Page 53 of Stardusted

Too bad it hadn’t helped.

The last vestiges of sleep slid away, and I rubbed a shaky hand over my eyes. My marked hand. I glanced at the scars before groping for my phone.

3:08 a.m.

I’d dragged myself to bed after hours of combing alien encounter forums and late-night vlogs. The more I read and watched, the less I jumped each time the pipes creaked or the fridge hummed. The more I came to terms with what I’d seen. What I’d experienced.

Okay, some of that was the wine talking. But still. There was something comforting in the sheer number of normal-seeming folks claiming to have experienced something. And somehow, they kept going. They had jobs. Families. They moved through the world. They functioned.

Sure, a few had bunkers and stockpiles of canned beans, bullets, and vodka. But those were the outliers. Most of them were like me: regular people trying to make sense of it all. Trying to cope.

If there was one thing everyone agreed on—bunker-dwellers included—it was that something big was happening. Sightings had increased. Drastically. Some claimed an alien race had arrived. That they were here. Now. Among us. On this tiny speck of rock we called Earth.

The parts nobody agreed on were the who, what, and why.

I hadn’t found any mention of robot aliens, though I’d searched. Plenty of chatter about glowing orbs and saucers. The former struck a particularly nerve-tingling chord.

No mentions of shiny, disintegrating tablets, either.

Could The Willow University, a tiny campus in the middle of nowhere, have held the key to a freaking alien invasion?

No. Not invasion. The last vlog I watched had used a different word:infiltration.That sounded less threatening. More like a video game. More like something I could do something about.

At least the bad guys were easy to identify. They were the seven-foot-tall robot jerks with glowing green eyes and grabby six-fingered hands. A little hard to miss.

I snorted and let my arm fall back to the mattress, rubbing at my bruised bicep. Discolorations and scrapes dotted my whole body. I sure looked like I’d survived an explosion.

Biting my lip, I raised my right palm, eyeing it. All the way down to the scars.

The media had already sunk their teeth into the university’s explanation. I’d received the official text and email earlier: Finke Hall was closed until further notice due to damage and investigation. Faulty wiring. Solar flare malfunction. Yada yada.

At least they weren’t blaming me.

I shook my head and stretched my arms overhead, careful of the deep purple, finger-shaped smudges. My spine popped, one vertebra at a time.

I’d crashedhard.The last thing I remembered was inhaling the last pizza slice and face-planting on the pillows.

I pushed the rainbow-colored quilt aside and stood, tugging my baggy sleeping shirt back into place. The room tilted for a second. Maybe finishing off the rest of that wine had been a poor life choice. I waited for the spin to pass, one hand braced against the wall, the other on my roiling stomach.

When the tossing subsided, I padded into the bathroom, used it, then leaned over the sink and stared at my reflection in the mirror.

The bruise on my upper arm looked even worse in this light, a violent bloom of purple and blue. When it threatened to twist up my guts again, I focused on my face instead. My hair was a disaster, but the dark circles under my eyes had faded.

Too bad those marks on my hand hadn’t followed suit.

Steeling myself, I raised my palm again. Under the yellow glow of the bathroom’s bulbs, the lines were faint. Barely visible, the palest curves and dots. Subtle enough, I wouldn’t have seen them at all if I hadn’t known where to look.

Filigree. Etched into my skin. Graceful and artistic and…totally not as scar-like as I’d like.

Angling my palm to better see the intricate design, I made my way down the hallway for a drink of water to soothe my dry throat. Those lines flowed in delicate swirls and angles, like decorations seared into my skin. Like something…deliberate.

A lot of the internet accounts I’d read talked about marks left behind from alien encounters. Marks onvictims. Symbols or implants, unfortunate souvenirs of abductions, some claimed. But I hadn’t been abducted.

Had I?

My blood chilled, and I exhaled slowly. Shakily. The white light had knocked me out—and I’d woken up in a different place.

Maybe I had taken a spaceship ride somewhere. If I had, it’d been a short one. Not much time had passed between my descent into the basement and being found by the EMTs and police. I pursed my lips. Strange that they’d taken my book bag for a ride, too.