Meta (Book 5): New Empire Read online

  “Can you do something with that thing to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

  “It’s a diagnostic wand, not a magic wand, Connor. But you shouldn’t have much to worry about. The magtonium has a machine-learning algorithm that makes sure it doesn’t fall for the same attacks twice. It should already be figuring out how to prevent a similar intrusion.”

  “That’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard all day,” I say as I make the nanosuit retract from my hand and form back into a disk.

  “I’m guessing, of course. It’s an alien material with a mind of its own that was tinkered with by a sociopath. Who knows what it’s doing,” Sarah follows up.

  “Great. I was starting to think I had one less thing to worry about. Anyway, you two are almost certainly targets. Kyle knows all about you, and if they can’t get to me to retrieve the magtonium, they’ll try to get to you.”

  “We’ll be fine. There’s an Agency safe house not far from campus if we need to leave in a hurry. My dad will be thrilled if I finally listen to him and use it sometime.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Positive. I already have a go-bag in the car for this type of occasion,” she says.

  “You have a bag in your car for when aliens invade Earth?” Jim asks.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Be careful, stay inside if you can. A lot of people are beginning to panic out there. They think these are end times, and they’re desperate.”

  “Don’t worry about us. I’ve also got my Ghost suit with me if anyone starts trouble. Do us a favor, though, Connor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep us in the loop. I won’t be happy if I have to find out the invasion began by seeing it on TV.”

  “I’ll make sure you know what I know. Promise.”

  Sarah narrows her eyes at me like she doesn’t trust what I’m telling her.

  “Come on Jim, let’s see if the dining hall is still open. We should stock up if we can,” she says.

  Sarah exits into the hallway. Jim follows behind and puts out his hand for a shake. I grab his hand and pull him in for a hug.

  “Be careful, Connor.”

  “You too, Jim.”

  He gives me a small smile, and the pair exit down the stairwell.

  I glance around my room, wondering if I should grab a few essential items. It might be a while before I can safely return. Not knowing where to begin, I take my phone out to check if Derrick replied. Nothing.

  It’s extremely unusual for Derrick to be away from his phone this long; he’s practically attached to the device. It’s even stranger considering everything that’s going on. The message was delivered, so I know his phone isn’t out of juice.

  I tap his name and hit dial. The phone rings over and over before kicking me to his voicemail. I don’t like invading his privacy, mostly because I don’t like him invading mine back, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

  I launch the location tracking app Midnight installed for emergencies only and enter Derrick’s phone number. A few seconds go by before a blue dot indicating Derrick’s position appears on the screen.

  According to this, he’s at home.

  Okay, now I’m getting worried. There’s no way Derrick would be sitting on his couch at home while an alien spacecraft hovers over the city. He’d be out there, trying to find out everything he could. If his phone is at the apartment, then maybe Derrick isn’t. And if it was forcibly taken from him, then Derrick is in danger.

  I pull the magtonium from my pocket and activate it. It’s back in working order and quickly envelops my entire body. I open the window over Jim’s bed and hop out, flying into the night sky toward the skyline of Bay View City.

  Fourteen

  I circle for a landing and notice the apartment building, and much of the city, is as dark as the campus was. People must have figured out that a high-rise building isn’t the best place to hole up during an imminent alien invasion. I land on the roof and enter through the emergency stairwell. I keep my nanosuit on since I don’t know what I’m walking into.

  It’s dark inside, with the only illumination coming from the light above the stove. I don’t see any movement, and my suit doesn’t react like we’re in danger. It could be wrong, but the more I use it, the more it gives me a sense about these things. I don’t have a full handle on it yet, but I think I could in time.

  With a thought, I retract the suit and reform it into a small metallic disk, which I shove into my pocket. I could have used it to look through the walls and see if Derrick’s here, but I feel creepy doing stuff like that when there is no clear danger.

  “Derrick?” I call out.

  There’s no response, so I head toward his bedroom. As I round the corner and head down the hallway, a small muffled noise comes from the living room, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  I return into the living room and flip the light switch in the hall. The room slowly illuminates, but not slow enough for Derrick. He’s lying on the living room couch in an awkward facedown position, wearing mesh shorts and a t-shirt. His hair is a greasy mess. I don’t think he’s gotten off this couch in a while.

  “Connor? What are you doing here?” he asks as he rubs the sleep from his eyes and sits up. “What time is it?”

  “It’s late. I thought you were working tonight?”

  “I was. I am.”

  He grabs his laptop from the coffee table and taps a button to wake it, but the battery is dead. He places the computer back on the table, next to a half-empty whiskey bottle. Derrick notices me looking at it and carries the bottle into the kitchen, where he places it on a shelf.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask. “I thought you would be out reporting about the ship.”

  “You don’t need to go outside to report about that. What am I going to learn looking up at the sky that no one else hasn’t already figured out?”

  He grabs a glass from the cabinet, fills it with water from the faucet, then drinks its contents down in one long gulp.

  “So why are you here?” Derrick asks.

  He’s never asked me something like that before. Even though I’m technically living at the academy, I still think of this apartment as my home, not a place I need a reason to be in.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I say.

  He places his glass on the counter harder than necessary, startling me. “And who asked you to do that?”

  “No one asked me. I just wanted to.”

  He laughs to himself.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Derrick?”

  “Why does it matter to you all of a sudden?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  He sways, confirming he’s drunk. He’s quiet for a moment and seems upset, so I don’t press him.

  Then he asks, “Why didn’t Midnight help us?”

  The question catches me off guard, but I know what he’s talking about. After my fight with Kyle, I decided I needed to be more open with Derrick. We’ve been through a lot together, and he’s always done what was right for me, even if that meant sacrificing his own interests. I had to tell him the truth about our mom and dad.

  He didn’t take it well. He felt stupid for not realizing they were metahumans. Here’s a guy who’s spent most of his adult life investigating and reporting on metahumans, yet he never realized his own parents were metahumans. I explained I hadn’t known either and that we’re often blind to things that are close to us, but he still took it hard.

  On top of that, he felt angry. Once he knew the truth about our parents and Midnight, he couldn’t understand why Midnight didn’t do more to help us after our parents died. He did, I told him. He was keeping an eye on us the entire time. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have accidentally killed myself after receiving my metabands.

  But he wouldn’t listen. Part of me couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t possibly know what it had been like for him to have to take over duties as my legal guardian when
he’d been barely old enough to drive. He thought Midnight could have done more, a lot more, and chose not to. Since then, I’ve avoided even mentioning his name around Derrick.

  “I don’t know, Derrick,” I answer. It’s the truth.

  Derrick shakes his head and turns back to the cabinet he closed. He opens it and retrieves the bottle of whiskey, then takes the glass he used back out of the sink. I start to ask if he thinks it’s a good idea, but before I can get the second syllable out, he shoots me an intense look that scares me off. He doesn’t want me lecturing him.

  “I don’t understand, Connor. I thought we were a team. Since Mom and Dad died, we’ve always been a team. It was always us against everyone else. But now I barely see you, barely hear from you.”

  “I’m away at school, Derrick. That’s not fair.”

  “I’m not talking about school. And you’ve got a thing in your pocket that makes it easy to fly back here anytime you want. I’m talking about everything else. You don’t want me involved in your life anymore, and I don’t understand why.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Derrick. You went on a field trip with me a few weeks ago. If anyone has been pulling away, it’s you.”

  His face becomes flush. He didn’t like that. “Who told you to say that? Michelle?”

  “What? No, of course not. I haven’t heard from her since you two broke up. Is that what this is about?”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes a long swig of whiskey from his glass.

  “Look, I don’t want to fight with you. I want your help. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Oh, now you want my help.”

  “I always want your help. I don’t know why you would ever think otherwise.”

  He might be mad at me, but I trust that the journalist in him can’t help but be curious. I take a deep breath, and then I spill my guts.

  I tell Derrick everything I know about the crashed ship in Kaldonia. I explain the message Midnight found, inexplicably in English, where the magtonium’s true purpose was explained.

  Derrick scrunches his nose like he’s trying to put all the pieces together, but the fogginess from his alcohol consumption is making it a slow process. It’s a lot to take in even if he was sober. He walks around the kitchen counter and sinks back into the small divot he’s formed into the couch. He pulls a notepad out from in between the couch cushions and flips it open to a blank page.

  “Is there anything else?” Derrick asks.

  “Not that I know about, but I’m getting all my info from Midnight. Who knows what he isn’t telling me.”

  “Good point, but at least we have somewhere to start.”

  He tries to wake his laptop again before remembering the battery is dead. He jumps up from the couch and marches into the kitchen to retrieve the laptop’s power adapter. He plugs the adapter into the laptop and a nearby outlet, then begins typing furiously.

  “Okay, so there were reports of a UFO crash in Kaldonia roughly five years ago,” Derrick says.

  “There were? Why didn’t I ever hear about it?”

  “They were just rumors. Nothing related to metahuman stuff, just internet conspiracy theories. It’s not exactly easy to get into Kaldonia, so it remained unverifiable. Do you know the name of the star that Volaris revolves around?”

  “Uh …”

  “I don’t know why I asked you that.”

  “Midnight said it was the closest one to us.”

  “That’s better.”

  Derrick types.

  “Here we go. Alpha Arcturus. It’s 36.7 light-years away. There are six planets revolving around it. One of them has to be Volaris. Let’s see what we can find out about them.”

  He enters terms into a search engine, leading him down one rabbit hole after another. He ignores the glass of whiskey on the kitchen counter, and the person sitting in front of me finally looks like someone I recognize.

  Fifteen

  A kick startles me awake.

  I open my eyes to find Derrick standing over me. I’m lying on his massive wraparound couch, wondering how long I’ve been asleep. The last thing I remember is thinking I needed to rest my eyes for a minute, but now there’s sunlight flooding in on all sides of Derrick’s living room. Obviously, that didn’t work like I’d planned.

  I swing my legs off the couch and stretch. Derrick has already retreated to the kitchen, where he has his head buried in his laptop. Despite having both a real office and a home office, the kitchen counter remains his preferred place to work.

  On my way to the kitchen, I take a brief detour to peer out a window overlooking the city. I didn’t dream it. The Volarian ship is still sitting silently in the otherwise clear blue sky. Helicopters and metahumans aren’t buzzing around it anymore.

  The smell of freshly brewed coffee pulls me out of my early morning stupor and lures me into the kitchen to join Derrick. I should be checking in with Midnight, but the world isn’t going to end if I have a quick cup of coffee.

  Probably.

  I pull up a stool next to Derrick and notice he smells horrible. It’s been a few days since he’s showered. I keep my nose buried in my cup of coffee.

  “I should check in with Midnight. Do you think it’s safe to leave from your roof in broad daylight?” I ask Derrick as I pull the magtonium disk from my pocket. The roof is fine to use at night, but I typically try to avoid taking off from it during the day.

  “I think you’ll be okay as long as you fly straight to Midnight’s. It’s still early, most people won’t be up yet.”

  The magtonium spreads up my arm, and I walk toward the door, but Derrick stops me.

  “Um, I think you might want to hold up a second.”

  He’s fixated on something outside the window and waving me back over with the hand not holding his coffee mug. I power down the magtonium and join him at the window.

  For the first time since the Volarian ship entered our atmosphere, there’s movement along its surface. Small patches of the silver ship illuminate with soft white light, then fade at random.

  “Well, that’s new,” I say.

  The sequence increases in speed, making me uneasy. It feels like it’s gearing up to do something. The lights flash rapidly, and a white beam shoots out from the front of the ship, terminating in midair. The white laser-like beam is joined by another and then another. Soon, dozens of lights are emanating from the ship, each one terminating at the same point in the sky.

  “Um, does this remind you of anything?” I ask, the image of the Death Star gearing up to obliterate a planet firmly in my mind’s eye.

  The magtonium senses my apprehension and activates, instantly covering my body with the black nanosuit. I question whether the magtonium is picking up on my nervousness or if it senses danger. This thought, of course, makes me more anxious.

  “Come on, Derrick. Let’s get out of here. If this thing is about to fire, we’re wasting precious seconds we could be using to get as far away as possible.”

  “No, just wait,” Derrick says, pushing my gloved hand off his shoulder.

  There’s an explosion of blinding white light.

  This is it. We’re all about to be vaporized.

  But the light fades.

  The beams no longer congregate into a single point, but combine to form a three-dimensional hologram in the sky. The hologram resembles the one Midnight found on the crashed ship. Its focus shifts until it is clearly displaying a hollow cube. The cube rotates until it aligns with the ground, then descends. It makes no noise, which only adds to the overall creepiness of the situation.

  “What the heck do you think that is?” I ask Derrick.

  “I have no idea, but I think we should find out.”

  “I think we should let someone else find out. We don’t always have to be the first ones to know everything all the time.”

  The cube seems to be setting down near the water. As it sinks through the air, it also darkens, taking on a milky-white appearance. One by one
, the beams of light connecting it to the ship flicker out until the cube is no longer attached to the ship.

  “Well, that’s not something you see every day. Do you think they’ll tell us how to make those hologram things?” I ask.

  Derrick stares at the ship in stunned silence. His phone rings, startling the both of us. Like a zombie, he walks over to the kitchen counter and picks it up, never shifting his attention from the scene outside the window. He slides his finger across the screen without looking and places the phone against his ear.

  “Hello?” A pause. “Yes, this is Derrick Connolly.”

  He’s quiet while he listens. His brow furrows, and he snaps out of staring at the ship. Whoever’s on the other end of the line is telling him something even more interesting than what’s happening outside.

  Sixteen

  “This is nuts, Derrick. You realize that, right? We could be walking right into a trap.”

  We’re in Derrick’s car, flying down the highway toward the bay. Derrick’s mysterious phone call was an offer for an interview with the supposed leader of the Volarians, and now I’m along for the ride despite the lack of details.

  Everyone has either gotten out of the city or hunkered down where they are. We pass smashed storefronts and litter strewn streets, the result of the wave of panic that has washed over Bay View City. But now the streets are empty and quiet in a way that makes me uneasy.

  “Why would they need to set a trap? They could just abduct me out of my apartment if they wanted to.”

  “Why would they invite you to come interview their leader if it isn’t a trap, then?”

  Derrick floors the gas to beat a yellow light. I cringe as the light turns red and we blow right through it.

  “If you want to tell your story, you need a journalist. And what journalist in Bay View City has more experience dealing with extremely strange stuff than yours truly?”

  “It all seems very sudden.”