Mom never dreamed big. She’d never been able to afford big dreams.
And Ms. K. What would she think?
Impulsive.
Then again, she always told him the importance of finding hobbies. It’s why she encouraged Tom Ralford and his stupid radio show. Why should this be any different?
He’d have to cancel his appointment with her today, though. He was technically supposed to go once a week ever since the incident, or else he’d lose insurance coverage or some state-mandated bullshit like that. But it was just one time, and some things were more important.
He washed his mouth out with Listerine and shoved on some old jeans and his cleanest T-shirt. He made sure his cuff was in place on his left wrist, doing his best to avoid looking at the thin, silvery scars, then tugged on his old leather jacket. The crow patch on his breast pocket seemed to be grinning at him.
Through the circular window on the door, people were peering into his house.
“All right, all right, coming,” Jesse said. He tried to sound casual. Confident. Like he knew what he was doing.
He took a deep breath, reached out, and opened the door.
Mom never dreamed big. So Jesse would dream big enough for the both of them.
460, 480, 500 . . .
By afternoon, Jesse had already made $520. Not even close to paying off the bills they owed, but hell, it was enough to cover a few days of Mom’s earnings. Enough for 120 poppyseed loaves, even. And that was a start.
Jesse wiped the sweat that clung to his forehead. Keeping the line of customers in check—twenty-six visitors today and it was barely 1:00 p.m.—was harder than he thought. He almost couldn’t believe how many people could just toss twenty bucks down the drain.
His hands had cramped hours ago, but he’d have to get used to it. At least the messages people wanted to send to Alma weren’t overly long; the gist of most of them was along the lines of Please don’t kill us. But others had messages that read more like wishes, as though Alma were a vast Santa Claus, or some kind of psychiatrist. Funny thing about people thinking it was the end of the world: people were suddenly more talkative, suddenly more open. Even the locals that recognized him seemed to forget that Jesse was the ghost of a kid at school who rarely showed up to class.
Instead, Jesse had become their messenger.
Aliens, Almaens, whoever, one of the first messages had read, give my Seymour a sign that I love him. Jesse had stared at the customer—an older woman with round Coke-bottle glasses—before shrugging and typing up her message into the machine. He wasn’t sure what the logic was in asking Alma to help with her relationship troubles—and really, if Alma was real, what made her think they’d help at all?—but he kept his thoughts behind his charming smile.
And anyway, for all he knew, Seymour could be a cat. He wasn’t about to ask.
“Now, there’s no guarantee that Alma will respond to every message,” Jesse said for what must have been the fortieth time that day as he finished typing the message. Tiny neon light bulbs that decked the face of the machine began to blink. “And I certainly can’t guarantee Alma will do anything for your Seymour. But I’ll broadcast your message for them loud and clear.”
Jesse had done some basic research; he knew radio waves had long been proven the fastest—and potentially most reliable—way for scientists to send messages into space. But messages via radio waves could never reach Alma before the aliens made their decision. They just weren’t fast enough. Nothing on earth was, anyway.
But Jesse didn’t need to make people believe he’d found an impossibly fast way to transmit messages. People were already convinced that Alma had to have incredible transmitter power to send a message like the one they’d sent to NASA; it would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to reach Earth in a day. So an alien planet having that kind of technology meant it was at least possible they had some kind of powerful receiver, too. Who was to say Alma didn’t already have some kind of super satellite receiver floating around Earth, ready and aimed to pick up our radio messages midflight?
All that mattered was the plausibility. The details didn’t matter.
It was like Tom Ralford said. People just wanted to get their feelings out, to feel heard. And they’d pay money to do it.
“Bless you,” said a large woman with skin the color of turned cheese. She fumbled through her oversized, stained leather purse until she found her wallet. Her skin was warm as she took Jesse’s hand and gently enclosed in it over twenty-five dollars in cash. “A little extra for your trouble, dear. You keep doing the good work.”
Jesse gave her the brightest smile he could muster. “Thanks, ma’am.” He crammed a copy of her message into a folder on a shelf behind the machine. He’d decided to keep the messages. For posterity’s sake.
Once the woman left, he slipped out of the shed, locking the door behind him and promising the guy next in line—some loser with a fanny pack—that he’d be right back.
He jogged across the short stretch of patchy desert lawn, trying to blink away a headache. He needed water. He needed a break. He’d talked to more people in one morning than he usually did in a month.
He wondered if that’s why his dad had locked himself away in the shed, working on the husks of these weird, egg-shaped machines. Was this his plan all along? Not to make Roswell some kind of extraterrestrial communication hub, but to get rich off the dream that it might be?
Or had he actually believed in this shit?
Before Jesse could slip inside the kitchen, though, a hand came down on his arm, just above his leather cuff.
“Excuse me,” a deep voice asked sheepishly. “Do you know if this HECC machine really works?”
Jesse nearly jumped out of his skin. It was the boy from the gas station—the cute guy who’d come in for coffee.
Jesse yanked his arm away as his brain frantically went through a mental checklist:
Had he put on deodorant that morning? Yes. Maybe. He couldn’t double-check without looking like an idiot. Shaven? His five-o’clock shadow straddled the line between boyish and hipster lumberjack, so good enough. His clothes would have to do; his leather jacket hopefully gave him more of a vintage, hipster vibe than dirt poor. So at least he didn’t look like total shit.
But this guy. If he was good-looking in the gas station, he was on an entirely different plane up close. His smooth, chiseled face and wide, round eyes screamed earnest. The boy’s eyes were dark, so dark that Jesse couldn’t see where his irises ended and his pupils began—obscuring, the kind that could hide secrets effortlessly. He wore a plain, dark blue T-shirt that hugged his taut body like a second skin. But despite his boy-band looks, he had a voice like sunset and smoke that left Jesse reeling.
Jesse tugged at his leather cuff, a nervous habit. For a second, he couldn’t make his own voice function.
Then he cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. I mean, I made the thing, so I guess I gotta say it works, right?” He gave a forceful bark of a laugh.
“Oh, wow. Sorry.” The boy recoiled in surprise. “Man, I feel dumb. With the jacket and everything, I thought you were a bouncer or something. You’re . . . a lot younger than I thought you’d be.” His eyes swept Jesse up and down, and Jesse’s whole body went tight beneath his gaze. “Gotta be honest, I’ve never been good with machines. Big ones like that kinda freak me out; I keep thinking it’s gonna turn rogue or burst into ‘Daisy Bell’ or something.”
Jesse nodded. “Yeah, I totally get that.” But he didn’t get it at all. Who the hell was Daisy Bell?
“Kinda ignorant to this stuff. How does it work?”
“Oh, it’s easy. Nothing too complicated.” Jesse cleared his throat. He’d explained it a hundred times before, but for some reason, he was having trouble keeping his head on straight now. “It . . . works kind of like a translator. Basically. I just type up people’s messages, and the computer translates it into binary. I’d be lying if I said I knew Almaen, but binary is the next-best thing. The m
achine then beams up the message alongside an encoded key, so they can recognize it from static. The hope is that they receive it one day and decrypt it.”
“Oh, cool, like the Arecibo message.”
Fuck. Jesse made a mental note to look that up later, too. “Exactly.”
“Huh.” He smiled at Jesse, but it was wooden. Forced. “Interesting. How’d you learn how to do it?”
Jesse stiffened. He didn’t like the way he’d said “interesting,” the way he’d lingered on the word to give it that infuriating tang of skepticism. Maybe Jesse could buy a nice new button-down shirt, make himself look older, more official.
“People learn how to make bombs on the internet, how to become dictators on the internet. You can pretty much learn anything these days.” He looked away. “You, uh, planning on using the machine today?”
“Nah, I’m just passing through. Was curious, is all.” This time, his smile was genuine.
“My name’s Corbin. Corbin Lee.”
As Corbin ran his hand through his hair, Jesse caught a whiff of that familiar woodsy shampoo. Jesse swallowed, dazed. He suddenly felt tacky, like a cheap door-to-door salesman—or worse, like Kit Newton, with his alien dirt. All Jesse was missing was a briefcase full of Mason jars. At least if he were still working his respectful stint at the souvenir shop at the Roswell Plaza Hotel, he could sidle right down to his usual hit-and-run method: flirt a little, invite Corbin for a tour, take him behind Close Encounters—and call it a single night well spent.
Then again, Corbin didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be easy.
He cleared his throat. “Jesse. Um, Hewitt. Like the Hewitt Electronic Communication Center. My machine. Obviously.” He cleared his throat again. Why was his throat so damn tight?
“Corbin! ¿Qué pasa?” a man in a camo baseball cap called. “Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?”
Corbin grinned and waved back. “Mr. Arroyo! Estoy en camino ahora, prometo.”
“¡Apúrate! Mariposa’s waiting.”
Hospital? Mariposa? For once, Jesse actually wished he’d paid attention in Spanish class.
Corbin gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I’ll let you get back to it. Jesse, right?”
Jesse nodded. Corbin extended a hand to him, and for a second, Jesse could only stare.
Was he asking for a handshake? Such a simple gesture, and yet it felt so out of place when Jesse had spent the whole day reeling in the bleary-eyed, high-strung people who’d come from all over town just to take a stab at his machine. He’d had to break up a fight in line and threaten to call the cops, even though he knew damn well the cops were too busy trying to stop Roswell from going up in flames.
A handshake felt so old-school. So civil.
But he kinda liked it.
Jesse took Corbin’s hand. Corbin had a great grip—confident, warm, just firm enough.
“Come back anytime,” Jesse blurted out.
Corbin’s gaze held Jesse in place. “I will,” he said, “just as soon as I figure out what I want to say.”
Jesse watched Corbin as he turned and stumped off to the street. Something about the way he walked—his broad shoulders ever so slightly slumped by an invisible weight—looked sad to him. Familiar, even. Then again, these days, almost everyone looked sad, no matter how much they tried to hide it.
“Excuse me.” A scrawny girl no older than thirteen shouldered through the crowd. “I can take a Snap with the machine, yeah? I don’t need to send a message or anything.”
Her friend, another girl chewing bubblegum with more concentration than necessary, nodded.
Jesse sighed. “You got ten bucks?”
Maybe starting tomorrow, he would increase the price per message to fifty bucks. If he wanted to save his house before the bank knocked on their door, he had to: with the amount of hours it took to draft people’s messages and Alma’s responses, and the amount of hours it took for Jesse to comfort some of his customers, just to get them to cough up their money, he simply wasn’t making enough. And the clock was ticking.
The girl forked over the ten bucks, and Jesse gestured her toward the machine.
“Then go for it.”
Jesse slipped the money into his beat-up wallet, and the two girls sauntered to the shed, where Jesse had pulled the machine out for easy access and viewing. Quickly, he scanned the crowd for Corbin, but he’d already left.
Jesse touched the palm of his hand, where the warmth of Corbin’s gentle grip still lingered.
Maybe his machine worked better than he’d thought.
13
Adeem
“Shit,” said Adeem. A small burst of anxiety flared in his chest. They’d only gone about a hundred and twenty miles, passing endless stretches of beige desert and lumpy mountain range, when the gas light came on. Adeem, distracted by the radio, hadn’t even been paying attention to the tank.
Or maybe, subconsciously, he’d been trying not to think about it.
The next big city on the way to Roswell was Las Vegas, where Priti lived—still a good three hours away. So close and yet so freaking far. The apocalyptic levels of traffic leaving Reno had been the equivalent of wading through quicksand while wearing a weighted tortoiseshell, and even though Adeem had turned the engine off during the lulls, it must have still been a drain on the gas. Once they had finally squeezed out of the city, gas station after gas station was either closed or sold out of gas. But he’d hoped eventually they’d find one. Hoped and hoped and hoped.
Out here, though, on this back highway? There was no telling when they’d pass another one, and panic was beginning to curl inside his gut.
Worse still, he was dead tired; after driving through the night, the gas tank wasn’t the only thing exhausted. But he couldn’t afford to stop.
“What is it?” asked Cate. She had leaned forward so suddenly, Adeem recoiled, her voice surprising him.
She’d been pretty quiet on the road, and Adeem could tell she was scared—scared of what would happen, scared of what had happened, maybe even scared of him. She looked like she could barely sit still in her seat. Who knew what she might have seen, what kind of horrifying flashbacks she was trying to suppress in the back of her mind? Adeem hadn’t been there, but even he was terrified. People might have died at the casino. Probably had died. How many times had he seen mass shootings on the news and dismissed it as something so unlikely, so remote, it could never happen to him? And yet it had, just across the parking lot of the church he’d been in. No wonder Alma was so disgusted with Earth, where shootings were as certain as death and taxes.
To fill the awkward silence between them, Adeem had put on the radio—the handheld Tecsun, since the car radio was too patchy. Though he half hoped he might catch another transmission from Leyla, he instead caught a report from a local pirate station about NASA officials scanning airwaves using satellite tech to find any sign of Almaen spacecraft, any sign of attack.
If the point of turning on the radio was to be distracted, he’d definitely succeeded. But it was the only thing to keep his mind off, to put it lightly, the bizarro situation he’d gotten himself into: Narrowly escaping a mass shooting. Running away with some white girl. Driving to Roswell with her.
Not exactly the original plan.
A few hours ago, when the cacophony of the casino and the gunfire was safely behind them, Adeem had asked her where he should drop her off, and was surprised when she’d said she didn’t know.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” As much as Adeem wanted to help her, he had things to do. A sister to find. A sister to drag back home.
“I mean, normally I’d say the bus station, but . . .”
He understood. None of the buses would be running anymore. Even train service had been suspended. That left her completely stranded if she couldn’t find a ride. He felt a pang of sympathy. They were probably about the same age, but there was something about her that wafted exhaustion, something sad and lost. Just how far was home for her?
/> Cate’s mouth went lopsided as she began to chew the inside of her cheek, and though her long bangs covered most of her forehead, Adeem could see from the rearview mirror the emerging deep creases on it.
“Well, where do you need to go?” Adeem asked. “Because I’m heading to—”
“Roswell,” she finished for him.
For a moment, Adeem was half-convinced Cate was an alien mind reader herself—what the hell had he gotten himself into? But he shook the thought out of his head. The radio reports were spooking him.
Sill, what were the chances? Roswell was a small town, and definitely not a popular tourist destination. No, it was too weird, too coincidental. Stranger things had happened, sure—there were fucking aliens in the sky watching all of humanity like some kind of ant farm, after all. But things like this didn’t happen to him.
Adeem had begun to laugh like Cate had said the most hilarious thing in the world.
Was it really just coincidence? Or fate?
Leyla had been a big believer in fate. When he’d asked her about why she was so hooked on Urdu poetry, she’d said it was because Urdu poetry was about two things: ishq and qismat. Love and fate.
“Humanity’s strongest driving forces,” she asserted. “And when they work in tandem—when something’s meant to be—the universe always has a way of sending you a message. Of telling you you’re on the right track.”
Maybe the sentiment had been comforting to Leyla, at least at the time. But love, fate—Adeem wasn’t sure if he believed in any of it. And yet, despite all odds, he’d heard her voice on the radio. If Leyla was right—that love and fate were the ultimate driving forces of humanity—then the universe really had pointed Adeem to Roswell. To her.
He just didn’t know how Cate was supposed to fit in all this. Either way, it seemed something would have them traveling together.
But what should have been a relatively simple twenty-four-hour trip was getting more and more . . . problematic.
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