I take a sip of coffee, swallow, and say, “I’m pretty sure the flying thing was a vehicle. It made a sound that was . . . I dunno, mechanical?”

“Agreed. I got a better look this time, and it definitely seemed metallic. But different. It was flowing. Liquid. Like quicksilver.” Trey leans forward, elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled before him. “What kind of energy must that thing be able to produce? To melt concrete? To obliterate anything organic in the space of a second?”

“Well, they’re spacefaring, right?” I say. “That already puts them way beyond our technological capacity.”

“Right.”

“I just wish . . .” Well, a lot of things.

“You wish?” Trey prompts.

“That my stepdad were here to ask. He was always going on about Star Wars and laser blasters and how a saber made of light, by its very nature, would be invisible, and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff about physics that I never really understood. He would have been . . .” I almost choke on the word. “Fascinated. Thrilled to able to observe something so magnificent and strange. Even if it was the end of the world.”

Tanq snorts. “Sounds like a douche to me,” she says. “And what are you going on about? Orkins? Spacefaring?”

My temper flares, but I tamp it down and instead quickly explain our alien theory, along with the likelihood that we were purposely exterminated.

Trey starts to tell her about the hospital, but Tanq seems to curl in on herself when he describes all the dead bodies, and he stops before he gets to the part about the creepy, floating alien. “And, uh, yeah, we got back here as quick as we could,” he finishes with an apologetic look my way.

Tanq is silent for a long time. And then longer still. Emmaline nudges Tanq’s elbow, hoping for a scritch. Something pops in the fire.

“So, um, are you hungry?” I say. “Trey makes a mean PB and honey, and we have a lot of stuff to eat before it goes bad. I was thinking of chopping up a fruit salad for us. Just apples and pears and bananas, but still.”

Tanq is tiny and tense, eyes darting every which way. I think of bombs about to go off, the way they tick, tick, tick, right until the very last moment.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” she says, but it’s more like a hiss, like she’s a cornered cat. A feline bomb.

The fire pops again, and I sidle closer to it. It’s cold in this house, colder still outside, and the fire is the only thing keeping this place livable. That, and the humans inside it.

Tanq is staring up at me, eyes wide with a need she’s failing to hide. I’m not sure what that means, but I do know that how I answer her is important. My next words could change everything.