Chapter 1: What Hit the Shed

The crash tore through Dylan's sleep like a hammer.

He came up off the mattress hard enough to knock his shoulder into the nightstand. The clock read 2:58. Three seconds later, Mara groaned, rolled over, and burrowed deeper into the pillow without opening her eyes.

Dylan pressed his palm flat against the bedroom carpet. The second shockwave had arrived and faded, but something lingered. A vibration in the floorboards, faint, still humming through the joists. He waited, pressed his hand to the wall, then the ceiling. Whatever had happened, it had come from below. From the garage side of the house.

A transformer blowout. That was the first thing that came to him. The power grid on this street was ancient, run by a municipal utility that hadn't budgeted for maintenance upgrades since 2009. A transformer on the block had probably popped, and the explosion had rattled everything within a quarter mile.

He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his face with both hands. The garage door was closed. The sound had come from outside, though, definitely outside. He could hear birds starting up in the neighbor's yard, which meant someone had triggered the light on the pole at the end of the cul-de-sac. The neighbors' dogs were barking. All of them.

Dylan pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs.

The kitchen clock said 2:58 still. The second hand had a tendency to skip on this house's clocks. Always had. He pulled a beer from the fridge, set it on the counter, and stared at the garage. The door was a manual roll-up, the heavy insulated kind from the seventies. His hand found the latch on instinct, and he pulled it up.

The hinge on the left side had snapped. The door hung at a forty-five-degree angle, propped open on its right track, and the wind that came in off the back of the property was carrying something that made his eyes water.

He took the fire axe from its magnetic mount above the workbench and carried it out.

The back of the house faced his yard, and the yard faced the alley. The shed was at the back of the yard, twenty feet from the garage, built three years ago when he'd decided he needed a place to store the lawn equipment. He'd paid $400 for it at a home improvement store. It was metal siding over a plywood frame. It looked like what it was.

Now it looked like something had chewed through it. The back wall was gone. Not collapsed, not pushed over. Gone. The metal siding was peeled back in jagged strips, curling like foil, and the plywood frame was in kindling. Wood splinters covered the grass in a pattern that radiated outward from where the shed had stood, as if something had exploded inside it rather than outside.

And in the flowerbed that ran along the back of the property, half-buried in dirt and crushed roses, sat something that was not a transformer, a car, or anything Dylan recognized from either Earth or his own limited experience of things that explode.

The vessel was roughly the size of a minivan, though calling it a vehicle felt inadequate. It was asymmetrical, all curved surfaces and layered plating that ran in organic rather than geometric lines. The outer shell was scorched black along the leading edge, where it had clearly impacted the ground, but the rest of it shimmered under a faint distortion field. The air around the hull wavered like heat rising off asphalt in August, and the distortion made the nearby flowerbeds and the chain-link fence bend and warp in ways that hurt his eyes.

He had never seen this before. He was fairly certain about that.

The garage doorway was the closest solid structure. He backed into it and held his breath.

Inside the vessel, a section of the hull was torn open, and something was moving. A figure was crawling out through a ruptured cockpit, pushing its legs and arms against surfaces that had buckled on impact. The figure was tall, maybe seven feet, and it moved with an awkwardness that suggested broken bones or internal damage, yet the movements carried a precision that didn't match a normal human body.

Dylan pressed his back against the doorframe and counted breaths. One. Two. Three.

The figure reached the torn section of the hull and jammed its hand against a control panel on the exterior. It pressed the panel in a sequence, rapid and deliberate, cycling through controls that seemed to activate without the figure ever actually touching the buttons, pressing only where the next one was already glowing faintly blue under the distorted light.

A signal was going out. That much he understood. Whatever she was doing, she was sending something. A distress call, probably. An emergency beacon of some kind.

She had maybe ten seconds of power left. Dylan could see the panel's glow weakening with each cycle.

He stayed in the doorway. The axe was in his hand. He had told himself he was holding it for protection, for some reason, though his arm ached from holding it up, and the whole arrangement seemed absurd even to him. What exactly did he think he was protecting himself from? A spaceship? A woman who looked like she was in worse shape than he was?

The ship's surface pulsed once, bright blue, and a pulse of energy shot straight up. Dylan looked up and saw it: a thin line of light, visible even in the ambient glow of the neighborhood's streetlights, extending upward into the sky. It was gone in half a second. But the ship's hull continued to glow faintly for a few more moments, and then the light faded to black.

Kessra staggered, braced herself against the hull, and pressed both hands flat on the scorched surface. She said something. The sound was too quiet for Dylan to make out, though the word she was probably repeating was "repeat" or "confirm" or something close to those.

She was bleeding. He could see it now, red on dark skin, running from her side down into the dirt where she'd landed against the hull.

Dylan set the axe on the grass and stepped back from the door. He needed to think.

He did not think.

A voice answered the signal.

It came four minutes and twelve seconds after the beacon fired. Dylan had counted. Four minutes and twelve seconds from the moment the ship pulsed, a second vessel tore through the sky and materialized in his driveway with a flash that turned the streetlights into a kaleidoscope of distorted color. It appeared rather than arrived, with space folding and opening around it in a ripple that made Dylan's vision swim. When the distortion settled, there was a second ship sitting on his driveway, smaller than the crashed one, its surface warping the light from the streetlamps into rings and halos that spun slowly around it.

A door irised open on the scout vessel.

The figure that emerged was humanoid, mostly. Two arms, two legs, a head, all at roughly the right proportions for a person. The proportions were wrong, though. The limbs were too uniform in thickness. The fingers were too long. The head sat too still, no micro-adjustments, no natural sway, like a mannequin that had been placed in the world rather than born in it.

Dark tactical gear covered it. The kind designed for speed, not for warmth or for looks.

The figure spoke.

"It is taking custody of the fugitive under interstellar treaty protocol."

The voice was flat. It sounded generated. It sounded like a computer reading a script designed to make the listener understand there was no room for discussion.

"The witness will be neutralized."

The figure didn't look at Dylan. It walked straight toward the crashed ship, toward Kessra. Toward the woman bleeding in the dirt.

Kessra moved before it reached the midpoint.

She drew a weapon from her wrist, a pistol-thin device that emitted a beam she had fired a dozen times by this point already, but the one she released now was wrong. Too dim, too ragged. The crash had damaged it. The beam cut yellow-orange instead of blue, and it struck the agent's shoulder at an angle that grazed rather than penetrated.

The agent staggered. Just a step. A half-step of imbalance that would have been nothing against a human, but this figure was built on a different tolerance threshold, and the beam was enough to put it off balance long enough for the next thing to happen.

Dylan grabbed the axe from the grass.

He had picked up the axe three minutes ago. He was standing in his doorway, having no plan, having no strategy, just a dead shed and a spaceship and a woman in the dirt who looked like she needed help. He'd put the axe down. Then the mannequin-thing had said "the witness will be neutralized," and his body had remembered what it was holding.

The swing came from instinct. His body did something his mind hadn't told it to do, a rotation of the hips and shoulders that sent the axe blade in an arc from his right side toward the agent's neck.

The blade caught. The agent's head tilted sideways, and something in the neck cracked with a sound like a dry branch snapping. The body dropped to the driveway, twitching once, and went still.

Dylan stood over it. The axe was still in his hand. The blood on the driveway was already spreading, pooling in the concrete's hairline cracks, and the green of his neighbor's fence was too bright and the streetlight was too bright and it was all too bright, too loud, too much, except that nothing made a sound and the only thing he could hear was the ragged sound of his own breathing.

He dropped the axe. The handle clattered against the concrete. His hands were shaking. He pressed them against his thighs, pushed them down, forced them still, but the shaking went up through his arms and into his jaw and he couldn't stop it.

He walked back into the garage and leaned against the workbench. The garage light buzzed. His vision had narrowed to the edges, tunneling, and everything in the center was washed out and overexposed.

He looked at his hands.

The blood on them was dark. Too dark for a human, almost purple, and under the fluorescent light it held a faint iridescence, a shimmer of color that shifted when he tilted his wrists. Iridescent blood. Alien blood. He'd killed something with alien blood.

The axe lay on the driveway. His blood was on his jeans.

He walked back outside. The crashed ship was twenty feet away, its hull still smoking slightly from the impact. Kessra had moved against the interior wall of the cockpit, one hand pressed to her side, the other braced on a console. Her breathing was visible. Not steam exactly. Something that looked like mist in the cold air, and the air wasn't cold.

He went inside.

The cargo hatch was on the left side of the vessel, just behind where the hull had buckled. It opened with a hiss and a click, and Dylan dragged the agent's body through by the ankles. The body was lighter than a human body would have been. Denser, though. He could feel the weight shifting inside the limbs, like there was machinery or some other kind of structure beneath the skin.

He sealed the hatch. The lock engaged with a mechanical sound that confirmed the seal, and he stood there with his hands on the hull, breathing hard, staring at the lock.

The blood on the driveway was a problem. He went to the garage, grabbed the garden hose, and turned it on. The spray hit the driveway and the blood dispersed, diluted, washing toward the edge of the concrete in a pinkish trail that ran down the slope toward the alley. He followed it with the push broom, sweeping the worst of it off the surface and into the grass, where the water spread it thin enough that in daylight it would look like fertilizer runoff or something similar.

The debris from the shed was harder to address. He dragged the splintered wood to the center of the flowerbed, piled it around the base of the crashed ship, and arranged it so the damage looked consistent with a contained explosion rather than something external. A gas leak. A propane tank in the shed that had detonated. Plausible, if no one inspected the scene with an equipment specialist. Probably not plausible at all, but he'd have to see how far the story carried.

He stepped inside to wash his hands.

The kitchen was dark. The faucet ran cold, and the water turned his hands pink for a moment before running clear. He scrubbed with the hand soap that had been sitting in the bottle since Mara had bought it three weeks ago, and the soap smelled like aloe and something synthetic, probably a preservative that had gone off already.

Footsteps on the stairs.

He dried his hands on a dish towel and stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway. Mara appeared at the top of the landing, still in her sleep shirt, hair pushed back from her face. She squinted at him. The hallway light was off. The only illumination came from the kitchen behind him.

"Why is the garage door open?"

"Pressure washer hose blew a gasket. The door swung open when I went to check." He hadn't even used the pressure washer in six months.

"Why is your hand shaking?"

He held his hands at his sides. "I don't know. Cold, maybe. I'll fix it in the morning."

She looked at him for a long moment. She studied his face, his eyes, the position of his arms. Whatever she saw in him was not alarming enough to keep her awake. She gave a small grunt and turned back toward the stairs.

"Don't lock the door tonight," she said. "I'll sleep easier."

"I never lock the door."

That was a lie, but she'd never check.

She went upstairs. The door closed. The house was quiet.

Dylan went back to the ship.

The agent's gear was scattered near where the body had lain. Most of it had been left in the scout vessel, but the wrist unit was missing from the agent's left arm, and the hand that had held it was still curled around an empty housing where the device had been sheathed. Dylan knelt in the blood-soaked concrete and pulled the communicator from the debris near the agent's other side. It was palm-sized, a smooth disc of dark metal with a display that showed a single status indicator.

Green. Pulsing.

He turned it over. The back was warm. The display showed a string of coordinates, a locked-uplink ping chain bouncing signals through a relay satellite to an orbital platform that had already registered the transmission. The coordinates matched. Kessra's ship. His house. Right here. Right now.

The green pulse slowed, then stopped, then resumed at a lower frequency. A heartbeat indicator, or a confirmation ping, or some kind of status blink. Whatever it was, it meant the signal Kessra had sent was still active. It meant the orbital platform was still listening.

Dylan sat on the driveway with the communicator in his hand and tried to understand what had just happened.

Her distress beacon had reached her people. That was the good news. The bad news was that the beacon had pinged through every relay node connected to the orbital network. The retrieval agent's arrival had been coordinated from space, and that coordination had left a trail that extended far beyond one ship. A scout vessel wasn't the full picture. The relay network itself was the picture, the full scope of it, and every sensor array, every tracking node, every automated system in that chain now had his house on its display, its coordinates marked, its position locked.

The trail hadn't narrowed. It had widened from one pursuer to an entire orbital network that could watch this property from anywhere between low Earth orbit and geostationary altitude. Her own people and the retrieval squad both knew where she was. And now, thanks to the ping chain still blinking green on the communicator in his hand, everyone else connected to that relay had the same information.

Dylan turned the communicator over again. The green light pulsed. Once. Twice. Waiting for a response. Waiting for someone to acknowledge that the coordinates were confirmed, that the target had been located, that the house on Maple Ridge Drive was exactly where the fugitive had landed.

He set the communicator on the driveway and stood up. His knees popped. The concrete was wet from the hose. The blood trail in the alley ran dark against the pavement, and the light from the streetlamp caught it at an angle that made it look almost real, which it was. He had done this. The axe was still in his hand. The blood was on his jeans. And the communicator on the ground was the only proof that anything at all had happened here tonight.

He could call the police. He could tell Mara everything. He could walk up the stairs, knock on her door, and say: "There's an alien woman in my garage, and there's a dead body in a ship, and I killed it with a fire axe, and I don't know what to do with any of it."

She would call an ambulance, or the military, or someone who would show up within minutes and take everything away from him. Mara would be terrified. The story would not end well for either of them.

Dylan picked up the communicator. The green light pulsed in his hand. He stood in the driveway, the alien woman in her wrecked ship behind him, the dead agent sealed inside, and the orbital network still watching, and he understood what he had walked into tonight. The choice had already been made. The axe had already swung. There was no going back to a version of this evening where he had stayed in bed and let the crash wake him as nothing more than a sound.

He set the communicator against the hull of the ship. The green pulse reflected in the dark metal. Somewhere above him, a relay satellite adjusted its trajectory, and somewhere else, a platform on a station in orbit registered another ping from ground level and filed it away for later review by eyes that would never see this house, this driveway, this small piece of suburban America where a man had just killed an alien and now had to decide what to do with the body and the woman in the ship and the entire consequences of what he had done.