Pulling my hand free, I stepped back. My light slowly faded, and then I returned to the form she was more familiar with. “Kat.”
She stared at me, slowly shaking her head.
Perhaps I should’ve waited on the whole show-and-tell thing. “Kat?”
“You’re an alien,” she whispered as though trying to convince herself.
“Yep, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Oh…oh, wow.” She curled her hand, holding it to her chest. “So where are you from? Mars?”
“Not even close.” I laughed. “I’m going to tell you a story. Okay?”
“You’re going to tell me a story?”
I nodded as I dragged my fingers through my hair. “All of this is going to sound insane to you, but try to remember what you saw. What you know. You saw me do things that are impossible. Now, to you, nothing is impossible.” I waited for that to sink in. “Where we’re from is beyond the Abell.”
“The Abell?”
“It’s the farthest galaxy from yours, about thirteen billion light years from here. And we’re about another ten billion or so. There is no telescope or space shuttle powerful enough to travel to our home. There never will be.” As if our home still existed, I thought as I stared at my open palms. “Not that it matters if they did. Our home no longer exists. It was destroyed when we were children. That’s why we had to leave, find a place that is comparable to our planet in terms of food and atmosphere. Not that we need to breathe oxygen, but it doesn’t hurt. We do it out of habit now more than anything else.”
Recognition flared across her features, and I bet she was thinking about the day at the lake. “So you don’t need to breathe?”
“No, not really.” I shrugged. “We do out of habit, but there are times we forget. Like when we’re swimming.”
“Go on.”
I waited for a moment, wondering if she could handle all of this, and then decided to go for it. I refused to acknowledge the part of me that wanted her to know everything. The part that wanted to desperately know what she’d think if she knew the real me. “We were too young to know what the name of our galaxy was. Or even if our kind felt the need to name such things, but I do remember the name of our planet. It was called Lux. And we are called Luxen.”
“Lux,” she whispered. “That’s Latin for light.”
“We came here in a meteorite shower fifteen years ago, with others like us. But many came before us, probably for the last thousand years. Not all of our kind came to this planet. Some went farther out in the galaxy. Others must’ve gone to planets they couldn’t survive on, but when it was realized that Earth was sort of perfect for us, more came here. Are you following me?”
Her stare was blank. “I think. You’re saying there’re more like you. The Thompsons—they’re like you?”
I nodded. “We’ve all been together since then.”
“How many of you are here?”
“Right here? At least a couple hundred.”
“A couple hundred,” she repeated. “Why here?”
“We…stay in large groups. It’s not…well, that doesn’t matter right now.”
“You said you came during a meteorite shower? Where’s your spaceship?” Her nose did that cute wrinkle thing.
I arched a brow. “We don’t need things such as ships to travel. We are light—we can travel with light, like hitching a ride.”
“But if you’re from a planet billions of light years away and you travel at the speed of light… It took you billions of years to get here?”
Did she really just do that math in her head? “No. The same way I saved you from that truck, we’re able to bend space and time. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know how it works, just that we can. Some better than others.”
She nodded slowly, but I had a feeling that was just for show. She wasn’t freaking out, so that was good news at least.
I continued as I sat back down. “We can age like a human, which allows us to blend in normally. When we got here, we picked our…skin.” She winced, and I shrugged. What could I do? It was the truth. “I don’t know how else to explain that without creeping you out, but not all of us can change our appearances. What we picked when we got here is what we’re stuck with.”
“Well, you picked good then.”
I grinned as I ran my fingers over the grass. “We copied what we saw. That only seems to work once for most of us. And how we grew up to look alike, well, our DNA must’ve taken care of the rest. There are always three of us born at the same time, in case you’re wondering. It’s always been that way.” I watched her sit back down, no more than a foot or so in front of me. “For the most part, we’re like humans.”
“With the exception of being a ball of light I can touch?”
My grin spread. “Yeah, that, and we’re a lot more advanced than humans.”
“How advanced is a lot?” she asked quietly.