Transmission

Kevin looked over to find that some of the kids were looking his way. He was about to tell them that he didn’t want trouble, but Luna was already on her feet, moving toward them.

“Kevin didn’t make anything up!”

“Of course he made it up,” one boy said. “Who would be stupid enough to believe in aliens?”

“You and everyone else, apparently,” Luna snapped.

“Are you calling me stupid?”

Kevin got up, joining her. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“So why did you do it then?” a girl at the back demanded. “My parents were so worried about aliens coming that they were talking about selling our house and moving out into the countryside.”

More people were staring at them now, and people had their phones out. Kevin knew he couldn’t be seen here like this. His mom would go crazy. Besides, he’d seen what large groups of people could be like.

“We’ll just go,” Kevin said, holding up his hands. “We don’t want to cause a problem.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” the boy who’d spoken first said. “Not until you admit what you did.”

He stood there with his arms folded, looking like he meant it. That was a problem, because the longer they stayed there, the more people would be watching. Luna seemed to be thinking the same thing, and, being Luna, she took a more direct approach to the problem:

She walked up to the boy in the doorway and pushed him, hard.

“Run, Kevin!”

She was already running, and it took Kevin a moment to realize he should be doing the same, but only a moment. As tired as he had been, he was recovered enough now to run past the boy, following Luna as she ran out into the middle of the town. He ran as fast as he could, ignoring the way his breath came in short bursts, trying to keep up as they retraced their steps, heading back through the factories and past the rusting metal. Kevin ran until he felt that his heart might explode in his chest, his lungs burning.

When it was obvious that no one was following, he and Luna came to a halt, and to his surprise, Kevin found himself laughing.

Luna laughed too. “That was fun.”

“My mom is going to kill me,” Kevin pointed out, but right then, even that didn’t sound so bad. The truth was that he felt better than he had for days now. It felt like so long since he’d done something as simple as getting into trouble with Luna, running away before it could turn into anything worse.

“Your mom will be fine with it,” Luna said.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Kevin replied, because she would be angry that he’d gone out like that, angry that he’d risked everything by going where people might see him. “When I get home, I’m going to have to…”

He trailed off as a feeling started to rise through him. A feeling he knew far too well, because it had been there before the facility, before NASA, before all of it.

“What is it?” Luna said. “What are you going to have to do?”

Kevin shook his head. “Luna, I think…”

“What?” she said.

“I think there’s another message coming through.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kevin stood among the factories, listening to the transmission as it started to come. He struggled to latch onto the message. That was hard at first; harder than it had been, and harder than Kevin suspected it should be.

He started to worry. What if whatever it was in his brain that connected with the transmissions had changed, shifting with the slow progress of his illness? What if there had only been a brief window when his brain was receptive to it all, and now it was starting to pass beyond it? He tried to concentrate, focusing on the sounds and willing them to make sense.

An image burned in his brain, numbers shining there in neat rows of coordinates. Kevin wouldn’t have recognized them as that, but he’d seen strings of them before, when he’d known to shift the telescope the first time to pick up the stream of the message.

“Kevin?” Luna said. “Are you all right?”

Kevin didn’t know how to answer that. The strange part was that he felt better than he’d felt in days, maybe some interaction between his illness and the message making the symptoms feel better for the moment.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think… I think the aliens want us to look for signals in a new place.”

It was what they’d wanted the last time he’d had a signal through straight to his brain like this, the power of it almost impossible to hold. It had been the beginning of all of this.

“So who do we tell?” Luna asked.

Kevin must have stared at her too long in the wake of that, because she spread her hands.

“What? We have to tell someone,” she said.

Kevin knew she was probably right. If there was a fresh message, people would want to know. The problem was that he wasn’t sure how they would react. He’d seen all the reporters who were still outside of his house. He’d seen the pain that it had caused his mother. Wouldn’t it be better to just keep quiet and protect her?

“I’m not sure if anyone will believe me,” he said. “They think that I’m a fake. If I tell people, then they’ll assume that I’m just trying to get attention.”