“Aidan, you don’t have to—”
“I think I do, probably,” said Aidan, teeth chattering very lightly.
He was sitting now, hugging his knees to his chest, all vulnerable little boy, his skin so pale, and Emily wanted to grab hold of the rock beside her and pull it out like a concertina from the cliff and stretch it around him, cocoon him in stone, so nothing could ever harm him. To set light to the whole forest, to keep him warm.
Silly, really.
She reached out to bring him into a hug, but he shook his head.
Bob was looking between them, from one to the other, bemused. “Are you…were you…was someone hurting the kid?” he asked. “Your…f—” He shook his head. “Your family?”
Father, he’d been going to say.
“No,” said Emily. “But they will hurt him if they catch him.”
“Your family?”
“No. The men in black.”
“White,” said Bob.
“What? Oh. Yeah. Whatever.”
Bob sat down heavily, still holding the SPOT tracker. “I really don’t understand what’s going on,” he said.
Aidan sighed. A meaningful sigh.
Emily sent him a look: You don’t have to.
He sent one back: It’s OK.
That was the thing about looks. You could use them to speak with. They were a kind of universal communication. Emily liked that. She wasn’t big on speaking. Her mom was always doing it—narrating everything. That wasn’t Emily’s style. She liked to find other ways to communicate. Her eyes. Dancing: the movement of her body through space.
Fire.
Though that had been kind of an accident, and totally Jeremy’s fault.
OK, not really.
“I think,” said Aidan, “I think I can show you.”
Bob was watching him closely now.
Everything was very still. There was bright light outside the shelter; but inside, it was as if the moment before dawn persisted, everything dull and shadowy, gravid with the day about to be revealed. Everything shaded by the pine-needled branches.
Aidan closed his eyes; rippled with effort. She knew that what he did was a reflexive survival instinct; it was hard for him to override it like this.
Then his outlines, the silhouette made in space by his body, the actual boy shape of him, began to shimmer, to heat-haze, to blur.
CHAPTER 14
AIDAN MOVED OUTWARD from his own self, and his shape altered, became strange and hard to understand: hard to fit into your mind, because there were no containers, no boxes in there, in your mind, for him to go into, to be framed by, no references at all to pin him in place.
Part of the problem with understanding it, Emily thought, was that movies always used bits of animals to represent them: tentacles, bug eyes, that sort of thing. People could imagine only things that corresponded to their own world’s physics, its biology, its system of structures. Whereas the reality was just…was just…something that you almost couldn’t see, even, because you had never seen anything like it, were not equipped in any way to delineate it in vision.
Aidan had said, in her bedroom, soon after they met: “My real form does not fit into your ontology.”
She’d had to look that one up.
Was there an impression of a head? Eyes? It was hard to tell. She remembered his ship, how she had known right away what it was—and not because it looked like any of the photos, like any of the movies. No: she had known because its corners had been in the wrong places, its edges had not made sense.
Bob was opening and closing his mouth, and he, at least, looked like an animal, like a fish dumbly kissing water, as he scrambled backward to the edge of the shelter.
Then Aidan—the thing that had been Aidan—retracted back inward, folded, a time-lapse video of origami, into the form of a little boy again.
There was a long silence.
“What. The— H-h-he’s…an alien?” said Bob.
“Not at all,” said Aidan. “I’m me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re an alien.”
That was when Bob passed out.
CHAPTER 15
EMILY CROUCHED OVER Bob. She didn’t like having to tax his mind like this, with the strain of something so big—and now that she was close to him, she didn’t like the heat that was coming from his skin, either, or the pallor of it.
She didn’t like that at least two men with very large guns were probably close to their position, right now, drawn by the thinning smoke from their dying fire, and Bob was unconscious.
How long would it have taken to traverse that snow plain they’d surfed down on their plane wing? A couple of hours? If anything, the men should be here already, which meant they might well be outside, waiting for them to make a move. Either that or they were regrouping at the crash site, taking things slow. Being cautious, believing she still had the gun.
Whatever: they knew that they were chasing an injured man and two kids. They wouldn’t be worried. Like good hunters, they could take their time.
Emily didn’t like any of this.
When the pilot opened his eyes, she helped him to sit up. He kept glancing over at Aidan, who was sitting very quietly.
“I’m feverish,” Bob said. “I must be hallucinating.” He was touching his arm, where the skin was red and mottled.
“You’re feverish,” she said. “Yes. But you’re not hallucinating.”
“But…but…”
Emily didn’t have time for this. None of them had time for it. She explained it all, as succinctly as she could. How she had found the ship—not that ship was the right word, of course. It had been the day she’d been suspended from school, but she didn’t mention that part to Bob.
The rest, though, she told. How she had heard it first—the breaking of the trees, the impact with the earth. She’d run out of the house a moment before, after her mom drove her home, after the boys’ locker room burned, and her mom was shouting after her, shouting for her to come back, that her dad was going to be home soon, that they needed to talk about this as a family.
And then there had been the noise: splintering branches; a dull thud.
She had gone out from their yard on the edge of the small town by the lake and into the woods, and she told Bob how she had seen the thing there in the burned and blackened earth, all the snow melted into air. The near impossibility of comprehending the angles and lines her eyes were delivering to her brain.