Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (30 page)

“I can’t shake the feeling that Terrence is being watched. That your dad doesn’t trust him at all but is going along with the bullshit for some reason.” He shrugged then added what Lila had already surmised: “And if he thinks something’s fishy with Terrence, he’d have to suspect something was up with me, too.”

“Raj … ” Lila began.

“He’s fine. He’s with the medics. Just a broken nose and a lot of bruises and cuts.”

Lila almost rolled her eyes. That was very much not what she’d been asking. She could give a shit about Raj. He seemed to have sicced the peacekeepers on Piper, and started the melee across town.
Fuck
Raj.

“I meant, what will he do when — ?”

“Him, your dad.” Christopher stood and pressed the cotton ball and its peroxide against a gash on his forehead. “Who knows? It’s not like I can ask. I’m not gonna run. Terrence
can’t
run. He has to be here. So we wait and see if I’m being paranoid.”

“And if you’re not?”

Lila wanted him to tell her he had a plan — a grand scheme that got her out of the house and to safety, away from Raj, while somehow turning her father from his apparent position on the Dark Side. That was, in a way, the worst thing of all. Until Meyer Dempsey stopped being Heaven’s Veil’s viceroy, Lila would always face a choice between her father and dignity as a human.

But instead of revealing a grand plan to magically solve everyone’s problems, Christopher repeated what he’d said a moment before: “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Why does Terrence have to be here?”

Christopher looked off into the distance — into the empty space past Lila. As if he was trying to wrap his head around something. Something necessary. Something perilous, vital, and impossible, given the eggshells underfoot.

“The thing Cameron gave him,” he finally said. “It has something in it that he built in Moab, before he and Vincent and Dan met up with the rest of us in Vail. Something that will open what the Astrals have been hiding on the network. Terrence says it’s something that could either work or fail spectacularly — but that if it doesn’t work or isn’t tried, the resistance won’t get another shot.

“Okay.”

“But how he’s going to do it — how he’s going to get it into the data center, where it needs to go? There’s just no way. I don’t even want him to try because it feels like that’s what they may be waiting for — to catch him red-handed for sure this time.”

Without thinking, Lila blurted, “Give it to me. I’ll do it.”

“Terrence has to do it. It’s not something he can explain.”

“But if they want it, why don’t they just take it now?”

Christopher gave Lila a look that said,
Why keep wondering about questions no one can answer?

“I’ll keep it then. Let’s go to Terrence’s now and get it.”

“Terrence already gave it to your mom.”

Lila wasn’t sure she liked that. Her mother had once been Lila’s best friend, and she hoped one day that trust could return, but it was hard to forget their fights in the final days of living underground. The energy pit access Heather had protected then handed to Meyer and the Astrals as if rolling out a red carpet. The way she’d fought with Lila, who’d wanted to destroy it so the Astrals couldn’t dock to Vail.

Lila, who even then had felt Clara broadcasting the future, and what she needed to do.

Clara, who’d told Lila of her dream, about Grandma hiding a
thing
like her father’s favorite salt shaker.

Clara, who’d said they might be helping the Astrals whether they wanted to or not — in, Lila thought, the same basic way Heather had once helped them without meaning to, back at the bunker.

Whatever Cameron had given Terrence, it might be the resistance’s last hope.

But Lila couldn’t shake the feeling that Heather’s possessing it now — controlling who saw it, who touched it, and where it would end up — might be exactly what the Astrals wanted.

C
HAPTER
48

Trevor waited until both women were in the bathroom before walking over and carefully locking the door.

The space was small but clean. Trevor realized with an odd strain of surprise that he’d never been in a dedicated women’s restroom in his seventeen years of life. Even in this lab staffed by a few dozen scientists and techs, it was maintained like a sacred space. There were flowers on the back of the toilet and beside the sink. By contrast, the men’s room wasn’t much better than a gas station’s. He had a moment to be fascinated and another to be inappropriately aroused by the intimate territory’s foreign nature. But it broke when Danika fixed him with a stare that seemed to suppose she could read his thoughts.

“So,” she said, “is everyone ready to start having sex?”

Coffey, Andreus’s lieutenant, looked at Danika with something like disdain. Trevor felt himself blush. Danika was super cute: straight brown hair in a no-bullshit ponytail, an elfin nose, little lips and a wiseass smile that always showed a few teeth. She was shorter than him, tiny, easy to pick up. He wanted to joke back about lifting her up onto the sink, but it wasn’t just wrong; it was also impossible to force through his lips with the harder, much-
less
-bullshit Jeanine Coffey staring daggers at them both.

“I needed to talk to you in private,” Trevor explained.

“Talk to us in private, or talk to our privates?” Danika countered. “My
office
is private.”

“Not private enough.”

“Mysterious.”

Coffey looked supremely annoyed. Trevor had only managed to nudge her into this meeting after he’d told her that Andreus had commanded it with implied urgency. That wasn’t technically true. Andreus had, after taking certain precautions and sweeping the room with a handheld comm device of his making, asked Trevor to have this discussion with Coffey and “anyone other than Benjamin,” but he hadn’t ordered a thing and certainly hadn’t specified the meeting occur in a bathroom.

But this was the only room that met Trevor’s criteria. First, it wasn’t the kind of place anyone — or any
thing
— would think to barge into. Second, it had a door with a thick rubber edge that formed an almost airtight seal against the top, bottom, and sides of the doorjamb, leaving no gaps. Owing to the lab’s in-cave construction, the bathroom’s location inside it, and the thick metal door someone had repurposed from a much heartier application elsewhere, the room would be relatively soundproof. And, perhaps most importantly, it was away from Benjamin’s lab.

Andreus had refused to give him the device he’d made to sweep less awkward meeting rooms, so Trevor had done his best.

But now that they were in the room, its confinement felt more like a detriment than an asset. They were close enough for Trevor to smell both women’s shampoo, for him to see more of Danika than he’d noticed before, and to feel Coffey’s harsh, militant disapproval.

“I want to show you something.”

“Okay, but I’m not showing you mine back,” Danika said.

Trevor pulled the phone from his pocket. It had stopped working as a connection device in the outlands, but was still an excellent multipurpose device. It somehow kept time in the absence of a strong signal and still worked as a music player, a game repository, and a camera.

“This is what Nathan asked me to show you.” Trevor zoomed in on the photo he’d surreptitiously snapped in Benjamin’s lab then handed it to Coffey. Danika leaned in, jockeying for a better view.

“What is it?”

“It’s a circle,” said Danika.

“Oh,” said Coffey. “Do you mean this?”

Trevor looked at the screen. One of them had touched it and scrolled to the side. The object was still visible, but now Coffey was pointing at a grainy blur that might be a banana sticker Benjamin had stuck on his desk forever ago.

“No, this.”

“The circle,” Danika said.

“No.” Coffey pointed at the wrong thing again. “This.”

“This.” Trevor reached over and stuck his finger on the thing Danika had called the circle. He had to push against Danika’s side. She turned, and Trevor felt the soft swell of her small breasts.

“Like I said,” Danika told Coffey. “The circle.”

“But what is it?”

“We don’t know.”

“We
?” Coffey said.

“Nathan and I.”

“So now you’re working with Nathan.”

“He just asked me to show you.”

“Well,” said Coffey, her voice sounding increasingly impatient,
“what the hell is it?”

“I just told you I don’t know.”

“You actually said
we
don’t know. You and your pal Nathan. You know, the warlord?”

Coffey gave the smaller woman a stare. “He’s not a warlord.”

“Like I’d trust a statement like that from a warlord’s lieutenant.”

“We’re on the same side whether we like it or not,” Coffey said. “Thanks to Cameron.”

“Who was delivering a device your boy agrees is genius.”

Trevor seemed to remember Danika thinking that the Canned Heat plan was risky and stupid but said nothing. She seemed to like losing less than holding firm to her convictions.

“But he didn’t tell Nathan he was carrying it at first, did he? And when we ran in to save his ass, he hadn’t even kept it so Nathan could use it. No. He’d handed it off to your guy in Heaven’s Veil. Which was really fucking smart.”

“Which was the plan to begin with,” Danika retorted. “Because Terrence designed it.”

“And now hopes to deploy in a police state, on a controlled and protected hub, rather than via Nathan’s pirate setup far outside harm’s reach.”

“We didn’t know he had that set up.”

“Which proves my point,” Coffey snapped.

Trevor held up his hands. “Okay, just … just hang on.”

“Yeah, hang on,” said Danika. “I’m in a bathroom with a bitch here.”

Coffey glared at her.

“The reason we don’t know what it is,” Trevor continued, wincing at his repeated use of the plural, “is because we can’t get a proper look.”

“Why?” Coffey asked.

“Because we don’t want it to know we can see it.”

Danika gave Trevor a long look. “Well now. That’s a normal thing to say.”

Trevor looked back. Despite the small space, Danika was standing hands to narrow hips and wearing a sarcastic smile.

He could have chosen anyone other than Benjamin. He couldn’t stand being this close with even Piper for lingering and obvious reasons, but why hadn’t he picked Cameron?

Instead of answering directly, Trevor flipped back to his image gallery and surfaced the first of the waveforms Andreus had sent him. He’d told Trevor exactly what he was looking at — pulled from something that was kind of like an oscilloscope but not quite, using components from an RF something-or-other. He’d stopped trying to memorize it when the bald man said that Coffey would recognize what she was seeing and wouldn’t require an explanation.

“Here,” he said, handing her the phone. “He wanted me to show you this. It’s a screenshot from his — ”

Coffey was scrolling side to side, up and down. Her face changed, moving from annoyance to something stuck between fascination and curiosity.

“This is coming from that … that circle thing you can’t look directly at?”

“It’s ‘in the room,’ is what he said.”

Danika craned up and looked, apparently unable to make sense of the lines onscreen.

“But he
thinks
it’s coming from the foreign object.”

Trevor nodded.

“Is it stationary? Or does it … ” She made a little squiggle in the air.

“It’s hard to tell without being obvious, and it’s way too small for the security footage, but yes, it moves. Like
they
move.”

Danika stared at Trevor as if offended by her exclusion. She glared at Coffey’s downturned face then back at Trevor. “What are you talking about?”

“While trying to restore communication with Terrence,” Trevor explained, “Mr. Andreus noticed that there was a second signal in the next room — Benjamin’s office — in addition to the one he was trying to create. Like there was a little television station or something. So he went looking with a handheld detector, and before long he noticed this — ” He reached for the phone and flipped back to the shot of Benjamin’s desk, then zoomed back in on the tiny, blurry circle. “ — floating nearby.”

“Floating?”
Danika repeated.

Coffey turned the screen so Danika could see. “Remind you of anything?”

“Not really.”

“Imagine it being a lot bigger.”

“Okay.”

“And shooting death rays.”

Danika looked up, shocked. “You mean like a shuttle?”

Coffey nodded. Trevor felt himself nodding along.

“We’ve suspected this,” Coffey said. “We’ve never seen them, but we imagined they’d have a means of surveillance. I know it would be on my punch list as a campaign coordinator, if I had their tech. And after hearing Cameron’s story about all those ‘BBs’ he found on the road, it makes perfect sense that one might follow him.” She exhaled, her face thoughtful. “This is why they let us go. They knew where we were going, and that they could watch us. But why?”