Page 24 of Stardusted

I abandoned all pretense and bent forward, too.

“There’s a farmer out on 100E who said he sawsomething. Not just the lights. Said it was silver and shaped like a saucer.”

I stared at her before a snicker escaped. Then another. I laughed until I snorted and had to stop to breathe. “You’re telling me people are claiming they sawflying saucersnow?”

Amelia arched a microbladed brow. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

“Come on, A.” I sighed and clasped my hands together. “Weird light phenomenon? Sure. I’ll buy that. But flying saucers? Seriously?”

“I’m just relaying what I heard while getting my nails done!” She shoved her phone across the table, pointing at it. I glanced at it long enough to register the grainy video of a blurry ball of light against a dark background before looking away. She jabbed a finger in the screen’s direction. “You have to admit—it looks legitimate. And it’s a little creepy how things have been glitching. TVs. Phones. Radios. And then these lights?”

“There’s a solar storm happening?—”

“Yeah, yeah. Magnetosphere, blah blah, electromagnetic interference. But what if it’s not that?”

I groaned. “Please don’t tell me you’ve gone full Kelly.”

“Is it really so hard to believe there could be something else out there?”

“No.” I shook my head vehemently. “Not at all. It makes total sense that something else is out there. Space is huge. Theuniverse is infinite. It’d be dumb to think we’re the only ones floating around out here.”

“Okay,” Amelia said slowly, sipping her latte while she studied me over the rim. She swallowed then cradled the foam cup. “So your problem is just…what? That they’rehere?”

“Yes. Exactly. Why would they waste their time on Earth? We can’t even get to Mars. We’re still debating if alienscouldexist. What’s so interesting about humanity that someone would travel lightyears—like, thousands and thousands oflightyears—just to…mess with our internet and light up some cornfields?”

The more I spelled it out, the better I felt.

It made no sense. Aliensbeing heremade no logical sense.

Sure, I’d freaked out last night, but that had been in the moment. After a double shift. In the dark. In a ditch. Now, in the daylight, with coffee in my veins and Google in my pocket, it was obvious. So obvious.

I’d fallen under Kelly’s conspiracy spell. Temporarily. Embarrassingly. I made a silent pact to never, ever admit it to her.

Amelia considered it for a moment before shrugging. “Who knows? I mean, if we’re being real, any alien race advanced enough to get here would be, like, majorly ahead of us in a lot of ways, right? Trying to guesswhythey’d come is like asking an ant why a human stepped on their hill.”

I blinked. Morbid. But also…disturbingly fair.

I thought back to all the anthropological studies I’d read. Ones where scientists embedded themselves into different societies to observe them. It always came with a power imbalance. A more “advanced” culture studying one deemed “lesser.”

Maybe, if someone had crossed the stars to get here, they were an explorer. A scientist.

Or maybe the paranoid ones were right, andIndependence Dayhad it nailed. Maybe they were just here to wreck the anthill.

Hypothetically.

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, the strands still wavy from air-drying after my shower. No matter what I wanted to believe, the facts remained: I’d witnessed something. A whole bunch of people had.

What thatmeant, though, was still up for debate.

Right along with my sanity.

Chapter 8

WAR OF THE WORLDS

Iwasstillthinking about it hours later.

Mostly because I didn’t have a choice, thanks to my company.