Tears abruptly threatened, but I refused to let them fall.
Not now. Not when we're so close to the truth.
Tack was reading ahead when he flinched. His gaze slid to Noah, then he tried to close the binder.
Noah's hand slapped down on the page. "What?"
"Huh? Nothing." Tack shot me a loaded glance, but I didn't understand.
"You're hiding something," Noah said softly, forcing Tack to meet his eye. "What don't you want me to see?"
"Noah, man, trust me. You don't want to know. It's got nothing-"
Noah pushed Tack's hand aside. "Ah. My mother's page." He began reading silently. All color drained from his face.
"Noah?" I was suddenly afraid. "What is it?"
He didn't answer. Head bowed, Noah turned and stumbled a few feet away. I quickly scanned the text.
"They killed her!" I gasped. "Oh my God, Noah. I'm so-"
"So what?" he spat, not looking at me. "Sorry? Why? My mother sold me to these people, Min. Same as yours. Why should I care what they did to her in return?" But I could tell it was ripping a hole inside of him.
"You didn't finish!" I shouted, holding the binder up before me. "Noah, they killed her because she tried to remove you from the project. She wanted to take you out, but they wouldn't let that happen. It's all right here!"
Noah strode back to the workstation and read silently. When finished, tears glistened on his cheeks. "Well," he stammered, "at least she didn't abandon me. That's something, I guess."
I felt a flash of hatred for whoever had given the order.
Tack gently took the binder from Noah and flipped to the next page. "Get this: after Barbara Livingston rebelled, the project decided it was too risky to involve any more outsiders. They stopped asking for consent forms, and adopted Dr. Fanelli's 'hypnosis treatment' for 'Beta Patients C and D.' Ethan's and Sarah's parents came here and verbally agreed. Can you believe it? They just handed their kids over to a government experiment! Amazing."
Then his head snapped up. He eyed me with a grimace, no doubt wishing he could take back his last comment.
"But what is the experiment?" I said, pushing the painful reminder aside. "What's the damn point?" I glared at the rows of gleaming binders, vowing to examine each and every one if that's what it took.
Tack's slip had cut me deep. Being this close to answers only made it worse.
"Maybe this could help?" Noah lifted a silver DVD case from the next workstation over. "It's labeled 'Dark Star-E.L.E.' That mean anything to you guys?"
E.L.E. Those letters again.
"Is there a place to play it?" I asked.
Noah's station had a computer. He located a keyboard and tapped the space bar. At the front of the room, the left-hand screen sprang to life. "There's a drive, too." Noah inserted the disk. Surprisingly, an old TV documentary began to play, a buttery voice surrounding us as an image of our planet appeared onscreen.
"For twenty-six million years, Nemesis, the dark star of legend, has hidden from the Earth, distant and invisible in the vast depths of space. But its implacable orbit will once again return to wreak havoc, as it has done in the past and will again in the future."
I shot a startled glance at the boys, but they were staring at the screen. The image changed to animation of our solar system in motion. "Most people think our sun is alone in the solar system, with only its eight planets to keep it company. But recent scientific findings point to an altogether different possibility."
The scale expanded, ballooning well past Neptune to include an enormous ring of asteroids and even larger comet cloud. Beyond even those, in the farthest reach, a dark red ball appeared, glowing with fiery menace.
"What if our sun isn't alone in its spiral around the galaxy, but is instead part of a binary system with a distant, nearly invisible companion?"
The word NEMESIS appeared in bright red letters.
Tack frowned up at the screen. "What is this, an astronomy lesson?"
The voice continued as a new simulation played. "For years, scientists have been alarmed by anomalies in the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy bodies that bounds our solar system. It's from this frozen realm that comets originate, sometimes falling inward toward the sun."
The video cut to a scientist sitting on a boulder in the desert. "The geological record is clear-every twenty-six million years, our planet undergoes a massive die-off during which nearly all life on Earth is eradicated. The most commonly known example is the demise of the dinosaurs, but these extinction-level events are as regular as clockwork. What we didn't understand was why." He gave the camera a shaky smile. "Until now."
My whole body went rigid.
Extinction-level events.
E. L. E.
Noah glanced at me. He'd caught it, too.
"Archaeological evidence points to regular periods of environmental disruption in our planet's long history," the man continued. "What we've been searching for are the trigger events-the root causes of these cataclysms. Most assume that comet or asteroid impacts were to blame, and to an extent that's true. But those theories are missing the much bigger picture. They fail to account for Nemesis."
Nemesis.
I felt a rush of blood to my head.
The original narrator returned. "Often dubbed the 'Death Star,' Nemesis is believed to be a red dwarf star one-tenth the size of our sun, barely glowing and therefore invisible from Earth by telescope. But what we can't see can hurt us."
A dark-skinned professor appeared, speaking with a smooth, Africanized British accent. "Nemesis is much smaller than our sun, and on an elliptical orbit, meaning that for long periods it remains far away from the solar system. But when the dark star returns, its massive gravity-over a hundred times that of Jupiter-creates instability in the Oort cloud, sending thousands of comets streaming into the habitable zone. Nemesis also rattles the asteroids of the Kuiper Belt. The result is a galactic turkey shoot during which the Earth cannot help but be pummeled."
"The results have been devastating." A chart flashed onscreen, listing a series of planetary extinctions with corresponding dates. "Every twenty-six million years, life on Earth is pushed to the brink. The only solution that fits this pattern is Nemesis."
The first scientist was back, smiling inanely. "As Nemesis moves closer, its gravity will even disrupt our planet's plate tectonics, causing eruptions, earthquakes, and other disasters. Earth will become a living hell. Humanity has never seen Nemesis before, but we can't survive it. And there's nothing we can do."
"Why is that lunatic smiling?" Tack demanded, shaking his head. "He's talking about the apocalypse like it's a freaking One Direction concert. Weirdo."
The program shifted to a pair of guys throwing tennis balls into a trash can, apparently to demonstrate some gravitational law. Minutes later it ended. My thoughts turned inward, vividly recalling the events of the last week.
Everything described in the video had been happening. Then it all stopped.
Everyone also disappeared.
Nothing makes sense. None of it. Not one damn thing.
"So those scientists think a rogue star is going to ravage the planet," I said, thinking aloud. This was different from what I'd been expecting, and I didn't know how to react. The "nemesis" here wasn't my personal serial killer, it was a ball of burning gas somewhere in deep space. "In response, our government secretly built this emergency bunker and stocked it with supplies. That part makes sense."
"Preparing for global catastrophe." Noah nodded slowly. "Okay. Sure."
Tack started. "The Anvil. This death star must've tossed it at us. Those comets too, I guess. Jeez, Toby was right for once. The government really did know all about it."
I slapped my palms on the desktop. "So what happened? It all just . . . stopped? The earthquakes. The eruptions. Ash-filled skies. All that stuff is simply gone now, along with-oh, right-everyone we've ever known. How can that be?"
"No one's even using this place," Tack said. "We walked right in. All that effort, for nothing?"
"Why send a man to kill me, over and over?" I was nearly shouting. "Why experiment on students? Why isolate our town? They shot people. Gassed sixty-four kids in a park! What does any of that have to do with an invisible star orbiting a billion miles away?"
"And one other thing," Noah said softly.
"What?" I asked, almost afraid to hear it.
"Where's the death star now?"
49
NOAH
Min and Tack were slogging through the binders.
"For a week we know nothing," Tack grumbled, dropping another into a growing discard pile. "Now there's too much information available. Great joke, universe."
He turned to Min. "Whatcha got?"
She blew a stray hair from her mouth. "Telemetry studies. Projected movements of celestial bodies. Comet decay and orbit aerodynamics. In other words, nothing that explains what Project Nemesis actually intended. You?"
Tack pointed to the closest shelves. "Those up top are about satellite tracking systems. I think. I'm honestly not sure-this is the most boring stuff I've ever laid eyes on. The middle ones seem to be the 'What the Hell Should We Do?' section. There's a whole binder about building a giant space station, but the front page is stamped 'DISCONTINUED.' Guess that idea never got into orbit. Same with the one about a cave complex in West Virginia."