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  I’m not nicer, he said.

  She smirked. No, but you look it.

  Doyle looked as if he wanted to put an arm around her, but he refrained. Instead, he cleared his throat and looked at the others.

  Lincoln tried not to watch the look that passed between Mina and Doyle, but he couldn’t miss it. She stood opposite Lincoln, her hands on the railing to steady herself on the wobbling platform. Her brown hair was as curly as it had always been, if a bit leafier looking. Her posture was different, though—straighter, harder.

  And she was alive. That hadn’t seemed possible a week ago. Mina caught Lincoln’s eye and smiled again. If she was worried about their current surroundings, she didn’t show it.

  Doyle chose not to hang onto anything, balancing on the swaying elevator without effort. Was Doyle his first name or his last? Lincoln hadn’t asked. At six feet six inches tall, Lincoln towered over everybody on the elevator, but Doyle somehow made everyone around him seem small. Lieutenant Halston had had a similar presence about him. So did the late Captain Baker.

  There was something between Mina and Doyle. Lincoln had seen some and guessed more. But he couldn’t figure out how Mina had become entangled with Doyle in the first place. She claimed he had saved her life. Lincoln suspected Doyle was the kind of guy—or alien, don’t forget—to orchestrate saving a life to achieve a different kind of goal altogether.

  Nelson shifted away from the railing. “All this technology, a huge factory in space, and you can’t have a decent elevator,” he said, interrupting the silence.

  Of course, Nelson would say something rude, Lincoln thought. Something about Nelson’s small, boyish appearance caused him to blurt out things like a rude teenager. Lincoln silently agreed with his friend, but angering Doyle while they were suspended a hundred feet in the air seemed like a monumentally bad idea. To be fair, though, Nelson had never seen Doyle kill anyone. Lincoln had.

  The elevator lurched again.

  “We didn’t need a lift until recently,” Doyle said. By we, he meant all the other hybrids—all one million of them. Many of them still milled around the hangar below.

  Lincoln thought of their walk through the hangar and shuddered. The hybrids had parted to let them through. Doyle had said the humans would be safe, but Lincoln took one look into the hybrids’ eyes and knew differently.

  “What, you just flew up to the next level?” Nelson asked Doyle. “The same way you whipped us up into the Nomad?”

  Doyle laughed. “Something like that. Want to try it?”

  Nelson glanced down over the railing. “No, thanks.”

  He was cocky, but not that cocky.

  Doyle smirked. “Too bad.”

  They moved up through the opening. It took a full minute for the thick stone floor supporting the next level to slide past them. Adarria covered it too.

  Lincoln nodded to the symbols. “Are they for communication?”

  “Yes,” Doyle said.

  “How do you read them?”

  “You don’t read them, they communicate. Think of them as artificial intelligence, using algorithms.”

  Of course—algorithms. Finally, something Lincoln could understand. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? “Is that what they are?”

  “No.”

  Lincoln glared at Doyle. He may have been terrified, but he wasn’t going to play games with this hybrid. “You don’t have to be condescending.”

  So much for not angering Doyle.

  “I’m not condescending,” Doyle said, taking a step back to lean on the railing. “Adarria are sentient beings, but they only take the form of the symbols. Like artificial intelligence, they need an interface to communicate with others. The code comes first, then the intermediary. Mina told me that’s your area of expertise. I thought you’d appreciate the analogy.”

  He looked around at Lincoln’s team. The platform swayed as if caught in a cross-breeze. They were halfway through Level 2—another dark, cavernous space lit only by the white light above. What else was on this ship?

  Carter retched again, a dry heave that sounded gut-wrenchingly painful.

  “What kind of interface do they use?” Nelson asked.

  Forget that, Lincoln thought. The symbols are aliens, too. All this time.

  “You have to possess the adarria yourself,” Doyle said.

  Lincoln remembered his terrifying glimpse of the Glyphs—the alien invaders. Giants of stone, they stood on two legs as large as pillars with claw-like fingers and eyes that glowed like fire. But the most striking aspect about them was the adarria that adorned their bodies like carvings in golden stone.

  Mina glanced at Doyle. Lincoln caught the look—a brief glimpse of fear on her otherwise relaxed face. What was that about?

  “So you can’t communicate with them, either,” Nelson said.

  “Yes, he can,” Lincoln said, remembering something. Nelson looked at him.

  “Iverson,” Alvarez whispered. She stood up straight and tucked a strand of short, dark hair behind her ear. “He had adarria on his chest. He was a hybrid too, wasn’t he?”

  Doyle nodded. “On the hybrids, the symbols are called adarre.”

  “And you use them to communicate.”

  “Yes.”

  “Baker and Halston?” Lincoln asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “All the people with Iverson were hybrids,” Mina said. “Smith, Hadley, Morrison, Gault.”

  We were surrounded by hybrids and didn’t even know it. More irritation washed over Lincoln. He felt like he’d been blind all this time.

  “I’m still not sure why they wanted the drawings of the adarria in the silo,” he said. Halston, Baker, and Doyle had kidnapped Lincoln for those designs.

  “Halston never told you?” Doyle asked.

  Lincoln shook his head.

  Doyle ran his hand through his hair. “The adarria in the silo are unique. Don’t know why. Halston and Baker saw them, of course, but we didn’t want the others to get in there until we figured it out. Halston had some of his people watching the entrance to keep everybody else out. But we couldn’t have you walking around with them on you because other rogues were in the area. Naturally, the drawings needed to be secured.”

  Heat rose to Lincoln’s face. “Why didn’t you just let me go after you got them?”

  “Halston didn’t work like that. If I’d let you run off, he would have suspected me.”

  “He and Baker did anyway, didn’t they? You led Iverson to the drawings in Alvarez’s bag.”

  Doyle smiled. “Yes.”

  Nelson perked up. “That was your fault?”

  Halston had threatened to kill Lincoln if Nelson didn’t bring him the plans. When the plans were stolen, Nelson had assumed he’d been too late to save Lincoln, and that his friend was dead.

  Lincoln glared at Doyle. “You almost got me killed. Why?”

  “I had hoped Iverson would have insight about the adarria.”

  Doyle was playing both sides against each other. Wonderful. Lincoln shook his head and looked at Mina as the lift moved up through the floor of the third level. She was frowning at Doyle. The information must have been a surprise to her, too.

  “Iverson’s buddies killed him,” Alvarez said. “Did you know?”

  Doyle raised an eyebrow. “No. When?”

  “The morning of the attack. Slit his throat and got out of Dodge.”

  “And that’s when you saw the adarre on Iverson,” Doyle said.

  “Yes.”

  Doyle frowned for the first time since they had left the Nomad, but he didn’t comment further as the platform swayed and swung over to the side, landing on a stone floor covered in adarria.

  He led them through a wide, arching tunnel. It reminded Lincoln of the tunnel in West Virginia, leading from the mine to the silo. What were the walls made of? Metal? Stone? He touched the wall, careful to avoid the adarria’s grooves. It felt more like stone than metal.
/>   Except for Doyle, the party moved slowly. He strode ahead as if he were on a different spaceship altogether. Lincoln puffed with the effort of walking, his right leg threatening to give out under the increased strain. It was the leg Halston had injured when he tortured Lincoln.

  Was that only two days ago? Already, the passage of time was becoming a blur.

  As they moved away from the hole in the floor, the light dissipated. The darkness became oppressive, just like the silo back on Earth.

  “Bit dark, isn’t it?” Carter asked.

  As if in answer, the wall to the left flashed yellow. Startled, Lincoln stepped right and bumped into Mina. The hallway flickered again, this time in front of them. It continued ahead as they walked, lighting the way like strings of rope lights flashing inside the walls.

  “What’s happening?” Lincoln asked.

  “Carter said it was dark,” Doyle said.

  Alvarez sped up to walk beside Lincoln. “How does that work? Where does the light come from?”

  Despite Alvarez’s insistence that she didn’t want to be here, the curiosity in her voice was unmistakable.

  “From the Core of the ship,” Doyle answered over his shoulder.

  “Are we in the Core?”

  “No.”

  “Does it travel through the walls?”

  “In a way. It runs through the adarria. They control it.”

  “They control light?”

  “Yes.”

  The corridor opened out into another expansive room. Here, the adarria invaded every surface—the floor, walls, and ceiling were all covered with the dense symbols. Warm, white light shone through a massive floor-to-ceiling window, and they paused to let their eyes adjust.

  Doyle walked to the window. “We’re on Level 3. This is central command.”

  The group lined up on either side of him. Earth, blue and green and white, filled the left half of the view. Far to the right, the sun was a white-hot orb sending warm light into the dark spaceship.

  “I don’t see any instruments or navigational panels,” Nelson said.

  “The adarria control the ship. We can monitor anything we need through holograms. Viewscreens and buttons aren’t necessary.”

  “Wow,” Alvarez whispered. She stood to Lincoln’s left, gazing out to the planet below. “It doesn’t feel real, does it?”

  Lincoln agreed. The entire day seemed like a dream. Or a nightmare, maybe. He hadn’t decided yet.

  His right arm itched. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he rubbed it through his shirt. He had a bad case of poison ivy, the result of Halston and Baker dragging him around blindfolded in the woods. It burned when he scratched it. But the burning was better than the itching.

  The enormity of their situation wasn’t lost on Lincoln. He was standing in an alien spaceship, looking down on an invaded Earth. A step closer to the window would bring him in contact with it. Was it truly there? What did it feel like? Could he lean against it, or would he be sucked out into the vacuum of space?

  Lincoln’s head spun, and he leaned forward to put his forehead against the icy window. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  We’re going to die here.

  The window froze his thoughts, leaving him unable to think of anything else. Already he’d cheated death too many times. He would never get off this spaceship.

  And what about Mina? She’d barely left Doyle’s side since Lincoln had reunited with her. Did she admire Doyle that much? Mina didn’t look at him like a young girl obsessed with an older boyfriend—dazzled and blinded by his experience. Nor did she admire Doyle like an art critic admires a statue from a respectful distance.

  Mina knew what Doyle was, and that, more than anything else, disturbed Lincoln. Mina used to stand against everything Doyle was—against bullies and power mongers, against violence and oppression.

  But Doyle was as close to evil incarnate as Lincoln had ever witnessed. The black eyes, the command of the darkness he called aether, the destruction of the world—if that wasn’t evil, what was?

  And Doyle had convinced Mina it was okay.

  Hatred burned inside Lincoln—a feeling he hadn’t truly experienced for many years. Doyle would answer for his crimes. Had to. Lincoln just had to make sure that when he did, Mina wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.

  Nelson was saying something. With an effort, Lincoln dragged his attention back to the group.

  “…but how does it fly?”

  “By harnessing the energy of the adarria into the engines. There’s no human name for the technology. The Condarri call it power.”

  “They don’t have much of a vocabulary, do they?” Alvarez asked.

  Doyle frowned. “Just the opposite. Most of what they say can’t be translated. And almost everything passes through the adarria first.”

  “They don’t have a language other than the adarria?” Lincoln asked.

  “They do, but it’s limited, and they rarely use it.”

  “What happens when the adarria decide to do their own thing?”

  Doyle made eye contact with Lincoln, and something like respect flashed in his eyes. Or maybe it was mirth, Lincoln couldn’t tell.

  Mina stepped away from the window. “You said the adarria were separate from the Condarri, but they’ve been a part of each other for so long it was almost forgotten they were separate entities.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like,” Alvarez asked, “when you talk to them?”

  “I just think of what I want to say. My adarre translate everything for me. It doesn’t matter what language I’m thinking in.”

  Lincoln shook his head, his mind racing. “What would the aliens do without the adarria?”

  Doyle turned back to Lincoln, fixing him with another stare. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you wondering,” Mina said, looking at Lincoln, “if the adarria could be separated from the Glyphs?”

  They all turned to Doyle.

  “I don’t think that’s even possible,” he said.

  “But what if it was?” asked Lincoln. “What would happen?”

  “Dar Ceylin.”

  At the interruption, the group turned back toward the room. A hybrid approached from a doorway to the right. He was shorter than any Lincoln had seen yet—smaller build, with dark hair and a round face.

  “Sir, they’ve found us.”

  Chapter Three

  Even though Mina heard the hybrid, it took her a few seconds to process what he said.

  Doyle, however, sprang into action before he finished speaking.

  “Hold on to something!” he yelled and ran to the center of the window.

  The other hybrid turned and ran, presumably due to some silent order from Doyle. For a moment, everyone else looked as confused as Mina felt.

  Then they all turned to look.

  A giant ship that looked like black, jagged stone glided toward them from Earth. It looked like one of the “towers” that had landed during the invasion.

  A Condarri war ship.

  The first attack was already rolling toward the Factory like a wave. With a haze of blue, lines of energy shot out from the Condarri ship and headed straight for the window. Remembering Doyle’s warning, Mina scrambled for something to hold onto.

  Lincoln was hobbling toward her, a look of fear on his face. The others scattered about the room, desperately looking for anchors.

  “No, Lincoln!” Mina yelled. “The wall!”

  The first wave of blue grew closer to the window. Mina tossed herself to the wall and hooked her hands into the giant adarria there. The stone was smooth and deeply etched, but she managed to get her fingers into the smallest grooves and hung on like a rock climber. Lincoln found a handhold beside her. Since she was still facing the window, she watched the attack unfold like a slow-motion film.

  The blue wave took forever to reach them. Mina thought that an alien race that could travel the stars would have weapons to match. Her heart beat faster and faster. Soon the blue
cloud covered the entire view, blocking out the ship behind.

  “It’s going to get us!” she said.

  Lincoln, who was similarly struggling to hang on to the adarria, bumped into her.

  “Look at Doyle,” he said grimly.

  While the humans fought for purchase along the walls, Doyle stood in the center of the window, looking out at the wave.

  “Doyle!” Mina called. She didn’t know why she did, but the thought struck her that he watched the wave like a man watches his death approach. The light grew until his face shone with it. Then his whole body looked consumed, like it was burning with blue light. With a sickening, cold dread spreading through her body, Mina half-turned to Lincoln.

  “I love you, Lincoln,” she whispered.

  Then the wave hit.

  At first, it looked like a wall of water splashing up against the window. Mina dared to breathe a sigh of relief. But the next second, she was thrown backward into Lincoln as the entire Factory shuddered and groaned.

  The window popped and sparked like fireworks were hitting it. The thick walls of the Factory prevented any sound from reaching them. All Mina heard was her own breath and her blood rushing through her ears. The giant sparks grew until they looked like bolts of lightning streaking across the window. Streaks of light ghosted across Mina’s vision.

  Mina panicked. They were going to get into the ship. With vivid memories of burning cities and balls of fire that ate up entire forests, Mina waited for the room to crash down around them in a blaze of light. The Condarri would crush the ship like they were crumpling a ball of paper.

  But the window held. Still sparking, the blue wave backed off like it was retreating to its master. It gathered up toward the black ship waiting behind.

  “Why aren’t they any closer?” Mina asked.