by Elsa Jade
Tyler nodded. “Just…a hard day, I guess.” After a hard seven years.
The barista nodded empathetically and gave her a smile as Tyler stuffed money into the tip jar. They refilled the mug and kept cleaning while Tyler sipped this time and kept a wary eye on the front windows. Should she confront Cross? Run away? Ask the Twinkle barista for safe passage?
Shouldn’t her years of video gaming have given her a clearer sense of the right path here?
She looked down at the device strapped to her wrist.
The barista came around again. “So did you ever make it to the lake?”
Tyler choked on a laugh. “It was amazing.”
They beamed. “I was thinking of taking a pony keg up to the falls one of these nights with some folk here in town. I’ll post a note on the bulletin board, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out. I’m still hoping to catch my first alien.”
Tyler laughed again, although it sounded a little hysterical to her own ears. “As long as they don’t catch you.”
“Even if we don’t see any UFOs, it’s the best party spot since they started refurbishing the old distillery.”
Tyler perked up. “A distillery? Anything I might’ve drunk?”
“Nah, it was abandoned. It used to be a moonshiners’ hideout, until some private company bought it out to make a retreat for celebrities or something. It was sold recently and all blocked off again.”
Evens had mentioned meetings at the distillery, and though she’d overheard Sol saying he’d found no sign of the shopkeeper there, it was the only workable clue she had. Maybe he’d been abducted by… Her brain skipped away from the word again.
Shouldn’t she have seen more tentacles, been baffled by undecipherable babbling, had to scrape off strange goos? Shouldn’t she have noticed something odd? Her fingers curled into a fist and she remembered trailing her hand across two, four, six, eight, ten ripples of Cross’s abs, the way he stayed hard inside her as he brought her to orgasm over and over—that alone made him something out of this world. And the way he said “my kind” as he discussed leaving his home, with a faraway look in his eye. Exactly how far had he been thinking?
No wonder he wouldn’t answer any of her questions.
After thanking the barista and promising to keep an eye out for the party invite, she warily stepped out onto the street. No sign of Cross or anything with tentacles or pie tins with flashing lights.
No idea what to do next. But she did have one data point, so she’d do what she always did: follow it to the next point, and the next after that.
Uncertainly, she wandered back toward the shop.
“I need to find a way to the distillery,” she muttered.
The device on her wrist vibrated, and the black SUV parked the other side of the street from where she was, flashed its lights, its door unlocking.
She tensed. If Evens or Cross or something with tentacles jumped out…
But nothing happened.
She peered through the tinted windows with no luck. Maybe someone was coming out of one of the other shops.
Her watch vibrated again.
Oh.
Cautiously, she crossed the street (forgetting to look both ways), tensed and ready to flee—or yell, if it was Cross.
She reached for the door handle, and a thread of violet light passed across her fingertips.
Shit. She’d been scanned. He’d know she was here.
Pulse racing, she jumped into the driver seat.
But she didn’t have any keys. Although neither had Cross when he started her rental. “Start the engine,” she commanded.
The engine roared to life. “Yes!”
She had reservations about tentacles and goo, but technology that instantly obeyed her commands at critical moments was a nice change.
She sped away from the shops. Maybe it was a long shot, but… “Disable tracking,” she demanded. “Go incognito.” Did Cross’s tech know what incognito meant? He seemed well versed in all other aspects of her world and her kind—and her personally.
She squelched that memory with a furious scowl. “Reject all scans, calls, search efforts, anything like that.” The watch vibrated again, and although she didn’t know if that meant it was obeying her, it was the best she could do right now.
“Take me to the distillery,” she ordered.
The wheel didn’t jerk abruptly under her hand and take control, but a 3D heads-up map abruptly projected from the face of the watch. The SUV was a small dot traveling along a roadway, and another glowing dot appeared to be her destination. “Holy crap,” she muttered.
The watch made a sour sound—the note of error across the universe, apparently.
Her heart beat heavily in her ears, and she gripped the wheel tighter.
What were they doing here? What did they want? She remembered the message spelled out cryptically in the added data. One simple word embedded in the patterns of favorite color, sexual preferences, dreams for the future.
Lies.
That was all it said, but it was enough. She would get her answers.
The blinking light took her deeper into the wilds around Sunset Falls, and she had the same sense of uncertainty and doubt as when she’d arrived—but worse this time because she knew more. Or knew less? Either way, she was right to be confused and angry and afraid. Which wasn’t going to stop her this time. She’d known something was off with Brett, the way he’d turned secretive and preemptively angry, as if she were at fault for wanting answers about why he’d become quiet and withdrawn. Now who was the disruptor?
But as the blinking dots on the map got closer together and the road got rougher and it got darker, her bravado waned.
Still she kept going. Because the last time she’d been willing to let her questions go unanswered, she’d lost everything. And even though her time in Sunset Falls could be counted in hours, somehow she knew what she’d lose this time would be worse.
The road ended before the dots converged. Though the freshly grated and graveled road seemed to verify what the barista had told her about the location being under new management—which fit with Evens’ assertion that he was launching a new business—there was no sign of work trucks or laborers. It was the weekend, though, right? Sometimes she lost track of the days, and the upheaval in her life plus the long drive plus the… Whatever this was, she could be forgiven for being a little confused.
Though she had her Uggs and her sweater and her heavy coat, it wasn’t exactly hunting-in-the-woods gear. She also didn’t have a laser sword or whatever else she might need to battle aliens.
Aliens. Ugh. Now that she’d thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. Was she really thinking aliens? One of her computer science professors had taught that solutions should take the easiest path between problems, that adding complexity introduced more potential for chaos. But what if the best explanation was beings from elsewhere come to Earth to find mates… As wild as it sounded, it did fit with everything she had, including the part where Cross lied to her.
Not that she forgave him.
Thinking of all the curses she would hurl at him—and she hoped that he understood every angry word of slang and invective—gave her the courage to get out of the car and follow the narrower path even deeper into the woods toward the pinned light on her wrist device.
The sky was clear, unlike last night. The starlight through the spears of evergreens shone on fresh edges of the granite gravel, giving her just enough light to stay on the path. She was still a ways out when the device vibrated. She looked down, and although the light had dimmed to accommodate the absolute blackness all around her, the map showed her concentric rings and other symbols she couldn’t quite decipher but assumed meant something to do with site security.
“Best options for evasion?” she whispered.
To her delight, the map zoomed closer and provided a zigzag route, avoiding what security measures she didn’t know. Putting her trust in the device that Cross had left to track her seemed
a little contraindicated when she didn’t trust him. But even though the technology was like none she’d ever seen before, she knew her own skills and abilities, and she’d done the best she could to hack the machine and make it her own.
Kind of crazy to think that this unlikely situation was what would give her back her belief in herself, but here she was.
She held back a giggle. Here she was in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. But maybe that was the best place to find lost things.
She crept forward, following the circuitous path indicated by the alien tech. No alarms blared, no tentacles or goo shot out at her from the darkness.
The pathway ended in the start of a small valley, and at the bottom of the bowl, small pools of bright work lights gave her glimpses of a large compound. In the darkness, the effect was like spots of starlight in an ocean of black, and offered only disconnected glimpses of interconnected buildings.
If the site had ever been a moonshiner’s hideaway, that had been mostly subsumed in a sleeker architecture. Just off center was a wooden, farm-like roofline and wall that might’ve been some rancher’s silo of spirits and sin, but now tiered layers of sloping roof lines layered up along the valley like a cluster of mechanical mushrooms. Softer pools of light, aimed downward from the edges of the roofs provided a faint glow, across which silhouetted figures moved, though at this distance she couldn’t quite make them out.
She glanced down at the digital map on the back of her hand. It wasn’t like there was a X marks the spot where she might find her answers. “Hide me,” she murmured to the device. Whether that would work… But if Cross was in charge of security for this location and this device was presumably part of that system, she could only hope they would work together inadvertently on her behalf. Evens had been so overt about mentioning the geology around Sunset Falls that interfered with cell signals; and now she had to wonder, was that deliberate, either something they’d caused or the reason they’d chosen this place?
Her questions kept piling up. Maybe they weren’t really her questions to ask. Should she be fleeing back to the closest point of civilization to contact the FBI or CIA or NASA whoever was in charge of fending off alien invasions?
But really, what proof could she show them? There had been no conquest besides Cross’s intimate conquering of her lonely body and aching heart.
She swallowed hard. Had they brought her to Sunset Falls because she would be vulnerable to their secrets?
No, somehow she knew Evens hadn’t been lying about that, at least. They’d chosen her because she was the best.
And now she was going to prove it to them.
“Take me through the dark,” she whispered.
The compound’s system should see her as friendly even if she was the invader here… No, dammit, she wasn’t going to cede any ground. She’d done that with the last job that was stolen from her, as if she didn’t deserve everything she’d worked for. They brought her here, and now they owed her the truth.
Closer she crept, and closer. The faint glowing dot that marked the site had actually moved toward her end of the compound, although it was unclear what exactly it was marking. Without a better option, she zeroed in on that.
She had to see, had to know.
A small meadow stretched ahead of her from the tree line toward an open paved area partly overhung by a long roofline—like an outdoor entertaining area at a fancy resort. Backlit figures passed the pools of light deeper inside, and strange sounds from within made her stiffen. Aliens yelling? But then the sound cut out for a moment before restarting, and her brain finally rearranged the noise into the actually familiar shrieky-grating of power tools interrupting…polka music?
Was this just a regular old remodeling overseen by an eccentric small-town wanna-be businessman?
Oh no. Had she leaped to a wild impossible conclusion? That was not how a universe-class data wrangler worked. Maybe she didn’t deserve this job after all.
But with the guitars and accordion urging her on, she continued forward. The flare of the trumpets echoed with a bit of distortion as she sneaked in from one side. Maybe this was all just an embarrassing mistake—one she would never, ever tell anyone about.
But she’d let herself not trust herself before, and how had that turned out?
Someone was coming out of the darker area toward one of the lighted work zones, whistling along with the polka. The sound was…wet? She bit down hard on her lower lip.
The figure crossed into the light.
Tentacles. A trail of goo. Also a power drill, but really it was the tentacles and goo that got her. She clamped both hands over her mouth to hold back a scream.
Luckily, right then the accordion solo came to a crescendo. The creature-thing-alien—shaped like a starfish but the size of a smart car—opened a beak-like organ in the center of its body and let out bubbles and a burbling sound.
It was…singing?
Two more beings strolled up. One thing had smooth limbs instead of tentacles, but eight of them. And it didn’t seem to have a head, although it did have a tool belt strung over its parachute pants. The other thing was covered in long, fluffy, white hair so its general shape was indistinct, but it had a crown of…eye stalks? Oh god, if it saw her…
The hair thing was reaching for one of the eight-limbed thing’s hammers when it slipped in the starfish’s trail of goo. Hair said something like, “Gah!” and Eight responded with something like, “Ha ha!” As Hair pivoted around, bristling, Starfish shrugged with several of its tentacles.
Heart slamming erratically around her chest like a pinball, Tyler cringed back.
Aliens. On Earth. What were they doing here?
Besides rehabbing an old distillery and now, apparently, dancing to polka music?
On her wrist, the watch buzzed again, rattling through her. She hazarded a quick glance down. The blinking light that the device had been homing in on was closing on the impossible trio who seemed to be doing their best to imitate the sounds of the accordion, trumpet, and guitar. Abruptly, they paused and turned to something out of sight. Eight raised three of its eight limbs in some sort of undulating waves gesture. Was it going to attack?
Cross stepped into the light.
Of course. Some part of her had known she would find him. She was out here in the dark, peering in, and he was now speaking to the trio. Although the distance garbled the words, the sounds themselves were unfamiliar, strange. Inhuman.
Because his kind was alien. Whatever moment of connection had been between them was not just a lie, but a terrible joke where she was the punchline.
She didn’t make a sound, didn’t move at all, but suddenly, he looked up. His dark amber eyes seemed to glow with a touch of flame that arrowed across the distance and darkness between them. He knew she was there.
He took one step toward her, and the trio of aliens pivoted to follow his focus.
Was he going to abduct her? Finally answer all her questions?
Or worse, was he going to tell her what she already knew: that the silly, little dream that had flickered to life in her heart was about as reachable and permanent as a shooting star.
She turned and ran.
She hadn’t gone far—how was she supposed to estimate in this unrelenting darkness?—When she realized she was looking at the watch wrong, blurred through the stinging of her tears, and she’d gone the wrong direction. Reorienting herself, she bolted between the trees. She should step out onto the path any second…
The night seemed determined to swallow her, but it wasn’t the darkness blinding her. Once again she’d ignored her own senses. She’d known something was off and gone against her instincts and taken this job anyway. She might as well have stayed in Silicon Valley letting other people tell her what to do and taking credit for her work.
Instead, she’d let an alien touch her heart.
Not to mention the rest of her!
At the memory, she ran even faster, as if she could avoid this one particu
lar truth. Ha, she’d said she wanted answers? Not like this!
The map showed she’d gotten clear of the compound security system and could make it back to the car, via a slightly circuitous route, if she cut across an open patch. The sharp branches of the trees grabbed at her as if trying to stop her. But she tore loose with a strangled curse. She wasn’t going to let him catch her, not when she’d have to look into his amber eyes and wonder what else he’d lied about.
He wasn’t going to take anything away from her, not when she could take herself away from him!
As if setting her free, the close confines of the trees expanded into a wide vista of star-studded night sky.
After the moments of suffocating dark, the crystal pinpoints dazzled her, the infinity of stars multiplied by magnitudes in her teary gaze.
She tilted her head back to stop the tears from falling, and in the next step, her foot plunged into nothingness.
Chapter 14
Across the distance between them, Tyler’s scream ripped through Cross like the longest teeth.
He’d been right behind her, but somehow she’d veered off the path. How had she found the outpost? How had she evaded him?
Maybe she’d sneaked past his security measures, but she’d never escape his beast. This close, he homed in on the echoes of her cry and the lingering scent of her passage between the trees. The perfume of her skin was spiked with a sharper tang like the long-gone inland ocean that had once hidden this area—an Earther scent, tasting of tears.
Despite his frantic need to find her, he slowed as he neared the cliffs that rose above one arc of Sunset Lake. The spires were jagged and crumbling, forming a natural protective barrier on one side of the IDA outpost that had protected it from wandering Earthers. But Tyler didn’t know the dangers of the area…
He paused at the precipice. “Tyler!”
A thin cry answered him, ragged as the rocks with terror and desperation.
Swiftly, he picked his way over the brittle stone to an outcropping that gave him a clearer view. Ignoring the risk, he stepped to the edge where his boots hovered over a fatal plunge. “Tyler?”
