The Fellowship for Alien Detection (27 page)

Come on, Suza!
she thought to herself, trying to fight the tide of sadness. If she could just do this . . .
I'll get to see them. I have to move, have to GO! Now!

Suddenly Suza's alarm clock blared to life with that weird, ancient-sounding music.

“No!” Suza screamed. The sound tore through her sanity. It was too much! She couldn't do it. “I CAN'T! I CAN'T! MOOMM!!!!”

There was a thump from beyond the wall, as her dad or Angie was startled awake.

S
UZA
, a voice spoke up in her head. C
ALM DOWN AND STOP THIS N
—

But Suza drowned it out with her screaming. “MOMMMM!”

Now a searing pain erupted behind her left ear, but even that couldn't stop her.

“MOMMMM!”

Her bedroom door burst open. Suza looked up to see Angie in her blue robe—followed by four small men in orange jumpsuits, yellow hard hats, and black boots and goggles. They converged on her bed, their smooth faces leaning over her.

“NO!!! MOM!!! MOM!!!”

And then everything washed away in orange light once more.

Gila National Forest, NM, July 6, 8:36 p.m.

Haley watched the boy named Dodger through the rearview mirror. He was slouched, his head lolled back against the seat, eyes closed.

She wanted to give him time to adjust. After all, she'd needed some. The first night after she'd left her parents, on the journey west across Arkansas and Oklahoma, she'd felt like a dry fried thing lying in the road. The smushed version of her former self. She'd spent hours going back and forth about whether leaving had been the right thing to do, whether it could possibly have been a good idea to strike out on her own with this strange man in black, until her thoughts were reduced to a low, broken hum.

She'd wondered about her parents, wondered what they were doing. Had they headed west, like she'd told them? How were they holding up?
They're a mess, you know they are
, she'd thought bitterly to herself. And that was all her fault.

Sometime after dawn, she'd actually slept, a bunch as it turned out, almost until noon. Despite the questions and regret, there was also a kind of stern calm that had settled over her. There was no more lying, no more trying to figure out where the story would lead next. Now, she knew: The Alto had access to the purchase records of the other fellowship winner's debit card. He was heading south and east. By late morning of the 6th, the Alto had guessed that Roswell was his destination.

Now they had him, and he looked much like she had: smushed.

Haley turned to the Alto. He was driving, motionless. This guy never had a scratch or an itch or needed to change his seating position or anything. In the nearly forty-eight hours since they'd left Fort Bluff, he'd only slept two hours, each one at dawn in a rest area. He'd lain on his side on the long vinyl front seat and immediately fallen asleep, like someone had shut off a switch, while Haley had gone to get snacks. His alarm had gone off exactly sixty minutes later and off they went again.

Haley had asked him how he could survive like that.

“The mind can be trained,” the Alto had replied.

And yet the Alto's mind seemed to be his least reliable part.

“What took you so long, back in the museum?” Haley asked him now.

The Alto shrugged. “Nothing. I was in position; I just wanted to wait until the moment of maximum surprise.”

“Yeah, well that was super fun,” Haley muttered. “I thought you said the agents wouldn't try another public Missing Time Field like that. You said it was too risky for them.”

The Alto shrugged. “That was before they failed in their attempts to get the two of you separately. And besides, Roswell is an exception. Because of the town's notoriety in connection with UFO's, nobody's going to believe reports of a Missing Time Event
there
. Can't cry wolf too many times, right, Holly?” The Alto reached out and flicked the tiny smiling hula girl on the dashboard. She bobbed in agreement, her tan grass skirt ruffling.

Haley looked at the doll, then back at the Alto. He'd done this a couple times before, conferring with the plastic doll and then flicking her, as if her springy bouncing was an actual response. “You know that's weird, right?”

“What?”

“Talking to a hula doll.”

“Holly is my copilot,” said the Alto in what seemed to be complete seriousness.

“You don't spend enough time with real people.”

“Real people?” said the Alto. “I've seen real people these days. It seems to me that a hollow plastic doll isn't much different.”

“Well, that's cynical.”

“Or just experience,” said the Alto. “Anyway, it was risky to try an MT Field in the middle of broad daylight, even if it was in Roswell. But worth it to try to get both of you at once, and because we're obviously getting close.” Upon saying this, the Alto reached to his wrist and fidgeted with the charm bracelet.

Haley glanced up at the darkening sky. The sun had set behind a line of rock mountains, spraying golden beams across the purple. “So they'll come again.”

“Without question. That is, if they can find us.”

Haley watched the high country pass by. Crumbly rock hills dotted with yellow grass. Dry valleys strewn with boulders, deep in shadows. Stands of pine trees here and there. A rickety fence ran alongside the road: low posts with barbed wire strung between. They saw a herd of brown cows standing there chewing at the tough grass. They gazed at Haley forlornly with their wet, brown eyes. In the distance, giant white windmills lined a bare spiny ridge, spinning slowly. All of this beneath a sweeping, cloudless sky. It was a vast country, beautiful and stark. It filled her with a sense of space, of grandeur, and limitless potential, but also, it was lonely.

Haley got out her tracking map. She'd written Dodger's coordinates down in the right margin. She ran her fingers in from the left and the top so that they met at the blank spot where Juliette was supposedly located. Currently they were on a small road winding through the Gila National Forest in western New Mexico. It was about eight more hours to the coordinates. The question remained though: what to do when they got there.

They'd compared notes once they were out of Roswell, Haley telling Dodger about the Missing Time Events, the mining company, and how something was being put in the ground at each of these sites. Also that people were being taken from each town.

Dodger had told Haley and the Alto about the radio station he could hear from Juliette, and about the orange crystal. He'd explained the strange cavern beneath Lucky Springs, with the doors and the giant orb of crystal, and together they'd decided that there was only one explanation: There must be one of these spherical rooms—Dodger thought it was called an amplification node, which led Haley to wonder
what
exactly was being amplified—beneath each missing time town. What were the aliens going to do with these nodes once they had been installed? And why were they taking the abductees?

“And how can you
talk
to this orange rock?” Haley had asked. “Or hear this radio?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” Dodger had said, before laying his head back and exiting the conversation.

For the moment, they were still heading to the Juliette coordinates, with no further plan.

Haley looked at the GPS on the Alto's dashboard. “Wouldn't it have been faster to take the highway?” Interstate 40 was north of them.

“Affirmative,” said the Alto, “but that's where they'd be expecting us to go.”

Haley looked around the boundless countryside. “Yeah, but out here we're so exposed.”

“Again:
if
they find us.”

Haley checked the rearview mirror again. “What do you think his deal is?” she asked the Alto quietly.

The Alto was silent for a moment. “He's been through a lot,” he replied. “I'm sure he'll tell us when he's ready.”

Haley nodded. “You sound like you can relate.”

“So do you,” the Alto replied. A moment passed with only the humming of tires on the road, before he spoke again. “When I was younger, all I wanted to do was get out and see everything there was to see. I thought I could push the boundaries of the world without consequence, but I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Haley asked.

“Every experience, every journey changes you,” said the Alto. “It's good, but it's risky, too.”

“Risky how?”

“If you change too much, you'll no longer be what you were. There's a balance. Go too far and you become a foreigner even to yourself.”

“I don't see how that's possible,” said Haley, but the idea had caused a nervous flash inside her. She wondered: Who would she be after this adventure?

“It happens one choice at a time,” said the Alto. “So gradually that you don't even know until you look back. One day you're in high school and dreaming of getting away from home, the next you are enlisting in special forces, then next running guns for rebels in . . . in . . .” The Alto gazed up into his eyebrows again, searching his head. “Then you take the job after that, going farther, and then the next one that sounds the most amazing yet. You agree to have your identity changed, because of course you can't be discovered. Then you agree to have your parents' identities removed for their own safety. You agree to have certain operations wiped from your memory, again, and again, until you have a hard time remembering what you tried to keep.”

“New map,” said Haley quietly.

“What's that?” the Alto asked.

“Nothing, just, I kinda know what you're talking about,” said Haley. “Well, the thirteen-year-old version.” She thought about what the Alto had said. How it had happened one choice at a time, a step-by-step process that had led to his current situation. And she wondered: Had her choices so far, lying to her parents, leaving them . . . had those been the first steps on her journey to becoming someone whose best friend was a hula doll?

After a few miles of silent driving, the sky cooling to black, Haley asked, “So, how do you go far, but not too far?”

The Alto shrugged. “You're asking the wrong amnesiac. I'm not sure you have a choice. Some of it's just how you're programmed.”

“Programmed? What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean,” said the Alto, “that when it comes to the big choices in life, even if you did your life over again, you'd probably still make the same decisions, because that's who you are.”

“So,” said Haley, “does that mean that we would end up out here every time?”

“Perhaps.”

Haley wondered about that. It was comforting in a way: Like, maybe Haley hadn't needed to worry about how she
didn't
get those other fellowships, because this was where she was destined to end up anyway. Maybe the wilds of New Mexico were on her map, just like Thorny Mountain was on Maddy's or the JCF was Bradley's.

“Where are we?” Dodger spoke up from the back.

“Almost to Arizona,” said the Alto.

Dodger sat up. Haley saw him rubbing his forehead. She reached down to the supply of food on the floor and turned around with a clear plastic container that was all steamed up. “Dinner?” she asked. “Well, breakfast, actually. Pancakes, from a truck stop. You know, breakfast served all day.”

Dodger just looked at the box.

Maybe pancakes weren't his thing. “I had no idea what you'd want to eat,” said Haley, backpedaling, “but I remembered that after I escaped from those agents, not to mention meeting mister man-in-black here, I was like zombie hungry. And I mean, nothing says
brraainns
like pancakes!” Haley almost threw a hand over her mouth. She couldn't believe this ridiculous stream coming out! What was with her?

Dodger was eyeing her. Haley noticed that he had a sort of piercing gaze. Not like action-hero-piercing, more like he was literally trying to figure out what her deal was, like she was speaking a foreign language. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I just, um, thought pancakes were sorta easy. You know, comfort food. There are eggs in there, too.”

Dodger took the box. “Thanks,” he mumbled, his expression blank. Haley was about to chalk this up as further evidence that he thought she was weird, but then she reminded herself that he was still recovering from the escape. She turned back around and heard Dodger take a couple bites. When he spoke again, quietly, it was in a zombie's low guttural growl.
“Pannncakesss . . .”

Haley laughed and felt a little stir. “It's nice to have someone around other than Mr. Serious,” she said, cocking a thumb at the Alto.

She heard Dodger chuckle a little at this, but then she heard the Alto sigh, and found him rubbing that bracelet again. “Christine . . .” he said quietly to himself, and then shook his head.

“What?” Haley asked.