TRANSMISSION

(THE INVASION CHRONICLES -- BOOK
1)

MORGAN RICE

Morgan Rice

Morgan Rice is the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author
of the epic fantasy series THE SORCERER’S RING, comprising seventeen books; of
the #1 bestselling series THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS, comprising twelve books; of the
#1 bestselling series THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY, a post-apocalyptic thriller
comprising three books; of the epic fantasy series KINGS AND SORCERERS,
comprising six books; of the epic fantasy series OF CROWNS AND GLORY,
comprising eight books; of the epic fantasy series A THRONE FOR SISTERS,
comprising eight books (and counting); and of the new science fiction series
THE INVASION CHRONICLES, comprising three books (and counting). Morgan’s books
are available in audio and print editions, and translations are available in
over 25 languages.

TURNED
(Book #1 in the Vampire Journals), ARENA
1 (Book #1 of the Survival Trilogy), A
QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1 in the Sorcerer’s Ring), RISE
OF THE DRAGONS (Kings and Sorcerers—Book #1), and A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1) are
each available as a free download on Amazon!

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vigorous set of encounters that focus well on Thor's evolution from a dreamy
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of what promises to be an epic young adult series.”

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RING has all the ingredients for an instant success: plots, counterplots,
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--Books and
Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos

“In this action-packed first book in the epic fantasy Sorcerer's
Ring series (which is currently 14 books strong), Rice introduces readers to
14-year-old Thorgrin "Thor" McLeod, whose dream is to join the Silver
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Books by Morgan Rice

THE INVASION CHRONICLES

TRANSMISSION (Book #1)

ARRIVAL (Book #2)

ASCENT (Book #3)

THE WAY OF STEEL

ONLY THE WORTHY (Book #1)

A THRONE FOR SISTERS

A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1)

A COURT FOR THIEVES (Book #2)

A SONG FOR ORPHANS (Book #3)

A DIRGE FOR PRINCES (Book #4)

A JEWEL FOR ROYALS (BOOK #5)

A KISS FOR QUEENS (BOOK #6)

A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (Book #7)

OF CROWNS AND GLORY

SLAVE, WARRIOR, QUEEN (Book #1)

ROGUE, PRISONER, PRINCESS (Book #2)

KNIGHT, HEIR, PRINCE (Book #3)

REBEL, PAWN, KING (Book #4)

SOLDIER, BROTHER, SORCERER (Book #5)

HERO, TRAITOR, DAUGHTER (Book #6)

RULER, RIVAL, EXILE (Book #7)

VICTOR, VANQUISHED, SON (Book #8)

KINGS AND SORCERERS

RISE OF THE DRAGONS (Book #1)

RISE OF THE VALIANT (Book #2)

THE WEIGHT OF HONOR (Book #3)

A FORGE OF VALOR (Book #4)

A REALM OF SHADOWS (Book #5)

NIGHT OF THE BOLD (Book #6)

THE SORCERER’S RING

A QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1)

A MARCH OF KINGS (Book #2)

A FATE OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

A CRY OF HONOR (Book #4)

A VOW OF GLORY (Book #5)

A CHARGE OF VALOR (Book #6)

A RITE OF SWORDS (Book #7)

A GRANT OF ARMS (Book #8)

A SKY OF SPELLS (Book #9)

A SEA OF SHIELDS (Book #10)

A REIGN OF STEEL (Book #11)

A LAND OF FIRE (Book #12)

A RULE OF QUEENS (Book #13)

AN OATH OF BROTHERS (Book #14)

A DREAM OF MORTALS (Book #15)

A JOUST OF KNIGHTS (Book #16)

THE GIFT OF BATTLE (Book #17)

THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY

ARENA ONE: SLAVERSUNNERS (Book #1)

ARENA TWO (Book #2)

ARENA THREE (Book #3)

VAMPIRE, FALLEN

BEFORE DAWN (Book #1)

THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS

TURNED (Book #1)

LOVED (Book #2)

BETRAYED (Book #3)

DESTINED (Book #4)

DESIRED (Book #5)

BETROTHED (Book #6)

VOWED (Book #7)

FOUND (Book #8)

RESURRECTED (Book #9)

CRAVED (Book #10)

FATED (Book #11)

OBSESSED (Book #12)

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Copyright © 2018 by Morgan Rice. All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any
means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior
permission of the author.  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment
only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would
like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy
for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it
was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your
own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.  This is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events,
and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

Kevin was
pretty sure you shouldn’t be told you were dying when you were thirteen. There
probably wasn’t a good time to be told it, to be fair, but definitely not when
you were thirteen.

“Kevin,” Dr.
Markham said, leaning forward in his chair, “do you understand what I’m saying
to you? Do you have any questions? Do you, Ms. McKenzie?”

Kevin looked
over to his mom, hoping she would have more of an idea what to say next than he
did. Hoping that maybe he’d misheard all of it, and she would explain. She was
short and slender, with the tough look of someone who had worked hard to raise
her son alone in Walnut Creek, California. Kevin was already taller than she
was, and once, just once, she’d said that he looked just like his father.

Right now, she
looked as though she was trying to hold back tears.

“Are you sure
this isn’t a mistake?” she asked. “We only came in to the doctor’s because of
the things Kevin was seeing.”

The things he
was seeing. That was such a gentle way to put it, as if even talking about all
of it might make it worse, or bring more of it. When Kevin had first told his
mother about it, she’d stared at him and then told him he should ignore it. Finally,
when he fainted, he’d woken up to find that he had an appointment with the
family doctor.

They’d quickly
gone from the doctor’s office to the hospital for tests, and then to Dr.
Markham’s office, which was white-walled and filled with mementos of what
seemed like trips to every corner of the planet. When Kevin had first stepped
in there, he’d felt as though it was an attempt to make a cold, clinical space
seem homey. Now he thought maybe Dr. Markham liked to be reminded that there
was life that didn’t include telling people they were dying.

“Hallucinations
can be a factor when it comes to diseases like this,” Dr. Markham said, in a
careful tone.

Hallucinations
didn’t seem like the right way to put it, to Kevin. That made it sound as
though they were unreal, ghostly things, but the things he saw seemed to fill
the world when they came. Images of landscapes he hadn’t seen, hints of
horizons.

And, of course,
the numbers.

“23h 06m
29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59,” he said. “It must mean something. It has
to.”

Dr. Markham
shook his head. “I’m sure it must feel that way, Kevin. I’m sure that you must
want it all to mean something, but right now, I need you to understand what is
happening to you.”

That had been
part of why Kevin had told his mom about it in the first place. It had taken
him weeks to convince her that he wasn’t joking, or playing some game. She’d
been sure that he wasn’t serious at first. When he’d started to have the
headaches, she’d taken it more seriously, letting him stay home from school for
the day when the pain was paralyzing. When he’d collapsed the first time, she’d
rushed him to the doctor.

“What is
happening to me?” Kevin asked. The strange thing was how calm he felt—well, not
calm. Maybe more kind of numb. Numb was probably the right word for it. His mom
looked as though she was on the verge of falling apart, but for Kevin, all of
it seemed far away, still waiting to rush in.

“You have one
of a group of degenerative brain disorders known as leukodystrophies,” Dr.
Markham said. “Here, I’ll write it down if you like.”

“But I’ve never
heard of that before,” Kevin’s mom said, in the tone of someone for whom that
meant it couldn’t be real. He could see the tears she was trying to fight back.
“How can my son have something I’ve never even heard of?”

Seeing his mom
like that was probably the hardest part of it for Kevin. She’d always been so
strong. He’d never had a problem she hadn’t been able to solve. He suspected
that was what she was thinking too.

“It’s a very
rare illness, Ms. McKenzie,” Dr. Markham said. “Or rather, a collection of
illnesses, each of which presents differently. There are different forms, each
one caused by a genetic abnormality that affects the white matter, what we call
the myelin sheath, of the brain. There are usually only a few hundred sufferers
of each of these illnesses at any one time.”

“If you know
what causes them, can’t you do something?” Kevin’s mother asked. “Isn’t there
some gene therapy or something?”

Kevin had seen
his mom on the Internet. Now, he guessed he knew what she’d been looking at.
She hadn’t said anything, but maybe she’d been hoping she was wrong. Maybe
she’d been hoping there was something she’d missed.

“There are
therapies available for some forms of leukodystrophy,” Dr. Markham said. He
shook his head. “And we have hope that in the future, they might help, but
Kevin’s isn’t one where there is any established treatment. The sad truth is,
the rarer the disease, the less research has been done on it, because the less
funding there is for that research.”

“There must be
something,” his mother said. “Some experimental option, some study…”

Kevin reached
out to put his hand over his mother’s. It was strange that they were already
almost the same size.

“It’s okay,
Mom,” he said, trying to sound as if he had everything under control.

“No, it isn’t.”
His mom looked as though she might burst apart with the shock of it all. “If
there’s nothing, then what do we do next?”

“We use the
treatments that are available to give Kevin the best quality of life we can,”
Dr. Markham said. “For the time that he still has left. I’m sorry, I wish I had
better news.”

Kevin watched
his mother forcing herself to be brave, piecing herself back together a little
at a time. He could tell that she was doing it for his sake, and almost felt guilty
that she had to.

“What does that
mean?” she asked. “What exactly are you proposing to do for Kevin?”

“I’m going to
prescribe tablets to help manage the pain,” Dr. Markham said, “and to reduce
the chances of seizures. Kevin, I know that hallucinations can be distressing,
so I’d like you to talk to someone about techniques for managing them, and your
responses to them.”

“You want Kevin
to see a psychologist?” his mother asked.

“Linda
Yalestrom is an expert in helping people, particularly young people, to cope
with the symptoms that rare illnesses like this can cause,” Dr. Markham said.
“I strongly recommend that you take Kevin to see her, given the things he has
been seeing.”

“They’re not
just hallucinations,” Kevin insisted. He was sure that they were more than
that.

“I’m sure it
must feel that way,” Dr. Markham said. “Dr. Yalestrom might be able to help.”

“Whatever…
whatever you think is best,” Kevin’s mother said. Kevin could see that she
wanted nothing other than to get out of there. There was something he needed to
know, though. Something obvious that he felt he should probably ask, even if he
didn’t really want to hear the answer.

“How long?” he
asked. “I mean, how long until I… die?”

That was still
a hard word to believe. Kevin found himself hoping it would all turn out to be
a mistake, even now, but he knew that it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

“It’s
impossible to say for certain,” Dr. Markham said. “The rate of progression for
leukodystrophies can vary, while each case is different.”

“How long?”
Kevin repeated.

“Perhaps six
months.” Dr. Markham spread his hands. “I’m sorry, Kevin. I can’t be more exact
than that.”

***

Kevin and his
mother went home, his mom driving with the kind of care that came when someone
knew they would probably fall apart if they didn’t concentrate completely. For
most of the journey out toward the suburbs, they were silent. Kevin wasn’t sure
what he could say.

His mother
spoke first. “We’ll find something,” she said. “We’ll find another doctor, get
a second opinion. We’ll try whatever treatment they can think of.”

“You can’t
afford that,” Kevin said. His mother worked hard at her job at a marketing
agency, but their house was a small one, and Kevin knew there wasn’t a lot of
money for extra things. He tried not to ask for much, because it only made his
mother feel sad when she couldn’t give it to him. He hated seeing his mother
like that, which only made this harder.

“Do you think
any of it matters to me?” his mother demanded. Kevin could see the tears
pouring from her eyes now. “You’re my son, and you’re dying, and… I can’t… I
can’t save you.”

“You don’t have
to save me,” Kevin said, although he wished that someone would right then. He
wished that someone would come along and just make all this stop.

It was starting
to seep in what this might mean. What it would mean, in less time than
the end of the school year. He would be dead. Gone. Anything he’d looked
forward to would be cut short, anything he hoped for the future would be
stopped by the fact that there would be no future.

Kevin wasn’t
sure how he felt about that. Sad, yes, because it was the kind of news you were
supposed to feel sad about, and because he didn’t want to die. Angry, because
what he wanted didn’t appear to matter when it came to this. Confused, because
he wasn’t sure why it should be him, when there were billions of other people
in the world.

Compared to his
mother, though, he was calm. She was shaking as she drove, and Kevin was so
worried they might crash that he sighed with relief when they pulled onto the
street where their house stood. It was one of the smallest houses on the block,
old and patched with repairs.

“It will be all
right,” his mother said. She didn’t sound as though she believed it. She took
hold of Kevin’s arm as they made their way into the house, but it felt more
like Kevin was supporting her.

“It will be,”
Kevin replied, because he suspected that his mother needed to hear it even more
than he did. It might have helped if it were true.

They went
inside, and it felt almost wrong to do anything after that, as though doing
normal things would have been a kind of betrayal, after the news Dr. Markham
had given them. Kevin put a frozen pizza in the oven, while in the background,
he could hear his mother sobbing on the sofa. He started to go to comfort her,
but two things stopped him. The first was the thought that his mother probably
wouldn’t want him to. She had always been the strong one, the one looking after
him even after his father left when he was just a baby.

The second was
the vision.

He saw a
landscape beneath a sky that seemed more purple than blue, the trees beneath
oddly shaped, with fronds that reminded Kevin of the palm trees on the beaches,
but trunks that twisted in ways palm trees never did. The sky looked as though
the sun was setting, but the sun looked wrong somehow. Kevin couldn’t work out
how, because he hadn’t spent time looking at the sun, but he knew it wasn’t the
same.

In one corner
of his mind, numbers pulsed, over and over.

He was walking
across a space covered with reddish sand now, and could feel his toes sinking
into it. There were creatures there, small and lizard-like, that scuttled away
when he came too close to them. He looked around…

…and the world
dissolved into flames.

Kevin woke up
on the kitchen floor, the oven’s timer beeping to tell him the pizza was ready,
the smell of burning food dragging him off the floor and over to the oven
before his mother had to do it. He didn’t want her to see him like this, didn’t
want to give her even more reasons to worry.

He took the
pizza out, cut it into slices, and took them into the living room. His mother
was on the couch, and although she’d stopped crying, her eyes were red. Kevin
put the pizza down on the coffee table, sitting beside her and switching on the
TV so they could at least pretend that things were normal.

“You shouldn’t
have to do this,” his mother said, and Kevin didn’t know if she meant the pizza
or everything else. Right then, it didn’t matter.

Still the
numbers hung in his head: 23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59.

CHAPTER
TWO

Kevin wasn’t
sure he’d ever felt as tired as he did when he and his mother drove into the
school’s parking lot. The plan was to try to keep going as normal, but he felt
as if he might fall asleep at any moment. That was a long way from normal.

That was
probably because of the treatments. There had been a lot of treatments in the
last few days. His mother had found more doctors, and each one had a different
plan for trying to at least slow things down. That was what they said, every
time, the words making it clear that even that would be something special, and
that actually stopping things was something they couldn’t hope for.

“Have a good
day at school, honey,” his mother said. There was something false about the
brightness of it, a brittle edge that said just how hard she was having to try
in order to produce a smile. Kevin knew she was making an effort for him, and
he did his best, too.

“I’ll try,
Mom,” he assured her, and he could hear that his own voice didn’t sound natural
either. It was as if both of them were playing roles because they were afraid
of the truth underneath them. Kevin played his because he didn’t want his
mother crying again.

How many times
had she cried now? How many days had it been since they’d been to see Dr.
Markham the first time? Kevin had lost track. There had been a day or two off
school sick, before it had become obvious that neither of them wanted that.
Then there had been this: school interspersed with tests and attempts at
therapies. There had been injections and blood tests, supplements because his
mom had read online that they might help, and health food that was a long way
from pizza.

“I just want
things to be as normal as possible,” his mother said. Neither of them mentioned
that on a normal day, Kevin would have taken the bus to school, and they
wouldn’t have had to worry about what was normal or not.

Or that on a
normal day, he wouldn’t be hiding what was wrong with him, or feeling grateful
that his closest friend went to a different school after the last time he and
his mom had moved, so that she wouldn’t have to see any of this. He hadn’t
called Luna in days now, and the messages were building up on his phone. Kevin
ignored them, because he couldn’t think of how to answer them.

Kevin could
feel the eyes on him from the moment he went inside the school. The rumors had
been going around now, even if no one knew for sure what was wrong with him. He
could see a teacher ahead, Mr. Williams, and on a normal day Kevin would have
been able to walk past him without even attracting a moment of attention. He
wasn’t one of the kids the teachers kept a close eye on because they were
always doing something wrong. Now, the teacher stopped him, looking him up and
down as if expecting signs that he might die at any moment.

“How are you
feeling, Kevin?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mr.
Williams,” Kevin assured him. It was easier to be fine than to try to explain
the truth: how he was worried about his mother, and he was tired all the time
from the attempts at treatment, how he was scared about what was going to
happen next.

How the numbers
were still going around in his head.

23h 06m
29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59. They were there at the back of his mind,
squatting like a toad that wouldn’t move, impossible to forget, impossible to
ignore, no matter how much Kevin tried to follow his mother’s instructions to
forget them.

“Well, just let
us know if you need anything,” the teacher said.

Kevin still
wasn’t sure how to reply to that. It was one of those kind things that people
said that was kind of useless at the same time. The one thing he needed was the
thing they couldn’t give him: to undo all of this; for things to be normal
again. Teachers knew a lot of things, but not that.

Still, he did
his best to pretend to be normal all the way through his math class, and
through most of history after that. Ms. Kapinski was telling them about some
early European history, which Kevin wasn’t sure was actually on any kind of
test, but which had apparently been what she majored in at college, and so
seemed to show up more than it should.

“Did you know
that most of the Roman remains found in Northern Europe aren’t actually Roman?”
she said. Kevin generally liked Ms. Kapinski’s classes, because she wasn’t
afraid to wander off the point and tell them about whatever fragments of the
past entered her head. It was a reminder of just how much there had been in the
world before any of them.

“So they’re
fake?” Francis de Longe asked. Ordinarily, Kevin might have been the one asking
it, but he was enjoying the chance to be quiet, almost invisible.

“Not exactly,”
Ms. Kapinski said. “When I say they aren’t Roman, I mean that they’re remains
left behind by people who had never been near what is now Italy. They were the
local populations, but as the Romans advanced, as they conquered, the local
people realized that the best way to do well was to fit in with Roman ways. The
way they dressed, the buildings they lived in, the language they spoke, they
changed everything to make it clear which side they were on, and because it
gave them a better chance of good positions in the new order.” She smiled.
“Then, when there were rebellions against Rome, one of the keys to being part
of it was not using those symbols.”

Kevin tried to
imagine that: the same people in a place shifting who they were as the
political tide changed, their whole being changing depending on who ruled. He
thought it might be a bit like being in one of the popular crowds at school,
trying to wear the right clothes and say the right things. Even so, it was hard
to imagine, and not just because images of impossible landscapes
continued to filter through at the back of his mind.

That was
probably the only good thing about what was wrong with him: the symptoms were
invisible. It was also the scary thing in a way. There was this thing killing
him, and if people didn’t know about it already, they would never find out. He
could just sit there and no one would ever—

Kevin felt the
vision coming, rising up through him like a kind of pressure building through
his body. There was the rush of dizziness, the feeling of the world swimming
away as he connected with something… else. He started to stand to ask if he
could be excused, but by then, it was already too late. He felt his legs giving
way and he collapsed.

He was looking
at the same landscapes he remembered from before, the sky the wrong shade, the
trees too twisted. He was watching the fire sweep through it, blinding and
bright, seeming to come from everywhere at once. He’d seen all of that before.
Now, though, there was a new element: a faint pulse that seemed to repeat at
regular intervals, precise as a ticking clock.

Some part of
Kevin knew a clock was what it had to be, just as he knew by instinct that it
was counting down to something, not just marking the time. The pulses had the
sense of getting subtly more intense, as if building up to some far-off
crescendo. There was a word in a language he shouldn’t have understood, but he did
understand it.

“Wait.”

Kevin wanted to
ask what he was supposed to be waiting for, or how long, or why. He didn’t,
though, partly because he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to ask, and partly
because almost as suddenly as the moment had come, it passed, leaving Kevin
rising up from darkness to find himself lying on the floor of the classroom,
Ms. Kapinski standing over him.

“Just lie still
a moment, Kevin,” she said. “I’ve sent for the school medic. Hal will be here
in a minute.”

Kevin sat up in
spite of her instructions, because he’d come to know what this felt like by now.

“I’m fine,” he
assured her.

“I think we
should let Hal be the judge of that.”

Hal was a big,
round former paramedic who served to make sure that the students of St.
Brendan’s School came through whatever medical emergencies they suffered.
Sometimes, Kevin suspected that they did it because the thought of the medic’s
idea of care made them ignore the worst of injuries.

“I saw things,”
Kevin managed. “There was a planet, and a burning sun, and a kind of message…
like a countdown.”

In the movies,
someone would have insisted on contacting somebody important. They would have
recognized the message for what it was. There would have been meetings, and
investigations. Someone would have done something about it. Outside of
the movies, Kevin was just a thirteen-year-old boy, and Ms. Kapinski looked at
him with a mixture of pity and mild bewilderment.

“Well, I’m sure
it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s probably normal to see all kinds of things if
you’re having this sort of… episode.”

Around them,
Kevin could hear the muttering from the others in his class. None of it made
him feel better.

“…just fell
down and started twitching…”

“…I heard he
was sick, I hope you can’t catch it…”

“…Kevin thinks
he sees planets…”

The last one
was the one that hurt. It made it sound as though he were going crazy. Kevin
wasn’t going crazy. At least, he didn’t think he was.

Despite his
best attempts to insist that he was fine, Kevin still had to go with Hal when
the medic came. Had to sit in the medic’s office while he shone lights in
Kevin’s eyes and asked questions about a condition so rare he obviously had no
more clue than Kevin did what was going on.

“The principal
wanted to see us once I was sure you were okay,” he said. “Do you feel up to
walking to his office, or should we ask him to come here?”

“I can walk,”
Kevin said. “I’m fine.”

“If you say
so,” Hal said.

They made their
way to the principal’s office, and Kevin almost wasn’t surprised to find that
his mother was there. Of course they would have called her in for a medical
emergency, of course she would be there if he collapsed, but that wasn’t good,
not when she was supposed to be at work.

“Kevin, are
you okay?” his mother asked as soon as he arrived, turning to him and drawing
him into a hug. “What happened?”

“I’m fine,
Mom,” Kevin said.

“Ms. McKenzie,
I’m sure we wouldn’t have called you in if it weren’t serious,” the principal
said. “Kevin collapsed.”

“I’m fine now,”
Kevin insisted.

It didn’t seem
to make any difference how many times he said that, though.

“Plus,” the
principal said, “it seems that he was pretty confused when he came around. He
was talking about… well, other planets.”

“Planets,”
Kevin’s mother repeated. Her voice was flat when she said that.

“Ms. Kapinski
says it disrupted her class quite a bit,” the principal said. He sighed. “I’m
wondering if maybe Kevin might be better off staying at home for a while.”

He said it
without looking at Kevin. There was a decision being made there, and although
Kevin was at the heart of it, it was clear he didn’t actually get a say.

“I don’t want
to miss school,” Kevin said, looking at his mother. Surely she wouldn’t want
him to either.

“I think what
we have to ask,” the principal said, “is if, at this point, school is really
the best thing Kevin can be doing with the time he has.”

It was probably
intended to be a kind way of putting it, but all it did was remind Kevin of
what the doctor had said. Six months to live. It didn’t seem like enough time
for anything, let alone to have a life in. Six months’ worth of seconds, each
one ticking away in a steady beat that matched the countdown in his head.

“You’re saying
that there’s no point to my son being in school because he’ll be dead soon
anyway?” his mother snapped back. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, of course
not,” the principal said, hurriedly, raising his hands to placate her.

“That’s what it
sounds like you’re saying,” Kevin’s mother said. “It sounds as though you’re
freaked out by my son’s illness as much as the kids here.”

“I’m saying
that it’s going to be hard to teach Kevin as this gets worse,” the principal
said. “We’ll try, but… don’t you want to make the most of the time you have
left?”

He said that in
a gentle tone that still managed to cut right to Kevin’s heart. He was saying
exactly what his mother had thought, just in gentler words. The worst part was
that he was right. Kevin wasn’t going to live long enough to go to college, or
get a job, or do anything that he might need school to prepare for, so
why bother being there.

“It’s okay,
Mom,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm.

That seemed to
be enough of an argument to convince his mother, and just that told Kevin how
serious this all was. On any other occasion, he would have expected her to
fight. Now it seemed that the fight had been sucked out of her.

They went out
to the car in silence. Kevin looked back at the school. The thought hit him
that he probably wouldn’t be coming back. He hadn’t even had a chance to say
goodbye.

“I’m sorry they
called you at work,” Kevin said as they sat in the car. He could feel the tension
there. His mom didn’t turn the engine on, just sat.

“It’s not
that,” she said. “It’s just… it was getting easy to pretend that nothing was
wrong.” She sounded so sad then, so deeply hurt. Kevin had gotten used to the
expression that meant she was trying to keep from crying. She wasn’t
succeeding.

“Are you
okay, Kevin?” she asked, even though by then, he was the one holding onto her,
as tightly as he could.

“I’m… I wish I
didn’t have to leave school,” Kevin said. He’d never thought he would hear
himself say that. He’d never thought that anyone would say that.

“We could go
back in,” his mother said. “I could tell the principal that I’m going to bring
you back here tomorrow, and every day after that, until…”

She broke off.

“Until it gets
too bad,” Kevin said. He screwed his eyes tightly shut. “I think maybe it’s
already too bad, Mom.”

He heard her
hit the dashboard, the dull thud echoing around the car.

“I know,” she
said. “I know and I hate it. I hate this disease that’s taking my little
boy from me.”

She cried again
for a little while. In spite of his attempts to stay strong, Kevin did too. It
seemed to take a long time before his mother was calm enough to say anything
else.

“They said you
saw… planets, Kevin?” she asked.

“I saw it,”
Kevin said. How could he explain what it was like? How real it was?

His mother
looked over, and now Kevin had the sense of her struggling for the right words
to say. Struggling to be comforting and firm and calm, all at the same time.
“You get that this isn’t real, right, honey? It’s just… it’s just the disease.”

Kevin knew that
he ought to understand it, but…

“It doesn’t
feel like that,” Kevin said.

“I know it
doesn’t,” his mother said. “And I hate that, because it’s just a reminder that
my little boy is slipping away. All of this, I wish I could make it go away.”

Kevin didn’t
know what to say to that. He wished it would go away too.

“It feels
real,” Kevin said, even so.

His mother was
quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice had the brittle,
barely holding it together quality that only arrived since the diagnosis, but
now had become far too familiar.

“Maybe… maybe
it’s time we took you to see that psychologist.”

CHAPTER
THREE

Dr. Linda
Yalestrom’s office wasn’t anywhere near as medical looking as all the others
Kevin had been in recently. It was her home, for one thing, in Berkeley, with
the university close enough that it seemed to back up her credentials as surely
as the certificates that were neatly framed on the wall.

The rest of it
looked like the kind of home office Kevin expected from TV, with soft
furnishings obviously relegated here after some previous move, a desk where
clutter had crept in from the rest of the house, and a few potted plants that
seemed to be biding their time, ready to take over.

Kevin found
himself liking Dr. Yalestrom. She was a short, dark-haired woman in her
fifties, whose clothes were brightly patterned and about as far from medical
scrubs as it was possible to get. Kevin suspected that might be the point, if
she spent a lot of time working with people who had received the worst news
possible from doctors already.

“Come sit down,
Kevin,” she said with a smile, gesturing to a broad red couch that was well
worn with years of people sitting on it. “Ms. McKenzie, why don’t you give us a
while? I want Kevin to feel that he can say anything he needs to say. My
assistant will get you some coffee.”

His mother
nodded. “I’ll be right outside.”

Kevin went to
sit on the couch, which turned out to be exactly as comfortable as it appeared.
He looked around the room at pictures of fishing trips and vacations. It took
him a while to realize something important.

“You’re not in
any of the photos in here,” he said.

Dr. Yalestrom
smiled at that. “Most of my clients never notice. The truth is, a lot of these
are places I always wanted to go, or places I heard were interesting. I put
them out because young men like you spend a lot of time staring around the
room, doing anything but talk to me, and I figure you should at least have
something to look at.”

It seemed a bit
like cheating to Kevin.

“If you work
with people who are dying a lot,” he said, “why do you have pictures of places
you always wanted to go? Why put it off, when you’ve seen…”

“When I’ve seen
how quickly it can all end?” Dr. Yalestrom asked, gently.

Kevin nodded.

“Maybe because
of the wonderful human ability to know that and still procrastinate. Or maybe I
have been to some of these places, and the reason I’m not in the
pictures is just that I think one of me staring down at people is quite
enough.”

Kevin wasn’t
sure if those were good reasons or not. They didn’t seem like enough, somehow.

“Where would
you go, Kevin?” Dr. Yalestrom asked. “Where would you go if you could go
anywhere?”

“I don’t know,”
he replied.

“Well, think
about it. You don’t have to let me know right away.”

Kevin shook his
head. It was strange, talking to an adult this way. Generally, when you were
thirteen, conversations came down to questions or instructions. With the
possible exception of his mom, who was at work a lot of the time anyway, adults
weren’t really interested in what someone his age had to say.

“I don’t know,”
he repeated. “I mean, I never really thought I’d get to go anywhere.” He tried
to think about places he might like to go, but it was hard to come up with
anywhere, especially now that he only had a few months to do it. “I feel
as though, wherever I think of, what’s the point? I’ll be dead pretty soon.”

“What do you
think the point is?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin did his
best to think of a reason. “I guess… because pretty soon is not the same thing
as now?”

The
psychologist nodded. “I think that’s a good way to put it. So, is there
anything that you would like to do in the pretty soon, Kevin?”

Kevin thought
about it. “I guess… I guess I should tell Luna what’s happening.”

“And who’s
Luna?”

“She’s my
friend,” Kevin said. “We don’t go to the same school anymore, so she hasn’t
seen me collapse or anything, and I haven’t called in a few days, but…”

“But you should
tell her,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t healthy to push away your friends when
things get bad, Kevin. Not even to protect them.”

Kevin swallowed
back a denial, because it was kind of what he was doing. He didn’t want
to inflict this on Luna, didn’t want to hurt her with the news of what was
going to happen. It was part of the reason he hadn’t called her in so long.

“What else?”
Dr. Yalestrom said. “Let’s try places again. If you could go anywhere, where
would you go?”

Kevin tried to
pick among all the places in the room, but the truth was that there was only
one landscape that kept springing into his head, with colors no normal camera
could capture.

“It would sound
stupid,” he said.

“There’s
nothing wrong with sounding stupid,” Dr. Yalestrom assured him. “I’ll tell you
a secret. People often think that everyone else but them is special. They think
that other people must be cleverer, or braver, or better, because only they can
see the parts of themselves that aren’t those things. They worry that everyone
else says the right thing, and they sound stupid. It’s not true though.”

Even so, Kevin
sat there for several seconds, examining the upholstery of the couch in detail.
“I… I see places. One place. I guess it’s the reason that I had to come here.”

Dr. Yalestrom
smiled. “You’re here because an illness like yours can create a lot of odd
effects, Kevin. I’m here to help you cope with them, without them dominating
your life. Would you like to tell me more about the things you see?”

Again, Kevin
made a detailed examination of the couch, learning its topography, picking at a
tiny speck of lint sticking up from the rest. Dr. Yalestrom was silent while he
did it; the kind of silence that felt as though it was sucking words up out of
him, giving them a space to fall into.

“I see a place
where nothing is quite the same as here. The colors are wrong, the animals and
the plants are different,” Kevin said. “I see it destroyed… at least, I think I
do. There’s fire and heat, a bright flash. There’s a set of numbers. And
there’s something that feels like a countdown.”

“Why does it
feel like a countdown?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin shrugged.
“I’m not sure. Because the pulses are getting closer together, I guess?”

The
psychologist nodded, then went over to her desk. She came back with paper and
pencils.

“How are you at
art?” she asked. “No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter if this is a great
work of art or not. I just want you to try to draw what you see, so that I can
get a sense of what it’s like. Don’t pay too much attention to it, just draw.
Can you do that for me, Kevin?”

Kevin shrugged.
“I’ll try.”

He took the
pencils and paper, trying to bring the landscape that he’d seen to mind, trying
to remember every detail of it. It was hard to do, because although the numbers
stayed in his head, it felt as though he had to dive down deep into himself to
pull up the images. They were below the surface, and to get at them, Kevin had
to pull back into himself, concentrating on nothing else, letting the pencil
flow over the paper almost automatically…

“Okay, Kevin,”
she said, taking the pad away before Kevin could get a good look at what he’d
drawn. “Let’s see what you’ve…”

He saw the look
of shock that crossed her face, so brief that it almost wasn’t there. It was
there though, and Kevin had to wonder what it would take to shock someone
who heard stories about people dying every day.

“What is it?”
Kevin asked. “What did I draw?”

“You don’t
know?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

“I was trying
not to think too much,” Kevin said. “Did I do something wrong?”

Dr. Yalestrom
shook her head. “No, Kevin, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

She held out
Kevin’s drawing. “Would you like to take a look at what you produced? Perhaps
it will help you to understand things.”

She held it out
folded, in just the tips of her fingers, as if she didn’t want to touch it more
than necessary. That made Kevin worry just a little. What could he have drawn
that would make an adult react like that? He took it, unfolding it.

A drawing of a
spaceship sat there, only “drawing” probably wasn’t the right word for it. This
was more like a blueprint, complete in every detail, which seemed impossible in
the time Kevin had to draw. He’d never even seen this before, but here it was,
on the page, looking giant and flat, like a city perched on a disk. There were
smaller disks around it, like worker bees around a queen.

The detail
meant that there was something neat, almost clinical, about the way it was
drawn, but there was more to it than that. There was something about the
geometry of it that was just… wrong, somehow, seeming to have depths and angles
to it that shouldn’t have been possible to capture just in a sketch like this.

“But this…”
Kevin didn’t know what to say. Didn’t this prove what was happening? Did anyone
think he could have just made something like this up?

Apparently, Dr.
Yalestrom wasn’t convinced though. She took back the picture, folding it
carefully as though she didn’t want to have to look at it. Kevin suspected that
the strangeness of it was too much for her.

“I think it’s
important that we talk about the things you’re seeing,” she said. “Do you think
those things are real?”

Kevin
hesitated. “I’m… not sure. They feel real, but a lot of people now have
told me that they can’t be.”

“It makes
sense,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “What you’re feeling is very common.”

“It is?” What
he was experiencing didn’t feel very common at all. “I thought that my illness
was rare.”

Dr. Yalestrom
moved over to her desk, placing Kevin’s drawing in a file. She picked up a
tablet and started to make notes. “Is it important that other people shouldn’t
experience what you’re experiencing, Kevin?”

“No, it’s not
that,” Kevin said. “It was just that Dr. Markham said that this disease only
affects a few people.”

“That’s true,”
Dr. Yalestrom agreed. “But I see a lot of people who experience hallucinations of
some kind for other reasons.”

“You think I’m
going crazy,” Kevin guessed. Everyone else seemed to. Even his mom, presumably,
since she’d been the one to bring him here after he’d started talking about
them. He didn’t feel like he was going crazy, though.

“That’s not a
word I like to use here,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “I think that often, the behavior
that we label crazy is there for a good reason. It’s just that often, those
reasons only make sense to the person concerned. People will do things to
protect themselves from situations that are too difficult to handle, which seem
to be… unusual.”

“You think
that’s what I’m doing with these visions?” Kevin asked. He shook his head.
“They’re real. I’m not making them up.”

“Can I tell you
what I think, Kevin? I think a part of you might be attached to these ‘visions’
because it’s helping you to think that your illness might be happening for some
kind of greater good. I think that maybe these ‘visions’ are actually you
trying to make sense of your illness. The imagery in them… there’s a strange
place that isn’t like the normal world. Could that represent the way things
have changed?”

“I guess,”
Kevin said. He wasn’t convinced. The things he’d seen weren’t about some world
where he didn’t have his disease. They were about a place he didn’t understand
at all.

“Then you have
the sense of impending doom with fire and light,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “The
sense of things coming to an end. You even have a countdown, complete with
numbers.”

The numbers
weren’t a part of the countdown; that was just the slow pulsing, growing faster
bit by bit. Kevin suspected that he wasn’t going to convince her of that now.
When adults had decided what the truth of something was, he wasn’t going to be
able to change their minds.

“So what can I
do?” Kevin asked. “If you think they aren’t real, shouldn’t I want to get rid
of them?”

“Do you want
to get rid of them?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin thought
about that. “I don’t know. I think they might be important, but I didn’t ask
for them.”

“The same way that
you didn’t ask to be diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease,” Dr.
Yalestrom said. “Maybe those two things are linked, Kevin.”

Kevin had
already been thinking that his visions were linked to the disease in some way.
That maybe it had changed his brain enough to be receptive to the visions. He
didn’t think that was what the psychiatrist meant, though.

“So what can I
do?” Kevin asked again.

“There are
things you can do, not to make them go away, but at least to be able to cope.”

“Such as?”
Kevin asked. He had to admit to a moment of hope at the thought. He didn’t want
all of this going around and around in his head. He hadn’t asked to be the one
receiving messages that no one else understood, and that just made him look
crazy when he spoke about them.

“You can try to
find things to distract yourself from the hallucinations when they come,” Dr.
Yalestrom said. “You can try reminding yourself that it isn’t real. If you’re
in doubt, find ways to check. Maybe ask someone else if they’re seeing the same
thing. Remember, it’s okay to see whatever you see, but how you react to it is
up to you.”

Kevin guessed
he could remember all that. Even so, it did nothing to quiet the faint pulse of
the countdown, thrumming in the background, getting faster a little at a time.

“And I think
you need to tell the people who don’t know,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t fair
to them to keep them in the dark about this.”

She was right.

And there was
one person he needed to let know more than anyone else.

Luna.

CHAPTER
FOUR

“So,” Luna
said, as she and Kevin made their way along one of the paths of the Lafayette
Reservoir Recreation Area, dodging around the tourists and the families
enjoying their day out, “why have you been avoiding me?”

Trust Luna to
get straight to the point. It was one of the things Kevin liked about her. Not
that he liked her liked her. People always seemed to assume that. They
thought because she was pretty, and blonde, and probably cheerleader material
if she didn’t think all that was stupid, that of course they would be
boyfriend and girlfriend. They just assumed that it was how the world worked.

They weren’t
together. Luna was his best friend. The person he spent the most time
with, outside of school. Probably the one person in the world he could talk to about
absolutely anything.

Except, it
turned out, this.

“I haven’t
been…” Kevin trailed off in the face of Luna’s stare. She was good at stares.
Kevin suspected that she probably practiced. He’d seen everyone from bullies to
rude store owners back down rather than have her stare at them any longer.
Faced with that stare, it was impossible to lie to her. “All right, I have, but
it’s hard, Luna. I have something… well, something I don’t know how to tell
you.”

“Oh, don’t be
stupid,” Luna said. She found an abandoned soda can and kicked it down the
path, flicking it from foot to foot with the kind of skill that came from doing
it far too often. “I mean, how bad can it be? Are you moving away? Are you
changing schools again?”

Maybe she
caught something in his expression, because she fell silent for a few seconds.
There was something fragile about that silence, as if both of them were
tiptoeing to avoid breaking it. Even so, they had to. They couldn’t just walk
like this forever.

“Something bad
then?” she said, sending the can into a trash container with a final flick of
her foot.

Kevin nodded.
Bad was one word for it.

“How bad?”

“Bad,” he said.
“The reservoir?”

The reservoir
was the place they both went when they wanted to sit down and talk about
things. They’d talked about Billy Hames liking Luna when they were nine, and
about Kevin’s cat, Tiger, dying when they were ten. None of it seemed like a
good preparation for this. He wasn’t a cat.

They made their
way down to the edge of the water, looking out at the trees on the far side,
the people with their canoes and their paddle boats on the reservoir. Compared
to some of the places they went, this was nice. People assumed Kevin was the
kid from the wrong side of town leading Luna astray, but she was the one with the
knack for squeezing past fences and clambering up derelict buildings, leaving
Kevin to follow if he could. Here, there was none of that, just the water and
the trees.

“What is it?”
Luna asked. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. Kevin
didn’t feel like doing the same. Right then, he wanted to run, to hide.
Anything to keep from telling her the truth. It felt as though, the longer he
could keep from telling Luna, the longer it wasn’t really real.

“Kevin?” Luna
said. “You’re worrying me now. Look, if you don’t tell me what it is, then I’m
going to call your mom and find out that way.”

“No, don’t do
that,” Kevin said quickly. “I’m not sure… Mom isn’t handling this well.”

Luna was
looking more worried by the moment. “What’s wrong? Is she sick? Are you sick?”

Kevin nodded at
the last one. “I’m sick,” he said. He put his hand on Luna’s shoulder. “I have
something called leukodystrophy. I’m dying, Luna.”

He knew he’d
said it too quickly. Something like that, there should be a whole big explanation,
a proper build-up, but honestly, that was the part of it that mattered.

She stared at
him, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. “No, you can’t be, that’s…”

She hugged him
then, tight enough that Kevin could barely breathe.

“Tell me it’s a
joke. Tell me it’s not real.”

“I wish it
weren’t,” Kevin said. He wished that more than anything right then.

Luna pulled
back, and Kevin could see her screwing her features tight with the effort of
not crying. Normally, Luna was good at not crying about things. Now, though, he
could see it taking everything she had.

“This… how
long?” she asked.

“They said
maybe six months,” Kevin said.

“And that was days
ago, so it’s less now,” Luna shot back. “And you’ve been having to cope
with it on your own, and…” She faded into silence as the sheer enormity of it
obviously hit her.

Kevin could see
her looking out at the people on the reservoir, watching them with their small
boats and their quick forays into the water. They seemed so happy there. She
stared at them as if they were the part she couldn’t believe, not the illness.

“It doesn’t
seem fair,” she said. “All these people, just going on as if the world is the
same, going about having fun when you’re dying.”

Kevin smiled
sadly. “What are we supposed to do? Tell them all to stop having fun?”

He realized the
danger in saying that slightly too late as Luna leapt to her feet, cupped her
hands to her mouth, and yelled at the top of her voice.

“Hey, all of
you, you have to stop! My friend is dying, and I demand that you stop having
fun at once!”

A couple of
people looked around, but no one stopped. Kevin suspected that hadn’t been the
point. Luna stood there for several seconds, and this time, he was the one to
hug her, holding her while she cried. That was enough of a rarity that the
sheer shock value of it held Kevin there. Luna shouting at people, behaving in
ways that they would never expect from someone like her, was normal. Luna
breaking down wasn’t.

“Feel better?”
he asked after a while.

She shook her
head. “Not really. What about you?”

“Well, it’s
nice to know that there’s someone who would try to stop the world for me,” he
said. “You know the worst part?”

Luna managed
another smile. “Not being able to spell what’s killing you?”

Kevin could
only return that smile. Trust Luna to know that he needed her to be her usual
self, making fun of him.

“I can, I
practiced. The worst part is that all this means no one believes me when I tell
them that I’ve been seeing things. They think it’s all just the illness.”

Luna cocked her
head to one side. “What kind of things?”

Kevin explained
to her about the strange landscapes he’d been seeing, the fire wiping it clean,
the sensation of a countdown.

“That…” Luna
began when he was finished. She didn’t seem to know how to end though.

“I know, it’s
crazy, I’m crazy,” Kevin said. Even Luna didn’t believe him.

“You didn’t let
me finish,” Luna said, drawing in a breath. “That… is so cool.”

“Cool?” Kevin
repeated. It hadn’t been the response he expected, even from her. “Everyone
else thinks I’m going crazy, or my brain is melting, or something.”

“Everyone else
is stupid,” Luna declared, although, to be fair, that seemed to be her default
setting for life. To her, everyone was stupid until proven otherwise.

“So you believe
me?” Kevin said. Even he wasn’t completely sure anymore, after everything
people had said to him.

Luna held onto
his shoulders, looking him squarely in the eyes. With another girl, Kevin might
have thought she was about to kiss him. Not with Luna, though.

“If you tell me
that these visions are real, then they’re real. I believe you. And being able
to see alien worlds is definitely cool.”

Kevin’s eyes
widened a little at that. “What makes you think that it’s an alien world?”

Luna stepped
back with a shrug. “What else is it going to be?”

When she asked
that, Kevin got the feeling that she was every bit as stunned by all this as he
was. She just did a better job of hiding it.

“Maybe…” she
guessed, “…maybe all this has changed your brain, so that it has a direct line
to this alien place?”

If Luna ever
acquired a superpower, it would probably be the ability to leap tall
conclusions in a single bound. Kevin liked that about her, especially when it
meant that she was the one person who might believe him, but even so, it felt
like a lot to decide, so quickly.

“You know how
crazy that sounds, right?” he said.

“No crazier
than the idea that the world is just going to snatch my friend away for no good
reason,” Luna shot back, her fists clenched in a way that suggested she would
happily fight it over the issue. Or maybe just clenched with the effort of not
crying again. Luna tended to get angry, or make jokes, or do crazy things
rather than be upset. Right then, Kevin couldn’t blame her.

He watched her
coming down from whatever nearly crying space she was in, winding down from it
piece by piece and forcing a smile into the space instead.

“So, terrible
disease, cool visions of alien worlds… is there anything else you aren’t
telling me?”

“Just the
numbers,” Kevin said.

Luna looked at
him with obvious annoyance. “You get that you weren’t supposed to say yes
there?”

“I wanted to
tell you everything,” Kevin said, although he guessed it was probably a bit
late now. “Sorry.”

“Okay,” Luna
said. Again, Kevin had the sense of her working to process it all. “Numbers?”

“I see them
too,” Kevin said. He repeated them from memory. “23h 06m 29.283s, −05°
02′ 28.59.”

“Okay,” Luna
said. She pursed her lips. “I wonder what they mean.”

That they might
not mean anything seemed not to occur to her. Kevin loved that about her.

She had her
phone out. “It’s not right for a license plate, and it would be weird for a
password. What else?”

Kevin hadn’t
thought about it, at least not with the kind of directness that Luna seemed to
be applying to the problem.

“Maybe like an
item number, a serial number?” Kevin suggested.

“But there are
hours and minutes there,” Luna said. She seemed utterly caught up in the
problem of what it might mean. “What else?”

“Maybe like a
delivery time and a location?” Kevin suggested. “Those second parts sound like
they might be coordinates.”

“It’s not quite
right for a map reference,” Luna said. “Maybe if I just Google it… oh, cool.”

“What?” Kevin
asked. One look at Luna’s face said that they’d hit the jackpot.

“When you type
that string of numbers into a search engine, you only get results about one
thing,” Luna said. She made it sound so certain like that. She turned her phone
to show him, the pages set out in a neat row. “The Trappist 1 star system.”

Kevin could
feel his excitement building. More than that, he could feel his hope building.
Hope that this might really mean something, and that it wasn’t just his
illness, no matter what anyone said. Hope that it might actually be real.

“Why would I
see those numbers, though?” he asked.

“Maybe because
the Trappist system is supposed to be one of the ones that have a chance of
harboring life?” Luna said. “From what it says here, there are several planets
there in what we think is a habitable zone.”

She said it as
if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The idea of planets that might
have life seemed like too much to be a coincidence when Kevin had seen that
life. Or seen some strange life, at least.

“You need to
talk to someone about this,” Luna declared. “You’re… like, the first proof of
extraterrestrial contact, or something. Who were those people looking for
aliens, the scientists? I saw a thing about them on TV.”

“SETI?” Kevin
said.

“Those are the
ones,” Luna said. “Aren’t they based in San Francisco, or San Jose, or
something?”

Kevin hadn’t
known that, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea tugged at him.

“You have to
go, Kevin,” Luna said. “You have to at least talk to them.”

***

“No,” his
mother said, setting her coffee down so firmly it spilled. “No, Kevin,
absolutely not!”

“But Mom—”

“I’m not
driving you to San Francisco so that you can bother a bunch of nutjobs,” his
mother said.

Kevin held out
his phone, showing the information about SETI on it. “They aren’t crazy,” he
said. “They’re scientists.”

“Scientists can
be crazy too,” his mother said. “And this whole idea… Kevin, can’t you just
accept that you’re seeing things that aren’t there?”

That was the
problem; it would be all too easy to accept it. It would be easy to tell
himself that this wasn’t real, but there was something nagging away at the back
of his brain that said it would be a really bad idea if he did. The countdown
was still going, and Kevin suspected that he needed to talk to someone who
would believe him before it reached its end.

“Mom, the
numbers I told you I was seeing… they turned out to be the location for a star
system.”

“There are so
many stars out there that I’m sure any random string of numbers would connect
to one of them,” his mother said. “It would be the same as the mass of the star
or… or, I don’t know enough about stars to know what else, but it would be
something.”

“I don’t mean
that,” Kevin said. “I mean it was exactly the same. Luna put the numbers in and
the Trappist 1 system was the first thing to come out. The only thing to
come out.”

“I should have
known that Luna would be involved,” his mother said with a sigh. “I love that
girl, but she has too much imagination for her own good.”

“Please, Mom,”
Kevin said. “This is real.”

His mother
reached out to put her hands on his shoulders. When had she started having to
reach up to do that? “It’s not, Kevin. Dr. Yalestrom said that you were having
trouble accepting all this. You have to understand what’s going on, and I have
to help you to accept it.”

“I know I’m
dying, Mom,” Kevin said. He shouldn’t have put it like that, because he could
see the tears rising in his mother’s eyes.

“Do you?
Because this—”

“I’ll find a
way to get there,” Kevin promised. “I’ll take a bus if I have to. I’ll take a
train into the city and walk. I have to at least talk to them.”

“And get
laughed at?” His mother pulled away, not looking at him. “You know that’s what
will happen, right, Kevin? I’m trying to protect you.”

“I know you
are,” Kevin said. “And I know that they’ll probably laugh at me, but I have to
at least try, Mom. I have the feeling that this is really important.”

He wanted to
say more, but he wasn’t sure that more would help right then. His mother was
quiet in the way that said she was thinking, and right then, that was the best
that Kevin could hope for. She kept thinking, her hand drumming on the kitchen
counter, marking time as she made up her mind.

Kevin heard his
mother’s sigh.

“All right,”
she said. “I’ll do it. I’ll take you, but only because I suspect that, if I
don’t, I’ll be getting a call from the police to tell me that my son has
collapsed on a bus somewhere.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Kevin
said, moving forward to hug her.

He knew she
didn’t really believe him, but in a way, that made the show of love even more
impressive.

CHAPTER
FIVE

It took around
an hour to drive from Walnut Creek down to the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
but to Kevin, it felt like a lifetime. It wasn’t just that traffic into the
city crawled its way through road closures; every moment was something wasted
when he could be there, could be finding out what was going on with him. They
would know, he was certain of it.

“Try not to get
too excited,” his mother warned him, for what seemed like the twentieth time.
Kevin knew she was just trying to protect him, but even so, he didn’t want his
excitement dampened. He was sure that this would be the place where he found
out what was going on. They were scientists who studied aliens. Surely they
would know everything?

When they got
there, though, the institute wasn’t what he was expecting. 189 Bernardo Avenue
looked more like an art gallery or a part of a university than the kind of
ultra-high-tech buildings Kevin’s imagination had conjured up. He’d been
expecting buildings that looked as though they might be from outer space, but
instead, they looked a little like expensive versions of the kind of buildings
his school had.

They drove up
and parked in front of the buildings. Kevin took a breath. This was it. They
walked into a lobby, where a woman smiled over at them, managing to turn that
into a question even before she spoke.

“Hello, are you
sure that you’re in the right place?”

“I need to talk
to someone about alien signals,” Kevin said, before his mother could try to
explain.

“I’m sorry,”
the woman said. “We don’t really have public tours.”

Kevin shook his
head. He knew he needed to get her to understand. “I’m not here for a tour,” he
said. “I think… I think I’m receiving some kind of alien signal.”

The woman
didn’t look at him with the kind of shock and disbelief that most other people
might have, or even with the surprise his mother had at him coming out with it
like that. This was more a look of resignation, as if she had to put up with
this kind of thing more often than she would like.

“I see,” she
said. “Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to talk to people who walk in off
the street. If you want to send a message to us through our contact email, we’d
be happy to consider it, but for the moment…”

“Come on,
Kevin,” his mother said. “We tried.”

To his own
surprise as much as anyone’s. Kevin shook his head. “No, I’m not going.”

“Kevin, you
have to,” his mother said.

Kevin sat down,
right there in the middle of the lobby. The carpet wasn’t very comfortable, but
he didn’t care. “I’m not going anywhere until I speak to someone about this.”

“Wait, you
can’t do that,” the receptionist said.

“I’m not going
anywhere,” Kevin said.

“Kevin…” his
mother began.

Kevin shook his
head. He knew it was childish, but the way he saw it, he was thirteen, and he
was allowed. Besides, this was important. If he walked out and left now, this
was over. He couldn’t let it be over.

“Get up, or
I’ll have to call security,” the receptionist said. She walked to him and took
hold of Kevin’s arm in a firm grip.

Instantly,
Kevin’s mother switched her attention from him to the receptionist, her eyes
narrowing.

“Take your
hands off my son, right now.”

“Then make your
son get up and leave before I have to get the police involved.” The
receptionist let go anyway, although that might have had something to do with
the look his mother gave her. Kevin had the feeling that, now that there was
one way she could protect her son, his mother was going to do it,
whatever it took.

“Don’t you
threaten us with the police. Kevin isn’t doing anyone any harm.”

“You think we
don’t get crazies here on a regular basis?”

“Kevin is not
crazy!” his mother shouted, at a volume she normally reserved for when
Kevin had done something really wrong.

The next couple
of minutes featured more arguing than Kevin was happy with. His mother shouted
at him to get up. The receptionist shouted that she would call security. They
shouted at each other, as Kevin’s mother decided that she didn’t want anyone
threatening her son with security, and the woman seemed to assume that his
mother would be able to move Kevin. Kevin sat through it all with surprising
serenity.

It lulled him
down, and in those depths, he saw something…

The cold
darkness of space stood around him, stars flickering, with the Earth looking so
different from above that it almost took Kevin’s breath away. There was a
silvery object floating there in space, just one of so many others hanging in
orbit. The words Pioneer 11 were stenciled on the side…

Then he was
lying on the SETI Institute’s floor, his mother helping him up, along with the
receptionist.

“Is he okay?”
the receptionist asked. “Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

“No, I’m fine,”
Kevin insisted.

His mother
shook her head. “We know what’s wrong. My son is dying. All of this… I thought
it would help him to come to terms with the fact that what he was seeing wasn’t
real, that it was the illness.”

Put like that,
it felt like a betrayal, as if Kevin’s mother had been planning for his dreams
to be crushed all along.

“I understand,”
the receptionist said. “Okay, let’s get you up, Kevin. Can I get you both
anything?”

“I just want to
talk to someone,” Kevin said.

The
receptionist bit her lip, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

Just like that,
her whole attitude seemed to have changed.

“Wait here.
Take a seat. I’ll go and see if there’s anyone around who can at least talk to
you, maybe show you around. Although there really isn’t much to see.”

Kevin sat down
with his mother. He wanted to tell her about everything he’d just seen, but he
could see from her face that it would only hurt her. He waited in silence
instead.

Finally, a
woman came out. She was in her early fifties, dressed in a dark suit that
suggested she had the kind of meetings where more casual clothes wouldn’t work.
There was something about her that said she was an academic—maybe something in
the curiosity with which she looked at Kevin. She offered his mother her hand,
and then Kevin.

“Hello, Kevin,”
she said. “I’m Dr. Elise Levin. I’m the director here at the institute.”

“You’re in
charge?” Kevin asked, hope rising in him. “Of all the alien stuff?”

She smiled with
amusement. “I think that’s putting it a bit strongly. A lot of the search for
extraterrestrial life happens elsewhere. NASA provides data, some universities
get involved, and we often borrow time on other people’s telescopes where we
can. But yes, I’m in charge of this institute and the things that go on here.”

“Then I need to
tell you,” Kevin said. He was speaking quicker than he wanted to, trying to get
the words out before this adult had time to disbelieve him. “There’s something
happening. I know how strange it sounds, but I’ve been seeing things, there’s a
kind of countdown…”

How could he
explain the countdown? It wasn’t like numbers, there wasn’t an obvious point he
could say marked its end. There was just a faint pulse that came with the
signal in his brain, getting steadily, almost imperceptibly faster as it worked
its way toward something that Kevin couldn’t guess at.

“Why don’t you
tell me about it while we take a look around?” Dr. Levin suggested. “I’ll show
you some of what we do here.”

She led Kevin
and his mother through the institute’s corridors, and to be honest, Kevin had
thought that it would be more exciting. He’d thought it would look less like an
office block.

“I thought
there would be big telescopes here, or labs full of equipment for testing
things from space,” Kevin said.

Dr. Levin
shrugged. “We have some laboratories, and we do test materials occasionally,
but we don’t have any telescopes. We are working with Berkeley to build a
dedicated radio telescope array though.”

“Then how do
you look for aliens?” Kevin’s mother said. It seemed that she was as surprised
by the lack of giant telescopes and listening equipment as Kevin was.

“We work with
other people,” Dr. Levin said. “We ask for, or hire, time on telescopes and
sensor arrays. We work with data from NASA. We put in suggestions to them about
places they might want to look, or kinds of data they might want to try to
gather. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t as exciting as people sometimes think. Here,
come with me.”

She led the way
to an office that at least looked a bit more interesting than some of the other
spaces. It held a couple of computers, a lot of posters relating to the solar
system, a few magazines that had mentioned SETI’s work, and some furniture that
looked as though it had been especially designed to be ergonomic, stylish, and
about as comfortable as a brick.

“Let me show
you some of the things we’ve been working on,” Dr. Levin said, calling up
images of large telescope arrays in the process of being built. “We’re looking
at developing radio telescope arrays that might be powerful enough to pick up
ambient radio frequencies rather than just waiting for someone to target us
with a signal.”

“But I think
someone is signaling to us,” Kevin said. He needed to get her to
understand.

Dr. Levin
paused. “I was going to ask if you’re referring to the theory that what some
people think are high-frequency radio bursts from a pulsar might be
intelligible signals, but you’re not, are you?”

“I’ve been
seeing things,” Kevin said. He tried to explain about the visions. He told her
about the landscape he’d seen, and about the countdown.

“I see,” Dr.
Levin said. “But I have to ask something, Kevin. You understand that SETI is
about exploring this issue with science, seeking real proof? It’s the only way
that we can do this and know that anything we find is real. So, I have to ask
you, Kevin, how do you know what you’re seeing is real?”

Kevin had
already managed to answer that with Luna. “I saw some numbers. When I looked
them up, it turned out that they were the location for something called the
Trappist 1 system.”

“One of the
more promising candidates for alien life,” Dr. Levin said. “Even so, Kevin, do
you understand my problem now? You say you saw these numbers, and I believe
you, but maybe you saw them because you’d read them somewhere. I can’t redirect
SETI’s resources based on that, and in any case, I’m not sure what else we
could do when it comes to the Trappist 1 system. For something like that, I
would need something new. Something you couldn’t have gotten another way.”

Kevin could
tell that she was trying to let him down as gently as possible, but even so, it
hurt. How could he provide them with that? Then he thought about what he’d seen
in the lobby. He had to have seen that for a reason, didn’t he?

“I think…” He
wasn’t sure whether to say it or not, but he knew he had to. “I think you’re
going to get a signal from something called Pioneer 11.”

Dr. Levin
looked at him for a couple of seconds. “I’m sorry, Kevin, but that doesn’t seem
very likely.”

Kevin saw his
mother frown. “What’s Pioneer 11?”

“It’s one of
the deep space probes NASA has sent out,” Dr. Levin explained. “It flew through
our solar system, sending back data, and had enough velocity to send it out
past the limits of the solar system. Unfortunately, the last contact that we
had with it was in 1995, so I really don’t think that—”

She stopped as
her phone started to ring, taking it out as if to ignore the call. Kevin saw
the moment when she stopped and stared.

“I’m sorry, I
have to take this,” she said. “Yes, hello, what is it? Can it wait a moment,
I’m in the middle of… okay, if it’s that urgent. A signal? You’re calling me
because NASA has data coming in? But NASA always has…” She paused again,
looking over at Kevin, the disbelief obvious on her face. Even so, she said it.
“Can I take a guess?” she said into the phone. “You’ve just had a signal of
some kind from Pioneer 11? You have? No, I can’t tell you. I’m not sure you
would believe me if I did.”

She put the
phone down, staring at Kevin as if seeing him for the first time in that
moment.

“How did you do
that?” she asked.

Kevin shrugged.
“I saw it when I was waiting in the lobby.”

“You saw it?
The same way that you ‘saw’ this alien landscape?” Dr. Levin stared at him, and
Kevin had the sense she was trying to work something out. Probably trying to
work out any way he could have cheated this, or made it happen.

It was almost a
minute before she came to a decision.

“I think,” Dr.
Levin said, in the careful tones of someone trying to make sure she hadn’t gone
crazy, “that you had better come with me.”

CHAPTER
SIX

Kevin and his
mother followed Dr. Levin from SETI’s facility to a car that seemed far too
small to belong to someone in her position.

“It’s very
environmentally friendly,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had faced
that question a lot. “Come on, it will be easier if I drive you both over.
They’re quite strict about security.”

“Who is?”
Kevin’s mother asked.

“NASA.”

Kevin’s breath
caught at that. They were going to talk to NASA? When it came to aliens, that
was even better than SETI.

The drive
across Mountain View was only a short one, a few minutes at most. Even so, it
was long enough for Kevin to stare out the windows at the high-tech companies
spread around the area, obviously drawn there by NASA and Berkeley, the
presence of so many clever people in one place pulling them in.

“We’re really
going to NASA?” Kevin said. He couldn’t quite believe it, which made no sense,
given all the things he’d had to believe in the last few days.

The NASA campus
was everything that the SETI building hadn’t been. It was large, spread across
several buildings and set in a space that managed to have views of both the
surrounding hills and the bay. There was a visitors center that was essentially
a tent built on a scale that seemed hard to believe, bright white and painted
with the NASA logo. They drove past that, though, to a space that was closed
off to the public, behind a chain-link fence and a barrier where Dr. Levin had
to show ID to get them in.

“I’m expected,”
she said.

“And who are
they, ma’am?” the guard asked.

“This is Kevin
McKenzie and his mother,” Dr. Levin said. “They’re with me.”

“They’re not on
the—”

“They’re with
me,” Dr. Levin said again, and for the first time, Kevin had a sense of the
kind of toughness involved in her position. The guard hesitated for a moment,
then produced a couple of visitors’ passes, which Dr. Levin handed over to
them. Kevin hung his around his neck, and it felt like a trophy, a talisman.
With this, he could go where he needed. With this, people actually believed him.

“We’ll need to
go into the research areas,” Dr. Levin said. “Please be careful not to touch
anything, because some of the experiments are delicate.”

She led the way
inside a building that appeared to be composed mostly of delicate curves of
steel and glass. This was the kind of place Kevin had been expecting
when they came down to Mountain View. This was what a place that looked out
into space should be. There were laboratories to either side, with the kind of
advanced equipment in them that suggested they could test almost anything space
threw their way. There were lasers and computers, benches and devices that
looked designed for chemistry. There were workshops full of welding equipment
and parts that might have been for cars, but that Kevin wanted to believe were
for vehicles for use on other planets.

Dr. Levin asked
around as they went, apparently trying to find out where everyone was who was
connected with the news about Pioneer 11’s message. Whenever they passed
someone, she stopped them, and it seemed to Kevin that she knew everyone there.
SETI might be separate from all of this, the way she said it was, but it was
obvious that Dr. Levin spent a lot of time here.

“Hey, Marvin,
where is everybody?” she asked a bearded man in a checked shirt.

“They’re mostly
gathered in the center for supercomputer research,” he said. “Something like
this, they want to see what the pits will come up with.”

“The pits?”
Kevin asked.

Dr. Levin
smiled. “You’ll see.”

“Who are they?”
the bearded man asked.

“What would you
say if I told you that Kevin here can see aliens?” Dr. Levin asked.

Marvin laughed.
“You can try to play up to the crazy alien hunter reputation all you want,
Elise. You’re as skeptical as the rest of us.”

“Maybe not
about this,” Dr. Levin said. She looked back at Kevin and his mother. “This
way.”

She led the way
to another part of the building, and now Kevin had the sense of extra security,
with ID scanners and cameras at almost every turn. More than that, it was
probably the cleanest place he had ever been. Much cleaner than, for
example, his bedroom. It seemed that not a speck of dust was allowed to intrude
on it without permission, let alone the piles of old clothes that filled his
space until his mom told him to tidy it.

The labs were
mostly empty at the moment, and empty in ways that suggested they’d been left
in a hurry because something more exciting was happening. It was easy to see
where they had gone. People crowded in the corridors as the three of them got
closer to their destination, exchanging gossip that Kevin only caught fragments
of.

“There’s a
signal, an actual signal.”

“After all this
time.”

“It’s not just
telemetry data, or even scans. There’s something… else.”

“We’re here,”
Dr. Levin said, as they arrived at a room where the door had been left open,
obviously to allow for the crowd of people trying to cram inside. “Let us
through, please. We need to talk to Sam.”

“Here” turned
out to be a large room, filled with blinking lights below and surrounded by
walkways that made it seem a bit like a theater where the actors were all
computers. Kevin recognized them as computers even though they were nothing
like the small, barely working laptop his mother had bought for him to do
schoolwork on. These were devices the size of coffee tables, cars, rooms, all
matte black and glittering with lights. The people standing or sitting close to
them had on suits like the ones forensics people wore on TV shows.

“Impressed?”
Dr. Levin asked.

Kevin could
only nod. He didn’t have the words for a place like this. It was… incredible.

“What is this
place?” his mother asked, and Kevin didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing
that even his mother didn’t understand it.

“It’s where
NASA does its supercomputer research,” Dr. Levin explained. “Work on AI,
quantum computing, more advanced superconductors. It’s also the equipment they
use to work on… complex issues. Come on, we need to talk to Sam.”

She led the way
through the crowd and Kevin followed, trying to be quick enough to move into
the gaps she created before they closed again. He hurried along in her wake
until they came to a tall, slightly stooped man standing by one of the
computers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing a clean suit. His long, bony
fingers seemed to be tying themselves in knots as he typed.

“Professor
Brewster,” Dr. Levin said.

“Dr. Levin, I’m
glad you could… wait, you’ve brought visitors. This really isn’t the moment for
sightseeing, Elise.”

If Dr. Levin
was annoyed by that, she didn’t show it. “David, this is Kevin McKenzie, and
his mother. They’re not here to sightsee. I think Kevin might prove helpful
with this. We need to see Sam.”

Professor
Brewster waved a hand at the machine in front of them. It was even taller than
he was, with pipes running up the side that were so cold they gave off steam
into the air. It was only when Kevin saw the sign on the side, “Signals
Analysis Machine,” that he realized Sam wasn’t a person’s name, but an
acronym.

“You want to
let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?” Professor
Brewster asked. “I mean, he’s what? Ten?”

“I’m thirteen,”
Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster’s
age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he
had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.

“Well, I’m
forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often
frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs”—he looked
around the room pointedly, but no one moved—“and now, apparently a
thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about
to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead.”

He seemed like
a man who didn’t like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a
disadvantage in his job.

“Kevin’s here because
of the signal,” Dr. Levin said. “He… well, he predicted that it would
occur.”

“Impossible,”
Professor Brewster said. “Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts
to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in
completely the opposite direction. It’s obviously a trick.”

Dr. Levin
sighed. “I know what I saw, David. He told me that there would be something
happening with Pioneer 11, and then we got the signal. Will you at least play
it for us?”

“Oh, very
well,” Professor Brewster said. He gestured to one of the scientists working
around the supercomputer. “Play it so that we can get on with our work.”

The scientist
nodded and tapped a control interface a few times. Data flashed up on a screen
in string after string of numbers, but Kevin was more interested in the audio
signal that came with it. It was a strange mechanical chattering that sounded
nothing like language, more like the kind of interference that might come from
a computer going wrong.

Even so, he
understood it. He just didn’t know how.

“You need to
adjust one of your radio telescopes,” Kevin said, the knowledge just sitting in
his mind. There were numbers too. Two sets of them, one marginally different
from the other. “I think… the first seems wrong somehow, and the second is what
it should be.”

“What?”
Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin asked almost simultaneously, although with
very different expressions. Dr. Levin looked amazed. Professor Brewster mostly
looked irritated.

“It’s what it
means,” Kevin said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know how I know it.”

“You don’t know
it,” Professor Brewster insisted. “If there’s any meaning in there at all,
which frankly isn’t likely, it will take SAM hours to decode it, if it’s
possible at all.

“I just told
you what it means,” Kevin insisted. “I can… it just makes sense to me.”

“You should
listen to him, David,” Dr. Levin said. “At least search for the numbers, see if
they mean anything. Can you write them down, Kevin?”

She held out a
piece of paper and a pen, and Kevin noted them as clearly as he could. He held
it out to Professor Brewster, who took it with bad grace.

“We have better
things to do than this, Elise,” he said. “Right, that’s enough. Out. We have
work to do here.”

He shooed them
away, and Dr. Levin didn’t seem inclined to argue. Instead, she took Kevin and
his mother out into the corridors of the research facility again.

“Come on,” she
said. “David might be too busy to actually use that gigantic brain of his, but
there are plenty of people here who owe me favors.”

“What kind of
favors?” Kevin’s mother asked.

Dr. Levin
looked back at Kevin. “The kind where we find out exactly how Kevin is managing
to receive and decode signals from outer space.”

***

“You need to
hold still, Kevin,” said an overweight researcher wearing a Hawaiian shirt
under his lab coat. He just went by “Phil” even though the nameplate on his
door declared that he had at least as many PhDs as anyone else. He seemed to be
a friend of Dr. Levin’s, although that might have had something to do with the
foot-long sandwich she picked up from the canteen before going to visit him.
“It won’t produce a clear image if you move.”

Kevin did his
best, lying still in the cramped interior of an MRI machine. It made him feel
like a torpedo about to be launched into the ocean, and the confined space was
only made worse by a regular dull thudding, which sounded as though someone was
hammering on the outside of it while he lay there. His experiences in the
hospital told him that was probably normal, and not a sign that the whole thing
was about to collapse. Even so, it was hard to hold still for as long as it
took for the thing to scan him.

“Almost there,”
Phil called. “Just hold your breath for a moment. And relax.”

Kevin wished he
could relax. The last couple of hours had been busy ones. There had been
scientists, and labs, and tests. Lots of tests. There were cognitive tests and
imaging scans, things like X-rays and word association tests while Kevin found
various kinds of devices pointed at him, designed to pump different kinds of
signals toward his body.

Eventually,
even Phil seemed to be getting tired of shooting rays at Kevin.

“Okay, you can
come out.”

He helped Kevin
from the machine, then led the way over to where Dr. Levin and Kevin’s mother
were waiting. The researcher shook his head as he pointed to the screen, and a
series of black-and-white images that Kevin guessed must be of the inside of
his brain. If so, brains looked weirder than he’d thought.

“I’m sorry,
Elise, but there’s no sign of anything different about him that wouldn’t be
explained by his illness,” he said.

“Keep looking,”
Dr. Levin said.

“How, exactly?”
he asked. “I’m telling you, I’ve used almost every test it’s possible to do on
a human being—fMRI, CAT scan, psych battery, you name it. I’ve fired so many
different frequencies at Kevin here that it’s a wonder he isn’t picking up the
local radio. Short of subjecting him to radioactive isotopes or actually
dissecting him—”

“No,” Kevin’s
mother said, firmly. Kevin didn’t like that idea either.

Phil shook his
head. “There’s just nothing else there to find.”

Kevin could
hear the man’s disappointment. Unlike Professor Brewster, he obviously liked
the idea of someone being able to hear alien signals. That disappointment
mirrored his own. He’d been sure that these people, with all their brains and
their laboratories, would be able to find out what was happening, but it
looked—

A man burst
into the room, and it took Kevin a moment to recognize the gangly frame of
Professor Brewster. He looked, if anything, even more agitated than he had when
he’d been throwing them out of the supercomputer pit. He was holding a tablet,
gripping it so tightly that Kevin suspected he might crack it.

“David, if this
is about the use of resources…” Dr. Levin began.

The tall
scientist looked over at her as if trying to work out what she was talking
about, then shook his head. “Not that. I just want to know how you did it. How
did you know?”

“Know what?”
Kevin asked.

“Don’t play
dumb,” the scientist said. He held out the tablet for them to look at. “One of
our people ran those numbers you gave us through our systems. It turns out that
they were the current settings for one of our radio telescopes, just as you
said. No one who wasn’t working at the observatory could know that. So how did
you know?”

“Know what?”
Kevin asked.

“Know what
would happen when we changed it!”

Professor
Brewster pressed something on his tablet.

“This is a feed
from it.”

He thrust the
pad at Kevin, holding it out like an accusation. A buzzing, clicking signal
came from it, which sounded as though it might just be static, or a mechanical
problem, or crickets stuck somewhere in the workings of the machine.

To Kevin,
though, the words were clear.

We are
coming. Be prepared to accept us.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

“We?”
Dr. Levin asked. She sounded as though she could barely contain her excitement.
“Who is we? Are we talking about some kind of alien civilization?”

“Hold on a
second,” Professor Brewster snapped, sounding skeptical. “Maybe Kevin’s is the
wrong translation. Maybe there is nothing to even translate—maybe it’s just a
bunch of noise. Maybe it’s just a figment of the boy’s imagination.”

“Then how did
he know the coordinates?” Dr. Levin asked. “We know that someone sent this
signal. Just think of the possibilities…”

She trailed
off, as if she couldn’t quite comprehend all the possibilities.

“Maybe no one
sent it,” another scientist piped up. “Space is filled with signals that have
no sender, or receiver.”

“Still,” Dr. Levin insisted, “you can’t discount the possibility
that this truly is a signal sent by another society. And that Kevin did indeed
interpret it directly. What if he did? Are you prepared to shut down that
possibility? Are you prepared to just walk away from it? To accept the
consequences?”

Brewster fell
into a grudging silence.

“We need more
information,” he finally said. “We need to study Kevin further.”

“Study
him further?” his mother said. “This is my son.”

“True,” Dr.
Levin countered. “And yet your son may also just be our planet’s sole link to
alien life.”

*

Kevin sat in
the room they had given him and looked around, wondering what it was for. It
looked as though it might have been designed for the observation of people over
long periods. Either that, or giant goldfish.

It was comfortable,
but it was impossible to forget that it was in the middle of the laboratory.
The bed was in the middle of the room, and everything seemed to be a pristine,
clinical white. Kevin suspected there might be cameras looking down. There was
certainly a length of glass along one wall that was obviously one way. It made
him feel a little like a frog waiting to be dissected in someone’s biology
class.

“Do you have
everything you need?” his mother asked. “Have they even fed you yet?”

Trust his
mother to find a way to be embarrassing even in a situation like this.

“Yes, Mom,
they’re feeding me,” Kevin said.

“I just worry
about you,” she said.

“You have to
work,” Kevin said. He understood. His mother couldn’t afford to take more time
off. Not even for this. There were too many bills to pay, and Kevin being sick
had only added medical bills to the list. He didn’t like hearing the guilt in
his mother’s voice, as if she was doing something wrong by taking him to the
place where they hunted for aliens.

“This is the
best place for you, though,” his mother said. She sounded as though she was
trying to convince herself.

“It’s a cool
place to be,” Kevin assured her. “They have so many things going on.”

It was amazing
being a part of something this important.

“Hi, Kevin,” Phil
said, poking his head around the door. He seemed to brighten even more at the
sight of Kevin’s mother. “Hi, Ms. McKenzie.”

“Call me
Rebecca,” his mother said. There was something strange in that, maybe because
it wasn’t something she said very often.

“I thought I
would give Kevin the grand tour,” Phil said. “Maybe you’d like to join us?”

“That sounds
good,” his mother said, and again, Kevin had a sense of a side to it that was…
no, he shouldn’t think like that. That was just gross. Parents weren’t supposed
to go around liking people. That was practically… well, it made the idea
of alien worlds look normal.

“If you’d both
like to come with me,” Phil said, leading the way down the halls. “I mean,
officially, I guess we’re not supposed to just wander around, because some of
the projects are kind of sensitive, but I sometimes think we kind of overdo
that, you know?”

He led the way
to a space where scientists appeared to be firing a laser at a blank surface
again and again, making minute adjustments between each attempt.

“They’re
looking into ways lasers might be used in mining asteroids,” Phil explained.
There was something about the look he gave Kevin’s mom that said he was trying
to impress her. Kevin found that kind of funny. His mom was his mom. She wasn’t
going to be impressed by lasers. Even if they were kind of cool.

After that, he
showed them a space where drones flew around in a large room like insects,
moving fast but somehow never colliding with one another.

“We’re doing
work on using AI to make it so that drones can interact without crashing,” Phil
said.

Kevin saw his
mother smile at that. “So that there’s less chance of losing the next package I
order?”

Phil nodded.
“Well, that or they could be used in building work, or for work in extreme
environments.”

Kevin wasn’t
sure how he felt about his mom and Phil getting along so well. He was probably
supposed to feel happy for her or something, but this was his mom. He
was sure there were supposed to be rules about that kind of thing. He set off
toward another door, hoping to hurry the tour along before the two looked
meaningfully into one another’s eyes or something.

He opened it,
and found himself staring at a thing out of his nightmares.

Kevin staggered
back as he found himself face to face with a robot almost as large as he was,
covered in spikes and blades, two great pincers sticking out from the front
like a hungry ant. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t moving,
wasn’t any kind of threat to him in spite of how fierce it looked.

“Is this some
kind of weapons project?” Kevin asked. “Something for the military?”

It looked like
the kind of thing that would be terrifying coming toward someone on a
battlefield. It managed to look pretty terrifying even standing still.

“It’s for the
local robot fighting league,” Phil said. “Some of the grad students from
Berkeley come up with vicious stuff.”

He looked over
at Kevin’s mom as if hoping she would declare herself to be a huge fan of robot
fighting. When she didn’t look particularly impressed, Kevin dared to breathe a
sigh of relief. It seemed that the world had returned to normal, kind of.

His mother
hugged him. “I have to go, Kevin. I wish I didn’t, but…”

Kevin hugged
her back. “I know.”

Even though he
knew she would come back soon, it was hard to let her go.

When she was
gone, Kevin turned to Phil. “So,” he said. “What now?”

“Now, we have a
bunch more tests to get through,” Phil said.

A bunch didn’t
cover it. Even though Phil had tried whole batteries of tests on Kevin before,
both Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin seemed determined that they should keep
going. Dr. Levin seemed to hope that by understanding what Kevin could do
better, they might be able to make more contact with alien civilizations.
Professor Brewster… well, Kevin suspected that he hoped it would all prove to
be nothing, a mistake.

Either way, it
meant test after test with different sets of scientists, question after
question, most of which Kevin didn’t have the answers to.

“I don’t have
any control over what I translate,” Kevin insisted, when one of the scientists
wanted to know if he could look around the alien world he saw to give them more
data on it. “I don’t even know how I’m doing it. When you play the signals,
it’s just… obvious.”

He suspected
the scientists weren’t very satisfied with that, but Kevin didn’t know what
else to say. He got what he got, and for the moment, that seemed to be mostly
the countdown in his head, pulsing away ever faster, along with the memory of a
world eclipsed by a bright, all-consuming light. So far, it had been the only
image he’d gotten. The signal seemed to be just words.

Kevin, needing
a break, found a quiet corner in one of the research center’s recreation rooms
and pulled out his phone and Skyped with Luna.

He smiled when
he saw her; he hadn’t realized how much he missed seeing her face.

She smiled
back.

“Hey,
stranger,” she said. “They putting you through the mill?”

“Every test you
can imagine.”

“Being poked
and prodded must get pretty bad,” Luna said. “But it probably means you’re
getting looked at by more doctors than you would otherwise. That has to be
good, right?”

“I don’t think
it means that they can do anything for me,” Kevin said. He’d thought about
this, briefly, but decided he couldn’t afford that kind of hope when it came to
his illness. He knew what was going to happen. “Most of them aren’t even that
kind of doctor.”

“But some of
them must be, and I bet that if there is any research into…” Luna looked
down, and Kevin guessed that she’d written it down so she wouldn’t forget it,
“… leukodystrophies, it’s going to be somewhere near you.”

“If there is, I
haven’t heard about it,” Kevin said. No one had exactly come up to him and told
him that there was suddenly a cure for what he had.

“And have you
been looking?” Luna asked. She had her determined expression on, the one that
meant she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“I’ve been too
busy trying to translate messages from an alien species,” Kevin pointed out.

“Okay,” Luna
said, “as excuses go, I’ll admit that’s pretty good. Just think, when they come
here and say ‘Take me to your leader,’ you’ll be the only one who can
translate, so you’ll be there. Your name will be in the history books.”

“And when did
you last pay attention in history class?” Kevin countered. “I remember trying
to help you study for tests, remember?”

“Well, maybe
I’d pay more attention if there were more aliens in them.”

“Kevin?”
Professor Brewster was standing there, looking impatient. “When you’re ready,
the signal is waiting.”

“Looks like I
have to go,” Kevin said to Luna.

“I miss you,”
she said, and there was a kind of wistful note to it that wasn’t normally there
in Luna’s voice.

“Well, maybe
you could visit,” Kevin said, but then he caught sight of Professor Brewster’s
expression. “I have to go.”

“You should be
careful about what you say,” Professor Brewster said when Kevin hung up. “Our
work here is supposed to be confidential.”

“I trust Luna,”
Kevin said.

“And if all of
this turns out to be nonsense, then it damages the reputation that we have
worked so hard to build up, which in turn will affect our funding.”

“It’s not
nonsense,” Kevin insisted. Why couldn’t Professor Brewster understand that? “I see
this.”

“Apparently,”
Professor Brewster said. “Although given your condition…”

Kevin stood up.
Right then, he felt tired, and not just because of the illness that was slowly
eating away at his brain. He felt tired of all this, of not being taken
seriously.

“You’re just
determined to dismiss this whatever I do,” he said. “I managed to translate the
message.”

“Apparently.”
That word again. “That reminds me, though. There’s no reason to believe that
you started listening at the start of these signals, so we want to have you
listen to our archive of signals from other sectors, and see if any more
trigger sudden translations.”

He said that as
if he hadn’t just barged in, and they weren’t having an argument about it. He
said it as if it were already decided that Kevin would do it. Kevin stood
there, ready to tell him no. Ready to just walk away.

He couldn’t,
though, and not just because he was thirteen, while this was some eminent
scientist who probably knew what he was talking about. He couldn’t risk not
hearing what the aliens had to say.

“All right,”
Kevin said.

Professor
Brewster took him, not to the supercomputer pit this time, but to a small lab
space where there was nothing but a plain white table, a pair of equally plain
headphones, and a pane of two-way glass that suggested dozens of scientists
might be waiting just beyond.

“Go inside, put
the headphones on, and we’ll see if any of the signals spark translations,”
Professor Brewster said in a voice that suggested he knew what the likely
outcome would be.

*

The next few
hours were among the most boring of Kevin’s life, and that included the time
he’d spent in math class. Whoever was in the other room played him noise after
noise, signal after signal, all presumably interpreted from light patterns or
electromagnetic discharges. Kevin expected one of them to spark something at
any moment, but there was nothing, and nothing again, and…

“If anyone
receives this, more communications will follow,” he said as he heard one.
It hardly sounded like his voice anymore, as though something were speaking
through him. It just seemed natural to say it as the sounds hit his ears.

There seemed to
be instant activity behind the glass, and Phil’s voice came in on his
headphones.

“What was that,
Kevin?”

“That last
signal, I think it means to wait for more,” Kevin said.

“You’re sure?”

Kevin didn’t
know how to answer that. It wasn’t as though he was any kind of expert on what
was happening. He probably knew less than the scientists trying to make sense
of it all. He just translated what he heard, relying on his altered brain to
understand.

“Maybe if we
try for more signals taken from that area,” Phil’s voice said over the
headphones, and Kevin couldn’t tell if he was talking to him, or himself, or to
other scientists.

Either way,
more signals followed. Some were just noise. Others, though…

“We are
coming, prepare to receive us.”

They were all
variations on the same theme, the same message, although none of them seemed to
say anything useful. Kevin found himself wondering how long these messages had
been pumping out into space, waiting for someone to listen to them. Maybe
they’d been striking the Earth for months, even years, and it was only now that
someone was able to understand.

Phil seemed to
have the same idea. He came in, wearing what looked very much like the same
Hawaiian shirt as the day before, looking excited.

“These signals…
some of them go back months, maybe longer, all from the region of space we
associate with the Trappist 1 system. That means that, if they were sent using
light, they’ve taken almost forty years to arrive. And you’re the first person
to be able to understand them.” Unlike Dr. Brewster, Phil seemed more than
happy about the prospect. He sounded truly excited.

“I think your
illness must have changed your brain in ways we don’t understand,” he said. “I
think it must have given you the capacity to tune into this in ways we can’t.
It would explain why we can’t see anything beyond the progress of your illness.
Your illness is doing this.”

Kevin smiled
tightly. “So I’m basically a freak.”

“But a very
important one,” Phil said with a smile of his own. “We might have missed
understanding this completely. More than that, it sounds as though there’s a
bigger message coming, something so important that they wanted to be sure no
one would miss it.”

Kevin thought
about the countdown. It was getting faster.

Now, he
suspected, he knew what it was counting down to.

The only way to
test that was to keep going, working in the institute’s testing lab with his
headphones on, listening as they pumped in the feed of signals from their
listening equipment. He sat there and did his best to translate the signals as
Phil sent them through, one by one.

“Nothing with
that one,” Kevin said, shaking his head.

“I’d have
thought there would be something,” Phil replied, his voice sounding in
Kevin’s ears as he worked on the other side of a pane of clear glass.

Kevin had
thought so too, with the countdown pulsing so fast inside him. Kevin could feel
the pulsing, hummingbird fast within him now, impossible to ignore and
suggesting that whatever was coming would be here soon. He was tired of
waiting, and tired of people staring at him, and sometimes just tired.

“Kevin should
take a break.” His mother’s voice, from outside the room. Kevin was glad she
was there. He wasn’t sure what that meant for her work, but he was glad she was
there.

“I’m sorry, Rebecca,
Dr. Brewster was pretty clear that we need to keep feeding Kevin the signal
this close to the end of his countdown.”

“And are you
going to listen to him, or to me?”

Kevin suspected
he might be about to get a break. He smiled at that thought. A more worrying
one replaced it. What if nothing happened? What if he sat here day after day,
and the countdown reached zero without anything happening? What if they’d put
this effort in and it was all in vain? How would they all react to that?

A worse thought
occurred to him, a thought that made Kevin screw his eyes shut in an attempt to
push it away. It didn’t work. What if this was all his illness? What if
the countdown wasn’t to a message but to some kind of seizure? What if that too
rapid beat was his own heart, or the blood vessels around his brain getting
ready to burst? The people of the institute had gathered around Kevin like a
prophet about to speak, but what if he really was just dying?

Then
the signal came, rushing through him.

And he knew the time had come.

***

Kevin could see
people rushing to get into the room on the other side, obviously wanting to be
there as the message came in. He barely paid any attention to them. The message
was too important for that.

“If you are
hearing this,” Kevin said, translating automatically even though he didn’t know
how he was doing this, “our world is gone.”

He heard the
gasps outside as people listened in and realized some of what it must mean. A
few of the scientists there started jotting down notes, and Kevin heard them
talking in the background.

“That would
mean that there haven’t been any aliens for at least forty years now,” one
said.

“If
there are,” another put in. “We only have the kid’s word for the translation.”

The others
ignored him. They seemed as caught up in the moment as Kevin was.

The message
kept going, and Kevin kept translating. “We are sending out these messages to
preserve what we can of our people, and to ensure that our knowledge does not
die.”

The signal
seemed to intensify, and now it was like a stream that Kevin couldn’t have
begun to hold back. There were only the strange sounds of the alien language,
and the words that came as he translated them almost automatically.

“Our planet was
one of seven, with three inhabited. The colonies collapsed first. Home was
destroyed in the fires that cleansed it. This is our story, our record. Perhaps
hearing it will help others to avoid the same fate as us.”

Kevin spoke the
words almost without registering the signal that triggered them. The signal was
a complex, chattering thing, and if he concentrated, he could just about make
out the clicks and buzzes that made it up. Mostly, though, he just got the
meaning, pouring straight into his mind as he listened.

It felt as
though just keeping his brain locked in with the signal was an effort, and
Kevin could feel a bead of sweat forming above his eyes as he worked to keep a
grip on it.

“We must send
these messages carefully, only a piece at a time, but if you listen, you will
learn.”

The signal cut
out. Kevin waited and kept waiting, listening for more, but there didn’t seem
to be anything else.

Finally, Kevin
looked up. He could see Phil and his mother staring back at him from beyond the
glass, but there were others there, plenty of others. Professor Brewster and
Dr. Levin were both there, along with as many staff as could fit into the room
beyond. He could see the shock on so many of their faces, and he could guess
why: they hadn’t dared to believe this was real. They’d thought that it would
turn into nothing.

This, though,
was a long way from nothing.

He could also
see their other reason for the shock: they clearly expected the message to
continue.

No one had
expected it to fall into silence.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Kevin sat very
still in Professor Brewster’s office while around him, adults tried to work out
what all this meant, and what they should do next. Mostly, they did it by
talking too much.

Professor
Brewster looked surprisingly pleased for once. “That was very impressive,
Kevin. I never thought I would see the day. Actual contact with another world!
Although we need to be careful, of course. Consider the alternate
possibilities.”

How did
Professor Brewster manage to sound both excited and skeptical at the same time?

“You don’t
believe it?” Dr. Levin asked.

“We have to
consider things carefully,” Professor Brewster said. “After all, we don’t hear
the messages directly, only get translations through a boy who is suffering
from a degenerative illness.”

“You still
think I’m making things up,” Kevin said.

“I’m not saying
that,” Professor Brewster said. “Still... direct contact…”

“I don’t think
it was direct contact,” Kevin said. “It felt… almost like a recorded message.”

“If anything,
that makes it more plausible,” Professor Brewster said. “Because a signal like
that would have to travel for years, even moving at the highest speeds. The
Trappist 1 system is almost forty light years away, after all.”

Kevin knew
that. They’d told him before the message had come. He and Phil had discussed
it, and he wasn’t sure he liked it that Professor Brewster was saying it like
it was something he’d just worked out.

Besides, in
spite of all that, a part of Kevin had been expecting something else, something
live.

“I don’t think
I got all of it,” he said. “I think there’s more.”

“That doesn’t
matter, Kevin,” his mother said. “The important thing is that you are safe.”

“And because
you’re safe,” Professor Brewster added, “you’ll be able to pick up more.”

The vision had
promised that there was more to come. A whole series of messages. A chance to
learn everything there was to learn about another world, and Kevin was the key
to it.

Some of the
others seemed just as excited as he felt.

“We have to
publish this,” Dr. Levin said.

Professor
Brewster held up a hand. “Elise, it’s important that we aren’t too hasty about
that. We have the initial messages, certainly, but we need more before we
involve anyone else.”

“How much
more?” Dr. Levin asked. Kevin could guess why she sounded so frustrated. She’d
put her whole life into looking for aliens. Now she had the proof, and of
course she would want to shout about it. She wanted people to know, and Kevin…
well, he kind of agreed with her.

“Why can’t
we tell people?” Kevin asked. “Why can’t we let them know what we found? If I
were out there, I’d want to know if people had found aliens.”

“It’s too
early,” Professor Brewster insisted. “We should have a full set of data before
we announce anything. That way—”

“That way no
one can say you’re making it up?” Kevin guessed.

To his
surprise, his mother spoke up on Professor Brewster’s side. “Maybe it’s not
such a good idea to say anything now, Kevin. We’ve all seen what you can do,
but other people…”

“You think they
wouldn’t believe me?” Kevin asked.

Professor
Brewster nodded. “I think people will need a lot of proof before they believe
something like this,” he said. “We must be careful to demonstrate to them that
this is more than just your imagination, and actually represents an alien
communication.”

“But I’m
translating it,” Kevin insisted.

“You appear to
be,” Professor Brewster said. “We need to establish the patterns between what
you’re saying and the signals we receive. In the meantime, if we keep it to
ourselves, it will prevent a lot of problems.”

“What kind of
problems?” Kevin asked. He couldn’t see how something this amazing could be a
problem. The news that people weren’t alone in the universe sounded incredible
to him.

“We do a lot of
research here that is considered secret for reasons of national security,”
Professor Brewster said. “I imagine that my superiors would consider this one
of those secrets.”

“So you’re
worried about your bosses?” Kevin asked. It didn’t seem like a good
enough reason to keep from telling people.

“There’s also
the question of how people might react,” Professor Brewster said. “People might
panic.”

“We
understand,” Kevin’s mother said, putting a hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

Kevin didn’t
understand, though. He didn’t see how people would panic at the news that they
weren’t alone in the universe. To him, it seemed like just about the coolest
thing it was possible to learn. He looked over to Dr. Levin, at least expecting
support from her. But it seemed that even she was convinced for now.

“I suppose if
we wait a while,” she said, “that would let us receive more messages.”

“They said I could
only get a part of the information at once,” Kevin said. “Why would they do
that? Why not just give it all at once?”

“Maybe they had
to do it that way,” Dr. Levin said. “Perhaps they had power restrictions, or
maybe they wanted to maximize the odds of someone hearing some of it.”

“Or maybe they
just have that much to send,” Professor Brewster suggested. “Like splitting up
files when sending email so that the receiver doesn’t have to download them in
one huge attempt.”

That made a
kind of sense, although Kevin wasn’t sure he liked being referred to as just
the receiver. It made him sound as though he was a machine rather than a human
being, useful only for what he could do. His mother, or Luna, would never see
him like that. If Luna were here, she would see how much it hurt him.

“Either way,”
Dr. Levin went on hurriedly, “I don’t think this is the end of it. What do you
think, Kevin? When do you think there might be more?”

Kevin could
hear the hope in her voice. This was the kind of moment that her whole career
had been working toward, after all. After so long wondering, and maybe hoping,
who would be satisfied with just one communication? He would want more, if he
were her. He did want more. He wanted to hear everything the aliens had
to say.

Kevin tried to
feel for any sense of the message in its aftermath. The constant pulse of the
countdown to the messages wasn’t there anymore, but he still had a sense of
expectation somewhere deep inside of him that there would be more. The aliens
had said that, hadn’t they?

“I think there
will be,” he said. It was strange, having so many adults hanging on his words,
actually listening to him. He suspected not many thirteen-year-olds got that.

“Then we need
to get Kevin back listening to signals,” Professor Brewster said.

“David,” Dr.
Levin said, “Kevin has only just finished translating the first signal. He’s
also very ill. It isn’t right to ask him to plunge back into that without
giving him some time to recover.”

“But the
information—” Professor Brewster began.

“No one cares
about that more than I do,” Dr. Levin said. “I’m not the director over at SETI
for nothing. But I also know that you don’t learn things by pushing
thirteen-year-old boys too hard. Give him time, David. We can record any
signals that come from that area of space in the meantime. That will give us a
record of them, too.”

To Kevin’s
surprise, Professor Brewster seemed to back down. He hadn’t been sure the tall
scientist would listen to Dr. Levin on this.

“All right,”
Professor Brewster said. “We’ll give Kevin time to recover. It will allow us to
work out the best way to work with this information. But I expect results.”

***

Kevin sat
listening, trying to pick through the silence for something more. Around him,
he could see scientists waiting, some with tablets poised, others with cameras.
He could feel the pressure there to perform for them, to do this on command,
when the truth was that he could only wait.

There was a
kind of rhythm to the waiting, sitting with a set of portable headphones
plugged into the stream from the radio telescope. He could feel himself filling
with anticipation before the bursts of transmission coming, the feeling like a
pulsing in his brain that built in an early warning signal that sent scientists
scrambling to record it.

It came now,
and Kevin looked up.

“I think
there’s a message on the way,” he said.

It was all that
was needed to send scientists hurrying to prepare, most of them moving faster
than they moved at any other time. Even so, they were barely in place before
the words came through.

“Our
civilization started simply, on the fringes of our planet’s oceans,” Kevin
translated. “We spread, and we learned, over many centuries. We built homes. We
built cities. We built—”

The
transmission cut off, as suddenly as it had started. Kevin waited a moment or
two more, in case it would begin again, but it didn’t. That seemed to be what
it was now: brief bursts and long pauses, with no sign of when it would start
again.

Scientists
stood around to record everything he was able to give to them, while they made
Kevin write down what he could just in case the impressions there were
different. Trust scientists to find a way to make something like this feel like
homework.

It wasn’t easy,
and not just because some of the researchers seemed to be determined to suck
all the fun out of it. Translating took a mental effort, so that Kevin’s brain
buzzed with it, and he could only stand unsteadily afterward. He hadn’t
expected this to be physically this hard. Then again, he hadn’t expected any of
this at all.

“This isn’t
good for you,” Phil said when he saw how shaky Kevin was. “Take your time.
Don’t push harder than you can push. Not in your condition.”

His condition
was what made Kevin want to get all he could. It was hard to think about, but how
much time did he have now? How many messages would he receive before his brain
changed to the point where he couldn’t understand them anymore? What if… what
if he died before he was done? What if he couldn’t get to the end before his
body and brain gave way?

It was more
than that, though. Every time he sat there translating, listening through his
headphones to the latest burst of information, Kevin felt as though all of this
might mean something. It was a reminder that he wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old
boy dying of a disease practically no one had heard of. He was doing something
no one else in the history of the world had done. If all of this was for something,
then that was a good thing.

“I have to keep
going,” Kevin said. “We need to get all of it.”

For the most
part, what Kevin managed to pull out were facts, and each one seemed to excite
the scientists around him more. Some of it, like the presence of seven planets
around the star, or the interlocking gravitational orbits of their moons, were
things that they’d been able to work out from their observations using the
telescopes available on Earth. Other parts, such as the presence of so much
life, had them scratching their heads.

“We think the
planets are all tidally locked,” one said. “Is there evidence of day shifting
into night? If not, one side of the planets should be burning, while the other
freezes.”

Kevin couldn’t
tell him at first, until another message explained that yes, the planets spun,
in ways that seemed to excite the scientists even more.

“We’ll have to
rewrite what we know about all of this. What about the radiation exposure from
being so close to the star?”

Again and
again, they asked questions Kevin didn’t know the answers to. They didn’t seem
to get that he didn’t have any control over what the aliens had sent in their
bursts of messages. They sent what they sent, Kevin translated it, and the
scientists had to scramble to try to make some kind of sense of it.

Strangely, Dr.
Levin was the one person who didn’t seem to mind that.

“It’s just
astonishing that they’ve chosen to communicate in this way,” she said. “They’re
sending so much information about themselves, trying to preserve some
understanding of who they are.”

“Who they were,”
Kevin corrected her. That was one thing that the messages had been clear about.
The people sending them were long gone. That was both incredibly sad and also
kind of cool, knowing that he was pretty much the last link to a dead
civilization.

One strange
thing was how simple and factual it all was. Kevin had been kind of expecting
to learn more about the culture or the languages of the beings that inhabited
the planet, yet he still hadn’t seen enough of them to understand what they
really were. Which of the creatures on the planet’s surface were they? Were they
the chitin-shelled creatures that crawled there, or the long-necked things like
scaled giraffes? Kevin’s imagination kept him expecting something humanlike and
familiar, but so far he hadn’t heard any reference to it.

Kevin just
wished that he could share more of those words with the world. When he couldn’t
stand it any longer, he sought out Dr. Levin, because he suspected she would be
his biggest ally. He found her in the canteen with Phil.

“I’m worried
that I’m saying all of this, and it’s just going to be locked away in secret
somewhere,” he said.

“Professor
Brewster is just being careful,” Dr. Levin said. To Kevin, she sounded as
though she was trying to convince herself.

“What if he’s
so careful no one ever learns about the aliens?” Kevin asked. It was a real
worry. He could imagine the tall scientist doing it all too easily. “What if my
mother only agrees because she doesn’t want people laughing at me?”

“I’m sure that
won’t happen,” Dr. Levin said. Again, she didn’t sound sure.

“What aren’t
you telling me?” Kevin asked. He wasn’t sure if Dr. Levin would answer that or
not.

“David…
Professor Brewster… has to answer to people inside the government,” Dr. Levin
said. “Some of his funding is from the military. Something like this… they
might want to keep it secret.”

Kevin could
tell she wasn’t happy about that. “So he might never tell people?”

“They’d
probably be worried about people panicking,” Dr. Levin said. Again, Kevin got
the feeling that she didn’t agree.

“You must
want to tell people,” Kevin said. “Your whole organization wants to find
aliens.”

Dr. Levin
smiled tightly. “I can’t,” she said. “If I do, it will make things harder for
SETI. Professor Brewster wouldn’t let it go, and some of his bosses… well,
they’d see it as a betrayal.”

“Even though people
have a right to know?” Kevin said.

“They’d say
that people only have a right to know what they’re told,” Dr. Levin said.

Kevin shook his
head. “This isn’t right. Professor Brewster shouldn’t do this.”

“I’ll try
talking to him. In the meantime, Phil, why don’t you take Kevin for a walk
around the facility? I’m sure it must be pretty boring spending all your time
either here or in your room.”

It was, in ways
that made even school seem interesting by comparison. Kevin might never have
been one of those kids who went to a different activity every night, and camp
in the summer, but he’d never spent his time in one room either, doing nothing
but acting as a kind of human satellite dish for alien messages.

He’d been
around the facility before, but it was good to spend some time being something
other than the kid who heard the messages. Phil led the way, using his security
access. Despite effectively living there now, Kevin didn’t have any.
Apparently, they could trust him enough to receive alien signals, but not to be
able to come and go as he wanted.

“We’re working
on producing plants that can survive in extreme environments,” Phil said,
pointing to a room full of what appeared to be tomato plants. “Maybe if all of
this leads to humanity meeting aliens, we’ll be able to offer them a
nice plant to take home.”

Kevin smiled at
that thought. “The aliens are dead, remember? They said that their planet was
destroyed.”

“But someone
must have sent that signal,” Phil said. “So they must have survived to do
it.”

“I guess,”
Kevin said, but even so, he wasn’t hopeful. What if they’d just survived long
enough to send out their messages? What if they’d lived out lives of a few more
years, only to die on some far-off world? The contact with the aliens felt
almost as doomed in the long run as everything else about his life.

“And this
elevator leads down to the bunker,” Phil said, gesturing to a set of doors.

“A bunker?”
Kevin said. “Like, a nuclear bunker?”

“Nuclear,
chemical, biological,” Phil said. “The idea is to have one close by in the
event that there ever is some kind of war, or attack, or something. There are
bunkers all over the place, and they give some senior people keys to save the
‘best and the brightest’ if it looks as though the world will end.”

He didn’t sound
particularly happy about the idea. Maybe he suspected that he wouldn’t be on
the list.

“So these
bunkers are everywhere?” Kevin said.

Phil nodded,
then took out his phone. “There’s a whole map of them,” he said. “Although
Professor Brewster doesn’t know I have this.”

He showed Kevin
the map, covered in small red dots. There was one right under them, and another
tucked away to the east in the state park under Mount Diablo.

“That seems
like a strange place for a bunker,” Kevin said.

“It’s because
it’s away from the city,” Phil replied. “It means it’s more likely to survive
an attack. Besides, no one talks about it, but they used to do military testing
up there.”

It sounded like
the kind of secret Kevin wasn’t supposed to know, but then, he suspected that aliens
were the kind of secret he wasn’t supposed to know right then.

“I guess I
wouldn’t make it into one of the bunkers anyway,” Kevin said. He couldn’t help
a note of resentment there.

“Still angry
that the professor decided to keep you a secret here?” Phil asked.

Kevin was about
to say no, say the thing he was supposed to say, but the truth was that he was
angry.

“He can’t just
do that,” Kevin said. “The aliens are sending a message to the whole world.
Shouldn’t everyone get to hear it?”

Phil shrugged.
“The trouble is, he can. Especially if his bosses want to keep anything you do
for military applications. This is a facility that engages in confidential
research, and it has plenty of security. Keeping people out is easy. Keeping
secrets in, though…”

“What do you
mean?” Kevin asked.

The researcher
gestured for him to follow, and he led the way to a broad window near the front
entrance to the building, looking out over the research facility’s front lot.
Out beyond the fence, where the public part of the NASA facility stood, Kevin
could see a large crowd of people all looking toward the building. Several of
them had cameras.

“Who are they?”
Kevin asked.

“Someone must
have let it slip that we were working on something to do with aliens,” Phil
said, in a tone that suggested exactly who that someone might be. “Probably a
scientist who decided that you shouldn’t keep things like this quiet.”

“Or you,” Kevin
suggested, because he’d never really understood it when adults tried to say
things without actually saying them, like that.

“It could have
been your mother,” Phil pointed out, “and Dr. Levin would love to be
able to tell the public about extraterrestrial life being real. I mean, it’s
literally her job. Or—”

“But it wasn’t
them,” Kevin said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Shh,” Phil
said. “Do you want to cost me my job? Now, it occurs to me that, if you were to
go out there and talk to those people, old Brewster wouldn’t be able to
keep you locked away. I’m just talking hypothetically, you understand.”

Kevin looked
over at the doors. They were solid things, with a card lock for which he didn’t
have a card. They seemed like an impossible barrier. Even the glass beside them
was toughened.

“I can’t get
outside,” he said.

“Why would you
need to get outside?” Phil replied, with an expression of badly feigned shock.
“I’m just talking hypothetically. I hope you understand that if I did anything
to help you, Kevin, I could get into a lot of trouble.”

“I… think I
understand,” Kevin said, with a slight frown, because he wasn’t quite sure that
he did. Seriously, why didn’t people say what they meant?

“Oh,” Phil
said, “I just remembered, I was supposed to help fix a security problem with
the cameras in front of the doors.”

“What security
problem?” Kevin asked with a frown.

“The one that’s
going to happen in about two minutes. Someone is going to decide it
would be a good idea to let one of the experimental AIs play chess with them.
Incidentally, could you do me a favor, Kevin?”

Kevin looked
over at him. “What do you need?”

Phil took out what
looked very much like a keycard. “Professor Brewster dropped this. Would you
mind returning it to him when you see him? I’m sure he’ll be along to demand
answers from you at some point.”

Kevin took it.
“I will,” he said. “And Phil… thank you.”

“For what?” the
researcher asked. “I didn’t do anything. Actually, it’s quite important to
remember that part.”

“I will,” Kevin
promised.

As Phil walked
away, Kevin forced himself to wait, counting the seconds under his breath. He
saw the lights on the cameras by the door go dim, and quickly swiped the card
in the door.

He walked out
from the building, feeling strange being out in the open air for the first time
in days. The air in the facility was so pristine, so carefully filtered, that
it felt almost stale next to this. It felt strange to be walking like this too,
when he’d spent so much time sitting or lying down, doing nothing but relaying
the contents of that golden thread of information. He kept walking, then ran,
as he heard a shout behind him. He glanced back to see a security guard there,
looking unsure what to do next and speaking into a radio.

Kevin kept
going for the fence, not sure how much more time he would have.

Professor
Brewster was somewhere behind him now, yelling for him to come back. Kevin smiled
at that. It would only make it more likely that people would believe what he
was going to do next. It might mean that people listened.

He ran up to
the fence and stopped, looking at the people there, looking at the cameras.
Some were from local news stations. At least a couple seemed to be from
national ones. Faced with that, Kevin swallowed nervously. He didn’t know what
to say.

“Um… hi, I’m
Kevin. You’ve probably heard some of the rumors about what’s been going on
here? Well, they’re true.”

CHAPTER
NINE

Kevin sat in
Professor Brewster’s office, getting the feeling that the scientist would love
to shout at him, if only he had enough time. He certainly looked angry enough
to do it. Frankly, right then, he looked just about angry enough to explode. He
didn’t have enough time, though, because he was too busy answering phone
calls, trying to talk to Kevin and Dr. Levin in between.

“Yes sir. Yes,
I’m sure it is. Yes, it’s true that the boy seems to be… yes, yes, of course.
But sir, it’s our project and… yes sir, of course I’m aware of the
implications.” He put the phone down. “That was the director of NASA. Can you
understand how difficult this is, Kevin? How complicated this is about to—”

He picked up
the phone again as it rang.

“Hello? Who?
No, I’m sorry. No. No, I don’t accept that the boy should be taken into
FBI custody for his own safety.”

He put the
phone down.

“This is only
the start of it,” he said. He looked over to Kevin. “Do you understand, Kevin,
that part of the reason I wanted to keep this a secret was because I knew how
some people would react? News of alien life is a big thing for this country,
for the world. I wanted to protect you from all the different people who would
want to try to control part of that.”

Kevin stared at
the older man. He hadn’t thought that Professor Brewster was interested in much
beyond the success of his institute. It was strange to think that he might have
been trying to look out for him. Adults, he decided, were far too complicated.

The phone rang
again.

“The CIA? But
we’re on American… Yes, I accept that space is beyond American borders, but…”

While they were
busy arguing about it, Dr. Levin put a hand on his shoulder.

“How about we
take you back to your room, Kevin?” she suggested. “I’m sure they’ll be arguing
for a while yet.”

Kevin nodded,
and they slipped off. He wasn’t sure if Professor Brewster noticed, he was that
busy fielding calls. Briefly, he wondered what would happen if he just walked
out of the facility again and kept walking, not coming back. Would the
scientist do anything to stop him? Would he be able to?

A glance out
the window suggested that wouldn’t be easy. Already, the crowd of reporters had
swollen until it seemed like a horde of them wanting to get in, the security on
site barely enough to keep them back. That security looked as though it was
about to be reinforced, though, because military vehicles were rolling up,
spreading out around the perimeter of the facility, with armed men jumping out.

“All this
because I talked about aliens on TV?” Kevin said. It seemed like a lot, given
the number of people who did that.

“All this
because we proved aliens to them,” Dr. Levin corrected him, and Kevin
guessed that far fewer people had done that. “There will be a lot more.”

“How many
more?” Kevin asked. He wasn’t sure he was comfortable with the idea of being
surrounded just because he’d said something.

“Follow me.”
She led the way over to one of the recreation rooms. The TV there was on,
scientists staring at one of the news channels.

“The boy,
identified as Kevin McKenzie of Walnut Creek, California, claimed to be in
contact with an extraterrestrial source of information, and gave extensive
details about the Trappist 1 planetary system, believed by many experts to be—”

Dr. Levin
flipped the channel, and now there was an interview there with a wild-eyed man
in a grubby T-shirt for a band Kevin didn’t know.

“It’s all a
lie,” he said. “It’s a distraction. The government wants us looking at
this, so that we’re not looking at the truth! It’s an excuse, so that when they
start drugging the drinking water, it will all seem normal!”

Dr. Levin
flipped the channel again. Now, there was a pastor on the screen talking in
front of a large congregation.

“It’s clear
that what the boy is actually hearing is the voice of God, preparing us for the
Rapture! We must be—”

She turned the
TV off, ignoring the protests of the scientists as she did so.

“That’s
enough,” she said. “You all have work to do, and it will be complicated enough
now without listening to all that trash. You know the truth. You’ve seen it.
Get back to work.”

To Kevin’s
surprise, they did, even though Dr. Levin wasn’t their boss. Maybe they were
just looking for someone to tell them what to do. He knew he was, right then.
He might understand the aliens’ messages, but he wasn’t sure that he really got
what half of this might mean.

“Things are
going to get tricky,” Dr. Levin said to him. “There will be people now trying
to twist what you say, and use it for their own ends.”

“So what do I
do?” Kevin asked.

She shrugged.
“Just keep saying things exactly as you see them. You’re at the heart of
something big, but you need to tell the truth, do your best with it. It’s all
any of us can hope to do right now.”

Kevin nodded,
but he doubted that it would be that easy. At least one reason it wouldn’t be
easy was his mom, and she was standing across the recreation room from him now.
He found that he was afraid. What would she say? He knew she’d been almost as
eager to keep the secret of all of this as Professor Brewster, and yet he’d
told people everything.

She rushed
forward to hug him. “Kevin, are you all right? I thought they’d bring you back
to your room, and then I went to Professor Brewster’s office and he was on the
phone to the Pope, and…”

“I’m fine,
Mom,” Kevin assured her. Right then, he would have said it even if he weren’t,
just to take away some of the look of worry on her face.

“There are so
many people out there now,” she said. “Kevin, we were just trying to keep you
safe.”

Kevin shook his
head. It was important that people knew about what was happening. It didn’t
matter if he was safe. “I had to tell them.”

“And now I
think they’re going to go crazy out there if somebody doesn’t tell them more,”
his mother said.

Dr. Levin
cocked her head to one side, then looked out at the crowds beyond the building.
“Your mother has a point, Kevin. Someone needs to explain all this to people.”

“What did you
have in mind?” Kevin asked.

“I think we
need to organize a press conference.”

***

“We need to be
very careful about this,” Professor Brewster said, as he, Kevin, and Dr. Levin
stepped into one of the institute’s conference rooms together. “I’m only
agreeing to this because the alternative is letting people make up what they
want in place of the truth.”

Kevin guessed
that he didn’t like the idea of people trying to force their way into his
research center to learn the truth, either.

“So we tell
them the truth,” Kevin said.

To his
surprise, he saw Professor Brewster shake his head. “Ideally, Kevin, I think
it’s best if you say as little as possible. We need to manage people’s
expectations of all this and what it might mean for them.”

“But there are aliens,”
Kevin said.

“And that will
scare a lot of people,” Professor Brewster explained. “We need to be careful.
Trust me, I’ve been involved in announcing a lot of scientific discoveries.
It’s important to get the message right with these things so that people can
understand the potential implications of it all.”

He led the way
out to a small platform, where some of the researchers had set up a small
table. Kevin sat in the middle, with the two adults flanking him. Out in front
of him was what seemed to be a sea of people, many of them with cameras. They
started to shout questions almost as soon as Kevin and the others sat down.

“Professor
Brewster, have you really found evidence of alien life?”

“Can we expect
to be visited by aliens in the near future?”

“Is this all
some kind of joke?”

“Who is the
boy?”

Kevin did his
best to just sit there, while Professor Brewster leaned forward and started to
answer, looking officious.

“Well, those
are all very complex questions,” the institute’s director began, and Kevin
could see how this was going to go.

Apparently, so
could Dr. Levin. “Yes,” she said. “There are aliens. No, this is not a joke,
and most of you have already met Kevin. From what I’ve seen of the news, half
of you have already started to trawl through his life. There’s really no point.
We’re not trying to hide anything. To prove that, we’re going to hold regular
press conferences here, explaining what we find out.”

Professor
Brewster looked as though he’d swallowed something unpleasant, but the
questions were already coming in again.

“But does the
boy, does Kevin, really have communications with an alien civilization?”
a reporter called out. “He’s talking to them?”

When Dr. Levin
looked over to him, Kevin stood up, trying not to look as nervous as he felt
right then.

“I’m not
talking to aliens,” he said. “I’ve had… some visions, I guess… and I can
translate their signal when I hear it. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” a
reporter said, with a laugh “It sounds like plenty. Will we get to hear
these signals?”

“I’m not sure
anyone would understand them,” Kevin said. Although what if someone did? What
if there was someone else out there like him? Would that be a good thing or a
bad thing? Kevin didn’t know right then.

“But we have
you to translate, don’t we?” another reporter called out. “Doesn’t the public
have a right to hear these messages?”

“They do,” Dr.
Levin said, and again, Kevin had the impression of her speaking up before
Professor Brewster could say anything. “Which is why we’ll be holding regular
press conferences from now on, where Kevin will try to decipher the signals
we’ve recorded from that region.”

Professor
Brewster stood up. He had a smile fixed in place that looked as though it might
crack at any moment. “Okay, folks. I think we shouldn’t tire out Kevin too
much. That’s enough for one day.”

***

This time,
Professor Brewster had more than enough time to shout.

“You ambushed me,
Elise!” Professor Brewster said. “Regular press conferences?”

“Come on,
David,” Dr. Levin said. “You know it’s the right thing to do, and this way you
get to keep everything orderly, rather than having people trying to break in to
get information. You’re a scientist. You don’t believe in hiding things away.”

“I also don’t
believe in getting our funding cut because someone in Congress thinks I’m
giving away something we should hold onto,” Professor Brewster said, and Kevin
could hear some of the worry under the anger.

Kevin wondered
what it must be like to have Professor Brewster’s job. Presumably, he’d wanted
to be a scientist when he was Kevin’s age, had wanted to discover things. Now,
it seemed as though he mostly spent his time organizing things and worrying
about money. It sounded like the kind of thing someone had to do if they were a
manager or something, not a scientist. It wasn’t something Kevin would have
wanted to have to do.

“We’ve
announced them now,” Dr. Levin said.

“You’ve
announced them,” Professor Brewster said. “We can still—”

He found
himself interrupted by a call, and something about his expression as he
answered said that this was different from the calls he’d received so far about
this.

“Hello? Yes,
this is he… I’m sorry, did I hear you correctly?... Yes, at once.” He looked
ashen as he put the phone down. “We need to go to the lobby, now.”

“Why?” Kevin
asked.

“Because
they’re saying that the President is here.”

Kevin might
have asked if he was joking, but one look at Professor Brewster’s face made it
obvious he wasn’t. Kevin’s heart tightened in his chest at the thought. The
President was coming here, to see him? Somehow, even the presence of the aliens
seemed more possible than that. Kevin suddenly found himself wondering if he’d
just done the right thing, nerves rising up through him. It didn’t seem right
somehow that he was meeting the President.

He followed
Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin to the research institute’s lobby, having to
hurry to keep up. It was obvious that they didn’t want to keep the President
waiting. As they got closer, Kevin glanced out of the building’s windows,
seeing a long motorcade there, full of vehicles with blacked out windows.

By the time
they reached the lobby, the President was already in the building, and he
wasn’t the only one. Secret Service agents in dark suits spread out as if
expecting a threat at any moment. Advisors and assistants trailed him in a
huddle, some of them looking a little surprised that they were there. Kevin saw
other people too, with badges proclaiming them to be from the military, the
NSA, the FBI, and more. It seemed that no one had wanted to miss out on being a
part of this.

The President
walked over as they arrived, taking Professor Brewster’s hand, then turning his
attention to Kevin. Kevin swallowed nervously as the older man stared at him.

“So this is
the boy?” the President said, looking Kevin up and down as if expecting far
more.

“Yes, sir,”
Professor Brewster said, sounding positively deferential. “This is Kevin.”

“Kevin? All
right, Kevin, do you know who I am?”

“You’re the
President,” Kevin said. Inside, a small voice was repeating the words you’re
talking to the President over and over. He did his best to ignore it,
because if he listened too much, he suspected that he might not be able to say
anything.

“Good lad. Now,
tell me honestly, can you really talk to aliens?”

“No sir,” Kevin
said.

“Ha, I knew
it!” the President said. “I told them in the emergency contingencies committee
that—”

“I can’t talk
to them, but I do receive messages from them,” Kevin went on. “They send
information about themselves and their planet, and I can translate it.”

The President’s
expression changed, as if he didn’t quite know what to say to that. Kevin was
getting used to that expression from people by now.

“Well then,”
the President said, wagging a finger. “Just you remember that this information
was given to us, in America. It was obviously intended for us as the most
advanced nation on Earth.”

“Sir,”
Professor Brewster said, “the signal hits the whole world. Kevin is just the
one who is able to translate it. You should also be aware that we’ve agreed to
press conferences so that we can’t be accused of hiding the information.”

Kevin was
surprised to find the man sticking up for sharing the information like that.
Sticking up for him like that. An advisor came up to the President and
whispered something in his ear.

“Well,” the
President said, “maybe that’s a good thing. Other countries will see us sharing
it and know that they wouldn’t have gotten it without us.”

“Yes, sir,”
Professor Brewster said.

“But now, I’d
like to see a demonstration. Kevin, can you show me what you can do?”

Kevin looked to
the others, who nodded. “We can only do it if there’s a signal,” he said.

But even as he
said it, he could feel the pressure in his skull that preceded one. An alarm
sounded and they hurried in the direction of the room where he did the
translating, sitting and waiting. Kevin sat there, while outside the President
and his advisors stood around, looking as though they didn’t know what was
happening.

Words filtered
into his mind, the translation happening automatically.

Our world
was destroyed. The words sounded flat, without emotion. We had to flee.
So few survived.

Kevin repeated
the words, and he could see the President’s expression changing, first to
surprise, and then to something like wonder.

We hid
everything we were, the voice said, and Kevin repeated it, as much of
ourselves as we could before the fire came. Messages were sent out, so
that people would know of us. We sent capsules in every direction, toward all
of the inhabited worlds.

Kevin tried to
imagine it, spaceships sent in every direction, trying to find safety. How much
effort would it have taken to organize that? How would they have been able to
organize it with a disaster threatening them?

Each vessel
holds a record of our history, the voice continued.

Coordinates
will be sent along this path, the voice said, but the vessel’s seal will
be tight to preserve us. You must find it. You must prepare to receive us…

Kevin gasped
with the effort of translating, the world around him coming into focus again as
he stopped. He could see the President staring at him now, then looking over to
Professor Brewster.

“What does all
this mean?” he asked. “What are you telling me?”

Kevin could
answer that one.

“I think…”
Kevin said. “I think the aliens are coming here.”

The President
stared at him. So did the others. Then the chaos started, with a dozen people
trying to talk at once. The President spoke over them.

“That’s
enough,” he said, gesturing for them to quiet down. “I know all of your
concerns. Professor Brewster, there are those on my team who feel that Kevin
here isn’t safe in your facility; that he is vulnerable to being snatched or
attacked by our enemies. They want to move him to a secure site.”

“You mean you
want to hide me away in some kind of bunker,” Kevin said. He shook his head. “I
don’t want to do that.”

“Sometimes it
isn’t about what we want, son,” the President said. “It’s about what’s good for
the country.”

“With respect,
Mr. President,” Professor Brewster said. “Kevin’s wishes on the matter should
count for something. He has not committed a crime, so it would be wrong,
even illegal, to lock him up. This is a secure facility, and if the others here
want to contribute to that security, that would be very helpful. But they
should do that here, where there is the technological knowhow to study
what is happening.”

Kevin was
surprised to find Professor Brewster standing up for him like that, even if he
knew that it was partly because he didn’t want to risk losing the chance to be
a part of all this. It seemed that the President was a little surprised to hear
it too.

“That’s a very…
forceful point, Professor,” he said. “Very well, the boy will stay here. We
will provide your facility with whatever it needs, but you will coordinate
with my office. I need you to understand the seriousness of this.”

“Yes sir,”
Professor Brewster said. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Kevin wasn’t
entirely sure what the professor had just agreed to. It sounded as though he’d
just given away a lot of the control of the project.

“I need you to
understand the seriousness of this too, Kevin,” the President said. “I thought
before I came here that this was nonsense, and now I’m not so sure.”

“It’s true,”
Kevin insisted.

“The truth is
that it doesn’t matter,” the President said. “Not now. We have reports of
Russia and China mobilizing their militaries, conducting ‘exercises’ in case of
some kind of attack. There have been riots in the Philippines, because people
think this means the end of the world. We need to be very careful about all
this, Kevin. I’m going to allow things to continue for now, but there will be
people here to watch what’s happening.”

That didn’t
matter to Kevin. What mattered was that they kept going. The aliens were
sending something to Earth, and whatever it was, Kevin was determined to find
it.

CHAPTER TEN

Kevin sat in
his room, listening to nothing. There were signals, recorded by the scientists
through their long-range equipment, but none of those signals turned into words
within his mind. None of them seemed to have meaning.

Kevin was
starting to get worried about that, and it seemed that he wasn’t the only one.

“Why aren’t you
hearing anything, Kevin?” Professor Brewster asked. He and Dr. Levin stood
there watching, waiting for whatever would come next.

Kevin didn’t
have an answer. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing to listen to.”

“You must try,
Kevin,” Professor Brewster said, with a disapproving look, as if the
solution to it lay in simply doing more, or pushing past the difficulty of
contact.

“David,” Dr.
Levin said. “Don’t pressure Kevin. Can’t you see that he’s getting sicker?”

Kevin knew that
part was true. He’d started to notice a small tremor now in his left hand that
would stop if he concentrated, but quickly started again whenever he was
stressed. That meant most of the time now in the research institute.

“Then we need
to get him more medical attention,” Professor Brewster declared. “Kevin, you
have to understand, I have government departments I’ve barely even heard of
calling me up to know what’s happening. I had a four-star general call me
earlier, wanting to know if there were any potential military applications for
this information. With the President wanting to know what’s happening, this
isn’t a good time for us not to be able to say anything.”

“I can’t
translate things if they aren’t there,” Kevin said. What did they want him to
do? Make things up? Maybe they still thought he was doing that, despite
everything. Kevin hated that thought.

“Maybe you just
need a break,” Dr. Levin said. “Go for a walk around the institute, try to
relax a little, and we can get back to listening for signals later, when you’ve
rested a little.”

Kevin nodded,
and went out into the institute, deciding to go search out his mother. When she
wasn’t in his room now, she was usually somewhere near where Phil was working,
or in the small space the research center had given her so that she could stay
near Kevin. Kevin decided to check there first, and set off along the halls.

There seemed to
be more people in the research institute now than there had been before. Kevin
could see people in military uniforms and others in suits wearing earpieces. A
trio wearing NSA badges stopped as Kevin went past, looking at him as if
wondering how he was allowed to just wander the halls like that.

One of the
stranger people there was a man who looked to be in his forties, with the
short-cropped hair and erect posture of some of the military people, even
though he was wearing a leather jacket and jeans instead of a uniform, and
clearly hadn’t shaved for a week.

“You’re
wondering who I am,” he said, as Kevin stared at him.

Kevin nodded
nervously. He suspected some people wouldn’t react too well to being stared at
like that.

“You have good
instincts,” he said. “The number of scientists who have walked past me without
wondering that… with so many people going in and out, anyone could get
in here if they aren’t careful.”

“Anyone?” Kevin
asked. “Who are you?”

“I’m Ted,” he
said, extending a hand. A group of soldiers went past and Ted nodded to them.
To Kevin’s surprise, one of them gave him a brief salute.

“Are you with
the military?” Kevin asked. “The CIA? The police?”

“Something like
that,” Ted said. He thought for a moment. “Actually, nothing like that,
these days. And you’re Kevin, the kid who can decipher the alien signals.”

He was probably
the first person who’d gotten that right. Most of them seemed to think that he
was getting a live stream from an alien civilization, or could actually talk to
them. That part made him want to stop and talk to this man, but even so, there
was something about his presence there that made Kevin pause. He didn’t fit in.

“I’m sorry,”
Kevin said. “I need to get going.”

“That’s fine,
Kevin,” the man said. “I’m sure we’ll see one another again.”

Kevin hurried
off. He could practically feel Ted watching him as he went. He found his mother
in the small bedroom that the institute had provided her with so she could stay
close.

“Kevin, are you
all right?” she asked. “You look a bit pale.”

“I’m okay,”
Kevin said. “Mom, there’s a man out there, and I’m not sure…”

He staggered
slightly as the room swam. One moment he was upright; the next, he was on the
floor, with people surrounding him. It took Kevin a second or two to realize
that he must have had a seizure. There were medical staff there, and
researchers, and of course his mother, but no sign of the man who had been
there before.

“I’m okay,”
Kevin said, struggling to sit up. He still felt dizzy, though, and only his
mother’s arm around him stopped him from falling back again.

“You’re not
okay,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get you back to your room, and then I’m going
to ask Professor Brewster why he isn’t taking care of my baby.”

“Mom,”
Kevin managed, because he wasn’t a baby, he was thirteen. Even so, he
let his mother help him back in the direction of his room. Somewhere along the
line, Phil joined them, the two more or less propping Kevin up between them
until they could get him back to his bed.

“I’m going to
go find out why they aren’t looking after your health better than this,” his
mother said, and she set off with the determined look of someone who needed to
get angry about something before she started crying.

“I guess we
should work out exactly what’s happening,” Phil said, as she left. “What do you
say, Kevin? Are you up for some more tests?”

“More tests?”
Kevin countered.

There were,
because Phil wanted to get an MRI, and then bloodwork. Kevin had only realized
in the last couple of weeks just how much he hated having needles poked into
him, because it seemed that everyone wanted his blood for something.
Researchers and medical staff came and went, all explaining what they were
doing as they went about it, almost none of them using words that Kevin could
actually understand.

“We’ve made
advances with anti-seizure medication,” one of the nurses told Kevin, “but the
doctors are currently in discussions with all the people here, asking if it’s
the best thing.”

Meaning that
they were worried it might block off his ability to understand the signal,
whenever it next showed up. Kevin could imagine them there, trying to balance
the possibility of missing the information that might lead to the aliens
against the possibility that Kevin might die and never give them anything else.
Probably only a few of them would think about what it all meant for him, and so
far, none of them had thought to ask what treatment he wanted.

“Is it
the best thing?” Kevin asked.

The nurse
shrugged. “Officially, I’m not supposed to have an opinion on that.
Unofficially… I hear a couple of the doctors are talking about using variations
on gene therapies developed for people with other illnesses, like Alexander’s
syndrome.”

“I didn’t think
there was anything like that available for me,” Kevin said, thinking back to
the consultation with Dr. Markham, and all the ones that had followed it.

“There hasn’t
been, but you currently have most of the biggest brains in the country on your
side. If anyone can tailor something to your condition, it’s them.”

And then Kevin
would find himself taking an experimental treatment that might cure him, might
do nothing, or might make things worse. Would that be worth the risk of losing
the alien signal completely?

“For the moment,
though, you have a visitor.”

She nodded to
the doorway and the short figure coming through it. Kevin’s eyes widened at the
sight of Luna, looking as casual as if she’d just called around to his house to
see if he wanted to ride bikes down to the reservoir.

“Luna? How did
you get here?”

“My mom brought
me along,” Luna said with a smile. “Because your mom thought you’d like
to see me.” She held up an orange, then threw it to him. “I didn’t have any
grapes.”

Kevin caught it
clumsily while Luna perched on the edge of his bed. Her expression changed from
happy to see him to worried.

“How bad is
it?” she asked, most of her usual cheerfulness gone from her voice.

“I don’t know,”
Kevin said. He glanced away for a moment. “Well, I guess we kind of do know.”

Luna put a hand
on his shoulder. “They might have said that you’re going to die, but I refuse
to let you die yet, Kevin. I haven’t even fallen madly in love with you
yet.”

Kevin laughed
at that. “If I have to wait for that, I might live forever.”

“True,” Luna
said, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Kevin could see how much it hurt her
having to be strong for him, having to be cheerful.

“It’s okay to
cry if you want to,” Kevin said.

“As if I’m
going to cry,” Luna said, although she looked like she might for a moment.

She didn’t
cry, but she did hug him, hard enough that Kevin thought his ribs might break.
He surprised himself by noticing how good she smelled.

“I’ve missed
you, you know?” she said.

“I’ve missed
you too,” Kevin assured her. He’d told her that it was okay to cry, but now he
was the one with tears stinging the corners of his eyes.

“Hey, I shouldn’t
make you upset,” Luna said. “One of the military guys in the hall would
probably shoot me if I did that.”

That was enough
to make Kevin laugh. Luna had always had the knack of doing it.

“What’s it like
out there?” he asked. “Out in the real world? What’s it like at school, or on
TV? I’m sick of everything just being about the things I can see for people.”

“Sorry to
disappoint you,” Luna said. “But there’s plenty about you on TV. There are
reporters at your house most days now, and people talking about whether this is
real, or a hoax, or an advertising campaign that got out of hand. There’s even
a weird alien cult that has started up, people wearing antennae as they walk
around and claiming that the aliens will save us from everything from
environmental breakdown to high grocery prices.”

“You’re making
that up,” Kevin guessed.

“Maybe the part
about the antennae,” Luna said. She looked around. “It must be peaceful being
here. It’s really quiet.”

“It’s been a
lot busier since people found out what I could do,” Kevin said. “And I spend
most of my time listening for the signals, so it’s not exactly a library.”

Luna smiled the
smile of someone who usually did all the talking they wanted in libraries
anyway.

It didn’t stay
quite that peaceful, either, because Professor Brewster, Dr. Levin, and Kevin’s
mother all came in together.

“You’re pushing
Kevin too hard,” his mother was saying.

“We’re really
not trying to, Rebecca,” Dr. Levin assured her. “We don’t have any control over
the signals we receive, and Kevin is able to stop whenever he needs to.”

“And Kevin has
barely listened to any today,” Professor Brewster said. “Besides, he’s
receiving better treatment here than he would be able to get anywhere else in
the country.”

“That’s… true,”
his mother admitted. She sounded pretty reluctant to do it though.

“We are looking
after your son,” the institute’s director continued. “And Kevin is doing
important work here. Speaking of which, Kevin, do you feel up to facing the
cameras?”

“Now?” Kevin
asked. He wasn’t sure.

“There have
been some rumors that you’re unwell today, and it seems like a good idea to
show people that you’re healthy,” Professor Brewster said.

“Even though he
isn’t?” Luna asked, beside Kevin.

“Especially
because of that,” Professor Brewster said. “And anyway, people are waiting to
hear more of what Kevin has to say. Kevin?”

“You don’t have
to do it,” his mother said.

Kevin nodded.
“It’s okay. I’m feeling a lot better now. If it will help, I’ll do it.”

***

Kevin felt as
though standing up in front of people should get easier. He wasn’t doing
anything, after all, that he hadn’t already done before. He’d shown them what
he could do at the gates to the facility, and in a press conference before.
Even so, he was nervous with so many people staring back at him.

“It will be
fine,” Luna said. How did she always seem to guess when he was feeling bad?
“And you can’t back out now. I want to watch you do your alien stuff.”

“Alien stuff,”
Kevin repeated. “We definitely need a better name for it than that.”

Even so, he
stepped out to face the crowd. There were more people here today, cramming
every corner of the conference room where Kevin was due to perform for them.
There were reporters, obviously, scientists, government people…

…and Ted,
staring at him intently from the crowd.

“That guy’s
here,” Kevin said.

“What guy?”
Luna asked.

“I met him in
the halls while I was looking for my mom, and he just seemed… I don’t know, out
of place. He kind of seemed like he might have been one of the soldiers, but he
said he wasn’t anymore. I don’t even know if he’s supposed to be here.”

“You think he’s
some crazy guy?” Luna asked. “You think he’s here to kill everyone?”

“I didn’t until
you said it,” Kevin said. Now that she had, Kevin found his eyes locked onto
the spot where Ted stood. He wondered if he should tell someone about him.

“Time to do
your stuff, Kevin,” Professor Brewster said, nudging him toward the center of
the platform they’d set up. “Hello, everyone, as you can see, Kevin is fine,
and some of the rumors out there are greatly exaggerated.”

“What rumors?”
Kevin asked him, and then found his eyes pulled back to Ted again. “Professor
Brewster, there’s this man out there…”

Professor
Brewster ignored him. “Kevin is quite tired today, though, so we’ll keep this
short. Kevin?”

Kevin stepped
forward and put his headphones in place, figuring that it was probably best to
just get on with this. The trouble was that there was still silence, nothing
new to translate, no signal coming in. He stood there in silence for several
seconds, feeling increasingly embarrassed. Worse, he couldn’t take his eyes off
Ted, convinced that the moment he did, the man would do something.

That was when a
completely different man, toward the front of the hall, started shouting.
“You’re evil!” he yelled. “You’ll bring the aliens down on all of us!”

He ran forward,
and even though he had a press pass, and was dressed smartly in a suit, there
was something wild in his eyes. He charged at the stage, and Kevin saw him
shove Luna out of the way as he went, sending her sprawling to the ground.

“Luna!” Kevin
shouted, but there was no time to help her, because the man was still coming,
and now Kevin could see that he had a knife. He grabbed Kevin, and the next
moment, the man was behind him, the blade pressed to Kevin’s throat.

“You’re trying
to bring them here. You’re trying to let them destroy us all. I have to stop
you, whatever it takes.”

Kevin had never
been so frightened before, but the strangest part was that most of that fear
wasn’t for himself. Luna was lying still where the man had knocked her down,
and now Kevin was wondering if he might have stabbed her, just because she got
in the way.

“Easy there,
friend.”

While Kevin had
been looking at where Luna lay, Ted, of all people, had gotten up onto the
stage, and he had a gun held expertly in both hands.

“If you put the
weapon down, we can talk about this,” he said.

The man behind
Kevin didn’t move the knife from his throat. “It’s talking that’s the problem.
He’s talking to them. He’s bringing them here to kill us! No, stay back!”

He punctuated
that order by pointing the knife at Ted’s advancing form. With the knife gone
from his throat for a moment, Kevin did the only thing he could think off, and
let himself fall to the floor.

Two shots rang
out, so loud they seemed deafening. Kevin heard something metallic clatter to
the stage, and something soft followed it a moment later. An instant after
that, and Ted was there, pulling him to his feet.

“Don’t look
around. There are things a kid shouldn’t have to see. Run to the others.”

Kevin wanted to
do all of that. He wanted to run and see if Luna was all right. He wanted to
run to his mother, who was, even now, pushing her way through the chaos. He
wanted to do all of that, but he couldn’t, for one simple reason.

“There’s a
signal coming!” he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kevin could
feel the next message coming, the signal starting in his headphones, the
beginnings of a translation working their way up through him. This was
happening now, whether he wanted it or not.

“I don’t think
we have much time,” he said. “I can feel it coming.”

Already, people
were crowding around him. His mother was there, wrapping her arms around him as
if she might protect him from anything that came. Dr. Levin and Professor
Brewster were there, both looking worried. To Kevin’s relief, Luna was back up
on her feet. She hadn’t been stabbed. Kevin ran to her, hugging her.

“Are you all
right?” he asked.

“That depends,”
she said. “How many of you are there supposed to be?”

Kevin shook his
head. “Don’t joke, I was worried about you.”

“You were
worried about me? I wasn’t the one with a knife to my throat.”

Through it all,
of course, the cameras kept rolling. They weren’t going to stop in the middle
of something this dramatic.

Professor
Brewster was there, looking as though he was afraid Kevin might break. Or maybe
it was just that he was staring at the dead man behind Kevin, the one that he
didn’t dare turn to face.

“What’s
happening?” he demanded. “Why are we not getting Kevin out of here?”

“He says
there’s another message coming,” Ted explained.

Kevin didn’t
know how to explain it any clearer than that.

“Well, hold it
back until we get you to safety,” Professor Brewster said, but surely he had to
know that it didn’t work like that by now.

Kevin gritted
his teeth. “I can’t control when the message arrives. I just receive it and
translate it.”

“Why… why is it
a problem if you get the message here?” Luna asked. She sounded shaky, which
was understandable given everything the two of them had just been through. Even
so, she was the one asking the right questions, not the professor.

“Because it
will be the coordinates for the escape capsules,” Kevin said. “I’m sure of it.
What else could it be?”

“You remembered
the numbers for the system before,” Luna pointed out. “You could remember
this.”

“What if it’s a
long list?” Kevin countered. “What if I miss something?”

Luna pointed to
the cameras, and Kevin realized she had a point. All he had to do was speak,
and everything he said would be recorded by so many cameras he couldn’t count
them all. It would be around the world in an instant.

He went over to
them, and even as he did it, the signal hit him.

The strings of
numbers seemed to last forever. No wonder the beings sending them had given
Kevin a warning that they would be coming. They’d wanted to give him a chance
to prepare to record them in some way, so that the information wouldn’t be
lost. Each time Kevin finished repeating a string of numbers, a new string of
digits and symbols began, barely giving him enough time to take a breath. He
was translating it as it came, shaking with the effort of doing it, or perhaps
just with the aftereffects of everything he’d been through in the past few
minutes.

He recited the
numbers and letters in a long, almost endless string, but the truth was that,
for the first time since Luna had helped him to work out the connection to the
Trappist system, he didn’t know exactly what any of it meant.

Finally, the
stream of numbers came to a stop, and Kevin stood there, trying to catch his
breath.

“Is that
everything?” Luna asked. “Kevin, are you all right?”

Kevin managed
to nod, although even that was an effort right then. He wasn’t sure which part
he was nodding for.

Dr. Levin was
there then, putting an arm around each of them.

“Okay,” Dr.
Levin said, “let’s get you both back inside. After everything that has
happened, my guess is that a lot of people will want to talk to both of you, but
I want to get you both checked out first and make sure that you’re all right. I
don’t like how close you both came to being hurt back there.”

As they turned
to go, Kevin could hear the shouts from the gathered crowd as they started to
come out of whatever stunned silence they’d been caught up in.

“Kevin, when
are the aliens coming for us?” one man yelled.

“Kevin, what
does life mean?”

“When are you
going to admit this is a hoax?”

“Are you hurt?”

There were so
many different questions being shouted at once that for a moment or two, Kevin
wanted to just walk away and leave them to it. He didn’t, though. He felt as
though he had to say something, and this time it didn’t have anything to do
with the pressures of alien signals.

“I know a lot
of you are looking to me for answers, but the truth is that I don’t have many,”
Kevin said. “I’m just a kid. I don’t have any special understanding. I don’t
even know why I’m the one who receives the messages that the aliens are
sending.”

“What happened
today?” a reporter asked. “Why all these numbers? What is it about?”

Kevin inclined
his head, trying to work out how much he was allowed to say. Then he realized
that was probably the wrong way of thinking about it. Misunderstanding this had
caused this. Someone had tried to kill him today, because they didn’t
understand the information he had. Because, given the space to do it, they
jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Someone tried
to kill me today,” he said, “because they think the information I’m receiving
is dangerous enough to be worth killing for.”

“Is it?”
someone called out.

Kevin shook his
head. “Knowing that there’s an alien civilization out there, that there was one,
is amazing, but it’s not worth killing people for, and I don’t want anyone else
being in danger for me.” He almost stopped as he thought back to the sight of
Luna being knocked aside, the sound of Ted’s gun as he fired. “I don’t matter.
What matters is that the aliens’ world was dying, and they have sent out… I
guess you could call them time capsules. And we know where those are going
now.”

He also knew
where he was going now, because his mother was pulling Kevin back away from the
platform, into the institute.

***

“If my son is
going to be attacked, then I don’t want him staying here!” Kevin’s mother said
while she and Professor Brewster argued.

Kevin watched
them both from the edge of his bed. He winced as one of the institute’s medical
staff disinfected a tiny cut he’d gotten from the knife. Beside him, Luna had a
bandage wrapped around her head, while Ted was there, looking as though he was
half expecting another attack.

“I understand
your concern,” Professor Brewster said, and even Kevin knew that was the wrong
thing to say to his mother right then.

“You understand
what it’s like to see your child attacked because he’s caught up in all
something crazy?” Kevin’s mother demanded. “Do you even have children?”

“Well no, but…”

“Who are you?”
Kevin asked Ted, ignoring the argument between his mother and the professor for
the moment.

“Oh, I’m just a
guy who helps out where he can,” Ted said.

“That’s not an
answer,” Luna said.

He seemed to
think for a moment or two, then shrugged. “I guess it can’t hurt. Sorry, I’m
just in the habit of not saying anything. I used to be in the army. Special
Forces. Then I got loaned out to the CIA for a while, then… well, then I
tried to retire, but I got a call when all of this started, and I couldn’t
exactly refuse.”

“You said
before that the President called you,” Kevin said. “He wouldn’t do that if you
were just some guy.”

“Well, maybe
I’ve seen a few things in my time,” Ted said. He looked over to where Professor
Brewster and Kevin’s mother were still arguing. “From what I hear, he met you
about this though. That must make you more special than I am. You two want to
come see how the eggheads are getting on with the numbers you pulled out of the
air?”

Kevin nodded,
and together, the three of them set off through the facility. Kevin felt a
little stronger now, most of the weakness he’d felt obviously down to the
combination of receiving the message and the stress of the attack. He also felt
strangely empty, and it took him a moment to realize why:

For the first
time since this had begun, there was no sense of the aliens.

There was no
countdown pulsing in his head. There was no impending signal he was supposed to
be waiting for. There were no messages. Everything was silent. It should have
felt peaceful, but for the first time since he’d gotten there, Kevin felt…
useless, as if he had nothing to do.

He was about
the only one who did. The people they passed were busy, and they all seemed to
be working on the problem of the coordinates. Labs that were used for other
things stood empty, and instead, scientists were gathered in conference rooms,
working on strings of numbers in a hundred different ways. Some of the NSA
people seemed to be involved too.

Kevin had
thought that there might be a problem with security as they got closer to the
space that housed the supercomputers, but Ted walked right through it all,
soldiers and FBI agents alike nodding to him as he went and letting the three
of them through.

“Wow,” Luna
said as they reached the supercomputer pit. “Imagine the games you could play
on those.”

Kevin doubted
that they’d be much use for that, but when it came to dissecting strings of
numbers, it seemed that they were very good. SAM was spitting out
possibilities using the signals, while half of the other machines there had
been fired up too, and scientists ran between them, calling out results.

“It’s another
miss,” one yelled. “I think that one hits somewhere out in the Pleiades.”

Kevin heard a
groan of frustration from the other scientists there.

“They’re trying
to narrow down the search,” Ted explained.

Dr. Levin was
there, and to Kevin’s surprise, people seemed to be listening to her. Maybe the
fact that there were definitely aliens made it easier to take orders from the
head of SETI.

“The problem is
too much information,” she said. “You gave us so many possible hits, Kevin,
that we can’t work through all of it, even with our computing power.”

“Have you tried
the Internet?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t think
this is the kind of thing we’d find on the Internet,” Professor Brewster said,
coming up to join them. “We have some of the most sophisticated computers in
the world here.”

Kevin shook his
head. “We might. When I translated, I gave the reporters the information,
right? So, won’t people all around the world have been looking at it? You said
the problem was having enough people to do it. Well, doesn’t this mean you have
the whole world helping?”

“The kid has a
point,” Ted said. “Have you checked?”

“Well… no,”
Professor Brewster admitted.

Dr. Levin
shrugged. “Maybe it’s worth a try. SETI has often borrowed computing power from
people around the world.”

“Do it,” Ted
said.

Dr. Levin went
away for a few moments. She came back with a tablet computer, and a faintly
shocked look.

“I… I don’t
believe it,” she said, and started tapping away on it. “Hold on, I’ll bring it
up on a bigger screen.”

She pressed a
few points on the tablet, and a computer screen across from them lit up, big
enough that the entire room would be able to see it. Coordinates sat on the
screen, along with the words “Alien craft to hit Earth!” The site appeared to
be anonymous, but there was no doubt about what it was saying.

“If we take
this set of coordinates,” Dr. Levin said, “well, watch.”

A map of the
world appeared on the screen, first so broad that Kevin couldn’t work out where
the crash site was supposed to be. It turned, zooming in on South America, then
kept going. It took in a country, then a region, then what seemed like a patch
of jungle just a couple of miles across.

“The Colombian
rainforest,” Ted said, staring at it.

“We’re sure
about this?” Professor Brewster asked.

“We’ll check,
of course,” Dr. Levin said, “but on first glance… yes, it looks correct. Which
is astonishing in its own way. The idea that a civilization could predict where
their vessel would land this precisely at such a distance is… almost impossible
to believe.”

“Well, I think
we need to start believing it.” Ted put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “If you’re
right about all this, our alien friends are sending their cargo to Colombia.”

“Is that a bad
thing?” Kevin asked.

Ted shrugged.
“I don’t know. It might make things complicated. I’m more worried about how
many other people will have seen this. Dr. Levin?”

“There’s no way
to know,” the SETI director said. “I’d guess that if we found it, plenty of
other people will have.”

“Which means
that half the world will be there,” Ted said. “What do you say we go there to
meet them, Kevin?”

“Go to meet
who?” Kevin’s mother asked, walking into the computer pit. “What’s going on?”

Kevin tried to
work out the best way to phrase it. “Mom, um… can I go to Colombia?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“You don’t need
to come, Mom,” Kevin said as he and the others found themselves waved through
security at the San Francisco airport. She was just a step away from him, as if
afraid that moving further would mean losing him in the chaos of the airport.
Ted was close by too, although Kevin suspected it was for different reasons.

“Of course I
need to come,” his mother said, wheeling along a small suitcase that made it
look as though she’d packed for a vacation. “One moment people are trying to
murder you, and the next, you’re flying off to the middle of a jungle? Do you
think I’m going to let you do that alone?”

“I wouldn’t be alone,
Mom,” Kevin pointed out. If anything, it seemed like the entire institute was
heading to Colombia, packing itself aboard not one but two chartered airplanes,
and taking with it an array of equipment designed to search for the escape
capsule.

“I’m still
coming,” his mother said, and Kevin knew better than to argue with that tone.

One person who
wasn’t coming was Luna, and Kevin found that he was already missing having her
there. She’d gone home, because her parents apparently had stricter
views about her flying to South America in search of aliens.

Professor
Brewster stood toward the front, marshalling the scientists and the soldiers,
the agents and the occasional reporters as they loaded onto the plane.

“Are you all
set, Kevin?” he asked. “We have a long flight ahead of us.”

Kevin nodded.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“We nearly
aren’t,” Professor Brewster said. “A lot of people are having to pull a lot of
strings to let us fly into Colombia for this. Now, hurry and get aboard.”

Kevin got onto
the plane and found a seat where he could look out of the window. His mother
took one next to him, while Ted took one just in front of him.

“It’s a long
way to Colombia,” Ted said. “It’s been a while.”

“You were there
before?” Kevin asked.

“Officially?”
he said with a faint smile. “Never been there in my life.”

“And
unofficially?” Kevin asked.

“Oh, it was
very unofficial the last time I was there,” Ted replied. “Things are a bit more
peaceful there now though. There are still a few cartels, but without the civil
war going on, the government can pay a bit more attention to them.”

“It sounds
cool,” Kevin said.

His mother
didn’t agree. “It sounds like a dangerous place to take my son.”

“I’m sure it
will be fine,” Ted said. Kevin heard the doors to the plane shutting as the
last people climbed aboard. “Besides, it’s too late to turn back now. Nine
hours from now, and we’ll be in Bogota.”

Nine hours. How
did you spend nine hours cooped up in a confined space with a bunch of
scientists? It seemed to Kevin that practically everyone there was having to
find the answer to that question. Some played games on phones, or read, or
watched movies. Kevin’s mother mostly slept. Kevin alternated looking out of
the window with trying to get some rest and occasionally putting on the
headphones with the signal stream, just in case there was anything to hear.
There wasn’t.

“I don’t even
know if these will work so far from the research institute,” Kevin said, after
the third time he’d done it.

“I asked the
scientists that before we left,” Ted said. “They’ve set it up so the base
signal is relayed over the Internet. Anywhere you have a connection, you can
access the signal.”

Kevin supposed
he shouldn’t have been surprised by that. Of course they would want to make
sure that he could hear it, whatever happened. They wouldn’t want to risk
missing an important message. Even so, the idea of being able to listen in from
anywhere in the world seemed impressive.

Kevin spent
some of the time looking down at the places they passed over. He’d never even
been out of state before, yet here he was flying over deserts and thick
rainforests, cities and patches of ocean. He thought about the people down
there. Did they know about the escape capsule? What did they think about the
possibility of actually finding alien life?

He got part of
an answer when they landed in Bogota. He immediately saw a dozen similar
groups, all carrying equipment that looked suspiciously similar to the gear
they’d brought with them.

“Looks as
though we weren’t the only ones who worked out where those coordinates led,”
Ted said as he looked over the collection of them. He seemed fairly relaxed
about it, but Professor Brewster was anything but calm.

“This is simply
unacceptable,” the scientist said. “The Swiss are here, and that looks
like a group from the private tech sector, and those are the Canadians. After
all the effort we’ve put into uncovering this information, I can’t believe that
they’re planning to snatch the capsule from under us.”

Kevin wanted to
say that they didn’t know for sure that was what the other groups were there
for, but he couldn’t think of another reason they might be there. He wasn’t
sure how he felt about their presence.

On the one
hand, he wanted to believe that the aliens’ message was intended for the whole
of humanity, and that it should be shared. He was happy that he’d had to shout
the coordinates to the news cameras or risk losing them for that reason. At the
same time, Professor Brewster was kind of right: Kevin was the one who had been
able to translate the alien signal, not the others, and he wanted to at least see
the escape capsule now that he had.

“We’ll just
have to be the first to it,” Professor Brewster said, although Kevin suspected
that it was going to be easier said than done. He couldn’t see how they were
going to get through the airport any quicker than the others, or get to the
jungle quicker, or even search quicker.

They tried,
though. Kevin would have laughed at the sight of a dozen sets of scientists
conducting a strange kind of race through the Bogota airport, except that he
had to keep up with them all, trying to find gaps in the press of people and
making sure that he didn’t lose sight of his mother at the same time.

“This way!”
Professor Brewster called, leading the way toward what looked like a rental car
desk. “Hello, we need to rent… let’s see, probably a dozen off-road vehicles
and a small truck.”

“I’m sorry,”
the woman at the desk said. “As I told the last gentleman to ask for that, it
is simply not something that we keep here at the airport. Most people… well,
they do not need this for their vacation, you see?”

“This is not a vacation,”
Professor Brewster declared. “This is a scientific expedition of the utmost
importance!”

“Even so.”

Dr. Levin
stepped in. “Come on, David, you know we’ll need to rest first, and then we can
work on the actual expedition after that.”

“And meanwhile
the Canadians will be getting ahead of us!” he complained. “How did they even
get here so fast?”

There didn’t
seem to be an answer to that, but Kevin found himself swept up as they made
their way from the airport to the spot where the American embassy stood
waiting, looking like a large gray block in the middle of Bogota.

The ambassador
was waiting for them within. He shook Professor Brewster’s hand, and then shook
Kevin’s, much to his surprise.

“I got the call
that you were coming from the President a couple of hours ago. It will be a
little cramped with so many of you here, but I’ve had rooms prepared for you
all, and I’m working to arrange transport for your team to the rainforest. You
should be aware that the Colombian government isn’t entirely happy about this,
but we’re working to smooth the way for you.”

It didn’t sound
good that the government of the country where they were looking didn’t like
them being there. By that point, Kevin was too tired to worry about it. He fell
asleep almost as soon as the embassy staff showed him to a room, and didn’t
wake up again until he heard Professor Brewster’s voice shouting from outside.

“Come on,
everyone! The embassy has managed to get us some transport, and we need to be
ready to go before everyone else beats us to the prize!”

Kevin did his
best to get ready in a hurry. Even so, by the time he got out there, most of
the others were already ready. Professor Brewster had acquired a khaki shirt
and trousers that made him look the way someone might think an explorer looked
if they’d only ever seen pictures of them. His mother was wearing her normal
clothes, augmented by a wide sun hat. Ted just looked like Ted.

“Quickly,”
Professor Brewster said, clapping his hands. “Quickly! We can’t allow anyone
else any more of a head start.”

He hurried off,
trying to get everyone out of the hotel.

“Will everyone
else already be at the capsule?” Kevin asked Ted. Professor Brewster might be
in charge of the expedition, but Ted was the one who knew what he was doing.
Half of the people there already seemed to be looking to him to find out what
to do.

The former
soldier shook his head. “I doubt it. The rainforest at night is tricky. It’s
easy to get turned around, even without the wildlife. The sensible move was for
everyone to stay put overnight, then move this morning.”

Kevin guessed
it was also the move they’d all made, at least if the sold out hotels were
anything to go by. There must be people from all around the world trying to
find the escape pod, and all because of the numbers he’d managed to translate.

“Well, kid,”
Ted said. “You’ve brought us this far. I guess it’s time to find out what’s at
the end of all of it.”

They went
downstairs, to where it turned out that the embassy had managed to find them
trucks and SUVs, a couple of old Jeeps, and a few older cars.

“Just stay
close,” Ted said, as he picked out a Jeep and jumped into the driver’s seat.

They drove,
sticking together in a convoy that snaked back at the speed of the slowest car,
which was, Kevin thought, pretty slow. A part of him didn’t mind that too much,
because Colombia was beautiful. More of him wanted to curse the slow vehicles
and the increasingly pitted roads, because he wanted to see the vessel the
aliens had used to carry themselves. He wanted to see the outcome of everything
he’d done.

They kept
going, and as they got nearer to the area of rainforest the coordinates pointed
to, the roads got worse. Then, as trees started to hem the road in on either
side, they were blocked entirely by traffic, and it took Kevin a few moments to
realize what was going on.

A truck lay on
its side in the middle of the road, another having dents in it big enough to
suggest a collision. There were more trucks and cars all around, with people
standing there waiting, or trying to work out what to do, or arguing in a dozen
languages. Kevin recognized some of the people there, and he knew who they had
to be.

“Aren’t they
the other research groups?” Kevin asked, as they pulled up. He saw Ted nod, but
before the former soldier could say anything, Professor Brewster was there,
moving up from another vehicle.

“Why are we
stopped?” he asked.

“You can see
why,” Ted said.

“But can’t we
just drive around them?” Professor Brewster asked.

Ted gestured to
the trees that grew close by either side of the road. “If you can do it, be my
guest.”

Professor Brewster
looked as though he might say something, then shook his head and set off to
join the argument.

“Do you think
it will make any difference?” Kevin’s mother asked.

Ted shrugged.

Ahead,
Professor Brewster started arguing with half a dozen other people, some
pointing fingers as they tried to work out exactly who was responsible for
dealing with the problems there. Since Kevin couldn’t imagine the research
institute’s director settling for talking to someone who wasn’t in charge, he
guessed that the other people there arguing on the muddy road must be directors
of their own organizations. Sometimes adults made no sense.

He jumped down
from the Jeep, as much because he wanted to see what was going on as because he
actually thought he could help. He walked forward to where two or three people
were arguing over a winch, while a crowd of bored-looking scientists and
soldiers looked on.

“If you have a
winch, why isn’t anyone using it?” he asked.

A man with a
thick Scandinavian accent answered. “Because it is our winch, and our director
doesn’t want us helping others to get to the… object first.”

“But that’s
stupid,” Kevin said.

“Kevin,” his
mother said, catching up. “All of these people are very clever. They probably
all have PhDs.”

“They’re still
being stupid,” Kevin said, and he was surprised to find them looking at him
rather than just ignoring him. They knew who he was, he realized, and they
seemed to be looking at him as if waiting for him to decide what to do.

“Why don’t you
just work together?” he asked.

“I told you,”
the man who’d spoken before said. “We can’t let them use our winch until—”

“Not the
winch,” Kevin said. “The whole thing. The aliens sent their escape capsule to
this planet, not to one country, so why don’t we work together to find it?”

“And see it
taken back to America?” one of those there asked.

“Well, we could
find somewhere else,” Kevin suggested. “Somewhere we could all look at it.”

The men were
quiet for a few moments as they started to think. One took out a map.

“There’s a UN
facility a few miles from Bogota,” he said.

Another nodded.
“I’ve done some work there on newly discovered plants. It has good facilities.”

“Our bosses
might still want to argue,” the first said, a little uncertainly.

Kevin had an
answer to that. “Then they can argue while we’re all opening the
alien escape capsule.”

When he put it
like that, the others didn’t seem to want to argue anymore. Instead, they
started to connect up the winch, the researchers who had been standing around
moving in to shift the truck from where it had toppled.

“Well done,”
Ted said as Kevin returned to him. “Not many people could have talked them into
working together.”

Kevin shrugged.
It had seemed like the obvious thing to do.

“What is all
this?” Professor Brewster asked. “What’s going on? Why are they moving again?”

“We’re going to
go find the escape capsule together,” Kevin’s mother explained.

“But no one
authorized that,” Professor Brewster said. “I didn’t authorize that.”

“But it means
that we’re moving,” Kevin’s mother said. “Is it so wrong that we’re working
together?”

“No,” Professor
Brewster said. Kevin guessed that he was just a bit surprised not to be the one
making the decisions for once. “I suppose not. But this doesn’t mean that I
trust them. When it comes to the cut and thrust of academic debate, I wouldn’t
trust those Canadians as far as I could throw them. Be on your guard, all of
you.”

He walked off,
calling out orders to their people, and to some of the other groups as well.
Kevin wondered if anyone was paying attention. He looked over to Ted.

“Should we
be suspicious of the others?” he asked.

The former
soldier shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes you work with people and you
don’t know what they’re going to do down the road. For the moment, only one
thing matters.”

“We’re going to
find the capsule,” Kevin said.

Ted nodded.
“We’re going to find the capsule.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kevin had never
been in a jungle before, but it was nothing like he’d seen on TV. There,
jungles were just a few palm leaves in the background, with plenty of space for
people to run and fight, and they moved quickly. In the real thing, plant life
pressed in on all sides, with only a few tracks worn by animals, and soldiers
having to hack a route for them as they got deeper into it.

They didn’t
show the rain either. That came down as they walked, steadily soaking their
whole party in bursts that seemed to fill the whole world beneath the canopy.

“Is it always
like this?” Professor Brewster called out.

One of the
guides shrugged. “It is called a rainforest for a reason, sir.”

Kevin wasn’t
sure how quickly they were moving, but it didn’t feel that quick. He’d
assumed that, as ill as he was, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rest.
Instead, he trekked along with them, the slowest of the scientists moving far
slower than he did. Maybe it didn’t help that half of them wanted to stop every
few hundred yards to take samples of insect life or unusual plants.

“They can’t
help themselves,” Ted said. He kept pace with Kevin, never more than a few
yards from his side, as if afraid that going further would mean losing him in
the jungle. “Cleverest people you’ll ever meet, but it just means that a place
like this is too full of potential discoveries. They think about being the one
who spots a new species of butterfly, or finds a substance that will cure
cancer, and they forget about how big the thing we’re here to do is. All they
can think about is how full of life the jungle is.”

Kevin couldn’t
blame them, because the jungle was full of life, in a way he couldn’t have
believed. It seemed that everywhere he looked, there were plants he hadn’t seen
before, from the giant trees that formed a canopy to the creepers that wound
their way between them and the lower level things that snatched what light they
could on the jungle floor. There were insects and lizards, small mammals and
occasional rustles in the brush that suggested bigger things.

Oh, and
spiders, big enough that Kevin didn’t want to go anywhere near them. The only
fun part of that was that it seemed Professor Brewster was particularly afraid
of them, jumping so high every time he saw one that Kevin thought he might
reach the canopy.

“What do you
think about when you’re here?” Kevin asked Ted.

“Aside from the
mission?” The soldier shrugged. “Mostly memories of the last time I was here.
You need to be careful, Kevin.”

“I’m not going
to wander off,” Kevin said. Sometimes people treated him like he wasn’t
thirteen. Like he was just… a child or something.

“Not what I
meant,” Ted said. “Things are better after the peace with FARC, but there are
still cartels out there who don’t like people coming into their territory. Even
the army. A collection of different scientific groups? We’d be easy prey for
the wrong people.”

He shot a look
to where a group of soldiers from half a dozen different nations were helping
to clear the way, hacking their way through with the certainty of people who’d
had to do it many times before in other places.

“It’s not just
that, is it?” Kevin asked. “You don’t trust the people we’re working with.”

“After they’ve
spent the last day racing to be the first one there?” Ted shook his head. “But
that’s common enough. We’re all going for something valuable. We have a
valuable asset, in you, because you can translate the signals. Maybe nothing
will happen. Maybe this will all go fine, but you know what they say: hope for
the best, prepare for the worst.”

Put like that,
the jungle seemed a more threatening place than it had before, full of spots
where it might be easy to reach out and grab someone. Kevin did his best to
ignore it.

One thing he
couldn’t ignore was the heat. He’d thought that, since he was from California,
the difference wouldn’t be too much, just a few degrees hotter, at most. He
hadn’t thought about the effects of the rain, which combined with the heat to
turn the whole place into a kind of giant pressure cooker, steam visibly coming
off people as they walked.

“Are you doing
okay, Kevin?” Dr. Levin asked.

He nodded. “I’m
fine.”

“You’ll tell
someone if you aren’t?” she asked. She looked over to where Kevin’s mother was
making her way along the track behind them. “Your mother is pretty worried that
we’re doing the wrong thing, bringing you here.”

“I want to be
here,” Kevin said. He knew that the scientist was just trying to look out for
him, but he wanted to see this. He wanted to find the object that the aliens
had sent to Earth. He wanted to see where everything he’d translated led.

“Well, I just
hope it isn’t too much further,” Dr. Levin said. “You might be fine, but I’m
melting in this heat.”

“Not much
further to the spot we saw,” Ted said, checking a robust-looking GPS readout.
“Just a little more that way.”

They kept
going, finding a clearing to use as a base while they searched. Some of the
soldiers started to set up rough awnings to keep the rain off, while the
different groups of scientists set up equipment that they had carried through
the jungle. They brought out what looked like metal detectors and strange
devices that fit onto small carts that could be pulled by hand. Some set up
enough computing equipment that they could probably have run their usual labs
from there if they hadn’t been so cut off from the world. The strangest part of
it was watching half a dozen sets of nearly identical equipment dragged out

“The object
that came to Earth fell somewhere in this vicinity,” Professor Brewster said,
obviously assuming that he was in charge. “We need to find it. That means that
we spread out and locate the general area of a crash site by looking for
damage, then use our equipment to locate the object.”

“Stay safe,”
Ted said, and Kevin suspected that if he didn’t say it, no one would have.
Professor Brewster would happily have sent people off into the jungle with no
more direction than that. “Always work in pairs, so that if anything happens,
the other one can get help. Stay close to camp, and stay in contact. The jungle
will try to get you lost. Watch out for the wildlife, and don’t go into
any watercourses. There are caiman and snakes in this area.”

The scientists
moved out cautiously, accompanied by soldiers and whatever local guides they’d
been able to find.

“Do we go and
look?” Kevin asked.

Ted shook his
head. “It’s better to wait for now. Let other people do the work of finding it.
You’ll see it soon enough. Now, I’d better go make a phone call.”

He got up,
taking out a satellite phone that would probably work now that they were in the
clearing, with a clear path to the sky. He walked a little way away, talking
quietly. Kevin thought about creeping closer to hear what he was saying, but
something about the way the soldier was talking suggested that it might not be
a good idea.

“I think we’ve
found something!” one of the scientists called out, from within the jungle.

Kevin couldn’t
sit there, and neither, it seemed, could any of the others in the small camp.
He found himself just one of those rushing forward, hurrying to keep up through
the jungle, the soft earth underneath giving way as his feet pushed into it. He
followed the scientists into another small clearing. Kevin had been half
expecting a crater there, surrounded by desolation. Instead, there were just a
few scars on the earth, hinting at something coming through there.

The strange
part was that the trees around it didn’t seem to be damaged. If something had
fallen to Earth in the recent past, shouldn’t there have been damage, wreckage,
even smoldering embers?

Then Kevin
realized that he was thinking about it the wrong way. The aliens had sent their
messages years ago, even traveling at the speed of light. Why would their escape
capsule have only just arrived? Why wouldn’t it have been here years, even
decades, waiting for someone to discover it? He found that he liked that idea,
of something secret waiting there for him to uncover it. It made him feel like
a treasure hunter.

The scientists
had already started to work their way along it, working with their various
devices. From what Kevin could hear, he didn’t think it was going very well.

“I’m not
getting any responses from the metal detector,” Phil called. The researcher had
sweated clean through his Hawaiian shirt by now. “I haven’t heard it this
quiet… well, ever.”

“I’m not
getting any response looking for a heat signature,” another of them called out.

“Well, we
wouldn’t,” Phil called back. “It’s been cooling all the time since it landed,
and we don’t know when that was. What about the magnetometer?”

A scientist
dragging the thing that had looked like a handcart shook his head. “The
ground’s too uneven. I can’t tell if I’m getting signals or just interference.”

Apparently, the
ground-penetrating radar had the same problem, although Kevin hadn’t known
before then that such a thing existed. He didn’t really know how half of the
scientists’ equipment worked; it could have been magic, although he doubted
they would have liked that comparison. From where he was standing, it just
meant watching a bunch of scientists run about with devices and wires, watching
screens or listening to things beep. It was fun to watch, for maybe the first
hour.

“We will just
have to dig,” Professor Brewster said eventually. “It must be here somewhere,
so if we dig up all of it, eventually we will find it.”

It seemed that
“we” in this case didn’t include Professor Brewster, because the institute’s
director made no move to pick up a shovel. Plenty of scientists did, though,
and even a few soldiers helped, attacking the earth around them as if it might
reveal its secrets if they just worked hard enough.

There didn’t
seem to be anything for Kevin to do except wait. He didn’t have a shovel, and
in any case it didn’t seem like the best way to find anything. It was just
digging randomly in the hope that something would happen. It seemed a bit like
digging random holes on a beach in the hope that one would contain a pirate
chest. He stood there instead, trying to keep out of their way as they dug.

That was when
he felt the whisper of connection through the trees, almost indefinable. It
felt a little like the pulse of the countdown within him, except that this
pulsing seemed to get stronger as he took a few steps along the path the
falling escape capsule must have taken. When he stepped the other way, it grew
weaker.

Kevin stopped,
trying to be certain. He didn’t want to say that he knew what he was doing
until he was sure it was more than just some random feeling inside him. What if
it was just the heat?

“It isn’t,”
Kevin told himself, wishing he were as certain as he tried to sound.

Kevin started
forward, trying to follow that pulsing, staying with it as it grew stronger,
picking his way between the trees. Every time it got weaker again, he stopped,
walking around in a circle until he found the direction that felt strongest. It
wasn’t long before he had a clear route, which brought him out onto what looked
like a small deer track. Kevin followed it along until he reached a space where
it opened out to reveal a large natural pool, as wide across as a swimming
pool, its water green-brown. Instinctively, Kevin knew that the object that had
come to Earth was there somewhere, beneath the surface. He could feel its pull
so strongly now that he took a step toward the pool, then another, trying to
remember the reason why he’d been told he shouldn’t do exactly that…

A scaled shape
came up out of the water, teeth snapping in a lunge that sent Kevin
backpedaling, barely fast enough to avoid it. He would have thought of
alligators if Ted hadn’t given them all a warning earlier. This creature’s
snout was too long and pointed, its shape a bit too sleek. The caiman kept
coming, moving out of the water low to the ground, its tail dragging an
S-shaped track behind it.

“Help!” Kevin
called. He wanted to turn and run, but he guessed that the moment he tried to,
the thing would be on him. Instead, he continued to back away, while the caiman
advanced with a growl that promised that Kevin would be its next meal. Kevin
felt the press of a tree against his back and knew that he’d missed the trail,
which meant that the caiman was gaining ground. It opened its jaws, showing
what seemed like endless teeth—

The roar of
gunfire came, so loud against the jungle that Kevin thought he might go deaf.
The caiman made a hissing sound of pain, then slumped. Kevin slumped too, only
the tree holding him upright as Ted moved into view with a rifle raised to his
shoulder. He only lowered it once he seemed certain the beast was dead.

“Are you okay?”
he asked.

Kevin managed
to nod, in spite of the fear that still gripped him. “I think so.”

“What were you
doing? I thought I told you not to wander off.”

Kevin wanted to
say that he wasn’t a little kid. Instead, he nodded to the pool of dark water.
“I had to, I sensed… I think that it’s in there.”

He saw the
soldier blink, then look toward the water. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Kevin
said. “I don’t know how I’m sure, but it’s there.”

To his
surprise, Ted didn’t question that any further, just called for the others.
They came, in just as much of a hurry as when they’d found the initial signs of
damage. They weren’t quite as quick to plunge into the water, though, obviously
afraid of what might still lurk there. Eventually, Ted and three other
soldiers, two Scandinavian and one American, stepped into it, wading around
with a tarpaulin for a net.

“We have
something,” Ted called back, and they wrapped it around the thing, hauling
together to lift it, dragging it from the water. It seemed to take forever, and
Kevin found himself expecting something huge as they worked to pull it out, a
dozen of the scientists moving to help them.

When it finally
rolled out from the tarpaulin onto the ground, it wasn’t what Kevin expected at
all. He’d been thinking it would be bigger, for one thing. His imagination had
told him that there would be a vehicle bigger than a car, maybe close to the
size of a house. He’d thought it would be silver and shining, or so black that
it looked like the space through which it had flown.

Instead, a
perfectly round sphere of rock sat there, still slimy with the water, but
smooth beneath. It looked as though someone had fired a rocky bowling ball
across the universe, or perhaps shot it out of some great cannon toward the
Earth.

Even so, the
scientists clustered around it until Kevin could barely see it because they
were so many of them.

“Is this it?”
Professor Brewster asked. “Let me through, let me through. Have we found it?”

“We found
something, definitely,” Dr. Levin said. She sounded as though she was trying to
force herself to stay calm, not get too excited. “Now we just have to work out
exactly what.”

Ted was shaking
his head. “Before we do any of that, there’s at least one other thing that we
need to do. We need to get it back.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kevin didn’t
want to take his eyes off the rock while they carried it back on a kind of
stretcher, not entirely sure what to make of it as they walked it back through
the jungle to their base camp. He was both excited and puzzled, caught between
the joy at having found what the alien signals had pointed them toward and the
surprise of it not being the great silvery spaceship that he’d imagined it
might be.

It felt weird,
having actually found it, even though they’d all come here to do exactly that.
It felt as though it shouldn’t be there, but it was, and now Kevin could barely
contain his excitement at the possibility of seeing what lay inside.

“We’ll open it
up when we get it back, right?” he asked Dr. Levin, who seemed to be looking on
with the air of someone waiting for Christmas.

Beside him, Dr.
Levin nodded. “That’s the idea. There will be a lab waiting for us at the UN
compound outside Bogota, and we’ll see what’s inside.”

He could hear
her trying not to get too excited by it all. In fact, most of the scientists
there seemed to be just as happy to have found this strangely smooth rock as
they would have been if they’d found some kind of intact alien spaceship,
bristling with advanced technology. Maybe it was just that they were
scientists, and a rock seemed more real somehow to them. They were
probably used to testing rocks from outer space, being from NASA, while
spaceships seemed impossible to them.

Even so, Kevin
was hoping that things would be a lot cooler once they opened it up. Maybe
there would be alien technology inside, or messages left in it like a message
in a bottle. Unless the aliens were really tiny, he doubted that there were any
in there, but maybe they were that small, or they’d found a way to fit more
into spaces than they should hold, or something.

Whatever it
was, it would be amazing.

They walked
back to the space where they’d left the trucks, and already, there were
scientists there packing away their gear. It seemed as though they were as eager
to get back and open up the rock they’d recovered as Kevin was. When they were
getting the equipment out they’d been delicate with it, but now they
practically threw it into the back of the vehicles.

“We should get
into the trucks,” Dr. Levin said. “We’re almost ready to go, I think.”

Kevin nodded,
starting to go back to the Jeep. He saw Professor Brewster along the way, and
was going to run around him, but to Kevin’s surprise, the NASA institute’s head
actually looked happy. He was practically dancing in place with excitement.

“We found it,”
Professor Brewster said. “We actually found it. This is… I know I’ve been hard
on you, Kevin, but it was only because I wanted to be certain of this. Ever
since I was… well, since I was your age.”

Kevin could
hardly believe it; he had never expected Professor Brewster, of all people, to
have a childlike optimism.

He ran back to
the Jeep where Ted and his mom waited. For possibly the first time since this
had begun, his mother had the kind of wonder on her face that told Kevin she
finally understood this, that she wasn’t just doing it for Kevin’s sake. Ted
seemed a bit less obviously happy. If Ted was worried about something, that
couldn’t be good. After all, he’d faced down a caiman with no problems.

It couldn’t
dent Kevin’s happiness, though. All the scientists had come in with their
testing machines, and he’d been the one to pick out the spot where the alien
capsule sat. It felt as though it was his somehow because of that, even while
it sat in a truck twenty yards away, guarded by a mixture of scientists and
soldiers of different nations. It felt as though whatever happened from now on,
it would be down to him.

“What do you
think will be inside the capsule once we open it up?” Kevin asked.

Ted thought
about it for a few seconds

“They could
have sent a time capsule full of information. Maybe they’re hoping that someone
out there has the technology to bring them back from what happened to them.
You’d have to ask the scientists. They’d know more.”

Maybe they
would. At the very least, most of them seemed to be talking about it, so that
the convoy’s radios seemed alive with speculation in different languages. Kevin
hadn’t heard them as excited as that since the messages began. Maybe it was the
part where they had something more than a signal translated by a
thirteen-year-old boy. Maybe they liked having something solid to prove what
was happening.

Kevin couldn’t
blame them for that. Even though he’d known that what he was seeing was real,
finding the rock had been a kind of relief. It had been proof of just how much
all this meant.

“How long until
we’re at the UN compound?” Kevin asked. He just wanted to get there now, so
that they could get on with looking.

“That depends,”
Ted said. “We’ve already seen how tricky the roads can—damn it.”

For a moment,
Kevin thought there must be another blockage across the road. Then he saw the
ribbon of uniformed figures there holding guns.

He stared at
them in shock. Kevin could hear the chatter of the others on the radio as they
saw what was happening. Even Ted seemed tense. Although not surprised. He
looked, if anything, as though he’d been expecting this.

“Too late to
reverse,” Ted said, slowing the Jeep. “There’s too many people behind us. Looks
like we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

He brought the
vehicle to a halt, turning to Kevin. “They look like Colombian military rather
than one of the cartels, so this should be okay, but if it isn’t, stay here and
keep your heads down. Understood?”

“Yes,” Kevin’s
mother said.

Ted looked to
Kevin. “Understood?”

“Okay,” Kevin
said. What did the former soldier think he was going to do? “Um… they aren’t
going to shoot us, are they?”

“Probably not,”
Ted said.

“Probably not?”
That didn’t sound very reassuring. Kevin would have preferred “definitely not”
or even “don’t worry about it.”

Ted nodded to
where Professor Brewster was already making his way to the front of the convoy.
“I suspect it depends on who we let do the talking.”

He jumped down,
and Kevin could see a bunch of other figures moving past too, either eager to
help, or wanting to show that they had some kind of authority there, or maybe
just wanting to see what was happening.

That was
certainly the reason he started to get out of the Jeep.

“Kevin,” his
mother said. “Ted told us to stay in the vehicle.”

“I know, Mom,”
he said, “but I don’t think it will make a lot of difference if there’s some
kind of fight.”

“Kevin!” his
mother said again, as Kevin hopped down from the Jeep and started forward. He
heard his mother following after him, but he kept going. He wasn’t going to
miss this.

By the time he
reached the group of armed figures, they were already discussing things in a
tone that sounded dangerously close to violence. Kevin had seen kids at school
when they’d gone past insulting one another, and they didn’t want to back down
because they thought it would make them look stupid. They always had that sense
that they didn’t want to fight, that they were scared and the whole thing was
stupid, but they were going to anyway. Kevin had never expected to hear adults
sounding like that, but at least some of them did.

“…And I am
telling you, Professor, that this is Colombia’s sovereign territory,” an
older man was saying to Professor Brewster. “If this artifact had fallen on US
territory, are you telling me that you would permit us to take it away as you
are trying to?”

“No, of course
not, General,” Professor Brewster snapped back. “Because we have the
finest scientific facilities in the world.”

“Are you
impugning the quality of Colombia’s scientific program?” the general asked.

“I’m saying
that it doesn’t have a tenth of the resources that we do,” Professor Brewster
replied.

That didn’t
seem to impress the other man. If anything, it only seemed to annoy him.

“So that’s it,
is it? The USA is the biggest and richest, and so we must all bow to what it
wants?” Kevin saw him shake his head. “We’ve had enough of that in the past.
You think I don’t recognize some of the men here from the past?”

“When we were invited,”
Ted said, moving up to them. “General Marquez, I didn’t hear you complaining
when we were here helping your country against the cartels.”

“And now you
are helping yourselves,” the other man said.

“We made
contact through diplomatic channels,” Professor Brewster said. “We told you
that we would be coming.”

“But you did
not wait for permission,” General Marquez said. Kevin had the feeling
all of this was heading downhill fast, and he was caught in the middle of it
with adults arguing around him. Adults who definitely wouldn’t listen to
someone like him, and who seemed to be determined to argue and shout until it
all turned into violence.

“If you’ll give
me a minute, sir,” Ted said, “I’m sure I can get our president on the phone for
you, and yours.”

“So that they
can agree that we should do what you want in return for some minor concession,
some empty promise?” the general demanded. “Our president is a good man, but
this is a military matter.”

“It’s looking
like it might become one,” Ted said. The strange thing to Kevin was that he
didn’t raise his voice, even in the middle of a dangerous situation like that.
Professor Brewster was sweating, and Kevin could feel his own nerves rising,
but it seemed that the former soldier was just… calm.

It was a
dangerous kind of calm, though, and it worried Kevin almost as much as the rest
of it.

“I will make
this simple,” General Marquez said. “The artifact you are transporting belongs
to the Colombian people. We will be taking possession of it. If you attempt to
stop us from doing so, you will be arrested and imprisoned. Now, step back.”

He made a move
toward the first of the trucks in the convoy, obviously intending to check it
for signs of anything alien.

“I can’t allow
you to touch that truck, sir,” Ted said, and now, somehow, there was a weapon
in his hand, pointed directly at the Colombian general.

Instantly,
there were more guns pointing than Kevin had seen in his life.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kevin tried his
best not to look scared as dozens of weapons pointed his way. It wasn’t easy.
Most of the Colombian ones seemed to be pointed at Ted, but since Kevin wasn’t
standing that far away, the distinction didn’t make much difference to him.
Soldiers on their side, meanwhile, had taken the opportunity to level their own
weapons at the Colombians. What had been a one-sided thing had turned into a
dangerous standoff in a matter of seconds.

“You’re still
outgunned,” General Marquez said. “If you fire, you would all die.”

Ted shrugged.
“With respect, sir, you would die first.”

He moved so
that the general was between him and the other Colombians.

“You think I
care about that?” General Marquez demanded. “Something like this is more
important than you, more important than me, and I still have superior
firepower.”

“Then it’s a
good thing I called in air support,” Ted said.

“You’re
bluffing,”

But Kevin could
hear the sound of rotor blades in the distance, and it seemed that so could
everyone else. It should have made him feel safe, but as far as he could see,
it made the whole situation more dangerous. It just increased the number of
people who might decide to open fire at the wrong moment.

Sure enough, a
helicopter came up over the trees, looking angular and spiked with weapons.
Kevin found himself thinking of the phone call Ted had put in earlier. He’d
expected this to happen, or at least something like this. He looked up at it,
then around at all the men with guns pointed at one another. Another few
seconds, and there might be bullets flying everywhere.

So Kevin did
the only thing he could do, and stepped between Ted and the general.

“Get out of the
way, Kevin,” Ted said.

“You should
move,” General Marquez agreed.

Kevin shook his
head. “No.”

“Kevin!”
his mother yelled from further back, but a couple of the researchers caught her
arms as she started forward. “Get away from there!”

Kevin didn’t
move. He looked from Ted to the Colombian general, staying between the two of
them while above, the helicopter hovered in a constant threat.

“You’re both
being idiots,” Kevin said. It wasn’t how you were supposed to speak to adults,
certainly not ones who were that heavily armed, but as far as Kevin could see,
it was only the truth.

“You don’t
understand what’s going on here, Kevin,” Ted said.

“He is right,”
General Marquez agreed. “You do not understand the implications of this.”

Why did adults
always think that they were the only ones who understood things? Why did they
think that kids like Kevin were stupid?

“You don’t want
a bunch of people from outside Colombia coming in to take what’s yours, or to
tell you what to do,” Kevin said, “because you think it’s like them saying that
they’re better than you. And Ted doesn’t want to give up the capsule
partly because he thinks that we’ve done most of the work of finding it, partly
because he thinks it will make us look weak if we let it go, and partly because
he has orders and he’s the kind of person who will follow them no matter what.
It’s all stupid.”

Ted cocked his
head to one side. “Kevin’s not entirely wrong. I do have orders.”

“And I don’t
want to see Colombia insulted by having this artifact taken by the
Americans,” General Marquez said. “You have already interfered in our country
too much.”

“So you’re both
just being stubborn,” Kevin said. It felt wrong, talking to the two adults like
this, but it was just the truth, and anyway, if he didn’t, they were probably
all going to be shot. It seemed like a good reason to keep going, so he
gestured to the scientists. “Look at all the different countries here working
together. If they can do it, why don’t you?”

“What do you
suggest?” General Marquez asked.

Kevin had an
answer for that, at least. “We were going to take the capsule to some UN
place…”

“The WHO center
there,” Ted supplied.

“So why not do
that?” Kevin asked. “It would look as though it was all happening because you
allowed it, and you could be there when we opened it up. Everyone would see
it.”

“Including the
cameras,” Ted said. He lowered his weapon. “I hear you’re thinking of making a
move into politics, General.”

The general was
quiet for several seconds while he considered it, and Kevin thought he
understood some of it now.

“It wouldn’t
make you look weak,” he said. “It would make it look as though you were
responsible for giving this to the world. This was sent to Earth, not to one
specific country. It’s for everyone. It’s not something that anyone can own.”

General Marquez
thought a little more, and then nodded. “Very well.” He called out to his men
in Spanish, and they lowered their weapons. “We will accompany you to the UN
compound, and we will watch this artifact opened up there. You have been very
brave, young man.”

Kevin felt a
flush of pride at that, although one glance back at his mother’s face told him
just how much trouble he was in for putting himself in harm’s way. Ted put an
arm around his shoulders, leading him back toward the Jeep.

“Well done,” he
said, “but don’t ever do anything that stupid again. We could have all been
killed.”

They could
have, but they weren’t. Better than that, as the trucks started to roll on
again in their convoy, they were going toward a place where they might finally
find out what it was that the aliens had sent to Earth from their world.

“We’re going to
get to open the capsule,” Kevin said. He couldn’t keep the excitement out of
his voice.

“We are,” Ted
agreed, and for once he sounded almost as excited as Kevin. “We’re going to see
what the aliens sent us.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Kevin kept his
eyes on the truck that held the capsule all the way back to Bogota. He felt
almost like, if he took his eyes off it for a moment, one of the different groups
that had spent so much time arguing over it would try to take it.

“It’s not going
to disappear,” Ted said. “You did a good job convincing everyone to work
together on this, Kevin.”

Kevin wanted to
believe it, but the capsule had almost come out of nowhere, hadn’t it? Why
wouldn’t it find a way to disappear the same way? Why wouldn’t they be left
staring at an empty space, just as they hoped for all the secrets that the
aliens had prepared for them?

“It will be
okay, Kevin,” his mother said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve already
done the hard part.”

Kevin
understood that, but even so, he watched the truck. It wasn’t just about
wanting to make sure nothing happened. It was more the promise of it, and the
need to wait. It felt like waiting for Christmas morning and a trip to the
doctor’s office, all rolled into one. He didn’t take his eyes from it until he
could see Bogota up ahead.

“The UN
facility is just a little further,” Ted said, pointing.

The building
ahead of them looked about fifty years more modern than most of the buildings
around it, built of glass and steel, while the houses that surrounded it seemed
kind of quaint and old-fashioned. There was a compound around it, complete with
soldiers in blue helmets. They made no move to stop the convoy as it rolled
toward the compound, and Kevin guessed that the people in it must have called
ahead to let them know what was coming.

That meant that
there was no chance of bringing it there quietly. Already, UN staff were
standing there, looking at the convoy as it pulled in, while Kevin could see
what looked like reporters stuck behind a barrier, barely being kept back by
the presence of the soldiers. They pointed cameras, and flashes went off as the
convoy ground to a halt. Kevin dared to breathe a sigh of relief. They’d made
it here. They had the capsule.

He watched as a
group of strong-looking researchers carried it inside, covered with a blanket
so that the cameras wouldn’t see too much of it.

“I wish they
didn’t have to hide it away,” Kevin said.

Ted looked from
the capsule to the cameras. “Something tells me that they won’t be able to do
it for long. Come on, let’s go inside.”

Kevin hopped
down from the Jeep and then set off with Ted, his mother, and all the others
into the UN compound. He wasn’t surprised to find more reporters, who had
obviously decided to give up the chance for a first picture to be in a better
position to shout questions once everyone got inside.

“Is it true?”
one shouted. “Have you found an alien spaceship?”

Professor
Brewster seemed to think it was obvious that he should answer, stepping forward
to do it. “Hello, I’m Professor David Brewster of NASA. We have found something
out in the rainforest, but for the moment, we’re not able to say exactly
what it is. My people won’t be answering any questions about it at the moment,
but there will be a press conference shortly, where we will be publicly
examining the artifact that we found.”

The press
continued to fire questions his way, but Professor Brewster ignored them,
walking toward the compound’s main building. Kevin and the others hurried to
keep up with him.

“We’re really
going straight into a press conference?” Dr. Levin asked. She didn’t sound
unhappy about it to Kevin, just surprised.

“Things have
progressed quite quickly,” Professor Brewster said. “Arguments about who got to
work on the rock were becoming quite… vocal.”

Kevin had hoped
that after everything on the road, the scientists might be able to get along
better than that.

“It was decided
that the only way to prevent further issues is to deal with the situation here.
There will be a press conference to announce it, and, since so many of my
colleagues are pushing for it, we will be seeking to cut into the rock to
discern the contents.”

“You’re
actually going to open it?” Kevin asked. He hadn’t been sure if they would or
not.

“Under strictly
controlled conditions,” Professor Brewster said. “We can’t risk potential
contamination, either of the rock or the surrounding environment. The room in
which we perform the opening will be a sealed space.”

He went off to
organize it, and Kevin could feel his excitement building.

“They’re
actually going to open it,” he said with a grin. That was so cool.

“And we get to
be a part of it,” Dr. Levin said.

“Will they need
Kevin to be a part of the press conference?” Kevin’s mother asked.

“Probably,” Dr.
Levin said. “He deserves to be, don’t you think?”

Kevin’s mother
nodded. “He does. After all this, he does.”

***

The press room
was a big conference room, obviously designed to hold large numbers of people.
Even so, it felt cramped as Kevin entered it, so packed with reporters and
researchers that it was almost impossible to squeeze through them all. A screen
had been set up on the far wall, showing a white-walled laboratory, in which
the capsule sat on a metal table, flanked by a trio of researchers. They wore
white plastic suits that Kevin guessed were to stop them contaminating the
capsule. They wore face masks too, and goggles.

At the front of
the conference room, there was a long table with a variety of serious-looking
men and women sitting behind it. Kevin recognized some of them from their
expedition, and General Marquez was at the center of them all. Kevin, Dr.
Levin, and Professor Brewster went up to join them.

“Thank you for
coming, everyone,” Professor Brewster said. “As you probably know by now, we
have recently returned from a scientific expedition into Colombia’s rainforest.
During that expedition, we located the object that you can see.”

“What is it?”
one reporter called out.

“Where did it
come from?” another demanded.

Professor
Brewster paused before he answered that. Kevin wondered what it must be like
for him, having to say something that sounded impossible, even as he knew that
it was true.

“We have reason
to believe that this rock is a capsule sent by an alien civilization,”
Professor Brewster said.

Gasps came from
around the room, and all of the reporters started to ask questions at once.
Professor Brewster raised his hands for silence.

“You will be
aware by now that NASA has been receiving communications from an alien
civilization,” he said. “These have been decoded by Kevin McKenzie, and based
on them, we were able to locate this… object.”

He gestured to
Kevin, and almost instantly, Kevin found himself blinded by the flashes of
dozens of cameras.

“With the
cooperation of the Colombian government, and an international team of
scientists,” Professor Brewster went on, “we recovered the object and brought
it here.”

He made it
sound as if it had all been a lot more peaceful than it was, but Kevin guessed
that was the story that they all wanted to tell, of working together and
helping one another. It didn’t seem like a bad story, if it encouraged people
to actually do it next time.

“We are going
to perform preliminary tests on the object,” Professor Brewster said. “And,
subject to the results, of course, we will open the capsule in line with the
messages we have received.”

Again, a buzz
of excitement ran through the room. One certainly ran through Kevin. All this
talking was frustrating now. He wanted to get to the point where they actually
opened up the capsule and saw what was inside. He tried to imagine what would
be in there, but the truth was that it was impossible to imagine. There could
be anything from information coded on a hidden supercomputer to vials of living
material… anything.

“Kevin,” one of
the reporters shouted. “What do you think all this will mean? Will you keep
getting messages? What impact do you think it will have on humanity?”

“I don’t know,”
Kevin answered. “I guess… I guess I’d like this to be kind of a new start for
people. If we know that there are aliens out there, I guess we’ll have to think
about who we are.”

There would be
so many changes in the world, and the saddest part of it was that he probably
wouldn’t be there to see most of them. Even that thought couldn’t push aside
the excitement. He wanted to see what was inside the rock. He thought just
about everyone did, by then.

“If there are
no more questions,” Professor Brewster said, “we will commence the process of
testing.”

He signaled to
the scientists on the screen, who started to work with devices Kevin didn’t
know the names of. Kevin found himself holding his breath while they did it.

“X ray seems
inconclusive,” one of the scientists said. “It might be solid, but it’s hard to
tell what a normal result should look like for an object like this.”

“Spectrometry
suggests a composition consistent with a beyond Earth origin,” another said.
“Similar to several meteorite compositions on our database.”

Kevin felt his
hopes rise with that, while another ripple of noise went around the room. It
seemed that the reporters there wanted to find out what was inside the capsule
just as much as he did. Or almost as much, at least. Kevin couldn’t imagine
anyone wanting to know as much as he did then.

“Given our
preliminary data,” Professor Brewster asked the scientists on the screen, “is
there any reason why we should not attempt to open the object?”

To Kevin, he
sounded like he was trying to sound as calm and authoritative as possible.
Kevin mostly just wished that they’d hurry up. He wasn’t sure how much longer
he could sit there, waiting for them to do the one thing that they all knew
they wanted to do.

“There are no
obvious dangers,” the scientist on the other end of the video link said. “The
structure of the rock appears sufficient to survive the process, and the
appropriate safety precautions are in place.”

It sounded like
a very long-winded way of saying that they could do it, to Kevin, but the main
thing was that they were saying it.

“Very well,”
Professor Brewster said. “Begin cutting into the object.”

He nodded to
the scientists on the screen, and they went over to the rock, clamping it in
place so that they could work on it. One came back with an electric saw that
looked too big for one person to hold. It looked like the kind of thing that
could cut through concrete or metal with ease.

Kevin
half-expected it to bounce off the surface of the rock in spite of that. He
thought that an alien capsule tough enough to make it all the way from the
Trappist 1 system should be tough enough to stand up to a saw.

The saw bit
into it, though, sparks and dust flying as it chewed through the rock.

“We’re getting
some resistance,” one of the researchers said. “We might have to switch to a
heavier blade.”

They kept
going, first making an incision around the rock as if expecting it to fall open
like an Easter egg the moment they did so, then plowing into it with the saw
when that didn’t happen. They kept going until dust almost filled the screen,
only clearing slowly, showing two halves of the capsule split neatly.

Kevin stared at
that image, and he guessed that everyone else there and around the world was
staring in that moment, trying to make sense of it. He looked at it until his eyes
hurt, trying to pick out the details that would tell him what the aliens had
sent to them. What was inside the capsule? What had been so important that
they’d sent it light years away, to a completely different world?

He stared at it
in hope first, then in disbelief.

What he was
seeing simply didn’t make sense.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Around the
room, Kevin could hear the murmuring of the scientists and the reporters as
they started to realize the same thing Kevin did.

The inside of
the “capsule” was just a solid, rocky surface. There was no hollow, no sign of
any advanced technology. The rock that the scientists had just cut through was…

…well, it was a
rock.

Instantly,
there was uproar, as a hundred reporters shouted questions simultaneously. On
the screen, the scientists were looking just as shocked, standing there as if
they didn’t know what to do next.

“How would you
like us to proceed, Professor Brewster?” one asked. “Professor Brewster?”

He didn’t
answer. From what Kevin could see, he was too busy standing there red-faced,
not knowing how to respond.

“Professor
Brewster, what’s going on?” a journalist called out above the others.

“Is this some
kind of joke?” another managed to shout.

“Why is this
rock empty?” a third yelled.

Kevin could see
Professor Brewster looking around as if there were someone who might have all
the answers for him. He looked so embarrassed in that moment that Kevin
actually felt sorry for him.

“I… I don’t…”
Professor Brewster said. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but there has been some
kind of mistake…”

***

Kevin had never
been as disappointed as he felt on the flight back to San Francisco with the
others. They were going to head back to the institute, because they had
equipment to take back, and because Professor Brewster had said something about
wanting to do a proper debrief there. Right then, though, a part of Kevin just
wanted to run home and hide.

He sat there,
hoping for the sensation that would come before a signal, hoping that there
would be some kind of answer, an explanation, but there was nothing. There hadn’t
been for so long now it was hard to remember that the signals had been real,
that they hadn’t just been a figment of his imagination. He huddled in on
himself, not sure what to think, or what to do right then.

Perhaps it was
the headphones, but no one bothered him there. His mother sat beside him on the
plane. Everyone else seemed to keep their distance, even people like Phil, Ted,
and Dr. Levin, as if someone had warned them against getting too close, telling
them that it would hurt them now by association with Kevin’s failure.

It was his.
He’d been the one to decode all the signals. He’d been the one to lead them to
South America, and then to the spot where the meteorite lay in the small lake.
Something had gone wrong somewhere, and Kevin couldn’t help feeling that he’d
been the one to get it wrong.

“Don’t blame
yourself,” his mother insisted, obviously guessing what Kevin was thinking
about. “You couldn’t know it would turn out like this. Maybe we should all have
been more careful about going along with it.”

That sounded as
though his mother was blaming herself for ever taking Kevin to SETI in the
first place. Maybe she was thinking that she should have been firmer about it.

“I don’t know
what went wrong, Mom,” Kevin said. “I mean, I heard the signals. And we
found the capsule right where they said it would be.”

“We found something,”
his mother corrected him gently. “Maybe we were all so eager to find it that we
assumed we knew what it would be. We all got ourselves convinced.”

Except that it
had been Kevin who had convinced them, because he’d been the one hearing the
signals. They were real. They’d come through the institute’s listening
equipment. Everyone had heard them. If so, why hadn’t the capsule been where it
should be?

“What will
happen to the capsule now?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know,”
his mother said. “I think I saw them loading it onto the plane. I guess no one
cares who owns it now that it’s just a rock. That doesn’t matter right now,
though. The important thing is that we get you back safely.”

Something about
the way she said that told Kevin that his mother was worried about being able
to do it. She sounded as though she was expecting trouble, and Kevin couldn’t
understand why.

He understood
once they landed, though, stepping down from the plane and then out into the
arrival lounge. Almost as soon as they did, a wall of voices hit him, camera
flashes going off everywhere.

“Why did you do
it, Kevin?” one reporter called out.

“Tell us all
that it’s not a hoax!” a man near the back shouted.

“We believed in
you!”

There were
reporters there, but there were other people too, some with placards, some just
shouting. None of them looked happy to see Kevin there. They mobbed around the
scientists, pressing in as they started to unload their gear. The meteorite was
in amongst it somewhere. Now that there was no sign of aliens, no one cared if
they took it back to the NASA facility.

“Is it right
that the public pays for all this when you are going off to Colombia to chase
rocks?” one reporter called out. “Don’t you think that this is a waste of money
that could be spent on schools or the military?”

People came
forward, still shouting questions, and for a moment or two, Kevin found them
pressing in on all sides. He lost sight of his mother in the crush, and then it
was like he was drowning in the camera flashes, the questions coming so fast as
to be almost deafening.

“Why did you
lie, Kevin?”

“Was this just
to get attention?”

“Was it all
about your illness?”

Kevin kept his
head down, not knowing what to say. He looked for a way through the mob, but
everywhere he looked there were people looking at him with accusing
expressions. Some grabbed for him; not the reporters, but they were happy
enough to take pictures as the people with the signs did it.

“Fraud! Liar!”

Kevin huddled
in further, and he felt as though at any minute he might fall to the ground
under the weight of them all, pushed down by the sheer numbers of people around
him. Another hand fastened onto him, but this one kept hold, pulling him
through the crush. Kevin saw Ted there, pushing back anyone who got too close,
his hand up to get in the way of the camera flashes.

“Keep moving!”
he called out above the noise. “There’s a car waiting outside!”

Kevin did his
best, not stopping as Ted carved a path through the reporters like someone
pushing their way through deep snow. Kevin hurried to fit into that space
before it closed up again, following as they fought their way forward, toward
the airport’s main entrance.

“Out here!” Ted
said, pointing to where a minivan stood waiting, Kevin’s mother and half a
dozen scientists already inside. There was a brief moment of space there, and
Kevin ran for the vehicle, jumping in beside his mother. She clung to him as if
afraid that if she let go he would disappear. For once, Kevin didn’t complain.

Ted drove,
fitting into a convoy of vehicles that felt as tense, in some ways, as the one
through the rainforest had. Kevin saw cars drive up close, their windows
rolling down to reveal more cameras, but Ted kept driving.

It seemed to
take forever before they reached the NASA facility. The crowds that had
surrounded it before were still there, but now they weren’t curious, they were
angry. Kevin could hear them shouting as they drove in, and when Ted stopped in
front of the doors to the institute, Kevin ran inside without hesitation. He
didn’t even try to talk to them, to explain. He wasn’t sure that he had an
explanation. Instead, Kevin just ran back to his room in the facility. He ignored
his mother when she followed, sitting there hoping that somehow, some of it
would make sense.

When it didn’t,
he went to one of the recreation rooms and used a computer there to call the
one person who might understand what was happening to him.

Luna looked
worried when Kevin called, and Kevin could guess why.

“You saw the
broadcast,” he said.

“I think everyone
saw the broadcast,” Luna replied. “I don’t get it. I thought that there was
supposed to be some special… I don’t know, alien stuff.”

“I thought so
too,” Kevin said. “Now… I’m sure I got the signals right.”

“Don’t start
that,” Luna said, in her firm voice. “Don’t start doubting all of this. I was
there when you saw the numbers, remember? I know that this is real.”

It felt good to
be believed, particularly by Luna. There was something reassuringly solid
about Luna’s belief. It was the kind that people could have built on,
unwavering and strong. Kevin needed that right then.

“You might not
want to go back to your house right now,” Luna said. “You know how there have
been reporters around it since this started?”

Kevin nodded.

“Well, now
there are like twice as many, plus a bunch of other people who don’t look
happy. It’s like a mob or something.”

“It’s because I
gave them a dream,” Kevin said. “And they think that I lied to them.”

“Well, they
shouldn’t blame you,” Luna said. “I mean, I was watching that broadcast. That
Professor Brewster himself said the rock was from outer space.”

That wasn’t
enough, though, was it?

“I don’t think
that will make things better,” Kevin said. “They’ll say it was just some random
meteorite. There are plenty of those.”

In fact, he
suspected that it would make things worse, because if there was one person who
didn’t like being made to look stupid, it was…

“Kevin,” his
mother called from the doorway. She was standing there with Phil. “You need to
come with us. Professor Brewster wants to speak with you and me.”

Kevin
swallowed, because that sounded far too much like when the principal wanted to
talk to someone at school.

“Looks like I
have to go,” Kevin said to Luna.

“Okay,” Luna
replied. “Just remember, this isn’t your fault.”

Kevin tried to
remember that as he made his way with his mother and Phil through the facility.
Ordinarily the researcher might have joked around, but now he had a serious
look, and barely said anything, just opening the doors ahead of them as he had
to. When they got to Professor Brewster’s office, Phil didn’t say anything,
just turned and left.

“What was that
about?” Kevin asked his mother.

“I think a lot
of people are hurt by how angry people are at them,” she said. “They all
believed that they would find aliens and… they didn’t, Kevin.” She took his
hand. “You’ve got to be prepared. I… I don’t think this will be good.”

They went into
Professor Brewster’s office. He was waiting for them, sitting behind his desk,
looking formal, even imposing. He didn’t say hello as they came in, just
gestured for Kevin and his mother to sit down in two chairs in front of his
desk.

“Kevin,” he
said, “Ms. McKenzie, we need to talk.” He paused, looking at Kevin as if trying
to see into him. “Kevin, I need to ask you, did you make all of this up?”

“How dare you
ask my son that?” his mother demanded, half rising out of her chair. “Kevin is
not a liar.”

“Please sit
down, Ms. McKenzie,” Professor Brewster said. “Kevin, did you make this up?”

Kevin couldn’t
believe that he was asking that.

“No,” Kevin
said, shaking his head.

“Are you sure?”

“This is
uncalled for,” Kevin’s mother said. “You have no right to ask this.”

Professor Brewster
steepled his fingers. “Given the amount of money that the government has put
into this project, not only do I have the right to ask it, I have the obligation.
Kevin?”

“You heard the
signals,” Kevin said. “I didn’t make it up!”

“I heard
signals, yes,” Professor Brewster said. “But you were the only one who could
‘translate’ them, and space is full of electromagnetic oddities.”

“I didn’t make
it up,” Kevin said. “I gave you the numbers for the coordinates. I gave you
information about the planets that no one else knew.”

“Which you
could have memorized,” Professor Brewster said. He looked at Kevin’s mother.
“Maybe you were coached.”

“Are you
accusing me of something?” Kevin’s mother shot back.

“I’m just
noting the possibility,” Professor Brewster said. He sighed. “As are many other
people. The truth is that you came to us and we threw resources at you that we
should not have. We provided you with healthcare, testing… and now I have
important people calling me to ask if that was all a trick.”

“It wasn’t,” Kevin
insisted. Why were people not believing him now?

“Then why was
there nothing but rock when we cut into that ‘capsule’ of yours?” Professor
Brewster asked.

“I… don’t
know,” Kevin admitted. There should have been more. He didn’t understand it.
“You said that it was from space.”

He saw
Professor Brewster wince at that. “Don’t remind me. I put my reputation on the
line in backing you, Kevin. I stood up in front of people and told them that
you were real. But many rocks are from space. At any one time, the Earth is
peppered by fragments from space. We have meteorite hunters who sell them over
the Internet. The fact is that this one didn’t have any evidence of the aliens
you promised.”

Kevin tried to
remember what Luna had said. “That isn’t my fault.”

Professor
Brewster put his hands flat on the table, shaking his head. “The truth is, that
doesn’t matter at this point,” he said. “The fact is that your presence here
has become toxic for this facility. Powerful people were expecting results from
us, and we weren’t able to deliver them. Already, I’ve had calls suggesting
that our funding will be cut if we don’t sever all ties with you at once.”

Kevin tried to
make sense of that. “You… you’re sending me away?”

Professor
Brewster was stony-faced. “I don’t know if you faked all this or not, but I’ll
say this: already, the FBI is looking into whether you and your mother have
committed crimes through your actions here. The best thing that you can do
right now is to leave, both of you. You will take nothing with you, and you
will receive a bill in due course for any medical services we provided.”

“Come on,
Kevin,” his mother said. “We’re leaving.”

She managed to
make it sound like something they were choosing to do, rather than something
they’d just been all but ordered to do. She marched angrily along the corridors
that led from the building, and if Kevin hadn’t been able to see the tears at
the corners of her eyes, he might have believed that she really was just
furious and not hurt.

They walked
past Dr. Levin, who half turned away from them. Kevin stopped in front of her,
hoping she might be able to work all of this out.

“Dr. Levin…” he
began.

The SETI
director didn’t give him any time to finish. “I’m sorry, Kevin. I heard what
happened.”

“You could talk
to Professor Brewster,” he said.

Dr. Levin shook
her head. “I don’t think David would listen to me right now. I lost a lot of my
credibility around here, bringing you to them.”

“But I’m not
making this up,” Kevin insisted.

Dr. Levin
sighed. “I know you believe that, Kevin,” she said. “It’s just… maybe I should
have checked things more carefully. Maybe you found out about things another
way, and didn’t even realize.”

“I didn’t,”
Kevin insisted.

His mother took
his arm. “Come on, Kevin. We’re done here. We’re going to go home.”

She led him
away from Dr. Levin, and when Kevin looked back at the scientist, Dr. Levin
wouldn’t look at him. The two of them kept going to the exit and out through
it, into the noise of the questions being shouted from every angle.

To his
surprise, Ted was waiting there, standing by Kevin’s mother’s car. He must have
brought it around for them.

“Are you here
to question my son’s honesty too?” Kevin’s mother asked, moving between him and
Ted.

To Kevin’s
surprise, or maybe not, Ted shook his head. “Nothing like that. I just wanted
to talk to him.”

Kevin’s mother
looked as though she wasn’t sure, but Kevin put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay,
Mom,” he said. “I trust Ted.”

He’d trusted
lots of the scientists too, though. He looked up at Ted.

“I didn’t make
this up,” he said.

“I never said
you did,” Ted replied. “People change what they think to fit in. They get
disappointed because things don’t work out, and they look for someone to blame.
They start thinking that proof they’ve seen with their own eyes must be a
trick.”

He held out his
hand and Kevin took it. “Thanks, Ted.”

“You stay
safe,” Ted said. “And… try not to let the things they’re going to say get to
you too much, okay?”

“Okay,” Kevin
promised.

He couldn’t see
how he could avoid it, though. He’d promised the world aliens and he’d failed.

He’d failed.

Was he a fraud,
after all? Had he unconsciously imagined the entire thing?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There were
reporters surrounding Kevin’s house when they got back. Reporters, and
protestors, and even a few police, obviously there to keep the rest of them
back. Kevin kept his head down in the passenger’s seat of his mother’s car,
hoping that no one would see him, but there was no real hope of that. The
moment they saw the car pulling up, the mass of people surrounded it, and the
car practically shone with the glare of the camera flashes.

“When I open
your door, don’t stop,” his mother said. She got out, and Kevin braced himself.

She pulled open
the door on his side, wrapping a protective arm around Kevin even though he was
taller than she was.

“Get back,” she
yelled at them. “Get off my property.”

The reporters
pulled back a little, but the press of people barely slackened. Kevin held
tight to his mother as they fought their way through. The cops there yelled for
people to get back, but they didn’t make any move to help the two of them
physically. Kevin got the feeling that they were probably just as upset as
everybody else about what had happened. How many of them had believed that they
were about to talk to aliens directly? How many of them now hated him because
the capsule hadn’t been what they expected?

He and his
mother pushed their way forward anyway, shoving past people who grabbed at
them, demanding answers to questions Kevin didn’t have an answer for.

“Why weren’t
there aliens?”

“Why did you do
all this?”

“Do you know
how many people you’ve hurt?”

Kevin saw his
mother turn to them angrily, and he tried to pull her back, but it was too late
to do anything about it.

“Leave my boy
alone!” she shouted. “He hasn’t done anything wrong here. He’s ill!”

They pushed
their way into the house, shutting the door behind them. Kevin saw his mother
bolting it the way she might have if she thought that people were going to try
to break in. She went through the house, drawing the curtains, blocking out the
flashes of the photographers along with the light.

Kevin went over
to the TV, turning it on. The news was running, with pictures of their house
from the outside, and a short clip of his mother that made her look like a
madwoman as she pushed reporters back.

“Leave my
boy alone. He hasn’t done anything wrong here. He’s ill!”

The words An
admission of the hoax? played across the bottom of the screen, in a
question that managed to accuse without accusing. They made it sound as if
Kevin’s mother were trying to excuse him doing something wrong, rather than
standing up for him as she had been.

She had been,
hadn’t she?

“You should
turn that off,” his mother said. She stepped past Kevin, doing exactly that,
sending the screen into darkness. “It won’t do any good watching them saying
all this about you.”

“Mom,” Kevin
said, “what they’re saying… They’re making it sound like you don’t really
believe me. Like you think I’m making things up because I’m ill.”

His mother
didn’t answer for a moment or two.

“You do think
that,” Kevin said. He couldn’t believe it. He’d thought that his mother, of all
people, would believe him at this point.

“I don’t know
what to think, Kevin,” his mother said. She sounded so tired then. “I know that
you believe all this.”

“We found the
signal,” Kevin insisted. “You defended me to Professor Brewster.”

“You’re my
son,” his mother said. “I won’t let them say bad things about you, no matter
what happens. Whether it’s true or not… I don’t know. I was convinced, but
everything with the rock…”

Kevin felt sick
inside. He felt as though things were back to where they had been when his
mother had first taken him to SETI, doing it only because she thought it was
something Kevin needed to do. He didn’t want her to do things because she was
his mother and she felt she had to. He wanted her to believe him.

“They’ll go
away eventually,” his mother said. “They’ll forget about all of this. We can
get on with our lives without them, without aliens, without any of it.”

She sounded as
though she was trying to reassure Kevin, but Kevin wasn’t sure that it was all
that reassuring.

He might have
said just that, but his mother’s phone rang then.

“Hello,” she
said. “Who is… No, I don’t have anything to say to you or any other reporter.”

She’d barely
hung up before there was another call, and another. Each time, she hung up
after only a few seconds of conversation. When the phone rang again, Kevin
thought that his mother might throw her phone across the room. She paused as
she held it up though, looking at the screen with a worried expression.

“What is it,
Mom?” Kevin asked.

“It’s work,”
his mother said, and something about the way she said that told Kevin just how
scared she was. She took the call, gesturing for Kevin to be quiet. “Hello, Mr.
Banks. Yes, it is pretty bad. Yes, I know I’ve been off, but my son… yes, I
know. No, I understand that, but… You can’t do that. I know it’s bad publicity,
but you can’t…” She fell silent, listening for several seconds. “No, I
understand.”

She finished
the call, and this time she did throw her phone, sitting down on the
edge of the sofa, her head in her hands.

“Mom?” Kevin
said, reaching out for her. “What happened?”

“That was my
work,” she said, without looking up. “They… they fired me. They said that they
don’t want the negative publicity that might come from employing someone linked
to all this.”

“Can they do
that?” Kevin asked. It didn’t sound like the kind of thing people should be
allowed to do, especially when they’d done nothing wrong.

“They say they
can,” his mother said, “and if I fight it, well, I’m pretty sure that they’d
make it so expensive I couldn’t do anything, and maybe a judge would agree that
I’m causing their business problems by being there anyway.”

It didn’t sound
fair to Kevin. It didn’t sound right. Worse, it didn’t sound as though there
was anything they could do about it.

“I’m sorry,
Mom,” he said. “If I’d just kept all this to myself…”

“It isn’t your
fault,” his mother said.

Kevin knew that
wasn’t true, though. Thanks to the TV, he knew his mother didn’t even think
that. He’d gone to NASA talking about aliens, and now his mom was getting
fired, while no one even believed him about what he’d heard.

“It will be
okay,” his mother said. She didn’t sound as though she believed it. “We’ll find
a way to make all of this right.”

She sat there
on the sofa, not putting the TV on, neither of them daring to open the
curtains. Eventually, Kevin went up to his room, sitting there in the dark so
his mother wouldn’t worry about him quite as much.

After a while,
he took out the headphones that Ted had given him before he left the institute,
putting them on more to shut out the sounds of the reporters outside than
because he truly thought something would happen. Maybe he did hope for it. If
he could get another message that would help to make sense of all this, maybe
he could go out to the reporters there and explain it all. Maybe he could make
people understand again that it was real, and that he hadn’t been
lying.

There was only
silence, though. No signal, no words in his head, no sign of anything that
would help. Taking off the headphones, Kevin threw them aside and settled down
to sleep. Maybe in the morning, things would look better.

***

Kevin went over
to his bedroom window, looking out the way he might have if he’d been looking
for snow anywhere other than California. He was looking for journalists, hoping
that by now, several days later, they would have gotten bored with waiting
around the house and gone home.

They hadn’t.
There were still cameras out there in front of the house, still reporters with
microphones waiting for whatever the next step would be in their story. Kevin
wished that they would go away, and thought for the hundredth time about going
down there to tell them to do just that, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the same
thing as translating the messages while people watched in a press conference,
and anyway, Kevin suspected that was just what they were waiting for.

Instead, he
went to get dressed, and staggered slightly as a wave of dizziness hit him.
Pain followed, flaring through his skull, and Kevin felt wetness against his
lips. When he put his hand to his nose, it came away red with blood. He even felt
sicker today, the effort of going to the bathroom and cleaning up almost
exhausting him.

He still did it
though. He didn’t want to worry his mother. He made sure that he looked okay
when he went downstairs, and tried to hide the faint tremor in his hands that
wouldn’t go away now.

He hadn’t
realized until then just how much care he’d been getting in the research
institute. He’d complained about all the tests and the scans and the rest, but
maybe somewhere in all of that there had been something that had been slowing
down his illness. Or maybe he’d just been so busy he hadn’t noticed its
progression.

“I can’t worry
Mom,” he told himself.

When he went
downstairs, he could hear voices.

“I’m sorry, Ms.
McKenzie, but this is not a joke. Proceedings are being brought against you for
using your son to defraud people, and we need to take them seriously.”

Kevin hurried
down there, and saw a couple of people in suits talking to his mother. She
looked as though she hadn’t slept at all, and when she looked over at Kevin, he
could see the purple shadows around her eyes.

“Ah, here’s
your son now,” one of the men said. “Maybe we could take a statement from him
now, and that might help.”

“No,” his
mother said, “not now, not like this. I just want people to leave my son
alone.”

“I don’t mind,
Mom,” Kevin said.

“Well, I do,”
his mother said. “Go into the kitchen, Kevin. I need to talk to these people.”

If she’d
shouted, Kevin might have argued. Instead, she just sounded incredibly sad, and
Kevin did as she asked, going through to the kitchen and sitting there at the
kitchen table. All the time, he tried to listen to what was happening through
the walls.

“I’ll have to
sell the house,” his mother said. “What this will cost… I can’t think of
another way.”

“I understand
that this is difficult, Ms. McKenzie, but it is important that we deal with it.
The alternative could involve imprisonment, for you, or for your son.”

Kevin’s fingers
gripped the edge of the kitchen table hard enough that it hurt. They couldn’t
do it, could they? They couldn’t throw his mother in jail, when he’d been
telling the truth. He sat there, part of him wanting to burst in there, part of
him knowing that it was all far too important to do that.

He was still
sitting there when he saw the figure sneaking into their backyard, a beanie hat
covering their head, a thick coat pulled up to obscure their features. They
leapt over with the grace of someone who had done that kind of thing plenty of
times before, landing neatly in the yard.

If it had been
a reporter or some stranger clambering over the fence, he didn’t know what he
would have done. Called for help, probably. Interrupted his mother in spite of
the seriousness of what was happening. Instead, he unlocked the back door,
letting Luna into the house as she hurried over.

“Hey,” she
said, hugging him so suddenly that it almost took Kevin by surprise.

“Hey,” Kevin
replied. “I’m guessing you couldn’t get here the front way?”

“Too many
reporters,” Luna agreed, stepping back. She pulled away the beanie cap. “Like
my disguise?”

“It’s great,”
Kevin said, but he couldn’t bring himself to smile.

“What’s wrong?”
Luna asked. She shook her head. “Stupid question.”

Kevin went to
sit back down, Luna joining him. How many times had they done their homework
like that? This felt different, though, more serious.

“There are
lawyers in the other room,” he said. “They’re saying that my mom might go to
jail, and that we might have to sell the house.”

“What for?”
Luna demanded, in the kind of indignant tone that said she was ready to fight
them off, lawyers or not. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“They think I
did,” Kevin said. “They think… I guess they think that I made all of this up to
get attention, or to con them into giving me medical treatment, or something.”

“Then they’re
idiots,” Luna declared, with the kind of iron-hard certainty that no one else
around him seemed to have. “You gave them messages from another world. You told
them all about a planet they would barely know anything about otherwise. You
helped them find the meteorite thing, even if it was empty. It isn’t
your fault that aliens are weird and send rocks to people as presents.”

That was a way
of looking at it Kevin suspected that nobody other than Luna could manage. Even
so, it felt good.

“So, you
believe me?” he asked.

She nodded. “I
believe you. I believe in you too. You’ll find a way to deal with this.”

“And you
climbed over my fence just to tell me that?” Kevin asked.

Luna put a hand
on his shoulder. “What are friends for? I like sneaking in. It’s fun. Besides,
I need to take you somewhere.”

Kevin looked
back at her in surprise.

“Where?” he
asked.

She smiled
wide.

“It’s a
surprise.”

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

Kevin checked
how he looked in the mirror before heading out. It wasn’t vanity; he wanted to
make sure that there was no possible way anyone could recognize him. He had his
hoodie pulled up over his head, dark glasses on to break up some of the lines
of his face. It wasn’t great, but if he hunched in enough then he could almost
convince himself that people wouldn’t be able to tell that it was him.

“It will have
to do,” he said to himself.

His mother had
left the house a few minutes before, out talking to more lawyers, or maybe
trying to find another job, not that anyone wanted to hire the mother of the
boy who’d lied. The doors were locked against the continued presence of the
reporters out front, and would probably stay that way even after she got back.

“She’ll be mad
if she finds out I did this,” Kevin said, but that was part of why he was
wearing the disguise. He’d been sitting in the house too long, with no school
because of his illness, no chance of going out because of both the reporters
and his mother’s fear of what might happen. He was going crazy there, and he
suspected that was only making things harder for his mother. He needed to get
outside at least for a while.

His phone was
full of messages from people he didn’t know. Some were questions, more were
insults. One or two held threats, or promises that they would pay Kevin if only
he would tell them his story.

Kevin wasn’t
sure that he wanted to be careful then. He felt as though he might explode if
he stayed hiding out for much longer. He looked out the back, trying to judge
if he could get out of there the same way Luna had gotten in. A few weeks ago,
he wouldn’t have had to worry about it.

Now, he thought
about the tremors that came and went in his body, the moments of losing time
and the dizzy spells. He fetched a stepladder from where his mother kept it in
the garage, setting it up against the fence and using that to climb over, to a
small path that ran between yards.

Kevin kept his
head down as he went along, making sure that no one saw his face. Even though
the part of town where he lived wasn’t a bad one, it was just a few blocks to a
more industrial area, where factories stuck up like fenced-in boxes, and
occasional rusted out machinery pointed to the businesses that hadn’t done so
well.

“Come on,” Luna
said, after they hopped the fence, setting off at a walk that took them through
some of the abandoned buildings, past graffiti that looked as though it had
been painted with someone’s eyes shut.

They came out
closer to the center of town. Kevin kept his hood up, sure that even here, away
from his house, people would spot him.

“We could go to
the mall,” Luna suggested.

Kevin shook his
head. “Too many people.”

“The square
then,” Luna suggested.

Kevin nodded.
There might be almost as many people there in the middle of town, but they
would be moving on more, less likely to notice a kid keeping his head down. In
the mall, security would probably think he was there to steal something, but
out in the open, he and Luna could walk where they wanted without it being a
problem.

They headed
into the heart of town, for a small square where they and their friends had
hung out since they were kids. There was a smaller block of park there, with trees
at each corner, and a statue in the middle that had probably once been a
monument to someone very important, but had now been worn by the wind and rain
until it could have been anyone. By the time they got there, Kevin was so
exhausted that he started looking around for a bench to sit down on.

“Kevin,” Luna
said, “what’s wrong?”

“I’m just
tired,” Kevin said.

Luna frowned,
obviously not believing it. “Well, we could always go to Frankie’s.”

The diner had
been one of their favorite places for a long time. Maybe if he hadn’t been so
exhausted, Kevin might have been worried by that, but as it was, he could do
with somewhere to recover a little from the effort of the walk. He nodded.

“I thought you
managed to go trekking through the jungle,” Luna said.

“I think things
are getting worse,” Kevin said, as they made their way toward the diner. “It’s
like I have to concentrate to make my body do things.”

Even that
wasn’t putting it right, but he wasn’t sure there were words for it. That was
one of the hardest parts about having such a rare illness: it meant there
weren’t really the words to describe everything that was happening.

“You should go
to the hospital,” Luna said, and she sounded as if she wanted to call for an
ambulance right away.

Kevin shook his
head. “There’s no point. We know what’s happening to me. It’s not as though
they can do much to help.”

“That can’t be
true,” Luna said. For a moment, Kevin heard her voice catch and he thought that
maybe she might cry. “I know… I know they can’t cure you, but they can help
with the symptoms and things, right? They can slow things down? They were doing
it in the NASA place.”

“Because they
had some of the cleverest scientists in the world,” Kevin pointed out. “I don’t
think they’re going to want to help now. And… if I go to the hospital now, I
think it would cost too much. I don’t think Mom could really afford my
treatment even before all this. Now, with the lawyers and stuff…”

Kevin didn’t
know how much a court case cost. A lot, he guessed. His treatment cost a lot
too. Was that twice a lot, then? A lot squared? When he had no idea of the
amounts involved, his imagination couldn’t even begin to supply the amounts.

“Okay,” Luna
said, “but we should at least get inside. Come on, Frankie’s isn’t far.”

They went into
the diner, which wasn’t busy at that time of day. There were a few kids Kevin
half recognized, a couple of older guys in one corner, and the owner, a
fifty-something man who seemed to spend most of his time wiping down the
counter with a cloth. It was a deliberately old-fashioned kind of place, and it
should have meant that Kevin’s friends didn’t like it, but it also had great
ice cream.

“I’ll go get
ice cream,” Luna said, pointing to a corner booth. “You sit down.”

She made that
into an order, and Kevin did it. He needed to sit down anyway, and if it meant
that Luna was buying the ice cream, that was even better. There was a TV on in
the corner of the diner, and for a moment or two, Kevin thought that was okay.
Then the news came on, and the pictures of the scenes around his house
continued.

Kevin did his
best to ignore it, but it wasn’t easy. That the channel was still there at all
was kind of surprising; maybe someone still believed, or maybe they just hadn’t
gotten around to looking at something else yet. Either way, he sat there,
hunched in on himself. It was hard to imagine that just a few weeks ago, he and
Luna had come here regularly; that everything had been normal. Now, he was
sitting here, and as far as Kevin could tell he was pretty much just waiting to
die.

That was a
thought he didn’t want, but it crept in when he wasn’t looking, sitting down in
his mind and refusing to budge, no matter how he pushed at it. He was going to
die. He’d been able to ignore that while there had still been all the stuff with
the aliens, the messages, and the trip to the rainforest. Now, there was
nothing to do but sit there and think about it.

“Well,” Luna
said, coming back with two glasses filled to the brim with ice cream, “you look
miserable. Better cheer up, or you’re not getting ice cream.”

Only Luna would
make fun of him when he was like this. Only Luna would know that it was exactly
what Kevin needed.

“You’re just
looking for an excuse to have both,” Kevin said.

Luna smiled.
“Maybe. You’re still stuck thinking about what you could have done
differently?”

Kevin nodded.
“I don’t know why. I guess… I just keep hoping it will make sense.”

“Hope is good,”
Luna said. “I think it’s good you’re still listening. You shouldn’t give up,
even if people don’t believe you.”

Kevin nodded.
He needed this. He needed something to hold onto, otherwise—

“Hey, wait,
you’re Kevin McKenzie, aren’t you? The boy who made up all that alien stuff?
You used to go to our school.”

Kevin looked
over to find that some of the kids were looking his way. He was about to tell
them that he didn’t want trouble, but Luna was already on her feet, moving
toward them.

“Kevin didn’t
make anything up!”

“Of course he
made it up,” one boy said. “Who would be stupid enough to believe in aliens?”

“You and
everyone else, apparently,” Luna snapped.

“Are you
calling me stupid?”

Kevin got up,
joining her. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“So why did you
do it then?” a girl at the back demanded. “My parents were so worried about
aliens coming that they were talking about selling our house and moving out
into the countryside.”

More people
were staring at them now, and people had their phones out. Kevin knew he
couldn’t be seen here like this. His mom would go crazy. Besides, he’d seen
what large groups of people could be like.

“We’ll just
go,” Kevin said, holding up his hands. “We don’t want to cause a problem.”

“You’re not
going anywhere,” the boy who’d spoken first said. “Not until you admit what you
did.”

He stood there
with his arms folded, looking like he meant it. That was a problem, because the
longer they stayed there, the more people would be watching. Luna seemed to be
thinking the same thing, and, being Luna, she took a more direct approach to
the problem:

She walked up
to the boy in the doorway and pushed him, hard.

“Run, Kevin!”

She was already
running, and it took Kevin a moment to realize he should be doing the same, but
only a moment. As tired as he had been, he was recovered enough now to
run past the boy, following Luna as she ran out into the middle of the town. He
ran as fast as he could, ignoring the way his breath came in short bursts,
trying to keep up as they retraced their steps, heading back through the
factories and past the rusting metal. Kevin ran until he felt that his heart
might explode in his chest, his lungs burning.

When it was
obvious that no one was following, he and Luna came to a halt, and to his
surprise, Kevin found himself laughing.

Luna laughed
too. “That was fun.”

“My mom is
going to kill me,” Kevin pointed out, but right then, even that didn’t sound so
bad. The truth was that he felt better than he had for days now. It felt like
so long since he’d done something as simple as getting into trouble with Luna,
running away before it could turn into anything worse.

“Your mom will
be fine with it,” Luna said.

“I’m not so
sure about that,” Kevin replied, because she would be angry that he’d gone out
like that, angry that he’d risked everything by going where people might see
him. “When I get home, I’m going to have to…”

He trailed off
as a feeling started to rise through him. A feeling he knew far too well,
because it had been there before the facility, before NASA, before all of it.

“What is it?”
Luna said. “What are you going to have to do?”

Kevin shook his
head. “Luna, I think…”

“What?” she said.

“I think
there’s another message coming through.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kevin stood
among the factories, listening to the transmission as it started to come. He
struggled to latch onto the message. That was hard at first; harder than it had
been, and harder than Kevin suspected it should be.

He started to
worry. What if whatever it was in his brain that connected with the
transmissions had changed, shifting with the slow progress of his illness? What
if there had only been a brief window when his brain was receptive to it all,
and now it was starting to pass beyond it? He tried to concentrate, focusing on
the sounds and willing them to make sense.

An image burned
in his brain, numbers shining there in neat rows of coordinates. Kevin wouldn’t
have recognized them as that, but he’d seen strings of them before, when he’d
known to shift the telescope the first time to pick up the stream of the
message.

“Kevin?” Luna
said. “Are you all right?”

Kevin didn’t
know how to answer that. The strange part was that he felt better than he’d
felt in days, maybe some interaction between his illness and the message making
the symptoms feel better for the moment.

“I don’t know,”
he said. “I think… I think the aliens want us to look for signals in a new
place.”

It was what they’d
wanted the last time he’d had a signal through straight to his brain like this,
the power of it almost impossible to hold. It had been the beginning of all of
this.

“So who do we
tell?” Luna asked.

Kevin must have
stared at her too long in the wake of that, because she spread her hands.

“What? We have
to tell someone,” she said.

Kevin knew she
was probably right. If there was a fresh message, people would want to know.
The problem was that he wasn’t sure how they would react. He’d seen all the
reporters who were still outside of his house. He’d seen the pain that it had
caused his mother. Wouldn’t it be better to just keep quiet and protect her?

“I’m not sure
if anyone will believe me,” he said. “They think that I’m a fake. If I tell
people, then they’ll assume that I’m just trying to get attention.”

People wouldn’t
listen to him now, whatever he said. If he came forward with another string of
numbers, wouldn’t they assume that he was just trying to start it all again?

“We could tell
your mom,” Luna said. “She’d believe you, and she’d know what to do.”

Kevin shook his
head. “I’m not sure she would now, not after all the trouble this has caused.
Even if she did, I don’t know if anyone would listen to her, either.”

“Who then?”
Luna asked. “We have to tell someone. A reporter, maybe?”

That would at
least get the news out into the open, but again, it didn’t feel like the right
idea. If he went to the reporters, trying to explain, wouldn’t they just make
fun of it? He needed to be able to prove it. There was only one place he could
do that, only one place where they might be able to realign a telescope to pick
up whatever new signal awaited.

“We need to
contact someone at the NASA facility,” Kevin said.

Even as he said
it, he could guess how difficult that might be. He took out his phone, trying
to think of the best way to do it. It wasn’t as though he had direct numbers
for any of the people who might be able to help.

He decided to
start with Dr. Levin, because at least the SETI director had seemed more sympathetic
than Professor Brewster. He found a number for SETI online and called it,
listening to it ring and finally getting through to reception.

“Hello,” the
receptionist said. “SETI Institute. How can I help you?”

“I need to
speak to Dr. Levin about an urgent matter,” Kevin said, trying to sound as
grown up as he could. Maybe if he could make it sound as though he was a
colleague or something, they might let him speak to her.

“Who is this?”
the receptionist asked.

“Well… um…”
Kevin looked over at Luna, who shrugged. “This is Kevin McKenzie. But I have to
speak to her right away. There’s been another message, and there’s a second set
of coordinates, and…”

He heard the
click as the receptionist hung up.

“They wouldn’t
even let me explain,” Kevin said. That hurt, that after so much they would hang
up without even letting him say anything.

“We need to
keep trying,” Luna insisted. “Here, let me. We’ll try NASA. They’ve got the
telescopes, after all.”

She rang, and
pressed some buttons. It seemed that she did a better job of sounding older
too, because when she spoke, it sounded to Kevin more like her mother than it
did his friend.

“Hello, I was
wondering if you could put me through to Professor Brewster? It’s quite urgent,
yes. It’s Professor Sophie Langford of the University of Wisconsin. Yes, I’ll
hold.”

Kevin hadn’t
known that Luna was quite that good at making things up on the spot. She thrust
her phone at him, and Kevin took it, just in time for Professor Brewster’s
voice to come onto the other end of the line.

“Hello?”
Professor Brewster said. “Professor… Langford, was it?”

Kevin took a
breath. “Professor Brewster, it’s me, Kevin. Don’t hang up, it’s urgent.”

“What are you
doing calling this number?” Professor Brewster demanded. “And getting through
to me under false pretenses? Don’t you think you’re in enough trouble already,
young man?”

“Listen to me,”
Kevin said. “I wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t important. There are things
you need to know.”

“I know quite
enough about your situation,” Professor Brewster said.

“That’s not
it,” Kevin insisted. “There has been another message! A new set of coordinates.
The aliens said—”

“That’s
enough,” Professor Brewster said. “We all put enough time and effort into
chasing this charade, without trying to revive it. I’m going to hang up now,
Kevin. If you contact this facility again, I will be passing the details of it
along to the police.”

He hung up,
just as firmly as the receptionist had.

Kevin stood
there, trying to work out what to do next. He didn’t have any other phone
numbers to try, unless he was going to attempt to call a journalist or the
White House or something, and in both those cases, he suspected that he would
get pretty much the same response that he’d just had. He could go home and try
to talk to the journalists there, or he could wait for his mother, but both of
those options risked him being ignored, and—

“So,” Luna
said, interrupting his thought process, “how are we getting to SETI?”

“What?” Kevin
said.

“It’s the best
option we have,” Luna said. “If we go to them, they’ll see that you’re serious,
and they’ll be able to persuade NASA to move their telescopes. Dr. Levin always
seemed far nicer than that Professor Brewster anyway.”

When she put it
like that, she managed to make it sound so utterly logical that there was no
arguing with it. Luna had a way of doing that kind of thing that was kind of
terrifying, in its way. Even so, Kevin thought that he should at least try.

“My mom will
kill me if I do something like that,” he pointed out.

“Your mom loves
you too much for that,” Luna said. “Anyway, she’s going to ground you forever
for sneaking out as it is. You might as well save the world while you’re in
trouble already.”

“You don’t
have to get into trouble though,” Kevin pointed out. “Your parents will be mad if
you just go off to San Francisco.”

“You think I’m
letting you do this alone?” Luna demanded. “You think I’m letting you get all
the credit for finding the aliens again? You think I’m letting you have all the
fun?”

“I’m not sure
that it will be exactly fun,” Kevin said.

Luna was
already shaking her head. “You got to go to the jungle without me, but you’re
not leaving me behind for this part, Kevin.”

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

They bought bus
tickets to San Francisco from a clerk who eyed them suspiciously. Kevin wasn’t
sure if it was because the man recognized him from the news, or because he
thought they were probably runaways, or both. They still managed to buy tickets
though, and snagged two seats toward the back of a bus that rattled along half
full in the direction of the city. They huddled in them, and Kevin found
himself grateful that Luna was there. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do this
without her.

The bus journey
seemed to take forever, and Kevin spent most of that time trying to work out
what he might be able to say that would be able to convince them that he was
telling the truth. He couldn’t just ask them to trust him, not after last time.

“Of course you
can,” Luna said when he said as much to her. “You ask them to check the
location of the signal. They might not be able to work out what it means, but
they’ll still hear it.”

She made it
sound easy, but the truth was that it probably was their best option. So, when
the bus got into the station, Kevin set off with Luna, finding a taxi that
would take them in the right direction, trying to ignore the way his body was
starting to shake.

“You going for
the excitement there?” the cab driver asked. “You missed most of it. They
stopped talking about aliens a couple of days ago.”

“Maybe they’ll
start again,” Luna said. “You never know.”

The driver took
them as far as the entrance to SETI. There weren’t the people camped out here
that there were with the NASA facility, and Kevin was happy about that. It
meant that he could simply walk in without people spotting him, or grabbing
him, or—

“You?” the
receptionist said almost as soon as he stepped through the door. “Didn’t you
get the message when I hung up on you? You’ve caused so much trouble here
already. Get out before I call security.”

Before, it had
been Kevin’s mother who had gotten into a shouting match with the receptionist.
Now Luna started forward, obviously spoiling for an argument.

“It’s okay,”
Dr. Levin said, stepping out into the lobby. “I’ve got this. Kevin, what are
you doing here?”

“He’s trying
to get through to you,” Luna said, the irritation easy to hear in her
voice. “But apparently people who have already betrayed him aren’t
willing to listen.”

“Hello, Luna,”
Dr. Levin said. “Do your parents know the two of you are here? You really
shouldn’t be here.”

“There has been
another message,” Kevin said, guessing that they didn’t have a lot of time. He
didn’t feel as though he had a lot of time right then. Maybe it was the effort
of coming all that way, but Kevin could feel the pressure in his head building,
along with a dizziness that made the world swim. He pushed it back. This was
important.

“Kevin,” Dr.
Levin said, “we all know by now that the messages aren’t real. Even if you
think they are, you need to stop this.”

“How did I
know about Pioneer 11?” Kevin demanded. He’d had a whole bus ride in which to
think about what he was going to say, and how he could convince Dr. Levin. “How
did I know where the first signal would be? You saw me do that with your own
eyes, Dr. Levin.”

The scientist
started to shake her head. “That doesn’t matter.”

“It does,”
Kevin insisted. “If you don’t believe the evidence in front of you, then what’s
science for?” He paused. “If you can explain it away, just tell me. Tell
me how I’m doing it, and I’ll turn around and go, but I think that you can’t,
and you can’t, because this is real, and there’s another message.”

He would have
said more then, but he couldn’t hold back the sudden pressure in his head.

Suddenly, he
collapsed.

*

Blackness
claimed Kevin. For once, there were no visions, no messages, and no signs of
anything.

Just emptiness

He woke to
harsh light, blinking, trying to figure out where he was.

Luna and Dr.
Levin were looking down at him.

“Kevin, are you
all right?” Luna asked.

“We should get
you some medical attention,” Dr. Levin said.

“No,” Kevin
managed to say, and for a moment, even he wasn’t sure which question he was
answering. “No more doctors. Don’t call my mom. We have to listen to the
signal.”

He realized he
had collapsed. He was lying on the floor, in the spot he had been standing just
moments before.

He heard Dr.
Levin sigh. He wasn’t sure what he would do if she threw him out. Put the
information on the Internet, maybe? Send it directly to some other observatory
in the hope that they would do something with the information? Probably, he
would be in too much trouble with his mother for that by then. He just had to
stand there and hope.

He saw her
eyeing him with more compassion than she had before; he suspected his collapse
had shifted something within her.

“Okay,” Dr.
Levin said, “okay, I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking about everything from when
you first came here. Unless you somehow managed to take control of all of
NASA’s systems… No, it just doesn’t work. But that means…”

“It means you
believe me,” Kevin said.

Dr. Levin
nodded. “Yes, I believe you. I don’t want to, but I can’t see any other way.
What’s this message of yours?”

“Coordinates,”
Kevin said. “Like the last time we had to change the telescope’s alignment,
only different. They want us to focus on a different place.”

“For messages
coming from a different patch of sky?” Dr. Levin asked. Kevin heard her sigh.
“You know that no one will move a telescope just on my word, right? Not after…”

“After
everything I did?” Kevin guessed.

Dr. Levin
nodded.

“There must be
someone,” Luna insisted, beside them. “Professor Brewster doesn’t have to know.
Or we could find a way to hack in.”

It was
surprising, sometimes, just how little respect for rules Luna could have. To
Kevin’s surprise, Dr. Levin seemed to be taking her suggestion seriously.

“Hacking NASA
is hard,” she said. “To do that, we’d need someone who…”

Then her eyes
brightened with realization.

“Of course,”
she said to herself. “Phil.”

Kevin nodded at
the mention of the scientist’s name. “Do you think… do you think he would
help?”

“He might,” Dr.
Levin said. “He’s our best shot, at least.”

She and Luna
helped Kevin to stand. It took an effort, but he was going to see this through.

“I can’t
believe that I’m doing this again,” she said, “but I guess… I guess we need to
take a trip to NASA.”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

They drove over
to the NASA facility in Dr. Levin’s car. As the three of them drove up, there
were still some people waiting outside, but fewer than there had been. They
made for the gates in Dr. Levin’s car. There was a security guard there,
standing behind a low barrier.

“This could be
tricky,” Dr. Levin said. “I haven’t been back since this happened.”

She drove up
and the guard there held up a hand.

“Can’t come in
here,” he said, holding up a hand. “If I’ve told one of you, I must have told
a… Dr. Levin, what are you doing here? You’re not on the list for today.”

“We need to get
in, Neil,” she said. “I need to talk to Phil.”

“We?” the guard
said. He looked back at the car. “Wait, isn’t that…”

Kevin didn’t
shy away from the guard’s look. Right then, it was their only hope.

“You? You
aren’t supposed to be here. They said—”

“They probably
said all kinds of things,” Dr. Levin said, “but we do need to get in. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Dr.
Levin,” the security guard said. “But I just can’t let you in like this,
especially not if you’re bringing him here.”

Kevin looked
across to Luna, who nodded.

“Please, Neil,
this is vital,” Dr. Levin said.

“I’m sorry, you
need to turn your car around and… Hey!”

Kevin and Luna
burst from the car practically simultaneously,

Kevin darted
past him at almost the same time that Luna did. The man couldn’t make a grab
for both of them at once, and so they managed to slip past the barrier, running
for the doors to the facility even as the security guard turned to run after
them, his efforts hampered by a few of the people who had come there to
protest, and who had clearly decided to follow and see what was happening.

Kevin ran
forward, sprinting for the door. He and Luna were both quicker than the man
was, and they made it to the doors before the guard had covered half the space.
That would probably have meant much more if the doors hadn’t been locked. Kevin
pounded on them, but he didn’t have the security clearance to get through them,
had never had the clearance to get through them, and now the guard was
bearing down on them.

“You’re both
going straight to the police!” he promised as he closed in.

Then the doors
to the facility opened, and both Kevin and Luna stumbled inside a step ahead of
the guard. The door slammed to shut him out, and Kevin looked up at the figure
who had opened the door.

“Ted?” He was
the last person Kevin had been expecting there, but probably also the best
person they could have run into. “You’re still here?”

Ted nodded. “I
had to stay around to answer some questions about all this. But never mind
that. What are you doing here, Kevin?” He looked over to Luna. “You’re both
here?”

“There’s been
another message,” Kevin said.

Where the
others had hung up or looked at him like he was mad, Ted gave him a serious
look. “You’re sure?”

Kevin nodded.
“We need someone who can realign the telescope. There’s another set of
coordinates.”

Ted watched as
Dr. Levin came up, able to get through now that Ted had gotten the guard to
back off. “You were coming to check?”

Dr. Levin
nodded. “I was hoping that Phil might be willing to realign things quietly. The
trick is getting there.”

“I can handle
that,” Ted said. “I’m just supposed to be here to wrap things up, but I still
have full access.”

He took out a
keycard, letting them into the building. Some of the people in the lobby stared
at them as they came in, but no one said anything. Kevin guessed that had a lot
to do with Ted’s presence and that of Dr. Levin.

“We should move
quickly,” Ted said. “Someone will tell Professor Brewster that you’re here soon
enough.”

“Just so long
as we have the new messages by then,” Dr. Levin said.

She led the way
down toward Phil’s office, with Kevin, Luna, and Ted following along behind.
Kevin saw the looks some of the people gave him, heard the muttering as he
passed. They hadn’t forgotten what had happened before. Kevin just hoped that
Phil would be willing to help.

Dr. Levin
knocked on the researcher’s door, and Kevin watched his face as he saw them
there. It moved from recognition to surprise, and then to a kind of worried
understanding.

“No,” he said,
holding up his hands. “Whatever it is, no.”

“We haven’t
even asked you anything yet,” Dr. Levin pointed out.

“But you will,”
Phil said, “and Professor Brewster will hear about it, and—”

“Do you care
what David says?” Dr. Levin countered.

Phil shrugged,
then sighed. “What do you need?”

“We need you to
point the telescopes at some new coordinates,” Kevin said, answering for them.
“I got another message.”

“You want me
to… do you know what you’re asking?” Phil said.

“Look at it
this way,” Dr. Levin pointed out. “If you do this, you’ll get to be the guy who
proved that Kevin was right all along.”

Phil swallowed,
then nodded. “Okay, but we have to do this quietly. Come on.”

He led them
through the facility now, taking them down to a lab space equipped with
monitors and screens. A few taps on the keyboard from Phil, and it started to
show the data from one of the telescope arrays.

“Okay,” he
said, “it looks like we’re set up here. We just… oh, there goes my career.”

Kevin looked
round. Through the doors of the lab space, he could see Professor Brewster
approaching, a thunderous expression on his face.

“What are they
doing here?” he demanded as he advanced. “Stop what you’re doing at once!”

Kevin guessed
that it had been inevitable that someone would tell him that they were here.
He’d just thought maybe they would get a little more time before it happened.

“Looks like
we’re done,” Phil said.

“Not if we do this
quickly,” Kevin replied.

“Not even that
quickly,” Luna said. She ran over to the door, shutting it and wedging a chair
under the handle. “What?” she demanded as the others looked at her. “It’s just
the obvious thing to do.”

“Only to you,”
Kevin said with a smile.

Outside,
Professor Brewster hammered on the glass door. “Open this at once! I shall call
security! Anybody assisting that boy will be treated as a criminal!”

Kevin looked
over to Phil. Without him, they wouldn’t be able to realign the telescope, so
if he decided not to do this…

“Okay,” he
said. “What are the coordinates?”

Kevin breathed
a sigh of relief and recited from memory. As with the first set of numbers,
these felt almost burned into him, there when he shut his eyes so that it was
almost more like reading them than remembering.

“You’re sure?”
Phil asked.

Kevin nodded,
opening his eyes. There were more people outside the door now, gathering around
to watch what was happening, or trying to help Professor Brewster get in there.

“Here we go
then,” Phil said. He pressed another button, and Kevin saw the numbers on the
screen shift as the focus of the radio telescope started to change. They
shifted little by little, the numbers getting closer to the ones he saw, and
closer, until…

The moment they
matched, a signal came through, clear and strong. Sounds started to come from
the system. They had a familiar feel to them, but at the same time they seemed
different from some of the ones Kevin had translated. Less precise and
mechanical, more flowing.

Even so, he
found himself translating them automatically.

“If you are
receiving this, beware,” he translated. “You are in grave danger. The last
messages you received were a trick.”

Kevin could
hear Professor Brewster continuing to hammer on the door, but he kept
listening, and now the translation flowed from him.

“Their
transmissions were a lie, designed to make you open the capsule. It is no time
capsule. It is a weapon. It has destroyed us completely. This is our final
transmission, to warn others not to make the same mistake we did.”

Kevin frowned,
not sure if he was translating it right, but the message wasn’t done.

Brewster and
his team burst through the door.

“What is the
meaning of this?” he demanded—but stopped short as he listened, too.

“Do not make
the mistakes we did. Do not open what they send to you.”

The message
stopped, then repeated, as if it were being sent on some kind of loop.

“Someone wanted
to make sure that we heard it,” Luna said.

Kevin nodded,
trying to make sense of it. He looked over to the adults.

“Where is the
rock?” Brewster asked.

“Downstairs—Lab
3b.”

“Get them on
the phone!” Ted yelled. “NOW!”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Kevin ran,
trying to keep up with Dr. Levin, Luna, and Ted as they hurried through the
NASA institute, trying to get to the space where the rock was being kept. He
could see the shocked looks on the faces of the scientists they raced past,
some of them obviously recognizing him, others probably just surprised that
anyone would run that fast through a serious scientific facility.

Dr. Levin held
out a set of keys to Kevin.

“If this goes
wrong,” she said as she ran, “if there’s something you can’t contain, there’s a
secure space below the facility, on the sub-basement level. One of these keys
provides access to the bunker network, if it isn’t locked down. Use this, and
the elevator should take you straight there.”

“Where is the
rock from the expedition being held?” Ted called out to a group of scientists
as they passed.

“Research Lab
3b,” one of them said. “Why? Is there something—”

They were
already sprinting past, trying to make it there in time. They paused at
security doors, but those only slowed them down a little, opening for Ted’s
security card with green lights and reassuring whooshes of air.

Kevin could
hear Professor Brewster yelling behind them, but he didn’t slow.

They went deep
into the bowels of the building, past laboratories that Kevin had seen while
Phil had been showing him around. He passed the lasers and the growing labs,
the things that promised to give humanity a chance to survive and thrive if
they ever got to another world, and the things that carried the promise of
making this one a better place. Right then, the only thing that mattered was
the threat of what might happen if they didn’t make sure that the rock was
contained.

They paused at
a set of signs, then ran on again, down a set of stairs and into a part of the
building where the only light was artificial. It felt sterile to Kevin,
unwelcoming compared to the rest of the place. The scientists they passed were
mostly in clean suits or lab coats, obviously trying to keep from contaminating
experiments.

When they came
to the lab, Kevin had to admit that it looked like a secure space. It
had toughened glass walls on three sides, while the fourth backed onto the
outer wall of the building. The rock sat in the middle of it, displayed on a
table like an Easter egg that had been cracked in half. Three scientists stood
around it in white plastic clean suits. Two were wearing masks, while one
didn’t seem to have bothered, since he was away from the rock, working with a
microscope.

The glass was
thick, but Kevin could still hear what they were saying while Ted worked at the
lock, trying to get in.

“These samples
are still interesting,” the scientist said. “Even if it’s not anything that we
were promised.”

“Don’t let
Brewster hear you saying that,” another replied. “As far as he’s concerned, the
sooner we can declare that rock worthless and get rid of it, the better.”

“Well, he might
have to wait, this is…”

“What?” the
third scientist asked. “And will you put a mask on? It’s protocol.”

Kevin saw the
moment when vapor started to rise from the surface of the rock. It was almost
clear, and he could have mistaken it for steam rising due to some temperature
change in the rock, but somehow, he knew it wasn’t.

“That keeps
happening,” one of the scientists said.

Kevin banged
his hand against the glass, while Ted kept working on the lock.

“It’s a code as
well as a card,” he said. “I guess it’s because it’s a sealed room.”

“You need to
get out of there,” Kevin called. “You’re all in danger.”

They turned
toward him as he continued to bang his hand on the glass, obviously not sure
why he was there, or what they should do. The two with the facemasks looked
puzzled. The one without…

The eyes of the
one who wasn’t wearing a mask suddenly changed, the pupils turning from black
to white, seeming almost to shine. He stared at Kevin, and there was a kind of
recognition there that hadn’t been present before. There was a kind of hostility
to that look that filled Kevin with fear.

It was
intelligent, and dangerous.

And anything
but human.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

“Get back from
him!” Kevin yelled. “There’s something wrong with him.”

The scientist
spun to the other two and made a grab for them, pulling their masks away before
they realized what was happening. Kevin wanted to call out a warning, but it
looked as though it was already too late. He saw the scientists’ eyes shift,
their pupils turning as white as the others’.

Kevin backed
away from the glass, looking across to Luna. She looked just as frightened as
he felt right then, which probably wasn’t a good sign. Luna didn’t get scared.

Ted looked as
though he was trying to work out what to do too, and that was almost as
frightening. Kevin was used to him having all the answers. He had a phone out
and was making a call.

“We have a
level four breach,” he said into it. “I’m working to contain it, but you need
to start emergency protocols, now.”

There was a
panel on the wall. Ted pulled it open, tapping a series of numbers into a
keypad. He pressed a button, and lights started to flash red along all of the
corridors, while a computerized voice sounded through speakers.

“Emergency,
Emergency. Containment in progress.”

Metal shutters
slid down the sides of all the labs on that level, effectively turning them
into giant metal boxes from which nothing could escape. Kevin heard a roar of
frustration from inside the lab, and he dared to breathe a sigh of relief.

“Have we done
it?” he asked. “Have we stopped them?”

“I hope so,”
Ted said. Despite that, he went to a storage locker, pulling out the kind of
filtration masks that the scientists had been wearing. He passed one each to
Luna and Kevin, then took another for himself.

“What is going
on here? Why is this whole space shut off?”

Kevin turned to
see Professor Brewster approaching, along with Dr. Levin and at least a dozen
others. A security guard had a hold of Dr. Levin’s elbow, looking apologetic
about it, but not letting go.

“You’ve gone
too far,” the facility’s director said, pointing a finger in their direction.
“You had no right to do this.”

“You’re lucky
we did,” Luna said, before either Kevin or Ted could say anything, “because
you’d be surrounded by aliens by now if we hadn’t.”

“Aliens,”
Professor Brewster said with a note of contempt. “Haven’t we heard enough of
this nonsense?”

“Oh, it’s a
long way from being nonsense,” Ted said. “I’ve seen it.”

“It’s true,”
Kevin said. “They can take over people’s bodies. A gas came out of the rock we found,
and it took over the scientists there.”

Professor
Brewster shook his head. “There are many gases that can produce erratic
behavior, and that’s if anything happened at all. We only have your word for
it.”

“My word,”
Ted said, in a tone that dared the other man to contradict it.

That was when
the knocking sounded.

“Knocking”
wasn’t quite the right word for it. That made it sound almost polite, even
delicate, but the sound that reverberated in Kevin’s ears was of something
smashing, hard, against the walls of the room.

“There are
people locked in there?” Professor Brewster demanded.

“The aliens are
controlling them,” Kevin said. “Their pupils turned white when it happened.”

“Probably just
a trick of chemical reaction,” Professor Brewster insisted. “Either way, this
foolishness has gone on long enough. I’m going to release my people, call
security down here, and have all of you removed from this facility.”

He started for
the security panel that Ted had used, and Kevin saw the soldier pull out a gun.

“I will shoot
anyone who touches those controls,” Ted promised.

That shocked
Kevin a little. He didn’t want anyone getting shot because of this. Although,
if it had to be someone from there, Professor Brewster was probably top of the
list. The scientist turned back toward them, his hands raised.

“You wouldn’t
dare!” he said. From inside the steel box of the shutters, the banging resumed.

“Um… I think he
might,” Kevin replied. “Professor Brewster, we can’t let them out of that room.
We have to stop the aliens while we can.”

“There aren’t
any aliens!” Professor Brewster insisted. “You’ve imprisoned my people on a
delusion, and…”

The knocking
stopped, and the suddenness with which it did so made even the facility’s
director pause. Something clicked and whirred, then the lights in the corridor
stopped flashing their dull red, and the steel shutters started to rise.

“That doesn’t
look good,” Luna said.

That was an
understatement. The shutters rose, and Kevin saw the scientists standing there
passively, looking calm as they waited for the chance to be free. Kevin guessed
it made sense that aliens would be able to hack a computer. After all, they had
technology that had sent them halfway across a galaxy. Compared to that, a
computer probably wasn’t very complicated.

“You see,”
Professor Brewster said. “There are no aliens, just three perfectly normal—”

The scientists
opened their mouths, shrieking in unison, a noise that sounded more insect-like
than human, more alien than either. Kevin saw the shock on the expressions of
the scientists around him as they realized that these weren’t their colleagues
anymore.

“Look at their
eyes,” one of the researchers said.

Kevin looked
over to Ted. “We’re safe out here, right?”

“As long as
they can’t get through the glass,” Ted said. “All of you, you need facemasks.
If any of that vapor gets out, you’re all in danger.”

Professor
Brewster looked as though he was trying to gather himself to say that there was
no problem, that it was all fine, but he seemed to be having trouble doing it. He
was still trying to say it when the scientists the aliens controlled picked up
a metal chair and started to hammer at the glass with it like a battering ram,
all three of them working in concert as the sound of it boomed around the
facility.

Cracks started
to appear on the glass. Kevin saw them spread like a spider’s web over the
surface, rippling out and joining with every blow. Ted leveled his gun at the
scientists, but it didn’t make them stop, or even slow.

The glass
broke, and they charged out. Kevin heard Ted’s gun go off, but it didn’t seem
to make any difference. Kevin saw those scientists who weren’t wearing masks
freeze in place, gasping as they grabbed at their throats, then straightening
up. One lunged at a neighbor who was masked, ripping it away and then breathing
out a clear mist that filled the space in front of them. In moments, that
scientist was converted too.

One grabbed
Kevin, ripping away the mask he wore. Kevin tried to hold his breath, tried to
pull away, but there was no way to do it. A foul-smelling vapor stole over him…

…and nothing
happened.

Luna smashed
into the side of the scientist holding Kevin. She was small, but she’d had
plenty of experience hitting people bigger than herself, and it was at least
enough to make the scientist loosen his grip.

“Run!” Ted
yelled. “Get to the bunker!”

He started
firing his gun into the melee. It didn’t stop the scientists. Whatever was
controlling them didn’t seem to care about human things like pain, or the
damage being done to the bodies they held in their grasp. As Kevin watched,
three scientists grabbed hold of Ted, dragging him down.

Kevin wanted to
help Ted, wanted to dart forward and pull him out of the mess, but there was no
way to do it, no way to even begin to help. The most that he could do was grab
Luna’s arm and pull her clear, the two of them running from the advancing
scientists.

Looking back,
Kevin saw them transforming one by one. He saw Dr. Levin gasp, clutching at her
throat as the gas got into her, then straighten up in a way that was far too
calm, far too still.

He saw
Professor Brewster shift in a matter of moments, the gas overwhelming him.

Some part of
him thought that Ted would somehow fight it off, that he would break clear and
come to help them. Kevin let out a heartbroken cry as he saw the soldier go
still, then stand, joining in the others as they chased them.

They hurried
together down the facility’s corridors, more and more scientists following
after them with a determination that wasn’t human anymore, wasn’t even close to
it. Looking back, Kevin could see Ted, Dr. Levin, and Professor Brewster, just
as alien as all the rest. A part of him wanted to just collapse to his knees,
broken by the shock of it. Only Luna’s presence beside him kept him running.

“This way,” Luna
said, pulling him down a side corridor, then off through a series of rooms
holding scientific equipment. They ducked down behind a series of large
microscopes, holding still while, beyond the doors, alien-possessed scientists
advanced through the facility, almost mindlessly, grabbing hold of anyone they
encountered to convert them.

Luna knelt, and
she stared at Kevin. “Let me look in your eyes.”

Kevin knew what
he had to be looking for. “I’m not an alien.”

“No, you’re
not, but you should be. I don’t know how you aren’t.” She shook her head. “What
do we do?”

She seemed to
take it for granted that there would be something they could do. Kevin didn’t.
If his disease had taught him anything, it was that there were some things it
was impossible to do anything about.

“Ted said to
get to the bunker,” Kevin said.

Luna nodded.
“Do you have the key?”

Kevin held it
up.

“Okay,” she
said. “Let’s go.”

Kevin led the
way, creeping through the scientific equipment, heading in the direction of the
elevators. Every so often they would stop, and both Kevin and Luna would freeze
in place, waiting while scientists moved past. There weren’t many now. Kevin
guessed that they were probably moving through the rest of the facility,
converting people as they went. It was a little like those days when they crept
into places they shouldn’t be, and had to keep out of sight of adults, only
really, it was nothing like that. They weren’t just going to be given a stern
warning or told to move on if they were caught.

The elevators
lay ahead, just beyond a room full of plants set out for testing. In front of
them, half a dozen of the scientists stood waiting, as if knowing that the two
of them would be going that way.

They probably did
know, Kevin realized. From what had happened in the lab, it looked as
though they had access to the thoughts and memories of the people they
controlled, so why wouldn’t they know about the bunker?

“What do we
do?” Luna asked.

Kevin tried to
think. “We need a distraction.”

He picked up
one of the plants, considering its ceramic pot. He moved to the door of the
room furthest from the elevator, picking a direction. Then he set the plant’s
container rolling, as hard as he could, hurrying back to Luna just in time for
a crash to sound in the distance.

The
alien-controlled scientists turned toward the sound, then hurried forward in
that awful, synchronized silence that they had.

“Now,” Kevin
said, and he and Luna scurried toward the elevators. There was a lock set by
them at about chest level.

“Quick,” Luna
said, “use the key.”

Kevin pushed it
into a lock by the elevators, and a green light shone. The elevator doors
rolled open with agonizing slowness. How long would it be before the aliens
spotted what had made the sound and worked out that they had been tricked? How long
before they came back for the two of them?

An inhuman
sound not far away suggested that it wouldn’t be long.

“Inside,” Luna
said, and they both stumbled back into the elevator car.

There was
another keyhole inside the elevator, along with a button at the bottom of the
controls labeled simply “Bunker.” There were other buttons too, for the various
levels of the facility, for its lobby and its parking garage. Kevin stood
there, considering them.

“What are you
waiting for?” Luna asked. “You heard Ted, we need to get to the bunker.”

Kevin nodded.
He’d heard. There was only one problem.

“What happens
to our parents?” he asked.

He saw Luna’s
eyes widen.

Outside, he saw
aliens coming around the corner, all of them moving toward the elevators with
perfect synchronization.

“If we go to
the bunker, who’ll save our parents?” Kevin asked. He couldn’t just abandon his
mother to become an alien. He couldn’t.

So as the
alien-controlled scientists started to rush forward, Kevin pressed the only
button he could.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Kevin could
only stand there as the elevator headed up, toward the lobby. The seconds
seemed to stretch out, and with every one that passed he could imagine the
scientists running through the building, grabbing more people and breathing the
vapor on them, or just waiting while it spread through the building, maybe
beyond.

The elevator
rumbled up, the lights flickering in a way that suggested something was
happening elsewhere in the building; something violent.

“Do you think
they’ll be able to stop this?” Luna asked. She actually sounded scared. As
scared as Kevin felt, right then.

“I don’t know,”
he admitted, and not knowing was one of the worst parts of it. He had no idea
what was going to happen, or if this could be stopped, or how.

Slowly, the
elevator ground to a halt, the doors opening to reveal the lobby beyond. Kevin
and Luna crept into it silently, not daring to take their masks off as they
hurried through it.

One look at the
floor told Kevin that it was the right thing. He could see vapor trailing along
it like mist on a cold morning, pouring out from under the doors and spreading,
caught by the breeze outside. He couldn’t see it as it touched the protesters,
but he could see the effects as they breathed it, could see them going still
one by one, staring up as if waiting for something.

“No,” Luna
said, and Kevin could hear the horror in her voice. “No, it can’t be spreading
this quickly.”

Kevin swallowed
back his own fear. How could the vapor be doing so much, so fast? But he knew
the answer to that: it had been designed to all along, and that was the most
terrifying thought of all, because it meant that the people outside were just
the start.

Kevin couldn’t
work out how they were going to get past them, but it seemed that Luna had an
idea. She was already leading the way out of the institute, heading for the
parking lot there.

“What are you
doing?” Kevin asked her.

“If we’re going
to get home in time, we can’t take the bus,” Luna said. “We need a car.”

“So you’re
going to steal one?” Kevin asked. “Can you even drive?”

It seemed
inconceivable to him that anyone their age might be able to, but Luna seemed
pretty confident.

“Not steal,
borrow,” Luna said. “And yes, I can drive. Probably. One of my cousins let me
drive his truck once. It’s not that hard.”

They went into
the parking lot, staring at all the cars there. Kevin wasn’t sure what it would
take to steal one of them, or how long it would take to do it. He wasn’t sure
that they had a lot of time. Already, he could see some of those outside the
facility’s fence turning toward them.

“Um… Luna?” he
said. “I think we need to hurry.”

“There!” she
said, pointing. Kevin recognized Dr. Levin’s compact city car immediately. “She
gave you all her keys, right?”

“I’m not sure,”
Kevin said. He took them out. “She gave me the one to the elevator, but…” One
stood out immediately. “Does this one look like a car key?”

“It does,” Luna
said. She snatched it from his hand, moving to the car and opening the doors.
Glancing back, Kevin could see the people the aliens controlled advancing now,
moving toward them and toward the facility in a single, synchronized group.

Kevin dove into
the car, where Luna was already working with the key, trying to make the thing
start.

“I thought you
knew what you were doing,” he said.

“This is
different from my cousin’s truck,” she replied. “Give me a minute.”

Kevin looked
over the dashboard at the advancing horde of scientists. “I’m not sure that we have
a minute.”

“Wait, I think
I’ve got it!” The engine didn’t exactly roar to life, given how small the car
was, but it started. Luna threw it into gear, and they lurched forward,
crunching it against the car in front.

“Other way,”
Kevin said.

“Do you want to
drive?” Luna shot back. She managed to get it into reverse, backing out of the
parking space with another scrape of metal on metal. She put the car back into
drive and they set off for the gate.

A protester
flung himself in front of the car, bouncing off the hood and then rising to his
feet, apparently unharmed. Kevin had seen Ted shoot the controlled scientists
without it stopping them though, so he doubted the car had done much. Another
flung itself onto the hood, holding on tight, white-pupiled eyes staring
straight at them.

“Get it off!
Get it off!” Luna yelled.

Kevin wasn’t
sure how he was supposed to do that, but he did his best. Rolling down the
window on his side, he leaned out, wrenching at the protestor’s grip. He
yanked, and the protestor fell clear, tumbling to the concrete.

They were clear
then, driving away through the NASA compound, heading for the highway while
controlled people trailed after them. The small car burst out onto the roads,
and Kevin looked around, hoping that he would see people just going about their
business, half hoping that there would be cops there who would stop them for
driving so erratically, so that they could warn people about what was
happening.

Instead, people
stood by the sides of the road, perfectly still as they stared at the sky.

“The vapor’s
spreading,” Kevin said.

Luna nodded.
“We have to get to our parents. Now.”

They barreled
down the road. Kevin could see Luna’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel
as she drove, her face set with concentration. Despite that, they wove and
braked as she struggled to get used to it. If there had been other people
driving there, Kevin had no doubt that they would have crashed within the first
mile. Instead, the only other cars on the roads were stationary ones, abandoned
at the sides, or occasionally just in the middle of the highway while their
owners got out to stare at the sky.

This was his
fault. If he’d never said anything about what he’d seen, if he’d never led
people to the rock, then this wouldn’t have happened. There wouldn’t be people
standing there as blankly as mannequins, the effect spreading…

His mother. She
would be out there, not knowing what was happening. Not knowing what to do.
Would she be safe? What if she was like them here? No, Kevin couldn’t stand
that thought. Kevin got his phone out, trying to call his mother to warn her. He
wasn’t surprised to find a half dozen missed calls from her, all the messages
wanting to know where he was. He called her back.

“Kevin?” she
said as she picked up. “Kevin, where are you? Where have you been? You weren’t
home when I got back. I’ve been going out of my mind!”

Kevin sighed
with relief because, by the sound of it, his mother was still very much
occupying her own mind.

“Mom, I’m with
Luna,” he said.

“Luna? What are
you two doing? Where are you? There’s stuff on TV… They’re saying all kinds of
things.”

“It’s hard to
explain, Mom,” Kevin said. “We went to the NASA institute to warn people that
the aliens had tricked us, but we were too late.”

“The aliens?”
Kevin’s mother said. “Kevin, you went all that way? It wasn’t safe, and—”

“Mom,” Kevin
said, “you have to listen to me. There was a kind of gas or something inside
the rock. It changes people, it lets the aliens control them. You have to find
a facemask, or a place that isn’t open to the air.”

“Kevin,” his
mother said. “This really doesn’t sound—”

“I’m not crazy,
Mom,” Kevin insisted, before his mother could finish it. “I’m not. Just look at
the TV. If you don’t believe me, Luna will tell you.”

He held out the
phone for Luna to speak. He wasn’t sure if it was such a good idea, distracting
her like that, but he needed to do something to try to keep his mother
safe.

“Ms. McKenzie,
it’s all true,” Luna said. “You need to listen to me. I saw it. I saw the
scientists change… Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. We’re
coming to get you now.”

She jerked the
wheel sharply to avoid another car and Kevin pulled the phone away.

“Mom? We’ll be
there as soon as we can. If anyone tries to get in, look at their eyes. If
their pupils are white, don’t let them in. Even us. And Mom? I love you.”

It probably
wasn’t a cool thing to say, but right then, Kevin didn’t care. He wanted his
mother to know.

“I love you
too,” his mother said. “Whatever this is, we’ll find a way to sort it all out.”

Kevin wasn’t so
sure it would be that easy. He hung up, calling Luna’s parents next since there
was no way she would be able to do it without either stopping or crashing. He
called her mom, then her dad, hearing the phone go through to voicemail each
time.

“No answer,” he
said.

Luna looked
over at him. “Do you think that means—”

“Look out!”
Kevin said, grabbing the wheel to pull them away from a knot of people who
stepped onto the road to look at the sky. Their car skidded briefly, scraping
along the side of the road before continuing on.

Luna fastened her
grip on the wheel again, not saying anything now as she drove, faster and
faster as her confidence grew. Kevin suspected that she should probably slow
down a little, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her that right then,
especially not when they still needed to get to his own mother.

It seemed to
take forever before they pulled into Walnut Creek, and everything there seemed
too quiet; eerily so. As Luna pulled the car up in front of Kevin’s house, it
occurred to him that she shouldn’t have been able to. They should have been
surrounded by reporters, all eager to photograph him doing something he
shouldn’t be doing.

Instead, the
street was empty.

“Where are they
all?” Kevin wondered aloud.

“Do you want
to be pestered by reporters?” Luna countered. “Probably they’re off
covering everything that’s happening, or they decided to take cover. I would.”

“We will,”
Kevin promised. Just as soon as they’d gotten their parents. “My mom should
have seen us pull up.”

He went from
the car over to the house, ringing the doorbell, and then banging on the door.

“Mom,” he
shouted, “it’s not a reporter. It’s me, Kevin.”

He waited there
for several seconds, not sure if the quiet was because his mother was hiding,
or because it meant something more sinister. He dared to breathe a sigh of
relief when he heard the click of the latch and the door started to open.

“Mom!” Kevin
said, throwing his arms wide to hug her, not caring that it was an uncool thing
to do. She stood there in front of him, smiling with her own arms open, looking
safe, looking happy…

…Then Kevin saw
her eyes, blank white and staring, and realized that his mother was grabbing,
not hugging.

It was too
late, he realized, a yawning pit opening up in his stomach.

The aliens had
her.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

For a moment,
Kevin just stood there, paralyzed by the grief he felt. He could feel tears
starting to roll down his cheeks. They’d taken over his mom. They’d controlled
her, like they’d controlled so many other people, but this was different,
because it was his mom, not someone else. He felt angry, and sad, and guilty,
all at once. He’d done this. He’d told them where to find the rock. He’d—

“Kevin, run!”
Luna said, jerking him back from his mom.

He managed to
jump back out of his mother’s grip, but she lurched forward after the two of
them, breathing out the vapor that might convert them.

More figures
came from the buildings all around, pouring from them in a way that said they’d
been waiting for Kevin and Luna to arrive just so that they could do it. Some
of them looked like reporters, with camera gear still strapped to them as they
came for them. Kevin could see worse than that. Luna’s parents stood there, as
blank-eyed and unseeing as the rest. The most terrifying thing was how normal
they looked as they did it.

It was enough
to send Kevin scrambling for the car. He made it as Luna took her place in the
driver’s spot.

“Drive!” he
yelled to Luna as he managed to fall into the passenger’s seat.

“Those… those
are my parents,” Luna said, and despite her mask Kevin could see how pale her
features were then, how upset she was.

“I know, Luna,
but if we don’t get out of here, we’re going to end up like them, or worse.”

Luna looked
over at him and Kevin could see the tears. Even so, Luna nodded, stepping on
the gas pedal so the car lurched forward. Reporters bounced off the hood. Kevin
was just grateful that it wasn’t Luna’s parents, even if the reporters got
straight back up again.

They kept going
more than a mile before they stopped, in the middle of a deserted lot where
there was no sign of anyone. Luna turned off the engine and cried. Right then,
Kevin knew how she felt. His mother was gone, taken by the aliens just like
that. He’d tried to warn her. Had she not believed him, opened the door to
someone? Had it just been too late?

Kevin didn’t
know. Right then, it didn’t matter. His mom was gone, changed, and so were
Luna’s parents. So was every adult they’d been able to trust. Dr. Levin.
Ted. All of them were gone. The world felt like a much bigger, scarier place without
them there to help.

He felt empty
right then, in a way that made all the things he’d felt when he’d learned that
he was going to die seem like nothing. Was this what his mother had felt,
hearing that he was dying? This sense of loss?

“Promise me
something,” Luna said between the tears. “Promise me that you won’t let me be
like that.”

“We’re safe,”
Kevin said. Even to himself, he didn’t sound convincing. “We have masks.”

“A mask won’t
stop them if they pull it away and breathe that stuff on me,” Luna said.
She sounded angry now. Not angry at Kevin; angry at the world. “It won’t keep
me from being like them. So promise me you won’t let me be like them.”

“How can I—”
Kevin began.

“You can kill
me,” Luna said. The tears in her eyes made them glisten. “I don’t want to be
some mindless thing, trapped in my own body. If I end up like that, I want you
to kill me. Say you’ll do it, Kevin.”

Kevin couldn’t
say it. He couldn’t promise to kill Luna. How could anyone promise that? The
best he could do was to stay silent while Luna cried, his hand on her shoulder
in silent support.

“Where do we
go, Kevin?” Luna asked. She sounded as though she was choking back her sobs
now. “Where can we go? What can we do? What if… what if everyone’s like
this?”

Kevin wasn’t
sure he had an answer to that.

“We need to get
somewhere safe,” he said. “Ted wanted us to do that.”

“He wanted us
to get to the bunker,” Luna said. “We can’t go there now, can we?”

Kevin thought
about all the scientists who would be in the way, who had come pouring out
after them. He shook his head.

“No. We
wouldn’t get through.”

“Where then?”
Luna said. “We have to go somewhere. We can’t take the masks off unless we do.”

Kevin wasn’t so
sure about that. After all, one of the scientists had grabbed his mask. “I think…
I think I can,” he said.

“Well, I
can’t,” Luna shot back. “How am I supposed to eat, Kevin? Or drink anything,
or—”

“We’ll think of
something,” Kevin said, and then froze, as he realized something. “There are
more bunkers.”

“More bunkers?”
Luna said. “But wouldn’t they be hidden?”

“Phil told me
about some of them when he was giving me the tour of the institute,” Kevin
said. “He even showed me a map.”

Behind her
mask, Luna looked hopeful. “Can you remember where they are?”

“I…”

“Try, Kevin,”
Luna insisted.

Kevin did his
best. He could remember one for certain. “Phil said there was one in the state
park up on Mount Diablo. He said something about it being a place they used to
do military tests.”

“You’re sure?”
Luna asked.

Kevin nodded.
“It would be safer than being outside,” Kevin said. He tried to think about
what they would need, and how it would work. “We’d need supplies. Food and
stuff.”

In the end,
they took what they needed from a gas station. They didn’t have any money to
pay for it, but the clerk was busy standing at the back of the store, staring
up at the sky. Kevin left a note anyway, with his mother’s address. It didn’t
feel right just stealing stuff, even with everything that was going on.

They drove on,
and now Luna seemed to be getting the hang of it, because the whole journey
seemed smoother. There was certainly less crashing into things, although they
still had to dodge around cars that had been abandoned in the middle of the
highway, the former drivers getting out to look up. There were even a couple of
police cars there, and Luna slowed down almost automatically as they drove
past. But the police were just as busy staring as everyone else. There was no
one to get them into trouble—and no one to help them either.

“Do you think
there’s anything we can do to help our parents?” Luna asked after a while.

“I don’t know,”
Kevin admitted. He’d been thinking about that almost constantly since he’d seen
his mother like that. “I guess I should know.”

He’d had so
many messages from the aliens, but none of them had said anything about how to
undo all of this. None of them had provided a cure to whatever this was, or
even suggested that it could be undone. A horrible thought came to Kevin then:
the aliens had burned their own world to stop this from spreading, trying to
burn off the threat, and even that hadn’t stopped it.

“What if there
isn’t a way?” Luna said. “What if everyone is stuck like that forever?”

“If there is
something, we’ll find it,” Kevin said, although he didn’t know how they could
even begin to do that. He had to hope, though. He wanted to bring his mother
back, and not spend the rest of his life hiding from any group of people he
met.

They drove
east, and kept driving. The road twisted and turned as they went up through the
foothills, obscuring the mountain for a while, but soon it came back into view.
They drove upward, and Kevin did his best to think where the red dot on the map
had been marking the bunker. It was hard, because he’d only seen it briefly,
and a lot of stuff had happened since.

“I think it’s
near the top,” he said.

Luna nodded,
and kept driving. There were fewer people out here, but even so, they were
doing the same things others had been: standing by the road, staring at the
sky. A few were walking back toward the city, too, as if there were something
there waiting for them.

There was
supposed to be a parking lot at the top of the mountain, but Luna pulled the
car off the road a little way before that, hiding it in a stand of trees.

“So that it
will still be here if we need it,” she said. Kevin couldn’t see who might be
there to steal it, but even so, it sounded like a good idea. He guessed that
there might be people about in the tourist areas, all controlled by the aliens
now.

They took food
and supplies from the car, a few cans and packets that didn’t seem like enough
now that they were here. They crept forward through the trees, trying not to
make a sound.

“Which way to
the bunker from here?” Luna asked.

“I’m not sure,”
Kevin admitted. “I think right at the top.”

Luna nodded,
and they started upward. It was hard, climbing that way, but they kept going.
They were almost at the top anyway, and the prospect of safety pulled them on.

There were
people near the top. Kevin could see them as he got closer. Some looked like
tourists, but there were others in military uniforms, suggesting that Phil’s
talk of a hidden military testing site might be true. All seemed to be as still
as everyone else he’d seen, as if waiting for orders. He knew that they couldn’t
just walk past them, though. If even one saw him, how many more would come? If
there were enough, it wouldn’t matter that they had a bunker to go to.

So they crept along
as best they could, trying to keep as many trees as possible between them and
the people there. Kevin kept his head low, trying to keep out of sight. He saw
people slowly turning to stare at him through the trees, and he knew that their
efforts to stay out of sight hadn’t worked.

“Run!” he
called to Luna.

They ran, while
the group of those by the lake started forward as one, moving at no more than a
walking pace, but looking as though they wouldn’t stop for anything. Kevin and
Luna rushed through the trees, heading deeper out of sight.

“There,” Luna
whispered, pointing.

Kevin sighed
with relief. She was right. They’d found it.

The entrance to
the bunker was camouflaged with green and gray, moss and small plants. The
entrance looked like a small hollow in the ground from a distance, but closer
to it, it was possible to see the steps leading down. There was a door there
closed by an old-fashioned round handle, like a ship’s wheel, or a safe. A
keyhole sat at the center. Kevin just hoped that Phil had been right about the
same keys working everywhere.

“Quickly,” Luna
said.

Kevin could
hear the crashing behind them now of the alien-controlled people closing in.
The two of them rushed for the door. Kevin set the key into the lock, and so
slowly that it terrified him, the wheel started to turn.

The door came
open just in time.

He and Luna
dove inside, slamming it behind them and winding the locking mechanism shut.
Something slammed into it from the other side, but the door held.

“Beginning
decontamination procedure,” an electronic voice said. Water came down in a
swift burst that drenched them both like a heavy storm. Right then, Kevin
didn’t even mind.

“We did it,” he
said. “We’re safe.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

To Kevin’s
surprise, the bunker was empty, no one left in it, despite whatever precautions
must have been in place. It felt strange being trapped in there with only Luna
for company.

The bunker had
an operations center with screens bigger than they were. Kevin pushed a button
and was relieved to see the bunker’s systems let them patch into TV and the
Internet, satellite images and more. There were even things that looked as
though they would access military communications channels, although Kevin
hadn’t figured out how to work those yet.

“Is there
anyone left?” Luna asked.

Kevin wasn’t
sure how to answer that. “There are broadcasts and things,” he said, “so there
must be someone.”

There didn’t
seem to be many people, though. From the sealed off interior of the bunker,
Kevin and Luna watched the world change. There was news out there on the
Internet, talking about the people being transformed. It wasn’t just America
now, and it was spreading too fast to contain. Perhaps if people had managed to
close their borders in time, they might have stopped it, but even then, what
could they do about a vapor carried on the wind?

“What do you
think our parents are doing now?” Luna asked.

“I don’t know,”
Kevin admitted. It was a strange, wrenching feeling not knowing like that.
Would his mother be out there with the others, just staring? Would the people
like that eat or drink, remember to sleep? Or would they just stand there until
they fell from exhaustion?

“There are
still some people trying to show what’s happening,” Luna said. She showed Kevin
images of a TV station where they were trying to map it all in front of what
looked like a weather map, and an Internet site where someone had managed to
tap into a bunch of cameras around the world.

“London, Paris,
Beijing,” Kevin said, reading from the captions. They were hard to tell apart,
because each one showed almost the same scene, with people just standing there.
Then it got worse, because on the screens, the images started to shift, showing
people staring up at the sky now, coming out into the streets in hundreds, in
thousands, gathering together to look up.

It took a
moment to work out what they were looking at.

Kevin watched the
screen, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He saw the people staring
up at the sky, and he saw the shadow that started to pass over them, too sudden
to be anything natural.

And too big, by
far, to be anything built by human hands.

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ARRIVAL

(The Invasion Chronicles—Book Two)

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ARRIVAL

(The Invasion Chronicles—Book Two)

Did you know that I've written multiple series?
If you haven't read all my series, click the image below to download a series
starter!

Books by Morgan Rice

THE INVASION CHRONICLES

TRANSMISSION (Book #1)

ARRIVAL (Book #2)

ASCENT (Book #3)

THE WAY OF STEEL

ONLY THE WORTHY (Book #1)

A THRONE FOR SISTERS

A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1)

A COURT FOR THIEVES (Book #2)

A SONG FOR ORPHANS (Book #3)

A DIRGE FOR PRINCES (Book #4)

A JEWEL FOR ROYALS (BOOK #5)

A KISS FOR QUEENS (BOOK #6)

A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (Book #7)

OF CROWNS AND GLORY

SLAVE, WARRIOR, QUEEN (Book #1)

ROGUE, PRISONER, PRINCESS (Book #2)

KNIGHT, HEIR, PRINCE (Book #3)

REBEL, PAWN, KING (Book #4)

SOLDIER, BROTHER, SORCERER (Book #5)

HERO, TRAITOR, DAUGHTER (Book #6)

RULER, RIVAL, EXILE (Book #7)

VICTOR, VANQUISHED, SON (Book #8)

KINGS AND SORCERERS

RISE OF THE DRAGONS (Book #1)

RISE OF THE VALIANT (Book #2)

THE WEIGHT OF HONOR (Book #3)

A FORGE OF VALOR (Book #4)

A REALM OF SHADOWS (Book #5)

NIGHT OF THE BOLD (Book #6)

THE SORCERER’S RING

A QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1)

A MARCH OF KINGS (Book #2)

A FATE OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

A CRY OF HONOR (Book #4)

A VOW OF GLORY (Book #5)

A CHARGE OF VALOR (Book #6)

A RITE OF SWORDS (Book #7)

A GRANT OF ARMS (Book #8)

A SKY OF SPELLS (Book #9)

A SEA OF SHIELDS (Book #10)

A REIGN OF STEEL (Book #11)

A LAND OF FIRE (Book #12)

A RULE OF QUEENS (Book #13)

AN OATH OF BROTHERS (Book #14)

A DREAM OF MORTALS (Book #15)

A JOUST OF KNIGHTS (Book #16)

THE GIFT OF BATTLE (Book #17)

THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY

ARENA ONE: SLAVERSUNNERS (Book #1)

ARENA TWO (Book #2)

ARENA THREE (Book #3)

VAMPIRE, FALLEN

BEFORE DAWN (Book #1)

THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS

TURNED (Book #1)

LOVED (Book #2)

BETRAYED (Book #3)

DESTINED (Book #4)

DESIRED (Book #5)

BETROTHED (Book #6)

VOWED (Book #7)

FOUND (Book #8)

RESURRECTED (Book #9)

CRAVED (Book #10)

FATED (Book #11)

OBSESSED (Book #12)

About Morgan Rice

Morgan Rice is the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author
of the epic fantasy series THE SORCERER’S RING, comprising seventeen books; of
the #1 bestselling series THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS, comprising twelve books; of the
#1 bestselling series THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY, a post-apocalyptic thriller
comprising three books; of the epic fantasy series KINGS AND SORCERERS,
comprising six books; of the epic fantasy series OF CROWNS AND GLORY,
comprising eight books; of the epic fantasy series A THRONE FOR SISTERS,
comprising eight books (and counting); and of the new science fiction series
THE INVASION CHRONICLES, comprising three books (and counting). Morgan’s books
are available in audio and print editions, and translations are available in
over 25 languages.

TURNED
(Book #1 in the Vampire Journals), ARENA
1 (Book #1 of the Survival Trilogy), A
QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1 in the Sorcerer’s Ring), RISE
OF THE DRAGONS (Kings and Sorcerers—Book #1), and A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1) are
each available as a free download on Amazon!

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