Starflight (Starflight, #1)(83)

He leaned in and skimmed the screen until he found the next entry describing the scientist’s progress. It took several months, but G.S. finally created a sample of Infinium that was interchangeable with Spaulding fuel.

G.S. ENTRY #360: To test compatibility, I rewired our compound’s power source to the ignition tank in the lab, fueled by a twelve-ounce sample of Infinium. The outcome was successful with no interruptions in energy supply. I will document the time lapse until the sample is depleted.



Doran scrolled through the next two months’ entries but couldn’t find any indication that the original sample had run out. He turned and stared across the room at the hunk of rock burning inside the laboratory tank, then had to force himself to blink.

“You mean to tell me,” he said, “that a tiny rock has been powering this whole complex? For months?”

Solara touched his arm. “If it’s true, think about what this means.”

He didn’t need prompting. His mind was already reeling with the implications of Infinium on the open market. A lump of this super-fuel would burn a lifetime in the farming machines that now lay dormant on fields across the outer realm. Homes would stay heated for generations. Travel expenses would plummet, opening new trade routes and freeing settlers to come and go as they pleased. Commerce would flourish, and lives would be saved.

Infinium had the power to change everything.

But what none of this told him was why his father had sent him here or how his DNA had ended up on the supply crate. All Doran knew was that he’d never touched these samples. He glanced around the lab until he noticed a strand of long jet-black hair on the floor, and an idea came to mind. Using a pair of tweezers, he picked up the hair and carried it to the lab’s genetic scanner.

“Let’s find out who G.S. is,” Doran said.

After he inserted the sample, the machine buzzed for several minutes, and the words MATCH FOUND scrolled across the screen. He tapped the DISPLAY option and leaned closer, pulse ticking in anticipation. But when the result flashed on the panel, his own face stared back at him, along with the text DORAN MICHAEL SPAULDING, HOUSTON, TEXAS: EARTH.

“That can’t be right,” he said. “You saw that hair—it’s not mine.”

“Has your hair ever been that long?” Solara asked. “Maybe someone planted it here.”

“No, never.”

“Then we have to assume it’s your genetic code.”

“But it’s not.”

“Are you sure?” Solara dipped her head and peered at him intently. “Doran,” she said with a gentle touch of her hand. “Think about it. A long time ago, there was someone who shared your DNA. I think he’s the one who invented Infinium, or at least that he handled the crate your father supposedly stole from the Solar League transport.”

Doran’s twin? The implication was so absurd that he nearly laughed. “My brother’s gone. We found his body.”

“Did you see the remains?”

“Of course not. I was nine years old.”

“What was his name?” she asked. “You never told me.”

“Gage,” he said. As soon as the word left his lips, the hair along his forearms stood on end. “Gage Spaulding.”

“The initials fit. It all fits.”

“No,” Doran whispered. “That’s crazy.”

He shook his head again and again, never stopping, because denial was the only way to bat down the prickle of hope quickly swelling inside him. He couldn’t afford to hope. It would only hurt that much more when reality set in again. His brother couldn’t be alive, otherwise Doran would have sensed it somehow. And what about his parents? If their other son had survived, they’d know it, and they would never keep a secret like that from him.

Solara was wrong. She had to be.

But then the lab doors swung open and revealed something that shifted his very center of gravity. Renny and Kane strode inside with their hands folded behind their heads, both of them led at gunpoint by a furious, distorted mirror image of himself.

At once, a memory washed over Doran—an emotional snapshot from his childhood that he’d nearly forgotten. On the night he was snatched from his bed, he recalled lying blindfolded on the cold floor of a shuttle and holding his brother’s hand. Fear had choked him in tandem with a musty rag shoved inside his mouth, but the grip of Gage’s fingers had kept Doran grounded, connected to something safe and familiar.

Now those fingers were curled around a pulse pistol.

Doran had to remind himself to breathe. Impossible as it seemed, Gage Spaulding was alive and well. But how much of the boy Doran remembered was still in there?





“Gage,” Doran whispered, his body as stiff and motionless as a tomb.

The twin’s eyes moved toward the sound of his name, then flew wide in a way that told Solara this encounter was just as shocking for him as it was for the rest of them. He studied his brother, no doubt taking in the subtle differences that set them apart. Gage’s skin had the slightly golden hue of someone who bathed in artificial light instead of natural sun, with a silver web of scar tissue tugging down the corner of his left eye. He wore his hair in a low ponytail that disappeared behind a pair of broad shoulders that could pass for Doran’s. And both of them had the same arrogant tilt to their chins, the one she’d taken months to recognize as a defense mechanism. Each boy peered at the other through an identical mask of reserved wonder, as if afraid to believe what their eyes were telling them. The similarities were uncanny.