My Crazy Hot Interstellar Affair

45. Mortified! Area Woman Discovers Mom Actual Mindreader

"Not directly. But there was so much marijuana in the air, you could practically chew it."

"Oh, Mama." Andie squeezed Rachel's hand.

Oliver conjured the route, like a magician unspooling an orange thread of light, stretching it across the cosmos, starting at the celebrity moon, then cutting through galaxies, curving past stars, skirting black holes, all the way back to planet earth. He connected the moon and the earth with a sprinkle of alien magic.

The ship rocketed into the sky. Andie kept her eyes trained on her mother. Not the beauty of the sparkly velvet of the universe above or the diminishing moon below. The further from the surface they traveled, the lower the moon's influence. Once it drained completely, Andie realized just how much effort she had been expending the entire time on The Colony in order to maintain her free will. In the reflection from the window, Andie checked for the silver scar. There it was, beside her left eye. But the shape had changed. Instead of a jagged line, it was now a crescent moon.

Andie held her breath. What did this mean for Rachel's vision? Even Star seemed to pause for a moment at the edge of the moon's atmosphere, before blasting into the fuzzy white glow of hyperspace.

"Mama?" Andie said.

Rachel turned toward Andie and gazed at her daughter's face in an unfocused "fuzzy as hyperspace" manner. "Oh, my," she said.

"Mama, are you okay?"

"Oh yes, better than okay. I'm wonderful."

Andie finally expelled a long breath. "Thank god."

"The goddess has blessed me, dear. With true sight."

"Huh?"

"I cannot see this plane as I did moments ago. Now I see auras, people's innermost thoughts, intersections of congruent universes, the future, the past, and a vague outline of the present. I haven't quite worked it out yet. Pilot is explaining it to me. All I can say is, it's bitchen!"

Andie could not wrap her head around her mother's sudden new abilities. All she knew was, having Rachel see her innermost thoughts was more frightening than being attacked by Blackhawk helicopters. And Andie knew exactly how that felt.

Luckily, Rachel seemed to have an engrossing telepathic conversation with Pilot, so Andie could use the time to examine her own predicament.

***

While Andie had often imagined this moment—heading home—she'd always thought it would be with Sterling at her side. Without a possible alien pregnancy. Without a mother who had twisted into a comic book character like Daredevil. And she would have a super good plan about how to stop the Amu invasion.

But no.

She was Sterlingless, probably pregnant, had a mother who could read minds and tell the future and had the worst burblings of a plan taking form in her brain. It was a plan so repugnant it amounted to nothing less than selling her soul. Because it would mean turning into her dad. Becoming a criminal.

The whole thing was so overwhelming, her eyelids grew heavy. It startled her when Pilot jumped off his seat and walked beneath the Google Galaxy route. He cocked his head, then raised a paw and bent it in the middle, making it sag.

Andie rubbed her eyes—perhaps from lack of sleep, perhaps from the daunting choice that lay ahead. "What did he do?" Her brain wanted to shut down. Let someone else be in charge.

"He's getting off at Gandulfia," Rachel said, twisting her beads. "To make his report about the Amu operation on earth."

This meant ... Oh my god! Andie didn't have to become a criminal. Relief coursed through her.