Disclaimer: Mike and Mia Whitman are mine. You can't have them! Mine mine mine!

....

I'll trade them for Alex thought.

No?

!@%$ !!!

So, everyone else isn't mine. They belong to other people that aren't me. Katims and Metz and others. Not me. I'm Darkchilde. See my name in the list of people that own the characters? See. Not in there. So not mine. Don't sue.

The explosion threw them both into the wall, Mike’s dark head striking the wall with a sickening crunch. In a second, Mia was on her feet and running toward her fallen brother, curly black hair falling into a pair of liquid blue eyes. Dropping to her knees next to the crumbled man, she extended one hand, her long, musician’s fingers trembling.

“Mike! Mike, Mike tell me you’re okay!” Mia screamed, wrapping one hand around her brother’s bicep and shaking him gently. “MIKE!”

“It’s okay Mia…” The young man sat up slowly, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I’m alright.” The young woman bit her lip and stared at her brother for a long moment, before he met her gaze with the same blue eyes she looked at him with. “I’m alright, Mia-Chia.”

The young woman smiled at him, and then shot to her feet, holding her hand out toward him. “Well, come on Spiky Mikey, we’ve gotta get out of here before—“

Another explosion cut her off, this time coupled with the horrifying sound of crumbling rock. The siblings looked at each other in horror, tears filling Mia’s eyes as he taller brother scrambled to his feet, his face pale and a thread of dark red rolling down his face.

“Oh God.” The girl whimpered, fear eating it’s way through her.

“Mia, come on!” Mike ordered, grabbing his little sister’s hand and dragging her forward, heedless of the nasty cut on his temple.

Mia couldn’t help but remember all the other times Mike had dragged her along behind him, literally and figuratively, when they had been little, when it had been safe to play and be happy. Before the war, before their parents and their aunts and uncles had become the only thing standing between Earth and a race of aliens bent on owning or destroying their world. Before people had started dying. Before Daddy had destroyed one of the aliens’ Space Stations at the cost of his own life, before Momma and Uncle Michael had gone to that peace conference and never come out again. Before Aunt Maria had been executed for the assassination of one of the more high ranking alien “diplomats” of the war, before their older brother Jamie had died in a pitched battle against the aliens, before Kylie and Lexie had died in a bombing of a supposedly safe area.

“Mike, is this going to work?!” Mia couldn’t help it; she was nervous and scared. There was no guarantee that this “Granolith” thing was going to work the way that Aunt Liz had said it would, or that they were going to be able to save the world. “Do you really think this will help!?”

“I don’t know.” Mike told her calmly, his long legs eating up the floor as he and Mia raced toward the chamber where the “Granolith” was being held. “But look at it this way, Mia—do you think we could make it any worse?” The lanky young man dragged the smaller girl through a small tunnel, and then into a chamber where a giant crystal hung suspended from the ceiling. Mia’s mouth dropped, and she gasped involuntarily, slightly annoyed with the easy acceptance she saw in her brother’s face.

Of course, he had been here before and she had not—Mike had inherited their father’s gift for computers, so he, along with Aunt Liz had been the ones to sneak in here to make the necessary adjustments to the alien structure that sat in front of them now. Reaching into his leather vest, Mike dragged out a long, multi-colored crystal and grinned as Mia goggled at that as well.

“What are you going to do with tha…” Another explosion, this one even closer then the pervious two had been, and Mike reacted, lunging forward and driving the crystal home into a slot on the machine, grabbing Mia’s hand with his free one as he did so.

A swirl of light swirled over them, sucking them up and away from the room, and then they were somewhere else, looking out over the room they had just been standing in. The wall gave way, and alien soldiers burst through the opening swarming into the room.

And then there was a burst of white light, and Mike and Mia Whitman were somewhere—some when else.