The World Forgot (24 page)

“The hard part will be living with what we did here,” Byron says, staring grimly at the star maps. “You realize we have blood on our hands now,” he tells me. “You've doomed an entire planet to a fate of enslavement.”

“Have I?” I say. “Or did I just send the Jin'Kai coordinates to a dead moon that could take them hundreds of years to get within sensor range of?”

“What?” Cole asks.

“Accessing . . . Hmm, yes. Very clever. Very clever indeed. You have a deft hand for programming. The alteration to my data is seamless. I have only been able to detect it by comparing it to the file redundancy.”

“The code couldn't have fingerprints on it,” I say. “It had to look like the original data entered years ago.”

Dad is the first to catch on, the lightbulb slowly illuminating over his head. “So they think they're headed to an inhabited planet,” he says. And if he doesn't sound proud of his only daughter, then I'll be a clone's mother. “When in fact they're off on a wild goose chase.”

“The best way to lie to someone is to give them ninety-nine percent of the truth,” I reply.

From the corner Marsden laughs weakly. We all turn to look at him.

“Oh right,” I say. “I forgot that you aren't all the way dead yet.”

“You're too clever by half, Elvie Nara,” Marsden says. “You may have fooled them for a time. But what do you think will happen when they realize you tricked them? They might easily discover another viable planet on their own, or simply realize they were duped. In either case, what's to stop them then from coming back and finishing what they started?”

“When that day comes, we'll be ready for them,” I say. “A few hundred years is a good head start on anybody.”

“I would be happy to provide your peoples with any information in the depository that may be of use to them.”

“See that?” I say. “We even have Merv on board.”

“You will fail,” Marsden spits. Blood speckles his lips. “You cannot deter my brethren with smoke and mirrors. We will come for you. We are strong.”

I kneel down next to Marsden and look him in the eye.

“You are a dinosaur,” I say. “I'm the chicken.” And I get right in his evil bastard face then, before I let out a triumphant,
“Ba-cawk!”

The hate rises in Marsden's eyes as he looks at me. He can't move, but his body trembles with rage. He starts to cough, and blood sprays from his mouth, flecking my face. The hate in his eyes clouds over, and his gaze goes blank as his death rattle escapes from his lungs. And then . . . that's it. I stand up and move to Chloe, slip an arm around her waist, and rest my head on her shoulder. To my surprise Chloe offers me a small hug in return.

It's over. Dr. Marsden is finally over.

Murmurs from across the room inform us that the gas Marsden used to dope Marnie and the Britta Brigade is wearing off. Slowly the girls rise from the ground, rubbing their eyes and whining about bed hair. After a few seconds the first of them spots Marsden, which sets off a chain reaction of shrill shrieking and gagging.

“Wha's all this, then?” Marnie says, rising off the floor.

“You missed it!” Ducky says, rushing to her.

“Missed what?”

“Elvie totally saving the entire world. Of course, she couldn't have done it without me. You should've
seen
me with Marsden.” Marnie gives Ducky a enormous squeeze of a hug, and he flinches away in pain. “Careful with the ribs,” he says. “Most likely they're broken.”

“Well, then I guess I best be kissin' ye instead,” she replies, and that said, she plants a fat, wet kiss on Ducky, smack on the mouth.

And Ducky, bless him, he doesn't flinch or turn red or anything. He kisses that girl right back.

I look at everyone standing around me. My adoring, adorable father. My pretentious, centuries-old grandfather. My best friend in the whole world. His way too worldly and awesome girlfriend. A young woman who is as much a part of me as if I'd given birth to her myself. And my Cole.

Well, not
my
Cole. But Cole. He offers me that trademark lopsided grin, and it releases any pressure that might still have been lingering in my shoulders. Now that I'm relaxed, I can allow myself to admit that I'm tired. And I need to rest. But not just yet.

There's one more thing I need to do.

Chapter Fourteen

In Which our Heroine Confronts Her Past and Recovers Her Future

“So, this is the place, huh?” Cole asks, looking around. “I expected something a little more, I dunno, secret-y.”

“This is the place,” I tell him. The smell of the sea is a refreshingly salty alternative to the stale, canned O
2
I've been breathing lately, first on New Moon and then on Mars. The sun is just starting to poke up over the horizon, sending a cascade of shimmering orange and purple lights across the ocean's surface. The early spring breeze is still bitingly cold, but it feels revitalizing more than anything else. We walk along the sandy beach—me, Cole, and Chloe—our spaceship parked in stealth mode farther down the beach next to the boardwalk, which is completely deserted so early in the season.

“You're sure they're here?” Chloe asks.

“Trust me,” I say, glancing at the tracker in my hand. “They're here.”

Ahead of us lies a large groyne, rocks held together by concrete, forming a jetty that juts away from the beach and into the water. I can just make out the silhouette of someone at the edge of the groyne, but I don't really need to get up close to know who it is.

Leave it to my mother to escape from outer space and hightail it directly to
New Jersey
.

We climb up onto the rocks and start the long walk to the edge. Zee sits cross-legged with her back to us, looking out at the waves, rocking back and forth. Sitting next to her is a small radio, and I catch snatches of a low, garbled news report as we approach. I can't quite make it out, but I can guess what they're talking about. Since the Jin'Kai ran off and the Almiri came out publicly to the world, that's pretty much been dominating the news cycle. World news. Local politics. Postulations about how this will impact the tenuous real estate market in “high alien” population areas. The only reason the news anchors ever take a break to talk about March Madness is because Villanova's starting backcourt can trace their ancestry to the other side of the galaxy.

As we get closer, I catch the tail end of the report.

“. . . the only known survivor of the doomed space station, single-handedly slowing the alien invaders as they made their way toward Earth. So stay tuned for our exclusive interview with Huxtable, the hero of New Moon.”

Seriously, who
is
that guy?

“Elvan,” Zee says without turning around. “I knew it would be only a matter of time before you caught up with us.”

It's hard to know exactly how to greet the woman who gave birth to you, faked her own death, let you grow up motherless, then snuck back into your life only to steal your daughter from you. “Hi, Mom!” just sounds like you're repressing things that will boil over at Thanksgiving ten years later. “Hey, you deceitful, double-crossing bitch”—while perhaps appropriate—seems a little too vulgar. So I decide to go with a classic.

“Put your hands up where I can see them.”

“May I stand?” Zee asks, rising without waiting for an answer.

“I said hands
up
. These Almiri ray guns don't have a hammer to cock or anything, so just imagine a dramatically slow ‘click' and use it as motivation to do exactly as I say.”

She raises only one hand. “I'm not trying to be difficult,” she says, turning slowly. “It's just that my hands are presently occupied.”

“Olivia!”
I screech. I immediately forget that I'm supposed to be pulling a calm, cool, collected badass-cowboy impersonation and run, elbows flailing, toward my baby girl, who is curled up in the crook of Zee's arm.

“Is she okay, Elvs?” Cole asks. His gun is still firmly trained at my mother's head. “Please tell me she's okay.”

“I'd hate to have come all this way just to shoot my pseudo-­grandmother in the face,” Chloe adds. “I mean, it'd be a nice topper, but . . .”

Zee doesn't even fight me as I scoop Olivia from her.

Oh God, she's so warm. So beautiful. She's grown since I've seen her. Not grown enough to be an ex-Jin'Kai youth cadet or anything, but the appropriate amount of development for the time we've been apart. I begin laughing and crying, both at once, snot shooting out of my nose in disgusting bubbles. I don't care. Who cares? She's back. She's here. After all this time, missing her, thinking I'd found her, then realizing I hadn't and missing her triple, I've finally, finally got my baby girl back.

“She looks good,” I tell Cole. “Come see. Doesn't she look good?” I check her all over. Ten fingers, ten toes, two ears. Nose fine.

And then I get to the stomach.

“What?” Cole asks in a near panic when he sees the fire hydrant's worth of tears that come pouring out of me. “What is it?”

“Oh, I wasn't—” I begin, trying to explain the tears. But I am becoming quickly hysterical. I hold up our daughter so he can see for himself.

I
♥
Momy!

It's still there, the smeared remnants of the message Cole scrawled on our baby's stomach in indelible marker, all the way back in Antarctica, a few dozen lifetimes ago.

“I told you that marker was permanent,” I say, laughing. More snot shoots out of my nose. Olivia lets out a tiny giggle and reaches a fat arm out for me, clenching my hand in hers.

“Aren't there two
m
s in ‘mommy'?” Chloe asks.

“Oh God, I'm just so glad you're okay.” I squeeze Olivia as tight as I can without damaging her precious internal organs. I may just keep squeezing until she leaves for college.

“I wanted to show her this spot,” Zee tells me softly. “While I still had her. It's very special. Your father proposed to me right here. Did you know that? Right here on the rocks.”

“You
kidnapped
her,” I snap.

“Stop being dramatic,” Zee says, waving a dismissive hand. “You should be thanking me for rescuing her from Marsden and his thugs.”

“Are you really that delusional?” I ask in disbelief. “You're the one who turned her over to Dr. Marsden in the first place!”

“You want me to shoot her now?” Chloe says. “Or is there something we're waiting for?”

“No one's shooting anyone, Chloe,” I reply.

Suddenly a look of horrified realization spreads across Zee's face. “What is
she
doing here?” she demands, eyeing Chloe up and down like she's some sort of infectious disease. “What's going on?”

“Chill out. Chloe's not with Marsden anymore,” I tell her. “No one's with Marsden anymore. He's perma-dead.”

“She's not even real, Elvan. She's a, a . . . a
thing
.” Zee can hardly get the words out. She's gone from calm and collected to unjustifiably morally outraged in the span of ten seconds.

“She's been there for me a lot more than you ever were,” I say.

“They grew her in a test tube. They pulled the DNA from your daughter, corrupted it with their own filthy genes, and created an abomination. You can't trust something like that. She's not a real person.”

“Hey, watch it,” Cole says. “That's my daughter's clone you're talking about.”

Chloe takes Zee in, a wicked smile spreading across her face. “You're starting to sound a lot like my old boss,” she says. “And by the end he and I
really
didn't see eye to eye.”

“I'm just trying not to laugh at the idea of you thinking someone
else
is untrustworthy,” I tell my mother, rocking Olivia gently in my arms as she coos.

“I did what I thought was best for our people. My mistake was believing that the Jin'Kai would be any different from their Almiri cousins. I won't make that same mistake again.” She takes a few steps toward me, and instinctively I back away. Cole is immediately beside me, a hand on my shoulder, and Chloe flanks me on the other side, her gun trained directly on Zee.

“Elvan, there's still time. Come with me.”

“Come with you?” I ask. “Come with you where?”

“There's an Enosi enclave not far from here. People will be gathering, making preparations. It will be safe there.”

“Safe? Haven't you been listening to that radio of yours? The war's over. It's the dawn of a brand-new day.”

“You're being foolish. The real war has just begun.”

“Do you, like,
ever
have a cheery thought?” I ask. “You should be overjoyed. The mere existence of hybrids has saved the entire planet from annihilation. Dad and Byron are even cowriting a poem about it. They're calling it ‘The Defeat of Devastation.'”

In my arms Olivia wiggles around. She wants a better view of her daddy. When she sees him, she breaks into a broad grin.
She smiles now,
I realize.
I missed her first smile.

But at least I get to see the rest of them.

“Oh, everyone's happy now,” Zee says. “The humans are more than willing to accept the presence of a people that have been exploiting them for millennia, and the Almiri are more than happy to receive that acceptance. But how long do you think it will last? How long before they both start seeing the existence of the hybrids as a threat to their respective species?”

“Wow,” I say. “I feel really sorry for you. I know you've been out of the loop for a little bit, what with hiding under a rock—I'm guessing somewhere in the Rust Belt?—so let me fill you in. We discovered life on Mars. Well, a computer on Mars, at least, with records of life there. And those records told us a lot of things. Like how we—you, me, and now Olivia—aren't some accidental mutation but a planned evolution of not one but two species. We're the future now.”

“And just how do you think they'll react to that, huh? Any of them. You think mankind has a real capacity to accept something so new and different? You think the Almiri will stand for sullying their perfect race?” She gestures back toward the radio. “The news already has stories of protests in the cities, of Almiri ships taking off to find another home separate from the ‘lower' species. How long before unrest and disdain lead back to the path they always take—fear and loathing? How long before the Almiri's solution—extermination—is back on the table?”

Zee takes another step toward me. This time I don't shrink away. She puts a hand on my arm and looks me in the eye.

“There's still time. You can come with us. We won't be on the sidelines anymore. We'll be prepared for whatever comes.”

“What makes you so sure we
can't
all live harmoniously?” Cole asks her. “How can you possibly know that we can't live together in peace?”

“Because I
know
!” Zee is shouting now, enraged. “I've
seen
it. Don't you understand? Elvan, your daughter's place should be with her own people. That's who she can trust to protect her. Come with us, and I can help you raise her, the way I should have raised you.”

“You had no idea we'd find you,” I say, the realization suddenly hitting me. Olivia gurgles and grips my thumb, squeezing it tightly. “You weren't waiting for us here, in this place. You were going to take Olivia, go underground. Teach her to be a distrusting, paranoid crazy person, just like you.”

“Elvan—”

“She's not your daughter.
I
am your daughter. At least I was.” I turn and walk back toward the beach. Chloe falls into place beside me, giving Zee a sarcastic good-bye wave as we go. Zee starts after me, but Cole blocks her path.

“You're being stupid, Elvan!” Zee screeches at me. “This is the only way! You're making a mistake, and it's your daughter who'll pay for it.”

I spin around and glare daggers through my mother. I want to shout a lot of things at her, especially about how she shouldn't exactly apply for a guest lecturer position in the field of How Not to Suck at Motherhood. And I'd like to illustrate my point with some of the choicest curse words I've ever had the good fortune to come across. But I steel myself, try to reach some inner calm, or at least lower my blood pressure to normal levels. This is not about me anymore, I tell myself. It's about Olivia.

“You know,” I say calmly. “You're right about one thing. There
are
Almiri leaving. There are definitely some who don't want to see the big picture, still think they're the big cheese. And so they're leaving. And you know what? They'll die. There are humans who are scared of change, scared of something different. But you know what? They'll adapt. And guess what else, Zee? There are Jin'Kai already turning themselves in, surrendering to authorities, willing to pay the price for their crimes. Because they want in on the ‘grand experiment.' They understand the stakes of the game, a lot better than you. I've met some Almiri who are real douche bags, and I've met some who are extraordinary heroes. I've met Jin'Kai who wouldn't think twice about killing just to prove a point, and I've met one who died to protect the girl he loved. I've met Enosi I would trust with my
life
. . . and I've met you. Your problem, Zee, is that you can't get past where people come from, when all that really matters is where they're headed.”

“Don't come running to me when your brave new world disappoints you,” she spits at me.

“Well,” I say. “I've met you. And I've met the world. And I think I'll put my faith in the world.”

And with that, I turn again, and walk off with Chloe by my side. Zee is shouting something while Cole holds her back, but the crashing of the waves against the rocks drowns out whatever hollow protests she might be making.

“So, is that it?” Chloe asks. “You're done with her?”

“It would appear so,” I say, trying to keep the tears welling in my eyes from spilling down over my cheeks. Olivia makes a high cooing sound and stares with wonder at Chloe. Chloe makes a sort of fish face, and Olivia giggles, and I can't help but laugh.