EMILY KEPT HOLD of Aidan’s hand as they walked. They were both cold, and their muscles ached, and always she was turning to check behind them for pursuers.
Well.
She was cold, and her muscles ached. So for Aidan it would be worse. For Aidan, it could be fatal. She kept stopping, to hold him to her, try to impart some of her warmth.
“I’m so sorry,” she said after the second hour, when they were coming down a snow-covered meadow, a logging track curving below them, toward a place where smoke rose on the horizon. A town, they hoped.
“What for?” said Aidan.
Emily’s parents were walking ahead.
She made an expansive gesture. “All of it. I wanted to help, to get you to safety, and I just…made this. The crash. Bob. The guns.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“I should have just…stayed in the house when you landed,” she said. “When I heard your ship crash into the woods. Then I wouldn’t have got you lost.”
He squeezed her hand. “Emily,” he said. “We’re still alive. We’re still going. Your parents have a map. We’re nearly off the mountain now. We’re not lost. We’ve come through that. We’re on the other side of lost.”
She thought about that. “They’re still coming after us, though, aren’t they?”
“I imagine so.”
“And they’ll kill you if they catch us.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think so. I think they want to study me. It…it has happened before. Not to me. But to one of us.”
She held his hand firmly. “Kill you. Study you. Either way, you never get home.”
“Yes,” he said.
“So we’re not going to let that happen,” she said.
He squeezed her hand again.
The sun was low as they reached the outskirts of the small town—little more than a timber mill and a road lined with houses. Telegraph poles capped with snow. A crow cawed at them from a tree. Emily’s dad told her to stash the assault rifle behind a tree, under some branches. They kept the pistol—Emily’s mom tucked it under her shirt.
“What should we do?” said Emily. They were passing the mill and entering the main street. A sign said: COPPER CREEK: POPULATION 2,830. “Ask for help?”
“Too risky,” said her dad.
“Aidan could ring a doorbell…do his thing.”
“Complicated,” said Aidan. “They might want to take me in, keep me safe inside. It’s hard to predict what people will do.”
Animals too, thought Emily, remembering the bear.
Emily’s dad looked at them. “We need to look for a Ford pickup. F-250, something like that. Not too new. But anything from about 2008 should be OK.”
“But”—she glanced around—“how are we…I mean…wouldn’t that be steal—”
“You do want to get to HAARP, right?”
“Right.” Emily felt her head spinning, like she was in zero G, like she was in space, where Aidan came from. Her dad had once confiscated her iPod because she was listening to Eminem, and Eminem had curse words. Now he was talking about jacking a car. She smiled, a little. “What if we don’t find one?” she asked.
“It’s Alaska. We’ll find one.”
Five minutes later, Emily’s mom pointed down a driveway. A white F-350 sat there, on big tires. There was a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN sticker on the back fender. Another sticker read: I HUNT BUCKS AND ILLEGAL ALIENS.
Another had Calvin on it, peeing on the letters DACA.
Yeah.
Yeah, this truck would do.
No lights on in the house.
Emily’s dad walked past a little way, then took off his backpack. He kneeled, searching through it. “Damn,” he said.
“What?”
“I need a screwdriver. Flat-head.”
Emily felt in her pocket and fished out the knife she’d taken from the cabin. Classic, red with the silver cross embossed on it. She held it out to him. “This work?” she said.
“Perfect.”
Emily was beginning to understand that there were doors in the world into other worlds, but not like in stories. That is, you could go through an invisible entrance into a whole other realm of experience—a place laid on the same topography, with the same landmarks, but with a different logic of possibility; a place built on the same bones but with a whole different skin—just by making a choice.
The choice she had made was Aidan.
And once you were in that other world, where houses and mountains and trees superficially looked the same but glistened with the potential for violence, everything moved fast.
The cliché was: a dreamworld. But Emily didn’t feel like she was dreaming. Instead, she felt like the mood of the world had changed. Like she’d lived in a polite world, a world that wore a fake smile. And now she lived in one that didn’t have time for smiles.
Which is to say: she thought there’d be some kind of moment of transition, some discussion, some hand-wringing before her dad did what he did next. But there was nothing. He just walked past her and down the driveway, fast and purposeful. “Liese, Aidan, wait here,” he said. “Emily, with me. Keep a lookout.”
Emily followed him, her eyes on the house. The curtains didn’t move. The lights stayed off. A man walked past on the other side of the street, with a dog on a lead. But he didn’t even look over—Emily’s dad was keeping his stance casual, and Emily tried that too; they were just a family visiting friends. Exactly where they were supposed to be.
When the man had gone down a side street, Emily’s dad said, “Clear?”
She watched the house.
No movement.
No light.
“Clear,” she replied.
He flipped the biggest screwdriver head out of the knife and popped the black plastic housing of the truck’s door handle. Then he reached inside and yanked on a lever and the door opened. “In,” he said. “Scoot over.”
Emily climbed into the driver’s seat, then slid over into the passenger seat. The truck smelled of smoke, and McDonald’s boxes were strewn on the floor. Her dad swung himself in; shut the door. He used the screwdriver again to prize the plastic covering off the ignition switch. A shiny metal slot was revealed. He slid the screwdriver head into it and turned it, and the engine started.
He shifted from N to R and reversed out of the driveway, spinning the steering wheel so that they came to a halt by Emily’s mom and Aidan. “Get in,” he said. There was a plastic woman in a hula skirt on the dash, and she danced as they stopped.
A light went on upstairs in the house the truck belonged to.
Shit, Emily thought.