Chapter One

The first crackle of sound sent a shiver down Gwen’s back. She sat up straighter, knocking the small plushie of the most classic alien—a gray—that her friend Izzie had given her “for luck in her crazy quest to find aliens” to the floor.

There was no way that luck had worked. Not the very first time Gwen managed to hack into the satellite she planned to use to scan outer space for signs of intelligent life.

Gwen stared down at the near-featureless doll, with its small mouth, flat nose, uniform, hairless gray body, and huge black eyes. It seemed to stare back at her.

Just in case, she reached down and picked it up. She set it next to her monitor, then pushed her glasses farther up her nose. She didn’t want to miss a thing.

Some of the many long, thin braids that trailed down her back fell forward. She flipped them back behind her shoulder and put on her headphones to keep them in place. That would help her hear whatever this was better as well.

Background static. Cosmic noise.

She adjusted some settings and tweaked the code she’d used to cover her tracks if anyone tried to trace her signal back to her house. Her heart was racing.

Something was out of place. She hadn’t quite pinpointed it yet, but she was close. She could feel it. Or she’d finally tipped over the deep end.

She didn’t think she was crazy because she believed aliens were real. It was thinking that she could discover them in the huge expanse of the universe that made her question her sanity.

There was so much emptiness out there. The odds of her actually making alien contact were infinitesimal.

That wasn’t going to keep her from trying, though.

She had decided to start somewhere close—Mars. She altered more settings, becoming more and more sure that she had picked up an actual data stream. Narrowing the parameters of her home-brew software, she scanned for signals from the planet and found…

Her eyes widened.

It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but it was still extraordinary. One of the Mars explorers that had gone offline over a decade ago was sending a signal.

Had the solar panels somehow managed to get enough sun to power the unit again? How could that be? They were covered in dust from the red planet. It wasn’t like someone was walking around out there with a duster and could clean them off.

The image of a gray parading around in a French maid outfit and wielding a feather duster popped into her head, making her giggle. She might be a little too sleep deprived.

Excitement gave her a second wind. She locked on to the signal, boosting it so she could clear the feed. There would be a delay from what was actually happening on Mars, but not much of one.

She was about to see live footage from another planet. Okay, almost-live footage.

A Martian landscape filled one of the windows on her monitor. The picture was washed out, like in the old videos she’d seen on the Internet from when the robot had been functional. Orangish-red sand littered with rocks stretched out to the horizon. She’d never thought such a barren view could be so mesmerizing.

What she wouldn’t give for an audio feed. But then, it wasn’t like there were Martians walking around looking to chat with—

A face appeared on the screen. A green face, hanging down from above the camera.

Gwen couldn’t breathe. Her mouth dropped open as she leaned closer, not believing her eyes.

The being was distinctly reptilian. It looked almost like an iguana, only with a flattened, somewhat more humanish face. It blinked its golden eyes, then crawled over the camera view, blocking it with its green belly.

Wait a minute.

This had to be a prank. That was a regular lizard and someone had… Had…

Had what? Figured out what she was doing and hacked her hack of the feed?

Aside from Izzie, no one else knew what Gwen was up to. And Izzie wasn’t the type to prank anyone, even if she knew how in this case.

Then again, someone hacking Gwen’s setup seemed more possible than a lizard-person crawling around on a long-dormant Mars explorer. But who would go to that much trouble?

The lizard vanished from view for a few seconds, then popped back up. On two feet. It stepped away from the camera, then lifted its arm and started tapping on some sort of metallic band encasing its forearm.

Okay, so not an iguana…

With a better view of it, she could see more of the metallic bands around its arms, legs, and body. Beneath the silver metal, its otherwise emerald-green scales had black stripes on its sides that seemed to come from its spine, with thinner, lavender-blue stripes lining them. There was a shimmering gold aura around the lizard-person as well. Some sort of energy spacesuit?

This was incredible. She was witnessing an actual alien!

Or else an elaborate prank.

If this were real, what did an alien want with Earth tech from decades ago? It could walk around on Mars with a spacesuit made of energy. Its technology was light-years beyond what they had on Earth.

The feed brightened, the colors becoming more vibrant. The lizard-person approached the camera again, reaching up above it to do something Gwen couldn’t see. It must have been pretty short to have to reach like that. Maybe three-and-a-half or four feet tall. She found herself leaning down, as if she was looking through an actual window and changing her angle would alter the view.

When she realized what she was doing, she sat back, and murmured, “Get it together, Gwen.”

The lizard-person smiled, then patted the side of the camera.

That was weird. But then, what part of all this wasn’t? The pat looked…affectionate.

She shook her head. She was probably reading things into the situation. Anthropomorphizing the lizard-person’s behavior.

It took a few steps back and stared at the camera for a few moments. Gwen felt the hair on her arms rise. It was almost like the alien could see her through the monitor.

She looked up at her computer’s camera. The light was off. She quickly closed the lens cover anyway, just in case. If this was a prank, the person behind it was probably trying to tap into her camera to get a reaction shot and they could have disabled the alert light. The last thing she wanted was a recording of—

“Crap!” Gwen yelled.

She separated the portable storage drive from her necklace and quickly plugged it in, starting up a recording that would capture everything on her screen directly to the drive. If this wasn’t a prank, she was going to need evidence to take to…the UN or something. Having the data on a drive disguised as jewelry would make her feel better, too.

The alien nodded, then dusted its hands together in a strangely human gesture. It waved, as if urging her to follow it. Again, she found herself half-rising from her chair.

It wasn’t communicating with her, though. It was talking to the explorer.

The view on her screen changed as the robot started to move forward. The alien really had fixed it.

Its smile broadened and it clapped its hands as the explorer stopped. Gwen couldn’t keep herself from joining in, laughing and weirdly realizing there were tears streaming down her face.

She had been so heartbroken at the explorer’s last message. Part of the reason she’d chosen her field had been in the hopes of being part of some sort of…rescue operation.

She didn’t care if it was ridiculous. All of her dreams centered around space. If what she was seeing was real, then some of her biggest and best dreams had just come true.

Aliens were on Mars. And they were kindhearted enough to want to fix a broken robot.

The explorer followed the lizard-person around for a bit. Each time it changed direction, the alien jumped and clapped. Its joy was infectious.

After a while, they both stopped. The lizard-person stood with its hands on its hips and nodded as if satisfied with the explorer’s progress.

It approached the camera, and once more gave the robot an affectionate pat. Then it angled its head, as if listening to someone.

Gwen couldn’t see anyone else on the screen. The lizard-person seemed to be looking at the explorer. Was it…talking to the explorer? As if the explorer could talk back?

Maybe all the years on Mars had rendered it intelligent… Maybe during its long dormancy, the explorer had developed a consciousness and—

She shook her head sharply.

“Get a grip, Gwen.” Even she had her limits on what she’d entertain.

The lizard-person’s lips pulled into a broad smile. She was really starting to like the little guy.

It angled its head again, its eyebrow ridges creasing and its smile fading as quickly as it had formed. It took a few steps back, then slapped its forehead and shook its head.

It ran toward the camera, frantically doing something. Its mouth moved the whole time, as if it was talking quickly. And it didn’t look very happy.

The feed suddenly cut off.

“What?” Gwen shouted. “No!”

She did everything she could to try to reconnect. Maybe it was on a different frequency. The feed had to still be out there.

A flashing red box on the window warned her that her haste had made her slip up. Strange symbols flooded her screen. They morphed more quickly than she could register their shapes, making her eyes hurt.

Just as frantic as the lizard-person had been, Gwen disconnected everything, sending a scrambling packet at the last moment to try to cover her tracks. The packet should take care of hiding her activity from most computer systems on Earth.

As if that would help against whatever the heck that had been.

When she was done, she realized she was crouched next to her chair, staring wide-eyed at her monitor, her glasses crooked on her face. She ejected her external drive and reconnected it to the rest of her necklace, then powered everything off.

She sat down for a few moments, trying to process what she’d seen.

That had to have been a prank. But if it was a prank, it was a damn good one. Whoever was behind it had gone to great lengths to make it look real.

Had they been pranking someone else? Gwen wasn’t supposed to be accessing that feed. No one should be watching for signals from a dormant Mars explorer. And no one knew about her pet project.

Even if they did, how would they have known she’d be scanning that exact section of space at that exact time? The sheer improbability of it… The timing was almost as hard to believe as what she’d seen.

Not a prank for her, then.

Maybe… Maybe not a prank at all.