“He was shot.”
“Did you see?”
“Yes.”
Our father crawling, hands clawing the dirt.
“Who shot him?”
“Vosch.” I closed my eyes. Bad idea. The dark snapped the scene into sharp focus.
“Where were you when he shot him?”
“Hiding.”
I reached to pull down the covers. Then I couldn’t. Wherever you were. In the woods somewhere off an empty highway, a girl zipped herself up in a sleeping bag and watched her father die again and again. Hiding then, hiding now, watching him die again and again.
“Did he fight?”
“Yes, Sam. He fought very hard. He saved my life.”
“But you hid.”
“Yes.” Crushing Bear against my stomach.
“Like a big fat chicken.”
“Not like that,” I whispered. “It wasn’t like that.”
He slung the blankets aside and bolted upright. I didn’t recognize him. I’d never seen this kid before. Face ugly and twisted by rage and hate.
“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to shoot him in the head!”
I smiled. Or tried to, anyway. “Sorry, Sams. I have dibs.”
We looked at each other and time folded in on itself, the time we had lost in blood and the time we had purchased in blood, the time when I was just the bossy big sister and he was the annoying little brother, the time when I was the thing worth living for and he was the thing worth dying for, and then he crumpled into my arms, the bear smushed between us the way we were trapped between the before-time and the after-time.
I lay down next to him and together we said his prayer: If I should die before I wake . . . And then I told him the story of how Dad died. How he stole a gun from one of the bad guys and single-handedly took out twelve Silencers. How he stood up to Vosch, telling him, You can crush our bodies but never our spirit. How he sacrificed himself so I could escape to rescue Sam from the evil galactic horde. So one day Sam could gather the ragtag remnants of humanity and save the world. So his memories of his father’s last moments aren’t of a broken, bleeding man crawling in the dirt.
After he fell asleep, I slipped out of bed and returned to my post by the window. A strip of parking lot, a decrepit diner (“All You Can Eat Wednesdays!”), and a stretch of gray highway fading into black. The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.
On the highway, beside an SUV that had run into the median strip, starlight glinted off the unmistakable shape of a rifle barrel, and for a second my heart stopped. The shadow toting the gun darted into the trees and I saw the shimmer of jet-black hair, glossy and perfectly, annoyingly straight, and I knew the shadow was Ringer.
Ringer and I didn’t start off on the right foot, and the relationship just went downhill from there. She treated everything I said with a kind of icy contempt, like I was lying or stupid or just crazy. Especially when Evan Walker came up. Are you sure? That doesn’t make any sense. How could he be both human and alien? The hotter I got, the colder she got, until we canceled each other out like either side of a chemical equation. Like E=MC2, the kind of chemical equation that makes massive explosions possible.
Our parting words were a perfect example.
“You know, Dumbo I get,” I told her. “The big ears. And Nugget, because Sam is so small. Teacup, too. Zombie I don’t get so much—Ben won’t say—and I’m guessing Poundcake has something to do with his roly-poly-ness. But why Ringer?”
Her answer was an icy stare.
“It makes me feel a little left out. You know, the only gang member without a street name.”
“Nom de guerre,” she said.
I looked at her for a minute. “Let me guess, National Merit Scholar, chess club, math team, top of your class? And you play an instrument, maybe a violin or cello, something with strings. Your dad worked in Silicon Valley and your mom was a college professor, I’m thinking physics or chemistry.”
She didn’t say anything for a couple thousand years. Then she said, “Anything else?”