Chapter 13
I SURVIVED A KILLER ROBOT, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS brUISE
It wasn’t until much, much later—after I’d given Officer Brown my contact info and signed some liability waiver for the university, and after I’d recapped my lie twice and submitted to one last EMT checkup (while resisting her push for a hospital visit again)—that I managed to escape.
I sat in the parking lot a full twenty minutes without starting Faith’s engine.
Mulling over, for one, how I was racking up near-death experiences like they were free drink stamps at the college coffee shop. And they were getting more and more…out of this world.
The afternoon sun had finally broken through the low-hanging clouds, warming the air and chasing away some of the chill. I was still shivering, though, when I tilted my head back against the seat and finally let myself breathe.
And I finally let myself remember every single fantastical, horrifying, sanity-challenging detail.
There’d been no explosion.
There’d been a robot in the lab.
A giant, seven-foot-tall mechanical creature had wrecked the storage room and come after me. Chased me. Grabbed me.
I knew I wasn’t crazy. Because I had proof. It throbbed beneath the sleeve of my hoodie every time I moved.
I needed to see it.
Even lifting the arm hurt. Wincing, I tugged the hoodie over my head anyway, tossing it into the passenger seat beside my dust-covered book bag. Bracing myself, I looked down and…
“Shit,” I hissed, extending my arm all the way.
A bruise had already formed, ugly and dark, in the unmistakable shape of a huge six-fingered hand. My pulse took off in a sprint, and sweat bloomed at my temples.
Real.
There was my undeniable proof that it was real. I hadn’t imagined any of it.
Just like I hadn’t imagined what had run me off the road the other night.
I couldn’t deny anything anymore. Not with this purple mark on my skin completely wrecking any excuses I could come up with.
I lowered my arm and slumped back in the seat, every nerve buzzing. My body flooded with another round of adrenaline, like fight-or-flight hadn’t gotten the memo it was too damn late for either.
There’d been a robotic monster in the school lab.
An angry, robotic monster made of weird metal parts.
So…what now?
Was the university covering it up? The cops? Those creeps in the black suits? The guy in military dress? Did any of them know how I’d ended up all the way back at the student stairwell, on the opposite side of the building from the lab?
Maybe I did need a tinfoil hat because a small part of me was starting to think maybe all of Kelly’s ridiculous theories were spot on after all.
I gripped the steering wheel with both hands, flinching when the motion tugged at my bruised flesh.
Outside the window, campus life carried on.
Students streamed down sidewalks and filled the lots, laughter and voices mixing with the low rumble of traffic.
People headed in and out of classes. Just another weekday.
Police had been stringing caution tape across the entrance to the Finke building when I left…but the rest of the university carried on. Business as usual. The staff and administration must’ve been clinging to that illusion with both hands.
But how?
Normalcy had officially taken a nosedive the moment I was chased by Optimus Prime’s smaller, much meaner cousin.
Everyone else moved like gravity still worked. Meanwhile, I was floating in orbit, watching my life spin out below. Watching my skepticism, my thoroughly vetted alternative explanation for all this chaos, dissolve just like the tablet had.
Glowing green eyes, too-sharp claws…
My lungs squeezed tight again, that lightheadedness creeping back in. Sweat blurred my vision. I fumbled with the ignition and jammed the window button, lowering it. Cool, bracing autumn air swept in, carrying the scent of imminent rain.
I gulped in a breath and held it.
It helped. A little. Just enough.
Steadier, I stared out the windshield, jaw tight, and finally said the word, the one I’d been choking on since I woke up on that hallway floor. Maybe even longer. Since the moment on the country road when the ground had smoldered under my palm.
“Aliens.”
There it was.
The strange light that had run me off the road.
The terrifying creature in the lab.
The white-hot light. The glowing tablet.
After all of it…
Kelly was right. There were freaking aliens here.
I sniff-laughed, a pitiful, half-hysterical sound teetering right on the verge of a sob, before leaning my head back again.
There was no way I was telling her. In fact, I wasn’t telling anyone.
Not Mom. Not Dustin. Not Amelia. Not until I knew what the hell I was dealing with.
Squaring my shoulders, I tried to think, really think, like the version of myself who still believed in logic and evidence. I cataloged the things I did know.
Like, for one, the robot had clearly been after the weird tablet I’d pulled out of that box.
It had reached for it. Like it recognized and wanted it. Too many coincidences for the truth not to be right there. That had to be what Professor Stern had been working on, too. That was what the military escort had delivered. That was why security had been crawling all over the anthro wing.
Maybe even why the suits were there. Not for the robot, but for the tablet. Could it be they didn’t even know the robot had been there? Maybe that’s why no one was freaking out about it.
So if that was the case, what the hell was that artifact? It’d looked just like a rock slab at first, covered in glyphs. Like a weird Rosetta Stone, except with only that single language on it.
Until it’d cracked open to reveal…something else.
Was it some crazy alien object? A power source? …a weapon?
It couldn’t be that dangerous. I’d found it in a foam box, packed like someone’s leftovers. It wasn’t exactly sealed in a vault.
Then again, I’d seen what it did. I’d felt it.
Had the robot taken it when I passed out, or had whatever caused that brilliant flash of light vaporized it? Maybe that light had been the explosion.
Maybe there had been one, something real. Something destructive. But if so, it’d come after the rest. After the lab had already become a battleground.
I blew out a long breath.
Okay, but that still didn’t explain how I’d ended up back in the hallway without a scratch on me, short of the bruises where the thing had grabbed me.
No, where the alien had grabbed me.
I tried the word out in my head again and shivered.
Now that I was calmer, the memories were clearer. I frowned.
I swore something else had been in that room, too.
Besides me, Mr. Robot-from-Hell, and whoever’s skeleton had been artfully splayed across the table.
I’d seen a dark figure when I’d first entered the lab.
And again, right at the end, before the white light crashed in and wiped my brain clean like an ice scraper across a frosty windshield.
I stared out the window without really seeing anything, too absorbed in replaying the events.
A dark blur. Then a flash of silver. A streak that might’ve been a body. At the very least…a form.
It had all happened so fast. There’d been so much flashing light. Electricity.
Fear.
Frustrated, I leaned back and gripped the steering wheel. I’d think better at home. After a hot shower and ten pounds of pizza. Maybe even a glass—or three—of wine.
I started to reach for the ignition, then froze, a new kind of fear slinking its way down my spine.
No, surely I’d seen wrong.
I sat back. Slowly, I twisted my right hand until my palm faced up, and my insides pitched, stealing my breath.
Dull daylight glanced off faint, pearlescent white shapes on my skin, swirls in a vaguely geometric pattern. So faint, they were nearly invisible unless I tilted my hand just right.
There were markings on my palm.
Numb, morbidly fascinated, I traced them with the fingers of my left hand.
Nothing. No raised edges. No pain. No heat.
But they were there. Dots and slashes and elegant loops, just barely visible at the right angle. Embedded. Like scars. Or…symbols.
Glyphs like those I’d seen on the tablet? No. These were different.
I’d never seen anything like them.
Maybe I could just…I used the hem of my tank top to scrub at them, my heart in my throat. It didn’t work. The marks didn’t smear or fade. They didn’t even smudge. There was nothing to scrub off.
They weren’t on my skin. They were in it. My scalp prickled.
This was the hand I’d touched the artifact with.
It had to be a burn. That was the most logical explanation. Something to do with the heat, the light, the electricity. Maybe the weird charge that’d zapped the entire lab.
I’d just read about ball lightning burns, and some of those had looked like strange, intricate designs. Lichtenberg figures.
Yes. That made sense. Sort of.
The fact that it looked like alien artwork could be a coincidence. Pareidolia. My brain searching for patterns in chaos.
That was all it was. Had to be.
Except…it didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like a burn. Or a scar. Or anything at all.
My fingers trembled. I dropped my hand into my lap and slumped against the seat.
Yeah, I was definitely going to need that wine.
My movements were as mechanical as the robot that’d nearly killed me when I started the engine and drove home on autopilot. Just me and one more gigantic piece of a weirdness puzzle to deal with.
I was going to need that whole bottle of wine.