Beyond the galaxy, p.23
Beyond the Galaxy, page 23
“It is,” the woman agreed. “But I promise you, there’s always another way. A better way.” She slipped something small and cool into Mara’s hand.
The something, it turned out, was Excalibur. Mara took it from her, which was probably mistake number one. It didn’t make sense to her—that a minute ago it had been a small, smooth river rock and now, it was Excalibur. She turned the blade to the side, reading the inscription just to be sure: To the once and future king.
A cry broke out from the line behind her, and she looked just in time to see two teenage boys play-wrestling, one shoving the other in a headlock through the beam. When she looked back, the woman was gone.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked no one, and no one from the line glanced back at her. A girl holding Excalibur. Just another day in New York.
She whirled it again, and this time, light caught the sword and she watched it shift, turning rosy pink. It was a flower now. Then it became a bouquet of roses.
But no one was watching her now. No one was paying her any attention at all.
“Dad,” Mara said to the kitchen, locking the deadbolt behind her. The bottom lock was still broken, which meant the super still wasn’t taking Dad’s calls.
Artu darted out of the bedroom, his ears indignantly flat, and she dropped the backpack on the kitchen floor so she could scoop him into her arms. She’d fed him this morning, and still, it felt like days. She’d been about to leave him forever, hadn’t she?
But not forever. Dad was supposed to see her video, and he was supposed to come. He was supposed to bring Artu, and his food, litter, and toys.
She stayed on the floor with her face in Artu’s fur until he stopped tolerating her embrace, and then she ate another sandwich, which was squished from being at the bottom of her bag. The tofu was lukewarm, the cumin sticky.
Excalibur had remained a bouquet for the walk home, but once she’d set it on the counter, it had become a large, round cartoon bomb. It still had the rosy color of the flowers, as if it were embarrassed. The bomb was glowing softly. Had it always done that?
“Dad!” she shouted, standing up. She was ready for him to come out of the studio. To ask her how her day was. To pour out the whole story while he steeped the apple spice rooibos tea that she liked. And anyway, she hadn’t come home from school on time today, so wouldn’t he be worried?
Shouldn’t he be worried?
“Dad!” she shouted his name again, hearing it echo a little through the apartment. “Dad, there’s a bomb in the kitchen!”
Artu glanced at her, indifferent, and then returned to bathing himself. The apartment was still.
Her room was exactly as she’d left it, the bed unmade, her nice shoes on the floor. Dad’s room was dark, but there was his lunchbox and his messenger bag, so he’d definitely come home from work. They’d missed each other. She stood there a moment longer, foreboding settling in her chest like lead.
You think I want to die? he’d shouted, his face red. You think I want—
What, she hadn’t asked him. What.
She went back into the kitchen to check on the bomb, only to find that it had softened a little around the edges, sprouting oddly Artu-like fur. Artu hissed at it, his gaze accusatory.
That was when she saw the toilet paper in the hall.
The roll had been unfurled halfway, the streamer stretching across the floor and under the dining room table. But there was a pattern to it, too, the more she looked at it. Words. The toilet paper had been carefully arranged in the shape of words.
Find him, it read.
Roscoe was sitting at the top of the stairs when Mara came out of the apartment. He watched her as she locked the deadbolt and pretended to lock the bottom lock.
“What are you doing?”
Damn, she thought, mentally putting a nickel into the scale model starfighter ship that her dad had designated the Swear Wing.
“My dad told you to go home,” she told Roscoe, suddenly conscious of the newly packed bag on her shoulder. Filled with food, snacks, a blanket.
The thick blanket her dad had given Roscoe was spread out on the upper landing of the stairwell now, exactly where he’d told him not to sleep. To her consternation, she saw one of her stuffed cats tucked against the wall with it.
She should probably give him her chocolate and peanut butter crunch granola bar. But she needed it now, didn’t she?
“Did you see anybody go in there?” She pointed at her own door, feeling at once the silliness of the gesture. The silliness of all of this. This whole stupid day.
“Maybe,” Roscoe said. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. But she saw the flash of light in his blue eyes. The want in them. “What’s in your bag?”
“Nothing,” Mara lied. Asking him was a mistake. “Look, my dad might—my dad’s in trouble, and I need to find him. I need to know if you saw anybody. Anybody who’d—”
Who’d what?
Roscoe tapped his chin as if he was considering just that question. It was one of those absurdly adult gestures that had gotten him beaten up at school.
“You don’t know that he’s in trouble,” he said significantly.
Because maybe he’d gone. Maybe he’d just left, like Roscoe’s mom had.
“I’ll give you a sandwich.” It felt inadequate even as she said it. “I’ll give you three sandwiches if you tell me what you saw.”
“A lady,” Roscoe said. He put his hand out at once, so Mara, feeling guilty for only having only one sandwich on hand, had to dig into her bag to retrieve it. It was already squished on one side, the parchment paper wet. “I saw a lady.”
“What kind of lady?” She watched Roscoe unwrap the last sandwich her dad had packed for her, remembering how his hands had sprinkled cilantro and cumin on top. For luck, he’d said.
Roscoe’s eyes flicked to her face. “Asian,” he said, a little shyly. As if saying it embarrassed him. “She went in there.” He pointed at the apartment door.
A chill traveled its way down Mara’s spine. “And my dad—my dad was in there, too?”
“I don’t know,” Roscoe said. He paused to catch some of the tofu salad on one hand and lick it off. “I didn’t see him leave.”
“Well, he left.” She heard the rising hysteria in her own voice. “He left and now, I can’t find him.”
Roscoe said nothing, his face suddenly, oddly, pitying. A pity that made her want to smack him.
“He’s not gone,” she said, more forcefully than she’d meant to. Then stupidly, horribly, she felt tears rising in her face again. I don’t want to die, Dad had said.
Roscoe vanished into the darkness of the hallway, clomping up the stairs so quickly that, for a moment, she thought she might be off the hook. But then he was running back down, holding out a tattered box of Kleenex.
She took one and blew her nose. “Thanks,” she muttered, humiliated. He was the baby, not her. The one whose mother had left for space adventures without a glance back at him.
“I want to see it,” he said.
So Mara led him into the kitchen, eyeing him as he stepped carefully over her discarded backpack and Artu’s tipped-over food bowl. As if they were evidence at a crime scene.
“Cool arcade,” Roscoe said, and where the fuzzy bomb had been, now there was an old-style arcade game console, bopping an innocuous ball back and forth across its screen.
“It’s not my arcade game,” Mara said. “I mean the woman… it came from her.” It sounded stupid to say it out loud. “It wasn’t an arcade then. First, it was a sword and then, it was a bomb.”
“Okay.” Roscoe tapped his chin again, considering. “So, there’s a clue.”
“Yeah. And it’s not the only one.”
She led him to the hallway, where Artu had dragged a bit of the toilet paper to one side, leaving claw marks in it. “There was a message,” she insisted, kneeling down to rearrange it.
See, she wanted to say, shaking him. See, I’m not crazy. See, it’s real.
Roscoe tilted his head to the side, his expression unreadable.
“I mean, she—obviously I’m supposed to go after her,” Mara said, even though that specific thought hadn’t really occurred to her until now. “Or she wouldn’t have left me a clue.”
Roscoe drew in a breath. “You can’t go,” he said, his tone pitched with that same strange note of pity. As if it was a hard truth he had the unpleasant task of breaking to her.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a trap,” he said. “It’s just what you said. They wouldn’t have left anything if you weren’t supposed to go.”
“I don’t care.” She could hear her voice rising again. “It’s my dad, okay? I have to.”
Roscoe’s eyes flicked behind her, and she turned just in time to see a nice box of charades cards where the arcade had been. “Sometimes, dads leave.”
“My dad doesn’t,” and suddenly, it meant everything to prove this to him. To outrace the clench of fear in her heart. “And even if he did, why would he write me a note in toilet paper?”
“He’s your dad,” Roscoe said, with another careless shrug.
Taking him with her was out of the question. Roscoe was a kid, for one thing. A dumb kid who’d said no to a place on the floor inside their apartment instead of on the stairs outside. No to homemade sandwiches and mint rooibos tea.
He was also a kid with no parents. A kid with no one at all to look after him, and leaving him behind in an apartment building that was clearly under alien surveillance felt wrong in a way that she couldn’t quantify.
And she’d promised him two more sandwiches.
But there were no sandwiches to be found once they ventured outside. And that made sense, since all of the falafel vendors and hotdog sellers were likely getting on the ship. Still, there was something a little staggering about the row of lifeless storefronts in front of them after they crossed the street. When had this happened?
The pizza vendor on 8th Street and York had left his oven warm, at least. Mara dropped $3 on the tray and helped herself to 3 slices, handing two to Roscoe. A page of the New York Post blew by their feet, a blurred image of the old Apple store turning over, folding into the gutter. The city felt like it was on mute. Moving in slow motion. Its life blood sucked dry, Dad would say.
But the world is ending, after all. It was what the Teku had said. She ate her slice of pizza slowly, trying to commit the flat dough, the cooling cheese, to memory. Dad could’ve taken a photo of this old sidewalk and caught it all in an image. He would have made it real.
“I hate pepperoni,” Roscoe said, chewing up one with gusto. His fingers were white with cold, which made her feel guiltier.
The thing had become a cell phone somewhere between the apartment and here, so like her iPhone X that the orange smiley face it kept presenting her in lieu of her lockscreen startled her every time. She switched to the real phone, scrolling for a minute. Dad still wasn’t texting her back.
“You can’t tell it what to do?” Roscoe leaned closer to her arm, staring curiously at the two phones.
“I guess not,” Mara said, though admittedly, it was the first time the thought had occurred to her. That this strange, impossible thing might actually take requests. That it might be anything other than a performance. A mime at Times Square. It’s alive, she thought, with a sudden, full-body creep of intuition.
“Well, I don’t think I should leave,” Roscoe said, sounding a little like a concerned guidance counselor. “I don’t see that you have this handled.”
“Whatever,” Mara told him. “Go home, I don’t care.”
But Roscoe didn’t go home, and Mara didn’t tell him to get lost again.
They stopped under the shelter of a bus stop, Mara turning her back against the needling gust of late November wind. The object shifted into a steering wheel, cartoonishly overlarge in her hands.
Roscoe choked back a laugh.
“Shut up,” Mara said. “Look, now we’re getting somewhere. It knows we want to go—” Well, somewhere.
“Alien brainwashing,” Roscoe said, sounding tired and world-weary. As if this were the hundredth alien brainwashing that he’d personally witnessed. “How do you know it’s not controlling you already?”
“Because it doesn’t get it!” Mara said, her frustration rising. With him, with the situation, with New York. “It’s trying, okay? It’s—” and the thing shifted again, too quickly for her eyes. Now, she held a ray gun instead, red and gold and garishly Flash Gordon. Her fingers, moved by some impossible impulse, squeezed the trigger. The gun fired, liquidating half of the bus shelter they stood under.
Roscoe screamed. Mara shoved him wildly, clumsily, and in the wrong direction, and then, she had to yank at his sleeve, dragging him away from the shelter before it could crush them both.
“I told you!” Roscoe shouted, his face red and furious. He scrambled up from underneath her. “I told you, I told you!”
The ray gun was sprouting fur again, even while it still held on to the ray gun shape. It huddled, trembling, against her arm. It’s scared, she thought. And the next thought came from somewhere strange and new: that it wasn’t Roscoe it was scared of.
And then, the street exploded in light around them. She heard Roscoe scream again, but she was already blind, the ground hissing around her.
She rolled to her knees in time to see the light bending, shifting, flashes lancing out against some invisible barrier curving out and around a double-parked BMW. She could have walked into it, never knowing it was there until the flashing lasers hit it. The damp fur against her arm shook.
We need to run, she thought, and she was turning to shout it at Roscoe when someone else screamed the word. She spotted a man inside the barrier, his arms and legs bound in bands of that light. He was flailing, struggling wildly as the shards of light continued to spear at his heart, coming up short against the shield. Two opposing forces. Two people who wanted him.
“Run!” he shouted again. His eyes, wild and terrified, found Mara’s in between the flashes. “Get out of here, get—”
The sound cut off a second before the shield abruptly winked out. She saw the light creep up his body, sliding into his mouth, separating skin from bones, cells from atoms. It was nothing like the gentle shimmer of the transporter. Mara closed her eyes against the light, against the vision, screaming and waiting for the engulfing, searing force to strike.
The light winked out instead, vanishing along with the man, the BMW, and part of Manhattan Deli’s rusting overhang. The man was dead. They’d watched the aliens kill a man.
The thing had become an EpiPen, damp in her cold, sweaty fingers. The message of its current form was clear. This thing was for life-or-death emergencies.
She noticed that her jeans were torn.
“Hey.” Roscoe appeared beside her, his small face round in the dim light. He could have been killed, too. He could have died, and it would have been her fault. He rested a hand on her arm. “Hey, are you having a panic attack?”
“No,” Mara said. She forced her fingers to relax. She thought of her dad waiting alone in their apartment. The light surrounding him just like that. She drew in a breath. Tried to will her hands to stop shaking. “Tell me where to go.” The EpiPen became a steering wheel again, sleeker and darker now. Another symbolic message from the thing.
Choose your path carefully.
Then it became a metronome, a pendulum swinging back and forth.
You're running out of time.
“No! I mean—” Her voice broke and she had to turn away. Her dad was missing, and aliens with laser guns probably had him. The lights were still on in the bar across the street. The door was open, as if someone was expected.
“It doesn’t listen to me.” It felt like a confession to say it. “I can’t—I mean I’m not—”
The shame swelled up, choking her words.
Roscoe reached past her, resting two small fingers on the metronome. At once, the pendulum smoothed itself out like cookie dough, rolling up and into a soft lump of smooth glass.
Mara stared for a moment. “You can….” Oh, God. “You can talk to it?”
His shoulder lifted up in a shrug. “It just doesn’t want me.” He looked away from her before she could see his face.
“Then why are you still here?” She’d thought, all this time— “You’re not like me, are you? You could just—you could go with your mom. You’re not stuck here just waiting around to—”
“She left.” Roscoe met her eyes at last, and the look in them was colder than November ice. “Moms leave, too.”
Mara picked up the fallen object, which was now shaped into a pair of neon sunglasses. She remembered her dad’s long fingers tying the laces of her ice skates. The photos he’d taken of her modeling clay dioramas. Moms leave. Dads leave. She knew that.
“You don’t have to come,” she said instead. She put on the sunglasses, feeling them cool on her face. And suddenly, she could see a faint glow where the barrier used to be, invisible in normal light. She saw flickering lights spiraling up the fire escape, all of them swarming toward—
Mara climbed up slowly, stepping over a tied-off electrical wire on the second floor. Roscoe stayed behind her, but that was something she noted from a distant place. She could hear a hum now, a soft thrumming of life. The heartbeat of a dying city.
She stopped for breath on the fifth floor and then climbed up to the roof at last. She could see Central Park below, lit from above by the tiny lights. There was a transporter there, but there was no orderly line. No hopeful, rising chatter. The gray, limp forms were bodies. Human bodies. The crack of the light sang in her head.
“I’m not getting in that,” Roscoe informed her as Mara gingerly slid herself into the tiny, girl-sized helicopter. There were two buttons in front of her, and it had taken Roscoe three tries to get the creature to label them correctly. “Fly” and “Land.”
