Star Crossed

Chapter One Twenty-five years from now… “Heading home, Grace?” Nate asked as I began to head out of the Lowell Observatory offices, although the question was pretty much superfluous, considering the weekender bag I held in one hand. Unfortunately, yes, I thought. I knew if I dared to say such a thing out loud, though, I’d only be inviting more questions, and that was the last thing I wanted right then. It had already taken me too long to mentally prepare myself for this departure. So I shrugged and replied, “Well, I suppose the powers-that-be thought it wouldn’t be fair to stick me on observation duty two Christmases in a row.” “Fair enough.” I could feel his cool blue eyes on me, watching me, and I wondered if he was finally getting the courage to make some sort of move. Never mind that we’d been working together for almost two years now, ever since I was lucky enough to be assigned to the weather station here at Lowell Observatory. Everything between Nate and me had always been proper, always been correct, but I knew he was interested. More than interested, although not enough to step over the line. After all, he was an assistant director at the observatory, and although he wasn’t technically my boss, as I reported to the National Weather Service director in Bellemont, that didn’t mean things couldn’t get messy if our relationship turned into something a little more than professional. In a way, I wished Nate would make that move. He was attractive, if not drop-dead gorgeous, and we had a good deal in common. I liked him. More to the point, if he spoke up now, asked me to go out for drinks, suggested that maybe it would be a good thing if I stuck around Flagstaff during the holidays, then I could avoid going back to Sedona altogether. Just another “sorry everyone, duty calls” kind of situation, like what had come up last year. But I knew that wouldn’t happen. Nate was too cautious to ever instigate a first date during an emotionally charged time of year like the Christmas holidays. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better get going. That front is coming in faster than we’d first estimated, and I’d rather be down in Sedona before it hits.” A nod. “That would be safer.” He hesitated, then said, “Have a great holiday, Grace. See you in a week.” “You, too, Nate,” I replied. What else was there to say, after all? I gave him what I hoped was a friendly but noncommittal smile, then headed down toward the lot where my car waited. Normally, I would’ve left straight from my apartment, which was located just outside of downtown, but I’d wanted to take a few last readings here at the observatory before I headed down the hill. I wasn’t taking that much with me, anyway — just the weekender bag I held now, and another smaller bag with toiletries and such, one that was already stowed in the trunk of my car. And since it had been easiest to put my laptop on top of my clothes in the weekender, that was why I had it with me now. The smile I was wearing disappeared as I went to my car and dropped the bag in the trunk. I hadn’t been looking forward to this trip at all, but there was no getting out of it. From the outside, my reluctance to go home probably would have looked pretty strange. After all, Sedona was gorgeous, a resort town that was a destination for people from all over the world. And it wasn’t as if I had a horrible home life or anything. Yes, my stepfather Lance and I didn’t get along all the time, but even so…. “Mom’s house,” I told the car after I’d buckled myself in. Immediately, the route popped up on the dashboard display, and the car began to back itself out of the parking space. Sometimes, I liked to disengage the auto-drive and handle things myself, but today, since I was feeling distracted, I thought it better to let the car do the driving. Snow had fallen two days earlier in Flagstaff, and so, although the roads were clear, dirty drifts were piled to either side as I made my way down Mars Hill, where the observatory was located, through the downtown area, and onto the interstate. The sky, which had been a clear, clear blue that morning, had already clouded up to the north and east. Right on schedule, I thought. The storm looked to be a nasty one, too, a deep low dropping south from Colorado. Most of northern Arizona was going to take a direct hit, which meant a lot more to the people in Flagstaff than it did to Sedona’s residents. Down there, more than two thousand feet lower than the town I now called home, if it snowed at all, it would be just enough to make everything pretty and picturesque, but not enough that anyone would have to worry about plowing a street or shoveling a sidewalk. Sedona actually had several snowplows, but sometimes a whole winter would pass without them being pressed into service. I knew why I was distracting myself by thinking about the weather. If I focused on that, on the observations and measurements I’d made before leaving work, then I wouldn’t have to think about what Sedona meant, what being with my family meant. When I was away from them, I could almost believe I was normal. After all, I appeared normal enough. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ten fingers, ten toes. Nothing to merit a second look, really. Except I wasn’t normal. My family and a couple of family friends so close they might as well be blood relations knew the truth about my background, but that was all. No one who met me would even guess at the reality of my situation, probably because it still felt crazy to me, even though I’d had to live with that truth for more than half my life. I looked human, but I wasn’t. Not completely. My father had been an alien — or, more accurately, someone with both human and alien DNA in his veins. A construct. A hybrid. If anyone had been paying close attention, they might have noticed a few anomalies. I never got sick, was one of those annoying kids with the perfect attendance record in school. Although people were still arguing over whether true eidetic memory actually existed, I had it, to some extent. I could read a book or article once and recall every detail of what I’d read, even years later. Almost without thinking, I could tell you that June 14, 2020, had been a Sunday. Things like that. It wasn’t flawless, but I had to work to hide my abilities as best I could. I got straight As, but so did a lot of my fellow students — Sedona was that kind of town. Lots of overachievers there. What I doubted my classmates knew was that I’d spent a good deal of time purposely getting things wrong here and there, just so I wouldn’t have psychologists and neuroscientists picking at my brain, trying to see how whatever made me tick was different from everyone else. The car slowed as it approached the switchbacks that crisscrossed their way down the side of the mountain, taking me into Oak Creek Canyon. Here, too, there were muddy piles of snowdrifts on either side of the road, and ice gleamed in the shadowy sections of the asphalt, but I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d specifically bought the car because, although it wasn’t a full-blown SUV, it had all-wheel drive and the best traction control on the market. It was smart to be prepared when you could get hit with crazy monsoon rains in the summer and blinding snow in the winter. Weather had always fascinated me, and so it had seemed logical for me to get my degree in meteorology. I think my mother had worried more than she should about me going off to the university in Tucson for five years, but I survived relatively unscathed. Kept my head down, got my B.S. in three years, my master’s in two. And then the position at Lowell came up, and I returned to northern Arizona. Not Sedona, though, despite some subtle pressure for me to live at home, at least at first — “but it’s only a half-hour up the canyon!” True, but even now the roads would get shut down occasionally if a storm was bad enough, and I couldn’t risk having to take the long way around. Besides, I’d gotten used to my independence, didn’t want to contemplate giving it up. I was an adult. I needed to make my own way in the world. And so far, no one had learned of my secret. Then again, who would believe it? I didn’t look any more alien than the girl next door…well, unless you stuck a blood sample under an electron microscope. Then you might find telltale signs that would raise a few eyebrows. Despite the oncoming storm — or maybe because of it — traffic was fairly thick going down into the canyon. Maybe people were trying to get to town before it hit. In general, Sedona was quiet the week before Christmas. It was afterward, up to and including New Year’s, that it could get kind of crazy. Now, with two days to go until Christmas Eve, I was sort of surprised by the string of cars both in front of and behind me. It could get really jammed going into Uptown, and I found myself a little glad that I’d agreed to stop in at the house first before going on to the cottage. The cottage. That was what we called it, but really, it was just a two-bedroom ranch-style house that my mother and my Aunt Kirsten had inherited from a family friend, since he’d had no children of his own. By all accounts, when Michael Lightfoot passed away, the house had been anything but a showplace. But my mother and my aunt carefully remodeled it, clearing out all the tchotchkes Michael had liked to collect, and now it was a sort of crash space they used for visiting friends or people in their UFO groups or whatever. Or for a prodigal daughter who didn’t want to sleep in her old bedroom, even if said bedroom had at last been reluctantly turned into a guest room. The car slowed, preparing to turn off the highway and onto the winding road that led to my parents’ house. It wasn’t paved, but every year, they laid down freshly crushed gravel, so it was in good shape. Dark pines and bare cottonwoods and sycamores passed on either side, and then I was crossing the bridge over the creek, going up the slight rise to the spot where the house stood. I didn’t see any other vehicles — the house had a three-car garage, but with my siblings Kevin and Kelsey and Melissa still living at home, you usually always saw someone’s car parked out front. In a way, it was a relief. With everyone home, the place could be bedlam — I tended to refer to the old homestead as “the Nuthouse” in my mind, although I knew better than to use the epithet out loud in front of any family members. Now, if only my mother was at home, I could nip in and say a quick hi, pick up the keys to the cottage, and be on my way before anyone else came back. Maybe that was cowardly of me, but I found it always took some mental readjustment on my part to deal with being around my family after a prolonged absence. Because I’d had to work over Thanksgiving, and because things had been hectic even before that, I hadn’t been home for more than two months. The car parked itself off to one side, away from the garage so it wasn’t blocking any of the bays. I’d programmed it that way a while back, since it was only the polite thing to do. I didn’t live here anymore. Then I unfastened my safety harness and got out, glad of the chance to stretch my legs. A cold wind passed over me — not as cold as it would have been up in Flagstaff, but still cold enough that I was glad I hadn’t taken off my coat or the wool scarf I had wound around my throat. Then I went up to the front door and let myself in. That door was never locked during the daytime, something I knew irritated Lance, but my mother always just laughed at his worries. “No one’s going to come in and steal anything, not here,” she said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure most people know about that arsenal of yours, and how good you are at using it.” Not that having an arsenal was the sort of thing to raise eyebrows in Arizona. However, my stepfather was what you might call a serious collector. I’d never liked handling guns, although I learned to shoot, just as my sisters and brothers had. That’s not to say I wasn’t good at it; my alien DNA had given me great aim. I just didn’t like it.