He was stern in a way he’d never been before. “Goddammit, Kyra, I’m not messing around here. Now stop being such a baby, and listen to me, will ya?”
This time I didn’t have to force thoughts of stolen memories to make myself cry. I blinked hard, and now I was the one avoiding eye contact. He gave me a curt nod and let go of me. “Good. Okay then.” He started talking, and I kept my eyes glued to his feet. But I listened hard. “Remember when you were little and you used to ask if you could go to the office with me? When they’d have Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and your friends would tag along with their folks? You always asked, and I always made excuses—meetings, appointments. Hell, three years in a row I pretended to have the flu just to get out of it.” Something heavy settled in my gut.
“The thing was, I couldn’t. Bring you, that is. You knew I worked with computers, but what you didn’t know was that I worked for the ISA.”
My eyes shot up to his.
“It’s true,” he admitted. “I gave them almost twenty years. Most’a my adult life. They recruited me right out of college, and I worked out of their Woodinville facilities. Nothing near as intense as this . . .” He spread his arms to indicate this place, and then he dropped them, shrugging halfheartedly. “But definitely not small potatoes either. My security clearance was pretty limited, but I knew they had other operations all over the country.” He chuckled ruefully. “Hell, all over the globe.”
I felt blindsided. How was I supposed to respond? All this time my dad had been working with the ISA and he hadn’t said a single word. I felt like I was talking to a stranger. Suddenly I had to wonder where he fell on my scale of who I could trust.
But he just kept talking. “I was there,” he said, his voice like a growl. “The night the ship crashed—the EVE, they called it. It happened right outside Devil’s Hole. They tell you that part?”
I shook my head, too dazed to manage anything else.
Simon had told me once that Devil’s Hole was a hotbed of alien activity. I thought when he’d said that, he meant abductions and sightings. I hadn’t realized that included UFO crashes too.
“I wasn’t actually at the crash site, mind you. That was reserved for top-level clearance personnel only. I wasn’t even part of the recovery team. But the body—that M’alue—was transported across the mountains, to where we were in Woodinville, and I happened to be in the facility when it arrived.” His voice drifted as he closed his eyes, remembering. “I saw it, all gray and broken.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were red. “I had no way of knowing how much trouble that thing would cause, but looking back, we probably shoulda let it die. We damn sure shouldn’t have kept it . . . not locked inside that capsule.” He covered his mouth to stop from choking on his sob. “Jesus, Kyr, I’m so sorry.”
“So why did you then?” I asked.
He let out a long, slow, shaky breath before trying again. “When they realized it was healing . . . that it was going to live, someone—I don’t know who, but some asshole—decided we should try to communicate with it. To break barriers.” He ran his hand through his hair. “No clue who thought that was a good idea. But that’s where I came in.” He started pacing, his voice no longer low, and I knew the others could hear him too. Everyone was watching us. Listening. “They put me in charge of writing a code—a translating program.” He shrugged. “Turns out it wasn’t all that complicated, at least to transcribe some of the stuff we recovered from the crash site. It was rudimentary, and like I said, definitely not perfect, but we made progress. That’s how we knew what it . . . what he was . . . that they called themselves the M’alue.” He scrubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “But we never quite got the verbal part right. I tried. Worked on it for months. Sat outside his tube and tried to communicate with him, and I thought I was making progress—a couple of times I swear he tried to respond to the messages I was transmitting. He would open his mouth and make this”—his gaze drifted as he remembered it—“this sound at me.” His eyes met mine. “Like static.” Like the hikers, I could practically hear his thoughts. “But I never understood. The program never deciphered it.”
I still wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me.
“I realized then just how much he was suffering,” my dad went on. “I tried to tell my boss, but he refused to listen. So I went to his boss. No matter who I told, no one wanted to hear it.” He just kept rubbing his chin, his jaw, his cheek. “But it was preying on my mind.”