But Remy was staring at me, his dark hair fluttering in the breeze, and he was afraid, and I couldn’t look away.

“The first blast,” he rasped. “When it hit me, it was like . . . like something twice my size was squeezing through me. My whole body wanted to come apart, but that thing wouldn’t let it.”

White light. The afterimage of pain. Cold, invigorating. Like the first crush of the ocean tide on your shins. And all those voices, thousands—no, millions—distilled into something like music, trying to soothe me.

“Relax,” they seem to say. “Relax your body.”

Remy pushed on through shivers: “On the one hand, it felt like eternity. But on the other, it was over in a second. I couldn’t move, or even think about moving. It was like I wasn’t in my body, or like—the connection between my brain and my body had been unplugged.” He ran his hand through his hair. “All I could do was feel the light, and if I focused on it, it hurt, but then my mind would start to wander, and there’d be nothing: nothing but white. Like a dream. Or anesthesia, blurring everything out.”

My stomach roiled.

Yes, my mind said. Exactly like that.

Like those hours had been recorded in our minds in the most jumbled, drunken fashion, and piecing the bits back together would be nearly impossible.

“There’s a lot I don’t remember until the end.” Remy shook his head, trying to choose his next words. “The being got fainter with each pulse. Like all that energy that was hitting us was leaching off its body, draining it. But it didn’t disappear, Franny. I was conscious enough to see it didn’t burn out.”

His voice was low and odd. “It started to move. And I promise, Franny, that as soon as I saw where it was going, I woke up.” He was talking more quickly now, his words tumbling out, hoarse and wet. “I promise, I was trying to get there first, but the blasts kept hitting me, and I couldn’t take a single step.”

My pulse quickened. The sweat on the back of my neck went cold.

The white light spread out behind my eyes, and nausea rolled through my stomach like laundry caught in a spin cycle.

I knew what he was going to say next.

Maybe I was starting to remember, or maybe my brain had worked out what the worst thing would be—what would scare me to say to Remy more than anything else—and so I knew he was going to say it to me.

“It went into you, Franny,” Remy choked. “That thing went into you, and that’s when it all stopped.”

NINE

THE MEMORY FRAGMENTS. THE electric shocks.

The television going staticky?

My phone malfunctioning?

The computer glitching?

I started to pace, like the thing inside me—THE THING INSIDE ME???—was a burrito I could walk off. Droog trotted along behind me, crying, agitated.

My stomach twitched. I gasped, bent over by a sudden shot of pain through my ribs. I caught myself against the propane tank, coughing again, dry heaving, like I could vomit the thing up. The ground swayed, and when I looked up, the trees multiplied, drifting apart then back together, hundreds of pendulums swinging in opposite directions.

A numbness spread through me. The woods, the dead grass beyond, my ramshackle brick house spearing the night sky all looked more like a two-dimensional set than an actual place.

This can’t be happening, my brain decided, and my body believed it.

I’d felt something similar that day at the hospital, when the doctor had finally come out to the waiting room and pulled us into the hallway where the other families couldn’t see.

I hadn’t cried, or screamed. Because it couldn’t be happening.

And when Mom slumped onto her knees and buried her face in her hands, it should have scared me, shaken me to my core, but that couldn’t be happening either.

Remy touched my elbow. “We’ll figure it out, Franny. You’ll be okay. I won’t let you not be.”

It was so Remy to lie to me like that, to pretend he could protect me. In my mind I heard Arthur giving me the harsh truth: You need to figure it out. No one else will. You’re the only one who will take care of yourself, Franny.

“We just need some kind of plan,” Remy went on. I blinked, trying to make out his face, but the fake world stayed fuzzy and unfocused. “When the others find out, everyone’s going to have an opinion, so I need to know, Franny: What do you want to do?”

The others.

Sofía would say I should tell my dad and go to the hospital immediately. Nick would tell me you couldn’t trust doctors not to experiment on me, and that meanwhile, all of Splendor would be gossiping about how I thought aliens were trying to communicate with me. Levi would try to convince Remy and Arthur to put off college to focus on the full-length documentary about me for Netflix, and Arthur . . .

Arthur would probably split in half trying to decide whether to buy (or have Nick steal) practical anti-alien gadgets for me or just convince me to help him blow the secrets of Area 51 wide open in spectacular fashion.

As for me, I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I needed to not think about this.

Arthur’s obsession, the sheriff’s questions, the missing wreckage (not taken by the alien, not if the alien was in me), and the white light and Cheryl Kelly’s red blazer and the video going viral and—