The chest had contained several discs—exactly the same technology as vinyl phonograph records, although in a kind of clear, organic resinous material that Earth didn’t have. Someone had had to reverse-engineer a player that spun the discs at the right speed. The message on the discs had been in four languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, all correct and fluent. They had promised that the people of the Otherworld meant humans no harm. The fae claimed to be scholars and artists, not warriors. They wanted to learn.

The box had also contained beautiful textiles and carvings; plant specimens that had gone straight to biologists for analysis, but which (it turned out) had been intended as food; jars of liquids—perfumes, ointments?—that chemists around the world were still trying to figure out; and more of that haunting music.

Entirely new fields of study had sprung up across the globe, just from the contents of that chest. The United States had established a new Department of Otherworld Relations.

And then, eight years ago, another tree had begun to glow: a crepe myrtle on the Georgia Tech campus. And an elf-lord had stepped from its branches. Alone, naked but for blush-colored crepe myrtle blossoms, and the veil of his long hair.

The elf-lord had been arrested by freaked-out campus police before the DOR had swooped in and established him in a new position: cultural envoy. Since then, Ángel had seen pictures of him on the internet and in magazines. He was tall, humanoid, fluent in English. He was a musician. He said he was a scholar. He only wanted to live on Earth and exchange information. He sometimes gave concerts and little talks about the Otherworld, or at least he used to; Ángel couldn’t remember the last one. He was pretty sure that he’d consulted with the scholars who were trying to understand the gifts that had been sent. For a while he had been a frequent guest at the White House. He’d once played a piano recital at a state dinner for the British Prime Minister and his family. Chopin.

Ángel stared out at the strange landscape beneath him. “If he’s lonely,” he persisted, “why doesn’t another elf come through to be with him? Or why doesn’t he just go back home?”

“The veil doesn’t work that way. Well—we don’t actually know how it works. But he says no one else can come through. It was just that one time.”

“And you believe him? Maybe there are other elves in, like, Africa, or China, and we just don’t know about it.”

“We would know,” said Jeremy.