Chapter 12

Carmen

Coming back to Hollowbrook turned out to hold a lot of surprises for Carmen.

Despite Sofia’s insistence that they should use the opportunity for a ghost hunt, she never expected them to find anything, let alone an alien prince hiding upstairs. The fact that she would then fall in love with the royal extraterrestrial was something else she could not have predicted.

All of those surprises aside, however, at no point did she ever dream she and her sisters would be preparing to leave the only planet they’d ever known and set course for a new world. More than once after finding the hidden area behind the bookshelf, she thought about how insane this all was.

Can we really do this? she wondered on a loop. How can we leave everything behind on a whim like this?

Then she would remember the gentle strength of Arccoo’s embrace. The way his violet eyes made her feel like the most important woman in the universe. How the only time she ever felt truly at home was by his side. As impossible as their situation was, life didn’t make sense until he walked into it. With him gone, she went back to feeling out of place again.

We fit together , she reminded herself. We were torn away from Pa-Brell’s robe and deserve to be reunited. The memory of that night below the stars gave her warm shivers. That was enough to convince her.

Yes. We can do this.

“Is it dangerous to eat crackers in space?” Sofia asked as the sisters got busy packing the essentials.

“Why would it be dangerous?” Carmen asked. “If every school field trip to the planetarium taught me anything, it’s that astronauts eat dried foods on the space station all the time. It has to be safe. Right?”

“What about that Simpsons episode where Homer was in space?” Sofia countered. “Homer sent a whole bag of chips flying in zero gravity and had to eat all of them to stop them from clogging up the instruments. We don’t want to crash into Jupiter because I ate a Ritz.”

Elena set down a bundle of blinking wires on the floor of the old carriage house and huffed. “This ship wasn’t built by NASA,” she told her sisters. “It has artificial gravity, a sophisticated ventilation system, and most of the ports are sealed, almost like child protection locks. I think it’s safe to have a few crackers.”

“Good because I’m going to need them to soak up all the alcohol I’ll be drinking,” Sofia said, dropping a sleeve of crackers into a duffle bag.

“You’re going to get drunk in space?” Carmen asked. She could feel her flabbergasted eyebrows raising so far up her forehead that they nearly merged with her hairline.

“You expect me to travel through a literal void sober?” Sofia asked. “I’m going to need the booze to keep me from panicking.”

Carmen sighed. “You don’t have to go. Especially if you’re that nervous.” The last thing she wanted was for her sister to regret her decision. It’s not like they were planning a road trip to Atlantic City. There was a very real chance that they wouldn’t survive the journey. She would have been fine with Sofia deciding to back out.

“No,” Sofia said, sounding surprised by the suggestion. “I’m pumped, seriously. I just have a thing about heights.”

Elena began untangling the wires, frowning as she did so. “Well, I have good news for you then,” she said. “Heights don’t really exist in space. Without gravity, there is no real way to tell how high up you are. So, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Carmen smiled. Elena always had a way of using her vast intellect to smooth over concerns. Horror movies never scared her because she learned about special effects makeup when she was three. Her logical approach to most situations had a comforting way of simplifying anything.

Then again, her powers could be used the opposite way as well. Instead of blessing someone after a sneeze, she was known to list off all the possible illnesses associated with sneezing with such cold clarity that by the time she was done, you were convinced you were on death’s door.

“Bring whatever you want,” Carmen told Sofia. “Whatever you need in order to feel safe and comfortable is fine with me. Okay?”

“Three bottles of wine it is,” Sofia replied with a wink.

Later that afternoon, the sisters had packed several changes of clothes, enough snacks and water to survive a nuclear fallout, cards, books, and, yes, three bottles of wine. Elena sat in the de facto pilot’s seat, poking every icon in sight and occasionally murmuring to herself.

“Interesting,” she said when lights came on in the armrest.

“I see,” was her remark when a holographic map shot up from the controls.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she repeated when an alarm started shrieking in everyone’s ears. After a second of panicked searching, she found the correct sequence of digital button mashing to silence the horrifically loud wailing. “At least we’ll know if anything is about to smash into us.”

Carmen strapped herself in next to her brilliant sister. The weight of the belts crossing over one another against her shoulders, chest, and abdomen was a reminder of how real this all was.

Before now, it had been a hypothetical, an abstract notion in her mind. The size and scale of the journey they were about to embark on was too impossible to comprehend. As she felt the steady hum of the idling engines, however, the truth hit her square in the gut, and she almost screamed.

Remember this , the ghost of Arccoo’s voice echoed through her mind. Remember us .

Recalling their final moment together chased away the fear burning through her nervous system. The unconditional vulnerability they shared was a new and energizing experience for her. It was like breathing clean air for the first time. If she had to travel more lightyears than she could count to feel that again, it was worth it.

Almost as if she had been reading her mind, Sofia, fiddling with the belts in the seat across from her, brought up time and distance. “How long is this going to take?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Elena answered, controlling the shimmering map with her fingers. It twirled, expanded, and shrank in response to her hand motions. “Their unit of measurement is different from ours. If I tried to estimate, I’d only be making a bad guess. Not to mention the time variance objects experience when traveling through space. Oh, and then there’s the possibility of encountering a wormhole.”

“Excuse me for asking,” Sofia said. Carmen was about to lean forward to explain how the buckles worked when they finally clicked. Sofia gave her older sister a smug smirk. “All it takes is a little trial and error.”

Carmen laughed. Not because Sofia had said anything particularly funny. Watching her siblings work so hard to make this journey happen overwhelmed her with joy. Not only were they there for her after that last nightmare of a relationship, they supported her and Arccoo without reservation. Now they were joining her on an interstellar voyage across an unimaginable distance. She felt very lucky to be able to call these two powerhouse women sisters.

I won the lottery , she told herself.

The humming increased. Carmen held on to the belts keeping her in place and darted her eyes over to Elena. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Uh, yes,” Elena said, not sounding all that confident.

“Are we about to explode?” Sofia asked. Carmen couldn’t tell if she was scared or excited.

“No,” Elena told her. “We’re just leaving now.”

Carmen’s eyes widened. “What? You couldn’t have given us a little warning?”

“We haven’t left yet,” Elena said. “So that was your warning.”

Carmen was about to debate it with her when she felt her stomach almost drop down to her toes. Before she knew it, the blue Hollowbrook sky had been replaced by unending blackness.

When the pressure lifted, all three sisters took a huge breath, as if they had simultaneously breached the surface after spending too long underwater.

“The fuck just happened?” Sofia yelled. “I thought I was about to be turned inside out.”

“Are you okay?” Carmen asked, not sure if she was herself.

“I think so,” Sofia said. “I’m not bleeding from my eyes or anything. Am I?”

Carmen shook her head. She looked at Elena. The youngest sister was frantically typing through what looked like a thousand holograms. “Is everything safe?”

“As far as I can tell,” Elena answered. “I don’t know what happened. I thought I was putting in some flight coordinates. Instead, I seem to have activated the autopilot. I can’t get any of the navigational controls to respond.”

“Autopilot?” Sofia asked, her breathing speeding up. “Doesn’t that mean we have no control over where we’re headed? What if we’re about to fly into the sun as a self-destruct thing? Like, what if it has a protocol to kill itself if aliens gain control?”

“Deeper breaths,” Carmen said, forcing her voice to remain calm. “You’re going to pass out if you keep going on like that.” She was saying that just as much for herself as Sofia. Jumping from Earth to the stars like that wasn’t only uncomfortable but terrifying. The old fear that this might be a mistake came back.

“According to the path laid out on this map, we won’t be going anywhere near the sun,” Elena explained. She pinched the middle of the three-dimensional map and zoomed in as if she were enlarging a picture on her phone. “This green line looks like it’s taking us directly to Thryal. Perhaps instead of a self-destruct protocol, it had an automatic return function in case of emergencies.”

Visibly relieved, Sofia closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the seat. “Is anyone else really happy I brought that wine?” she asked.

Tension successfully broken, the Flores sisters broke into laughter.

Space travel wasn’t what Carmen had expected. Time was impossible to track. Elena did her best to decipher the symbols that appeared to count like a digital clock, but she couldn’t make sense of them. Minutes, hours, even days were indistinguishable. Everyone’s sleep cycle was out of whack, making for three irritable and cranky sisters.

Stars didn’t blur past the windows as they did in movies, to Carmen’s disappointment. If anything, the distant points of brilliant, burning gasses never got any closer. This made tracking distance just as difficult as time. She couldn’t tell which direction they were going, how far they’d traveled, or how much time had elapsed.

It made for a surreal nonexistence. The three of them inhabited a bubble where they and everything inside it progressed, but nothing else did.

Carmen began to wonder if they were even awake. She had a secret theory that she refused to share with the others for fear of sounding unhinged that the ship had knocked them out and was keeping them asleep in stasis. Isn’t that how space travel worked in science fiction?

They tried to monitor their progress by playing games, estimating how long each hand of cards took and marking them down. Reading was out of the question, for Carmen, at least. Each time she opened a book in the hopes of getting lost in a story, the words blurred together. When she felt exceptionally tired, they floated off of the page. Did this psychological phenomenon have to do with space travel, or was it exhaustion? She couldn’t tell.

Things started to pick up when they entered the nebula. None of them were astronomers. Therefore, they didn’t know what its name was. So Sofia decided to call it the Flores Nebula. “As far as we know, we’re the first humans to have discovered it,” she said.

The enormous cloud of gas lingered in the cosmos, reflecting light across the color spectrum. Carmen leaned over the controls to get a better view from the front.

Blazing reds swirled around shining yellows. Sapphire mingled with violet and smoldering orange. Light streaked across her face, reminding her of multicolored soaps cascading down the windshield at a carwash. It was like being surrounded by magic.

“Now this is more like it,” Sofia said from over Carmen’s shoulder. “We are officially in outer space.”

Elena wasn’t as entranced. “Sit down, please.” Her voice was clipped, not angry.

“Why?” Carmen asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe just sit down and strap in again,” was all Elena would say.

Carmen did as instructed, but Sofia needed an extra nudge. Once both sisters were safely snug in their seats, Carmen asked again what was wrong.

Elena sounded nervous. More nervous than when the autopilot shot them into space without warning. “Well, the good news is we could be very close to Thryal,” she told her sisters. “ Could being the operative word.”

“So, there’s bad news?” Sofia asked. “What’s the bad news?”

“I wouldn’t say the news is bad, necessarily,” Elena said. “More like uncertain news.”

Carmen noticed her brainy sister pulled the straps extra tight. She did the same.

“Just tell us what you think,” Carmen said. “It’s better to rip the bandage off.”

“Well, I noticed this spherical ball of light,” Elena said. “I thought it was pretty and hoped we might get a little closer so I could see it better. Turns out the ship is headed straight for it.”

A fist pressed itself into Carmen’s lungs. “What do you think that means?”

“I am fairly certain that it’s a wormhole,” Elena said.

“Are wormholes bad?” Sofia asked, nibbling on her thumbnail.

“No,” Elena answered. “They could, theoretically, serve as shortcuts across the universe. Meaning, you could arrive anywhere in space in a matter of seconds.”

“Like Thryal,” Carmen said. She meant it as a question, but the sphere of light was close enough now that it was filling the ship with blinding platinum rays, and her voice fell away.

“Like Thryal,” Elena confirmed. “Or anywhere else in the universe. My advice is to close your eyes, hold on real tight, and pray the autopilot knows what it’s doing.”

The ship was consumed with white light. Carmen closed her eyes.

A second later, the alarms were blasting at full volume.

When Carmen opened her eyes again, it looked as though they were crashing.