When the Sky Fell on Splendor(36)

Did someone else see what Remy had? The farmer, St. James? Someone else?

Black Mailbox Bill’s warning reverberated through me.

People in our situation have a habit of vanishing without a trace . . . waste no time in erasing your tracks.

But what if someone else had access to those tracks?

Someone with enough interest in all of this that he or she had hidden the wreckage here?

“Wait.” I turned back to Sofía. “How did you know about the bullet?” She’d been by the car when I found that first one, and if she’d seen me pick it up, why hadn’t she mentioned it? Then again, I’d been so dazed the last few days I’d forgotten to tell the others about the bullet too.

Sofía’s mouth opened and closed a few times. “Franny, I think something—”

The sound of more footsteps and voices cut her off, and moments later Levi and Arthur rounded the bend in the tunnel.

Levi’s mouth fell open at the sight of the stockpiled debris.

“Shiiiiiiiit,” Arthur said, tracing his flashlight over the steel beams. “Way to go, Franny.”

I shook my head. “How’d you find me?”

“Sofía texted us,” Levi said.

Sofía gave a one-armed shrug. “I saw you go in, but the sheriff was too close for me to follow you right away. Once he’d turned back, I texted the others.”

Arthur’s mouth screwed up as he studied my hands. “Why are you wearing one rubber glove?”

“Um.” I looked down at the practically glow-in-the-dark yellow.

I couldn’t tell him. There was nothing he could do about it anyway, and if Black Mailbox Bill was telling the truth, even knowing could put Arthur—all of them—in more danger than we might already be in.

“I was afraid the metal might shock me.” It wasn’t totally untrue.

Arthur had already lost interest. He was fixated on the bullet now. “What’s that?” He plucked it from my hand and held it aloft.

“It’s a bullet,” Sofía answered.

I glanced at her. Something was still bothering me—her knowing about the bullet, her showing up in the cave.

She continued: “Franny found one just like it when we woke up after the . . . you know.”

Was it possible she already knew about the cave? That she wasn’t looking for me after all, when she found my bike just inside the entrance?

I was being paranoid.

Wasn’t I?

“What does it mean?” Levi asked, wide-eyed, as he took the bullet from Arthur’s hand. “Our alien has a gun?”

“It means whoever moved this wasn’t an alien at all,” Sofía replied. “It was someone who saw the whole thing go down and probably figured he could hawk memorabilia of a close encounter for way too much money to UFO-weirdos like your YouTube commenters.”

Arthur’s brow wrinkled. He shook his head and took the bullet back. “No. Something else is going on here, something bigger. I can feel it.”

Sofía shot me a knowing look, like, Oh, he can feel it, right?

“Besides,” Arthur went on, “Sheriff Nakamura told us that whoever took that wreckage did it during another weird power surge that knocked out the fence and the security cameras.”

“See, Sof? That’s not something your average eBay salesman can do,” Levi said.

But if what had happened in the Jenkins House was any indication, it might’ve been something I could do. Or the thing in me, at least.

Only I hadn’t, so who had?

“If our alien is capable of all that,” Arthur said, half to himself, “why’s it carrying around human ammunition?”

Sofía grabbed the bullet and carried it a couple of yards away from us. She held it with her compass in one hand and shone her flashlight on it with the other. “Look, it’s magnetized, just like the other stuff. Maybe whoever—”

“Whatever,” Levi said, right as Arthur blurted, “Our alien!”

“—put it here wasn’t the person who dropped it,” she finished. “It’s just one more piece of evidence they wanted to sell, or maybe hide.”

Her gaze cut toward me with a force that made my throat tighten. Was she accusing me? Or confessing?

Had Sofía hidden this stuff? She didn’t have a car, but she regularly borrowed her mom’s CRV to get to work and lacrosse. Maybe she’d seen the thing go into me too. Maybe she figured it wouldn’t end well for us if that information went public, so she’d decided to clean up anything that linked us to what happened.

But moving the wreckage itself seemed too reckless for Sofía, and it wouldn’t explain what had caused the blackout at the substation.

Probably Sofía was looking for me to back her up on her perfectly reasonable theory.

“That makes sense,” I offered.

She looked to the boys to gauge their reaction. Arthur still had his mouth screwed up. “Levi, you’ve got your camera, right?”

“Of course!” Levi hurried to get it out of his backpack. “You want to get footage of the debris, or the spinning compass? Maybe we should go back and get footage of us ‘discovering it.’ I should’ve been filming for that.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Arthur said. “Contact is what matters. We need to figure out where our alien went, and what it wants. We’ll set the camera up in a tree outside the cave and see if we can catch it coming or going.”