“No,” said the senator. Unlike the rest of us, he walked into the room fully clothed and even more fully composed. He joined us at the window, a warm smile on his lips and cool murder in his eyes. “Something’s here.”

The lights in the desert took on new meaning. Tahlia and I both turned to look at them, moving closer together, like that would keep the chill at bay.

As we watched, a bright bolt shot out of the sky and slammed into the earth somewhere between us and the horizon. It was like watching a star fall. We all knew it wasn’t a star.

“I’ll get my coat,” I said, and that was that: we were on the move.

2.

There were no roads from our house into the desert. There might have been other ways, access roads and gravel trails blazed by the local park service, but we didn’t know them, and this wasn’t the time to go and meet the neighbors. More, we knew everyone in a hundred miles who had seen that light smashing into the earth would be on their way to investigate, hoping to find it before anyone else did. Some of them would be treasure hunters. Others would be government officials.

Maybe some of them would be like us, spies who had made it this close to our little copse and no farther, stopped by whatever barriers the world had left to throw up in front of them. We would all come together now.

Of the four of us, only the senator was wearing shoes. Tahlia walked with smooth confidence, unbothered by the obstacles in her path. I was a little more cautious, wincing when I put my foot down on a particularly sharp stone or uneven patch of ground. Jeff hopped and swore, trying to seem unconcerned, but flinching away from everything he stepped on. I glanced back, once, and saw dark smears on the ground, like he’d been bleeding as he walked. It was difficult to suppress a fierce joy at the sight. He still had blood to spill? Good. Let him spill it.

Of course, if he spilled it all, he was going to need to replace it that much sooner. It was hard not to worry about Toni and David, still back at the house, unaware that absolutely everything was about to change. Maybe. Maybe we were just following a fallen star into the desert, and all of this was going to be for nothing: maybe we were succumbing to a group delusion, convincing ourselves our alien lives weren’t going to be wasted sitting in someone’s vacation home and waiting for the sky to fall. I didn’t think so, though. The air was rich with the smell of ozone and loam, more green than there should have been in this desert, which lived, yes, but more slowly, more simply than our swift vegetable existence allowed.