The Rising(94)

“How’d you do that?”

“Where I come from such skills are as natural as walking.” He plugged in Alex’s patient ID number, opened the file, and turned the laptop toward Donati.

But Donati was currently entrenched in reviewing the findings accumulated by Dr. Chu first, focusing on the blood tests. He peeked over the pages at Alex several times while reviewing them, once and then again to make sure he was reading the results right.

“You know my specialty,” he said suddenly to him.

“Sam told me it was astrobiology.”

“Which makes me rather expert on regular biology as well, enough so I can tell you that if I didn’t know better, I’d say these blood tests were the result of a hoax instead of actual samples. The astrobiologist in me passes that off to what must be subtle differences in the atmosphere of your home planet, leading to different levels of oxygen and CO two, just for starters.”

“This is my planet,” Alex corrected. “Just like you.”

“I was speaking of your native planet,” Donati corrected quickly. Then his gaze moved to Raiff. “Unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head, trying to process everything at once. “All this is truly unbelievable. I’ve spent my life trying to prove what I always suspected to be the case. And you’ve validated everything I’ve ever believed, and instead of being joyous, I find myself terrified. Not of you, or the boy, but of what’s coming.”

“I wish I could be more helpful,” Raiff told him.

“Perhaps you can,” Donati said, leaning forward. “Tell me more about this world you come from.”

“Virtually identical to your own, just more advanced. Our landmasses are smaller. As a result, our population is substantially smaller. And there’s no famine or poverty.”

“But there will be, won’t there?” Sam interjected. “That’s why you came here in the first place. To plant us like crops to be harvested when you needed us to handle the heavy lifting.”

“Not me,” Raiff corrected, “or those like me. But, yes, human life on this planet owes its existence to the same forces that want to enslave you the way they enslaved us.”

“You came here as refugees,” Donati concluded, utterly transfixed, hanging on Raiff’s every word. Still having only skimmed Alex’s medical records.

“There were others who knew more, who preceded Dancer to this world, but they’re gone now.”

“Gone?”

“Eradicated, exterminated.”

“I don’t understand.”

Raiff crossed his arms and laid his elbows on the table as the boat engines began to rumble louder. The tour guide’s voice continued to blare through the speakers on the deck above, echoes merging by the time the sound reached down below.

“Have you ever heard of a man named Langston Marsh?”

“Should I have?” Donati asked him.

“He’s built a private army whose sole purpose is to track down and kill every alien they can find. His soldiers have been hot on Dancer’s trail since his parents were murdered last night.”

“Murdered?” Donati asked, eyes widening.

“Maybe not,” Alex interjected tentatively. “The ash man told me they were still alive.”

“You saw him?” Sam exclaimed in disbelief. “He came back?”

“He appeared at my house when I went to pick up my sketchbook,” Alex responded, leaving out the ash man’s mention of her.

“Speaking of which,” said Raiff, extending a hand toward Alex.

Alex handed the sketchbook to him. “Not sure if this is going to mean anything to you.”

“Let’s take a look and see.”

*

There was a slight jolt as the tour boat eased away from Pier 39 and angled toward the bay. Raiff scanned the contents of the sketchbook quickly, shaking his head in silent amazement at some of the drawings, the ones featuring the most detail. Donati had come around to the other side of the table to study the pages as Raiff flipped them.

“I don’t remember drawing those,” Alex told them, breaking the silence and feeling the ship being jostled by a combination of waves and the rolling wakes of the big freighters and cargo carriers clinging to the center of the channel. “It was like I was in a trance or something.”

“Machines,” Raiff explained. “Machines from my world, that practically ran my world. That’s what most of these pictures are of.”

“But how would I know about them?”

“Let’s see if this might help tell us,” Donati said, moving back to the laptop to view the results of Alex’s initial CT scan.





96

CT SCAN

DONATI SQUINTED TO BETTER view the laptop screen, scrolling through the various images. “Come have a look, Dixon. Your boyfriend has something tucked in his head besides his brain.”

This time Sam didn’t even think of correcting him. They’d just passed a family of sea lions nesting on a rock assemblage sticking out of the bay. The boat turned so they had a brilliant view of both the San Francisco waterfront and the city’s striking, if irregular, skyline. Nothing like a large city framed by the water at night.

Sam positioned herself to better see the screen Donati had tilted toward her. The object to which he’d referred was oblong, almost egg-shaped. What looked like small hairs of varying sizes jutted out from it at irregularly spaced intervals.