Invaded (32 page)

“Let’s start at Neiman’s,” Tori said, her high heels clicking against the asphalt.
“So you can help me pick a prom dress.”

Cara pressed a hand to her heart. “I forgot all about prom.” The image of frilly dresses
brought a smile to her lips. Maybe she’d try one on, just for fun. An eager bounce
lightened her steps as she tugged open the door to her old stomping grounds, but the
vibrating wall of noise that greeted her on the other side had her twitching to run
back to the car.

Holy sensation overload.

An indistinct pop tune blared through the ceiling speakers, competing with the throbbing
bass of club music that wafted from the entrance to Hot Topic. With spring break in
full swing, every
teen in the county was here, each one laughing and shouting over the din while their
fingers flew across their cell phone screens. The cloying scent of perfume leaked
from the doors of Hollister in
clouds so thick it forced Cara to cover her nose, and when she breathed through her
mouth, the residue seeped inside to coat her tongue. How could anyone stand to go
in there? Or any other store,
for that matter? The shops were teeming with people rudely nudging one another aside
as if their lives depended on scoring this season’s trendiest belt.

The scene inside Neiman Marcus was marginally calmer, but Cara had to keep reminding
herself to unclench her jaw. So much for a leisurely day of shopping. Leaning toward
her brother, she said,
“Can you have someone bring me a bunch of jeans while Tori’s trying on prom dresses?
We’ll finish quicker if we multitask.”

Troy didn’t need further convincing. “What size?”

“Somewhere between a four and a six, I guess.”

He used his phone to tap a text message. “I told him to grab a few shirts, too.”

“Good thinking.”

She scurried to keep pace with Tori, whose mahogany eyes locked on to the formal wear
department with the single-minded determination of a girl with a raging case of Prom
Fever.

“
Puta madre
,” Tori breathed, gravitating as if entranced toward a backless ivory gown with a
side slit cut clear to the hip. With its satiny fabric and barely there straps,
it looked more like lingerie than a dress. Tori reached out with reverent fingers
and held the gown in front of her. “What do you think?”

Honestly? Cara thought her friend would be very cold in that dress. “Um, the color
looks great with your skin.” And given how easily it’d slip off at the end of the
night, Eric
would love it.

“I’m gonna try it on.”

Cara followed to the dressing rooms, where a young soldier balanced a stack of folded
jeans on one arm. He made an apologetic face. “I did the best I could, but it’s redonk
over
there. I didn’t know if you wanted cropped, boot-cut, straight-leg, skinny, flared,
low-rise, high-waist, or jegging.” He leaned in, shell-shocked. “And that’s just the
cut.
Then there’s dark wash, medium vintage—”

“That’s okay,” Cara interrupted. “I’m sure one of these will work.” She took the pile
of denim into the fitting room and emerged ten minutes later with three
pair of jeans that fit and one pair she could actually afford. Suddenly the L’eihr
uniform didn’t seem so bad.

“Ta-da!” Tori sang, opening her dressing room door. She hitched up her gown and strode
to the three-way mirror, then began checking out her butt from different angles. “Nice,
huh?”

She really did look nice. Overly exposed, yes, but tame compared to what some girls
would be wearing. Cara gave a teasing wolf whistle and checked the price tag. Her
mouth dropped open.
“Did you see this, Tor?”

Satisfied with her reflection, Tori turned from the mirror and strutted back to her
dressing room. “Yep.”

“You’re gonna drop this much on a gown you’ll wear once?”

“I’ll put it on my card,” Tori said, as if she weren’t spending real money that way.
“I need shoes and a bag, too. What do you think about strappy nude
heels?”

By the time they reached the shoe department, Cara thought strappy nude heels were
as unnecessary and overpriced as the plastic-wrapped gown draped over Tori’s shoulder.
Cara lifted a
butt-fugly leopard-print platform pump and gasped at the price sticker affixed to
the sole. Maybe if humans didn’t spend so much time and money on useless crap, they
wouldn’t need the
L’eihrs to save the world for them.

“Cute,” Tori said, nodding at the monstrosity in Cara’s hand. “You should try ’em
on.”

“Yeah. Or not.”

Tori wrinkled her brow and studied Cara over a display of sandals. “Retail therapy
isn’t working, is it?” She set down a glittery clutch and nodded toward the exit.
“Let’s go. Time for that triple chocolate meltdown.”

“Dig in.” From the other side of the table, Tori pointed her spoon at the plate between
them. “If you let me finish this by myself, I’ll never fit into
that kick-ass dress I just bought.”

The mere sight of hot fudge pooling out from the center of a gooey chocolate cake
was enough to turn Cara’s stomach, but she took one for the team and shoveled in a
bite. She swallowed as
quickly as possible before washing out the taste with unsweetened iced tea.

“What the hell?” Tori asked. “It looked like you were chewing razor blades.”

“Sweets make me kind of sick now.”

Tori’s black brows shot up. “You’re not preggers, are you?”

“No,” Cara said with a humorless laugh. “Zero chance of that, trust me.”

“Huh.” Tori chewed the inside of her cheek and stared at their dessert. “The mall
was a bust, and chocolate isn’t working. This leaves us with only one
option…”

“Oh, no. Not
Magic Mike
.”

“Then give me an alternative. Tell me what’s going to make you smile.”

That was a good question, but Cara didn’t know the answer. She thought back to the
last experiences that had brought her joy—snuggling with Vero, mastering the intermediate
track,
glimpsing the colony for the first time, placing her hand in Aelyx’s strong grasp.

Cara sighed and poked at the cake. “Nothing on Earth.”

They fell silent for a while, fidgeting with bendy straws and silverware, until Tori
said what they were both thinking. “You’re different now.”

“Yeah, I am,” Cara said. And she had a feeling things would never be the same as before
the exchange. She peeked up from beneath her lashes. “But I still love you.”

Tori’s face broke into a bittersweet grin. She reached across the table and took Cara’s
hand, her touch somehow both familiar and foreign. “Right back at’cha.
That’ll never change.”

Cara flipped open the AP physics textbook she’d found in the bottom of her closet.
If she wanted to apply to Dartmouth, she’d first have to make up the work
she’d missed, and what better opportunity to catch up than during spring break? As
she pulled her Einstein packet from her backpack, it occurred to her that she’d probably
lost her
valedictorian rank when she’d fled Earth.

She supposed that douche canoe, Marcus Johnson, would graduate at the top of the class.
The old Cara would have devised a plot to reclaim her title, but the new Cara couldn’t
bring herself
to care.

“Valedictorian,” she muttered to herself. “Whoop-de-friggin-do. I’m the Chief Human
Consultant to the most powerful woman in the universe.”

Or rather, she was.

She turned to the chapter on Einstein’s theory of relativity and began skimming the
text, but then she realized that the advanced physics she’d learned on L’eihr transcended
her AP science class. Cara closed her textbook. It had nothing to teach her.

Her internal clock was still on Aegis time, and it seemed too early for bed. She stepped
into the hall, finding no signs of life other than the subdued glow of the oven exhaust
hood, which Mom
had always used as a night-light. Cara recognized the sound of a kitchen chair scraping
the linoleum floor and decided to see who was awake.

“Hey,” she said to Troy, who sat at the table with a box of Cheerios and a bottle
of Sam Adams lager to keep him company. He tossed back a handful of O’s and used his
bare foot
to push out a chair for her. Accepting his invitation, she took a seat and grabbed
the cereal box.

After munching his snack and washing it down with a swig of beer, Troy asked, “Change
your mind about the party?”

“Nah.” Cara shook out a pile of Cheerios even though she wasn’t hungry. “Just bored.
What about you? I figured you’d be hanging with your friends.” She nodded
toward the backyard, where soldiers stood guard around the house.

He shrugged and leaned an elbow on the table, propping his chin in one hand. “They
invited me to a poker game later. I dunno. I used to like that stuff, but now it seems
so…”
He appeared to struggle with the right word, eventually settling on, “Pointless.”

Cara’s eyes flew wide. “I know exactly what you mean! I thought it was just me.”

“Trust me, it’s not.” Troy smirked, more at himself than at her, then glanced through
the kitchen entry and into the living room as if to make sure they were alone. “Can
you keep a secret?”

Cara hesitated a beat before nodding, not because she couldn’t keep her lips zipped,
but because Troy had never confided in her.

“I haven’t been the same since I got back from L’eihr,” he said. “My CO sent me to
the head shrinker, and she said I’ve got an adjustment disorder.”

Cara tipped her head. “What’s that?”

“Failure to adapt.” Clearly uncomfortable, Troy dropped eye contact and began stacking
his Cheerios atop one another in a crooked pyramid. “You usually see it with special
forces guys—the ones who go out on big missions. They get hooked on the adrenaline
and can’t cope when they come home.” Troy raised his gaze to hers. “How’re they
supposed to go from live combat and jumping out of helicopters to grocery shopping
and driving their kids to school, you know?”

“Real life is dull by comparison,” Cara said.

“Exactly.”

“I get that.” As much as she wanted to feel like a “normal teenager” again, her time
on L’eihr had ruined her for dances and shopping and all the things she used to
love. “But for me, it’s more than that. I’m starting to see our way of life differently.”

“Like…” Troy prompted, seeming to perk up a little.

“Remember the gas station where we stopped on the way home from the mall?” When he
nodded, she said, “They had TVs built right into the pumps.” The old Cara would have
thought that was cool, but the new-and-ruined Cara didn’t see it that way. “Are we
so overstimulated that we can’t spend five minutes pumping gas without a TV or a cell
phone to
distract us?”

“Guess so.”

“And when I went inside to buy a magazine,” Cara went on, “that’s when it really hit
me. I stood there looking at the racks, and all the headlines seemed so trivial.
I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but what am I going to do? Write articles about
which movie star had the fat sucked from her ass and injected into her face? Which
professional athlete
just confessed to shooting steroids? The latest celebrity baby names?” Cara lowered
both brows in frustration. “Who cares? It’s like our whole culture is built on frivolity,
and I
never noticed before.”

Troy flicked an O into the pyramid he’d built, toppling it over. “It’s the noise that
gets to me. Everything sounds amplified now.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cara agreed before continuing her rant. “And we squander our money
on the most ridiculous things. You know how much Americans spent on Halloween candy
last
year?” Without giving him a chance to guess, she cried, “Two billion dollars. That’s
billion
, with a
B
.” She fell silent, struck by the absurdity of it
all. “We’re dropping piles of cash on candy while disease research and scientific
advancement go unfunded. It makes my head explode.”

Troy snickered and held both palms forward. “Chill, Pepper. I believe you.”

“The worst of it is I don’t know where I belong.” She wasn’t wholly human anymore,
but she didn’t feel like a L’eihr. She swept aside her Cheerios, too upset
to taste anything. “Can
you
keep a secret?”

“Probably,” her brother said.

She told him about her decision to remain on Earth after the alliance ceremony, including
her residual breakup with Aelyx, whom Troy had never liked. But by the time she finished
explaining her
reasoning, Troy seemed more conflicted than relieved.

“What?” she asked. “I thought you’d be happy.”

He picked at the label on his beer bottle, avoiding her eyes. “I am, if it’s what
you really want…” Then he trailed off, warning her a
but
was coming.

“But?” she asked.

“If you were going to the colony,” he said, peeking up at her, then back to his bottle,
“I was thinking of coming, too, when my enlistment’s over.”

Cara drew a breath. “Are you serious?”

“Uh-huh,” he said with a slow
I know it sounds crazy, but I really mean it
nod. “I’ve been thinking about it since I got back.”

“But you hated L’eihr,” Cara reminded him. “You kept saying we didn’t belong there.”

“Yeah, and that’s still kind of true,” Troy said, locking his blue eyes with hers.
“But we also don’t belong
here
.”

He was right—Cara knew it all the way down to the marrow in her bones. But that didn’t
change the fact that she couldn’t be happy on the colony, not without the kinds of
concessions The Way would never make. It was an impossible situation. She felt like
a square peg that had been shaved into an octagon, so now she didn’t fit into any
hole, round or otherwise.
But somehow in the next forty-eight hours, Cara would have to decide once and for
all where her future lay.

No pressure or anything.

T
he official first day of spring was hopelessly bleak, which matched Aelyx’s mood.
He shifted in bed and stared out the window, where freezing rain pelted the
glass. This afternoon he would have to stand by Cara’s side at the alliance ceremony
and pretend he didn’t feel gutted—scooped out of any happiness he’d once known. At
least
tomorrow he’d leave this godsforsaken planet and return home, where ice never rained
from the sky. If nothing else, he had that to look forward to.