Inheritance

twitch at her touch.

“No,” he said.

She lifted her gaze to his eyes and realized the blood was from the agent’s head. David pulled his hand away, looking a little sick.

The sound of a door slamming startled them all. They crawled over to the lower hay bale and peeked over the edge. The kitchen light had gone off, and they saw the homeowner, now dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a lunch box and a hard hat, heading to his truck. The engine rumbled and a moment later he pulled out of the carport, heading down the dirt driveway. They waited until the sound of the truck had completely faded away, and then they waited a bit longer, worried that he might have forgotten something and would come back. Finally Reese whispered, “I think we should go in.” She pulled the gun from its hiding place nearby, and Amber recoiled from her.

“Be careful with that,” Amber said.

“I am.” Reese ejected the clip and counted five bullets before pushing it back into place.

“Do you know how to use that?” Amber asked warily.

“You pull the trigger,” Reese said.

Amber raised an eyebrow. “Oh really.”

David picked up the agent’s gun and got to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Shit, I forgot you had one too,” Amber said.

“I don’t think we should leave them behind,” David said.

Amber eyed his bloody fingers and said, “You two scare me.” She carefully stood up, barely flinching as she walked around the stacked hay bales and headed for the house.

The front door was locked, and the front window—through which Reese could see a sparsely furnished living room—was locked too. They went to the rear of the house, looking for an easier way in, and found a back door with a square window in it. Reese looked from Amber to David. “Are we really going to break into this house?”

He shrugged. “Or we could keep walking and hope someone takes us in?”

She shook her head at him. “Funny.”

Amber had already begun to look for something to use to break the glass. She returned a minute later with a fist-sized rock. “Get out of the way,” she said. When they were all a decent distance from the door, she hurled the rock at the glass. It shattered, and the rock dropped through into the house. “Give me your jacket,” Amber said to Reese.

Reese took it off and handed it over. Amber walked to the door, edging carefully around the fragments of glass that had fallen outside, and wrapped the remains of the jacket over her hand to knock a few more shards out of the window. Then she gingerly reached inside and unlocked the door, pushing it open. “Voila,” she said.

“We scare you?” Reese said.

Amber shook out the ruined jacket and held it out to Reese. “I never said it was a bad thing.”

The house was clearly a bachelor’s residence. The back door opened into a mudroom that was empty except for an extra pair of work boots and a puffy winter coat. They passed a bathroom with a sink strewn with men’s shaving equipment, and a bedroom with an unmade bed and a dresser with several drawers hanging open. They proceeded into the kitchen, which had the remains of someone’s breakfast sitting on the counter: a cereal bowl with an inch of milk in the bottom next to a box of Frosted Flakes. There was a stack of mail on the round kitchen table in the corner. Reese laid Carter’s gun on the table and shuffled through the envelopes. “Hey, we’re in Ohio,” she said. “The guy who lives here is named Carl Baldwin.” A cordless phone was lying nearby, and David set the agent’s gun down to pick up the phone.

“Wait a second,” Reese said. “Who are you calling? Don’t you think our parents’ lines will be tapped by now? The Blue Base people have to be looking for us.”

Amber held out her hand. “Let me call Malcolm Todd.”

“Agent Todd?” Reese said in surprise. “Where is he?”

“He’s not really an agent, and he had to go undercover. He leaked the video, you know. The one of me getting shot. So after that he couldn’t exactly go back to work for your government.”

“Really?” David said. “So he’s been hiding out ever since then?”

“Sort of. He’s been waiting for the call to go back home, but the ship hasn’t been able to leave Earth yet. So he went underground.”

“Is he near here?” Reese asked.

“I don’t know where he is, but he can contact the ship securely, and they can get here. Give me one of those envelopes with the address on it.”

Reese handed her an electric bill, and David gave her the phone. Amber dialed a number from memory. It rang for what seemed like a long time, but finally she said, “Hello?” After a brief pause, she began to speak into the phone in Imrian. Reese had never heard more than a few words in the language, and hearing Amber speak it was startling. Even though she knew Amber was Imrian, Reese had always thought of her as being American. Of course, Reese realized, she wasn’t. Amber’s whole body language changed when she spoke Imrian; she seemed to stand up straighter, and the tone of her voice lowered. The language sounded liquid, with multiple syllables rolled together in soft Rs and breathy Hs. After a few minutes of conversation Amber read out the address on the electric bill, and then concluded the call.

“What did he say?” Reese asked.

Amber put the phone down. “They’re coming. He said to be ready in a few hours and to wait outside.”

“Did he say anything about our parents?” David asked.

“They’re okay. He’s been in touch with the ship since we were taken, and they’re all safe.” Amber rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I need to use the bathroom to wash off my feet and stuff. Do you guys need it first? I might be a while.”

David glanced at Reese. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

“Thanks,” Reese said. “I’ll be quick.”

The bathroom was about a thousand times cleaner than the one in the farmhouse where they had been held prisoner. As Reese washed up in the sink, the water ran brown down the drain. She felt filthy all over. Dirt from the basement was crusted over her previously white shirt, and dirt from the field was smeared all over her pants. She found rusty spatters of dried liquid on her knuckles, and she scraped at them with damp fingernails, hoping it wasn’t Carter’s blood from when she had shot him.

She thought she was going to be sick.

She moved to the toilet, flipping up the seat, and gasped raggedly as she bent over. Droplets of water plummeted from her chin into the toilet bowl. I shot a man, she thought. Last night it had happened so fast she hadn’t had time to think. She had no love for Carter, but she hadn’t wanted to kill him either. What would happen to her if he was dead? Would she be tried for murder? The thoughts made her head spin. She remembered the agent saying he could make sure she wasn’t prosecuted for what she had done. David had smashed his head in with a rock.

“Oh God,” she muttered.

She had to kneel on the floor. Her hands gripped the edge of the toilet bowl and she tried to breathe regularly. One thing at a time, she told herself. First things first: get out of Carl Baldwin’s house.

When her stomach stopped lurching, she got up. Her hands shook as she finger-combed her hair away from her face. It didn’t look good, but it helped a little. She looked less like an escaped lunatic, and more like the average juvenile delinquent who had gone running in dress clothes across a field in the middle of the night. She sighed, dried her hands on Carl Baldwin’s towel, and went back to the kitchen.

David and Amber were looking at each other with extremely weird expressions on their faces. They spun around when she returned, and she realized she had been gone for a while. “What’s going on?” she asked warily.

“I have to pee,” David said, brushing past her.

Amber went to the refrigerator and opened the door, peering inside. “I’m starving.”

Reese followed her. “Amber.”