When the Sky Fell on Splendor(14)

I could see myself and Arthur, trembling, shivering like the mugs in our kitchen cabinets when a train rushed past, like we were being electrocuted, seizing, and the whole thing was visible because the light wasn’t going out entirely.

Instead it was sucking back inward. Not into the disc—the disc was nowhere in sight now.

No, the light was cycling in and out of something else. A tall, narrow thing that absorbed the light in those jagged streaks and spat them out in every direction only to reabsorb them and repeat.

I stared at the computer, trying to make sense of our impossibly fast convulsions, the sparking eruptions of light, and the shape they leapt from.

“Is that . . .” Arthur trailed off.

In the glow of the computer, Levi’s eyes were glassy and his skin looked almost blue.

He jammed the space bar and the video paused, halfway between a flash and a moment of darkness.

Bits of light hung across the screen like frozen confetti. Through the splotches on the right side of the screen, my hand reached toward Arthur’s back. Tendrils of light seemed to be sparking off the fabric, crawling up my arm like ants.

And then there was Art, standing with his arm extended toward the disc.

Only the disc was, as I’d thought, gone. And in its place stood a person.

No, not a person. A person-shaped thing, its head and hands and legs all grotesquely elongated. A body made of white light, emanating shards of it in every direction.

I whispered exactly the same thing Arthur had said: “Is that . . .”

Levi nodded. “I think it is. And so do our commenters.”

“Commenters?” I parroted. “Mister KillYourself and Mademoi-selle RacialSlur have an opinion on what this thing is?”

“Guys,” Levi said, pulling up a YouTube Channel—not The Ordinary, a different channel named TheFallingSkyIncident, but the video on display was the slowed-down footage Levi had just played. “Everyone has an opinion on what this thing is.”

“Holy shit,” Arthur gasped.

There were nine thousand views already, and the count was rising before our eyes.

“So not only did we meet an alien,” Levi said. “We’ve also gone viral.”

I swallowed the fist-sized knot in my throat. “Pretty big day for us.”





FIVE



WHAT ELSE COULD IT be? It had fallen out of the sky during a meteor shower. It had hit the earth in a disc and unfurled into a person shape when that disc cracked.

“No way.” Sofía was still in her lacrosse shorts and a muddy NYU T-shirt, gnawing on one fingernail. Even so, she managed to be supermodel pretty and smell like a mix of rosewater and tea tree oil. It would’ve been annoying if she weren’t also the most truly kind and sensible person I’d ever met.

Which was why she couldn’t accept this.

“What else?” I said. “I mean, the options are basically that or superhero.”

“Or coincidence,” Sofía said. “It’s a—a trick of the light. It’s a random pattern, and that’s just the shape our brains can most easily compare it to.”

“It’s an alien,” Arthur said.

Levi nodded eager agreement.

“It’s not,” Sofía said.

“We all know where you stand, Bill Nye,” Nick said. He was wearing the button-up and khakis he worked in, but he’d stuffed the Walmart vest in his back pocket and rolled the sleeves as soon as he arrived, like his tattoos needed to breathe, or maybe we couldn’t recognize him without them. “Space light or alien, either way, that thing knocked us out for six hours. Let’s just be glad it’s gone.”

“We don’t know that,” Levi countered. “The camera died hours before we woke up. We have no idea what happened.”

“Exactly.” Arthur pounded Levi on the back so hard that he coughed. “Levi’s right. We’ll have to go back to the field.”

Nick’s mouth fell open. Sofía closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. They both said, more as a statement than a question, “Why.”

For Mark’s necklace, I thought futilely.

“For answers,” Arthur said. “We witnessed something, and none of us can even remember it. We need to find out what it was. We have to go back.”

Nick guffawed, but Levi nodded. “We can get more footage for our new fans on The Falling Sky Incident!”

“Horrible name, by the way,” Nick sniped.

Sofía dropped her face into her hands and groaned. “You’re stoking mania, Levi. You’re part of the problem.”

“What problem?” he asked, aghast.

“Groupthink!” Sofía said. “Inaccurate assumptions spreading faster and farther than facts!” She looked to me for backup.

I shrugged. “You are so vastly overestimating my understanding of Everything.”

She huffed and pushed off the bed. “Okay, setting aside the irresponsibility of sharing that video with impressionable conspiracy theorists, there’s the fact that you posted proof we were at the substation that night. Exactly where the sheriff practically begged us to never reveal we went. We broke the law, Levi!”

“I posted this from a new account!” Levi said. “There’s nothing here to link this video to The Ordinary, or even Splendor!”