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  “Right there,” he said, pointing to a building near the middle of the campus.

  “Got it. Thanks, Roberts.” I smiled at him. He quickly turned without looking back, leaving all three of us in the small dorm room.

  “That went well, I think,” Mary said, laugh lines crinkling around her eyes. I had the urge to boot Mae out and take Mary into my arms.

  “It’s late. How about we sleep, then regroup early in the morning?” This from Mae. Maybe she saw the look in my eyes. “And thanks for treating me like one of you. I’ll never forget it.” The words were touching, but ominous at the same time. I could feel goosebumps rise on my arms, and I wasn’t sure why.

  “Goodnight, Mae,” I said, and closed the door behind her. “Good thing the room is all the way across the hall,” I said, smirking at the woman I loved.

  She sniffed the air and took her shirt off. “I agree. How about a shower first?”

  Looking around, I realized dorm rooms didn’t have their own bathrooms. They had shared toilets and showers on each wing. At least that was how my old school was.

  “I know, I saw the sign down the hall.” She opened the door, and I chased after her down the corridor. The hall was dim, and we soon found ourselves interlocked under a weak showerhead. We had plenty of time for saving the world later. That night we took for ourselves.

  __________

  There was a tentative knock on the door, followed by a harder one seconds later. I rolled over and checked the time. Seven on the nose.

  “I think it’s for you,” Mary said weakly.

  “You always say that. Oddly, it never is.” I rolled out of the small twin bed, realizing I was naked.

  “Good morning, sleepyheads,” Mae said from the hall.

  After sliding into some pants, I opened the door. She held a tray with three coffees in it, each marked with our names. Here we were sleeping, and Mae was thinking of us. She truly was a great friend.

  Smiling and saying thank you, I ushered her into the small room. Mary had pulled some clothes from the chair beside the bed, and magically got dressed in moments under the blanket.

  “How about we take these to go? I have some news. Take a few to get ready. Leave through the entrance, and head left. About a hundred yards down is a park. I’ll be at a bench.” She looked at me and laughed, then took her coffee and left.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked Mary.

  She looked down, and I followed her gaze. My pants were on inside out. I burst out laughing, almost spilling my hot coffee.

  A few minutes later, after we’d bird-bathed in the bathroom sink, we made our way over to Mae. The morning was beautiful, a single wispy white cloud slowly trailing through the otherwise clear blue sky. It was going to be a hot day.

  Mae was sitting on the bench, legs extended and feet crossed. She held her coffee in her hand on her lap, and I was shocked to see how much she looked like Janine right then. That was exactly how she sat when she was in a contemplative mood. My heart suddenly ached, and surprisingly, I didn’t push it away, I embraced it. I felt the love I’d had for Janine fill me. The tender moments, the tough ones, the end of her life, the betrayal I’d felt at learning the truth; they all filled me, and for the first time in years, I felt true. True to myself, and true to Janine.

  “Are you okay, Dean?” Mary asked.

  “I am,” I answered, and I was. I felt her fingers slide through mine and squeeze my hand slightly.

  “What did you find out, Mae?” Mary asked, letting go of my hand and sitting down on the bench beside her friend. We knew Mae would have gotten up early to poke around the other hybrids and hear the latest gossip and news.

  “They were a little tight-lipped around me, at least the few I spoke with. Remember, to some of them, I’m the turncoat. Even to the ones that are happy to be here rather than dead, I still did something I wasn’t supposed to. But a lot of them are happy. It just goes against their indoctrination, which is weakening all the time. I do think there’s a larger group of dissidents than we originally guessed. I don’t have anything to back this up, but the averted eyes and nervous toe-tapping I got this morning told me enough.” Mae took a sip from her coffee and kept staring forward at the dew-covered grass in the park.

  “Did you ask about Leslie and Terrance, the two names Clayton the shooter had for us?” I asked.

  “I mentioned Leslie in passing to someone I didn’t know well. Asking after her like we were old friends or something. Jarvis paled and told me he hadn’t seen her in some time. That she must be busy with a project for the humans or something. A bunch of BS, if you ask me.”

  It didn’t seem like we were going to be able to get far on Mae’s previous relationships. We were going to have to rely on the intel of the guards, and the so-called “dean.” What a presumptuous name to give the head of the camp. It was softer than calling him what he really was: a warden.

  “I’m sorry, guys. I wish I could have done more,” Mae said.

  “I have an idea.” Mary smiled widely and took a drink of her coffee.

  SIX

  The dean’s office was my kind of place. Mahogany wood desk, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, not just filled with pretentious unread textbooks and encyclopaedias. I saw some King and Child in there too, along with a few of my favorite sci-fi authors. I wouldn’t mind getting locked in there for a few weeks. He even had a connected washroom and a small wet bar, with what appeared to be Scotch in a decanter and one of those fancy digital single-serve coffee makers.

  We sat crunched together in front of his large desk, our chairs nowhere near as comfortable and leather-clad as his. When we’d arrived, we were ushered in; I vaguely remembered the guard last night mentioning breakfast with the dean, and my stomach growled at the notion. Maybe he was too busy to eat with the likes of us.

  After ten minutes of sitting there, I got up and started flipping through an old Clarke paperback, admiring the classic cover. I’d been lucky enough over the last year to have more free time than I’d had in years, since I hadn’t gone back to working as an accountant. One thing I had missed was reading. Somehow reading about alien civilizations, when I knew it was real, took some of the fun out of it.

  The door opened, and a tall man stepped through. I’m not ashamed to say he was very handsome, his light hair neatly combed in a look I didn’t understand how to accomplish. I felt inadequate, with my sink-rinsed hair and wrinkled plaid shirt.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Skip Anderson, otherwise known as the dean.” He spoke with a prim accent. Not one I could place within a region, but more one acquired through an upbringing in private schools and Harvard education.

  I was still holding the book, and when I saw his eyes scan to it, I set it down. “You a fan of Clarke?” he asked.

  “Sure. Who isn’t? He revolutionized science fiction. But I’m not sure I have a stomach for any of it anymore,” I answered.

  “I always liked Asimov better. Robots always interested me as a teenager. Back to business. You really believe this guy from D.C.? There’s no way our hybrids could have contacted him,” Skip said smugly.

  Mary rolled her eyes. “I highly doubt that. We learned that there’s an intricate hybrid network of terrorists, recruited even in space. They had a long game, that’s for sure.”

  Skip leaned forward, frowning. “That’s impossible,” he said, voice raised. “They have no way to communicate, and no way out. We have things under control here.”

  “We were told your surveillance heard some keywords. What can you tell us about that?” I asked, wondering if he would lay his cards out on the table or hold them close to his chest.

  “Yes, we have, but those people are under our care now.” Skip spat the word “people,” and Mae tensed as he spoke.

  “Which people?” I asked.

  “The ones causing the stir at the Oval Office, and evidently around the world. They sent another group of guards when they heard the word Bhlat come th
rough the speakers. As if one of them saying the name of a race will actually make them appear and destroy us.” Skip looked like he was about to stand up, and the handsome man took on a dark, unpleasant face.

  “You do remember what happened under a year ago, right? Where were you that day?” Mary asked, probably thinking it would diffuse his undeserved anger.

  Skip slid back in his chair; her question seemed to have the desired effect. He looked much younger than his forty-something years as he began to quietly speak. “I hate those bastards.” He looked at Mae for a brief second and averted his eyes back to his desk. “I lived in D.C., well, Arlington. The ships came and I still went to work at the senator’s office. I remember being so mad that no one else showed up. Can you imagine me at work, trying to email files and work on a presentation while we had these gray ships over us, and a bunch of those behemoth vessels looming over the world? What an idiot I was.” He stopped, getting up to cross over to his wet bar. His hand moved to the Scotch, lingering for a few quiet moments before continuing to the single-serve coffee maker. “Coffee, anyone?” he asked, trying to put on an affable voice.

  We all shook our heads silently, me wanting him to continue his tale.

  “Very well.” He made a cup of coffee, and took it black back to his desk, sitting up a little straighter. “Sorry about that. It’s hard going back to that day, I’m sure for all of us. There I was like a crazy man, working as we were invaded, and my wife was trying to get me to come to her. Well, my ex-wife. She called me first thing and I told her I couldn’t see her. I was still angry with her for leaving me. She’d left a few months earlier, telling me all I cared about was work, and never had time for her.

  “She wanted a family. Kids, white picket fence…I thought I did too, when we first met. Only the older I got, the less I wanted that, and the more I wanted a career in politics. We were drifting, but… I didn’t want to admit it.” He was taking us on an extended journey through his time of the Event, but I assumed this path was relevant to the big picture. “She decided to head out of town, I guess. She made a break for it, but no one escaped, as we all know. Well, except you two and your friends.” He said the words with a drip of envy. “I was just leaving the office when the sun had set. I still can’t believe I stayed there all day. No wonder she left me.” He took a drink of his coffee and stared blankly past us toward the door.

  “Hey, life is full of growth moments. None of us were or are perfect. It’s what we do with our teachable moments that define us and change us,” Mary said, again impressing me with her ability to spout out positive messages.

  He looked at her and smiled lightly. “I’m still trying to be at peace with that idea. I was brought to vessel twelve, along with countless others. I spent the first day just trying to figure out what was going on. There were fights breaking out everywhere, and I witnessed two murders in the first two days alone. I never even tried to stop the young man from killing the other guy. I don’t think anyone was expecting it. He just clocked the older guy and went straight for his throat with his hands. The kid wasn’t big, but he had a sinewy strength to him. Before we knew it, the older man was on the ground, unconscious. The kid took something from his pocket and ran out of the room. Pills.

  “The room was full of people, and no one stopped him. We all just stood there with our jaws open, like we didn’t understand what had happened. Finally, a burly man ran after him, but I guess the kid was long gone down the corridors. I decided, then and there, I wasn’t going to be a passive prisoner.

  “After exploring the vessel and talking to a lot of people, I knew our prison was huge. Gargantuan, with hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions. We didn’t know the scope, but we were trying to figure it out. So that meant the area they beamed us up from must have been a large one. That meant my wife might have been there with me.” Skip stopped, and I almost said something comforting but decided to hold off. “My ex-wife, I meant. So that was my new goal. Find her among the throngs of matching rooms full of people. Some of the rooms seemed to have expelled a gas into the rooms, because people were down all over the place, seemingly at random.”

  We knew now that the Kraski were planning on moving their whole species away from their home, and they were going to put everyone in some sort of stasis using this gas. It basically slowed down the metabolic functions and allowed them to keep humans alive without food and water for prolonged periods of time. Quite a cool concept, if it didn’t mean the death of so many people. It turned out a percentage of people were deathly allergic to the alien toxin, and about five percent of Earth was lost just from that alone, among the already sick who just couldn’t survive, the vessels we’d lost to the sun, and the mass firings the hybrids had rained down on some vessels.

  “Quite the needle in a haystack,” I said, getting up to make myself a coffee. I asked if anyone else wanted anything, and after a pause, the dean asked for a splash of Scotch. I wasn’t going to judge the guy for taking a pinch at eight thirty in the morning as he told us a story; I expected it wasn’t going to end well for anyone involved.

  He continued as the single-serve machine whirred and poured. I passed him the Scotch, and he swirled the brown liquid on the bottom of his tumbler and watched it as he spoke. “I tried to find the upper corner – the top floor and far left room. It took me hours to get there, and when I did, I searched that first room. People were milling about: some in the halls, some fearful of leaving the room for fear of retribution from an alien host we hadn’t seen yet.

  “Some people thought it was a crazy government experiment, and others thought they were just dreaming. I called for Marcie. When I entered a room of the unconscious people, I searched through the piles of them, hoping to see her lovely face. I never did find her. She didn’t make it. They killed her.” His eyes moved once again to Mae’s face, hard lines etched on his forehead. “I found her name on my vessel list after it was over. If only I could have made it to her, I could have protected her.”

  “Or died yourself,” Mary said softly – perhaps to make him feel better, but it didn’t work.

  “I would have rather died trying to save her than lived and not been there,” he replied.

  I wondered how this traumatized man had ended up running the camp there, but in the end, everyone was traumatized by the same event. Almost every single person in the world had been through similar situations and had lost someone close to them. My mother, cousins, old co-workers, friends, and countless others. We were all bonded in our loss.

  “I’m really sorry, Skip,” Mary said. “Losing a spouse is one of the hardest things anyone will ever endure. Dean and I have been through it too.”

  He frowned. “Weren’t you guys married to some of them?” He nodded his chin at Mae. “I’m not sure it counts.”

  “Now wait a damn minute,” Mary started. I set my hand on her shoulder and could feel how tense she was.

  “Skip, I think we can agree to disagree, but this isn’t conducive to what we’re doing here. Now can we see the video surveillance, and then talk to those two that seem to be causing all the stir from inside your gates?” I added emphasis to the word “your,” so he knew I tossed a little blame at him. He might have been through a hard time, but he was still being a jerk, and had likely been one long before the Kraski had lowered to our world.

  With a swift motion, he slid the Scotch down his throat, quietly setting the glass on a wooden coaster on the desk. “Of course. President Dalhousie says you’re members of our new Earth Defense, and she evidently trusts you, so why don’t you follow me?”

  We left the office and were soon walking through a long hall with a freshly polished floor. I noticed someone who looked just like Vanessa sweeping the corners of a room as we passed. We continued on, and there were plenty more hybrids with familiar faces doing different tasks; some were unfamiliar outside of the news feeds. There were six different “models” of them. Janine had been one of them, Bob another. Then, of course, our friendly neighbor
hood saboteur, Vanessa. Ray’s girlfriend Kate was the other model, and I had met her once at my wedding so many years ago. After that, we had an Asian man and an Indian woman, whom Magnus had described as matching the two he and Natalia had known overseas.

  Mae smiled at some of them, and a few waved to her like they were old acquaintances. I was sure most wondered what one of their own was doing with the visiting strangers, but many recognized her as their savior. A lot of them knew it was with her help that they were alive. Others blamed her for their imprisonment and wished they had burned in the sun like planned. Those were the ones we were after.

  “Mae,” someone called as we passed a gymnasium. There was a group inside playing a strange-looking game, with four small nets and a silver disk. It looked fun, and maybe a little dangerous. The man was sweating profusely but had a wide smile across his face. “Hey, Mae. I’m not sure if you remember me, but my name’s Richard. We met…well, right after we arrived. I was from vessel seven. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you again. And to you guys too.”

  He extended his hand, and I shook it despite the sweat dripping from him.

  “Of course I remember you, Richard. How are things going here?” Mae asked.

  The game had paused, but when they saw Richard was tied up, someone sitting on the sidelines jumped in and the game started up again. I looked at Skip, and he clearly wasn’t enjoying the delay. Mary, noticing this, smiled at me and took the dean aside, speaking softly to him and taking him away from us. Richard guided Mae and me into the gym, and we sat down on one of those wooden benches I hadn’t sat on since my days of riding the pine on my varsity basketball team.

  “This is a nice place to live. We work a bit each day, but I mean, it’s no slave labor.” He paused, looking embarrassed at his choice of words. “I just want you to know that most of us are so grateful for your part here. We were real slaves before this. Genetically created to invade a planet and act like humans. The Kraski never cared about us. There are a few who drank the Kool-Aid, if you will, but they’re few and far between. They also seem to know to keep it to themselves, because I guarantee you, if I heard someone plotting against Earth, I’d string them up and call the dean over there to send his guards. This is our home now.”