Mothership (18 page)

“Well . . .” Cole lets out a breath. “No. Not really.” I can hear the soft scratching as Cole rubs his fingernails across his chin, a sure sign that he’s thinking hard. “The Almiri are a . . . different sort of species. See, we can’t breed on our own.”

I open my eyes. There are Cole’s knees, on the other side of the door, his hand resting just on top. He is so close, I could reach out and touch him. But I don’t. “What does that mean?” I ask.

“It’s like . . .” He scratches, thinking some more. “You know those things, what are they called? Tapeworms? They’re their own species, but they can only live and grow inside another animal?”

“Are you telling me you’re a freaking
tapeworm
?”

“No! Shit, that was a bad comparison. I’m bad at this. Seriously, Elvs. I got, like, a D in bio. Maybe the captain should be the one to explain this to you.”

“You got me here, Cole,” I tell him. “You explain it.”

“But I don’t . . .” He trails off, as though an idea has suddenly occurred to him. “Wait. Okay, no. I got it now.” I see him shift on the floor a bit, and once he’s repositioned himself, he begins his explanation again. “Okay, here it is. Yeah. The genetic makeup of the Almiri species is unparalleled, particularly within the realms of physical fitness, intellectual capacity, and aesthetic attractiveness. However, the Almiri are incapable of sexually reproducing with members of their own species. In order to propagate, a host with a sufficiently analogous genetic makeup must be procured. Once the Almiri has—”

I cut him off. “Are you, like, reading from a textbook or something?” I ask. There’s no way Cole knows what half those words mean.

“Uh . . .” Suddenly his voice has turned sheepish again. I peek through the slat between the door and the stall, and see that he is holding his phone to his face. When he notices me staring at him, he flips the phone in my direction so that I can read what’s on the screen.

A Brief Introduction to Almiri History.

“Are you shitting me, Cole?” I screech, scooting back against the wall to avoid further eye contact.

“What?” he mutters. “There’s a lot to remember.”

I slap my hand against my forehead. “I
would
have to get knocked up by the dumbest alien in the cosmos.”

“Can I continue, Elvs?”

“Only if you stop calling me Elvs.”

Cole sighs but carries on. “Okay, where was I? Sexual reproduction, blah, blah, blah. A host must be procured . . . All right, yeah. Here’s the part that concerns you. Once the Almiri has found a viable host, he can then implant his seed in the female, so that she may carry the Almiri infant to term. The Almiri infant will have all the superficial characteristics of the host species, and in most cases the unwitting host will be unaware that the child she is carrying is not her own.”

Suddenly I feel very cold all over. “Cole, put the stupid book down and just tell me straight, all right?”

“It’s not a book. It’s an interactive—”

“Cole!”

“Sorry.”

“So I’m your ‘unwitting host,’ then? Is that it?”

“Well, yeah. But you’re witting now.”

“When I have this thing, when I finally give birth to your precious little bundle of joy, it’s not even going to be mine, is it?”

The floor squeaks as Cole rubs his shoes against it, shifting his feet. “No,” he says, and I’m thankful that at last he seems to be skipping the sentiment and sticking to the facts. “He’ll be all Almiri. The host mother, like,
has
the baby, but it’s not her child. It doesn’t have any of her DNA. She’s just sort of, like, the envelope. But it’s not her letter.”

As I think about what it means to be, as Cole so delicately put it, the container for a foreign package, I have to force the bile down. I need to listen. Even though I don’t want to, I need to hear what Cole has to say.

“Anyway,” he continues, “when the baby is born, it looks just like the host species. That’s why I look human, because I was born to a human mom.”

“In Milwaukee,” I confirm.

“In Milwaukee. But I have all Almiri DNA.”

“So,” I say, thinking it over, “if your dad had done it with a chicken, you would’ve come out feathered?”

“I’m not sure if . . . No, it says here that the Almiri came to Earth because the humans were the only viable host candidate in this section of the galaxy, so I don’t think the chicken thing would ever be an iss—”

“Cole, I was joking.”

“Oh.”

I clear my throat, stalling for time while I think things over. “So all that stuff you told me about your mom,” I say slowly, “how she died, just like mine—it was, what, a lie? Just so you could get into my pants?”

“
No.
Elvs, I would
never
—”

“’Cause there are easier ways to get a girl to put out, you know.”

“Jeez, Elvie. Who do you think I am?” I do not answer that. “My mom, she . . . Everything I told you about her was true. I grew up thinking she was my real mother, thinking I was human, thinking I was a normal kid. She had no idea about me. She . . . she loved me. And she did die when I was fifteen. And then suddenly there were all these Almiri guys, and they took me away and I had to learn to live by the Code.” Even through my swirl of anger-fear-worry-resentment, I notice that Cole’s voice has changed. He’s not apologetic anymore. He’s
sort of, what’s the word? Wistful? Melancholy? I settle myself against the stall and listen.

“Talk about feeling like an alien,” Cole goes on. “Most of the Almiri are allowed to grow into men before they discover who they are. I was . . . I didn’t get that chance. And the Almiri, they’re good at lots of stuff—they’re a good people, Elvie, no matter what you think—but they have no idea how to raise kids.”

I bite down on the insides of my cheeks.
God,
I think,
sob story much?
I might feel sorry for Cole if it weren’t for the fact that
he’s an alien who took my virginity and left me with a parasitic love child
. I thump the toilet lid closed and climb up to sit on top of it.

“Look, Elvs, I know none of this is what you thought it would be. But I think if you try, you can learn to love the poor little guy. Even if he’s not human, he’ll be amazing, I swear.
My
mom loved me. She didn’t even know I wasn’t . . .” He trails off, and I let my thoughts trail with him.

There is a lot to take in right now, obviously. But before my brain careens off down the path of
holyshitholycrapholyhell,
I ask the question that has pushed itself to the forefront of my mind.

“You keep saying ‘he,’” I say. “How do you know the baby’s going to be a boy?”

“Almiri are always boys,” Cole replies.

“Always?”

“Always. Otherwise they couldn’t, you know . . .”

“Implant their seed?” I finish for him.

“Well. Yeah.”

Lovely.

I hear Cole standing on the other side of the door, and when he speaks, his voice is gentle. “Elvs, why don’t you come out here? I want to see you. We can’t really talk like this. It isn’t—”

“I prefer to stay well away from tapeworms, thank you,” I tell him. I like having the stall door between us. Half a dozen centimeters of aluminum alloy might not be much distance, but right now it feels like a force field.

“Elvs . . .”

“So when were you planning on telling me all this?” I ask. “Tomorrow? On the kid’s fifth birthday? When?” I gaze down at my swollen stomach, and I swear to God, if I wasn’t mad about the Goober before, now I am absolutely livid. “You know, you had a really good chance to tell me this story when I let you know I was knocked up in the first place. But you didn’t. You left.” On the other side of the door, Cole squirms. I can tell I’m skewering the guy, that he feels downright shitty, and I guess that ought to make me happy, but it doesn’t. “It’s bad enough you put me in this position,” I say with a sigh, “but Britta, too? Jesus, Cole, how much seed did you need to implant?”

“No,” Cole replies quickly. “I didn’t . . . With Britta it was . . . I didn’t mean . . . It was an accident, Elvie.”

“Some accident,” I say with a snort. He does not reply. “I would say you’re a shit of a human being. But, you know.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he says. “Really.” And I can tell by the tone in his voice that he means it. But the eight-plus-month-old fetus that’s currently practicing karate on my
large intestine begs to differ. “Look, it’s not so bad, Elvs. I know the little guy won’t
technically
be human, but . . . Almiri have lived peacefully with humans for five thousand years, virtually undiscovered. We have excellent genes. We, uh, heal well. We’re always very handsome.” I snort, but Cole goes on, undeterred. “No, seriously. That’s how we, uh, attract our mates. And our life span is far longer than that of a human. Hundreds of years. In some cases even longer. Without ever aging.”

“Shit,” I spit. This is just what I need. “You’re not going to tell me you’re, like, a thousand years old or something, are you? God, if I did it with a
senior citizen
alien . . .” I suddenly feel like upchucking again. “You know I’m a minor. You can do some serious time for that, right?”

“Elvs, calm down.” I can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “I’m nineteen. You can tell because my starkiss hasn’t faded yet.”

“Your
what
?” I ask. “What does tuna have to do with this?”

“No, my
starkiss
. Every Almiri is born with one. It’s like a birthmark. A little pattern of freckles on the left cheek. It always fades completely after thirty or forty years. I still have mine.”

“Really?” I say casually. I can picture it exactly. “I never noticed.”

“Anyway,” he goes on, “listen to this, Elvs. This may cheer you up.” And I can hear the soft
whisk
of his fingers across the screen of his phone as he scrolls through the history once more. “Since their arrival on Earth, Almiri have contributed enormously to human society, in nearly every field of cultural and physical advancement, including politics, science, and the arts. Some of the most famous ‘people’ in human history
were in fact Almiri. Alexander the Great, Dmitry Venevitinov, Pope Gregory V, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Christopher Marlowe—”

“James Dean,” I finish for him.

“Yeah,” Cole replies. “He’s on the list.”

I think on that. My mom’s favorite movie star, an alien. Well, he
was
inhumanly handsome. “So why does everyone think James Dean died in a car crash?” I ask.

Cole sighs. “Well, since we live so long, and we don’t age at the normal rate, some of us—especially those who are sort of famous—have to fake an early death, so no one catches on. Can you imagine if movie stars seemed to look twenty-two forever? Byron’s actually officially ‘died’ about five times now. He’s sort of sick of it at this point, so he tries to keep a low profile. I’m probably going to have to fake my own death in a couple years, depending on how often I’m willing to move. I’m thinking tractor trailer accident.”

As fascinating as this tangent is, there are other things weighing more heavily on my mind than the way in which Cole intends to fake off himself. “All right, fine,” I say. “So you’re an alien.”

“An Almiri.”

“Whatever. I guess I can deal with that.” I’m gonna need some serious therapy, but just at the moment I’m busy wrapping my head around things. “And I’m guessing Captain Bob and everyone else involved in your rescue mission of crap is Almiri too.”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m further assuming that all of us on board this
space school—me, Ramona, Natty, all of us—we’re all unwitting hosts for freaking bastard alien children?”

“In a nutshell.”

I clear my throat. “So that would make our teachers, what, like, Almiri gone bad?”

“It’s complicated,” Cole says, and he ignores my snort. “But basically your teachers are another race, similar to the Almiri. It used to be that we were all one species—the Klahnia, they were called. But when we left to come to Earth, they traveled to a different planet, and they started to evolve a little . . .
differently
. They call themselves the Jin’Kai now. They only came to Earth a few decades ago, as far as I know. And they’re doing their best to wipe us out completely.”

I try to wrap my head around the idea of alien ethnic cleansing. “So these Jin’Kai or whatever,” I say, “they, what? Signed up for teaching positions on this space school so they could get close to all our Almiri fetuses?”

I can hear the air whistle through Cole’s nose as he takes a deep breath. “Elvs,” he says slowly. “They
created
this school, to lure you guys here.”

Da-
fuh
?

“So what were they planning on doing with our babies?” I ask. “Were they going to . . .” I look down at the lump that’s the Goober. Well, more like a parasitic freakazoid. I can’t quite bring myself to put my hand on my own stomach. “Kill them?”

“Honestly, we have no idea what their plans were,” Cole replies. “But given the way they freaked out when we landed on their ship, we can be pretty sure they weren’t going to treat all the kids to hot fudge sundaes.”