“Bill will never let them take his car,” Gloria countered. “That’s his pride and joy. He loves that car more than he does Sally and Marie.”

  “You said you had money, right?” George asked Keep.

  “I have money,” Keep affirmed.

  “He won’t sell the car,” Gloria said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Keep countered. “I can offer him enough to buy three cars. Besides, I can be pretty persuasive when needed.”

  “That might not always be a good thing,” George said, no doubt still upset about how Keep had grabbed Kyrie to make his point.

  “Why are you helping us?” I asked. “We lied to you and you were tied up while your house burned down over your head, all because of us.”

  “I’m not helping you so much as I’m helping your mother. I can see how worried you are, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to her as happened to us. Now turn this thing around and make a right at the first intersection.”

  Keep hit the brakes, making such a hard u-turn it sent the tools in the back crashing against the side of the vehicle and me to brace myself against the door.

  He was gaining speed in the opposite direction when George’s phone rang. I looked back at him as he eyed the number on the caller ID before picking it up.

  “Hello?”

  His face froze, his eyes latching onto mine. It seemed like everything moved in slow motion as he handed me the phone. “It’s for you.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I took the cell, glancing down at it, my entire body cold, my head beginning to buzz with tension and fear. I closed my eyes as I brought the phone to my ear, trying to calm the insidious side effects of my tumor, rearing its ugly head at one of the worst possible times.

  “This is Ben,” I spat into the phone, desperate not to sound desperate or afraid. I could sense the squeaky quiver in my voice betray me.

  “You shouldn’t have gone home,” the woman on the other end said in a raspy voice, as if her throat was as dry as mine. “You made it too easy.”

  “If you hurt her…” I started to say. It always seemed so cheesy and cliche in the movies to make the threat, but faced with the real situation, they were still the first words that came out of my mouth.

  “Don’t be stupid,” the woman interrupted. “We don’t want them. You know what we want.”

  She said them, which meant they had taken Sheri and probably Nick, too.

  “How am I supposed to get it to you? You took our ship.”

  “Which we’ll be able to use to set up a new transit,” she replied. “As I’m sure was your intent when you stopped at the hardware store to pick up quite a few tools. What I haven’t figured out is where you’re headed now? You took out the unit we left behind to capture you. Impressive. You saved the Frasiers from the fire. Good work. I pegged you for Fresno, but it seems you’ve had a change of heart. Too bad. We could have ended this sooner if you’d run headlong into our next setup.”

  I looked over at Keep. Whatever satellites Sedaya’s forces controlled, they’d been watching us since they locked on to Flippy. Obviously, it had taken some time to move their people in from wherever they were based. But now that they were getting into position, it would only be a matter of time before they had us surrounded.

  So why call now? I figured they hadn’t called earlier because they didn’t have a number to use. Phoning Mom had changed that.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I replied, gaining confidence from the idea. I pulled the phone from my face and put it on speaker so Keep could hear, and also so I could rest the phone in my lap. My hands had started shaking hard enough to make it challenging to hold onto the device.

  “I’m sorry, too. Honestly, Ben, I would have preferred to keep your family out of this. We don’t know one another, but I’m not a bad person. I just have a job to do.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care,” I said. “You’re okay with holding people hostage and burning down their homes. News flash, you’re a bad person. Sorry to break it to you. You made your point that you’ve got eyes on us at all times. That doesn’t seem to have helped. Since this is business, make your offer or go away.”

  “If I went away, you’d never see your mother again.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”

  Keep raised an eyebrow at me, his expression a veiled warning about getting too cocky. It wasn’t arrogance that drove my attitude. It was exhaustion.

  “He told me you were feisty,” she replied. I assumed she meant Sedaya. “Fine, I’ll cut to the chase. Deliver yourself to the address I’ll text to you. Two o’clock, sharp. Come alone. Your mother, sister, and her boyfriend will be there along with some of my people. We’ll trade them for you, simple as that.”

  “You won’t be there?” I asked.

  “No. I’ll be preparing for your arrival so I can deliver you back to my boss as quickly as possible.”

  “What about Keep?”

  “What about him?”

  “You don’t want him back?”

  “The boss wants him stranded on Earth and out of the way.”

  “Why don’t you just kill him?”

  “Are you offering to do it? At this point, it’s better for our bottom line to isolate him from the Spiral.” That comment brought an arrogant smirk to Keep’s face. “Two o’clock, Ben. If you aren’t there, if you aren’t alone, they die. Understood?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I—”

  The woman hung up.

  “Geez,” George said breathlessly from his seat behind me. “I was trying to hold onto a thread of hope that all of this was still some kind of stupid, sick joke.”

  “I don’t want them to hurt your mom,” Kyrie said.

  “Neither do I,” I answered, putting my head in my hands and trying to stop the spinning. The phone beeped, and when I glanced at it from between my fingers I saw an address had popped in from Mom’s phone. I tried to pick it up to check the address on a map, but my hands were shaking like a speaker at a Deadmau5 concert. “George, can you get that?”

  George picked up the phone. Gloria leaned in from the back seat and put her hand on my arm. “Ben, are you okay?” she asked. “You look awful.”

  “I forgot to get more meds when we were in Modesto,” I said through chattering teeth. “Not that the pharmacies were open.”

  “Medication?” Gloria asked. “For what?”

  “I have cancer,” I replied. “Terminal cancer. A brain tumor.”

  Her face froze in a compassionate frown. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She looked confused. “You have terminal cancer, and you’re running around out here fighting these people? What for?”

  “It’s all because of Duke Sedaya. He’s an asshole who’s trying to upset the balance of power in the Manticore Spiral. That’s the galaxy Keep is from. I don’t know exactly how far the Spiral is from us, but it’s far.”

  “About a million light years,” Keep said. “Give or take.”

  “You’re joking,” Gloria said.

  “Nope. It isn’t close.”

  “The technology I used to push what was left of your house off the foundation used to be lost and forgotten,” I continued, finding that talking helped me relax enough to at least ease the shaking and blurred vision slightly. “But somehow, Sedaya rediscovered it. If he’s able to equip even a small force with the technology, he’ll have an edge that might help him unseat the Empress of the Manticore Spiral and gain full control. Once he does that, it’s game over for Earth.”

  “Game over?” George said. “How? Why?”

  “A handful of starships from the Spiral could wipe out the entire planet in a matter of hours,” Keep said. “And a few minutes ago I thought maybe that would be Sedaya’s move once he reigned over the Spiral, if only because he could. But the fact that he has forces positioned here already makes me wonder what he really wants with Earth. I guarantee, whatever it is, it’s not good.”

  “That’s part of it. More importantly, my friends have something he wants,” I said. “He calls it a Grimoire. He was holding me prisoner to trade me for it, but Keep helped me escape.”

  “Grimoire. Like a spell book?” Kyrie asked. It surprised me she knew the word.

  “Yeah. But it’s not a book of spells. It’s like a manual on how to use the lost technology. He’s already chased me halfway around the galaxy and killed a bunch of innocent people trying to get it. He’s not going to give up until he succeeds.”

  “If all of this is happening in some other galaxy, why are you here?” Gloria asked.

  “I don’t want to be. We had to cross back to Earth to escape. And we thought we had slipped him completely. He isn’t supposed to have any power here. I’m sorry again for what our trouble has put you through. For putting Kyrie in danger, and for your house.”

  “I believe you,” Gloria said. “I understand you don’t really want to be here, and why you lied to us. If those people hadn’t done what they did, we would never have believed any part of your story.”

  “I probably would have kicked you off the farm without a second thought if you came out spouting nonsense about other galaxies and alien technology,” George added. “But you don’t have to do this alone. Why don’t you get the government involved? If there’s a threat to Earth, I’m sure they’d want to know about it.”

  “Because they’ll treat us like crackpots and lock us up somewhere,” Keep said. “I think you know that.”

  “But you have proof,” Gloria said.

  “A phone call doesn’t equate to proof, at least not of an intergalactic threat. No, we need to handle this ourselves.”

  “I’ve got the address on Maps,” George said. “Sorry it was slow, but we’re still on Edge out here. It looks like an abandoned junkyard about eighty miles west of LA. I remember this place. It was in the news a few years back because of a massive fire that shut it down.”

  “Eighty miles west of LA?” Keep said. “That doesn’t leave us a lot of time.”

  “Us?” I said. “She said to come alone.”

  “They always say to come alone.”

  “I’m not risking the lives of my mom and sister so you can ride along.”

  “Bennie, no matter what we do, right now their lives are at risk. You know Sedaya. There’s no guarantee he won’t kill them once he has you, or use them as further leverage to ensure you get Alter to bring the Grimoire to him.”

  “I know. But what else am I supposed to do?”

  “You told me back on Eviscerator that you didn’t want to run anymore. That you were ready to fight.”

  “Yeah, so? This doesn’t seem like the best time to go on offense.”

  “Which makes it precisely the best time to go on offense,” Keep said.

  “That wasn’t a good idea before, but it’s a good idea now? By what stretch of the imagination?”

  “We both know the variables have changed. Sedaya has people on Earth for a reason. If you make the exchange, even if everything goes perfectly, what do you think happens to Earth after Sedaya seizes control of the Hegemony? On the other hand, if we can turn the tables on them…” He trailed off suggestively.

  “How? They can see every move we make.” I pointed toward the sky.

  “I have tools and an idea,” Keep replied. “Probably not a great idea, but the alternative is a lot worse. I know you won’t let them hold your family. But we also can’t let them get what they want.”

  I stared at Keep. My fear for Mom and Sheri played tug-of-war with my understanding that things could get a lot worse for a lot more people if I made the easy move. “I signed up for the adventure of a lifetime,” I opined softly.

  “I know, kid,” Keep replied. “Maybe once all this ugly business is done, things will be better than you ever imagined. It’s always darkest before dawn.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “So you’ll do it my way?”

  “Not yet, Sinatra,” I said. “Give me time to think.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time for you to think.”

  “Just until we get to the Ackermann’s farm. We can’t do anything else before then, anyway.”

  “Deal.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Make a right at the next gate just up ahead,” George said, ending the quiet that had consumed the van for the last ten minutes. “That’s Bill’s farm.”

  “Got it,” Keep replied.

  “I hope I can go to space one day,” Kyrie said, now that the silence was broken. “But I don’t want to go if it’s filled with mean people.”

  “Not everybody there is mean,” I replied. “I've made some great friends there. But it is a lot more dangerous than Earth.”

  “Are there lots of funny looking aliens?”

  “Yeah,” I said, turning in my seat to smile at her. My tremors had calmed some, though I still felt lightheaded. “One of my best friends there, Shaq, looks sort of like a blue squirrel. But he’s as smart as you and me.”

  “Probably smarter than you, kid,” Keep said.

  Kyrie laughed. “He sounds cute.”

  “He is cute,” I agreed. “And more loyal than a dog. He’s already saved my life a couple of times.”

  “Maybe I’ll get to meet him.”

  “You never know,” I replied.

  “That’s it right there,” George said as an open iron gate came into view on our right. Keep braked hard to slow enough to make the turn, transferring from the paved single-lane road to gravel. We sped along the path, taking nearly another mile before reaching an open gravel circle ahead of the Ackermann’s primary home. A large garage occupied the left side, an equally large stable on the right. I could see two barns further in the distance, flanked by a pair of silos.

  “Bill’s farm is a little nicer than ours,” George said.

  “It’s also four times the size,” Gloria added. “Bill’s a bit of a character, but his wife Marie is a sweetheart, and Sally’s just a doll.”

  Keep stopped the van closer to the house. “George, why don’t you step out first?”

  “Okay,” George said. He pulled open the sliding passenger door and hopped out, waiting for Gloria and Kyrie to join him before heading for the house.

  “Well?” Keep said, shifting in his seat to face toward me. “Did you make up your mind?”

  “Mom sacrificed everything for me and my siblings,” I said. “Working herself to exhaustion to put us through school, to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. She’s given me everything she could. Even now, I know she would bankrupt herself without hesitation to pay for cancer treatments. She doesn’t deserve what she’s going through right now. Neither does Sher. The best thing I can do for them is to get them out of there safely.” I paused, waiting for Keep to argue. He surprised me by staying quiet while waiting for my decision. “And initially I thought giving in to the demands would be the safest approach. But then I realized that if Mom were here to help me make this decision, if she had all the facts, she would never want that. She would give herself up rather than give in to a tyrant. She wouldn’t want me to let myself be bullied. She’d want me to fight back.”

  Keep smiled. “Smart woman. Does that mean you’re with me?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’m thinking I’m fighting back.”

  “Thank you, Ben,” he replied, using my actual name for the first time. “I can’t tell you how much I respect your courage.”

  “Is your idea that bad?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I hope not.”

  We waited while George knocked on the door to the house. A woman, old enough to be Gloria's mother, answered soon after. She was overweight, with pale skin and reddish-silver hair. I couldn’t hear what George said to her, but Gloria turned to wave the all-clear with a friendly smile on her face.

  “Come on,” I said, jumping out of the van.

  “This is Mister Alan Murdock and his son, Ben,” Gloria said to the woman when Keep and I reached the front door. “They spotted the fire, came to help and got us out of the basement. They saved our lives. Alan, Ben, this is Marie.”

  “What an ordeal you’ve been through,” Marie said. “Why don’t you all come in? I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through already today. I can’t believe I didn’t see the smoke. Your farm isn’t that far away.”

  She led us into a home clearly larger and more upscale than George and Gloria’s. Large framed paintings hung on the walls with a huge television. A rich leather L-shaped sofa occupied most of the floor, large enough to seat ten people. A huge chandelier hung overhead.

  “Is Sally here?” Kyrie asked.

  “She’s up in her room,” Marie replied. “I’m sure she would have come down if she knew you were here. Why don’t you go up and surprise her?”

  “Okay!” Kyrie replied excitedly, running out of the room. I heard her feet on stairs deeper inside the house a few seconds later.

  “Alan, Ben, why don’t you sit? Can I get you anything to drink?”

  “To be honest, ma’am,” Keep said. “We can’t stay long.”

  “Marie, I was hoping George and Kyrie and I might be able to stay with you for a few days while we deal with the insurance and all of that,” Gloria said. “Or at the very least maybe Kyrie can stay with you? She’s a little shaken up, but she always enjoys spending time with Sally.”

  “Of course you can, dear. We have to look out for one another, right? I know you’d do the same for Bill and me, and we certainly have the space.”

  “Thank you. You’re a lifesaver. You have no idea.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet soon enough.”

  “Is Bill around?” George asked. “I told Alan about his Mustang. It turns out he’s in the market for a classic car.”

  Marie shook her head. “Good luck convincing him to sell that thing. Unless you’ve got a couple hundred thousand spare dollars burning a hole in your pocket?”

  “I wouldn’t call it spare,” Keep replied. “But my pockets are fairly deep.”

  She laughed. “Well, you’re free to talk to him about it. But don’t get your hopes up too high. He treats that car better than he treats me.”