by Nick Lake
Silence. Emily’s mom sniffled.
The comment hung in the air.
“Sorry,” said Aidan. “For my purposes, what is important is that they are able to send radio waves past the ionosphere. They have used them to measure meteor paths. I will use them to contact my…my people.”
Emily’s mom looked at the facility. “But how are you going to get in? You’re just going to knock on the door?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, OK,” said Emily’s dad.
“You’re not going in there on your own,” said Emily. “I’m coming with you.”
Aidan shook his head. “No,” he said. There was no hesitation in his voice, no crack for doubt to get in. “It’s better if I go alone.”
She looked at him. He looked back into her eyes.
He smiled—and held her hand. “Trust me.”
Eventually she nodded.
“OK,” she said.
They drove up to the white building, and Aidan opened his door, letting in a waft of cold air. If it were a movie, there would be a big swelling soundtrack, but instead, he just walked up to the facility, rang the doorbell—no need to knock, after all—and soon the door opened and someone spoke to him briefly, then let him in.
The door closed behind him.
CHAPTER 49
“OH,” SAID EMILY.
“What?” said her mom.
“I just thought…you know…something more might happen. Something bigger.”
“It still might,” said her mom. She was watching the road behind them in the rearview mirror. Nothing coming. Yet.
“What do you think he told them?” said Emily. “Whoever opened the door.”
“No idea,” said her mom. “Won’t people see whatever he needs them to see anyway?” There was an edge of bitterness to her voice.
“I suppose so,” said Emily. She reached forward and touched her mom’s hand. Her mom gripped her fingers, her dad watching them silently. Her grip was strong.
They sat there without speaking for a while, the engine running for warmth. There was a low hum under everything, coming from the antenna array.
“What happens now?” Emily said.
“Now we wait,” her dad replied.
The sun was getting low—the air was frosty, and the antennas cast long shadows, long dark crosses, ground versions of themselves, slicing the earth. They kept the engine running—stale toasted air blasting through the vents. Emily watched the sky. A couple of thin clouds, altostratus, stretched across the blue. The light was strange: there was almost a sheen to the sky, as if reflecting some unseen glow. She wondered if Aidan had sent the message; if she’d see the ship when it came, or if it would be cloaked in some way.
There was a rumble, a vibration—but it wasn’t the ship. It was coming from ground level. Her mom had taken out the pistol, Emily noticed. Her dad got out of the car, and Emily and her mom followed. As the sound grew louder, Emily turned to see a black jeep coming down the long road, past the antenna array.
The jeep got closer, kicking up dust, but the disturbance in the sky remained the same—the heavens catching the light strangely, as if concrete after rain, glistening under streetlamps. Something imminent, about to be revealed—but for the moment staying hidden.
A thrum was running through Emily, her whole being buzzing, from multiple sources: the car’s tires, translated through the ground; the heavy electric singing of the antennas; and something else perhaps, something she couldn’t see.
The jeep was coming up fast now, and then it did a sliding, turning stop just like in a movie, spraying a wake of gravel, close enough for it to sting Emily’s skin. She stepped back, wincing.
The doors were flung open, and two men jumped out, guns swinging up as they moved toward Emily and her parents. They were really dressed in black this time. Emily’s parents moved to stand in front of them.
“Keep back,” said Emily’s dad.
The men were wearing helmets with masks that covered their noses and mouths; only their eyes were visible. Professional eyes. Ruthless eyes. “Where’s the boy?” said one of them. His voice was tinny, amplified. His rifle was trained on Emily. The other man was aiming at her parents. “No sudden movements.”
“What boy?” said Emily.
The man barely glanced at her. “We know he’s here. Hands behind your heads.”
Emily’s dad said something under his breath, something urgent, and her mom, very deliberately, very slowly, held the pistol out, flat, to show the men. Then she bent her knees and lowered, placing it carefully on the ground. She straightened up again, and she and Emily’s dad raised their hands in surrender.
Oh, great, Emily thought. So they’ve given up.
One of the men pressed a button on a small device clipped to his jacket. “We got them,” he said. “No sign of the boy.”
But he was in there; he was in there, and he would have to come out.
Emily lowered her head. It was over.
CHAPTER 50
THEY CAME LEVEL with her parents, and one of them kicked the pistol on the ground—it slid away, spinning, into the brown grass beside the road. One of them kept covering her parents, sighting down his rifle at them, while the other held his eyes on Emily.
“I’m going to ask you again. Where is the boy?”
There was a creaking sound behind them, and Emily turned to see the door of the facility open. And there he was.
A tiny boy framed in the huge doorway. Light behind him, from inside.
The air crackled with a sense of something on the edge of happening, something about to be revealed—like an amp with an electric guitar plugged into it, humming, just waiting for a note to be played.
“Aidan!” Emily shouted. He ran to her, and she threw her arms around him, felt him squeeze her back.
A voice behind her shouted, “Step away from the boy,” but she ignored it, held him close.
“Are they coming?” she whispered into his ear.
Aidan glanced over her shoulder up at the trembling sky, then whispered, “I hope so.”
Emily pulled away from him and looked at the approaching men. They were moving slowly forward, and one of them was taking out a pair of handcuffs. The other was holding a black baton with wires coming out of it. A taser of some kind?
“You need to step away from the boy now,” said the man with the handcuffs. Low sun gleamed on his rifle barrel, hurting her eyes.
Strange, she thought. She didn’t fear them. It had never really occurred to her to fear them. She didn’t want to die—of course not—but these men with their guns were not what she was afraid of.
What she was afraid of, she realized, was the thought of a whole long future without Aidan, stretching ahead of her.
“If you want him, you’ll have to get past my dead body,” she said, and she stood in front of Aidan, her arms out, shielding him.
For a moment nothing and no one moved.
“Kid, step away from the—” began the man nearest Emily.
But then her mom flung her hand out, and he cursed, stumbling back, raising his hand to his eyes, and Emily realized she had thrown gravel in his face, which she must have picked up when she laid her pistol on the ground, and now, as well as being blinded, he had hit himself with the heavy metal cuffs in his hand.
Simultaneously, Emily’s dad stepped forward to the other man. His strength and speed were impressive, the old knee injury forgotten:
sidestep
hand on the rifle pushing it out of the way
other hand striking the guy’s face
grabbing the gun and somehow twisting it over and then smacking that into the guy’s face too.
Except that in fact it went like:
Sidestephandontherifllepushingitoutofthewayotherhandstrikingtheg
uysfacegrabbingthegunandsomehowtwistingitoverandthensmackingthatintotheguysfacetoo.
Because it was so fast.
Five seconds, and Emily’s dad was pointing the rifle at the men, stepping back to cover them both. It did not waver in his hands. Emily felt a surge, tidelike, of pride for her parents.
“Gun down now,” Emily’s dad said in a voice she had never heard before, a voice that wasn’t loud so much as violent, pointedly violent—the aural equivalent of a knife. “I was Delta Force. So help me, I will put you down, and I will not hesitate.”
CHAPTER 51
THE MAN IN black with the dust and gravel in his eyes dropped his rifle. It landed with a clatter on the ground. He was still blinking. The other man was bleeding, a lot. Blood soaked his mask. He was teetering on his feet but managing to stay upright.
“You,” said Emily’s dad. “Handcuff yourself to your friend. Take too long and I shoot.”
The man with the cuffs went over to the other and clicked a metal ring onto his wrist, then its partner onto the other man.
“Emily, grab the rifle,” said her dad.
She moved as if her body belonged to someone else and she was just borrowing it. She picked up the rifle from the ground and took it over to where her dad was standing.
“What’s the plan now?” she said under her breath.
“I didn’t think much beyond this.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” said the man Emily had taken the gun from. His voice was thick, nasal, choking—Emily thought his nose was probably broken. “That thing is not your son.”
“We know that,” said Emily’s mom. “You’re still not having him.”
“He’s not a he. And he’s a security threat to this country and the property of the United States government.”
“No,” said Emily. “He doesn’t belong to anyone.”
Except me, she thought. For now. Or perhaps I belong to him.
“A prisoner, then. He entered U.S. air space. He’s an invader, an interloper, a—”
“Living thing,” said Emily. “And he’s going home.”
The man stared at her. His eyes were hard; flat. They didn’t go anywhere, open onto anything. Just darkness. “What are you talking about?” he said.
And that’s when Aidan whispered:
“They’re here.”
She looked up. But there was nothing. She felt it before she could see it: a sort of tightening in her skin, as if a storm were coming. She could smell ozone in the air. And was that a shimmer, a fish-scale flicker, in the sky above them? As if light were falling on something just behind the air.
And then she saw it.
Above, something beyond comprehension hovered in the vibrating air.
“I’m talking about that,” she said to the man with the broken nose.
CHAPTER 52
SOMETHING WAS FLOATING in the sky. Something is not a specific word. But it was not a specific thing. It seemed irreducible to a single, simple shape. Its edges and corners were not where edges and corners should be. It was large, and dark, and broadly circular. But it was hard to tell exactly how big it was because it didn’t seem to reflect and absorb light in an ordinary way; it was as if there were parts of it you couldn’t see, and Emily didn’t know how that was possible.
Clouds boiled around it.
A bird, flying past—a crow—fell from the sky, dead.
A beam of light wasn’t there, and then it was there, with no in-between state: a perfect cylinder of brightness, arc-lamp bright, throwing black shadows long behind Emily and her mom and dad and Aidan and the two men, who threw up their hands, photo-flash blinded, except that this didn’t end, the light from the column went on warping their sight.
“He’s not from here,” said one of the men. “It’s not natural. We need to take him in, find out what—”
“None of us are from here,” said Emily. “Not really. We’ve all come from somewhere. We’ve all traveled.”
Around them, the antennas and the domelike building disappeared, the road too, the black car, their own stolen pickup, so that there was just them, just these human figures and one not so human, standing in a white glow, and all sound stopped, the hum of the transmitters, the engine noise, voices.
All gone.
Aidan took Emily’s hand, squeezed it.
“Goodbye, Mom,” he said. “Goodbye, Dad.”
Neither of them was able to speak, but they nodded.
The world went away, into light, into exposure glare.
“Time to go,” Aidan said, turning to Emily.
She nodded. Tears were on her skin. She didn’t trust herself to talk. She didn’t know what to say.
And then she did:
“I’ll miss you,” she said. It was all she could manage. It was all that mattered. It was all.
After a moment, she reached into her pocket and took out a small object. She’d carved it the night before, in the woods, when her parents had learned the truth. By the firelight, not sleeping.
She handed the carving to Aidan.
“Here,” she said. It was a girl, fairly crude, though she was proud of how she’d done the hair. She’d spent a lot of time whittling with small knives on hunting and camping trips when she was younger.
“Is it…you?” said Aidan.
“You mean you can’t tell? I’m offended.”
“No, no, I—”
“I’m kidding,” she said, and squeezed his hand. Some things really didn’t translate, no matter how smart the other species was.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes, very funny.”
“Yes, it’s me,” she said. “Because you lost Goober. And so that you don’t forget me.”
He looked up at her, serious now. “I will never forget you,” he said.
A pause.
“Don’t go,” said Emily. “Don’t go, don’t go. You’re family. I mean, I know you’re not, not really, but you are. Don’t leave me.”
She sensed her parents, somewhere in the blinding light, thought she heard her mom gasp.
He smiled. “Do you know,” he said, “I have seen every film you have seen. All the TV. I remember everything you remember. I get it all from inside your head. It is part of how I survive.”
“Yes,” she said. The thought was terrifying—all the lies she’d told, all the petty jealousies she’d felt. But oddly reassuring too. Oddly freeing.
“I know everything your parents know too,” he said. “I have looked in their heads as I have looked in yours. And, Emily, here is the thing. It is funny to me that you have so many stories about us invading. About us taking over the world. As if war were a universal language, as if it were the thing that makes all creatures the same.”
She nodded. She couldn’t speak. Her voice would crack. Her voice would break. Her voice would fall, like their plane, and be in pieces, all over the world.
“It seems strange to me,” Aidan continued. “Because the most universal language is love, isn’t it? It’s the thing we all understand. I look into your parents’ heads, and it’s all I see. All I see is love. All I see is love, for you.”
CHAPTER 53
EMILY INHALED SHARPLY.
Aidan squeezed her hands, tighter. He was looking directly into her eyes, and she couldn’t look away, and his eyes opened onto galaxies, onto spirals of stars and uncountable worlds.
“And you?” he said. “All I see in you is love too. For your parents. For Jeremy. For this beautiful world. Mountains! Snow! Sunlight! Trees! All of it is a miracle. But, Emily, you have to let it in.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“My survival mechanism is to make myself something small. Something in need of protection. A little child.”
She nodded. She managed to open her mouth. “I know.”
“But yours, Emily,” he said, “your survival mechanism, I think, is to remain as one.”
“I don’t—”
“—know what I mean? In your head right now, Emily, yes, you do.” He gave her hands a final squeeze. “You act like you are trapped, powerless, like a child. Like your life is a prison. But what happens next is up to you.”
“What happens next is that you leave me,” she said.
“Oh, Emily,” he said. “I will never leave you. We’ll always be right here, together.”
She felt herself frown. The weight of her eyebrows. “What?”
He squeezed her hands even tighter: that had always been his thing, squeezing her hands. “I’ll show you,” he said. “I’ll show you what I showed Bob.”
He squeezed her hands once more, and without warning or interval, she was in a state of darkness. Absolute darkness but with a sensation of space around her; deep space.
CHAPTER 54
NO: THERE WAS a pinprick of light, a glimmer, and it grew and grew and then it was the world she was seeing, the earth, from far away in space. But the land was all squashed together into a single mass, and the clouds seemed thin and strange, and gradually she realized: this was the earth millions and millions of years ago.
With a lurch, she flew forward, downward, closer in: until she could see the trees forming and falling and dying and the clouds and rain being made, and then life exploding, as the leaves sucked carbon from the atmosphere, making it possible for things built of cells to breathe. Bright lines of bacteria, becoming small strange creatures, and then under the sea with the coelacanths, and then up—into the air with the flying dinosaurs, and she saw the huge beasts below her, grazing and lifting their heads on long necks and bellowing into the clear, clear air—
and another lurch—
and suddenly there were mammals, more and more of them, bigger and bigger, and then apes that came down from trees and hunted and fished and spread around the world.
Grains grew up, cultivated. Forests fell.