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"What else did you hear?" One of those questions you don’t want to know the answer to, but still have to ask

He sipped his latte through the little hole in the plastic lid

"Not much It’s not like I asked around"

"You asked somebody and they told you I didn’t dateyou out and they go, Cassie’s pretty cool And I said, what’s she like? And they said you were nice but don’t getfor Ben Parish--"

"They told you that? Who told you that?"

He shrugged "I don’t rean?" I’ll kill her

"I don’t know her name," he said

"What did she look like?"

"Long brown hair Glasses I think her na"

"I don’t know any…"

Oh God Some Carly person I don’t even knos about me and Ben Parish--or the lack of anyknew about it, then everybody knew about it

"Well, they’re wrong," I sputtered "I don’t have a thing for Ben Parish"

"It doesn’t matter to me"

"Itout," he said "Everything I say, you either get bored or rily

"Okay, I’ for not telling him the Cassie he kneasn’t the Cassie I used to be, the pre-Arrival Cassie ouldn’t have been mean to a mosquito I wasn’t ready to aded with the coed The moment the mothership appeared, I started down a path that would end in the back of a convenience store behind soht with Mitchell was only the beginning of ht about the Others not stopping by just to say howdy On the eve of the 1st Wave, the world’s leading theoretical physicist, one of the suys in the world (that’s what popped up on the screen under his talking head: ONE OF THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE WORLD), appeared on CNN and said, "I’n reason for it I’ closer to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all kno that turned out for the Native Americans"

I turned to my father and said, "We should nuke ’em" I had to raise my voice to be heard over the TV--Dad always jacked up the volu the news so he could hear it over Mom’s TV in the kitchen She liked to watch TLC while she cooked I called it the War of the Rean to curl inside his white athletic socks He grew up on Close Encounters and ET and Star Trek and totally bought into the idea that the Others had coer No more wars The eradication of disease The secrets of the cosmos unveiled "Don’t you understand this could be the next step in our evolution? A huge leap forward Huge" He gave"We’re all very fortunate to be here to see it"

Then he added casually, like he was talking about how to fix a toaster, "Besides, a nuclear device can’t doto carry the shock wave"

"So this brainiac on TV is just full of shit?"

"Don’t use that language, Cassie," he chided me "He’s entitled to his opinion, but that’s all it is An opinion"

"But what if he’s right? What if that thing up there is their version of a Death Star?"

"Travel halfway across the universe just to blow us up?" He pattedand smiled Mom turned up the kitchen TV He pushed the volume in the family rooalactic Mongol horde, like he was talking about?" I demanded "Maybe they’ve come to conquer us, shove us into reservations, enslave us…"

"Cassie," he said "Si could happen doesn’t uy’s Mine Nobody knohy they’re here Isn’t it just as likely they’ve come all this way to save us?"

Fourthose words,about the Others And I rong And One of the S

It wasn’t about saving us And it wasn’t about enslaving us or herding us into reservations

It was about killing us

All of us

6

I DEBATED WHETHER to travel by day or night for a long tiht is preferable if you want to spot a drone before it spots you

The drones showed up at the tag end of the 3rd Wave Cigar-shaped, dull gray in color, gliding swiftly and silently thousands of feet up So Sometimes they circle overhead like buzzards They can turn on a dime and come to a sudden stop, from Mach 2 to zero in less than a second That’s hoe knew the drones weren’t ours

We knew they were unmanned (or un-Othered) because one of theee camp A thu-whu shriek as it rocketed to earth, the ground shuddering under our feet when it plowed into a fallow cornfield A recon team hiked to the crash site to check it out Okay, it wasn’t really a teae of the ca was empty Were they sure? Maybe the pilot bailed before impact Dad said it was packed with instruments; there wasn’t any rooot a big laugh So of the Others as being two-inch Borrower types

I opted to travel by day I could keep one eye on the sky and another on the ground What I ended up doing is rocking ain, like soroupie at a rock concert, until I was dizzy and a little sick to ht to worry about besides drones Wild dogs, coyotes, bears, and wolves coer from a zoo I know, I know, there’s a Wizard of Oz joke buried in there Shoot h it wouldn’t be ainst one of theainst one of my own, if I’m not the last one What if I stumble onto another survivor who decides the best course of action is to go all Crucifix Soldier on anyone they cos up the probleht? Do I wait for the a deadly one? I wonder, not for the first time, why the hell we didn’t co before they showed up--souys We had no way of knowing they would show up, but ere pretty sure so would sooner or later