A few seconds? It had felt like so much longer. And it hadn’t felt like dragging… It had felt like floating, like flying… I shivered as I remembered the feeling of Riley’s arms around me… the look in his otherworldly eyes as his face had been so close to mine at the side of the pool.

But then… Travis… It was like Riley did something. Something to Travis.

Oh god, what had he done? And why?

I bit my lip hard and looked down. It was then that I noticed Vik held something in his other hand.

The waterlogged remains of my book.

Oh god.

What had I done?

Chapter Six: Confrontation

Though I barely slept at all, I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. I saw no point in getting up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything but my own thoughts, and I could just as easily do that lying down.

My mom came barging in every couple of hours, asking questions and looking at me as though I were dying. I must have said, “I’m fine, Mom,” a dozen times. Of course, I wasn’t fine, but she didn’t need to know that. There was nothing she could have done to help me, except leave me alone with my thoughts. Again and again, I went over the events of the past week, trying to make sense of it all, but it was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces.

Riley had made Travis lose his mind. I was sure of it.

But how? And, more importantly, why?

I thought about Thursday in the parking lot at Henrietta’s, when he’d vanished into thin air. The way he talked, like he was from another era. The fact that he’d appeared in my dreams before I’d met him in real life. The conclusion was as obvious as it was terrifying.

Riley Bay wasn’t human.

But if he wasn’t human, then what was he? An alien, sent to Earth to learn about humanity in preparation for an invasion? Riley was certainly weird enough to be an alien, but I didn’t see why the mother ship would send him to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in the guise of a high schooler. Surely, he would learn more by infiltrating our government or something, right?

If he wasn’t from outer space, then he had to be from Earth. But if any native of Earth could do the things he did, then the world was a much stranger place than I’d been led to believe.