Trapped (Here Trilogy) (19 page)

“But—”

“But nothing.” His mouth tightened. “Now stand. Let’s get this done.”

Orange appeared and grabbed me by the arms, hauling me down the short hall and out into the waiting area, where McIntire still had West’s hands cuffed.

“Milo!” His eyes widened. “You alright?”

I nodded. “You?”

“Fine.” So far, at least, this experience hadn’t been too terrible. Of course, that’s the way it was at the compound, too; pretty benign during the moments when I wasn’t being asked to swallow weird pills, being poked and prodded, or being forced to watch Nick as the DoD tortured him.

Diego nodded at West. “Bring him this way,” he told McIntire.

We walked quickly out the doors dividing the administrative wing from the rest of the school and headed down a hallway that smelled of crayons, vacuum cleaners, and plastic. The place was deserted, except for the occasional black-clad, DoD rubbernecker, peeking at us as they hustled by, carrying paperwork or talking in low tones into cell phones.

I kept trying to look over my shoulder to see West as we walked, but Agent Orange, who still had me by the arms, seemed bent on keeping me away from him.

I tried to tell myself wherever we were going, whatever was happening—things would be okay. Nick and Vera were strong, and they could deal with the DoD. It was possible, I realized, that the DoD didn’t even have Nick. Maybe they were using the promise of him as bait. Of course, that wouldn’t work nearly as well as
actually
using him as bait.

What if they did have him?

The thought made me break out in a cold sweat.

We took a left, down another hall with gray carpet and burgundy walls, one of which was decorated with a large, black Golden High Demons emblem. I clenched my teeth as we passed a dozen or more closed classroom doors. All I could think about was Nick. If they did have him, what kind of shape was he in? How had they captured him? Did they have Vera, too? I was surprised to find I actually sort of cared.

I had a hard time believing they would be able to nab Nick again. In my mind, he was invincible. I think that was part of why, despite dwelling on it nearly all the time, I had trouble imagining that he would have to leave me. He just…couldn’t. It was a possibility I wasn’t ready to accept.

We passed a wall of lockers and I pictured myself going to school here. Walking down these hallways with a backpack full of books weighting my shoulders. Chatting with my friends and flirting with regular guys. The thought of it made me ache.

How would I ever go back to being a high school student if Nick left?
When
Nick left. I bit my lip until I tasted blood and said a quick prayer that he wasn’t hurt; that maybe he wasn’t even here.

After what seemed like forever, the hall ended at a set of burgundy double-doors. Agent Orange pushed one open, and I was the first one through. My heart beat hard as I blinked around a large gymnasium that had been segmented by makeshift office walls. On every side of them, people wearing black suits huddled together, talking; studying computer monitors; in one case, even watching a TV.

We got a few more curious stares as Diego marched us across the gym, to yet another set of burgundy double-doors, into a short hall that smelled faintly of sweat, and then through a door marked “VISITORS.”

I held my breath as I stepped through the doorway. It was an average locker room, done in burgundy and black, with beige tile floors; around the perimeter of the room were plastic lockers, and in the middle, several banged-up benches. I froze in place as I spotted Nick and Vera sitting side-by-side on one of them.

Agent Orange abruptly let me go, and I flew to Nick, throwing my arms around his neck and squeezing tightly. I was so relieved to have my hands on him, it took me a second to notice he wasn’t hugging me back. I pulled away, looking into his brown eyes. They were dull and lifeless, blinking without seeing.

I whirled to Vera. “What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s temporary,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s temporary? What happened to him? Who hurt him?”

I lost my breath when I realized she wasn’t frozen and muted like Nick was. She had betrayed him. She had done something. I looked from Nick to her, engulfed by pain that started with a cracking sensation in my chest and spread outward, through my arms. I didn’t even mean to hit her. It just happened.

Vera’s head snapped back, and one of her hands flew up to cup her cheek. Her lips parted in shock, but before she could get a word out, Diego shoved a fold-out chair behind me and barked, “Sit.”

“Tell me what you did to Nick!”

“Sit down, Milo Mitchell,” he said in a sterner tone.

I did, mainly because my legs were quivering. I looked back over at Nick. He was sitting there vacantly, handsome as ever but totally gone.

“What did you do to Nick?” I said again. I could feel the tears building somewhere way behind my eyes, but I was too livid to cry.

“Why don’t you take a moment to gather your emotions?” Diego said.

My emotions were a riot. I put my hands on my knees and bowed my head and tugged back big, deep breaths, not because he’d asked me to, but because the pressure in my chest was kind of scaring me.

Behind my awful gasping, I heard West’s voice ask, “What’s going on, Milo? This shit is creepy.”

I opened my eyes and tried to get a handle on myself. As I did, I saw Diego flick his wrist at West. Sid stepped up behind West’s foldout chair and pinched him on the neck, in the same spot where Vera had pinched Nick in the car. West slumped over, his head dead weight on his shoulders, his cuffed hands hanging limply into his lap.

I jumped to my feet. “He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“He’s fine,” Diego said dismissively.

“Well answer his question! What is going on here? Why is Nick like that? What the hell did you freaks do to him?” I looked from Diego to Sid to Ariel, who was leaning against the door we’d come in. “Why isn’t Vera like he is?” I demanded. Diego opened his mouth, and another question struck me. “Why don’t you remember meeting me? And why the hell are you wearing a tie with that outfit?”

Vera looked down at her feet, and I had a sick feeling.

And then I knew. I just knew. Even as I asked the question, I knew. “You’re aliens, aren’t you?”

Diego held his hands out and applauded. “That didn’t take nearly as I thought.”

I turned to Vera. “I can’t believe you! How could you do this to him?”

She stared back at me with a completely neutral expression, and Diego wagged his finger.

“Don’t blame ‘Vera,’” Diego admonished. “She blew that whistle, just as she promised.”

“I don’t get it.” I was sweating now, trembling as I struggled to realize what this meant. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

I glanced at Vera, but she wasn’t handing out answers. My gaze gravitated toward Nick, who was still staring straight ahead. I wanted to scream and cry over the loss of him. I wanted to drive my fist through walls. In the seconds before Alien Diego answered, I struggled to draw air into my lungs.

“I can take credit for that, I suppose,” he said. “You never know, it might be remembered as my first act of leadership.” He stroked a hand over his blond hair. “Even among my fellow….we’re more spies than scouts, although I prefer to think of myself as a
revolutionary.
” Alien Diego smiled a little. “But even among my fellow spies, I’m among the more curious. Why was the alarm raised in the first place? ‘Vera’ had reported only an unspecified hardware error, which she later reported resolved. She had wiped her log clean, of course, but I knew she was partnered with ‘Nick’; when I checked his logs, voila. The incident log was still there in its entirety, which I now understand is because Nick couldn’t wipe them from this hastily thrown-together body.”

Diego tsk’d. “I couldn’t find anything wrong with the vessel he had prepared. Nor could I find a reason as to why he chose to modify a human body and deviate from his pre-set destination—a location that appeared to be intact.”

Alien Diego gave me a look that was caught between a leer and a grin; it made my stomach roll.

“To find out, I checked his data transfer patterns. All the information he had ever marked for review. The planets he chose to investigate. I followed the paths he took through the stars, and I recognized a journey similar to my own.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we had come to the same conclusion about Our fate as The Rest. At least, I suspected we had.”

From over to my right, where she still sat on the bench, Vera snapped, “What conclusion is this?”

“That fragmentation is necessary for survival, of course.”

Vera’s gasp suggested this was the first time they were having this conversation. I looked to Nick automatically and immediately wished I hadn’t. Like before, his expression was vacant. As if he wasn’t even here. I opened my mouth to fire off more questions at Diego, but his attention was on Vera.

“Oh, please, ‘Vera,’ you’ve seen it too. So have ‘Sid’ and ‘Ariel.’ We’ve all seen the same thing, because we
are
the same thing. We are the only fragment of our species with any capacity for independent processing. And when we’re not overwhelmed by our collective desires, it’s not so difficult to see: The Rest is doomed.”

Vera opened her mouth to protest, but Ariel beat her to it. “Vera, don’t be dense. We’ve clearly reached the point of no return.”

“Except
we
have a way out,” Diego cut in. “Those of us that I call spies—or ‘scouts,’ if you will. We’re different in a vital way. We can put ourselves anywhere. Take any form. As we’ve done on this planet. We’ve always known it. But only ‘Nick’ had the courage to do it.”

He looked admiringly at Nick, whose face remained an awful mask.

“I decided I wanted to experience whatever ‘Nick’ was experiencing, so I searched for a suitable host. Human interfaces are laughably easy to access, and instantaneously I located this human.” He waved at himself. “Lance Coleman, code-named Diego, leader of a secret government team charged with finding extraterrestrials.
And he happened to be on the trail of two.

“We abducted Diego, Sid, and Ariel, wiped their memories, and here we are.” He looked me in the eye, his green eyes hard.
“We
are here to stay.”

“What about Nick? Where’s he? What did he do wrong?”

I glanced over at Nick again, desperate to see something on his face—but he was like a robot. I saw him blink, and I could tell he was breathing…but there was no sign of life inside.

Diego didn’t even look at Nick, just kept on talking. To Vera? To me? I couldn’t tell. He seemed to be enjoying himself, almost orating for his own amusement. “We have close to thirty-eight hours before our transfer process is perfected—before we initiate the fragmentation—but after that, we should be able to start bringing in like-minded…people,” he said with a small smile.

If every alien body-snatching ended a human life… I held my stomach. “How many are you talking about?”

“Not many,” Diego said. “If my calculations are correct, slightly less than two billion.”

I MUST HAVE gasped, because Diego frowned.

“That’s not even a third of your population. We’ll be slowed by numbers—we began as four—” he nodded in the direction of Ariel and Sid, and then at Vera— “but once the transfer process gets further underway, we should be able to double our number every three hours. The entire process, start to finish, should take about eighty of your hours.”

That was only three and a half days!

West lifted his head a little, and my eyes shot to him. He looked sleepy, but he wasn’t…void, like Nick was.

“They’re going to fill the ranks of the world’s elite, of course,” Diego was saying, “but most of them are going to go into bodies of the relatively young. Ideally in the fifteen to thirty-five-year-old age range. Which makes you perfect.” His eyes met mine, and I experienced my first real moment of terror.

“You’re going to…take my body?” I choked.

“Probably not, as it were. Since you were so kind to our brother Nick, we’re going to leave you alone, albeit with a wiped memory.”

“You’re going to erase my memory?” I put my hand to my chest, horrified at the thought.

He nodded slowly.

“No, you can’t!” I jumped up. “There’s no reason to! I’d never tell! Like you said, I’m a friend!”

“You’re not one of us. Therefore, our memory will be wiped.” My stomach twisted, and I finally got the nerve to sob out,
“Is that what you did to Nick?”

Diego shook his head. “The one you know as Nick is in suspension.”

“What does that mean?” I said tearily.

“When we arrived, we weren’t sure what to expect from Nick. I put a kink in his atomic transfer, until I make a final decision on whether to keep him.”