That afternoon, Alma left her last class ten minutes early. She followed the rules and took the hall pass with her, but she didn’t plan to come back. She couldn’t sit at her desk for another minute. Hurrying down the hall, her thoughts were whirring so fast and she was listening to herself so intently that she wouldn’t have stopped at all, wouldn’t even have noticed that anyone else was there, if that someone hadn’t said, “Greetings, Alma.”
Hugo was standing by a hallway bulletin board. He was wearing another totally gray outfit and his robot glasses. In one hand, he held a stack of papers. In the other, a tape dispenser.
“Oh. Hi,” Alma said. “Hi, Hugo. What are you doing?”
Instead of answering, Hugo stuck one of the pieces of paper onto the bulletin board.
It was a flyer.
A very plain flyer, Alma noticed. White paper with words written in cramped black-marker letters: Astronomy Club Lecture. Next Tuesday. After School. Science Lab. There were no stars, no shimmering gold words.
“Mrs. Brisa had no knowledge of the flyers you and Shirin received,” Hugo said, “but she was very pleased to hear about our club.” He gestured toward the flyer with the tape dispenser. “She suggested that I offer my lectures in addition to our regular meetings rather than replacing them. Will you be attending? If you are truly serious about the study of astronomy, I would highly recommend it.”
Alma did want to go. But she didn’t know who might be there.
“There will be no tutoring at the lecture,” Hugo said, as if he could read her mind.
“Oh,” Alma said. “Oh. Well, then yes. I’d love to come. What’s it about again?”
“I will be discussing stellar nucleosynthesis,” Hugo replied. “The material will be purely introductory.”
“That sounds very … nice,” Alma said, even though she had no idea what stellar nucleosynthesis was and highly doubted there was anything introductory about it. “It’s about—it’s about stars then? I mean, astronomy.”
“Of course,” Hugo said. “This planet, as you know, and everything in it, including human beings, is made of elements. And those elements are created in stars through stellar nucleosynthesis. So really, everything is astronomy.”
“The elements,” Alma said. The ShopKeeper had mentioned them too. Find the elements—wasn’t that what he had said? She didn’t know anything about the elements.
But Hugo did, and Alma suddenly realized that if anyone besides the ShopKeeper could help her, it was him. True, he had already said there couldn’t be a fallen star, but she had evidence now. She had the crater and the charred trees. She had seen the Starling up close.
What if she could get him to help her? She had to try.
“Can I—can I ask you something?” she asked.
“There is nothing preventing you,” Hugo said. He pulled a piece of tape from the dispenser and rolled it into a circle.
“I—I need your help,” Alma said.
“You need my help,” he repeated, sticking the tape circle to a flyer.
“Yes,” she said. She straightened up, took a breath, then said, “Can you come to my house tonight?”
“Come to your house tonight.” Hugo didn’t move toward the wall with the flyer, just held it.
“Yes. But late. Like … maybe midnight?”
“Midnight.”
“Yes.” He was repeating her, but he had also gone extremely tense and his voice was very robot-y now. Alma tried to see his eyes, but the light bouncing off his visor made it impossible. “Will you come?”
“I am profoundly confused,” Hugo said.
Alma felt her resolve begin to seep away. He was going to laugh at her.
“It’s about the—the star,” she said. “The one that fell into my backyard.”
“Apologies, but if you recall our discussion yesterday—”
“There’s a crater,” Alma said. “From where it fell. And the trees are blackened and everything. Burned.”
Hugo pressed the flyer onto the bulletin board. “This may be socially inappropriate to say, but that is ludicrous.”
“It’s true! I saw the star fall. There was a—a bright light and—” She had told him all this before. She needed to say something new, something that would make him want to help her. “The star,” she said, “there was something inside it.”
Hugo was silent. He was silent for so long that Alma wondered if that was his way of getting her to leave.
“What kind of something?” he finally asked.
“Just a—it was a thing,” Alma replied. She couldn’t tell him the truth, not here in the school hallway, where everything was so fluorescent-lit, with students hovering inside classrooms, like bees in a hive, waiting to swarm out any moment, stingers sharp and ready. “I’m hoping we can see it again tonight,” she said, knowing that would not be enough, knowing she had lost him.
But then Hugo asked, “Did you say something about quintessence the other day, right before you walked into the lab?”
Alma flushed, remembering how she had been caught talking to herself. “It’s just a word I’ve been hearing a lot lately,” she said. “I’m not even sure what it means.”
“I’m not entirely sure either,” Hugo said. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pen and a tiny spiral notebook. He held both items out to her. “Please inscribe your address on the first blank page,” he said.
Alma didn’t know what she’d said to make Hugo agree, but she took the pen and notebook. She wrote her address inside in careful blue letters. “It’s on the edge of the Preserve,” she said. “In the Third Point neighborhood. Do you know it?”
“I am familiar with the Preserve,” Hugo said. He took the pen and put it back into his pocket. “We should discuss, however—”
The bell rang. Alma’s heart began to race. She felt her throat grow tighter, so tight that her words came out choked and fast. “Midnight,” she said. “Back of the house, at the very end of the yard, on the edge of the woods. I’ll be waiting there.”
Then she ran for the school’s front door.
She hoped Hugo would show up.