Because what if they knew who she was, were waiting for her to turn her phone on so they could track it? She imagined switching it on and seeing a dozen messages and missed calls from her parents, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home.
Unless something had happened to them. Unless more drone things had showed up at her house too.
The thought gave her chills, made her shudder. And what would she have told her parents anyway, that these things had killed Alex’s parents, that they wanted to take him with them?
It would sound like she’d been raiding the weed stash they grew for purely medicinal reasons, distributed among a number of marijuana dispensaries, thanks to their legal status as registered growers. No, not easy at all to explain drone things that refused to die and a spectral being who spoke out of both sides of his mouth after being separated in half.
What do you think of that, Mom and Dad?
Once registered, they climbed back into the Beetle and drove to their room, easing into a parking slot directly before it, each of the rooms boasting their own separate entrance. Sam counted five other cars for the sixty rooms spread over two twin levels.
The room was just what she expected: old and worn, but good enough. A single bar of soap cloaked in an unmarked white wrapper and a pair of plastic cups stacked one inside the other atop the counter. The toilet bowl was stained and the seat wobbly, thanks to a missing bracket. Sam switched the dull bathroom light off, then back on again. Alex was sitting on one of the double beds, staring at the nineteen-inch tube television screen like something was showing other than his own reflection.
Vending machines lined the walkway on the side their room was located, the steady whir of the soda machine and regular thunk of the ice dispenser slipping through the walls in the quiet. The motel marquee’s stubborn bulbs flickered and flashed, sending an alternating wave of red and blue light pouring through the flimsy window blinds, which were torn at the bottom.
Sam sat down on the edge of her bed, staying there until Alex finally laid down atop the bedcovers, clutching the tiny wooden statue of Meng Po as if it were a teddy bear.
“I want you to leave,” he said, breaking the tense silence. “I don’t want anybody else I care about getting hurt.”
“We’ve been over this, Alex.”
“So we’re going over it again,” he said, without looking at her. “You got me this far. That’s enough. Go home, please.”
“My answer’s still the same.”
“It wasn’t a question.”
“Would you leave me?”
He looked at her finally.
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Sam continued. “No more than you’d leave that kid who was about to get smashed last night.”
“He was my teammate. It’s what we do.”
“Well,” Sam said, lying back on the second bed, “this is what I do.”
40
JANUS
“I BELIEVE WE’RE READY now, Doctor,” Donati heard the disembodied voice say and slid his chair closer to his computer.
Six hours had passed since Donati called for an alert, that much time taken to assemble the Janus team—no small challenge given two of the five were in truly remote regions and had to be transported to where service was available. Even with that, one remained out of touch, leaving only four boxes on his computer with bar grids that danced in accordance with which one of the participants was speaking. No names had been exchanged and, for all Donati knew, the voices had been scrambled for security purposes as well.
“We’ve all had a chance to review your classified report from eighteen years ago on the explosion and its aftermath,” the voice, associated with the top left-hand square on Donati’s screen, continued, “along with the addendum material filed in the wake of your call for an alert earlier today.”
“Most disconcerting,” the box immediately beneath that one voiced. “What degree of certainty can you provide as to the validity of your conclusions?”
“One hundred percent.”
“No such thing,” the box on the lower right insisted.
“There is this time,” Donati told him, told all of them.
Janus had begun years before as an amorphous extension of the NEO, NASA’s Near-Earth Object office, located at the agency’s jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, which monitored asteroids and the algorithms of their potential trajectories with regards to Earth. Its mission statement was to function as a kind of extraterrestrial NSA or CIA, responsible for dealing with threats posed to the planet from outer space. Unlike the NEO, however, Janus trained its focus on hostile threats, specifically from other life forms. Since its existence had been covertly circulated among the various departments responsible for monitoring space, primarily the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, three alerts had been called, all of them ultimately deemed to be false alarms.