“What did they say?” Lan asks, but she notices my morose expression. “Oh, sorry, Li-Li!”
Only my father and closest of close friends call me that. I used to love pandas, okay? My father thought it was cute and that’s how I got the nickname.
Her eyebrows smash together and furrow her brow. “Did you tell them about Dr. Wendland’s research? I can send them the Q-cluster location to the paper. And my parents—”
“Won’t matter,” I say.
“Did your mother utter the three dreaded words?” she asks.
“Yes.”
We share a moment of silence. Lan’s blue eyes shine more than normal as she nibbles on the blond hair at the end of her French braid. She’s fifteen, but soon to be sixteen—a little over a year younger than me, but we bonded over our mutual love of Diamond Rockler— the greatest singer in the Galaxy. Our only disagreement was over who he was going to marry, me or Lan, and that was three A-years ago. I wouldn’t have gotten so close to her except my parents assured me that this was their last assignment. Sigh.
“My brother works for the port,” Lan says. “You can sneak off the shuttle and he’ll hide you until it takes off. By the time they discover you’re missing, they can’t return.”
An interesting idea. My heart races with the possibilities. I could start my own life. I hope to attend Brighton University on Planet Rho, a mere four Earth-years away. We measure distance between planets by how much E-time passes while you’re traveling, not by how many Actual years pass. Which means if I stay here, I’ll be fifty A-years older when my parents arrive at Yulin, but they’ll only be ninety days older. Crazy right?
Regardless, I’d never see my parents again, which is why they won’t leave me behind. Not yet anyway. They’re still grieving over Phoenix and hoping I’ll catch the science bug and stay with them, but I am tired of hanging around ancient things that have been buried for thousands of E-years. My excitement over running away fades.
“Thanks, Lan, but I can’t do that to my parents.”
She nods and gives me a watery smile. “I understand.” She heaves a sigh, then lowers her voice. “When should we plan your...” Lan hesitates. “You-know-what.”
I glance at my door. It’s closed, but I sit at my desk and insert the entanglers into my ears—they resemble little round plugs, but they allow me to link directly to the Q-net through the terminal. Then I engage the privacy mode. If my parents walk into my room, they’d see a blank screen, but I can still see and hear Lan—another super cool invention courtesy of the Q-net.
How about at my last required soch-time? Do you think Jarren can fool the snoops? I think.
Of course. Who do you think created the dead zone in the back corner of the supply bay?
I laugh. You mean the kissing zone? I heard Jarren took Belle there for a smooch fest .
He did not! Lan’s cheeks turn pink.
Oh? Do you have better intel?
Shut up .
A knock at my door prevents me from replying. Lan says good-bye and I disconnect and return to my flopped position on the bed. I might be resigned to leaving, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let my parents off easy. “Display wall art,” I say to the screen. Only when it once again shows images of my old friends, do I say, “Come in.”
Dad pokes his head inside as if expecting to be ambushed. “Is it safe?”
I huff. My temper isn’t that bad. Well…not since I was seven A-years. “Only if you brought something sweet.”
He holds his hand out, revealing a plate of chocolate chip cookies. A warm sugary scent wafts off them— fresh baked! My empty stomach groans in appreciation.
“Then it’s safe.” I’m not above bribery.
He enters and sets the plate down on my desk. He has a box tucked under his right arm. “You okay?”
“I’m gonna have to be. Right? Unless you’re here to tell me you changed your mind?” I sit up at the thought.
“Sorry, Li-Li. We’re not ready to lose you.” My father hunches over slightly as grief flares in his brown eyes.
My older brother decided to leave for Earth two years ago when he turned eighteen A-years. Earth is about ninety-five E-years away. So by the time Phoenix arrives on Earth, we will all be dead and Phoenix will still be eighteen.
Guilt over my earlier snit burns in my stomach.
“You just have to go on one more assignment with us, then you can decide what you want to do,” Dad says.
“It’s all right.” I gesture to the box. “What’s in there?”
He sets it down on my desk. “A puzzle.”
I’ve fallen for that before. “Are you sure it isn’t a bunch of random rubble?”
“No. We think we have all the pieces, but my assistant swears no one can possibly put it back together.” He raises a slender eyebrow.
Appealing to my ego, he knows me so well. “Let’s see.”
Dad opens the box and pours out what appears to be shards of pottery—all terracotta, ranging in sizes from a thumbnail to six centimeters. I scan the pieces. They’d once formed a specific shape, and I can already see it has edges. Could be a piece of armor. Or a shield. Intrigued, I sort through the fragments, flipping them over and matching colors.
My father hands me the adhesive. “I’ll let you prove Gavin wrong.” He pulls my straight black hair back behind my shoulders and plants a kiss on my temple. “Thanks, Li-Li.”
“Uh huh.” The air pulses as he leaves. I arrange the pieces—about a thousand or so. There are markings on most of them. Odd. I group the ones that appear similar together. Reconstructing artifacts is actually fun. Not I-want-to-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life fun, but challenging and satisfying to make something whole again.
No one was more surprised than I. Trust me. I was roped into helping my parents a few years ago when they noticed that, after attending my required socialization time, or rather soch-time, and doing my school lessons, I had plenty of free time. I argued there was a reason it was called “free.” It went over as well as my bid to stay on Xinji.
I was assigned all the chores no one else wanted to do, like sweeping and running the 3D digitizers—each of the thousands of Warriors has to be scanned and cataloged. But one night I found a half-finished reconstruction of a face and, well, I finished it in a couple hours. My parents made a big deal about it and now when there’s a jumble of fragments that is declared “impossible” by the team, it comes to me. Not that I’m that great. There have been plenty of boxes filled with bits that I couldn’t get to go together. A 3D digitizer could do it in minutes, but we only have four so using them for repairing broken pottery is not the priority.
This piece is tricky. Usually once I connect the edges, the rest is easier to match. But the shape is…octangular? Strange. Lan messages me while I’m working.
“It’s all set,” she says. “All our friends have been informed.” Her voice is heavy with dismay.
I glance at her. “Thanks.”
There’s an awkward silence.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“At this point, I’ve no idea.”
“No. The markings on it.”
I peer at the symbols etched into it. Silver lines the grooves so they stand out from the reddish orange clay. Lan should recognize them. Her parents are the base’s language experts and cryptologists. While life-sized and made of terracotta, the extraterrestrial Warriors have quite a few differences from those discovered in China. One is they are covered with alien symbols that no one has been able to translate.