didn’t want to let him go. Her fingers dug into David’s upper back even though she was conscious of their parents waiting nearby. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, loosening her grip.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
I know.
What they went through in Nevada had brought them closer together than Reese had ever anticipated. She knew David was only going to his home, but the idea of him leaving filled her with an embarrassing panic. She told herself she was being illogical—this was just some kind of posttraumatic stress thing. Besides, their parents were watching.
She pulled away before the burning behind her eyes manifested into tears. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.
He gave her a small, crooked smile. “Definitely.”
Now Reese turned onto her side, drawing her knees up beneath the covers. David had kissed her that afternoon in this very room. The memory of it made a warm thrill snake through her, quickly followed by a surge of self-doubt. One kiss didn’t necessarily mean there was going to be another—and it might not mean anything other than kissing. But she wanted it to mean something. She just wasn’t sure what.
She gave up on sleeping and turned on the light again. Across the room, the red and gold paint that covered one entire wall of Reese’s bedroom took on a darker, warmer hue. It was like being inside a womb: soft gold skin and streaks of bloodred. This was what she remembered of the adaptation chamber, which Amber had described as being similar to an incubator.
Reese remembered painting that wall in a possessed rush, knowing only that she needed to get this image out of her brain. She had dreamed of a pliable yellow room with bleeding walls ever since she woke up from the accident in that strange hospital in Nevada, and spilling it onto the wall seemed to be the only way to exorcise it. Maybe that had worked—she hadn’t dreamed of it since she finished the painting—but she still didn’t understand the full repercussions of what had been done to her in that adaptation chamber.
She climbed out of bed and pulled the khaki pants out of the trash. She had forgotten about the phone Amber had given her.
Call us when you’re ready
, she had whispered in Reese’s ear. Reese dug the phone out of the pocket. It was a plain gray flip-phone,the kind sold to technology-phobic senior citizens. She flipped it open; there were no messages. She looked through the contacts and found one listing: Evelyn Brand.
Dr. Brand was Amber’s mother, as well as the Imrian who had overseen Reese’s and David’s recoveries at Project Plato in Nevada. Could Reese trust Dr. Brand to tell her the truth? She was doubtful.
She put the phone down and moved to her desk, opening her laptop to go online. She needed to find out what was being reported about her and David’s abduction and return. Maybe that would give her some indication of who to trust.
As soon as she logged into the Hub, news feeds from around the world showed that the entire globe was focused on the spaceship hovering over her house. If extraterrestrials appeared over your city, would you run for your lives or run to take a photo? one article asked. Thousands of people have chosen the latter in the last twenty-four hours, flooding into a normally quiet neighborhood in San Francisco to catch a glimpse of the black triangle from another planet. Meanwhile, others have been stocking up on supplies and taking to the back roads—just as they did earlier this summer after the June Disaster. “I’ll be prepared,” said Tom Maynard, en route to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe. When asked what he was preparing for, Maynard replied, “You want to talk about terrorists? That ship is scarier than all of those birds.”
Reese remembered the day after the planes were grounded, driving with Mr. Chapman and David down highways packed with people fleeing a threat they couldn’t identify. As far as she could tell, nobody had yet pinpointed the cause of that mass