I said, “So what now?”
“We play with it.” Ian began a long explanation of what this “play” might involve, but I was no longer listening. The wallscreen had interrupted its comedy and raised its volume.
“—report that a so-called ‘Sweet’ has been arrested and charged with murder in Erie, Pennsylvania. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, was a six-year-old child. The alleged suspect, Martin Michael Shields, is being held without bail at—”
“Not possible,” Ian said. “Either he’s not really a Sweet or they have the wrong man. Fear bradycardia—”
I stared at the TV. Martin Michael Shields certainly looked like a Sweet: a big man in his twenties but with the same shy, vaguely bewildered look I’d seen on my sister’s face her entire life. I said, “It’s a frame.”
“What?”
“A frame. Someone else killed the kid so that a Sweet could be blamed.” Bile rose in my throat. Had the child died quickly? Was it a boy or a girl? Six years old . . .
Ian frowned. “Why?”
He was so much smarter than I was about science, but not about things like this. “To justify the violence against Sweets. Not the violence that’s already happened. Something more. Something big and coordinated.”
“That’s a little paranoid, Sophie.”
I hoped so. I really hoped so.
For the next week, all I did was watch the news. In our apartment I watched it on the wallscreen. In the APBRI cafeteria I tried to stay as much as possible in the back kitchen and I kept the screen tuned to news channels. Eventually Ted and Sarah and Kayla, the new cook, objected. “All that doom and gloom,” Sarah said, switching to a rerun of some show so old that cars thronged New York City. A half hour later I said I felt nauseated, went home, and stayed there, watching news shows whenever they were broadcast. A few times I even got recast European and Asian news, with and without translations. I told Kayla that I had the flu.
In seven different countries, children were attacked and mutilated. Each time, the alleged attacker, for whom there was “forensic evidence,” was another Sweet. A little boy in San Diego, twin girls in Munich, children in Cairo and Shanghai and Mumbai and Rio and London.
Louis William Porter was everywhere, vomiting out his poison that it was no coincidence the alien ship had appeared just before Sweets “went vicious.”
Attacks against Sweets ramped up around the world, became more organized and deadly.
My mother phoned constantly; eventually I stopped taking her calls. A dozen times I picked up the phone to call Carrie and then set it down again. What would I say? “Come here?” APBRI was not sheltering anyone but its own personnel. Go somewhere else? She wouldn’t go. Arm yourself for an attack? She wouldn’t.
Eventually I settled for calling her a few times every day, hearing her say, “Sophie?” and then cutting the link. As long as her voice was calm, the settlement was okay.
More murdered and mutilated children on TV.
Scientists fought back. On Understanding the News, Ian took his turn explaining that the biology of Sweets “as it is understood now” simply made such violence impossible to them. It was this objective fairness that sunk him. Fifteen minutes after Ian’s broadcast, Louis William Porter proclaimed triumphantly, practically licking his lips, that “science as it is understood now” implied both incomplete understanding and the possibility of change. The Sweets had changed, and the aliens had caused it. (Porter had changed his mind about their existence—they were now not only allies of the Chinese but were in fact controlling Sweets “like the soulless puppets they are!”)
When Ian got home, I turned on him. “Why the fuck did you say that?”
He stood in the doorway to our apartment, and for a moment I saw it through his eyes: blaring wallscreen to keep me awake, dirty dishes with the bizarre food combinations left in the pantry, myself even dirtier than the dishes. It had been days since I showered. The place reeked. But Ian didn’t look all that great, either: pale, heavy-eyed. He knew he’d screwed up.
He said, too evenly, “I said it because it’s true.”
“Ian McGill, the great acolyte of Truth! And now more people will die because you needed to preserve your scientific purity!”
He took a step forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Ian, who was never violent. But neither was he a Sweet, and I knew that in my anger I’d crossed an important line. But he mastered himself, threw me a look so terrible that it seared itself onto my brain, and went into the bedroom. I heard the door lock.
I picked up my cell, called Carrie, and hung up when I heard her voice.
A few days later, the attack came. Not on Carrie’s settlement—the other attack I’d been waiting for.
Only cynics like me believed that what was left of the United States government was mistaken about China’s space capabilities. Was mistaken, or was lying, or was protecting diplomatic secrets—in the end, all three came down to the same thing. NASA said no one on Earth had nuclear missiles that could accurately reach the alien ship, but at 2:47 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 14, China hit the alien spacecraft with enough nuclear power to blow up greater Los Angeles.
Our one remaining orbiting telescope caught the attack on camera. The missile exploded and the ship did not. The photo wasn’t a close-up, but it was clear enough to see that the ship emitted a blue haze a nanosecond before the missile hit, the missile disappeared, and the ship floated serenely in the void, its fragile-looking and oddly-shaped projections still intact.
The news feeds erupted. Theories, accusations, counter-theories, counter-accusations, defenses and offenses—it was a fucking law court on the airwaves. Somewhere a few hours in, I stopped listening. I no longer knew if the aliens had caused the biological changes in the Sweets, or the volcano, or the Big Bang that began the universe. I was sure of only one thing: They were waiting. They would wait for decades, if necessary. Until everyone over thirty-five, every nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, pre-Sweet human was dead.
But why? Were they waiting for the planet to hold only cooperative humans to ally with, or passive humans to easily conquer?
Suddenly I was very tired. I wanted to sleep, and I wanted it with the passionate intensity of a five-year-old lusting for ice cream. Since our fight, Ian had been staying at the lab. I staggered toward the bedroom.
The doorbell rang.
Ian? Wanting to reconcile? That would be the only thing better than sleep. Tears blinded me as I stumbled to fling open the door.
My mother stared at me, white-faced and clutching her two canes, before one of them gave way and she collapsed into my arms.
“You . . . wouldn’t . . . an . . . answer . . .”
Shame flooded me, followed immediately by anger. It felt old, the same anger that we had passed back and forth since I was ten years old. I snapped, “Of course I wouldn’t answer. You were harassing me sixteen times a day. Nobody sane could deal with that! And are you an idiot, coming all the way over here in your condition—how did you even get here?”
“Ar . . . armored . . . cab . . .”
“For chrissake, sit the fuck down!” I eased her to the sofa, got her a glass of water, stared at her trembling legs and twitching face as if a hard gaze could drill sense into her equally hard skull. An armored cab cost a small fortune. The trip cost my mother even more in strength. And I knew what was coming.
“Sophie,” she said when she’d recovered enough to speak, “you have to go!”