instar | the alien

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

aeskhyne

"He... asked me about my mom," says Trouble. "I told him she believed in aliens. Didn't seem like the time to get into the rest of it."

From:

instar

"...That's weird."

From:

aeskhyne

"Yep."

From:

instar

Bella writes it down anyway. "He was just like, 'Tell me something about your mother?' Why would he say that?"

From:

aeskhyne

"It was something like, 'Tell me about your mother, tell me about your family'. Maybe he was just going with the first thing he thought of in our five seconds of get-to-know-you-time? That's the only thing he asked, then he told me to scram and I asked if I could acquire him and he said sure if I was fast and I did it and ran."

From:

instar

"Weird. I wish..." She shakes her head. "Okay, so morphing works for healing, which is big, but takes enough energy that he couldn't do it, so it's not perfect elixir of life..." She chews her lip. "...And speaking of - Is there any point to talking to your mom, she who believes in aliens?"

From:

aeskhyne

"...Maybe," says Trouble. "I don't know. She hasn't said shit about them in years, and they weren't this kind of aliens to begin with, anyway."

From:

instar

"What kind were they?"

From:

aeskhyne

"The kind with, like, flying saucers. Not flying cockroaches."

From:

instar

"She didn't describe the aliens themselves?"

From:

aeskhyne

"Yeah. They looked like aliens. You know, skinny, grey, pointy chins, big eyes. As opposed to looking like the actual aliens we've seen. I dunno, maybe there are more aliens out there who go around abducting people and starting UFO legends."

From:

instar

"Oh. Well, that's not very promising, they could still be real but they aren't obvious leads."

The bus approaches. Bella falls silent and tucks her notebook away.