Chapter 24
ANIASI WHATEVER AND OTHER INSANE ALIEN BURDENS
I should’ve been scared. Distracted by the fact he’d just admitted to being from outer space. I should’ve been…at the very least, too overwhelmed to be thinking with any of my hormones.
But this was Sky crowding me against the counter. And because it was Sky and I lost all sense around him, my hormones were still very much involved. They were practically throwing a party.
I’d never been this close to him before. Not really. Crescent had been the exception, and it’d been dark. Here, under the warm lamplight, I could see everything.
Tiny imperfections. A scar near the hinge of his jaw where stubble didn’t grow. A cowlick curling at his temple. A faint mole beneath his ear, along the tanned line of his throat.
They were flaws that made my heart stutter.
Human flaws.
Because despite everything I knew…he looked human. He felt human. And every cell of my body insisted he was.
But he wasn’t.
And for some reason, I didn’t care.
Then he brushed his thumb across my palm almost absently, and damn it, it felt way better than it should’ve. Whether it was some alien reaction or just me being pathetic, I didn’t know, but my face heated, and I barely suppressed a shiver.
Amelia was so wrong about me not being desperate.
Up close, his indigo irises gleamed with threads of pale blue and silver, the same uncanny colors I’d seen earlier when I’d glimpsed his Pladian form. Otherworldly and breathtaking. They reminded me of trapped starlight. How I’d never noticed before, I didn’t know. They weren’t quite normal.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured, looking up. Those eyes landed on mine, widened a little with shock. Enough so, I stiffened, the dreamy daze fading instantly.
“What? What is it?” I asked, swallowing hard. His hand was warm against mine.
As if he’d suddenly realized how close we stood—or maybe my rising blush had telegraphed my reaction—Sky released me and stepped back. Willing away the redness, I curved my fingers into my palm, clutching my fist in my other hand. My stomach was all sorts of confused about what to feel.
Sky backed up, halting a few feet away. Far enough for me to recall how breathing worked.
“That…tablet, as you called it,” he said, grimacing, “was ancient Pladian technology.”
My mouth fell open. “What?”
“I know it all happened fast. But did you see the crystal under the stone facade?”
I blinked rapidly, struggling to follow. “Yeah. I did. I touched it. The stone with the writing kind of dissolved and…” I waved the hand still holding my phone. “There was glowing crystal underneath.”
“And you touched it?”
“The crystal?” At his nod, I shrugged. “Yeah. I thought it burned me and that’s what caused these marks, but…” I uncurled my fingers, looking down at the markings, something cold and hard settling in my stomach. “That’s not what these are, is it?”
“No,” Sky agreed, something grim in the quiet admission. “I don’t think so, Rae.”
That ball of dread inside me grew heavier, and I lifted my gaze to his. “What is it?”
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “As far as I can tell, you absorbed the tablet’s energy.”
“I absorbed…” I stared at him, mouth working. “How the heck would I do that? What was that thing?”
He studied my face for a quiet moment, looking torn. The storm battered the windows in the tense silence. A moment passed before he spoke again.
“You have to understand. I’m not supposed to talk about any of this, Raven. The Creed—it’s very serious—”
“Sky,” I broke in, lifting my palm. “In case it’s slipped your mind, I’ve got alien squiggles on my freaking hand.”
“I know. Trust me, I know.” He pursed his lips, shifting his weight. “That’s why I’m here and why I’m telling you any of this.”
“Okay.” That and the fact that I’d seen his silver sparkly bits. I kept that observation to myself. “So what exactly was that stone tablet?”
I almost didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. Albeit with obvious reluctance.
“It was…a greeting, I guess you could call it. An info cache. An organic crystal mainframe designed to impart information using nexus technology and coded molecular…” He trailed off when he caught my blank look.
Shaking his head, he braced his hands on his hips.
“Basically, it was a calling card the Pladians left here with the hope humans would evolve to access it. Like…like a hard drive.”
“Wait—left here? That tablet looked old. Ancient, even.”
“Several thousand years old, yes.”
“So…” My head spun. “You’re telling me your people have already been here. On Earth. Thousands of years ago.”
His chest heaved with his heavy exhale. “Yeah. We’re…well, we used to be explorers. Scientists. Millennia ago, we surveyed this sector of space and left behind those crystals. On planets we visited.”
Earth had alien visitors. Millennia ago. Oh my God. The implications of that…for human history, for the galaxy…
With effort, I gathered myself. Worrying about the archaeological record having somehow skipped over ancient alien visitors could wait. “So Pladians were here, and they left a…rock with a crystal inside it?”
“One programmed with a message. My ancestors did that when visiting planets with budding civilizations. Think of it like leaving our phone number—except a lot more complicated. Obviously.”
“Kind of like leaving your number on the napkin for the waitress.”
Sky shrugged. “Sure.” His mouth twitched. “That happen to you a lot?”
I sniffed in amusement. “Definitely not to me, but to Kelly, sure.” He arched a brow slowly, like he didn’t believe me. Blushing, not sure what to do with that, I rotated my palm to study the marks. “So what the hell is this, then?”
“That’s the thing,” Sky said, growing somber again. “I don’t know how it happened, but that’s an old Pladian dialect. Like what would be inside the halix.”
“Halix?”
“The crystal. The nexus tech,” he clarified, crossing his arms over his broad chest, then uncrossing them. Like he couldn’t decide what to do with his hands. “That’s what it’s called.”
Sure. Of course. Sounded sufficiently science-fiction-y.
I took a deep breath, and my exhale came out shaky. “I’m not following. So these markings…are, what, burned into me from the crystal going boom while I was touching?”
I didn’t miss how Sky’s expression closed. The calm mask. That didn’t bode well for me.
“Essentially, those markings are the first part of the halix’s greeting. In ancient Pladian. It basically says, ‘Greetings to those who inhabit this planet.’ That’d be a…” He caught my horrified look and grimaced. “That’d be a rough translation.”
My ears were ringing. “I’ve got an alien greeting. On my hand.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”
“I’m a walking, talking alien greeting card.”
Sky watched me carefully. “Basically.”
“Basically,” I echoed dully. Panic tried to kindle, a tight ball of it cinching in my middle. I pushed it back down. “The stone part of the tablet disintegrated.”
“It did. It’s gone.”
“Why?”
“My guess?”
I gave him an incredulous look. “It’d be better than mine.”
“Fair,” he said, a faint smile touching his lips. “I think it was triggered by the…other alien tech present. It backfed and shorted.”
“Exploded,” I corrected, remembering the flash of light and heat and that pain, the burn.
Sky bit the inside of his cheek. “Correct. It exploded, and you were touching it. So all that energy…”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. My insides twisted. “You think it went into me.”
“It’s a hypothesis,” he murmured. “One backed up by the fact you emitted energy at Oasis. When you…” He cleared his throat, looking away. “When you touched me.”
“When I touched you and you went all silver and shiny.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, suddenly very interested in my cluttered coffee table.
“And what I saw. That was…you? The real you?” I whispered. I needed to hear him say that, too. To confirm I wasn’t losing it and hadn’t imagined the whole thing.
His wide shoulders rose and fell beneath his jacket.
Slowly, he turned his head. At least an arm span separated us, but I felt the impact of his midnight eyes across the distance.
There was a flash of something—vulnerability, maybe—in them and he nodded gravely.
“Yes. What you saw…that was my Pladian form.”
I mulled that over. His Pladian form had looked shockingly…homo sapiens. Well, besides the skin and those eerie eyes. He’d had a nose, a mouth, two eyes. Hands with five fingers. Two legs.
He seemed to have all the parts.
Well, the parts I could see, anyway.
Another flush threatened to crawl its way up my neck. I tried not to think about Sky’s parts and battled it back.
At any rate, that had to be what he’d meant by our evolutions taking similar paths. Pladians and humans had a lot in common. At least where physiology was concerned.
Fascinating.
And so not what I needed to be concentrating on right now.
“So, if your hypothesis,” I arched a brow at him, “is correct and I really did absorb some energy from that crystal, what’s that mean for me?”
The marks on my palm gleamed faintly under the lamplight. Pladian writing. That’s what those little shapes and marks were. A cosmic howdy.
When I looked up, I found Sky watching me with a tight expression.
“What?” I asked, tensing.
“It’s hard to explain the nexus tech, but the halix was designed to impart information, Rae. So when I say you absorbed the energy, I mean…”
My heart thumped hard, a shocked thud against my breastbone. “You think I absorbed something more than just these marks.”
“I think you absorbed the message the halix contained.”
He said it gently, but the words rocked me to the core. Rooted me to the floor. I stared at him. He stared back, dead serious.
That couldn’t be true. I wasn’t some kind of human flash drive. I hadn’t downloaded an alien info cache. I’d remember. I’d be…I’d be speaking Pladian and doing advanced physics equations or something, right? There’d be signs.
No, he had to be wrong. I hadn’t unlocked any secrets of the universe just because I had some new artwork on my hand.
I scoffed, shaking my head. Everything had been normal. Ish. As normal as my life was right now.
“Sorry,” I said, giving him a tight smile, even as my stomach did a little dive roll. “I hate to tell you this, but I think I’d know if I got zapped with alien info.”
“You emitted a burst of Pladian energy at Oasis,” Sky said flatly.
“What?” I jerked back. “How do you—”
“I ran a scan, and there was a residual signal.”
“What kind of scan? How—”
“Not important,” he said, slashing a hand through the air. “You’ll have to trust me.”
“Trust you?” I gawked at him. “You tried to wipe my memories and now you’re saying I’ve got some kind of…some kind of otherworldly download in my brain! What message do you think I got zapped with?”
His jaw tightened. “Rae, I can’t tell you everything. You’ll have to trust me. I’m right about this.”
“About my brain being stuffed with new information from an alien crystal info cache that exploded.” Words I’d never imagined uttering. “I think I know my own mind.”
“Be that as it may,” Sky said, still in that calm, sure tone, “that’s got to be why you remember what happened at the university and nobody else does.
The halix…it changed something in you. Nullified the neural manipulation.
” I reeled a little at the term neural manipulation, but he plowed forward.
“Maybe the ancient Pladians messed up and our tech interacts with human brains differently than anticipated. I don’t know.
There’s no way to know without digging into this more—”
“Digging into my brain?” I whisper-yelled hoarsely.
“No, I—” Sky broke off on a curse and pinched the bridge of his nose for a second before letting his arm drop and pinning me with an intense look. I’d busted through the calm, it seemed. “Rae, you’re in danger. You’ve got to at least believe me that something happened.”
“Yeah, I nearly got annihilated by a murder robot!”
He didn’t bat an eye. “You haven’t had any symptoms at all? Nothing’s different?”
I snapped my mouth closed and glared instead. It couldn’t be true. I’d know, right? I fisted my marked hand tightly. “So is this why I’m in danger, then?”
He didn’t answer right away, and when he looked away, I read the conflict in his tense profile. He was struggling again with his damn conscience. That stupid Creed. Annoyance rose beneath the shock and rising fear.
“Come on, Sky.” I planted my hands on my hips. “I deserve to know.”
He ran his tongue across his teeth and gave in.
“Yes, that’s the reason you’re in danger.
The Enil are here for the halix. It’s why they’re on Earth.
They know Pladians left those devices behind when we visited planets, and they’ve been searching for that one here.
” His nostrils flared on an exhale. “Since they arrived, they’ve been scanning for the cache’s energy signature.
Methodically. And they finally caught up to it here in One Willow. ”
Chasing it. Tracking it.
Methodically. Like a…like a search grid.
Damn it.
I laughed once. It came out dry and cracked. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Kelly really was right.”