She laughed again, louder this time, increasing the intensity of my chest pains.
She was even more gorgeous up close, and her eyes, which I’d thought were brown, actually appeared to be more amber colored, and her gold irises were shot through with streaks of copper.
“Sorry,” she said. “You have a young face. How old are you?”
“Eighteen last month.”
She smirked. “Too bad,” she said. “I kinda have a thing for jailbait.”
“Great,” I said. “A pedophile with a drinking habit.”
That got a third laugh—a snorting, girlish chuckle that disrupted my heart rate yet again. Then she glanced back down at her flask and addressed it in a confidential tone.
“R2,” she muttered. “This dream just keeps getting weirder. Now a cute, wisecracking boy has shown up in it. What are the odds?”
I almost asked if she meant me. Disaster averted.
“I hate to break it to you,” I said. “But you’re not dreaming this.”
“I’m not? How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’m clearly the one who’s dreaming all of this,” I said. “How could you be dreaming this, when you’re just another figment of my imagination, like everyone else here?”
“Well, I hate to break it to you,” she said, poking me with her flask and splashing some of its contents on my leg, “but I am not a figment of anyone’s imagination.”
That’s a relief, I thought. But what I actually said was, “Unfortunately, neither am I.” Then I offered her a smile. “So all of this must really be happening right now. To both of us.”
She nodded and took another drink. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” Then she held out her flask, finally offering me a drink. But I shook my head.
“You know, on second thought, maybe I should keep a clear head for the briefing,” I said. Then, as if that weren’t lame enough, I added, “I’m not old enough to drink, anyway.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “They’re about to tell us the world is ending, you realize?” she said. “You don’t want to be stone-cold sober for that shit, do you?”
“You make a compelling argument,” I said, taking the flask from her.
As I raised it to my lips, she began to chant “Breakin’-the-law-breakin’-the-law.”
I gave her a pleading look. “Please—don’t make me shoot this out my nose, okay?”
She nodded solemnly and raised three fingers. “Girl Scout’s honor.”
I rolled my eyes. “I find it hard to believe that you were ever a Girl Scout.”
Her eyes narrowed, then she reached out and rolled down her striped knee sock, revealing a dark green Girl Scouts of America logo tattooed on her left calf.
“I stand corrected,” I said. “Are you hiding any other cool tattoos?”
She punched me in the shoulder—hard—then pointed at the flask, still in my hand. “Quit stalling, baby face. Bottoms up.”
I took a small sip—but I still swallowed enough of the burning liquid to make me wince and cough. I didn’t know enough about liquor to discern what she had in there, but my guess would have been rocket fuel mixed with a finger or two of paint thinner. I knew she was still watching me, so I forced myself to choke down a second, longer drink. Then I passed the flask back to her, all smooth-like, even though my eyes were watering and my throat felt like I’d just downed a shot of molten lava.
“Thank you,” I said hoarsely.
“I’m Alexis Larkin.” She stuck out her hand. “But my friends call me Lex.”
“Nice to meet you, Lex.” I felt a small static shock as we shook hands. “I’m Zack—Zack Lightman,” I said, stuttering through my own name.
She grinned and reached for the flask, which I gladly handed back to her. “So, where do you hail from, Zack-Zack Lightman?”
“It’s just one Zack,” I said, laughing. “I’m from Portland, Oregon. What about you?”
“Texas,” she said softly. “I live in Austin.” Her expression darkened, and she took another drink—wincing at this one. “And I was just there, less than an hour ago, debugging subroutines in my cubicle, when a motherfucking Earth Defense Alliance shuttle suddenly shows up and lands right outside my office building! I figured I must be losing it. Now I’m not sure what to think.”
She shivered and rubbed her bare shoulders.
“It’s cold as balls in here!” she said. “And I left my sweater in a different time zone.”
I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Crom, then opened my backpack and handed her my father’s jacket.
“Wow,” she said. “Badass. Thank you.” She spent a few seconds admiring the patches; then she drew the jacket across her shoulders like a shawl.
“Where do you work?”
“At a software company. We make apps and operating systems for mobile devices. It was surreal when the shuttle landed outside our offices, because a lot of my coworkers are gamers, too. So a lot of us recognized the shuttle right away, even before we saw the Earth Defense Alliance crest on its hull. None of us could believe what we were seeing.”
“What happened?”
“We all ran outside to the parking lot. Then two people wearing suits—a man and a woman—stepped out of the shuttle and asked for me by my full name, which was weirdly humiliating, like getting called to the principal’s office or something. They said they needed my ‘assistance with a matter of urgent national security.’ What was I supposed to do? They were riding around in a spaceship from a videogame, and I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life wondering what it looked like on the inside, or where it was going to take me—so I went with them.” She nodded at our surroundings. “Now I’m in a top-secret government base somewhere in the middle of fucking Iowa, waiting to find out what the hell is happening. In short—I’m totally losing my shit.”
She said all of this in a very calm, steady voice.
I nodded. “I think we’re actually somewhere in the middle of fucking Nebraska.”
“Yeah? How do you know?”
“Because Ray—the EDA agent who brought me here—said this was Nebraska.”
“The jokers who brought me here wouldn’t tell me shit,” she said.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I may have been given special treatment, but it seemed doubtful that all of the other recruit candidates in that auditorium had been mentored and watched over by an undercover EDA agent who had been stationed in their hometown for the past six years.
Lex glanced back down at her QComm, which had finished rebooting, and thumbed through the icons on its display.
“They better make good on their promise to unlock these things,” she said. “I don’t want my grandma to get too worried about me. She tends to do that if I don’t call her every day—” Lex dialed a number on the QComm from memory, but a red X appeared on the display, along with a message that said, “Access to Civilian Networks Locked.”
“We’ll see about that,” she muttered, scowling at the QComm before she slid it into her pocket.
“Are you and your grandma close?” I asked, just to hear her talk some more.
She nodded. “My folks both died in a car crash when I was little. My grandpa had already passed, so my grandma raised me by herself.” She met my gaze. “How about you, Zack? Anyone back at home you’re worried about? Anybody who’ll be worried about you?”
I nodded. “My mom.” I pictured her face. “She’s a nurse. It’s just the two of us.”
Lex nodded, as if I’d explained everything. We both fell silent for a moment. I suddenly found myself wishing Cruz and Diehl were there with me. The insanity of this experience would have been much easier to handle with my two best friends around.
But even though the Mikes were skilled at both Terra Firma and Armada, their rankings apparently weren’t high enough in either game to merit an invitation to these strange proceedings.
“Lex?”
“Zack?”
“Do you play Terra Firma and Armada?”
“TF.”
“How good are you at it?” I asked. “Are you one of the Thirty Dozen?”
She nodded. “I’m currently ranked seventeenth,” she said, far too nonchalantly. “But I’ve been as high as fifteenth. Those standings fluctuate a lot.”
I whistled low, impressed. “Damn, woman,” I said. “What’s your call sign?”
“Lexecutioner,” she said. “It’s a portmanteau. What’s yours?”
“IronBeagle,” I told her, wincing at how dorky it sounded in my ears. “It’s a—”
“It’s fantastic!” she said. “I love that flick, as cheesy as it is. And my grandma used to play that Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album every Christmas.”
I did a double-take at her. No one had ever gotten the Iron Eagle/Peanuts mash-up in my call sign without me first having to explain it to them—including Cruz and Diehl. I felt a strong urge to reach out and touch her shoulder, to confirm that she was real.