Chapters (48)
- Cover
- Dedication
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Copyright
FIFTEEN
VARYING DEGREES OF SHOCK GREETED Liam’s comment. We’d known we weren’t the only ones the aliens had attacked. When I’d scanned the files on their ship, I’d found plenty of evidence that they’d done this before: injected their DNA into a planet, allowed it to fester a few generations, and then harvested the results as a sort of genetic terraforming. But that meant . . .
“You’re an alien?” Jasper demanded bluntly.
Liam shrugged. “Depends on your perspective, I guess.”
“How’d you get here?” I challenged.
“Not sure of that, either.”
“So, you just woke up. On Mars.”
“On Obsidian,” he corrected. “Otherwise, that’s more or less accurate. The zemdyut attacked our planet in force. They started small, like they did with you: a few outposts here and there, harvesting a few hundred people at a time. We’d barely start to recover from an attack and they’d return and take more. After a few generations, we were at war. My people had powerful weapons, but they weren’t any use. Yours won’t be either. The zemdyut are fast. Unpredictable. Adaptable. Much smarter than you think.”
Zemdyut. I mentally repeated the unfamiliar word, committing it to memory.
Reed chewed his bottom lip. “But, dude . . . I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look exactly like us.”
“What did you expect? Tentacles? Horns?”
“Well, the other aliens we met weren’t exactly humanoid,” Jasper pointed out. Mentally, I agreed, but looking at Liam, I picked up little differences I hadn’t identified before. The sparks in his eyes. A pointed, defiant edge to his chin. A slight extra length in his arms. None of it screamed alien, but there were differences if you looked hard enough.
Now he chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought when I woke up here: that you looked just like me.”
“And your world?” Cage demanded. “Is that just like ours too?”
Liam hesitated. “I still don’t know much about your solar system,” he hedged, obvious deception in his voice. “I’m a stranger here, even after all this time.” Prickles stood along my spine. For all his bluster, Liam was a rotten liar.
“Then tell us about yours,” demanded Alexei and Mia in unison. Reed pulled a face, but he was careful to do it out of their line of sight.
“Similar to Mars, I suppose. It’s dry and dusty. Has an atmosphere without any fancy tech, but we’d managed to destroy a lot of the surface before the last century. Most of the vegetation and water are artificial. Or were. I suppose it’s gone now.”
He was still hiding something, but the pain in his voice rang true, and I took pity on him. “The creatures destroyed your entire planet? How did you escape?”
Liam hesitated, then shrugged again, an almost defiant look settling over his features. “I abandoned my family when the zemdyut came through our front door. There was nothing I could have done for them. My mother and brother were already screaming. I went out the back window, stole a ship, and called up every ounce of power I had.”