Page 27 of Alien in the Attic

“It’s the device Arccoo came here to find. Supposedly, it can cure any disease but can also be used as a deadly weapon, so the Thryal people decided to hide it off-world. I guess they trusted Grandma and Grandpa with it.”

“But why them?” Elena asked, joining her sisters.

Carmen shrugged. “They must have thought humanity wasn’t advanced enough to know how to use it.”

“Makes sense. If you need me, I’ll be looking over their notes on the computer. I’ve never had to navigate anything as old as thisbefore.” Elena grinned, flapping her hands in excitement. She always loved a challenge. “It might as well have been built by Ada Lovelace.”

Carmen and Sofia gave their genius sister a blank look. Elena sighed. “One of the original inventors of the computer. Her dad was Lord Byron.”

Now that Elena mentioned it, Carmen did know him. In high school, she wrote an essay about how his melodramatic personality influenced bothFrankensteinand Polidori’sThe Vampyre.And his daughter invented computers? “Cool.”

Elena rolled her eyes and returned to her happy place, the computer. Meanwhile, Carmen and Sofia searched the rest of the room. Opening a drawer, a strange glow caught her eye.

She pulled out a small canister like the kind they would use for nuclear rods. Painter’s tape had been stuck to the top, a label in her grandmother’s handwriting.Frillin crystals. She fumbled, nearly dropping it in her surprise. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Sofia asked. She and Elena were immediately at Carmen’s side.

“This is the missing part to his ship. The energy crystal core had burned out, stranding him here. All this time, he’d been searching for replacement crystals exactly like these.” Suddenly lightheaded, she set the canister on the table and reached for a dusty swivel chair.

Her breath caught in her throat. “Do you know what this means?”

Sofia grinned. “Hell, yeah! We’re going to Thryal!”

Carmen blinked. “I-I couldn’t ask you to give up everything and come with me.”

“Are you kidding?” Sofia slung an arm around Carmen’s shoulders. “Pass up the opportunity to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no man has gone before? Have you met me?”

“And there’s no way I’m going to miss out on all that alien tech,” Elena said. “I’m still trying to figure out how his invisibility cloak works. It’s fascinating, and I cannot wait to see what else Thryal has to offer.”

Carmen lunged up and hugged her sisters. “I love you both so much!”

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 wouldthen 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 thatastronauts eat dried foods on the space station all the time. It has to be safe. Right?”

“What about thatSimpsonsepisode 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.

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