Burn by Sarah Fine and Walter Jury Page B

Willetts.”
    â€œWhen did he die?” I ask.
    â€œAbout five minutes before I boarded a helicopter to the Walmart,” he replies. “He fired on my agents as they came through the door of his apartment.”
    Next to me, Christina shudders. She’d escaped from Willetts only moments before.
    â€œWhen did you guys become enemies?” I remember how determined Willetts was to keep the scanner out of H2 hands. “Was he human?” Was that why he was working with George? Why wouldn’t he have told my mom?
    â€œHe was neither human nor H2,” Congers says. “We’ve just scanned him.”
    Neither
 . . . My stomach tightens. He’d avoided scanning himself. “He scanned orange, didn’t he?”
    Congers and Race both nod. Neither looks all that surprised at my question.
    My mom does, though. “How did you know?”
    I’m not ready to give that away yet. “What does scanning orange mean?”
    Race glances at Congers. “Bill?”
    Congers nods, though he looks pretty pissed. “Tell them.”
    â€œIt means this planet is going to be invaded,” Race continues. “It means the process has already begun.”
    â€œAnd it means that if we don’t work together, the same thing that happened to our planet four hundred years ago will happen to Earth,” Congers adds.
    â€œThen you’d better tell us what happened,” my mother says. She looks tired and angry, but also . . . scared. Her petite frame is practically vibrating with tension as she stands with her injured left arm folded against her body.
    Congers looks down at the scanner in his hand. He switches it off and lets his arm fall to his side. “The H2 planet was peaceful, somewhat similar to this one in terms of climate and resources, but much more advanced, even hundreds of years ago. They were engaging in deep-space exploration.” He stares steadily at my mother. “They’d discovered Earth but had not made contact because it was so primitive. They’d started studying humans, though.”
    â€œBut I bet humans weren’t the only thing they discovered,” Leo comments.
    Congers doesn’t even look at him. “The leaders of the unified world government announced that they’d made contact with another advanced race within our galaxy, one that had endured a serious environmental disaster on its own planet. Our leaders decided that this race of beings would be sheltered on our planet. Permanently.”
    My mouth drops open. “They
invited
another race to invade?”
    â€œIt wasn’t framed like that, of course. These aliens were supposedly refugees. The unified government cleared all airspace to let the Sicarii in and granted them legal status as well.”
    â€œSicarii?” I ask, remembering my dad’s hastily scrawled note in his safe house—
Race: “Sicarii.”
He must have heard Race say it at some point, maybe during one of the multiple interrogation sessions Race put him through. Or maybe he had some surveillance set up that no one else knew about. But did he know what “Sicarii” meant?
    â€œThat’s what we call them now,” Congers says. “Just like you call us H2.” The bitter twist to his mouth has returned. “But they were called something else, just as we were, in a language that is now known and spoken only by a few—because of what they did to our people.”
    â€œBut you just told us you guys laid out a welcome mat,” Leo says.
    Race rubs at his temple. “The H2 planet was not like Earth, a patchwork of barely developed nations, chaotic leadership, and constantly shifting power bases and conflicts. It was peaceful and unified—but that made it vulnerable to a centralized infiltration. Here, they may not try to get to world leaders until they control those with power and weapons.”
    The Core. The Fifty. My stomach drops. Mom