Soon the room itself fell away, and Dana felt her spirit body rise through the ceiling and into the air above Beyond Beyond. Even though she could still feel her limbs, she somehow knew that this was only a lingering illusion, because her true self was a luminous ball that glowed with bright golden light. She looked into the sky and saw that it was crisscrossed by a network of crystalline rods, as if reality itself was but a dream within a lattice of silica and diamond. It was beautiful and she wanted to weep, but when a sob broke from her, it came out as a shout of pure and unfiltered joy.
She could hear Sunlight speaking, but she was no longer in the same room with him. Dana wasn’t even sure she was on the same planet. His words were soothing, guiding, but the language was now meaningless. Not actual words but more like a breeze that stirs a tide. She rode along on that tide, going farther up and out until Craiger was a patchwork of tiny houses and farmed fields. And then higher. Maryland blended into a landscape smear of green and brown and blue. Higher still until the earth, the whole world, spun below her, a smoky blue gem laid on a vast piece of black velvet on which ten billion diamonds were scattered. Crystal dust was cast across the fabric, and Dana realized that it was the Milky Way.
There was no pain, no doubt, no fear, no worry, no anxiety, no trepidation, no concern, no trace of negativity.
There was nothing but peace.
Nothing but an ever-expanding awareness that brought with it the understanding that she—Dana Scully—was as important a part of the universal All as everything else. As important as the warming sun. As important as the dark matter that held the universe together. As important as love. As important as life.
She floated there, high above the earth, and became aware of something behind her. She turned, expecting it to be the moon.
And it was.
Not some dead, pitted chunk of debris caught in synchronous orbit with the earth. It was somehow alive.
Alive.
She flew toward it, laughing aloud despite the airless vacuum of space. The mountains of the moon, crenellated edges of vast impact craters, looked lovely as she flew across them. Sunlight’s voice was fading, fading as she flew beyond his control, beyond his reach, making this journey her own.
Far below she saw something gleaming like metal, and she realized that it was something left behind by one of the Apollo missions. She saw Surveyor 1 and 2. She saw the lunar rover from Apollo 15 and the Apollo 11 LM-5 Eagle descent stage. She saw the flag that had been planted by the first human beings to step onto the surface of another world. She looked for the footprints, but they had become obscured. There was debris, though. Proof that humans had been here. And that made her laugh, because she was a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had taken her moments to soar through space to reach this point. No rockets, no space suit. Nothing but her will and her mind.
And then something moved on the dusty surface of the moon.
Dana turned her awareness to see what it was.
There was something on the edge of a large crater, poised on the rim, touched by the sun and gleaming with silver fire.
It was triangular and huge. Hundreds of times bigger than any of the debris left behind by NASA. It did not sit cold and inert, as the other machines did. Instead there were lights blazing on each of the three points. Bright white, and these were the first lights she had seen that hurt her to look at. They were too bright, or … maybe bright in the wrong way. In a way that was not harmonious with her spirit-sight.
The lights seemed to throb, to pulse. A slow, heavy rhythm. Flaring and dimming, flaring and dimming, and flaring again. She understood that this was a machine, a ship of some kind, but the rhythm was like a slumbering heart. Then the throbbing changed, quickened, became more urgent.
All of a sudden Dana realized that this thing, this ship, had indeed been sleeping and now that she had flown so close to it, it had begun to awaken.
With a cry of alarm, she turned and ran, racing on solar winds back toward the earth. Back toward her body. She flew faster and faster while behind her the lights throbbed and flared and came closer to being awake.
“No!” cried Dana, because every instinct, every part of her expanded awareness, knew that this was wrong, that she had made a terrible mistake.
A dangerous and deadly mistake.
She flew downward, downward, needing to escape back into the mundane and ordinary world. She thought she heard Sunlight’s voice calling out to her, but she flew past it as she plunged into the atmosphere, down toward Maryland, toward the small town of Craiger, toward the center of town and the rooftop of Beyond Beyond. She smashed through it, actually feeling the tar of the roof, the wood and plaster, metal and brick, electrical wires, and everything of which the building was made.
Then she was in the room and her body was there. So was Sunlight’s. Both bodies looked empty, vulnerable. Dead.
But there was something very wrong here, too.
A figure stood between the two vacant bodies.