But Justine kept her hands neatly folded on the table. “Yeah, well, these are real,” she said, mocking Ariane’s casual tone. “Confirmed through airport radar and our own satellites. And not a weather balloon among them,” she added lightly.
Ariane went still, a new alertness running through her like electricity. I could feel it from where I stood. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite as certain as she had a few moments ago.
“And yet, don’t those locations seem significant?” Justine pressed.
It took me a second to see it. “Milwaukee and Chicago. It’s near you, near Ford and the others,” I pointed out quietly. Phoenix was the outlier that I couldn’t make fit, but the other two were dead-on. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Justine gave me a nod. Then she looked to Ariane. “It seems, my dear,” she said, “that our visitors are looking for something very specific.” She paused. “You.”
I STARED AT THE FOLDER in my hands until it became an unfocused red blur.
That was the fantasy, wasn’t it? Every orphaned or abandoned or unhappy child dreamed of her “real” family showing up to claim her. Taking her away from the horror of her current life, whether that was being forced to eat her vegetables before dessert, or being bled and broken as a laboratory experiment.
The difference being that, in this case, we weren’t talking about a previously unknown aunt from Omaha or even a minor member of royalty in some unheard-of country. (That was a key factor in most of those stories, a subgenre I’d discovered during my exploration of fiction. The rescuing relative was also usually wealthy, possibly famous, and preferably gruff with a soft heart that had been hardened by tragedy or loss.)
No, when it came to me, we were talking about an advanced civilization from light-years away. An entirely different planet, species, everything. And they were here for me, supposedly? That made no sense. Why? How did they even know I existed? It wasn’t like I was someone they’d lost along the way.
My fingers felt numb and thick on the file. “I don’t understand,” I managed to say.
With a hint of weariness, Justine gestured to the chairs we’d abandoned.
Zane slid a glance at me, and I nodded. Even if this was a trick, a joke of some kind, I wasn’t leaving now without the punch line.
We sat again, and Justine leaned forward, her expression sharp with intensity.
“The government has been tracking the incidents for years. Most of them, as you so astutely pointed out, are the result of witnesses mistaking experimental aircraft or a weather phenomenon as something…extraterrestrial. Occasionally with the assistance of mind-altering substances, including what they’ve cooked up in their own distillery.” She rolled her eyes. “Or worse.”
“But…” Zane prompted with a hint of impatience. He was on the edge of his seat, as if he might try to pull the words from her faster.
“When we inherited these files, it was one of our analysts who noticed the pattern.” Justine gave a dismissive sniff for all those who’d missed the connection, likely the FBI and possibly the CIA as well. “The only confirmable instances were those in the last fifteen years or so, in those locations. Then we received information from a knowledgeable source inside Project Paper Doll.” She said this last bit carefully.
“Emerson St. John,” I said.
She gave me a tight, enigmatic smile.
Zane snorted. “It’s him. He ran out of funding faster than the others. He said as much.”
I nodded. That was consistent with what Dr. Jacobs had suggested.
Justine scowled at both of us. “Regardless, it became obvious that the most active locations were also those we knew to have the only living sources of extracted tissue.” She cleared her throat. “And the size and general shape of the craft at each of these sightings match that of the recovered ship from…the desert.” She gave me a significant look.
A shiver slid over my skin, and I resisted the urge to run my hands over my arms to warm them. This had nothing to do with a physical change in the temperature.
The recovered ship from the desert. Justine was being cautious, not using buzzwords that might catch attention from even the most casual listener. But she meant Roswell.
Justine was saying not simply that humans had evidence of recent extraterrestrial visitors but that these visitors were likely from the same place as that original ship. The ship that had carried the source of my nonhuman DNA once upon a time.
My breath caught in my throat. My people. Whatever they were, whoever they were. The other half of my heritage. They’d been here, and not that long ago.
“Have you had contact with…them?” Zane asked, his face paler than even his new normal. The idea made him uncomfortable, despite the extraterrestrial bits currently transforming him into this new version of himself. Or maybe because of it. It was one thing to be okay with genetic changes on a theoretical level, but it was another to be confronted with the reality of a ship full of black-eyed, gray-skinned telepaths hovering in your sky at night.