Like everything else here. Something about being on this planet is causing the molecular structure to decay. That’s my guess.”

“But . . . but we have a year’s supply, right? You said we had a year’s supply.”

“If this was Earth, yeah.” Her hand went to her neckline, to a tiny vial attached to a leather necklace, which she absently rubbed between her fingers. “This isn’t Earth.”

“But last night it was fine. Last night . . . what did we drink last night?”

“It’s still mostly good,” she said. “The parts that aren’t, your body doesn’t absorb, and after a few days you start to feel the bad stuff sloshing around in your stomach. You have to vomit it up. Lately it’s been building up sooner, you have to drink more . . . it’s turning faster.”

“How . . . how long do we have left?” I said, remembering my first day here. I touched my stomach under my shirt, feeling nauseous all over again.

“Until it all turns? I don’t know. A month. Less. What I do know is the human body can survive three days without water. Three days.” She released the vial necklace and held up three fingers. “That’s all you get. Seventy-two hours. And half that time you’re in excruciating agony, too weak to function. It’s torture. We need another source of fresh water.” She stood up. “Which is why I’m building one. Come on, I’ll show you.”

“It extracts water
—
real
water—from any of the contaminated sources here,” Sarah explained, grunting behind a handcart as she wheeled the hulk of twisting pipes and cylinders down Major Connor’s sloped driveway. Freshly welded beads of metal clung to the joints like caterpillars, gleaming in the noon sunlight. She set the machine down and wiped her brow.

I stared in awe. “You
made
this?”

“Wasn’t like I was working on my thesis.”

“So what’s wrong with the water?” I asked. “Why can’t we drink it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, gazing out over the city—Major Connor had an amazing view. “Chemically, it’s almost identical to real H
2
O, but something’s missing, something fundamental.”

“Yeah, that’s what it seemed like,” I said. “When I was first here. Like it was something else pretending to be water.”

She nodded. “It’s everything here. Wood doesn’t burn, food doesn’t have calories. The bonds don’t have any energy. I don’t even think the stuff is made from atoms on the periodic table. Whatever it is, it’s something very strange and perverted. Fortunately, it’s not the whole planet.”

I looked at her. “It’s not?”

“Take a deep breath,” she said, demonstrating herself. “What is that?”

“Air,” I whispered, catching on. I hadn’t thought about that.

“Oxygen,” she said with a crooked smile. “Honest-to-god oxygen. It’s real. If it wasn’t, we’d be dead within two minutes.”

“I’m so glad I found you,” I said.

“Want to know what else?” she said, pointing up at the sky. “The sun. That’s real light, real heat we’re feeling. And heat comes from the fusion of hydrogen—
real
hydrogen—which means there’s a real sun up there burning real hydrogen. Real hydrogen, and real oxygen. And what’s water made out of? Hydrogen and oxygen—H
2
O.”

My gaze fell to her machine. “Yeah, but how are you going to get hydrogen from the sun?”

“We don’t have to get it from the sun. Hydrogen is everywhere. It’s all over the universe. There’s a constant rain of it from outer space, and it’s combining with oxygen high up in the atmosphere and forming water vapor, which eventually settles down to the surface. You couldn’t keep water off this planet if you tried. Every body of water on this planet should contain trace amounts of drinkable water. We just have to separate it.”

“And you think you can do that?” I asked hopefully. “How would you even know? I mean, if it looks the same and acts the same and tastes the same . . .”

“The fake stuff doesn’t have any chemical energy. It
can’t
have any chemical energy. That’s the difference. So you give it energy. You electrolyze the water, separating it back into hydrogen and oxygen, and the fake water will be unaffected because it’s not even made of hydrogen and oxygen. All you have to do is gather the hydrogen and oxygen and turn it back into water. That’s what my machine does. It’s so simple it’s painful.”

“Wow, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So where are you going to get the electricity?”

“Another one of Major Connor’s gifts.” Sarah pointed to the sloped hillside in front of the house, where she’d laid out an array of glittering blue-green solar panels. “It’s powered by sunlight. All we have to do is plug it in.”

“Can we test it already?” I was getting thirsty again, and I didn’t want to drink from another Fiji bottle knowing it was probably contaminated.
Turning
, as she’d said. Plus, I wanted to get back to searching for a way home.

Sarah was a physics genius. She would know how to get us out of here . . . wouldn’t she?

“I’m going to run a hose from his swimming pool,” she said. “We’re going to need a lot to get even one cup of water. It’ll take some time to set up.”

“Sarah, you’ve been here for three weeks, right?”

“Almost.”

“And you’ve . . . I mean, I’m assuming you’ve figured out how to get home. You know how to get home. To Earth.”

“Right,” she scoffed, “and I’m just hanging out here because I wanted some alone time.”

“No, I know, I get it, you’re still here—obviously—but you’re working on it, right?”