Chapter Text
It was now quiet and wild.
The snowstorm had come down from the west, obscuring the sun as it set and smothering the world in a thick gray haze. Fractal flakes filled the gusty air as they coiled and danced through the rural valley. Some were so buoyed by the winter wind they seemed steadfast in their refusal to fall into the huge white drifts forming on the ground with any sense of urgency or order. But their sheer numbers caused the piles to grow anyway, rising like a frozen tide towards a darkened sky, burying rocks and bushes and the boards of the cabin’s deck, and all the while in quiet. An ominous beautiful quiet that whistled against the walls, softly scraping and whispering words Adora knew too well. ‘It was too late to leave now.’ The storm said.
She watched the quiet encroach from the reading nook. Amber firelight glowed behind her, the dry log in the hearth crackling softly as she took another sip from the mug held between her hands, knuckles white. The motion activated her phone’s screen again, and she glanced at it, dreading the seconds ticking by. Soon now. She felt like a stone set at the precipice of a waterfall, the fireplace’s glow rushing around her and tumbling out the nook’s window into the night, threatening to pull her with it. It was difficult to see much outside; only the flakes within a small radius were lit a fluffy orange. The view of the normally easily visible mountains was now a mere memory in her mind; her brain drawing the sharp flanks and rounded peaks where they should be onto the bleak canvas of the storm.
It was too quiet. The house was too quiet. The phone finally rang.
Adora nearly spilled her cocoa as she dove for it, fingers fumbling over the screen as she struggled to answer. “Mom?” She asked, pressing it to her ear, but only the faintest hint of a voice replied through thick static. “Mom, can you hear me?”
“Ho-” She caught a clipped word before silence briefly blanketed the line, then static returned. “It’s har-”
Dammit, she should have known. “Mom, I can’t hear you.” Adora carefully set her mug down on the quilted cushion below her so she could plug her opposing ear and try and focus on the words. “It’s . . . there’s . . .”
“A—rahhh? Ca-alkzaa-yotztztzu?”
It was no use, she knew, but God dammit did she wish hoping could make it so. The solution was obvious, despite how much she really didn’t want to do it. She looked out into the main room of the cabin where, between the wooden floor and the vaulted ceiling rafters twenty-five feet above, taxidermized animals watched her agonize with glass eyes. The staircase was there, beside the fully lit and present-stuffed Christmas tree, leading down, leading outside. Then she looked back out the window, clenching her jaw.
It wasn’t going to get better out there.
She needed to talk to them.
Adora left her mug on the cushion as she pounded down the stairs. “Mom, I can’t hear you. I’m going to call you back.” She hung up the line and, even though it was futile, drafted a text to the same effect. She was unsurprised when the little red mark appeared next to the word ‘unsent’.
The main floor of the cabin was technically the second floor. At the bottom of the landing was the mudroom, normally packed to the gills with winterwear, now unsettlingly bare. She felt like a trespasser as she retrieved and donned a second hoodie, then her thick red snow jacket, then a white scarf. Below the waist she pulled snow-pants over her pajamas, making sure the flannel hems were tucked inside her boot’s cuffs and the stretchy bands of the snow-pants were wrapped over them. Ski-goggles, a knitted hat, she pulled her jacket hood up, then gloves last before she faced down the door.
It opened inward and revealed snow up to her thighs and a rush of frigid air. Adora shivered, then steeled herself. The cabin was situated in the lee of one of the many tall round barren prairie hills that dotted the floor of the valley. If she wanted a cell phone signal, she would have to climb.
Her boots crunched down the snow, a muffled sound in a muffled world. Though the wind now whipped over her hat-covered ears, everything was still quiet. The soft pattering of snowflakes against the ground and on her goggles were a white noise that dampened everything. Adora looked up. The cloud deck was thankfully above the peak, and she could just make it out through the blizzard. A barely distinguishable line between two near-identical shades of shadowed gray. She had never made this climb alone before, much less in conditions like this.
With a thirty-degree slope and in the deep fresh power, it was much more a scramble than a hike. Snow was somehow making it through the seams of her cocoon of winter gear, compacted balls of ice stinging her wrists and ankles as she ascended up and away from the little glowing beacon of comfort that was the cabin, whose details were already vanishing into the white death that was the edge of her vision. Getting lost was not an option here. Adora knew what happened if you lost all bearings in zero visibility. Once you had, the chances of getting back to where you started were . . . well, not wise to bet on, that was for sure.
Fifteen minutes later and three hundred feet vertically, she reached the craggy peak of the hill. On the rocky outcrop at its summit, stiff gloved hands gripped the tallest boulder in the spots where Adora was used to doing this in the summer, and heaved herself up with a grunt, landing on her stomach with a soft woosh of compacting snow.
“Hah . . . ha . . . made it.” She announced to no one, and forced herself to stand. Here, above the windbreak, the storm was far fiercer. Shearing gusts blasted her body, buffeting and threatening to blow her over. The snow in the air became biting missiles, pinging and burrowing into her chin, the only skin exposed to the elements. She should have brought a gaiter.
Adora would have said it was a beautiful view - she nearly always did, because it nearly always was atop the hill – but tonight there was nothing to see but gray. Only an orange tint rising from below signaled any hint of humanity. She pulled off a glove, flexing her rapidly cooling fingers before fishing in her fluffy pockets for her phone. It rang only once, and the signal was much much better here. “Hey Mom.” Adora greeted. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I climbed the hill.” She cringed at the shout that followed that. “No. No. I’m fine! It wasn’t too bad actually . . . just some well-needed exercise!” She laughed, but it came out a little hollow. “No. Yeah, I bet. So . . .” She inhaled sharply, bracing for the worst. “How are things?”
Adora listened. “Okay.” She exhaled all the air from her lungs and elected to sit down in the snow. Thank God. “That’s good. Yeah. Tell her- . . . okay. Good. Can I . . . No? I understand.” Adora sighed and reached up to switch hands, stuffing the already aching bare one in a pocket. “I was just hoping - I’ll call tomorrow. When do you think you’ll be able to come back up?” Her eyes widened. “Really? That long? I know the storm is bad but . . . okay . . . okay.” They spoke for another minute or so, but by that point all was pretty much said. Adora would be alone up here for the foreseeable future. Thankfully there was plenty of food and water, and gas for the generator should the power fail. She would survive. She said her goodbyes quickly, “Love you too.” and hung up.
With another huge sigh, she sat slumped for several minutes, one glove over the lower half of her face to block the snow. The cold was seeping in little by little, bitter and lethargic. Adora forced herself to stand and get ready to move. No point sulking here.
Without warning, two amazingly loud booms suddenly roared in Adora’s ears. Thunderous, one after the other. CRACK! CRACK! Like someone had fired a double-barreled shotgun a foot from her ears. Every muscle in her body spasmed at the shock, and she jumped to turn and face north, eyes widening.
In the midst of the distant clouds that way, there was a mote of orange light, growing brighter. Growing closer. Awestruck, Adora watched as the flashing light became a long-tailed streak of fire, tracking across the sky over her head through the clouds. She followed it, blinking through her goggles as it fell southwest and disappeared behind a hill she knew to be half a mile or so from the cabin. An instant after it vanished over the hillside, the ground shook. Snow sheets sloughed off the rocks, and Adora was thrown off balance. Arms pinwheeling, she cringed as she fell backwards off the boulder. Crap! There were sharp rocks down ther-
Whoophf. She sunk a few inches into a deep snowbank. Oh. Good. Nice. Not impaled in the middle of a blizzard. Like that.
Adora scrambled up and trudged a few paces to try and see better. Was that a meteor? It wasn’t moving very fast to be one. Not that she was experienced with them. Were meteors slower than she thought they were? Or maybe it was a plane.
Her breath caught, and the agonizing began again. Someone could be hurt. Though she couldn’t see any of the other cabins scattered around the valley in these conditions, she knew most of the other families had been smart enough to not come up with a storm like this brewing. There was probably not a single other person in the area that could go help. They would freeze to death long before someone else could reach them.
But it was one thing to climb to the top of a hill where you could see where you came from. It was a whole other to drive out into the night chasing a fallen star. The snow was deep, the roads unplowed, trails ungroomed. But there was a trail that led over there, Adora knew, and she could see even now. The outline of the hill reappearing through the snow as fire began to glow behind it. It was like a tiny second sun was trying to rise, creating a foreboding scarlet dawn.
Adora swore bitterly to herself and started the scramble back down the hill. If someone was there, they might burn or freeze in the wreckage, but it wouldn’t be because of her inaction.
After tripping on frozen rocks and roots and nearly having a heart attack several times on the way down – snowballing down a three-hundred-foot hill might sound fun, but the number of broken bones you receive at the bottom generally makes the experience not worth it - Adora came crashing back into the mudroom and went right out again, this time through the other door into the garage. The garage was the rest of the first floor, a concrete room currently with four very cold snowmobiles inside. She ran to the Polaris 40 horsepower, quickly found the key and started it, then ran to open the garage door.
It whirred up, letting the huge mound of snow that had fallen against it slump into the garage. The storm rushed in after it. Crap. She should have cleared that first, now it would melt on the floor and she would get an earful. Adora looked at the shovels in the corner, then decided against it. They would forgive her if someone was hurt.
Tossing her hat and goggles, Adora tied her hair up into a tight bun before donning a black balaclava, then her white motorcycle helmet over it, flicking the visor down as she mounted her mechanical steed and drove out into the night.
The snow was very deep, and so fresh it flew up and around her face as she drove. With the flakes filling the air, she was nearly blind as she quickly rode through the unpaved driveway to the main road. As the cabin's lights disappeared behind her, the world became homogenous and indecipherable, a featureless sphere of gray. The whirr of the two-stroke was the only anchor to reality. At least for a time, Adora could navigate by the gentle mounds that marked the borders of the road but quickly had to start going off memory. She turned on the headlights, their old incandescent bulbs casting a pitifully weak beam ahead of her.
Half a mile down the valley, she slowed and looked left for the wooden post that marked the trailhead. She found it, only just, sides covered in windswept snow. Adora turned onto it, then really let it rip, roaring up towards the ridge of the hill. The snowmobile struggled through the powder, threatening to slip sideways into a drift and become stuck. Adora gave it more power and fought the handlebars, heaving the machine away from the rocks hidden beside the clear track. She had ridden the Polaris since she was nine, it wasn’t hard to tame whenever it got rowdy.
Ten minutes of driving brought her to the ridge of the hill, the fringe lit by whatever was beyond. When the snowmobile lurched over the edge, Adora stopped, standing up on the kickplates and pulling her helmet off. Her balaclava came with, and blond hair tumbled out into a ponytail as she stared down on the scene.
Behind this hill there was a small circular valley where, shaded from the harsh prairie wind, a grove of hardy trees had managed to eke out a living. The conifers - pines and firs - stood green between barren larch, which towered like grey sentinels above their brothers, guarding them from whatever had fallen within. From the center of the copse a huge pillar of smoke rose up into the snowstorm, and orange light flickered between the trunks. Adora could see that from the same direction that the star had fallen, a swath of these trees had been shredded and ripped asunder, and at the end of the carnage, she could just make out a large dark object.
She drove in closer. Stopping where the trail came nearest to the trees before dismounting and venturing into the pocket forest. Her footsteps crunched over the soft sound of creaking wood and the blizzard wind tugging the highest branches. Reaching into her pocket, she retrieved a flashlight and shone it up and ahead.
The trees that had been in the meteor’s way were thoroughly destroyed, sheared roughly twenty feet up at the edge of the clearing then growing closer to the ground at a perfect angle as she moved inward. Huge pale splinters as long as Adora’s arm lay scattered all around, not buried by snow, and above, embers drifted through the air, some the size of her palm, edges rippling with red heat. She pressed between the lower branches of trees and winter-bare woody bushes, squinting ahead.
The fires were already going out. Yes, a few large branches still burned or smoked, and the snow was blackened all around, but it wouldn’t spread any further. It was too cold for that. Adora ducked beneath a broken section of trunk, then stopped when she saw it there.
The . . . thing . . . was big. At least forty feet long. The shape was smooth and fusiform, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter in the middle and tapering to a narrow but rounded point at both ends. On the side near her, what she presumed was the rear, there were large baffles that folded out at shallow angles, and gave the entire structure the look of a half-opened pinecone.
Adora stopped a good thirty feet away. This was not a meteor. Half crouched in the snow, she waited and watched. The ship was made or coated entirely in some kind of dark gray material that didn’t reflect much light. Judging from the long gash in the earth, it had slid nearly a hundred feet through the trees before stopping. For several long minutes, nothing happened. The ship remained perfectly still. Gentle curls of smoke ascended off it into the air. The forest creaked, and Adora grew colder.
Gaining the courage, she traced a wide circle around the craft, moving to be able to see its right side. But even though it was hard to see much through the snow and trees, she couldn’t find any markings of any kind. No words, no windows. No identifiable anything.
“Some kind of military drone?” Adora wondered in a whisper and, confident it was at least mostly inert, crept closer. She snuffed out a small burning branch she passed with a kick of snow then, getting an idea, crouched to form a powdery snowball. It didn’t stick together well, but it was solid enough for her to lob at the object.
With a soft whisking noise, the snowball left a circular splatter mark on the side of the craft. Adora tensed, ready to run, but nothing happened. Alright. Feeling slightly silly, Adora stood and closed the final twenty feet.
Her breath fogged in front of her face as she reached up and carefully touched the surface. It was very warm, even though thick gloves. When she pulled away her fingertips carried soot stains with them. A satellite of some kind? It definitely seemed like it had come from space.
Carefully, she began to walk the circumference of it, hand hovering just an inch above the skin as she did, appreciating the ambient heater. Rounding the front of the object, which was raked with streaks of pale ash as well as the dark gray burns, she found something on the other side. Ten feet from the nose, a third of the way up, there was a panel of sorts, a clear line in the otherwise unbroken skin of the craft. Square with rounded edges, Adora ran her fingers over the seam, then wiped down across the middle of it, revealing the beginnings of something.
Not caring about her gloves, she rubbed around the spot, and quickly uncovered a large red symbol. Two dragon or bat wings surrounding a small diamond. Adora stepped back, trying to place the icon, but didn’t think she had seen it before when it suddenly began to glow.
Adora gasped and jerked away, stumbling backwards into the snow. The symbol glowed a dim scarlet. Then there was a hiss, and the panel shifted inwards. Adora’s heart hammered. She pressed back on her hands and feet, trying to put some distance from it without making too much noise. Over her heavy breathing, the panel slid aside, and a torrent of liquid poured out of the hole left behind. Adora was very confused, but instinct forced her up before the flood of translucent green fluid, thicker than water, reached where she had been sprawling.
It flooded over stones and snow and burning branches, smothering their heat with a hissing noise. Adora watched, wide-eyed, and the thought finally struck her.
It’s an alien goddamn spaceship. No. But . . . maybe? A real alien spaceship? Right in front of her? It seemed impossible but, she had touched it. She had touched something that may have been made light years away, under an alien sun.
The flood of liquid continued for several seconds, then slowly began to ebb. But when it was just about to turn to a trickle, something washed out of the dark interior of the craft onto the ground.
No, not something. Someone.
It was a humanoid figure, about Adora’s size, half curled, half sprawled out in the middle of a half-inch deep puddle of alien goo. Adora, frightened, turned to shine her flashlight on the body.
It, or she, Adora guessed by her proportions, was wearing a red and black jumpsuit or uniform of some kind. An alien? Adora couldn’t quite believe the idea. She looked quite human at first, the arms and legs all in the right places, and her face, visible in the beam, was humanlike. Two closed eyes, a nose, a mouth. But her ears. She had huge triangular cat-like ears that stuck out from the sides of her head. In fact, Adora squinted. It almost looked like her face was covered in short fur. It was. It was a real alien.
Suddenly said alien started coughing, and Adora watched frozen as more greenish slime flew out of her mouth, splattering with a disgusting sound. The hacking lasted several seconds before she took a deep inhale, and slumped back into unconsciousness.
Adora was shaking. She had expected to find nothing, or perhaps a smoking meteor or a downed airplane. This was crazy. She stood lock still for a long time, mind whizzing with so many thoughts that it all blurred together into paralyzing blankness as she stared at the being before her.
What shook her out of it was the fact that they obviously needed help.
Adora, driven almost subconsciously, carefully dipped the toe of her boot into the green liquid. When it didn’t hiss or melt away the rubber, she stepped fully in and approached the alien. Kneeling just a foot away, Adora reached out and touched them with her glove. Their breathing was shallow, and her skin was already feeling cold. Adora looked around her, wary of the moment when a spotlight would suddenly switch on and reveal an entire platoon of soldiers about to descend on her and surround the site in a plastic bubble. But the wood was still and quiet and dark other than Adora’s somehow still contained panic and the beam of her flashlight. Okay, maybe she had seen too many movies.
Slowly, Adora leaned down and shuffled her arms under the alien. The goo was unsettlingly warm and thick, and when she pulled back to lift her up, it proved to be very sticky as well, forming sinuous connecting threads as she hauled her up. She was as heavy as Adora expected, about one human’s worth of dead weight, and now with her in her arms, she took another look at the alien’s face. Indeed, there was thin fur there too, even on her closed eyelids. The subtle motion of her breathing transferred into Adora. She looked back at the extraordinary object the alien had emerged from.
“Oh please don’t want to eat me.” Adora begged, then headed back toward the snowmobile.
Curses tumbled from Adora’s lips as she struggled to get the sticky unconscious alien up the stairs from the mudroom. Carrying her bridal style, she managed to bash their head against the left wall once, and their feet against the right several times. Also a regret was the decision to take her boots off below, her slippery socks on slick wood now threatening to send them both tumbling back down the flight.
At the top she looked left and right around the dim cozy cabin. The main room contained everything that wasn’t a bedroom, bathroom, or closet. Couches and the TV in one corner, stools lined against the bar-style kitchen in another. The dinner table near the far wall, and there were throw rugs all around. Everything was lit low by the now much-diminished fire, embers reflecting in the red beads, ornaments, and shiny paper-wrapped presents stuffed beneath the Christmas tree. The left wall had her nook, and the right was all windows, floor to ceiling, giving a view of the deck. Adora elected to lay the strange girl down in the center it all on the hardwood. It would be much easier to mop up the sticky goop than wash it out of couch cushions, she hoped. Pulling off her gloves, jacket, and disgustingly gooey snow-pants and leaving them next to the alien, Adora turned her back and went to the light switches. With a click, she could finally get a good look at the person she had definitely not kidnapped.
Adora exhaled after she did so, still facing the wall as she quickly reset her hair into its poof and ponytail. It was half a miracle she had even found her way back through the blizzard. So, maybe she was a human pilot or something, and the weirdness could be over? Please? Maybe she had that wolfman condition. Adora turned slowly. The one where you grew hair all over your body and . . . nope. She was definitely not human.
Head slightly tilted; Adora approached again. If you squinted, the two looked very much alike. No extra arms or tentacles, no weird proportions. A visible bust and hips that she had identified as female. Though she supposed if they were an alien any assumption like that was liable to be wrong.
Only her hands below the wrists, head above the neck and, now she just now noticed it, a furry tail, cylindrical and as long as an arm, were exposed from the skintight jumpsuit she wore, which was black around the shoulders, down the arms, and below the knees, and a rich maroon in between. Pinned on her left breast was a pentagonal badge of some kind, green with the same red logo that had glowed on the spaceship. Her hands had five fingers, all seemingly human, but the nails on the ends of each were black like a dog’s, long and curved like claws. Adora sensed they were very sharp. Her hands, like all her exposed skin, were coated in a thin, honey-colored, velveteen fuzz.
This fur blended with the darker hair on top of her head. Though she supposed it was fur too . . . whatever, it looked like hair. It was a wild wiry mane the color of mud. Adora sensed it would stick out in all directions if it currently wasn’t matted in hopeless knots and filled with green slime. Her eyes were closed but Adora could still tell they were very large. Her nose was slightly upturned at the end, though the nostrils beneath were very thin.
If thin nostrils were how Adora could identify alien species, then maybe Star Trek wasn’t far off just sticking points on actors’ ears.
Most surprising was that she looked young. Like, as young as Adora. It seemed unlikely someone her age could work on a spaceship. Maybe she aged differently, but still. How had she ended up here?
She seemed uninjured at least, despite what was surely a very high-speed impact earlier. Adora knelt at her side, watching the soft rise and fall of her chest with a half-raised hand. It was strange she hesitated now to touch her again. She had just carried her up here. But this seemed more personal somehow, no gloves.
The ears though. They looked just like a housecat’s ears, through huge, each triangular organ the size of her entire hand. She wondered how well she could hear. Her trepid fingertips gained the courage, and she slowly reached up to brush the long hairs on the tip of one. As they touched the soft sticky fur, it twitched, flicking at her as if trying to dispel a fly. Goosebumps ran up Adora’s arm, and she pulled away, hesitating again before reaching down to gently shake her shoulder. A cheek twitch was all she received in response. She was out cold.
Adora considered what to do next. She didn’t want to disturb her, or accidentally hurt her in any way. But just leaving her on the cold hard floor still covered in whatever it was seemed wrong. She went to go get some towels, but not without carefully looking back before she left the room.
Retrieving a laundry hamper, she wetted four shower towels with warm bath water and returned to carefully begin wiping the green liquid off her. Running the towel through her short fur and over her suit was a surreal experience. Like a dream where everything was just a little off. She was alone in the family cabin, which had never happened, washing an alien like a dirty baby in the middle of the night. Her heart had hardly slowed down since she’d seen the falling star, and by the time she finished drying her fur and untangling her ‘hair’ with a brush she was exhausted.
But she couldn’t sleep. At least not until the alien woke up. If she woke up: the fearful corner of Adora’s brain worried. What if she had gotten some kind of brain damag-No! She would wake up. Adora just needed to be sure she was awake for it when she did.
Selecting a less sentimental blanket from the pile in the corner. Adora laid it over one of the two couches in the room before picking the alien up again and setting her down on top. Stepping back and touching her chin to observe, she adjusted their arm, then folded the blanket down over top before going for coffee. One cup with sugar in her hands later, Adora sat on the opposite couch and watched the tucked-in cat slumber. The placid look on her face made her seem very peaceful.
The coffee vanished as time crawled, and Adora waited. She kept the fire steady with logs and listened to the clock tick softly over the empty house. Above her, the taxidermy heads watched over them both. Deer and pronghorn, sheep and elk, and above her head as a centerpiece, a massive moose up to the shoulders, antlers five feet across.
Minutes turned into hours. The alien did not wake. Adora went for a second cup of coffee, and then a third, but her body felt like lead. The whirlwind of the last twenty-four hours with everything, then the storm, and now this had taken its toll. Each was an anchor trying to drag her down into the depths of sleep. She swam against it as fiercely as someone who was really really tired could.
The softly breathing alien was a promise of how incredible the rest would be, however. Sitting in front of a softly roaring fire under a warm blanket in a warm winter cottage. Adora began to grow irrationally jealous of the cat alien, despite the fact that she had just survived a fall from space. Why couldn’t she have been the one to fall from space, then she could be sleeping right now, was her last thought before the overwhelming drowsiness finally swept her under.
When Adora woke again, there was a knife to her throat.