Ashfall Prophecy, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Part One: Run, Lie, Fight
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Two: The Most Dangerous Place In the Universe
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three: Whose Planet Is This?
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Three Months Later: The Moon
Chapter 30
About the Author
Books by Pittacus Lore
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
They left you behind.
Hours must have passed before you could fight your way back to consciousness. The simple act of raising your eyelids felt like a monumental task. You’ve faced less resistance punching through brick walls. It took longer still for sensation to return to your limbs. You’re stuck there on the cold floor of the temple, staring up at the vaulted ceiling. You’re trapped in your body like it’s a coffin and this place is your tomb. You wanted to scream and thrash, but you couldn’t move—just your mind bouncing off the padded walls inside your skull.
Syd put something in your hair. That’s all. It will wear off. You could already feel it wearing off.
He took advantage of your Denzan half.
Your weaker half.
It was stupid of you to think he could be your friend. Just because he was like you. A hybrid. He moved under a dark cloud, just like you have your entire life, and so you foolishly thought that you were the same.
You didn’t think he’d poison you and leave you behind.
Staring up at the ceiling because you can’t turn your head yet, you remembered how the Ossho curled down from the shadows above. The vision that followed—the memories, the experience, the warning—had been seared into your brain. The beautiful and cruel Tytons who once ruled over countless galaxies, now trapped by the upstart Denzans on a prison planet called Earth.
Earth. What a moronic name for a planet. Why not just call the place Dirt?
Eventually, you stood up. Your arms and legs felt like mushy noodles, but that didn’t last long. Your strength was coming back.
Your weaker half, making way for your stronger half.
A dark bruise throbbed on your elbow. That was from pounding down on Syd’s back, trying to shatter his stupid ribs. Everyone yelling at you and flipping out.
Maybe things got a little out of hand. Maybe you were the one who overreacted.
You couldn’t think about that now. You had to get out of this horrible place.
The old man’s dead body stopped you short. Vanceval. He was one of the only nice instructors back at the institute. A bit of a coot, with his big swoop of hair. Harmless. And yet, it was partially his insatiable curiosity that got you into this mess. He got to learn the secrets of the universe while bleeding out from a sniper’s bullet.
At some point between betraying the Eastwood crew and coming here to die, Vanceval had bound his hands in obsidian. Probably because of what he did to Syd.
Everything always came back to Syd.
Denzans bound their limbs when they’d done something shameful, only removing the metal reminder once they had made up for their misdeed. It all traced back to the Great Shame, a long-forgotten incident that had scarred the Denzans forever.
Well, not so forgotten anymore.
You knelt down next to Vanceval and took his hands. You weren’t sure why you were wasting time on this, but some part of you—
The weaker part.
Some part of you wouldn’t let you leave him like this. You felt around the metal gloves until you found the hidden clasp at the inside of the wrist. Then you recited the incantation that your Denzan mother taught you when your grandfather died.
“I release you from this shame, brother, so you may float upon the ocean,” you whispered in Denzan. “Let it hold you down no longer.”
Flicking the clasp triggered a chemical reaction in the metal bonds. With a hiss, the gloves dissolved into Vanceval’s hands, darkening his grayish skin with a scar that will never have a chance to heal. You stood up and wiped your hands on the front of your uniform.
There was one other body on the floor of the temple. Syd’s dad. Marcius. Or was it Ool’Vinn? He meant to protect this place, no matter the cost. And now his head was gone, punched into fragments by Captain Reno. The Denzan part of him had died long before that, eaten away by the Panalax. With the sentient fungus forcibly detached from the brain, what remained of the body was rapidly disintegrating. The fungal growths dried up and sloughed off, leaving behind a pale architecture of bone. In the still air of the temple, the decomposing Panalax sounded like whispers.
The sudden urge to run overwhelmed you, so you bolted through the temple’s exit on jelly legs, escaping into the twilit stillness of Ashfall. You skidded to a stop in the plaza outside and tried to orient yourself, coughing into your shoulder at the stale, bitter air. When you first landed here, you’d had a breathing apparatus, but that had fallen off during all the chaos. You wondered what kind of chemicals were currently settling in your lungs and how long your half-Denzan immune system could keep you alive. If you were truly stranded on this world, at least you’d probably die of starvation before suffocation.
With the sky shrouded in clouds of particulate, you couldn’t tell if that was a sun or a moon above you. Either way, it didn’t give off much light. Everything looked drained of color. It had been something like a million years since this planet was destroyed and still nothing grew here; nothing survived at all except the temple behind you.
The Denzans killed this world, but they couldn’t kill its secret.
There were still footprints in the layer of ash from where your crew passed hours before—scattered and frantic near the temple but more orderly the closer you get to where the Eastwood landed. A good metaphor for the whole visit to this planet, you think. Before everything went to shit, you trusted your crewmates. You didn’t always open up to them, but you relied on them. You worked together and learned together. They were supposed to be your friends.
And they left you behind.
Passing through an intersection, you noticed a dark crimson starburst that’s already nearly covered with dust. That’s where Hiram got shot, a sniper’s bullet ripping clear through his leg. He didn’t think he could be hurt. Neither did you.
Hiram wouldn’t have left you here. Not him. The two of you grew up together, your parents never around, both of you basically living on Rafe’s terrible pizza. Hiram thought of you like a little sister. And you thought of him . . . well, better not to think about that. Anyway, he wouldn’t just leave you. He’d find a way to come back for you.
Even though you already sensed it was gone, your heart still sank when you reached the clearing where the Eastwood was supposed to be parked. Huge scorch marks in the shape of teardrops were burned into the ground from where the ISV’s rockets had fired—normally, the ship lifted off with gentler antigravity thrusters and didn’t blast the afterburners until reaching atmosphere. That they triggered the rockets on the ground meant they left in a hurry.
To your relief, there was still another ship in the landing zone. The vessel that Vanceval and his hired team of Vulpin mercenaries flew in on was much smaller and more streamlined than the Eastwood—a spacefaring switchblade compared to your old floating schoolhouse. Dusted with ash, the ship’s mottled orange-and-red camouflage looked like a sunset in a cemetery. You’d never ridden on one of those ships, much less flown one, but at least there was a way off this godforsaken planet.
And then there was the captain.
You were surprised by how uncomfortable the appearance of Marie Reno made you. Seconds ago, you’d been terrified at being all alone on Ashfall, but finding Reno waiting in the landing zone didn’t exactly fill you with warmth. In fact, you hung back, feeling a twinge of fear that you couldn’t explain, worried that your captain would notice you.
Maybe it was the eerie way that she stood there, as unmoving as a statue, so still that dust had started to collect on her shoulders and in her curly silver-blond hair. Her back was to you, so you could see the deep gash that crossed the back of her calf, her uniform splattered with blood and grime. Reno kept her wounded leg cocked, balancing lightly on the toe, like she couldn’t put any weight on it. Despite the injury, the captain somehow seemed larger than you remembered, her spine ramrod straight and her shoulders square. Her eyes were turned to the listless clouds above, almost like she could pierce them with her glare and track the journey of her stolen ship.
Your voice was small and embarrassingly squeaky. “Captain Reno?”
Reno’s head cocked, and she turned slowly in your direction, her eyes blinking rapidly. Her fists had been balled and now opened, a crushed piece of metal falling out of one. Her communicator. She’d squeezed it into a useless twist of tin.
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“Darcy,” she said. “You’re still here.”
She’d forgotten about you. Would she have gone back to the temple to get you eventually? you wondered. When everything had broken down with the others, you’d been the only one to defend Reno. When you’d been fighting Syd, you swore you heard her chuckling. They’re just playing, she’d said.
“I’m here,” you said. “What happened to the ship?”
“Gone,” she replied. “Just another thing that’s been stolen from us.”
Her eyes swept over you, and the corner of her mouth twitched spasmodically. You wished like hell that you had your hooded sweatshirt, the cozy one that you always wore over your uniform on Denza to keep people from staring, because Reno was looking at your hair. In the toxic atmosphere of Ashfall, with your Denzan half working overtime, you could only imagine how brightly the telltale fluorescent streaks shone.
“Stolen from us,” Reno repeated, more to herself than to you.
You swallowed. Were you included in that “us”? You were human, not Denzan. At least, that’s how you thought of yourself. That’s how Rafe had brought you up.
But Reno wasn’t Rafe.
“What do we do?” you asked, feeling a need to fill the silence with anything that might get Reno to stop eyeing you that way.
Reno’s jaw clenched and then relaxed. She shifted to more fully face you, brushing the accumulated dust off her shoulders.
“It’s good that you’re here,” she said, her voice pitched loud, like you weren’t necessarily her intended audience. “They’re trying to wait me out. When it was just little old me, maybe they could have. But now that there’s two of us, you can keep an eye on the ship while I go hunting.”
You looked left and right, suddenly feeling like you were being watched by more eyes than just Reno’s. She gritted her teeth and took a few lunging steps toward the buildings on the landing zone’s perimeter. You could hear blood squelching in her boot. The wound on her leg must have been killing her, but she powered through.
“They don’t want to make me search for them,” Reno snarled. “I don’t know how many of them it takes to fly that ship, but it can’t be all of them. So what do I do, Cadet? Do I catch one and make her fly me out of here, leave the others behind? Or do I catch one and break her bones one by one until her friends come out? Show them what they get for wasting my time?”
You remembered Captain Reno’s goofy one-liners from her seat on the Eastwood’s bridge. Hiram used to call them grandma jokes. All her weird, old-timey Earther sayings, always comparing things to sweet tea. You didn’t get the sense that she was joking now. She wasn’t bluffing either.
“What’re you staring at, Cadet?” she asked. “You don’t think it’s a good plan?”
Before you could respond, a half-dozen scruffy shadows detached from the nearby ruins. They were what was left of the Vulpin mercenaries, the ones lucky enough to dodge Ool’Vinn’s bullets. The leopard-print manes that signified their den were caked with soot and grime and in some cases blood. The Vulpin kept their tails low and their blasters down as they approached, led by Nyxie, the one who’d been in the temple with you. She held her claw-tipped hands out open-palmed and bowed to Reno.
“There you are, boss lady,” Nyxie said. “We been looking all over for you.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Reno replied. “Get your ship ready to fly.”
Nyxie accessed her wrist-mounted control panel, hurriedly keying in a set of instructions. The cruiser came to life with a rumble, floodlights on its underbelly illuminating this grim scene, a ramp extending from one side. You flinched as the ship’s guns—two heavy artillery cannons mounted at the front like viper’s fans—swept across the landing zone.
Even with her leg dragging behind her, Reno was on Nyxie before you could think to duck for cover. Her hand closed around the Vulpin’s throat, and she hoisted her into the air like a misbehaving child.
“You know those guns won’t hurt me,” Reno said. “They’ll only piss me off more.”
Nyxie gasped for air. “Finger . . . finger slipped.”
As her eyes welled with tears, Nyxie managed to blindly tap her control panel until the guns went limp. Reno dropped Nyxie, who fell at the captain’s feet, coughing and wheezing. The other Vulpin kept their heads down, shying away from Reno, not wanting to attract her attention.
“Get up and prep for launch,” Reno said coldly.
She started for the ship, doing her best not to hobble too much, even if that meant putting undue strain on her ruined leg. A couple of the Vulpin scurried ahead of her to make the necessary preparations.
Nyxie picked herself up and shot you a look. Was she looking for help? Sympathy? You kept your expression stony—you were good at that from years of probing stares on Denza. Nyxie produced a low whimper, then hurried to catch up with Reno.
“Where we going, boss lady?”
“Wherever I tell you,” the captain responded. As she reached the ramp, Reno glanced over her shoulder, like she’d just remembered you were there. “Are you coming, Darcy?”
You nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
What choice did you have?
Part One
Run, Lie, Fight
2
“Running is always the best way out of any bad situation,” my mom told me once.
We were in a motel bathroom in Reno. Or was it Phoenix? Somewhere dry and hot and on Earth. Anyway, I was like ten years old, parked on the lip of the tub while my mom combed streaks of blond dye through my hair.
“But what do you do if you can’t run?” she asked. “What do you do if you can’t identify an exit strategy?”
“Lie,” I answered dutifully.
We’d been over this before. Repetition was my mom’s way of really making sure her lessons penetrated my thick skull. I guess it worked, because years later I still remembered this conversation.
“That’s right,” my mom said. “You lie your ass off. Believable is good, but confusingly brazen will do the trick. Run your mouth. Gaslight. Create confusion. Buy yourself time until you can—”
“Run,” I finished for her.
“And if all else fails?”
“Go for the balls,” I said.
My mom smirked. “Balls are a luxury target, Syd. Not always an option.”
“Then the eyes.”
“Good.” She pinched my cheek, stepped back, and looked me over. “I think you’re going to like this color.”
I caught a glimpse of myself in the motel mirror and wrinkled my nose. I looked like the phony surfer from an antidrug PSA. The bleached highlights weren’t all that different from the Etherazi-gold extradimensional dye job I rocked now, six years and some million light-years away from that memory of my mom.
Why was I thinking about that particular scene when Hiram Butler hobbled onto the bridge of the Eastwood?
Because Run, lie, fight. That was the lesson. And I had a feeling I was going to have to put it into action.
The bridge of the Eastwood was a soothing place—mellow tones, crisp air provided by the wall-mounted plant life, supple chairs, and gentle curves. None of us looked like we belonged there. It was like war refugees invaded an Ikea catalog.
I stood hunched next to the captain’s chair, my uniform ripped and stained, feeling like I was wearing a weighted vest of bruises. Darcy had really hammered my back and ribs.
My uncle Tycius occupied the command console. His long fingers were poised over the controls, but he didn’t seem to know what to do next. We were rocketing hard away from Ashfall, at nearly the maximum speed our bodies could manage without settling into our seats for a soothing dose of space drugs. Our supply of sedatives was tapped out, I remembered. A problem for later.
Aela stood in front of the screen watching the dead planet recede behind us, their armored stick-figure exo-suit dented and dusty. Stoic and silent, which was pretty unusual for the Ossho. The magenta cloud behind the faceplate was streaked through with tendrils of smog now, evidence of the toxic memories they’d absorbed on Ashfall.
Zara hung at the back of the room, muttering to herself and fiddling with an object that I couldn’t make out. Probably a knife, maybe even the one she’d used to slice through Reno’s hamstring. Her tail was perked up like she was ready for danger—it’d been like that since before we boarded the Eastwood.
H’Jossu had briefly sat down at his station, but there was nothing for him to do there. He got up and paced back and forth in front of the planters, occasionally stooping his bulky frame to examine a perfectly good leaf with the waggling mold spores that filled his eye sockets. There was nothing wrong with the wall garden, he just didn’t know what to do with himself.
