When the Sky Fell on Splendor(74)

“You have a couple of enthusiasts right here in town. Did you know that? A Mr. Doug Rosenbaum?”

I started. “Principal Rosenbaum?”

Bill nodded. “He was the first to give us an ID of Levi Lindquist. He had some ideas of who the girl could be.”

“There were two girls.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, brought Sofía into it, but I was unnerved. I didn’t want him to be too sure of everything he’d figured out so far.

But he only nodded calmly. “Sofía Perez.”

The pulse traveled out from me like a mushroom cloud, a sudden singular thrum of energy all throughout the building, every piece of machinery still connected to wire, and worse, the lone blast from the bells.

Bill winced and plugged his fingers in his ears, swaying briefly on his feet. “Not so good for my vertigo,” he said when the sound had stopped. His tone was light, but that something in his eyes had sharpened, darkened. “I was less concerned about Sofía. I needed to find the host.”

The sterility of the word sent another shiver through me.

Bill took another step, and this time I couldn’t stop myself from jerking back, my ankle screaming in response. “I remember how it felt,” he said quietly. “All that power, all that light.”

With his last step forward, I became aware of how tall he was. Not as tall as Levi, but easily as tall as Sofía.

The wrinkles around his eyes tightened, fine lines spreading out like cracks in glass. “The glory.” His face relaxed once more, the fiery thing in his eyes replaced by the watery twinkle that had been there before. “You feel it, don’t you, Frances?”

I shook my head. “I know it’s in me. I don’t know why, or what it wants, or how it’s doing this.”

“What it wants? Now, that’s going to take some time and cooperation to figure out. But as for how it’s doing this, well, the science is heavy on the pseudo, but as far as I can tell, the beings are made of an energy akin, if not quite identical, to electricity.”

He huffed through a few more humid breaths and licked his lips. “If these—these remarkable beings were to move freely through the Earth—well, they’d blaze right out.”

“You said they were electricity,” I said. “Not fire.”

“Right.” Bill wetted his lips again. “Right you are, Frances. But we’re not talking light switches and copper wire. No, these things are much more . . . volatile. Like lightning. I’ve interviewed eleven people with encounters like ours, and from that research, I believe the gel—the meteorite debris the creatures land in—is some sort of protective conductor, something that allows them to exist in our physical and seeable world indefinitely. Maybe even a magnetic field, stoking the electric current, you see?”

I’d gotten such a bad grade in physics class that I couldn’t even be sure this was the sort of thing you’d learn in physics class.

Bill went on. “But when that structure’s compromised, the beings start to lose their form. They’ve got one of two options: Light up like a dying star, expel all that energy in an electrical storm until there’s nothing left of them, at least not any place that we can see. Or they can attach to a host. Use a body as a conductor.”

He took another step. “Now, here’s the thing, Frances.”

His expression was friendly, and the gun was still on the ground, but I stepped backward anyway.

“Our bodies? They’re not the same thing as the disc you found. Every pass of the current through you costs something.”

He took another step. “At this rate—setting off alarms and powering up furnaces—you’re liable to burn right through the energy in you, and kill yourself doing it.”

My gaze dropped to the scars on my arm. “Ah,” he said. “Exactly! You understand! As you expel the power, the markers of it on your skin will fade.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?” I said. I thought of Remy, shut into an interrogation room with an FBI agent. How many times had he had his vision? Had his scars disappeared yet? “If I’d known that,” I went on, “I could have burned through it by now!”

Bill shuffled toward me, and I took another half step back.

“If there’s no alien in me, then the people you say are after me—they wouldn’t have any use for me.”

Bill’s mouth went slack. Another step through ash for him. Another anxious half step back for me. “And you would do that?” he said in a low voice. “Pity. You’re just like all the others.”

“The others?” I said.

“The others,” he hissed. “Everyone who’s ever squandered this precious gift! You’d be okay dumping the being right out of you without ever knowing why it came!”

I tried to step back again, but my shoulders met metal. I’d backed into the forklift, caught between it and Black Mailbox Bill.

“You’d give up all that it shows you. The keys to the very universe! Things no other man on Earth has seen.”

His white eyebrows twitched. He was too close now. I could smell the heady punch of his aftershave, that fake ocean breeze, and see the sagging pores on his nose and cheeks.

Bill harrumphed. His glittering eyes swept skyward, his hand arcing up to mirror the path. “What’s out there. Who’s out there. Everything the being has seen and felt—eons’ worth of information that has been hidden from us since the birth of the universe, and—and proof!”