by Emily Henry
“Like where?”
Bill’s watery blue eyes crinkled. He smacked his lips. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“Oh, I’m worried, Bill,” I said. “Put the gun down.”
Something surprising flared into his eyes, and his leathery face went rigid for a beat. Then it relaxed and he slipped the pistol from its elastic holster.
He held it up, hand shaking a bit, then bent at a snail’s pace and set it on the ground near his feet.
I considered having him kick it over to me, like people did in cop shows and movies, but we weren’t in a dark school or an underground facility with polished cement floors. We were standing in inches of soot and ash, and I doubted much less than a professional punt would get the gun anywhere near me.
“You—you said MUFON helped you find me,” I said. The Mutual UFO Network. I’d read about them when I was digging through Wikipedia, trying to make sense of what had happened to us. MUFON was the largest, and oldest, collective of armchair UFOlogists in the world.
“Not in any official capacity,” Bill answered. “But the community’s expansive, and members are willing to help. This trip is—so to speak—off the books.”
That same smile flicked across his broad lips, which were dried and cracking but very pink. “I had an analyst friend take a look at your footage. That was where all this started. He confirmed what I already knew—that it was real.”
Bill took another small step. This time I didn’t move. My ankle was bruised, and it was swelling too.
“You have a couple of enthusiasts right here in town. Did you know that? A Mr. Doug Rosenbaum?”
I started. “Principal Rosenbaum?”
Bill nodded. “He was the first to give us an ID of Levi Lindquist. He had some ideas of who the girl could be.”
“There were two girls.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, brought Sofía into it, but I was unnerved. I didn’t want him to be too sure of everything he’d figured out so far.
But he only nodded calmly. “Sofía Perez.”
The pulse traveled out from me like a mushroom cloud, a sudden singular thrum of energy all throughout the building, every piece of machinery still connected to wire, and worse, the lone blast from the bells.
Bill winced and plugged his fingers in his ears, swaying briefly on his feet. “Not so good for my vertigo,” he said when the sound had stopped. His tone was light, but that something in his eyes had sharpened, darkened. “I was less concerned about Sofía. I needed to find the host.”
The sterility of the word sent another shiver through me.
Bill took another step, and this time I couldn’t stop myself from jerking back, my ankle screaming in response. “I remember how it felt,” he said quietly. “All that power, all that light.”
With his last step forward, I became aware of how tall he was. Not as tall as Levi, but easily as tall as Sofía.
The wrinkles around his eyes tightened, fine lines spreading out like cracks in glass. “The glory.” His face relaxed once more, the fiery thing in his eyes replaced by the watery twinkle that had been there before. “You feel it, don’t you, Frances?”
I shook my head. “I know it’s in me. I don’t know why, or what it wants, or how it’s doing this.”
“What it wants? Now, that’s going to take some time and cooperation to figure out. But as for how it’s doing this, well, the science is heavy on the pseudo, but as far as I can tell, the beings are made of an energy akin, if not quite identical, to electricity.”
He huffed through a few more humid breaths and licked his lips. “If these—these remarkable beings were to move freely through the Earth—well, they’d blaze right out.”
“You said they were electricity,” I said. “Not fire.”
“Right.” Bill wetted his lips again. “Right you are, Frances. But we’re not talking light switches and copper wire. No, these things are much more . . . volatile. Like lightning. I’ve interviewed eleven people with encounters like ours, and from that research, I believe the gel—the meteorite debris the creatures land in—is some sort of protective conductor, something that allows them to exist in our physical and seeable world indefinitely. Maybe even a magnetic field, stoking the electric current, you see?”
I’d gotten such a bad grade in physics class that I couldn’t even be sure this was the sort of thing you’d learn in physics class.
Bill went on. “But when that structure’s compromised, the beings start to lose their form. They’ve got one of two options: Light up like a dying star, expel all that energy in an electrical storm until there’s nothing left of them, at least not any place that we can see. Or they can attach to a host. Use a body as a conductor.”
He took another step. “Now, here’s the thing, Frances.”
His expression was friendly, and the gun was still on the ground, but I stepped backward anyway.
“Our bodies? They’re not the same thing as the disc you found. Every pass of the current through you costs something.”
He took another step. “At this rate—setting off alarms and powering up furnaces—you’re liable to burn right through the energy in you, and kill yourself doing it.”
My gaze dropped to the scars on my arm. “Ah,” he said. “Exactly! You understand! As you expel the power, the markers of it on your skin will fade.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?” I said. I thought of Remy, shut into an interrogation room with an FBI agent. How many times had he had his vision? Had his scars disappeared yet? “If I’d known that,” I went on, “I could have burned through it by now!”
Bill shuffled toward me, and I took another half step back.
“If there’s no alien in me, then the people you say are after me—they wouldn’t have any use for me.”
Bill’s mouth went slack. Another step through ash for him. Another anxious half step back for me. “And you would do that?” he said in a low voice. “Pity. You’re just like all the others.”
“The others?” I said.
“The others,” he hissed. “Everyone who’s ever squandered this precious gift! You’d be okay dumping the being right out of you without ever knowing why it came!”
I tried to step back again, but my shoulders met metal. I’d backed into the forklift, caught between it and Black Mailbox Bill.
“You’d give up all that it shows you. The keys to the very universe! Things no other man on Earth has seen.”
His white eyebrows twitched. He was too close now. I could smell the heady punch of his aftershave, that fake ocean breeze, and see the sagging pores on his nose and cheeks.
Bill harrumphed. His glittering eyes swept skyward, his hand arcing up to mirror the path. “What’s out there. Who’s out there. Everything the being has seen and felt—eons’ worth of information that has been hidden from us since the birth of the universe, and—and proof!”
“Proof?” My voice was small, smothered by the layer of ash and rubble coating everything.
“Of them.” The words hissed out of him like air from a teakettle. His eyes bulged in their sockets, all the manic energy of Nick but none of the warmth. “Of where they come from. Of what lies beyond the limits of our human understanding and the technology we have to advance it.”
He took another step, trembling. “When you close your eyes, you see it, don’t you?” he whispered, wispy brows knitting together as his gaze darkened with focus. “All that light, and that sound—the sound you can feel. The voices—zillions of them, whole civilizations that came before us, and maybe even those that come after us! All drawn into that same timeless place. You still can feel that, can’t you? You haven’t wasted too much yet, have you, Frances?”
“I need to go,” I said, heart thudding as he pressed in tighter.
“That feeling of—of utter connection. There’s nothing else like that. Nothing, and b
elieve me, I’ve looked. There isn’t a drug or a piece of art or a temple on this earth with a feeling like that, that bliss. No amount of money can buy your way back to that pool of light and all those voices and—” His words caught in his throat. He seemed suddenly sick, his skin sheened with sweat, his legs wobbly as he took another step. “All that light.”
“I really need to go,” I said again. “My brother will be wondering where I am.”
Outside, thunder rumbled, and the darkness in Bill’s eyes cleared. His mouth softened, and he blinked rapidly, like he was caught off guard to see me standing there. “Yes, yes, of course. And he won’t be the only one. We can discuss this more at the safe house.”
“Safe house?”
I wasn’t going anywhere with Bill. Not with shaky, half-desperate Bill, whose voice went hoarse with awe when he talked about the creature in me.
He adjusted his footing. “Frances, do you know what will happen if they find you?”
He waited just long enough to make me wonder whether the question was rhetorical, then went on. “It won’t matter whether you’ve got any of the extraterrestrial left in you or not. They’ll want to test it. They’ll tell your folks they’re taking you in for questioning—oh no, not for something you’ve done, but for something they’ll say you witnessed. Something you were exposed to, maybe. They’ll say they need to run some tests, see whether your immune system’s been compromised, courtesy of some Russian satellite that fell out of the sky, or some such nonsense.”
The word satellite sent a dizzy wave through me.
“You’ll say you feel fine,” Bill said. “But they’ll frighten your folks enough to get them to sign some waivers, and next thing you know you’re in quarantine. And as they’re running some tests you’ll realize—hey, I’m not feeling so well after all. You’ll think they might have been telling the truth. When your parents come in to see you, they’ll notice you’re not looking swell. You won’t be able to hide it, what with all the drugs they’ll be pumping into your system. Your illness will progress quickly. One night, your parents will be at your side, through a protective layer of plastic, of course, and the next morning, they’ll get a knock on the door letting them know their little girl didn’t make it.
“Tragic, I know,” Bill said. “But hardly the worst part. The worst part is the body—contaminated, highly toxic! It cannot, safely, be released. Your folks might be ticked, sure. Might even go so far as to call a lawyer friend, but things will be settled quietly in the end, with a check and a nondisclosure agreement. Now.” Bill’s eyes brightened and his eyebrows lifted. “Will they actually kill you? I can’t say. The accounts I have of this are from our end of things, Frances, the little guy, not the suits. I don’t know what happens at that point.
“Maybe they keep you in a lead box and feed you on a tray pushed under the door until they’re good and finished. Maybe when they realize there’s no trace of your little friend left in you, they toss you into another round of unrelated experiments, the kind that’s supposed to be illegal. The point is, you’ll be more than dead to your friends and family. You’ll be erased.” He smacked his lips, beleaguered breaths grating out of him. “That’s what will happen to you, Frances. If you don’t come with me somewhere safe right now.”
He knew about the satellite. He knew they were saying the field was contaminated.
And staying here wouldn’t keep me safe. If he could find me, they could too. Maybe he was right.
“I’ll just . . .” I cleared my throat. “I’ll just let my brother know—”
Bill shook his head. “They’ll be monitoring your friends’ and family’s calls. They’re tracking your phone too. We’ve got to discard it and get out of here. They’re likely on their way right now.”
My mind whirred, cycling through my options. Bill was a stranger, a strange stranger, but he was right about the phone—if TV and movies were any indication, a person with resources could use it to find me.
Still, I wasn’t going to get in a car with him. At least not alone.
“I have to get ahold of my brother.” I sidestepped him, but Bill moved into my path, his hand held up, fingers splayed.
“I can’t let you do that, Frances.”
“Then it’s lucky you can’t stop me.” I sidestepped again, but he was already in front of me, hands buried in the pockets of his Members Only jacket.
“Frances, be reasonable. This is what’s best for everyone—you, your brother, your friends, the being.”
“Me be reasonable?” I said. “I’m a teenage girl, and you’re the old man who came across the country to corner me in an abandoned mill. If you want to help me, then let me get out of here before anyone else turns up.”
I ignored the pain searing through my ankle and pushed past him. He snatched at my elbow and caught a fistful of sweatshirt.
I tried to yank my arm back, but his other hand shot out and knotted into my hair, pain shrieking across my scalp as he dragged me toward him. I tried to scream, but one of his arms had already snaked around my throat, his papery palm flattening across my mouth and his elbow pushing in on my windpipe so hard it made me cough.
Stars popped behind my eyes, and my eardrums gave a red-hot throb at the sudden noise of the fire bells.
I grappled at Bill’s arm, but his grip only tightened as his other hand reached for something in his pocket. Another gun, I thought with a burst of fear that sent a rumble of current through the warehouse.
I clawed more viciously at his arm, and he jabbed the heel of his foot down hard on my ankle, making red explode behind my eyes.
What had I done? What had I done, staying here with him, when no one knew where I was?
He’d freed the thing in his pocket, and in my peripheral vision I watched him whip the white rag out, then bring it toward my mouth.
I could barely breathe as it was, and then the damp rag was being plastered over my nose and lips, his palm cupped over it. I couldn’t breathe at all. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t smell or taste whatever was on the rag, but I had an idea of what it must be.
“Don’t worry,” he coughed. “The energy won’t be wasted. Just like when the gel receptacle was destroyed, the being will leap to the nearest body when its current host dies.”
A quiver ran down my center as I thrashed against him. The room seemed to pulse around me, shrinking as it went. The corners of the room fuzzed and dimmed until all I could focus on was the block in my throat and the buzz building in my middle.
I tried to concentrate, but panic sent my mind and gaze zigzagging uselessly. They hit the clock over the front doors, still quietly ticking out time five years after anyone was left to watch it.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
How long had it been since I’d breathed? My limbs felt heavy and clumsy. But still, that buzz was there, zealous, eager. Use me, it seemed to say.
The forklift, I thought. If I could power up the forklift—it was already angled right toward us.
But even as the buzz was building, the world was getting foggier. My legs were turning into jelly and my lungs were stuttering.
In the movies, this always looked so quick. Painless.
A chloroform-soaked rag swept over the mouth. Eyes rolling back, knees dipping. An unconscious body caught by people in black uniforms.
For me it was five minutes of clock hands ticking. Five minutes of fighting for breath. Of lungs burning, imploding and feeling like I was going to die before the world started disappearing, blotting out bit by bit.
The ground turned soft as warmed butter under my feet.
And then a red face punctuated by curling white eyebrows was over me, a voice melting out of it, slowing impossibly.
“I am sorry, Frances,” Black Mailbox Bill said. “If I didn’t do this, it just would’ve been someone else. Isn’t it better this way? Isn’t it better that someone who really under
stands gets the gift? Someone who will appreciate it.”
And then the dark closed in.
TWENTY-SEVEN
A SHARP BANG. THE thunder of footsteps scuffing over cement. The sudden intake of breath and a feminine grunt as something whistled through the air, cut off by a meaty thump. The crackle of a storm, and then the feel of rain, splatting against my face.
The pain in my ankle being transmitted to a spot behind my eye that thwump-thwump-thwumped with every pulse of my heart.
My brain felt like alphabet soup spun through a food processor. Fragments of words, images.
That grunt again, a voice I recognized. And then a sickly, humid huff of breath against a clean-shaven upper lip.
Another roll of thunder.
It came back to me. Poured into my mind as quickly as it had rushed out. I’d been drugged.
The girl’s voice let out a scream, and my eyes snapped open. The burnt ceiling was gone, replaced by dark gray clouds swirling overhead, lighting up. Pebbles, not ash under my hands. And the sound—feet scuttling through gravel.
She screamed again.
I sat up with another jolt of pain.
The powder-blue Cadillac was parked in front of me, trunk open and waiting. My legs were dirty, scraped. I’d been dragged.
Behind the Cadillac, a silver Honda CRV had parked at a mad diagonal, headlights piercing through the rain, engine still humming and driver’s side door hanging ajar.
I recognized the lanyards hanging from the rearview mirror.
Christ Hospital, where Sofía’s mom worked.
Sofía.
I tried to jump to my feet and collapsed with a shriek against the bumper. My ankle was swollen, bruised green.
Back between the noses of the two cars, I could still hear the chaotic scuttle of feet, the grunt and huff of two people locked in a struggle. Sofía, my mind repeated.
