24
Harlow
Drenched in sunshine and happier than he could recall being in recent history, Harlow opened the front door to 2769 Trefore Avenue and broke his own rule—he let Simon enter first. On his way past, Simon awarded him with a smile that did wicked things to Harlow’s heart. A change had come over him since their visit to the spring, and whatever it was, Harlow hoped it continued. Simon was more vibrant than ever now that he’d shaken whatever was limiting him, and Harlow hungered to see more.
“I’m not used to you holding the door for me,” Evie said, disrupting him from his thoughts as she entered the apartment lobby. “You always go in first to make sure the area is secured. Is this going to be a new thing?”
Harlow raised an eyebrow. “Nope.”
“Not even once you start training me to be the most badass actress to ever possess a mortal coil?” Evie held a hand to her forehead dramatically, then rolled her eyes and grinned at him as she dropped her arm. “I’m going to be able to karate chop through walls and jump like, seven feet in the air from standing, right? You’re not going to need to clear the room once you’ve trained me into the Ultimate Weapon. Bad guys are gonna look at me, and first they’re going to be like, ‘Oh my god, how could a girl even be so pretty?’ and then they’re going to be like… well, I guess they won’t be much of anything, because when I’m done with them, I’m gonna have kicked so much ass that even their minds will be broken.”
Harlow snorted. “If you can jump seven feet in the air from standing,you’regoing to be the one teachingmea thing or two, kiddo… or you’ll be the next test subject all those evil government scientists conduct study after study on in the quest for the perfect super soldier.”
“Well… maybe seven feet is alittleunreasonable.” Evie tucked her hands behind her back, standing just beyond the doorway while Shep entered. “But, you know, I won’t give up on my dreams. There might still be alien DNA in me. If I believe hard enough, maybe it’ll activate.”
“You’re such a dork,” Shep said with a smile. “Alien DNA?”
“Hey, stranger things have happened.” Evie wagged her finger at him. “You never know what’s hiding in your DNA. It’s invisible, after all, isn’t it? It’s not like you can see it. But maybe—and this is me just being an even bigger dork—there are actually aliens, or monsters, or… I don’t know… things like that, and they can mask their DNA just like we can dye our hair or put in colored contacts. Wouldn’t that be something? Aliens walking around looking all human because they just went to the salon and got their DNA done.”
Shep laughed. He narrowed one eye and lifted the brow of the other as he looked at Evie, then, in a falsetto, trilled, “Girl, you’re not even gonnabelievehow long it took Jason to get my DNA right at the salon today. Oh-em-gee. He had those molecular reconfigurators jacked up so high, I thought I was gonna turn into a damn puddle on the floor.”
Evie clasped her hands in front of her mouth to hold back her laugh, but there was no helping it. She giggle-snorted like she’d never heard anything more hilarious in her life.
Harlow couldn’t blame her. Shep’s impression was spot-on.
“C’mon, little aliens,” Harlow said. He entered the apartment and let the door swing shut behind him. “Evie, you know better. The less time we loiter, the less of a chance there is that you’ll be discovered.”
“Even though Jayne did my face up and my hair’s all hidden?”
“Yup.” Harlow shooed her inward, and she danced a few steps toward the stairwell. “Let’s get inside.”
They walked as a unit up the stairs, Simon in the lead, Harlow taking the rear, Evie and Shep between them. The dim stairwell was empty apart from their group, its eerie light and flickering shadows ominous. Evie, it seemed, didn’t notice. Her mouth ran almost nonstop, turning even the gloomiest places joyful.
“So, I mean, with all the Egyptian stuff? Like, all those conspiracy theories, and like, the batteries they’ve found and everything? All the architecture, and the hieroglyphics, and everything. I’d be so surprised if aliens didn’t exist. I mean, what about the statues on Easter Island? Or Stonehenge or the Bermuda Triangle? There are too many weird things for therenotto be aliens involved.”
“What if humans are the aliens?” Shep asked. “Like… as a species, we’re pretty invested in our own success, right?”
“Yeah.” Evie looked over the railing, then shivered and kept climbing. The drop was steep—Harlow was glad to see he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. “So what? I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“Okay, so imagine this. We’re like… we’ve turned into this super-advanced species like thousands of years into the future, right?” Shep gestured with his hands while he spoke. “So right now, we’re over here.” He gestured with his left hand. “And then over here, we’re thousands and thousands of years into the future in a time when we’ve fucked the planet and we’re space travelers and we’ve maybe colonized another planet.” He gestured with his right. “So what else have we invented in those thousands of years? A way to travel across the universe reliably, maybe with unlimited energy generators, or like, I don’t know, some kind of never-ending nuclear coil or whatever. But we’ve got that going on. We’ve probably figured out a way to change the atmosphere of a planet and terraform it to suit our needs.”
“What does terraform mean?”
“It’s a sci-fi word and it means like… change the earth so it’s compatible with human life. Like with water, and air, and plants, and all the things that let us live on Earth.”
“Got it. Okay.” Evie hummed. They climbed the stairs slowly, the conversation too lively to focus on movement alone. “But I still don’t understand.”
“Right, so I’m getting to that.” Shep shook his right hand as he spoke. “So in the future we’ve invented all these crazy things… but what else have we invented since then? Maybe we’ve figured out how to harness some kind of selective time travel.”
“… Oookay.”
“So maybe what we’re doing is,” Shep swung his right hand over to his left, “going back in time and influencing the development of humanity—basically, investing ourselves in ourpaststhe same way people say that they’re investing in their futures.”
“Wait.” Evie came to a stop, halting everyone else in the party when she did. Even Simon, who led the group, didn’t take another step farther. “So, us in the future… I’m assuming we look like aliens, right?”
“Maybe,” Shep said with a shrug. “Or maybe it’s just space suits or—no wait, it’d be time travel suits. Maybe they’re time travel suits.”
“Okay, so we’ve got us in time travel suits or evolution’s really gone and turned us into weird alien-things, whatever, that’s cool…” Evie frowned. “But why would we go back in time and do all kinds of weird, unexplained stuff like the Bermuda Triangle or Stonehenge or whatever and not just, you know, give the people at the time the straightforward information they needed to be able to like… make themselves better?”
