Oblivion Read Free

cause of all this.”
    Nikara sighed. “The aliens did this. I’m going. That’s what we came for.”
    “I thought we came to see it up close.”
    “You can’t see it up close without getting in it.” Nikara snorted. “Anybody knows that.”
    Danny didn’t agree, but he knew better than to argue with Nikara when he was in this kind of mood. Nikara half slid, half walked to the edge of the roof.
    “Think it’s too far to jump?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Danny said. He hadn’t left the peak, hoping that would discourage Nikara.
    “If I hang off the gutter, I won’t drop so far,” Nikara said. “If you break your leg and those things start eating you,” Danny said, “I’m not coming to get you.”
    Nikara looked at him over his shoulder. “I didn’t think you would.”
    Danny didn’t know how Nikara meant that. Did he mean Danny was a coward? Or that it was a sensible thing not to rescue someone who was dissolving?
    Nikara gripped the gutter and swung his legs off the roof. Danny’s stomach tightened. All he could see were Nikara’s brown hands clinging to the rusty metal.
    Danny made his way across the roof. He reached the edge just as Nikara let go.
    A cloud of dust rose around him, and Danny felt a cry leave his throat. Not Nikara, too. Danny wanted to close his eyes, so that he wouldn’t see a friend die, but he couldn’t look away.
    He was breathing shallowly, waiting for the dust to settle, hoping he’d see Nikara in one piece. Danny realized he had lied; if Nikara was injured, Danny would do everything he could, short of jumping in the dust himself, to get Nikara back on the roof.
    Finally the dust stopped swirling. Nikara was standing very still. His face, his clothes, his hair were covered in black dust. But his eyes were his own. And they were twinkling.
    “It’s like feathers!” Nikara said. “It tickles.”
    Danny frowned. He thought the stuff would be stiff and bristly, like rust flakes. He didn’t expect it to be soft.
    “Come on down,” Nikara said.
    Danny put his hands on the gutter as he had seen Nikara do. The metal was cold against Danny’s skin. He was about to swing over, to join Nikara, but something stopped him.
    “Come on /” Nikara said.
    Danny looked at the dust. Some of it was still swirling near Nikara’s feet. Every time Nikara moved, the dust would move, too. Then Danny let his gaze wander from Nikara to the house foundations. One of those was Cort’s. No one had said what the black stuff was. Some of it had come from those ships, yes, but some of it had to have the remains of buildings in it.
    When Danny’s great-uncle Milton died, he’d been cremated, and Danny’s mom, as the only surviving relative, got the ashes. She couldn’t decide whether to keep them or scatter them, so for a few weeks, Danny, Nikara, and Cort would open the urn and look inside.
    There were gray flakes—soft gray flakes because Danny had touched them—mixed with bits of bone. And that’s what this black dust and the rubble reminded him of. Ashes, with a bit of bone.
    Bile rose in his throat, and he had to swallow hard to keep it down.
    “Danny,” Nikara said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
    But Danny couldn’t swing himself off the roof. Not and land in ashes. Cort’s ashes. One of his closest friends, forever reduced to dust and bone.
    “You go,” Danny said.
    Nikara made a small sound of disgust and slogged through the blackness toward Cort’s house. A cloud rose in his wake. Danny watched as the ashes mixed with ashes, and the dust with dust.
    And right at that moment he knew that the aliens had to pay for what they had done to Cort and everyone else.
    Danny didn’t know how. But he knew they had to pay. Cort and everyone else mixed with this gray dust that spread out before him couldn’t rest until they did.

1
    April 23, 2018
7:50 p.m. Eastern Time
    174 Days Until Second Harvest
    The Oval Office smelled musty. That was always the first thing Secretary of State