Halifax (13 page)

“I’m half Doroan and half Orlian,” Izzy told Bobby. “I guess you’d say my gift is being really sensitive. That’s the Orlian side of me. I can, I don’t know, pick up on feelings.”

“You can read minds?” Bobby said.

“If I could read minds we would have already found out who our Cambian has infected by now,” Izzy replied with a hint of annoyance. “No, I just can sense things. Feel emotions. Know what someone wants or is afraid of. It’s like I can see the person beneath what they show the rest of the world.”

Izzy turned to look at Nora, right into her eyes, but Nora quickly and uncomfortably turned to Farrell. “What about you, Farrell?” Nora asked him. “Any special powers?”

“Actually, I have two,” Farrell said. “Incredible good looks and magnetic charm.”

“No seriously,” Bobby said. “You’re half what and half what?”

“Farrell?” Izzy asked. “He’s not half anything. Isn’t it obvious?”

Nora looked at Farrell. He wasn’t obviously anything other than intriguing to her. She was about to follow up, to ask another one of the many questions she liked to ask even if she didn’t understand why she wanted to know so much, when Bobby suddenly jumped up, squirming, and yelled at Rom.

“Stop looking at me!” he said.

A tiny light in a sea of other tiny lights slowly came into focus. It was nothing more than a pin prick, a speck indistinguishable from the other specks to the naked eye, but a light that continued to be the brightest star in the sky to Farrell and Izzy and Rom.

Farrell stepped away from the huge telescope he had trained on the sky and the fixed point in it. The Halifax siblings had brought Nora and Bobby to the Griffith Observatory high on a mountain overlooking the city. They all stood on the platform in front of the Zeiss Telescope, a reflector telescope tilted to peer out into the stars through an opening in the observatory’s copper dome.

“That’s Ryden,” Farrell said, motioning towards the night sky, somewhere millions of miles away in the direction the telescope was pointed. “That’s our planet. It was the prison planet before Earth.” It was a planet, the little light in the sky. It was
their
planet.

Nora looked through the telescope. She couldn’t tell one planet from another. They all looked the same. “I don’t see it,” she said. Farrell moved in close to her, leaning down with his head right next to hers, brushing against her cheek. The touch of his skin almost shocked Nora. A current of energy, or a surge of chemicals, rushed through her body.

“Follow the line of stars from the bottom left,” he said quietly. “One…two…three. It’s just past the third star.”

“I see it now,” Nora said. She pulled away from the telescope and looked at Farrell. Brushing up against someone’s cheek was a much different sensation than battering them with a lacrosse stick. It was a different sensation and not an unpleasant one. It triggered that elusive, inexplicable moment when you begin to see someone in a whole new light.

“Let me see,” Bobby said, pushing in between Nora and Farrell, disrupting the small connection they were having.

“Ryden was a lot like Earth,” Farrell told them. “It was a peaceful planet filled with families and politics and business and…life. After thousands of years as a prison planet, though, it had become polluted by wars and cruelty and hatred and the Committee decided it was beyond hope.”

“What’s the Committee?” Nora asked as Bobby stepped back from the telescope and Rom climbed up on a step to get a view for himself.

“The Committee is like the prison review board of the galaxy,” Izzy said.

“They pass judgment on criminals,” Farrell added. “Hand out penalties. They gave Ryden the ultimate punishment. They sentenced the entire planet to death.”

Rom looked away from the telescope. His face was flushed and red with anger and Rom was rarely angry. It was unsettling to the others to see him growing in fury. “The Committee didn’t think Ryden was worth bothering with any more,” Rom said. “They thought is cost too much to maintain and that no one there could be rehabilitated even though most of the inhabitants weren’t even prisoners. They were the descendants of prisoners. They were innocent.”

“So they destroyed it,” Izzy said. Just like that. She was beyond understanding it. “Destroyed it and the eight billion beings that lived there. Including almost everyone we knew.”

“But it’s there,” Nora said, pointing to the telescope that itself was pointing to Ryden in the night sky. “I just saw it.”

“It’s not there anymore,” Farrell said, suddenly looking as sad as Rom looked angry. “It takes years for light to travel across the universe. Looking at the sky is like looking at an old photo album. Some of the people in the pictures were kids when a photo was taken but now they’re grandparents. Some of the people died a long time ago. That’s the sky. It’s an old photograph. One day someone will look through that telescope and that light, Ryden, will be gone.”

Bobby turned to Farrell, almost turning on him, bursting with aggression. “This Committee killed eight
billion
people, or whatever, and you
work
for them?”

Farrell put his arm on Bobby’s shoulder, trying to calm him down, trying to reassure him that he, Farrell, wasn’t the bad guy. “It’s not the same Committee any more. The former Committee members were…fired. We work for the new Committee.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Izzy said. “To prove we can make this work. This can be a successful prison planet.”

“We’re not the only division on Earth,” Farrell added. “There are other groups like ours. We’re all here to make sure no rogue aliens give anyone a reason to destroy this planet. We don’t want the same thing that happened to Ryden to happen to your planet.”

Nora looked through the telescope again. The image of Ryden faded, flickering in and out. She was looking at what had once been the home of billions of people. There, but not there. Like people in a black and white photograph. There, but not there.

“This place is seriously serious,” Bobby said. He was in the Garage. He was surrounded by blinking, beeping, fantastic machines and it was almost more than his little alien conspiracy loving heart could take. “Wait until I tell the guys in my club.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Rom said. “If you do we’ll have to kill you.”

“Why are you guys all so eager to kill me?” Bobby asked, but Rom didn’t respond. The answer, to him, was self-evident. Instead Rom continued to show Bobby around the Garage. He was full of pride for all that he had created.

Nora was there, too, but was much more subdued. Whatever it was that had Bobby so excited was the same thing that had her feeling uneasy. She looked around the Garage and was lost in its expanse and its otherworldliness. She had never been in a place like it before and there was a reason for that. Nora had never thought about aliens. It had never occurred to her to think about aliens. She lived in a very earthly world full of very earthly problems. She had popular girls to contend and compete with. She had a cranky boyfriend. She had a drunk mother. She was worried about her grades and her friends and her weight. Why would anyone ever think about outer space?

Bobby, though, could think of nothing else. He had spent too many years looking up at the sky wondering who might be looking back. He had spent too many hours looking at a computer screen searching Internet chat rooms and alien conspiracy websites and searching for clues and proof and others who believed what he believed. That
they
were out there. And now, here he was in the Garage,
with
one of
them
.

An array of children’s toys, the ones favored by Rom, were strewn out across Rom’s workstation under one of the massive screens that filled the walls of the Garage, one with an image of some far away galaxy. Bobby reached down and picked up a Rubik’s Cube. Its multi-colored squares were just waiting to be turned, a puzzle to be solved.

“I love these things,” Bobby said. He was about to start twisting its sections around when Rom grabbed it out of his hands.

“Don’t ever touch that!” Rom warned him. “It’s not a toy. It’s been modified to control satellites circling the globe. One wrong turn and you could send the entire Defense Department’s group of satellites into the Atlantic Ocean. Or even worse, we could lose our ESPN feed.”

Rom moved down the workstation and Bobby followed. He was entranced by what he was seeing and eager to see more. They reached a white box that had a black panel with small holes. It was about the size and shape of a toaster oven. Light shone through from behind the holes in the panel and illuminated small translucent pegs of orange and red and blue and yellow that were plugged into the different holes. It was an older toy called a Lite Brite and the pegs formed a picture of Earth on its panel.

“Now this may look to you like a simple child’s toy, but it actually tracks nascent black holes on Earth,” Rom said. He then pointed to one yellow peg in particular. “That one there is the black hole in the
Bermuda Triangle
.” Rom said the last two words slowly and ominously, trying to frighten Bobby, but Bobby had probably read about things much more frightening in the school paper. Black holes? Whatever?

“What’s this?” Bobby said as he picked Rom’s clown-headed Pez dispenser up off the table. He barely had time to look at it before Rom took it back from him.

“Careful,” Rom said. “You could take an aircraft carrier out with this thing.”

“Not really,” Bobby said.

“Really,” Rom told him. Really.

Near the end of the table, within a teetering tower of Tinker Toys with its interlocking wooden sticks and colorful wheels, was a tempting plate of peanut butter cookies. Bobby reached in to help himself to one, or possibly two, of the cookies, but pulled back when a spark of light flashed. It illuminated what had been an invisible force field around the Tinker Toys and sent a small electrical shock up Bobby’s arm.

“That’s the force field I’ve been tinkering with,” Rom said. He got the pun but Bobby didn’t. Bobby continued to pick at the force field, watching it spark. It was kind of fun. “I’m glad it was only set to stun,” Rom continued. “You could have lost your arm of something.” Bobby quickly pulled his hand back, deciding cookies and a light show weren’t worth the risk.

The last item on the table was begging for Bobby to pick it up. It was a silver slinky, all springy and gleaming. Bobby wanted to play with it but he had finally learned his lesson.

“What does the slinky do?” he asked suspiciously. “Translate secret alien languages? Melt alien brains?”

Rom picked the toy up and began stretching it like an accordion. “It doesn’t do anything. I just like it.” Now it was Bobby’s turn. He grabbed the slinky out of Rom’s hands and began playing with it as Rom continued his tour.

Across the room, Nora was on a self-guided tour of the Garage. She was a girl who was used to acting. She pretended to be the dutiful daughter when all she wanted to do was run away from home. She pretended to be the rich, popular girl when she was really poor and always felt like an outsider. Nora had learned to hide her emotions and here in the Garage, surrounded by things she couldn’t have ever imagined existed and people who, with the exception of Bobby, weren’t even people at all, she still held her poker face. She could just as well have been wandering through the mall as walking through the hideout of alien hunters.

Nora stopped at Farrell’s workstation. His well thumbed through books were stacked in piles around the desk. The only other personal item there was a picture frame. The photo inside, however, was not a photo at all. When Nora picked up the frame the photo came to life and a home movie was projected out of it in 3D. It was of a beautiful woman and two small boys, not older than ten, one perhaps a year older than the other. They all laughed and playfully jostled for position as they posed for whatever camera had taken the images. Nora put the frame back down and the video projection disappeared. The image froze back into a snapshot.

Above Nora, on the steel walkway that rimmed the expanse of the Garage, Farrell and Izzy stood watching. Or rather Farrell watched Nora, intently and with much admiration and Izzy watched Bobby, annoyed and with much bewilderment.

“I don’t understand this, Farrell,” she said. “Why these two? It just complicates things.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a little help you know?” Farrell said. “Bobby’s tough. We could use the muscle.”

Izzy was offended. She grabbed Farrell by the arm and turned him towards her. “I’ve never let you down,” she said with growing anger. “Not once. I can fight as hard as anyone. Do you want to see the scars, Farrell?”

“Come on, Iz…”

“Then what about her?” Izzy asked, turning her and Farrell’s attention back to Nora.

“There’s just something about her,” Farrell said. Even he didn’t know why or he knew why but didn’t want to admit it.

“So this is all about…what? Physical attraction? Romance?” Izzy asked. “Because I know how you feel. But this is against every rule.”

“Luckily, I’m the one who made the rules, right?” Farrell said with a new tone to his voice. The tone of a boss. The man in charge. He walked away from Izzy.

She had seen this side of Farrell before. She never liked it. She hated it when he pulled rank on her. It didn’t happen often but when it happened it meant he was serious. All of which meant he was serious about this girl Nora. This
cheerleader
. Izzy looked down at Nora and Nora turned and looked back up at her. To Izzy they couldn’t have been more different. Different hair. Different personalities. Different planets. Farrell had always respected Izzy and although she had never thought of him as anything more than a comrade or a friend or sometimes even a brother, she couldn’t understand how he could respect her but also be emotional about a girl like Nora.

Izzy knew how Farrell felt, but she didn’t understand why he felt that way.

The Citroen came to a stop on a cement driveway that was broken apart and cracked. Weeds grew along its edges. It was the driveway that led to Nora’s trailer. It was dark out and moths hovered around the bare bulb above the small front porch. A fern hung from a hook over the porch, but it had long ago died. A welcome mat was at the door, but it was faded and tattered at the edges. The trailer was the victim of fits and starts of care and neglect, much like the girl who lived there.