the alien

[instar]

There are no more five-person meetings at the Swan household. They're a circle: Bella-Andi-Robin-Ethan-Trouble-Bella again. They meet in twos, threes, pass around information, get it all down in Bella's cipher in Bella's notebooks. They have a list of members of the Sharing, mostly procured by Ethan and to a lesser extent Trouble, but no safe way to learn if these people's behavior has changed; they have seen no more aliens, observed no more disintegrations, caught no one ducking into anything that is an alien hideout.

The twins try to behave normally with their father or his pod person, whichever the person who calls them is, for a value of "normally" that involves adamantly continuing to want nothing to do with the Sharing.

And sometimes crying and refusing to tell Renée what's wrong.

School proceeds. No one's grades see more than a minor downturn as a result of all the alien business.

Andi and Robin play music. Andi's getting pretty good on the drums, although her teacher moves away and she has to hunt up another one, who she sticks with for four lessons before deciding to go self-taught.

Bella tightens up her cipher. It began as a letter substitution and since then has evolved to include plenty of personal shorthand - she turns the ratio of shorthand to straightforward letters up as far as she can and still read the thing herself. She abbreviates, she leaves out spaces, she names things in roundabout ways, she refers to things many notebooks ago that she can find easily that anyone else could spend hours hunting for, if she has to record names she finds ways to describe the spelling without ever placing all of the characters in sequence. Maybe the aliens have super-cryptanalysis and super-OCR and can eat her notebooks in one bite and know everything they know; but maybe not, and maybe if she's careful enough she'll look like she's writing her paranoid diary and not like she's taking notes on the quiet invasion.

Trouble comes over a lot. He stays over a lot. Renée has a quiet conversation about him with Bella, in which Bella is vague, pretends ignorance, suggests that maybe he just likes it here, maybe his folks are allergic to gluten and won't eat his baked goods? Renée leaves it alone.

May begins.

Comments

[palmofyourhand]

Several stops and two left turns later, Ethan and Robin get on the bus.

[instar]

"Fancy meeting you here," Bella says.

[palmofyourhand]

"Yeah, imagine that," says Ethan.

[instar]

"You guys want to come over to ours for a bit?"

[hold_infinity]

"Love to," says Robin.

[instar]

"Great. I think we should all hang out more."

[palmofyourhand]

Ethan makes a face, but voices no objections.

[instar]

The bus trundles along.

The stop nearest the Swan house is stopped at.

Off they get.

[palmofyourhand]

All five of them.

[instar]

"Hi, Mom," Bella calls experimentally after she opens the door.

[kindestgarden]

"Hi girls! How was swimming?" Renée's voice replies from upstairs.

[pandion]

"It was good," Andi calls back. "We're all here, we're gonna hang in the basement for a while."

[kindestgarden]

"It's nice and cool down there," agrees Renée.

[instar]

Bella leads the way to the basement.

"Nice and cool. Nice and private," she says, when the door is closed behind them.

[palmofyourhand]

"Yes, so I see," says Ethan. "And how was your evening?"

[instar]

"You missed some interesting spectacle." There are folding chairs; she starts unfolding them. Then she gets her notebook out. "Are you guys thinking you want to do something, or would you rather forget you saw anything?"

[palmofyourhand]

"Something such as what?" says Ethan.

[hold_infinity]

"I am not gonna forget any of this," says Robin.

[instar]

"We have a resource now. We have information and really killer spy gear to get hold of more. We know what's doing the pod person shtick, we know they have at least one weakness, we know there might be help on the way, and we can - turn into things. It's no longer all we can do to sit around making tentative, useless inferences based on the one alien Robin saw one time. I'm going to figure out how to un-Yeerk Charlie without arousing suspicion, and then I'm going to see where else I can hit them. I know Andi's with me, but the more help I have, the easier it is to accomplish anything."

[aeskhyne]

Trouble shrugs. "Sounds good to me."

[hold_infinity]

"What else am I gonna do?" says Robin.

[palmofyourhand]

"If she's in, I'm in," sighs Ethan. "You can't just starve him out and let him loose, they're bound to give him another one. Or kill him. They probably have an entire division for it; anyone sensible would."

[instar]

"Right. I'm going to guess the guy Robin saw murdered was a fleeing host. My best guess on a workable plan, right now, is that we fake Charlie's death and he goes into hiding; maybe we cube him and he adopts another identity or something. If we're lucky his Yeerk got him in position to see all kinds of stuff and Charlie will be able to tell us more after we get it out of him."

[hold_infinity]

"Fake his death how?" wonders Robin.

[instar]

"Don't have that part figured out yet. If we're going to cube him we could potentially - I don't know how much it takes to render morphing impossible like it was for Elfangor, but morphing heals, which means there's lots of evidence we could leave without actually killing him, if nothing else you can get blood out of a person without hurting them too bad or killing them, we could do it in a few stages. I don't know how much of more solid evidence-leaving he'd go for and I'm still contemplating staged causes of death. It might be better to follow him to wherever the Yeerk soaks up its rays and spring him while it's doing that, but that alerts the other Yeerks, so I'd rather think more on the 'fake his death' plan."