Drops of Jupiter

[Gundham]

((Karin Han continued from The Hunt Is On))

Karin never slept well. Most nights she woke up two or three times, tossing and turning fitfully before falling back asleep. Sometimes her eyes would snap open and she’d find herself sitting up, her heart racing from nightmares she couldn’t remember. She dreamed a lot, but she never remembered anything concrete from them, just vague fragments of emotions and fears that didn’t fit into the waking world.

She’d volunteered to take a shift of night watch, since she’d be awake no matter what. Might as well look brave and get some brownie points out of it. She doubted the others would get much sleep either, so it was better to be out here on the front step rather than join the sleep heap.

The stars were brighter here. There was no ambient light to get in the way, not like there was in the city. It was all just darkness, so any little bit of light seemed brighter. Karin could see hundreds of stars that she never could have seen in Salem or Boston. Constellations in brilliant array, scattered like confetti across the heavens. A different sort of person would have found the scene comforting, but not Karin. Karin didn’t like looking at the night sky.

Once upon a time, Karin had read about stars. In that book, she’d learned that all those twinkling lights were coming from stars that were thousands, maybe millions of light years away. Stars that died out would appear to be shining for years and years afterwards, because it took so long for the light to make its way to the Earth.

Most of the stars that she was looking at were dying. Many of them had burnt out a long time ago. They were nothing but corpses now, forever drifting in the cold silence of the void.

But it wasn’t the death up there that concerned her. It was the life.

Karin didn’t believe in aliens, in the same way that she didn’t believe in snow or gravity or the air in her lungs. Those things just were, you didn’t have to believe in them. They existed, whether you wanted them to or not. No belief required.

Most people always thought she was making it up, about the abduction. Most her therapists thought if they just asked her enough questions about it, if they just shoved her face into the flaws in her story and held her eyelids open and made her see how crazy it sounded that she’d somehow go “Oh, yes, you’re right. I made it all up. I was going to continue lying about this forever until you logicked me out of it.” Other people took it one step further; they thought she knew it was a lie, but that she was so wrapped up in it, so keen on making it part of her identity, that she just couldn’t let it go.

She wondered, bitterly, if people would say the same thing now. If people would say that Survival of the Fittest never happened, that it was all staged. She wondered if her parents would join one of those conspiracy groups, the wingnuts who refused to believe that the terrorist victims were actually dead. How fitting would that be?

She edged off the step a bit, and stood in the middle of the road craning her neck back. Tried to ignore the stars and focus on the gaps in between them.

That was where the aliens lurked, there in the blackness. That was why she had her rules. Stay inside. Never go out alone at night unless it’s absolutely necessary. And if you do have to go out, never, NEVER look up. She’d lived by those rules for almost a decade, and she had never, ever broken them. But tonight Karin Han was looking up with eyes wide open. She searched the skies, looking for the faintest sign of a hull, a stabilizer, an antenna.

Karin had never romanticized the abduction. She wasn’t one of those freaks who listened to alien abduction ASMR and fantasized about being probed, or one of those lunatics who chained themselves to the fences at Area 51 and shouted on their vlogs about how the truth was out there. The abduction was a stain on her life. She would have given anything to erase the whole stupid thing from her memory. She hated that it had happened. She hated that she couldn’t just look her parents in the eyes and tell them the whole thing was a lie, because it wasn’t. She knew what had happened. She knew it was true. And she couldn’t just pretend that everything was normal, or that it didn’t matter. And all her life, everybody had hated her for that.

Karin hadn’t want to be abducted. She hadn’t wanted to be the crazy alien girl, the liar, the attention seeker. She had never asked for any of it.

But tonight, she was asking. She was flat-out begging for somebody, something up there to see her. There was at least one craft out there who had to remember her as The One That Got Away. She wanted them to come and take her away, whisk her off to another galaxy. Any planet, any star system. It didn’t matter where she ended up. Anywhere would be better than here.

She stayed out there for hours, shivering, waiting for a sign or a signal. But the aliens never came.

((Karin Han continued in Fort Hunting Lodge))