“It’s not Benji,” I said. “She’s full of shit for once instead of geriatrics.”
She knew Benji was my friend, and she was trying to separate us from our allies. I wasn’t educated on intelligence tactics, but KIT didn’t accept students on personality alone.
“Keep talking, bitch,” Ellie said, cocking her gun.
“You might work for Majestic, but they pimped you out. You’re a legit whore after all.”
“Yep, I’m going to shoot your pet in the face, Cy,” Ellie said, aiming.
I raised my hands, one on each side of my shoulder. “Make her more promises, Cy. I’m super scared right now. Really.”
“Rory, take steps back, toward me. Right. Now,” Cy said again. This time, his voice was tinged with desperation.
“Okay,” I said calmly. “I’m going to take a step back now.” Before Ellie could mouth off again, I reached for her gun, pulled it out of her hands, and flipped the barrel so that it was facing her. I cupped the grip of the gun in my hand, getting a feel for it. The move felt as if it all happened in slow motion, but in reality, it was about two seconds.
“Last time I checked, they didn’t teach that in self-defense class,” Ellie said, clearly surprised.
“I took an advanced class.”
It wasn’t a total lie. Sydney’s older brother, Sam, had picked up a lot of useful things during his time in Afghanistan. He took her death hard, and his way of forgiving himself for not teaching his baby sister how to defend herself was to teach me. This turnaround trick was the last thing he’d taught me, and other than Sam, Ellie was the first person to see me use it.
I was just relieved it worked. I hadn’t practiced it in over a year.
I held the pistol in front of me, aiming straight for her forehead.
“Rory, don’t!” Cy said.
Ellie took that momentary distraction to bolt, pushing through Dr. Z’s screen door. I followed her, but she had already disappeared into the darkness.
“I am so confused,” Dr. Zorba said, wiping the sweat from his brow with a shaking hand.
“Can I have the flash drive now?” Cy asked.
I turned to him. “I thought you said you had it?”
“I had to provoke her. Something wasn’t right.”
I smiled. “Congratulations, Cy. You just told your first lie.”
He opened his hand, revealing a screw. “I said I had it. I didn’t say what it was. Still not a lie.”
“Close enough.”
“The truth,” Dr. Z said, exhaustion in his voice. “If you tell me the truth, I’ll give you the flash drive. I just need to know.”
Cy looked at me and then to Dr. Zorba. “We haven’t much time. They know we’re here. They’ll come for us.” He glanced at me. “All of us.”
“Then give me the short version,” Dr. Z said simply.
Cy thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “Okay. You might want to sit down, Professor.”
Chapter Thirteen
DR. Z SAT NEXT TO ME on his green crushed-velvet couch. It had seen better days, I was sure. I was also sure he’d found it at a garage sale like the rest of the furniture in his home.
Dr. Z was a humble man even though he’d won a Fields Medal, the Hubbard Medal, and the international Balzan Prize. He was the most respected man in his field, even before his tenure. He expected to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry one day for his thirty years of research on the calcium-sensitive proteins within cells and their biochemical language. But for a little over a year, he’d been obsessed with newly discovered, unusually regular radio signals coming from an unknown object in Galaxy M82. His oldest and most trusted friend, Lucius Brahmberger, a renowned astrophysicist, had discovered the signal, and together, they had begun investigating the anomaly and Erich von Däniken’s paleocontact hypothesis.
Seven months after Brahmberger had first heard the radio signals, he’d disappeared. Dr. Z had remained committed to continuing their research, believing that doing so would lead him to his friend. He had been given a tip from a secret government contact about a meteorite landing in Cape Hallett, an Antarctic Specially Protected Area. Knowing this, Dr. Z had packed his bags and left immediately. When he’d come back, he was more consumed by his work than ever. He had been tracking this particular meteorite since not long after Dr. Brahmberger’s disappearance, and Dr. Z was convinced that because of its trajectory, radioactive dating, and reflectance spectra, the rock’s origin was the same as the signal’s.
He lectured to his classes, giving no one any reason to ask questions. Every other moment of the day, Dr. Z was in his lab, studying his specimen and gathering data. He told me about the rock right away, but no one else—as far as I knew. He was convinced that if he learned enough about the rock, somehow that knowledge would lead him to his friend.
Waiting for Cy to offer some epiphany that Dr. Z had been waiting fifteen months for, Dr. Z was wringing his hands and shifting on the couch cushion. I’d never seen him so apprehensive. Even back when he realized that Majestic was after his rock, he had a confident, mischievous look in his eyes, as if he were accepting the challenge. Nothing seemed to intimidate Dr. Z. He knew then that he was truly onto something, and now that he knew the answer was just a few moments away, he was a wreck, waiting anxiously for Cy to tell him what it was.
“The specimen is dangerous, Dr. Zorba. It’s the last piece of a long-dead planet, Chorion. The planet had suffered civil unrest for years before wars, planet-wide devastation, and finally, what we had always thought was a plague led to its demise. The planet had been quarantined for decades. All of Chorion’s inhabitants are extinct.
“The remnant, your specimen, is something I’ve been tracking for a very long time. It contains inactive parasites, and given the right environment, those parasites could spawn. Earth was the perfect place for the remnant of Chorion. Fortunately, the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere keep them inert, so there was no danger of the parasites reactivating. I tracked the specimen here with the intent to bring it back with me so that we could properly…dispose of it, just as we did the rest of the planet.”
I sighed. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Hush, Rory!” Dr. Z said, frowning and waving me away. “So, you’re saying you…you destroyed an entire planet?”
“We had no choice. It was overrun.”