Robin Brande, besides being a prolific bestselling writer and a lawyer, is also a wilderness medic who understands a great deal about how tragic the outdoors can be.

This story is an amazing story of aliens and human reactions and so much more, I don’t want to even accidently spoil it. It’s just a great story.

You can get a lot more of Robin’s wonderful stories in numbers of genres at https://www.robinbrande.com/

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The handcuff on my right wrist was much tighter than it needed to be. I wasn’t going anywhere. But I understood their need to assert some authority. The whole base was on high alert.

They had lost three priceless assets, as the people interrogating me kept calling them. I never corrected them. What would be the point? They didn’t want my opinion, they didn’t want my enlightened world view, they only wanted to know how I helped their assets escape. Right under their noses. No security cam footage, no clues, nothing.

They had me in one of the small concrete interview rooms, one-way mirror, just like in a TV cop show. The other half of the handcuff was attached to the leg of a gray metal table that was bolted into the floor.

I’d already been held for about three or four hours. There was no clock in the room, they took my watch, but you get a sense of blocks of time. They let me have one bathroom break, escorted by a guard, then back to the hard metal chair to wait and wait.

I was still in my blue coveralls and black work boots. No one took my shoelaces, so I guess they weren’t worried I’d try to hang myself. From what? The table leg? I knew they were watching me through the glass. I just sat and thought my thoughts.

Mostly about how slick it all was. None of it my idea, which made it all the better. I could just shake my head at it and go along and watch the show unfold.

Plus I learned a lot in that last critical hour. Things I certainly never knew and didn’t even suspect.

In the almost seven years I’d been there, you could say I befriended the guys. The assets. They were easy to like.

But before I got the job, I had to go through two weeks of psychological testing. I figured working as a civilian for the military, there would be all sorts of hurdles, but the psych questions were strange.

They showed me all sorts of pictures and videos of men, women, boys, and girls, all of every possible nationality and color.

They had me hooked up to sensors to see if I reacted negatively at all. Of course I didn’t. I’m a Black man, I’ve spent my life with prejudice, so you think I care if someone is Pakistani or Chinese or Native American? Come one, come all, I’ll judge you by your actions. If you’re an ass, you’re an ass, I don’t care what color you are. But if you’re good people, then fine. Come sit by me.

And then, week two, they started slipping in some new kinds of pictures. People with horrible disfigurements. People who had obviously survived being burned. People who might have made a living with a traveling circus back in the old days, the only way they could support themselves.

And then, aliens. Cartoon aliens at first, little green Martians, then little gray extraterrestrials from science fiction movies.

Any reaction, Mr. Swan?

They checked my readouts. Didn’t matter to me, green, gray, disfigured, any of it. I’d lived a life. I’d seen a lot of people.

Just to make sure I wasn’t totally dead, they also showed me scenes from horror movies where face-eating aliens were stalking normal folk. I didn’t care for those, because who would? They checked my readouts. Elevated heart rate, fast breathing, I guess they liked what they saw.

Because I got the job. Technician Specialist. Top security clearance.

I know I came highly recommended. My old boss at Champion Rigs must have known someone in the Army, because they came looking for me, not the other way around. I didn’t know their secret base in the wilderness outside Aspen, Colorado, even existed.

The rules were strict. You live on base. You don’t leave. You don’t travel. We provide everything you need for free: food, comfortable housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, you name it.

I was recently out of a marriage and without a lot of personal prospects. I figured I’d take the job for a year or two, just to get my feet back under me. And learn some new things.

I’ve been what people call a mechanical wizard ever since I was a little boy. Not just normal fix-it and build-it kind of childhood play, but next level. When I was five I took apart my mother’s vacuum and a few other appliances around the house, and used the parts to make a working spaceship for my plastic army men. I got it airborne. I’ve always been a nut about flight.

Teachers noticed me, they put me in programs. I won all sorts of competitions. Reggie Swan became a name. My picture in the paper, holding up those big fake checks that show thousands of dollars in prize money—that was me. I made a good living as a kid.

And just like basketball and football standouts who start getting scouted while they’re still in junior high, my parents started getting offers early on. Scholarships to this college or that. High-paying tech jobs with Boeing and Ford and a lot of other companies. And military recruiters telling them why I’d do best in the Army, Air Force, or whoever that particular recruiter represented.

But I have a stubborn streak in me. A real obsession with not being bossed around. And I had a different plan in mind.

Learn everything. Try everything. Not the college route, that wasn’t for me, but hands-on. Working cars and airplanes and ships for a while. Then bridges and high rises. Whatever someone could design and build, I wanted to have my hands on that. Learn how everything worked, down to the nuts and bolts and motors and rivets.

If you start at sixteen, like I did, you can work a lot of jobs by the time you’re forty-six.

But I parked myself at Base X for six years and ten months—the longest I stayed anywhere—because there was more to learn there than anyplace else. I would have stayed there for the rest of my life if I could have kept learning from the guys.

When I finally got clearance to begin the job, the supervisor, Greg, took me to a special room for my orientation.

It was a little bigger than the one where they held me after they arrested me, but it had the same light gray concrete walls and metal table and metal chairs.

Greg said, “They tell me your psych eval was clean. But I won’t let you on the floor until I know you can handle it.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. All they told me was I’d be working on high-tech flight simulators and maybe some special aircraft. It sounded interesting, but not something anyone would have to handle.

The door opened, a woman stepped through, and after her came three little kids.

I thought they were kids. But only for a half a second. Then the light in my brain went on….

Whoa.

They were about three feet tall. Hairless. Skin a pale pinkish-gray. Heads more of an oval shape than round.

Their eyes were gentle and beautiful. That was the first thing I thought. It took me a moment to realize how much larger than were than a human’s. Maybe three times as large, and oval, and lidless. But the way they looked into my eyes, I just loved them right away.

I know that sounds strange for a grown man to say about extraterrestrials, but the bond was immediate. Like bonding with an animal just from the way it looks into your eyes.

You just know. You may be different species, but you are the same. You belong. The trust and the bond are real.

I smiled. I think I even laughed. But with a kind of wild joy that I got to see three such extraordinary beings.

My new supervisor was watching me closely all the time. He seemed relieved at my reaction.

I found out later there had been two other tech specialists before me who washed out the first time they met their new coworkers. Both of them freaked out so mightily, doctors had to come in and give them sedatives.

Then the techs were whisked off the base under all sort of security. I have no idea what happened to them after that.

Because they were risks now to the secret program on the base. They had seen and they couldn’t unsee. They couldn’t be allowed to talk about it, ever. The military has experience dealing with things like that.

But I wasn’t going to be a problem. I was all in, from minute one.

The woman who had escorted the three extraterrestrials into the room introduced them as RJ, LX, and MT.

No kinds of names for friends. I renamed them RayJay, Linus, and Mit.

And finally I found out why I was there.

The three extraterrestrials—ETs, for easier reference—hadn’t been captured, like I read might have happened back in the 1940s when spaceships started getting shot down in places like Roswell, New Mexico.

These three ETs had shown up on Base X voluntarily one day. Just out of the blue. I found out from talking to some of the officers that there have been all sorts of spaceships over the years hovering around military complexes, especially ones with nuclear weapons.

Like they’re monitoring us. Trying to make sure these Neanderthals aren’t blowing up their world like foolish teenagers playing around with gasoline and matches.

But RayJay and Linus and Mit didn’t just buzz the base or disable the missiles, like some other ETs have done at other military installations. Instead, they came straight in one day, flying a disk-shaped craft with a glowing blue dome on top, and they landed on the airstrip right where any gawking personnel could see.

Communication was a challenge. It took a while to find someone suitable to act as interpreter.

It took a week, in fact, before they somehow found Kirsten Simmens, the woman who escorted them into the room the day I first met them.

She was an attractive young woman in her late twenties when I first met her, small, slender, with pale skin and long blond hair. I don’t know where they found her or how. There must be some kind of database, though, because her skills were perfectly suited to this case.

RayJay and the other two had small slits for mouths, but they didn’t seem to have the mechanism for speech. No vocal cords. Nothing that allowed them to make any noise at all. I never heard them groan or laugh or cry. It would have been like trying to communicate with a fish.

They spoke with their eyes. They latched on with their gaze and you just knew what they were feeling. Sad, scared, frustrated, delighted—I felt many of their emotions over the years.

But Kirsten Simmens could do more than just feel what they felt. She could hear what they wanted to tell her.

It was at a particular frequency, she explained to me when she realized I was ready to learn how to do it myself. Like tuning in to a faint and secret radio station that you could only access if the ETs gave you a special dial.

Not everyone could hear them, even if they wanted to. RayJay and Linus and Mit were in charge. They decided who could hear them and couldn’t.

And then when you did hear them—it made me laugh the first time. Because they were mimics. They talked to you in your own voice.

“Hey, Reggie?”

“Yeah, Reggie?”

That’s what it sounded like. Like me having a conversation with myself in my own head.

Kirsten spent a lot of time with the three ETs and gained their trust. And the fact was, they wanted to be able to talk to someone. They had come to this planet and this particular base on purpose. It was no accident.

But they were new to the planet, obviously, and didn’t know which humans they should trust with their knowledge.

I came along two months after they’d already been there.

And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I became their best friend.

They showed me. They taught me. They confided in me. Not just the mechanics of their spaceship that they intended to give to us humans.

They told me everything I asked. About themselves, about their people, about the planet that they came from, and their galaxy. All of it.

And they taught me how to build a spaceship like theirs. They taught me things maybe no other ET has shared with any other humans.

I learned how to easily create anti-gravity propulsion. How to make a ship invisible. How to pilot one without installing any levers or controls, but only by thinking to it with my mind.

RayJay told me he hadn’t planned on sharing those extra details. He had specific instructions about how much to teach the Earthlings. He and the others were here to help us advance, as others like them had come before—many times over the millennia—but they were supposed to dole out just so much at a time. To keep our more primitive minds from overloading. And also to make sure we were using their technology for good, not to invent new ways of killing ourselves. We already had enough of those.

But RayJay could see that I was different. I could understand as much as he decided to teach me. And my heart is peaceful. I’m not a man of violence.

And RayJay knew that I loved him and Linus and Mit. He knew I would always protect them, I would never betray them, I only wanted what was best for them all the time.

I gave up caring about any of my old life. About anything outside the base. I didn’t need anything but to work and to learn morning until night.

I would take the eleven o’clock bus back to my housing on base every night just so I could shower and sleep for a few hours, then I’d come right back on the first bus at six.

And I’d been living that way, loving every minute of my life, for the past almost seven years. My brain felt like it had grown ten times bigger than it ever was. I had learned so much about the universe and space travel and other life forms, I could write a hundred books on them to start and still have more to say.

But even the best things can’t last. Think of your favorite dog or cat, dying too soon, when you wish they would live with you your whole life.

You still have all that love for them, you would still want them by your side even when you’re an old, old man, but that isn’t how life works. Even extraterrestrial life.

I could see that RayJay wasn’t looking right for a while. His skin was losing the pink tint that always made all three of them look like they were blushing.

He was getting to be a duller and duller gray.

Finally I said, “RayJay, are you dying on me?”

He answered me in my own voice, speaking directly into my head. “Reggie, we have to go soon. Will you help us?”

We were alone in the special hangar where they kept the guys’ ship. Only a few personnel were allowed to come in there.

So we were alone at the moment, just the four of us, and I bawled like a baby. I couldn’t make myself stop.

I hugged RayJay. Then the other two guys came in for the hug, too, and we stood there, just clinging to each other like brothers who were about to be separated.

They didn’t make any noise, but I could hear them inside my mind crying with the same sound I was making. Like hearing myself, and then three echoes of the same sobs. It made it so much worse to know that they were feeling it, too.

But then I got hold of myself. I said of course I’ll help you however I can.

And then RayJay let me in on yet another secret. Of how I could help them escape.

I asked them to wait one more day. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. But I understood that RayJay needed to go back or he wasn’t going to make it.

They told me they knew from the start that they would only stay for seven years. They had prepared their bodies to survive in our atmosphere for that long.

And they knew that I would be with them for almost all of those seven years.

“How did you know?”

“We saw you,” came my own voice in my head. “On our time map.”

They had hinted about their time map a few times before, but I never really understood what they meant.

“Do you mean time travel?” I asked them the first time, but they said it wasn’t exactly that. “Is it a time machine?” I tried. “You see a time on your map and you can go there?”

But still the answer was no.

Now RayJay tried one more time to help me understand. He pressed one of his four pale gray fingers into his chest where a heart would be if he was a human instead of what he was.

Then he drew a line through the space between us, and pressed that same finger to where he knew my heart was.

“Beginning,” said the Reggie voice in my mind, “end. Time to end of time.”

“But you saw it,” I said, trying to grasp what he meant. “Like looking at a map, but not of a place. It was of a time.”

I could feel RayJay smiling with his eyes. And I heard the rest of his explanation, and finally understood.

Before coming to Earth with Linus and Mit, they had looked at a time map to see when to come.

Just as they had consulted other maps to find the best location to bring their gift of technology to teach the humans. And just as other extraterrestrials before them had chosen the best time to bring their own earlier technology to humans living in earlier times.

Why are there suddenly a rash of discoveries and advances in different places around the world, all in the same few years?

Because the leaders of the ETs send out teams. They try to seed our planet with knowledge by sharing information with people they think can understand it. Little by little, bringing us children along. Helping us to do better. Helping us to understand the better and peaceful ways so maybe some day in the future we can join the greater unified community and not just try to shoot everybody who looks and sounds different.

So RayJay and the other two volunteered to be one of the teams. And they knew they had seven years to do as much as they could for as long as their bodies could survive. But which seven years should they use?

They saw me on their time map. Reginald Swan, making my way through a life as best as I could.

Not knowing I would get the job Base X. Not even dreaming I would one day meet RayJay and Linus and Mit.

But they knew. They saw it. Just like astronomers can map out the future paths of the stars.

So they landed when they did, and they waited for someone like Kirsten to come along to explain why they were here and what they intended to do.

And then they waited longer still, just a few more months, for their friend to show up, answering a job offer that didn’t exist before they arrived.

I passed the psych test. I would accept people of all kind. I would accept aliens. I wouldn’t freak out.

To the contrary, the minute I saw those three, it was like I’d come home to a planet I didn’t know I had left.

And then all my lifelong mechanical wizardry finally had a reason to be.

If they had time, I wish they could have shown me how to make a time map of my own. To find out what to do next, now that they were leaving.

But there wasn’t time. I could see that. RayJay had waited as long as he safely could.

Linus and Mit were still looking healthy to my eyes, but I knew they would soon look as gray and sickly as RayJay.

You have to let people go. Even if you don’t want to. And I was ready to do whatever I could to help them.

So they gave me the one more day that I asked for, and they told me as much as they could about whatever else I wanted to know.

Including how to help them escape. It took so little effort. That’s why it worked so well.

They did not travel through the stars to get here to Earth. They didn’t travel light years. They didn’t travel distance.

They traveled time and dimension. Both of them entangled together. They slipped from their time and dimension into ours.

To our human sensibilities, they must have needed a spaceship to do it. And I spent the last seven years picking it apart and reverse-engineering it and learning about anti-gravity and all of its other special properties.

When they never needed the ship at all. And they proved it to me when they left.

They asked me to bring three items from my home. Small metal objects that were easy to conceal.

I plucked out three clean teaspoons from my kitchen drawer their last morning. And even though I was sad, desperately sad to know my friends were leaving, I still had to smile to myself at the absurdity of thinking these spoons were somehow going to transport them to a galaxy so far away.

I knew that whatever they were going to show me would be the last perfect lesson. But I couldn’t even guess how it was all going to work out.

I dressed in my blue coveralls and heavy black work boots. I stuck the three spoons in my coveralls pocket.

I took the six o’clock bus. I didn’t even pause at the commissary for my usual cup of coffee. I was too sad and nervous. I wanted both to delay it and to get it over with.

The three of them were waiting for me in the hangar beside their ship. The security cameras that monitored us at all times would have seen us greet each other and go inside the ship as we did almost every day.

There were no cameras inside the ship. There wasn’t room and there wasn’t a place to mount them. The interior walls were curved and smooth and there was barely space for the three small extraterrestrials and one five-foot-eight human.

I had to lie on my back, scrunched behind their command seats. But I loved it inside their ship and never minded the discomfort.

The walls always glowed with a faint kind of golden color, not metallic, but more like the first glow of sunrise.

It was always the perfect temperature, even though the hangar was too freezing in the winter and way too sweltering in the summer. Inside the craft it was always just right.

In the closed-in space I could smell the unique scent of the ETs. Both earthy and lemony. Like citrus-scented soil. I always wondered if they minded the way I smelled so sweaty at the end of a day. It was why I always wanted to shower at least once a day, to try to make it a little nicer for them.

But they never seemed offended by all the human aspects of me. They never minded any of my human failings.

My impatience when I wasn’t learning as fast as I wanted, or when I couldn’t easily understand what they were trying to say.

My anger sometimes at the way things were run on the base. The way people sometimes treated me like an underling to be bossed around.

My awkward, gangly physical form that couldn’t copy their elegant motions with even a fraction of their finesse. Their ship was a work of art. Sometimes I felt like a gorilla trying to mimic the delicate work of their hands.

They forgave me all my failings. They embraced me as their brother.

And now it was time to say goodbye. I didn’t even try to hold back my tears.

I pulled out the teaspoons from my pocket and gave them to RayJay. He handed one each to Linus and Mit.

Then RayJay struck his spoon against the smooth golden wall of his ship. I could hear a faint tinkling, like a vibrating chime.

Linus and Mit struck their spoons against the wall, too, and RayJay said this was a resonance. The sound and vibration were all they needed.

I looked into their eyes. I could feel the love they felt for me. I know they could feel my love for them.

Then with the sound of three goodbyes in my head, all of them in my own voice, my teachers slipped away, like disappearing behind a hidden wall. One moment they were there, and the next the spoons fell with a ting to the floor of their craft and my three dearest friends were gone back to their homes.

I stayed there for a while. I couldn’t bring myself to move. I cried like a boy who had just had to put down his beloved dog.

But I couldn’t hide inside that spacecraft for very long. I had promised the guys I would cover their trail.

So I pulled myself together. I slapped my palms against my cheeks. I took some deep breaths. I had to do this right.

I climbed out of the craft like I’d done a hundred times before. No big deal, the ETs were obviously still inside working on something.

I went to the commissary and got myself a coffee and a Danish. I made myself sit at one of the tables and take my time eating.

I went back to the hangar, knowing there were cameras that could confirm everything I did. I waved to where the guys would have been sitting inside their ship, and motioned that I just had to go do something first, and I’d be right back.

All to stretch out the time. All to confuse anyone who might try to piece together what had really happened.

Not that they could. I could barely understand it myself. But I promised the guys I would protect them all the way to the end.

I fiddled around at my locker for a little while, then I returned to the hangar and got ready to do the big act.

I climbed up to the ship and called out for RayJay. I opened it and looked inside.

Then I looked around the hangar and called to RayJay again.

I pretended to be puzzled. I started asking around. You seen the guys? Where could they be?

And then I saw Kirsten Simmens with her long blond hair running through the door of the hangar, looking panicked.

She lived on the base, just like me, there to help facilitate communication with the ETs if anyone needed it. I don’t know what she did most of the day, since I had no trouble talking to the guys myself and I never saw anyone else trying to talk to them separately.

Most everyone was afraid. They kept away. That was fine with RayJay and the guys. They had been told to be wary of most humans, and to try to find just a few who would understand them and want to help them, like Kirsten Simmens and me.

“Where are they?” Kirsten called to me. “They’re not here!”

How she knew, I wasn’t really sure.

She must have been locked on to their frequency even when she wasn’t directly communicating with them. But whatever it was, she knew they were gone.

And then everybody knew. Kirsten made sure of that. I don’t blame her, she was honestly upset.

And in time, just like I knew they would, the powers that be decided I had done something bad.

Four MPs showed up, ready to try to wrestle me to the ground. I held up my hands to show them I’d come willingly.

But they still cuffed my wrists before taking me on the perp walk across the base. And then they cuffed me to the heavy metal table in the interrogation room.

And for four hours I answered the same damn questions, posed by a parade of different people in charge: What did you do with them? Where did you hide them?

And then at some point they must have realized the ETs weren’t hiding anywhere on base. Maybe because Kirsten Simmens said she couldn’t sense them.

So then the questions were about how I helped them escape.

What could I say? That I gave them three spoons and poof? I said I had no idea where the guys were now. No reason to believe they escaped. They liked it here. Didn’t we all treat them well? Why would they leave?

But no one seemed to be buying it. I was in trouble. Even though no one could prove I had any part of it. But I was the last one to see them, and that always means something.

So I sat there locked to the table and wondered how it was all going to sort out.

They took me to a cell eventually to sleep out the night. I lay on the hard bunk and stared up at the gray concrete ceiling.

I tried to imagine where RayJay and the guys were now. What they were doing. Where they lived. Who their people were.

How happy they all must have been to return to their home world. Even explorers eventually long for something familiar. Their favorite foods, their favorite places, the faces of people they love.

I wondered where I would go now. If I would ever return to my old life. Or if I was going to get disappeared like the two techs who washed out before me.

Or was I about to spend the rest of my life in some military prison?

If I had a time map of my own, I might have been able to see it.

But I guess smarter minds realized what they had in me. A man full of information and knowledge that shouldn’t go to waste.

Locking me up in prison wouldn’t help them create supertech spaceships of their own. What do we do with Reggie Swan? I became just another asset.

On my second day of interrogation I waited chained to the same gray metal table. I had a few bathroom breaks, escorted by a guard.

And then some time in the afternoon the door to the room opened again, and someone new came in, accompanied by Kirsten Simmens.

The man was shorter than me, maybe five-six, but buff and stocky, like he had been a wrestler back in his youth.

He was in his thirties, I guessed, white with brown hair and brown eyes. He wore a button-down shirt and a dark blue tie.

No jacket, so I could see the sweat stains in his pits. Maybe he had traveled all night to get to me and didn’t have time to change his clothes.

He smiled at me and held out his hand. “Ted Whitling, Mr. Swan. Nice to meet you.”

Kirsten took a seat and Whitling took the other. The three of us sat for a moment just judging what to do.

Kirsten had taught me where to find the right frequency to talk to the guys. But what I didn’t realize was she and I could keep talking there even after they were gone.

I heard her in my head, talking in her own voice, not mine.

“He’s from the government. One of their intelligence agencies. He’s the one who found me and brought me here seven years ago. I think we can trust him.”

“I don’t trust anyone right now,” I thought back to Kirsten. “He’s going to have to prove it.”

And it went on like that, with Ted Whitling talking to me out loud and Kirsten and I talking to each other in secret.

Whitling was different from the others. He didn’t ask me any questions. Instead he spent his time telling me what he could do for me.

“I think you need to face something,” he said. “This is the end of the road here.” He looked at Kirsten. “For both of you. If you want to keep going, you have to pick a new road.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by keep going. Was he telling us the military might decide to kill us for what we knew?

I had heard things. I wasn’t happy to think it might happen to me, but I can’t say I was surprised.

Or was Whitling just giving Kirsten Simmens and me career counseling? Telling us we were in dead-end jobs now and we needed to level up?

“Doing what?” I asked him. “What’s the new road?”

Ted Whitling smiled. “I’d rather not discuss it here.”

We were being watched and no doubt recorded. Whitling wasn’t stupid. But neither am I, and I needed more than a vague promise.

Kirsten was young, but she had obviously learned a few things, too. She told me, “We need some guarantee of our safety.”

“So, are we assets now, too?” I asked Whitling. “Are we being traded to someone else? Is that it, our lives aren’t our own anymore?”

Whitling smiled. “Look, Mr. Swan. I’m going to be honest. I’m just a cog in a big machine, the same as you and Ms. Simmens. We aren’t special. I’m afraid we can all be replaced. They just remove the defective part and stick another one in.”

“I’m just a cog,” I repeated.

“That’s right,” Whitling said. “So let’s be smart about where we put you next.”

Kirsten and I looked at each other.

I could see she didn’t believe it any more than I did.

Not special? The hell with that. Kirsten Simmens and I were bright, shiny special if there ever was one. Both of us had just spent seven years getting to know three extraterrestrials. We couldn’t just be plucked out and replaced by anyone else.

I don’t know what RayJay and the others told Kirsten over that time, but they had sure filled my brain with exactly the kind of valuable information any government would want.

So I wasn’t buying this idea that we were just replaceable cogs in a machine.

And it was time to make a deal that I wanted.

I have never been motivated by money or power. Those don’t interest me in the least.

But everybody has their price.

All I’ve ever wanted since I was a little boy was to learn everything. Try everything. Know everything that there was to know.

What Ted Whitling should have said was the road stops here, and from now on you’re cut off and you’ll never learn the rest.

But I could see that on my own. And that was what I didn’t want to lose. I wanted to take what RayJay, Linus, and Mit had taught me, and then keep going and going from there.

I couldn’t speak for Kirsten Simmens, but if Whitling could find me a new place to slip in as a cog in the big machine, then as long as I could keep learning more, my answer was going to be yes.

But mindful of Kirsten, I said, “How are you going to guarantee our safety?”

“I’d like to discuss that with you,” he said, “but not here.”

I looked at Kirsten. She was chewing the side of her thumbnail. But her mind was working, too, even though she wasn’t talking to me through all of the steps.

Maybe she, too, had no interest in returning to whatever her life had been before. How much work was there for extraterrestrial translators out in the regular world?

So both of us took Whitling’s offer, not really knowing what it all meant.

But it was enough to know that he got them to take the handcuff off me right away. And that he and Kirsten and I would be leaving Base X on a jet within the hour.

I didn’t bother going back to my place. I never really lived there, I lived for my work.

But Kirsten quickly packed a small bag and joined us as fast as she could.

Even though she still asked me, “Do you think they’re going to dispose of us?”

I didn’t think so, but how could I be sure?

But once we were in the air, jetting away from the base, Whitling took off his tie and visibly relaxed.

“Will you tell me how they did it?” he asked me. “How they got away?”

I thought about it, and told him maybe later, when I got to know him better.

If he wanted that from me, it was some leverage. I wasn’t about to throw it away.

But the time came when I did tell him. That and a whole lot more.

It’s been ten years now. Ten astonishing years. Years when I’ve gotten to make the most out of everything RayJay and the guys taught me.

All I can say is that I made the right choice. I can’t speak for Kirsten, but she seems to be doing all right. They’ve even trained her to do more than just sit on the sidelines and wait for some extraterrestrials to show up needing a translator.

She goes out and finds them. She listens to the frequency in her head, and she knows where to go to greet them and show them to safety.

I told her that was what RayJay tried to teach me. About their time maps that told the extraterrestrials when to come.

How he drew a line from where his heart would have been if he were human, and drew it across the space between us to where my heart was.

I took it to mean he could feel me. Across the distances between our galaxies, on this planet where he intended to land.

He adjusted his travel for when he knew I would be here, ready to befriend him and learn everything he wanted to teach me.

“Maybe all of them have time maps,” I told Kirsten. “And maybe the dot on some of their maps is you.”

She’s not the only one. There are people like Kirsten roaming all over the world right now, waiting to greet the teams that are coming to teach us.

“If you see RayJay,” I told her. “Or Linus, or Mit…”

She gripped my arm and gave me a smile.

But I’m not counting on them coming back. They never said that they would.

Instead they taught me how to go and find them.

I’ve been working ten years on transportation of my own. Not only building ships for the machine, as Ted Whitling called it, but also building one for me.

It’s exactly like RayJay’s, with smooth, curved walls inside that seem to glow golden like the first rays of sunrise.

The walls make a particular sound when you strike them with an ordinary metal teaspoon—one of the three that I saved from where they fell after the guys went away that day. Their spoons still vibrate at a particular frequency.

I’ve done tests. I’ve gone on short excursions.

And now it’s time to go further afield.

But it isn’t just the resonance or the sound or the vibration that take you there. It’s also the time map you hold in your heart.

You reach out to someone on the other end. And when you find them, you lock on to the path you need to take.

Heart to heart across the galaxies. Back to the planet where you belong. At exactly the right time, so they’re waiting for you there.

Tomorrow I’m leaving to go find my friends.

They’re a dot on a time map, and my heart knows where to find them.