CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Kevin stared up in horror at the small ship dragging him and Chloe inside it, feeling completely helpless as it lifted them up with its beam of light. They dangled in the air, turning over helplessly as it drew them up.

It had seemed so certain that they would be able to stop the aliens using the virus they’d taken from the tar pits, but the aliens had sent the vial back empty, almost with

contempt

.

That wasn’t the worst part though. The worst part was that Luna was gone. They’d made Luna one of them, and that hurt more than Kevin had thought anything could.

Chloe screamed beside him as they rose, tumbling in air that no longer seemed to know which way was down. Kevin could hear the fear there, but also the anger.

Metal closed around them, and they tumbled together onto the floor of the small ship that had sucked them up. Kevin struggled to stand, bracing himself, half expecting to be attacked by some alien force.

Instead, he found himself standing in the middle of a large, round, white-walled room. There was a circular portal on the floor that looked as though it opened and closed like the aperture of a camera, and nothing else.

Chloe went over to one of the walls and banged a fist on it.

“Kevin, what are we going to do?”

Kevin wished he had an answer. But after everything that had happened down below, he didn’t think he had answers for anything anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Chloe hit the wall again, the thud sounding dull against the interior.

“Chloe, that won’t—”

Suddenly, they were standing in thin air. The wall was now as translucent as glass, giving Kevin a clear view of Sedona falling away beneath him, and the larger ship above that they were rising up to meet.

This close, Kevin could see the door—more like a cavernous mouth—open to accept them, letting their ship into what must have been a hangar. There was a ripple of something as they passed into it, some shield or membrane that must have been there to hold its atmosphere in place.

“Incredible,” Chloe said with a gasp.

Kevin had to agree. The hangar was large enough for dozens of the ships, all connecting to walkways. Their ship connected to one.

They stopped abruptly, and a section of the wall slid aside, revealing an open doorway.

Kevin and Chloe stared at each other. Why weren’t they being greeted? Attacked?

“So they want us to just walk out?” Chloe asked. “Why haven’t they killed us yet?”

Kevin wondered that himself.

“Maybe it’s a trap,” he said.

She started to cry.

Kevin put a hand on her arm. He knew how bad things could get, and he found his thoughts caught between concern for her and worries about what might be happening here. Why were they alone? Why weren’t they greeted by the aliens’ equivalent of police or soldiers waiting for them?

“Should we walk out?” Kevin asked. “Or stay in here?”

She looked at him.

“Neither option seems safe,” she said.

Chloe stepped to the opening, to Kevin’s surprise, and he followed. But suddenly she stopped, walking right into something. It was an illusion—a translucent wall that stopped her from walking but allowed her to look out.

Then their small ship starting moving again, slowly, through the massive hangar.

Kevin stepped up beside her and looked out in awe. The hangar was huge and rounded, looking as much grown as built, the walls seeming to pulse faintly with power. But other than the rows and rows of ships, the space was empty.

There were no captured people, no machines working on things, and no aliens.

“Where is everyone?” Chloe asked, echoing his thought.

Kevin didn’t answer, because he was too busy looking back at Earth. Sedona sat below them, seeming so close, yet so achingly far.

“Why aren’t we falling down toward it?” he wondered aloud.

Chloe frowned at him, looked around, and then shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the gravity works differently here. I’m kind of glad we aren’t, though.”

Kevin was glad too, because it would have been a really long way to fall. It took him a moment to realize that it seemed to be getting further with every passing moment, receding little by little, the buildings growing smaller until Kevin could no longer make them out.

“We’re still moving!” he said. “We’re going up into space!”

In spite of everything, in spite of the horrors that had been inflicted on the world, and the danger they were probably in, in spite of the fact that they’d failed to destroy the aliens, Kevin had to admit a part of him was excited. The idea of actually going into space was almost too incredible to believe.

“It would be cool except for

where

we’re going,” Chloe pointed out.

Kevin could hear the fear there, and he could even feel some of it himself. If they were heading up, then there was only one place where they could be going, and that would be a dangerous place for them both. The world ship hung above, its rocky surface punctuated by spike-like towers, but almost blank aside from that.

It was frightening, yet the thing was, it might also be their best opportunity to actually

do

something about all of this.

“I know you’re afraid,” Kevin said. “But there’s nothing we can do to stop it. And look at the bright side: we had no way of stopping them back on Earth. Maybe up here we can.”

Chloe scoffed. “How?”

Kevin shrugged. He didn’t know yet. There had to be something. Maybe there would be some way to shut down the things the aliens were doing. Maybe there were ways to drive them off, or fight back against them, or even kill them.

“We have to try,” Kevin said.

He couldn’t help thinking about Luna. What had happened to her was a lot worse than being transported in some alien ship.

They stood there quietly, watching as the Earth grew smaller and smaller beneath them. Soon, it was the size of a watermelon, then a baseball, then a marble against the night sky.

Kevin turned and looked at the mother ship. He hadn’t realized quite how big the alien world was before, and it was only as the craft turned and shifted in space that he got a real sense of how large it was.

“It’s an actual world,” Kevin said, unable to keep the awe out of his voice.

“We knew that,” Chloe said. “It’s been up in the sky.”

“But an actual

world

…”

There was a big difference between seeing something far off and being there. Like the moon, Kevin could have covered up the world ship with the palm of his hand from Earth, but now that they were here, it stretched out as far as he could see in every direction. There were structures on the surface, although most of it looked barren and empty, with only giant towers sticking up from it like the spines of a sea urchin. There were also mouthlike apertures, big enough that even a ship like the one they were on could fit into them without touching the sides. Kevin couldn’t imagine what might have carved gaps like that into a world, but right then they had bigger things to think about.

“I think we’re going into it,” Kevin said. Not just to a world, but inside it, down past the outer shell of its surface.

Chloe didn’t look happy about that. “We’re going to be trapped. We’ll never find our way out.”

“We will,” Kevin reassured her.

He had to believe that. The alternative was that they were heading down to their deaths as the ship that carried them descended into the surface of the world…

…and through it.

Kevin stared. The entire interior of the world ship was like a hollow shell, and inside it there was everything Kevin might have expected on the surface of a planet. There were oceans and landmasses, vehicles moving back and forth, and cities so huge they seemed to take up almost every scrap of available land, turning the whole great ship into one giant hive of activity. Spires stood out from different spots on the vast city, golden and gleaming, looking like palaces set against the rest. A great reddish-gold orb pulsed at the heart of the planet, giving off heat and light.

Kevin thought he could see figures down below, but they were too distant to make out the details yet.

“Aliens,” Chloe said, staring down. “Not people controlled by them, not messages, not their voices… aliens.”

Kevin knew what she meant. All this time, they’d had only hints of the aliens, seen only the effects of what they could do. Now, here they were on the aliens’ world, and there was so

much

of it.

They felt the clunk as the ship that carried them locked into place on the world, steadying their view of a city beyond in which creatures of every impossible shape and size walked at strange angles, seemingly held in place sideways and upside down in defiance of gravity, or maybe they just had control of the gravity, so that any direction could be “down.”

This time, the door opened for real. Kevin could feel the slight breeze on his face, warm and balmy, smelling unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

What surprised him the most, though, was what lay waiting on the other side.

A trio of figures stood there, waiting to greet them.

They were almost identical, which in this place seemed like an impossibility to Kevin. They were tall and hairless, pale-skinned, with eyes that reminded Kevin of a wasp’s, except that they were a pure, milky white. They wore long robes over pale jumpsuits, and each seemed to have an assortment of metal, and occasionally fleshy, devices set around its body.

The one standing at the heart of the trio spoke. Its words came out in English from a translator on its arm, but Kevin didn’t need it to translate the flat monotone. His brain did that for him.

“Welcome, Kevin McKenzie. We have been waiting for you.”