Alien vs. Alien

looking for us.”
    “Seriously? With Clarence running amok? With me point blank telling Jeff to get you because you were the assassination target of the day?”
    Jeff sighed. “Baby, there was more going on. We weren’t alone in the room.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the glowing cube. “It turned out that this wasn’t the one Christopher and I had when we were little.”
    Chuckie released one arm from around Naomi and reached into his pocket. “The only thing the room contained was this.” He pulled out another glowing cube. “Per Martini, this one isn’t the one he had as a child, either.”
    “So, did you try the wishing we were somewhere else thing?”
    “Yeah, after the ‘throw himself against every part of the walls’ attempt that lasted far longer than was good for anyone’s health, your husband did,” Chuckie said. He looked like he was trying not to laugh. “For what I’m guessing was an hour. With no success.”
    “Yeah, yeah. It was more like fifteen minutes, if that. Reynolds finally convinced me to sit down and tell him what I knew about our cube and how it worked.”
    “From what I can tell, your mother,” Chuckie said to Christopher, “was able to alter the cube you two used to be trained on your DNA signature. Maybe tuned to your talents. But set up just for the two of you. The ones Clarence had and we found are more . . . general.”
    “How would my mother have ever found a cube like this?” Christopher asked. “They aren’t manmade and they aren’t something from our home world. Are they?” he asked White.
    “I’d never heard of these until today, son.”
    Chuckie’s wasn’t the only human mind that could move fast when needed. Mine liked to comply now and again as well. “Richard, I’m sorry, I know you don’t know this, but now’s apparently the time. I know Terry went to see Yates right after the Mephistopheles superbeing showed up. She was going to ask for his help. Instead, he infected her in some way. Whether it was with a parasite or something else, I’m not sure, but that’s what killed her.”
    White clenched his jaw but otherwise didn’t betray emotion. Christopher put his arm around his father; Abigail took and squeezed White’s hand. “I’m fine, children,” he said quietly. “Confirmation of long suspected truth is something of a relief.”
    “I know it was a long time ago, but do you know where Yates was the week before Terry got sick?”
    “It still feels like yesterday most of the time, so yes, I do remember. He was in Washington, D.C. Rumors put him at his club.”
    “Which we can safely assume was the same country club the dead zone is under. So, maybe he had the cube, maybe Terry followed him, something, but somewhere along the way, she found it. Figured out how to program it and brought it back with her. So she could pass on what Jeff and Christopher would need in order to survive without her.”
    “But she never told me where she got it,” Jeff said. “Why not?”
    “The same reason she didn’t tell you many other things. You were ten years old, and she was already giving you more responsibility than any child should have to bear.”
    “So, how did you two get out?” Stryker asked. “The room’s impregnable.”
    “With our tools, yes,” Chuckie said. “But not if you use the cubes properly.”
    “Only works if you’re with the smartest guy in not just the room you’re in, but any room in the world,” Jeff said. Proudly. Wow. This was a red-letter day in a lot of ways.
    “Thanks. It’s based on mental telepathy, which would sound like so much New Age junk if we didn’t have A-Cs doing similar every day of their lives. It requires more than wishing to make it work, however.”
    “So how did Jeff manage it?”
    They both chuckled. “Lucky accident, as near as we can tell,” Chuckie said. “He was pressing the right points of the cube at the right time, and was completely focused on his goal, which was a clear and simple goal.”
    “How do you mean?” Buchanan asked.
    “Martini wanted to get the two of us away from Clarence and to safety. That’s a clear goal. ‘I want to be rich’ isn’t as clear a goal, for example, because it’s not saying how you’re going to get rich, it’s not saying what you consider rich to be, and so on.”
    “Makes sense.” Who was I to argue? I could talk to animals now. I had no That’s So Crazy leg to stand on.
    “If you look at the cube, it’s set