Terra (32 page)

The skydweller doesn’t seem to notice. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, delicate silver bracelet. No, not a bracelet. A watch. He holds it up for me to see.

“That’s very beautiful,” I say, wondering what his end game is.

He places the watch in the center of my palm, face up. I pause for a moment, tilting my head as a memory fights its way to the front of my mind.

“What?” Mica says eagerly. “What is it? What are you thinking?”

“It’s just… it’s funny, this looks almost exactly like one our mother used to wear.” I run the pad of my pointer finger in a circle around the edge of the watch face.

“Oh.” Mica exchanges a look with the stranger.

The skydweller smiles. “It’s yours then,” he says. He gently plucks the watch out of my palm and begins to wrap the delicate silver links around my wrist.

“Oh, no, please. I couldn’t possibly accept this.”

“I insist.”

Tick, tick, tick. The needle-thin second hand makes a complete circle as I stare at the watch face. It’s like something is trying to edge its way into my mind.

I look up into the stranger’s blue eyes. It’s almost like the colors are shifting right in front of me—different hues compete, pushing each other out of the way over and over again. They’re not just blue. They are cobalt and indigo, sapphire and cerulean.

Somewhere outside of my reverie, Mica coughs quietly. He rushes a hand up to his mouth as if he can’t believe he’s made a sound. I notice it happening, but I don’t bother wondering what it means. I’m too consumed by what’s happening inside my head. I can feel my mind grasping at the fog, blindly trying to force through the recesses of my memory.

The skydweller leans forward and touches his forehead to mine, a gesture far too intimate for strangers. I should be alarmed. I should recoil. I should be upset, repelled, or, at the very least, weirded out.

But I’m not. I simply stare at the watch and let him take my other hand in his.

Tick, tick, tick.

“Terra,” he breathes.

Something clicks in my brain. My heart instantly plummets to the bottom of my stomach, and I feel my face start to flush with new color.

I pull my head back and look up to meet his unparalleled eyes.

“Adam.”

Chapter 32

Adam’s face breaks into his lopsided grin as I fall forward off my chair and crash into his arms, sobbing. I don’t even know why I’m crying; I can’t identify one singular emotion. I feel everything: happiness and desolation and relief and confusion and… love.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave me,” I cry into his chest.

“Never,” he says.

I look over at Mica, who is grinning like a lunatic. I force myself to break from Adam’s embrace, standing up so I can hug my baby brother. Then I slap him on the chest, hard.

“Ryk?” I say hysterically. “Really?”

Mica bursts out laughing. “Don’t look at me! It was your boyfriend’s idea.”

“I apologize for nothing,” Adam says. He stands from his chair to wrap his arms around me. I lean back into the warmth of his chest, and he nestles his chin in the dip between my neck and shoulder. “Nothing else seemed to be working. We were kind of getting desperate.”

“Leave it to my sister for a
guy
to affect her more than near-death raider-related trauma,” says Mica.

I try to laugh but I’m still crying, so it comes out as a half-gargled moan. I pull myself together, wiping the tears from my cheeks as I try to make sense of what’s just happened. I run my fingers over my thigh and press gingerly on the spot where the bullet entered. I remember the pain as if I had just been shot yesterday, but I feel nothing now.

I whirl around, dislodging myself from Adam’s arms. “How long was I gone?” I demand.

Adam and Mica exchange shamefaced looks.

“How long?”

Adam sucks in a slow breath, like he’s afraid to tell me.

“It’s been three months since my birthday,” Mica says finally.

I feel the wind knock out of me. Three months. A quarter of a year. So much lost time.

I take a shocked step forward, breaking out of Adam’s arms, and stumble into my chair. “How did I not realize…?” I say quietly as I sit. “How could I not notice that my life simply jumped from one date to another?”

“Do you remember anything that happened during your outprocessing?” Adam asks, taking my palm in his and running his thumb soothingly across the back of my hand.

I think back, trying to conjure the last memory I have of being in Korbyllis. Besides Whitlock’s malevolence, though, the only thing I come up with is a white flash.

I shake my head.

“We don’t know how they did it,” Adam continues, “but if the Tribunal has the ability to wipe memories, they must have a way to control reintegration, too. Maybe nothing so powerful as to implant new memories, but enough to alleviate suspicion. It’d be too conspicuous otherwise.”

“What about everyone else? Didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t anyone care that I just—poof!—vanished?” I say.

“Oh, the Tribunal thought of that,” Mica says coldly. “You’d been gone less than a day when a couple of guardsmen goons showed up and fed me a story about how you had taken off to Lexicon with all our steel.”

“Me, gone off to gamble away our savings in a casino? Yeah, that sounds right up my alley. You didn’t believe them, did you?”

“Of course not,” he says, though he is suddenly unable to tear his eyes from the floor.

“Oh.”

“I didn’t believe them at first. Honest.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “I tried finding out what happened, I asked everyone. But you gotta see it from my side, Terra. Both of you were just gone. And the longer time went on, the longer you stayed gone… it started to make more sense. And when this guardsman came by to drop off your stuff—the watch, your jacket—it really did seem like you’d just taken off. I checked our bank account, too, and it was drained. Well, drained back to normal, I should say. They left me enough to get by. But the pieces fit, you know? Plus, I was already kinda pissed. I mean, you did miss my birthday.” He grins, but I can see real emotion behind his attempt to relieve the tension.

I look at him sadly. His face falls, remorse swimming in his golden-specked eyes. Our eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I smile and shake my head. “No, it’s okay, Mic. Really. I’m the one who should apologize. I left you here, alone.”

“It’s not as if you had a choice. And anyway, it wasn’t so bad. A little boring, maybe, but everyone has been really supportive.”

“So I guess that explains all the extra vitriol coming my way from Copp… and our neighbors… and pretty much everyone.”

“Word spread fast, like it always does. The story’s a little different depending on who you ask—some people remember Adam and thought you guys ran away together, some think you went to another settlement instead of the skyworld—but the gist is always the same. People weren’t really thrilled with the idea that you’d left me here. They…”

“They what?”

He fidgets with the string on his hoodie. “They said it was just like you to follow in
his
footsteps.”

My hands curl into fists at my side. The thought of being compared in any way with my father, let alone like this…

“How did I not hear about this?” I say angrily. “My return must have been the talk of Sixteen, and people are obviously still angry, but it’s not like anyone’s come up and thrown paint on me.”

“You know how it is, sis. People love to talk, but actual confrontation? Forget it. They all know you’d kick their asses.” Mica grins widely at me, and I can’t help but smile. “Anyway, we should all be relieved nobody said anything to you. You probably would have thought you were going nuts.”

“I was starting to think it anyway…” I mutter, then add, “I’m still sorry you thought I left you.”

Mica waves his hand in the air like he’s batting away my apology. “It wasn’t that long before Adam came back. Pretty much jumped me in an alley. I almost didn’t believe his story at first but, well, there are a lot of things about Adam that seem unbelievable.” Mica punches Adam on the shoulder affectionately. “That’s when we started planning how to get you back.”

“How did you even know I was still alive?”

“We figured they wouldn’t have concocted this big backstory if they were only going to do you in. I mean, they could have said you had an accident or something, you know? Could have just told me that you died.”

We fall silent.

“I can’t believe I’ve been gone so long,” I say after a few moments, looking at Mica sadly. The physical changes he’s gone through are more evident now. It’s not just the additional height, or the length of his hair. He seems different. Like he’s grown up twice as fast while I was gone.

“We were shocked they kept you so long, too,” Adam admits. “My guess is it had something to do with your injuries. They must’ve wanted to make sure you were completely healed, so you wouldn’t be triggered.”

“Ha,” I scoff, tracing a circle around the phantom bullet hole in my thigh, “I guess they’re not as good as they think they are.”

“We wanted to get you back, sis. More than anything,” Mica says. “It’s just that planning for that became much more difficult than we thought it would be.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve been watching him,” Adam says. “It didn’t take long for Mica to figure out he was being tailed, but it was always unpredictable. One guard, two guards, people pretending not to be guards, different times, different places… we couldn’t figure out a pattern, a workaround. I guess that was probably the point.”

“They know how smart you are, Mic. Prime Whitlock told me so herself,” I say, my pulse accelerating as I recall her threats. “The Tribunal probably knew you’d be able to figure out any kind of regular schedule.”

A smirk flashes across Mica’s mouth, just for a second. “Well, whatever the reason for my extra special security detail, clearly my hands have been pretty much tied,” he says, with something that looks suspiciously like pride lingering in his eyes. “And with Adam not exactly being able to walk into the Skyline ticket office and hop on the next shuttle to Korbyllis, planning your rescue was a little challenging.”

“If they’ve been keeping tabs on you,” I say, “how have the two of you been communicating?”

Mica scoffs. “Oh, please. We’ve got alien tech on our side, Terra.” He pulls a tiny, flesh-colored earpiece out from inside his ear. “Kind of puts skydweller phone implants to shame, doesn’t it? All of the convenience, none of the Tribunal getting to listen in.”

“So what do we do now?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Adam says, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I really don’t think he does. “We’ve been focused on saving you for so long, it hasn’t left much time for follow-up.”

“Well, obviously we have to do something. The Tribunal is planning on taking off to space without us,” Mica says angrily.

My stomach drops as I remember.

“Even if it’s a hundred years before they can actually do it,” Mica continues, “that’s a hundred more years of babies, and their babies’ babies. A hundred years’ worth of people to kill.”

Adam nods gravely. “And yet they feel they’re champions of mankind.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. I feel like there’s something more to it, something else Whitlock told me. But my mind is still clearing through the fog. “I think we already know what the next step needs to be,” I say.

“Yeah,” Mica says. “Making sure the Tribunal never, ever finds out you remember. If they ever realize either of us knows what we know—”

“No, Mic, we have to make sure we’re
not
the only ones who know.”

“What are you saying?”

“We have to tell the Council, to tell everybody. We need to spread word to the other settlements. If all of us know the truth, we might have a fighting chance of stopping them!” I stand up and start to pace, too worked up to sit, before remembering the clacking sound of Whitlock’s high heels. I force myself to stand still, though I can’t keep from bouncing a little.

“
Fighting
is right,” Mica says. “Think about what you’re saying. You’re talking about revolution. Anarchy.”

“So? Maybe we need a revolution! Our government has been plotting to literally leave us for dead. We can’t stay silent.”

“So, what, a girl who everyone thinks just came back from a gambling spree, her kid brother, and an alien insurgent are going to save the world?” Mica says. “This isn’t something we can just scream from the rooftops. Even if we didn’t get swept up by the Tribunal the second they realized what we were doing, why would anyone even believe us?”

“But—”

“We aren’t revolutionaries, sis.”

“So you’d rather have us, what, sit back and watch TV? Go back to school, to scaving, and just hope that somebody else eventually figures it out?”

Mica exhales with an annoyed huff and throws his hands into the air. “Well, if there was any doubt as to whether she really is back… You have fun, Adam.”

“We do have to be smart about this though,” I continue, ignoring my brother as he skulks into his room and shuts the door halfway. “Mica’s right about one thing: If the Tribunal finds out you’re still here—I still can’t believe the risk you took—or if they find out that I remember, we’re just going to find ourselves in the same position as before. Well, actually, they’d probably be a
lot
angrier. So, worse than before.”

“Terra.” Adam takes my hand.

“I don’t even know where we would start.”

“Slow down for a second.” He pulls me over to the couch and directs me to sit down next to him.

“What?” I look at him, annoyed. “We have to figure out what to do. We have to prepare ourselves.”

“Yeah, well, there’s something else we’re going to need to prepare for first,” he says, lowering his eyes.

I bring his hand up to my cheek. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the others. Charlie, Luke.” He tightens his jaw. “Tom.”

My mind floods with memories. Dark eyebrows framing a kind expression. Being handed a silver gun. Red hair, cascading down a woman’s back, paired with a distinct feeling of distaste. And blue eyes—Adam’s blue—peering at me from someone else’s face.