The Frequency of Aliens

By Gene Doucette

Annie Collins is back!

Becoming an overnight celebrity at age sixteen should have been a lot more fun. Yes, there were times when it was extremely cool, but when the newness of it all wore off, Annie Collins was left with a permanent security detail and the kind of constant scrutiny that makes the college experience especially awkward.

Not helping matters: she’s the only kid in school with her own pet spaceship.

She would love it if things found some kind of normal, but as long as she has control of the most lethal—and only—interstellar vehicle in existence, that isn’t going to happen. Worse, things appear to be going in the other direction. Instead of everyone getting used to the idea of the ship, the complaints are getting louder. Public opinion is turning, and the demands that Annie turn over the ship are becoming more frequent. It doesn’t help that everyone seems to think Annie is giving them nightmares.

Nightmares aren’t the only weird things going on lately. A government telescope in California has been abandoned, and nobody seems to know why.

The man called on to investigate—Edgar Somerville—has become the go-to guy whenever there’s something odd going on, which has been pretty common lately. So far, nothing has panned out: no aliens or zombies or anything else that might be deemed legitimately peculiar... but now may be different, and not just because Ed can’t find an easy explanation. This isn’t the only telescope where people have gone missing, and the clues left behind lead back to Annie.

It all adds up to a new threat that the world may just need saving from, requiring the help of all the Sorrow Falls survivors. The question is: are they saving the world with Annie Collins, or are they saving it from her?

The Frequency of Aliens is the exciting sequel to The Spaceship Next Door.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gene Doucette
• Release date: Dec 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370339792

Gene Doucette

GENE DOUCETTE is the author of more than twenty sci-fi and fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, Unfiction, and the Tandemstar books. Gene lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

Prologue: The Notion at the End of

the

Lane

When a spaceship that was unquestionably of non-terrestrial origin touched down in a small field in a small town in Massachusetts, it set off a series of events—both small and large—worldwide. Quite a few of those events were fascinating in their own right, being the sort of thing the human race’s collective psyche could only learn about itself following a first contact event. Especially in this case, where the intelligence behind that first contact was truculent to a maddening extent .

In other words, the ship landed and then didn’t do anything, for a solid three years. It didn’t move, or open. Nobody from inside it talked to anybody outside it. No other ships showed up behind it. It just refused to do anything, not even take a soil sample or stick a thermometer out of an orifice.

And yet, the consensus was that it existed, and this was a very

important

fact

.

One specific consequence of this important fact was that every last person who fervently believed in a pet theory of some kind, turned to the nearest person who did not believe in this theory, and said, you see, I told you I was right.

It didn’t at all matter if this pet theory pertained to extraterrestrials, or to outer space in general. The spaceship was an unfathomably impossible thing, and so it proved, by extension, that there were other unfathomably impossible things out there which also

were

true

.

This didn’t make a tremendous amount of sense as a logical syllogism, but in the days that followed the public announcement confirming the ship’s existence in Sorrow Falls, almost nobody was feeling particularly rational.

In the American Northwest, Bigfoot sightings quadrupled; the Loch Ness monster made dozens of appearances, including—according to several witnesses—an appearance at a wedding reception; and three different teams of climbers on Mount Everest insisted a talkative Yeti helped them up a particularly challenging pass. El Chupacabra appearances became so common in Brazil that new sightings—including some very good photographs—were relegated to the back-pages of the newspapers if they were reported at all. The same could be said for eyewitness accounts of the Jersey Devil and the Mothman.

It wasn’t just the cryptid urban legends that saw a boost. Vampire sightings became extremely popular in certain regions of the United States and Western Europe, werewolves apparently roamed the countryside in parts of Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, and something called a rakshasa made regular appearances in India.

Worldwide, people began seeing ghosts with a degree of regularity that almost made collective delusion the less likely explanation.

At the same time, just about every pseudoscientific idea got a tremendous boost. The Flat Earth Society began holding quarterly regional meetings that filled up arenas. One in ten Americans reported, in a survey taken six months after the ship landed, that they had been abducted by aliens, and there were nightly UFO sightings all over the world.

Then there were all the SETI projects: hundreds of people—from self-taught astronomers using homemade equipment to large telescope arrays in places like Latvia and Argentina—reported discovering extrasolar signals from various parts of the night sky, but (importantly) all from different parts of

that

sky

.

It was a crazy period in world history. The general opinion of rational people at the time was that the surge in fringe beliefs was a manifestation of public hysteria, and needed to be taken just as seriously—from a sociological perspective—as the riots, religious schisms, and mass suicides happening in the same period.

However—and this was important—there was no reason to believe any

of

them

.

The ship’s existence was, perhaps, comforting to someone who felt with all sincerity that it confirmed that the planet’s surface was in fact flat, but that didn’t mean they should be taken seriously. Likewise, vampires didn’t suddenly become real; the sky was not now suffused with text messages from alien civilizations; and that wasn’t Bigfoot, it was

a

bear

.

It was tough to say whose pet theory suffered more when the ship finally did do something, but it was probably the majority who continued to scoff at those obscure theories that came out the worst. Because on the night of The Incident (as it came to be called—The Night of the Living Dead was already taken) Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, was overrun by actual zombies.

It only made matters worse that the zombies were directly associated with the spaceship, because that further bolstered the arguments many were already making.

Q: What’s the connection between the Loch Ness Monster and the spaceship?

A: Who knows, but zombies were involved so there could

be

one

!

Above and beyond the problem that zombies ended up being real (for at least one night) was everything else that happened during The Incident. One of the things that had been considered true for the entire time the ship was on the surface of the planet—which ceased to be the case at the end of that night, when the ship left the Earth and settled into low orbit—was that nobody could touch it. (This particular detail spawned its own crackpot theory, which was: the ship wasn’t even really there at all. This was, it should be noted,

not

true

.)

Unfortunately for the No-Shippers and the No-Touchers alike, somebody actually had put a hand on the ship, way back on the night it landed. Improbably, that someone wasn’t the strongest warrior in the land, or the holiest, or the rightful ruler of England. She also was not a secret alien, although this remained in dispute long after the night was over. No, it was a thirteen-year old girl. And three years later, at age sixteen, that girl—her name was Annie Collins—somehow managed to save the world.

Nobody fully understood how any of that was true, aside from the young Miss Collins and a few other people, and so of course hardly anyone believed it. The logical/pessimistic contingent just assumed there was a better explanation. The fringe theorists believed there was a much weirder explanation. (In this regard, the ‘secret alien’ idea never

entirely

died

.)

Since the world had essentially stopped making sense when the ship landed, every possible idea was in play, and there wasn’t much anybody could do to correct that record. Yes, zombies had turned out to be real, albeit temporarily. Yes, the ship did have an alien inside of it, but that alien was (somehow) more like a non-corporeal malevolent energy-being than the giant bug-thing everyone had planned for. Yes, a sixteen-year old did… something… to save the Earth from total destruction, and yes, it appeared that same sixteen-year-old now had herself a pet spaceship that followed her around.

However, most could agree that this position was where to draw the line. None of the other stuff people were saying during the ship’s occupation was really true, and the Yetis and vampires and flat earth theories and alien abduction scenarios could be shoved back into the closet again.

Unfortunately, when it came to at least one fringe theory, the rational consensus ended up being wrong again. It would just take another couple of years before anyone

realized

it

.

Part I

March

1

School

Daze

Jerry: Welcome back! Today’s guest is the girl everyone’s talking about! Annie Collins!

(Applause)

Annie Collins: Hi, glad to

be

here

.

J: Annie, according to several sources, you almost single-handedly prevented what we’re being told was an actual alien from destroying the planet. I have to ask: was

it

fun

?

A: Jerry, I have to be honest here, I didn’t do it all alone. I had a lot

of

help

.

J: But was

it

fun

?

A: Um. Sure. Sure, it was fun. I guess. You know. Terrifying, mostly,

but

fun

.

J: I bet it was! And now you have your own spaceship? Is that right?

A: I’m not really supposed to talk

about

that

.

J: I also hear there were zombies!

A: I’m… well yes,

there

were

.

Audience

:

Oooo

.

J: Well that’s great, that’s fantastic. And Annie, we have so much more to talk about after the break, but really quick: What’s next for Annie Collins?

A: College,

I

hope

.

transcript, The Jerry James show

A nnie. Annie Collins .

The barista—his name was Wally—wasn’t reading the side of the cup, as it only said Annie on it. He knew her full name because pretty much everyone did, and announced it loudly for the same reason: because Annie Collins was a name belonging to a famous person. Appropriately, the announcement made all ten of the customers in the shop turn

and

look

.

It was something like a prank. Wally got away with it because he happened to know Annie personally to a minor extent, which was to say that she went to the shop regularly; he had introduced himself in the past; and they’d had several conversations lasting more than fifteen seconds. She also knew his name without having to look at the nametag, which was useful because he changed the name on his tag every couple of weeks. Today, he was Brenda.

Thanks, Wally, Annie said, sticking her tongue out. I hate you, and I’m never speaking to you again. See you tomorrow.

He smiled. "

See

ya

."

Annie took the cappuccino to the next counter in order to add massive amounts of sugar. This was because she didn’t actually like coffee. But she had learned some time in the third week of her first semester to value caffeine intake more highly than her taste buds, and much more highly than whatever organs were being damaged by all the sugar.

While she was busy adding sugar, the people in the shop were fighting private battles, as they decided whether to A: pretend to ignore Annie completely, B: go up and introduce themselves, or C: surreptitiously take her picture. What all of them were definitely doing was texting and/or tweeting something along the lines of I’m sharing a coffee shop with Annie Collins

right

now

.

Annie mostly found it funny. Annoying, sometimes, but mostly funny. Knowing Annie personally was effectively useless to anyone looking to leverage her fame for greater things, because she wasn’t rich, and she couldn’t introduce someone to other famous people, with the possible exception of a few semi-well-known military persons and the president. If anything, getting to know Annie meant someone in the government would be performing a background check.

Basically, Annie was famous for something that happened in the past, not something she was currently doing or would be doing in the future. It meant the people she could call friend—like Wally, annoying as he was—tended to actually be friends, so far as she

could

tell

.

Annie liked to think she was pretty good at sniffing out someone coming at her with an agenda. A year’s worth of appearances on talk shows contributed a great deal to her understanding of the artificiality of the human condition as it pertained to engagement with persons of great fame and fortune. One of the things she learned was that strangers tended to interact with their idea of her, and to deal poorly when that idea didn’t jibe with who Annie actually was. The ones who tried to continue to interact with the wrong version of Annie were the ones who wanted something. If they adjusted their understanding and tried to figure out who Annie actually was, there

was

hope

.

Annie finished prepping the cappuccino, and headed for

the

door

.

In the corner, near the bathroom, a guy had his cell phone out, trying to line up a decent shot. He looked to be about the same age as Annie, and probably attended the same college. They might even end up in the same classroom sometime in the next few years. Maybe by then, he’d be used to the idea enough to not bother relating their shared existence to his social media circle.

She paused at the door, and turned to look at a spot somewhere just above the kid with the phone. He was going to take the picture anyway; might as well make it a

good

one

.

Agent Cora Blankenship was waiting on the other side of the door. Cora was another kind of person Annie had learned to grow accustomed to in the past couple of years: the kind who was paid to follow Annie around.

Morning, Cora,

Annie

said

.

Cora—Annie couldn’t bring herself to call her Agent Blankenship, even in formal settings—was only a little taller and looked only a little older than Annie. In truth, Cora was twenty-eight, which meant she had nearly a full decade on Annie, but they appeared to be contemporaries, which made the daily transition into the on-campus experience a tiny bit less awkward.

Hey, Annie, Cora said, with a smile that was largely genuine. "We late

for

calc

?"

We are indeed. I was up cramming.

Figured.

The coffee shop was directly across the street from one of the side entrances to the lower campus. It was only the second-nearest source of coffee in relation to Annie’s dorm room, but the cafeteria coffee was unsustainably bad, which was to say that no matter how much sugar and cream Annie added, she still couldn’t

tolerate

it

.

She kept waiting for the day when she’d just suddenly start liking coffee, or the day she discovered something that worked just as well but which she liked better. Bonus, if it was also a legal substance.

Once across the street—a two-lane affair that had no active traffic, because the only thing to get to-and-from in these parts was the college itself—they fell into the speed-walk style that was the customary mode of transportation for the entire campus, especially between periods. Annie’s 8:20 calculus class was off the commons in middle campus, which was a good long walk in the springtime, and the kind of distance that inspired Nordic epics in the winter.

What’s today, philosophy?

"Yeah, second period. Midterm’s worth a third. You can put in your reports that I actively despise David Hume, if

you

want

."

Cora laughed. Annie thought that probably would end up in a report, and further, that this report would go to a team of analysts who would spend a few weeks debating the significance of Annie’s hatred of empiricism in general and Hume in particular. Of course, She only hated Hume on this day, and only because she was about to be tested on him; otherwise, she rather liked what he had

to

say

.

Annie hoped that this hypothetical room in which her blanket hatred of Hume was hashed out included at least one developmental psychologist telling everyone not to take the mood swings of a nineteen-year old all that seriously. This seemed unlikely, though, because no matter how many times Annie tried, she couldn’t get the United States government to calm down

about

her

.

There was a spaceship in synchronous lower orbit directly above Annie Collins, give or take a few degrees. This ship happened to be the most dangerous weapon in the entirety of human history. That it was under the exclusive control of a teenage girl was essentially the worst-case scenario for everybody who ever had to deal with a teenage girl. This was especially so for the largely male elected members of the US government, a collective body that had not shown itself, historically, to be particularly good at understanding women of

any

age

.

Some wondered, privately—always privately—what would happen if Annie had a bad breakup? Or what if ‘women’s issues’ (because menstruation came with euphemisms in the halls of Congress) made Annie particularly moody one day? Essentially, what if this hormonal ball of young lady decided to vaporize the entire East Coast because she had just Had Enough? Another teen might slam a door, and cry, and eat a tub of ice cream, these important men reasoned, using the best examples they could think of from some combination of twenty-year-old sitcoms and Archie comics. This teen could eradicate all life on the planet.

In short, Annie Collins was potentially a destroyer god, and from a demographic that probably wouldn’t vote for any of them. This was a genuine nightmare.

The problem was, nobody could figure out what to do about it other than give Annie what she wanted. They could try and take control of the ship, except that would mean forcing their way into something that had been impossible to get inside back when the thing sat in an open field. Trying it now, when getting close required a rocket ship and a space suit, seemed like a pretty bad plan. Or, they could perhaps convince Annie to hand over control, but so far, she hadn’t been willing to

do

that

.

Killing Annie was on the table for a long time. The problem with that plan—aside from the part where murder was widely considered to be wrong—was that Annie herself recognized this option almost immediately, and made absolutely sure everyone else knew

she

had

.

There was a document. In the United States, every single government employee above a certain clearance was issued a copy of this document, and a similar process was followed in other countries. It detailed precisely what would happen should Annie Collins die suddenly, and it was basically the most terrifying last-will-and-testament in recorded history.

First, every secret government file for every country in the world would be shared with the Internet in the largest electronic push notification ever. Second, everyone involved in the decision to murder Annie would discover how difficult it is to hide from high-powered lasers fired from space.

Essentially, it established clearly and simply that the state-sanctioned murder of Annie Collins was a much worse idea than everybody leaving Annie Collins alone.

The document remained a secret to the general public, because there were a pretty decent number of people who would see value in exposing the world governments’ secrets with one well-placed bullet. Likewise, there were rogue governments, including one or two who had no secrets for Annie to expose. This was the reason for the secondary threat of actual physical violence in the form of lasers from space. Annie—who of course wrote the document—hated to include that part, but didn’t see a way

around

it

.

The first question most people—on being shown the document for the first time— asked was: Is this for real? Aside from Annie’s e-signature on the bottom, how did

they

know

?

This was where the message’s provenance came in, because that was also part of the message.

The document appeared simultaneously on computers all over the planet, some in utterly impossible-to-get-to places: isolated servers with no Internet access hidden behind impenetrable firewalls and lots of concrete; computers on orbital satellites; and laptops belonging to presidents and kings and prime ministers. Each version of the message was personalized when it was delivered, addressing the reader by their full name, in their native language, with their exact geo-coordinates at the time they happened to be

reading

it

.

It was a remarkable, albeit understated, display of force.

The document led to a large number of back-channel summit meetings in the halls of the United Nations, convened with about the same tenor as a hostage negotiation. The question everyone had was, what does Annie Collins want, aside from to not be murdered?

The answer was so simple, at least half the world’s diplomats remained, more than two years later, concerned that they were missing something important. What she wanted was: to be left alone; to go to college tuition-free; for her mother to have the best medical care in the world.

She had no demands for vast wealth (notwithstanding the cost of tuition, which was indeed large) or fame or power. No gold-plated jets or mansions or dates with hot young celebrities. No weird requests, like making the entire House of Representatives dress in mascot costumes, or insisting that somebody apply lipstick on the Statue of Liberty, straighten the tower in Pisa, or fill in the Grand Canyon with licorice. Also, she made no political demands, like the passage of certain bills, or the freeing of political prisoners, or the ceding of Tibet.

Annie just wanted to be left alone to live her life as normally as was possible under her current circumstances.

To some, this was a huge waste of capital. But they didn’t see the world the way Annie did. She had some ideas for the future, certainly—there was one particularly loud one—but those ideas couldn’t be bought or negotiated. They had to be nurtured.

There was another implication to the message in Annie’s document. It more or less guaranteed that nobody acting at the behest of a government would attempt to kill or detain her, but that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t try to do it. This was why, shortly after returning home to Sorrow Falls and just before her first television appearance, Annie ended up in a lengthy phone call with the president, to negotiate the terms of her security detail.

The terms were essentially that she was going to have to have a security detail for the remainder of her life, or until the spaceship went away. The president was negotiating from a position of weakness no modern head of state had ever experienced, so he was pretty glad Annie agreed to it. To that extent, he mostly just lucked out in catching her at the right moment. At the time, she was only sixteen, and had gone overnight from being decently-well-known exclusively to the residents of Sorrow Falls, to extremely famous world-wide. Annie was pretty confident in her ability to deal with most of the fame, but the world had a lot of crazy in it, so it was nice to have someone around who was prepared to take a bullet

for

her

.

Having security was a little rough at first, because for about six months the secret service treated Annie like she had a live bomb strapped to her chest. Things improved, though, either because Annie was exactly as charming as she thought she was, or they got used to being next to a

live

bomb

.

Annie thought it was probably the latter, even though she didn’t think of herself as about to explode, and she did think she was pretty charming.

The walk through lower campus ended at a long staircase that dropped Annie and Cora next to the library. From there, it was a short trip to the commons, and then the third floor of the Palmer building, where the calculus class she was sleepwalking through took place. Then came philosophy and a test on Hume that wasn’t as bad as Annie thought it was going to be. Then there was nothing but rainbows and kittens and

cafeteria

food

.

And there was Ginger.

Boom, Ginger said, as she introduced herself to the table currently only occupied by Annie and Cora. The sound effect accompanied the cafeteria tray-drop, said tray holding food of questionable origin. "What’s up, space baby? Hey G-girl. I just murdered an entire econ midterm. Did you slay the great

white

Scot

?"

Talking to Ginger required a guidebook, most times. She seemed to think it was her goal in life to create nicknames and invent ridiculous colloquialisms, so nearly half of what came out of her mouth was non-literal. Annie knew at least three English-as-second-language students who were literally terrified of getting caught in a conversation with Ginger.

On this day, Annie was space-baby and Cora was G-girl. These were default nicknames, and Cora didn’t like hers. The first time it was used, she spent a good portion of the lunch hour trying to get Ginger to understand that the title ‘G-man’ was specific to the FBI, that the term was non-gender-specific anyway, and also nobody was supposed to know Cora was a Secret Service agent, so could Ginger please stop

announcing

it

.

Ginger kept using it anyway, because being aggressively impolite was kind of her thing.

I did indeed slay the great white Scot, Annie said. This was the nickname for Hume, and he had no opinion on it. It was a compound nickname based on the usual collegiate disparagement of old white men that surfaced most often in English classes, combined with Hume’s Scottish origin. The great that turned this into a shark reference was all Ginger.

"Groovy. Reset the hard drive.

Who’s

next

?"

"Kant, I think. But let me enjoy this first,

will

you

?"

"Kant sucks whale meat. You’ll miss Scottie in

no

time

."

"Like I said, let me enjoy this. I’m not ready for a final boss battle with the next guy

just

yet

."

"Yeah cool. But

you

aced

?"

"

Pretty

sure

."

No cheating?

Annie threw a roll at Ginger’s head. It bounced off harmlessly and landed on the floor, with the target completely ignoring the impact had even happened. Given the potential damage implicit in a collision with a cafeteria roll, this was unquestionably a conscious effort.

It was widely rumored, among Annie’s fellow students, that Annie could access any fact she wanted any time she wanted it, because she had a computer in her brain, or was an alien/human hybrid, or was getting the answers in advance for some reason.

Annie hated the rumor, a lot. It made no real sense in the first place, because why would she bother to go to college if she already knew all the answers? Because of her unique circumstances, a college degree really didn’t do anything for her, so cheating to get one wasn’t at all worth her time. Obviously, she was in college to actually learn. That perhaps made her a minority.

Also, the ship didn’t really work like that. Certainly, the spaceship’s archives were terrifyingly vast. Comparing them to something like the Library of Congress, or the Internet, or even to the combined knowledge of all human history, was unfair, because the ship had more information than any of those things. Annie understood this, but she understood it in the same way a squirrel in a tree at the base of a mountain might have a dim comprehension of how large the mountain is. She would never have a full grasp of all

of

it

.

That said, while she could get answers, they weren’t necessarily fast answers, and they usually came with a lot of things she didn’t really need to know that badly.

There was one time, when she was about to go on live television, she had decided it would go better if she knew a little more about the host. She asked the ship, and it more or less worked, in that she got to know a lot more about the host, but the information included that he was a closeted homosexual who was having an affair with a

married

man

.

Annie knew enough to keep that to herself on television, but she couldn’t look him in the eye, and she blushed noticeably on-camera. Then, for about a month after, she had to field questions about whether she had a crush on

the

host

.

That was just one of the reasons Annie didn’t spend as much time communicating with the ship as everyone probably thought she did. It was complicated, and there were usually unexpected consequences. It was a little like dealing with an over-literal genie.

You know better, Ginger, Reza said, as he sat down with them. "Keep teasing her, she will shoot you with a

death

ray

."

Hey, come on, I don’t have anything else to throw,

Annie

said

.

Try the fork,

Ginger

said

.

"I still need the

fork

.

Cora

?"

You have to stop asking me to shoot people.

Fine. Reza, next time I’m getting extra dinner rolls and then you’re done. Whole governments fear me, hombre.

More for the death rays than the dinner rolls, he said. But the rolls are quite fearsome.

If Annie were still in high school, she’d probably use the word motley to define her circle of friends. At Wainwright College, that was pretty much the whole campus.

This said more about Annie’s upbringing than it did about Wainwright. In many, many ways, there was no town on the planet quite like Sorrow Falls, especially for certain three-year stretch. But in other ways, it was pretty typical for Western Massachusetts. There was a certain homogeneity, if not of race—or, not entirely of race—then of attitude and general worldview. Having their own spaceship for a little while meant regular visits from a wide range of people, but those people didn’t stay, and didn’t contribute their perspective to the existing New England groupthink in any meaningful sense. The town never got a restaurant that served Indian food, or a yoga studio, or a family of refugees from a war-torn country. Everyone listened to more or less the same kind of classic-rock-heavy diet of music, with occasional forays into country, but nothing so radical it couldn’t be played over the speakers in Joanne’s Diner.

Wainwright College was also in Massachusetts, but almost none of the students were from the state originally, which was more or less typical for a Massachusetts institution of higher learning. It was kind of what the state was known for. Well, that and spaceships. And maybe baked beans, although Annie considered that more of a tourist thing.

Annie’s college choice got a lot of attention, which was sort of amazing considering she didn’t even finish out her senior year at Sorrow Falls high school. (Technically, she also did not start that year.) Eighteen-year-olds with GEDs don’t typically field calls from Harvard, or issue press releases

about

it

.

She nearly did go to Harvard. It was on the short list, especially once she ruled out the tech schools—MIT and CalTech were very interested—in favor of a more liberal arts education.

She picked Wainwright because it was the closest thing to the isolation she very much missed from her hometown, combined with an education not all that different from the one she might have gotten attending a more cosmopolitan university. Wainwright also had one of the better astrophysics departments, thanks in part to the convenience of a campus on a hill that was topped by what was once considered a state-of-the-art telescope.

The suburbs suited everyone. It took less than a semester for her professors and classmates to get accustomed to Annie being in their presence, and then they kind-of/sort-of treated her like anybody else. And since they weren’t surrounded by a major city—Wainwright was located in the hills of Turnbull, in a small exurb of Boston—the likelihood of encountering some rando off the street was reduced to approximately the occupation capacity of the coffee shop that was just off campus.

The Secret Service was pretty happy about it too. Annie was a lot easier to protect in this environment.

The cafeteria was located on the second floor of the Corcorcan Student Center, right at the edge of middle campus. It was a five-story building, with largely unused classrooms on the top three floors, and entirely too many things on the bottom two. It had the bookstore, the radio station—which played a rotation of alt-rock and a heavy techno that did not fit in with Joanne’s Diner or any other part of Sorrow Falls—and a laughably outdated computer lab. There was talk of a new student center breaking ground in the next one or two years, because these were the sorts of public spaces colleges used to attract new students and the Corc, not having been built originally to serve its current purpose, mostly

attracted

rats

.

There was a campus joke Annie was probably not supposed to hear, which was that the new center was going to be called the Collins center, on the assumption the college was rolling in government money thanks to her attendance there.

She thought that probably wasn’t true, but since she wasn’t supposed to hear the joke, she didn’t say so. Her opinion wouldn’t change the narrative all that much anyway.

It had been a pretty messed up couple of years, she reflected, from her uncomfortable wooden chair in the terribly-in-need-of-renovation cafeteria.

Annie was used to the idea of being known. Certainly, in Sorrow Falls, everyone knew her, and since for the first sixteen years of her existence, the town constituted her entire world, it was reasonable to argue back then that the whole world knew her. And that was fine because, as it happened, she knew

everybody

back

.

Now, the actual whole world knew her, and she couldn’t say the same. Even in a smaller pond, like Wainwright, she only knew a tiny sliver of the populace and had to rely otherwise on the generic hey… you greeting to cover

the

rest

.

The talk at the table reached a banal phase, which was what happened with people who saw one another essentially every day. They had been joined by Hua—who increasingly preferred the name Helen—and Frank who, aside from Annie, was the most conspicuously American-looking at the table. Provided one adhered to the appropriate stereotypes. Hua was Chinese, and Reza was Iranian, but Ginger—who had Filipino heritage—was an American citizen. Frank, meanwhile, was Canadian.

It was all very confusing.

Annie drifted out of the conversation, which was about a party on Thursday night she doubted she’d be attending. Her gaze ended up fixed on a point at the far end of the room, near the doors.

There were two sets of public-entry doors to the cafeteria. One was straight ahead of her: five double-doors propped open, on the other side of which was a staircase that led to the downstairs lobby. The second set was on the left: two double-doors to a hallway where the bathrooms were located.

She couldn’t have said why her gaze ended up in that particular area, although Annie did have a habit of looking toward exits. It was a thing she’d picked up over the past couple of years because most of the time the exits had a Secret Service agent nearby. Today, it was Agent Yount. He was dressed in a nice windbreaker and jeans and was pretty tough to miss because Yount was stupidly handsome, no less so for being forty

years

old

.

He had an earpiece and an active mic attached to his sleeve, so he and Cora could talk with one another as well as with ‘command’—a team coordinator in a van that was currently parked on the road behind Corcoran. Annie hardly ever spoke directly with anybody in the command center, so she had no idea who was in the van or how many

there

were

.

It wasn’t Agent Yount that caught her attention, although he certainly could do that. It was someone else. Specifically, the back of someone’s head looked extremely familiar.

What is it? Cora asked, quietly.

Hmm?

You’re holding your breath, Annie, what’s wrong?

It’s nothing.

It wasn’t nothing, but she couldn’t say what it was yet because she didn’t know. She sort of wanted Cora to ask Yount to