by Emily Henry
Her gaze cut toward me with a force that made my throat tighten. Was she accusing me? Or confessing?
Had Sofía hidden this stuff? She didn’t have a car, but she regularly borrowed her mom’s CRV to get to work and lacrosse. Maybe she’d seen the thing go into me too. Maybe she figured it wouldn’t end well for us if that information went public, so she’d decided to clean up anything that linked us to what happened.
But moving the wreckage itself seemed too reckless for Sofía, and it wouldn’t explain what had caused the blackout at the substation.
Probably Sofía was looking for me to back her up on her perfectly reasonable theory.
“That makes sense,” I offered.
She looked to the boys to gauge their reaction. Arthur still had his mouth screwed up. “Levi, you’ve got your camera, right?”
“Of course!” Levi hurried to get it out of his backpack. “You want to get footage of the debris, or the spinning compass? Maybe we should go back and get footage of us ‘discovering it.’ I should’ve been filming for that.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Arthur said. “Contact is what matters. We need to figure out where our alien went, and what it wants. We’ll set the camera up in a tree outside the cave and see if we can catch it coming or going.”
Levi gaped at him. “What if it rains?”
Arthur stared back. “I don’t think a little rain would stop an alien from coming back to its hideout.”
“No, dude,” Levi said. “What if it rains on my camera?”
“Then you’ll order another one,” Arthur said, impatient.
Levi huffed but seemed to have no argument for that.
“The battery will die,” Sofía pointed out.
“Levi just charged it.” Arthur pocketed the bullet. “It’ll get at least a couple of hours. For now, let’s head back to our house. Who knows what brought the sheriff out here or when he might be back.”
“Right.” Sofía looked toward me. “Who knows?”
THIRTEEN
ON OUR WAY OUT of the cave, I searched Sofía’s face for signs she knew about the thing in me, but if she did, she was working hard not to acknowledge it.
I wanted to ask her if she was keeping a secret, but among the Ordinary, there was so much we didn’t talk about that avoiding touchy subjects was second nature. And aside from that, if I asked her if she knew more about all this than she was letting on, she’d probably ask me the same question right back.
Keeping things from each other was easy; outright lying would be harder.
ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL you tell no one about what you’ve experienced. NOT EVEN—PERHAPS ESPECIALLY—those you are closest to. All that you share with them will put them in greater danger with those who might wish to find you.
But what if Sofía, like Remy, already knew?
And what kind of danger was Bill talking about?
A jolt of dread went through me every time the thought hit me, which happened over and over again while Arthur and Levi were fixing the camera to a tree branch that overlooked the cave. They’d made do with what they had––Levi’s bike lock and one of his shoelaces––and they’d wiped the whole contraption down as thoroughly as if it were a bank vault we’d just robbed without gloves.
The air felt sticky and unpleasant after the cool of the cave, and with my bike’s bent tire, the walk home was miserable. I kept waiting for the sheriff to pull up alongside us and demand to know where we’d been, or for Sofía to announce that she remembered the light-thing going into me.
But we made it to our brick house without any more discussion of the incident, the Jenkins House, or the debris. We propped our bikes against the shed and were headed across the field when a hunched silhouette jumped up from the steps.
“Franny?” Nick called through the dark. In the wash of the moth-encircled porch light, he looked harried and white-faced, even more skull-like than usual.
“Already missing us, huh? I knew it!” Levi cried.
“I knew you’d join the investigation,” Arthur said.
Nick marched right past them and bore down on me. “I’ve been trying to call you for an hour!” His voice was hoarse, edged with panic, and his face was rigid, angry.
“Me?” I looked around at the others, who were as evidently stunned as I was. Nick was like a third brother to me, but he was way closer with Arthur. We rarely called each other.
“Yes, you,” Nick growled. “What happened? You sent that gah-damn message, then dropped off the face of the planet!”
“What are you talking about?” Arthur said.
“The piano!” Nick snapped.
The piano?
The picture I’d sent him. The red kid’s piano with the embossed gold lettering. That was what this was about—not the alien inside me, not the secret that had been pressing down on me all day.
“Where’d you see that?” Nick grabbed my arms. The already sharp lines of his face went razor-edged with tension. “I need to see it, Franny.” His accent thickened. “Take me to it.”
“Chill out,” Levi said. “You look like Beetlejuice right now, and it’s freaking me out.”
Nick shook my shoulders. “Where is it, Fran?”
Arthur shoved him so hard he stumbled back, then reeled toward us, looking like a wounded animal. “Franny, tell m—”
“It’s at the Jenkins House!” I snapped, rubbing my arms where his fingers had dug in. “It’s nothing to lose your shit over.”
The fire faded from Nick’s eyes. He jammed his mouth shut and blinked. “It’s . . . it’s at the Jenkins House?”
“You must have seen it the other night,” I said. “That’s all.”
Nick stared for two complete seconds then let out an embarrassed laugh. He dropped his head, rubbing the back of it. He gave another uneasy laugh. “I’d just about convinced myself it was, like, some kind of message, from . . . you know, your little green friend.” He tipped his chin toward Arthur.
“Gray,” Arthur said. “It’s way more common for people to see gray aliens. But ours isn’t like that anyway.”
Nick gave his head another restless rub. “I really am losing it.”
Sofía folded her arms over her chest. “Well, I hope you find it fast. Look, we never should have climbed that fence, but we did, and now we have to deal with the consequences. You don’t have to believe Arthur’s theory, and I certainly don’t, but something’s going on here, and until Cheryl Kelly’s magically orgasming microphone is put back on its shelf and the sheriff’s investigation is over, you’re as stuck in this mess as the rest of us.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick said.
“Orgasming microphone?” Levi asked.
Arthur’s brows knit together. “What do you mean, you don’t believe my theory?”
Sofía focused on Nick. “Someone else was at Jenkins that night. We don’t know who, or what they saw, or what they want. But there’s a stockpile of magnetized wreckage in a cave behind the abandoned house. At any moment, someone could connect us to what happened, and we need to have a better explanation than ‘we didn’t do it!’ We need the truth.”
The truth. The words rattled through me. If Bill was right, that was something I couldn’t let them have.
Nick took a few steps back and lowered himself onto the front steps. “Shit.” He shot me a cautious glance, and, misreading my expression, said, “I’m sorry for acting like that, Fran. This thing’s really messed with me. I’ve barely slept since that night. Whenever I close my eyes, I see that damn piano, and when I saw your message—it doesn’t make sense, but I felt like if I saw it in real life, maybe it would all be over.”
“I think I get it,” I admitted. It was how I’d felt about the necklace, like it was the final piece connecting me to something I wanted to forget.
It’s not the final piece, though.<
br />
There were the bullets, whoever had moved the magnetized debris, the questions from the sheriff, the scars on our skin, the malfunctioning technology and surging light bulbs and the e-mail from Bill about people who’d want to vanish me, and the YouTube video that had been removed for reasons I didn’t understand.
There was Arthur determined to make an extraordinary discovery, and Levi determined to find new ways to keep us together, and Sofía determined to find some truth that would justify her momentary lapse of judgment when she’d climbed that fence.
But I’d briefly convinced myself that finding the necklace would end all this, so I understood how Nick could think resolving the mystery of his piano dream could close the box we’d opened.
“So what do we do now?” he said.
“We get a long night’s sleep,” Arthur said. “We need to be ready to get back to work tomorrow. This is just getting started.”
Nick seemed wary, but he let Arthur lead him inside anyway. We all did.
Maybe we were just used to Arthur leading the way. Or maybe Levi, Sofía, and Nick all knew, like I did, that my brother was right.
This was only the beginning.
FOURTEEN
A LITTLE AFTER ELEVEN, I lay awake, listening to the easy rhythm of Sofía’s breath in the bed beside me. She slept on her stomach, but whenever she seemed nearly out, she kept twitching awake again, shifting in the bed.
Not yet. I couldn’t sneak out to walkie-talkie Remy until she was out. I flipped onto my back and stared at the ceiling.
I used to fall asleep like this every night, gazing at the Milky Way Mark had painted overhead for my eleventh birthday.
I rarely glanced at it these days. Not just because it reminded me of him. That I didn’t mind.
But it also reminded me of Mom.
Whenever I looked at it, I pictured her floating through space in an astronaut suit, alone and happy among the stars, happier than she ever was or could be in Splendor, especially now that her one tether to the Great Beyond, the son who understood the awe it struck in her, was lost to her in all the ways that mattered.
Sofía let out a snore. It was time. I turned onto my side, untangling the sweaty sheets from my legs, and slid out of bed.
At my dresser, I stopped and carefully removed the rubber gloves and walkie-talkie, then sneaked out.
I stepped over Droog at the bottom of the stairs, and her tail gave one thump on the mat as her eyes slitted open, but she didn’t follow me back to the kitchen.
I moved a stack of mail from the chair onto the table, then sat and turned on the walkie-talkie, tuning it to our usual channel. “Remy?” I whispered after a beat.
A few seconds passed. A crunching sound came over the speaker. “You’re okay,” Remy said in a rush.
“I am,” I agreed, though it didn’t feel true.
“Did he e-mail you back?”
“He did.”
“Well?” Remy rasped. “What did he say?”
My stomach dipped.
That some mysterious entity is going to kidnap me and anyone who knows what happened.
“Basically he said not to tell anyone, and little else,” I said.
“What the hell. What are you supposed to do with that? Why did he even bother e-mailing you back?”
I’d reached out to Remy because I was dying to tell him about what had happened in the Jenkins House, but now that I could hear his voice, now that he wasn’t so far away, I couldn’t bear to drag him any deeper into this.
I cleared my throat. “I’m going to e-mail him back and try to get more.”
Remy was silent for a beat. “Maybe we should tell someone. For all we know this guy’s a fraud, Fran.”
“No,” I said quickly. We fell into silence again. Moonlight pooled across the floorboards from the window, and the ceiling fan was still whipping dust through the air, but the air-conditioning unit in the window was silent.
“I’m sorry I can’t be there with you,” he said.
“It wouldn’t make a difference.”
“Still,” he said.
“Still,” I agreed.
The soft static shuffle between our words reminded me he was there, though, on the other end, and even that was a relief.
A floorboard creaked at the front of the house.
“I have to go,” I hissed, and turned the walkie-talkie off, slipping it behind a pile of books. I peeled the glove off and tossed it over the sink, then hurried to fill a glass of water.
But whoever was down here didn’t intrude, and a second later, I heard the front door squeal open.
“Hello?” I called.
No answer.
I tiptoed down the hall. Droog was standing on the mat, whimpering, her nose pressed to the window beside the door.
I brushed the drapes back and looked out at the shabby yard. A dense fog hovered over it, diffusing the moonlight, wiping everything from sight except the massive, stock-still figure two yards from the front door.
My heart leapt, and fear punched in my stomach before I placed the messy twist of auburn hair and the gentle slope of the figure’s shoulders.
Levi, I realized with relief. Just Levi.
But what was he doing? There was something eerie about his stiff posture. A breeze rolled toward the house, rippling through the grass and tousling his hair and bright yellow boxers.
He turned on his heel and started walking jerkily, like a mostly naked toy soldier come to life, around the side of the house.
I remembered the shiny purple bruise near his temple. He must be sleepwalking. I doubled back to the coat closet and grabbed a sweatshirt from it, then stuffed my feet into a pair of shoes and ran out the door.
Levi was already out of sight. I wrapped my sweatshirt tighter around me as I circled the house, scanning for him.
A strand of moonlight lanced through the foliage to catch the shocking yellow of his underwear, lighting it up like a neon sign.
He was already across the fence. On Wayne Hastings’s property.
I hissed his name, but Levi kept walking, vanishing into the shadow between two trees.
By the time I reached the forest’s edge, I’d lost track of him.
I hesitated at the fence.
A six-foot stretch of it had been toppled, laid flat to the ground, but all down the length of it, posts leaned wildly, were uprooted from the mud, and in some cases smashed to bits, the barbed wire strung uselessly across the ground between them.
Had Levi done this?
Had Wayne Hastings seen Levi do this?
A breeze gusted fog around me, and the hair on my arms lifted.
I stepped over the fence.
The woods were preternaturally silent. No cricket chirp or cicada song, no owls or foxes or possums skittering through the brush, and the leaves had started to curl, their edges blazing in the fiery tones of autumn.
I broke into a jog, mud and leaf-guts sloshing up my shins as I searched the dark spread of trees for a flash of yellow fabric or wisp of auburn hair.
“Levi!” I hissed again. The night swallowed my voice before it could dent the weighty silence. I kept running, calling out to him, until the hermit’s A-frame house sprang suddenly into view.
My stomach twisted and dropped, like a drill bit turning through me.
The mucky windows were aglow with amber light, except where the NO TRESPASSING signs and pictures of firearms the hermit had duct-taped to the glass blocked it. All the downstairs windows had deep cracks in them, and one had been boarded up with a square of plywood on which someone had spray-painted MURDERER in a neon yellow that gave Levi’s underwear a run for its money.
My stomach lurched at the sight of the word.
Wayne Hastings. The murderer who’d walked free, who’d been cleared of wrongdoing by an internal invest
igation, but whose every move since the accident had proven he lacked any regret, that he hated all of us.
“Levi?” The whisper barely came out.
I edged around the house, my gaze trained on the windows. A flurry of movement on the roof startled me, and I jerked back as my eyes lifted to it.
The green corrugated metal was barely visible, blotted out by the massive crowd of birds perched there.
Dozens, easily.
Silent, focused, all angled in the same direction, as if they were watching me. My gaze traveled up to the branches overhead, reaching toward the house.
More.
Birds everywhere. Hundreds of them, filling every crook and branch, a near-silent flutter of oily black wings.
All quiet. All watchful.
I thought of the cows at the substation, all lined up along the fence. What had Nick said? That cows grazed according to Earth’s electromagnetic field?
Those sharp beaks and beady eyes now all pointed toward me like a hundred accusatory compass needles. I glanced over my shoulder, but there was nothing back there except the shallow valley where the woods dipped.
Something snapped—a branch? The drop of a bullet into a chamber?—on the far side of the house.
A silhouette moving in a stiff, tin-soldier way shambled around the corner of the house.
“Levi!”
I bounded after him, tripping over a pair of padlocked cellar doors that jutted up from a disguise of fog and dead brush.
Of course this creepy man had a creepy cellar behind his creepy house. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were trip wires just waiting to catch me and Levi in nets.
I fought a shiver and hurried to the front of the house.
Levi stood at the steps, his glassy eyes fixed on the door.
If he heard me crashing through the bramble, he didn’t show it. I stepped between him and the door, waving a hand in his face. “Levi? Levi! Are you okay?”
He stared right over my head.
“We have to go.” I pushed against his shoulders, but he didn’t budge.