Driving Oliver’s van had presented a bit of a learning curve for Emily, but after we started moving, she began to pick it up rather quickly. A second car could have been helpful, but we had to leave Emily’s vehicle back at Sheep Nose. She said she was nervous about returning to it, since there was the possibility of the car now being monitored. I didn’t know what plans she had with it, but she said she would take care of it later.

  The drive back was nice. Oliver had fallen asleep pretty quickly–which was good, seeing as he needed the rest. Emily seemed to be keeping herself awake, but I could tell she was struggling. It was a clear night, meaning once again, the lack of the surroundings I could see due to my height was replaced by the view of the stars. I pulled out the guitar Emily had packed.

  As expected, the guitar itself was horribly out of tune, but that problem was easy to fix. Splayed out across the middle bench on my back, I continued to stare up at the stars. This time, I was getting mixed feelings, unable to quite decide how I felt about them. They’d kept me company during my travels, and I knew I came from somewhere up there, but now it seemed as if they’d also left me here…abandoned me. At least, it felt like they had.

  I played my guitar, idly yet determinedly, my emotions flowing into sound, my feelings guiding my hands. Each brilliant burst of light slowly began fading, then disappearing as the sun began to rise. So too did my melody, the tune beginning to slow as I bid the stars farewell while they began their own sleep. As the final gleams of light vanished, my song slowed to a stop.

  The van went silent for a few minutes before Emily softly cleared her throat and gave a thoughtful hum. “That was a new one.”

  “Hmm?” I asked, hands still on the guitar, body still unmoving.

  “That sound, it was a new one. What emotion was that?”

  It took me a moment to consider her question, and another to reach my conclusion.

  “Betrayal.” I said quietly.

  That single word stewed, flowing through the car during the minute I took to continue.

  “Why did they leave me here? Was there a reason? Did I do something wrong?”

  Emily took a deep breath. I heard the chair squeak slightly as she straightened her posture.

  “I’m not sure.” She admitted. “I don’t really know how to make sense of any of this. I have a lot of questions, same as you. I mean, yeah, I’d love to know how you got here, too, but there’s something else about it I want to figure out.”

  Emily tapped on the steering wheel, sounding as if she was trying to formulate her own thoughts as well.

  “I mean…” She finally continued, “who are these people looking for you, and why? Whoever they are, they seem to know a lot about you already. Has something like this happened before now? Are there others like you here on earth?”

  I quickly rose in my seat, looking at her with wide eyes. “What was that?”

  Taking a deep breath, Emily shrugged. “There have to be others, right? They knew about you, but they knew a lot. They knew about that ship and booby-trapped it. They had that light…thing, whatever it was. It did something to you, and that man knew what it would do and how it worked on you. How did he know that? Where’d he get that device?”

  All good questions.

  “What did it do to me, exactly? I’m kind of drawing a blank on that.” I asked, still trying to remember what happened during those moments.

  “It was bizarre.” Emily admitted. “You were so heated before that moment. I’ve never seen you like that…but then he turned that little flashlight thing on. It looked like a faint blue light, but you stopped. Your eyes turned bright white and you just stared at it. He was still hurt, so it gave me a chance to grab it from him and turn it off. After that, your eyes went back to normal, but it took you a few seconds to come back to me. Even then, you were still pretty dazed. It was strange…”

  Mumbling the last three words, Emily kept tapping on the steering wheel. “He said something to me that didn’t make any sense. He was trying to tell me you were dangerous.” Her gaze met mine as she looked at me through the rearview mirror. “It…it didn’t fit what I knew about you at all. He said you’d done things…something about hurting someone.”

  Emily shook her head and looked back at the road.

  “I’ve known you since you were a baby, Tess. You’ve never hurt anyone. I don’t know what he was talking about.”

  I nodded. Everything had happened so quickly, but only now did I have the chance to consider everything. She was right. My mind pictured the previous interaction with him, the one at the farmhouse.

  “Emily…I just remembered something.”

  Her gaze met mind in the mirror. “Yeah?”

  “The first time they found us, they saw that blurry picture of me, they knew…what…I was. The way they found me was from all the mercury John had been buying. They knew I needed it…”

  Both of us sat in silence. I couldn’t have been the first alien they’d found. I wasn’t some anomaly, at least, not a one-of-a-kind anomaly. There had to have been others they’d captured and studied. They knew way too much about me for everything involving them and I to be a one-off hunt. Finally, Emily asked the question we were both thinking:

  “How many others are there?”

  ***

  Sunlight warmly crept over the horizon as our van pulled up to the house. Oliver was still asleep and Emily was just barely awake herself. It was a modest sized building with a long dirt driveway leading to it. The lights were glowing through the windows. As I opened the sliding van door, I could hear music thumping loudly from beyond the door.

  With the guitar in my hands, I took in the view. The house rested along the side of a long hill, a few trees surrounding it. It had two floors with a big A-shaped roof on top of the second story. Emily joined me, stepping out with the box we’d found inside the ship. She gave a long yawn as she closed the van door.

  “So…” Emily began, then yawned again, “...I don’t know how he’s going to react to…you…Oliver said he doesn’t know about you yet, so it’s anyone’s guess. We should wake up Oliver before–”

  Before she could finish, the front door swung open as someone stepped out of the house. I froze. I was in full view of this stranger.

  “Oh, good! You made it!” He exclaimed.

  I recognized Gav’s high-pitched, excited voice the second he began speaking.

  Emily quickly tried to damage control the situation as he approached us. “Gav, uh, yes, sorry, we can explain this whole thing, it’s, uh…”

  He simply nodded, approaching and taking the box from Emily. Turning it over in his hands, he beamed in excitement.

  “Oh, this is perfect! You found this at the crash site, right? I bet this must have been an exciting find! Wow!” Gav exclaimed.

  Then he turned to look at me…

  “Tess, good to finally see you!” He reached out a hand.

  Confused, I reluctantly reached out and shook it. He nodded again and turned, briskly walking back into the house, box under his arm as he closed the door behind himself.

  Emily and I looked at each other, equally baffled. We both shrugged at each other, unsure how we should feel about that interaction.

  The door flung open again. Gav leaned out from the gap.

  “Oh! Sorry! Come on in, drop off your stuff wherever!”

  The door closed behind himself again.

  With the ‘okay’ from Gav, Emily and I started grabbing our things from the van and bringing them into the house. Gav was nowhere to be seen, but the music we’d heard was coming from a door which sounded as if it led into the basement. The inside of the house was rather cluttered. Various parts and machines seemed to be lying around everywhere.

  There was a pile of desktop computers piled high in one corner, a massive series of bins full of wires, and several mismatched desks lining the walls. Each desk was covered in soldering stations, tools, wires, and mechanical components seemingly ripped out of other appliances or toys. Not wanting to disturb any of…whatever that mess was…we decided to stack our things in the middle of the living room. It was the only place seemingly empty.

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  With everything else temporarily sorted, we grabbed Oliver’s wheelchair and pulled it over to the side of the van. Oliver was still asleep. I hopped next to him and gently tapped on his chest a few times. His eyes slowly creaked open as he groaned. Scanning the surroundings, he gave a yawn, seemingly awake enough to recognize where we were.

  “Oh…wow, I was out…” He said.

  Oliver looked at me, then at the house with a deep breath.

  “Okay, so, let me go in first. I’ll get him ready. I haven’t told him about you, so he’s probably going to freak out about something, so just let me go in-”

  I lifted a hand to stop him. “He already saw me. We actually just finished taking everything inside already.”

  “Oh no…he saw you? What did he do?”

  “Uh…nothing, honestly. He seemed more interested in the box.”

  Oliver leaned his head back and sighed. “I swear, I will never understand that guy…”

  After the two of us were inside Gav’s house, we noticed Emily on the couch, fast asleep. I couldn’t blame her. She’d been fighting off drowsiness for a while now. Oliver made his way to the corner of the room. A strange series of cables ran up from the floor to the ceiling, with a large hole gaping above the circuitry.

  “I’m…super tired. I think I’m gonna follow Emily’s lead on this one, Tess. There’s a spare bedroom up the stairs to the left if you need it. We’ll figure all this stuff out later.” Oliver finished, yawning again.

  Oliver rolled his chair next to the square between all the cables and pressed a button on the wall. Suddenly, the cables sprang to life as the floor started rising to the ceiling. It was like a small elevator, made just for him. It fit the ambiance of the rest of the house, so it had to have been something Gav had created.

  Now, suddenly, I was alone in the living room. Music continued thumping from downstairs, even more loudly with the hole now in the living room from the elevator. I could see a bit of the basement from the gap. I wasn’t tired yet. I’d slept the previous night, so I could stay awake for another day or two before I’d need rest. Deciding to see what Gav was doing, I walked to the door, gently swinging it open as I cautiously made my way down the stairs.

  The music grew louder as I continued into the basement, some sort of heavy techno rhythm with a lot of bass to it, but not one I recognized. Now below the ground floor, the basement had a plethora of wires and pulleys scattered along the ceiling. Various tools were placed along the ceiling and walls, creating a basement nearly completely covered with tools. Like the upstairs area, workbenches lined every wall, piles of equipment piled on each one. Some of them looked as if they hadn’t been touched in years, with a layer of dust visibly forming across the benches.

  Right in the center of the basement, the most well lit section, had a semicircle of desks with computer monitors of all shapes and sizes stacked in rows and columns. Gav sat in the middle of it all, leaning over a mostly empty desk. The box Emily and I had found was sitting in the center, a bright light hovering over it. He was inspecting it with a handheld camera, eyes glued to the monitor next to him. The screen seemed to be showing a live feed from the camera.

  I waved to him, but he didn’t see me. “Hey!” I yelled over the music.

  Gav turned to see me and grinned. Reaching to the side, he turned a knob to lower the music to a reasonable level.

  “Hey, hey! Come on over! This thing is super neat, have you looked at this?” He asked me, pulling a stool from under the desk and patting it.

  It was a fairly short chair, but when I stood on top of it instead of sitting, I was close to his eye level. Atop the stool, I could see the box a bit better. Gav actually had several lights shining on it from all sides. The camera seemed to get an extremely close view of the whole thing, revealing far more detail than I could see with my eyes alone. He was holding the camera over a small area on the top with the view showing a few seams in the outer layer of the box.

  “Gav, I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect you to take this so well.” I rubbed the back of my head, still feeling awkward about the whole thing.

  “Oh! Yeah, yeah, I kinda figured what was up, you’re good.” He said, eyes still locked on the video feed.

  “You…kinda figured?” I asked, confused.

  “Yeah, I mean, I asked Olive about you and he kept avoiding the question. I thought he was being shy, but he showed me…”

  He looked away from the screen, grabbing a large contraption in front of me and pushing it to the side, showing a small holder he’d made for my crystal.

  “...this thing, and I was like ‘hey, this isn’t something I’ve ever seen before’, so I took a reeeeally close look at it, and this thing is amazing! I don’t know how it works, but this is some sort of storage technology that doesn’t exist yet! Like, we’re just starting to figure out glass storage in the super early phases, but this is something else, way beyond that. As soon as I looked at it, I knew it had to have some sort of alien technology in it or something. And then I realized that you had it originally. I mean, where’d you get it from? Why was Oliver being so weird about talking about you? Why’d you come to me instead of, I dunno…the government or something. I figured this wasn’t something you’d just found, so I pieced it together.”

  I nodded. “Okay, but still…even with all of that, I’m surprised you didn’t say anything about it when you saw me in front of the van.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be rude.” He said very matter-of-factly.

  I nodded. It was refreshing to meet someone so straightforward with everything.

  We sat together as he continued looking at the little box. After a while, he gently pressed his thumb to one corner as the top opened up like a lid. I leaned closer, unaware there even was a button there. The lid had a small screen on it, with several buttons on the bottom layer. It looked almost like a laptop, having a cube for a base instead of a more flat surface.

  The screen flashed to life the moment it was opened. I moved even closer, looking intently at the pure white screen with a colored symbol in the center. It looked like a circle with some lines on either side. The colors were similar to what I’d seen inside of the ship. They weren’t like the screens I was used to using–they weren’t made of red, green and blue. Each color was pure, but it was dancing between different colors, as if it were a ribbon of color flowing through the symbol. The symbol took up the same space, all without blending together.

  “Oh wow…look at that…” Gav whispered.

  “What…do you think that symbol means?” I asked.

  “A white screen? Probably means whatever’s in here is fried or something.”

  “No, the symbol there, in the center.” I said, pointing at it.

  Gav looked at me, then back at the screen, turning his head slightly and squinting. He tapped the desk for a moment in thought, then reached out for something next to his computer. Pulling out a piece of paper and a pen, he placed both in front of me.

  “Idea: draw it.” He said.

  I looked at the shape again. It was odd, but for some reason, he couldn’t see what I was seeing. I took the pen and drew out the shape on the screen.

  I drew a small circle with a larger circle around it, two spokes coming out of the large circle, each with another circle on each of their ends.

  Gav intently watched me as I drew the shape as best as I could manage. My artistic skills weren’t exactly great, but I felt like I’d managed to convey the shape well enough. When I finished, I showed it to him. Taking a moment to look at it, Gav nodded.

  “Interesting.” He said, mulling over the symbol, putting the paper down after a moment and looking back at the box. “Is it still the same?” He asked.

  “Yeah, it hasn’t changed at all.” I nodded. “Just that symbol, nothing else.”

  He gently picked up the crystal. Gav had taken the necklace part off of it, leaving the crystal itself with the strange top. Turning the box to the side and showing the hole, he looked at me.

  “Well, it’s definitely shaped to go in here. I guess we should just give it a try, shouldn’t we?”

  “I guess so.” I said.

  Gav slid the crystal inside the box. I heard a light ‘click’ and the crystal suddenly glowed brightly. The screen changed to reveal text scrolling; they were symbols I didn’t recognize, but it was moving far too quickly for me to read anyway. The light from the crystal was much the same, flowing between colors too fast to keep track. Each color was flowing through in perfect purity, but not long enough for me to properly see it.

  “What’s it doing? Do you see anything?” Gav asked.

  I nodded, forgetting Gav couldn’t see what I could. “It’s text…a lot of text. It’s going too quickly to read anything, but I don’t recognize any of the symbols and–oh, it stopped…” I said just as the screen stopped flying through symbols. It now showed some sort of simplistic looking menu.

  Gav was practically bouncing in his seat, waiting for more of a description.

  “Oh, sorry Gav. Um, it’s a computer…thing…I guess? It’s showing a bunch of boxes with text in it. I don’t know what any of these symbols mean, but…”

  I looked at the buttons under the screen and saw something resembling arrow keys, so I started pressing them. As expected, the highlighted box moved when I pressed them.

  “It’s some sort of simple computer interface. I don’t know what these things do, though.”

  “Oh, sweet! Okay, so…hmm…I need to figure out a way for me to see it, too. I just see white. But hey! This is great! We’ll have to figure out what all this stuff does.” Grinning, he pulled out a whole ream of paper and set it down next to me. “Until then, I’ll need you to draw out everything you’re seeing. Don’t spare a single detail!”

  ***

  Hours continued to pass as I went through each menu, selecting every option I could find and writing down everything I saw. Gav began piecing it together like a tree, showing what branches led where and keeping track of the full layout. After a while, I started to get used to navigating the menus, even if I didn’t actually know what it was doing. It seemed to be some sort of system for files.

  The different choices led me to plenty of places, but Gav and I couldn’t tell if it was a folder structure or if it was something organized together in some way. Regardless, the navigation was consistent and I could get to some sort of files. When I chose one, however, the screen would just change to the symbol it had when it started, seemingly doing nothing until I hit the button I’d discovered was ‘back’.

  While we continued piecing all the various menus together, I heard a set of footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “Hi there!” Came Emily’s voice as she walked into the basement, looking around at all the various equipment on the walls and ceiling. “Wow, this place has quite a charm to it, doesn’t it?”

  “Hello! Welcome!” Gav exclaimed as he turned in his chair. “I hope you got some good sleep! You’re Emily, right? Oh, this is great! We’re finding so many things! Come take a look!”

  Emily joined us, standing behind me. She looked at the box, then up at all the drawings I’d made with it. Both Gav and I spent the next few minutes showing her everything we’d made so far while she awoke properly, then explained what we were currently doing. As she sat quietly, Emily listened intently, looking through the different pictures of the menus I’d drawn.

  “So, when you select a file, it just shows you that symbol?” She asked, pointing at the first drawing I’d made.

  Gav and I both nodded.

  Clearing his throat, Gav elaborated. “There’s a lot here, but I don’t think looking through these menus will give us anything to work off of. I want to test the other box, see if it does the same things, but if we can’t go any further here, I think I might have to open it up and see what’s actually going on inside.”

  “Wouldn’t that break it?” I asked.

  “Not if I’m super careful!” He beamed. “Besides, like I said, we have a second one, and if we’re gonna get anywhere, I think I’ll have to get in there. Who knows what could be inside?”

  “I’ll bring the other one down.” Emily offered, standing as she yawned again. “...anyone else want coffee?”