there are billions of stars, just in our galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies. Anything is possible. A creature made of rare metals, flying between the stars.
You saw it?
I was with him in the silence and blackness. Flinging out from one star, gliding to another. They can feel our sun’s gravity like… how swallows migrate thousands of miles, and they always get to the exact same spot, you know?
Or maybe it’s more like whales, singing their way home.
And the shapes by the standing stone, all those visions of yourself, what were they?
He was just trying to talk to me, the only way he knew how. Scared, trying to show me something I could understand. I mean, he’d only been on Earth a couple of thousand years, which is like… I don’t know, a few minutes for them? It’d be like you trying to learn a whole new language in a few seconds.
At last you are telling me something interesting. Of course, we knew the dust from the quarry induced hallucinations, but we had not identified the reason. Now I understand. A mineral-based organism would continue to exist in the minerals absorbed from the dust into your body, making you, by some measure, part of its body. Your bones were its bones.
Perhaps Isis had talents unusual enough to allow her to perceive the creature without assistance?
So the value of what you destroyed was greater than I previously thought. Such material could have been used for communications, weapons, perhaps even space travel. It would have brought our sponsors great wealth.
I didn’t destroy anything, I keep trying to tell you.
The evidence only a few miles outside of this town makes a liar of you. How do you explain that?
Chapter Twenty-eight
Isis
They were on the ground, sitting in a tangle of legs.
Gray’s eyelids lifted open.
“You’re hurting me,” he said, his eyes wide with wonder. “Please stop. Listen. Help.”
“Are you all right?” Isis whispered.
He shook his head, laughing. “All those things that looked like me. Everything they said. It was a message.”
“Merlin thinks there are ley lines here,” Isis answered with a smile, “but it’s thoughts.”
The field was full of them, the swirl and circle of colours seeming to drift within the land. She could see far more clearly now, but they were still unreadable, still alien. She turned back to Gray. “You weren’t seeing ghosts, you were seeing her trying to talk to you.”
Gray was lost in his own thoughts, gazing at the hills and fields around them. “Everything me and Dad have been looking for. All those nights we spent staring up at the sky.” He pressed his fingers onto the ground, as if he’d never seen it before. “There was an alien already here.”
“Beneath your feet,” said Isis.
Gray kept his hand on the grass. “This whole valley is alive. That’s why no one can explain why the rare earth metals are here. Mr Watkins went on about the geology not matching and all those different theories about how it happened. No one said the obvious, that it’s not from Earth.”
Isis crinkled her brow. It seemed so evident now, but before – how could anyone even have guessed?
“They’re mining her,” she said, “because they don’t even know she’s here.” Isis could feel the quarry, like a hot poker against her skin. “And it hurts.” The machines were cutting into the alien, a being of metal and stone, killing her bite by bite, turning her body into the ingredients for smartphones and computer screens. “They’ll kill her, won’t they?”
Gray looked up. “The alien’s not female.”
“Yes she is! Definitely! Her name is—” Isis stopped. She’d been told, only moments ago through their link, but there wasn’t a human sound to match the name. “It means the sparkle of sunshine on the ice crystals in a comet’s tail… I think.”
Gray made a face. “He just told me, and his name means the crash of a meteor onto the rocky face of a moon, actually.”
“The alien isn’t a he…”
“It’s not a she!”
They paused.
“Maybe she’s both?” said Isis.
“Maybe he’s neither?” suggested Gray.
“Hey, man, what are you doing?” came a shouted voice from behind them.
Isis and Gray pulled themselves out of their tangle, standing up awkwardly. Instantly embarrassed. A tall, thin man was running across the field towards them, his thick wedge of dreadlocks bouncing at his back.
“Merlin?” said Isis.
He reached them quickly, running to a stop and frowning anxiously.
“Whatever you’ve done, you’d better not hang around.” He pointed towards the trees and the road behind. Isis caught a