Seven years passed. Each one did so a little faster than the last, a little more blurry, a little more harried. They were unremarkable, but, to four very specific people, there was an intractable undercurrent of a deep and inexplicable unease.

Phil knew something had changed the second the Vizion craft landed. Perhaps it was a change in the flavour of the air, a hint of smoke like a bonfire's shadow, a negligible detail that fell slightly out of place...

... Or perhaps it was the fact that birds kept freezing in place in the sky; that the scientific news facilities were having a field day raving about an 'unidentifiable flying object speeding towards earth at an incredible velocity'; or that, at roughly ten in the evening, a massive, blazing wreck took the opportunity to ruin the perfect burnished blue of the sky and crash in a nearby wood with all the inherent grace of a drunk passing out on a park bench. Phil watched it all from the balcony of his apartment building, thoughtfully pairing together his basket of mismatched socks.

Seven years. Seven years of blissfully monotonous, uninterrupted normalcy. Phil took a smoke-tinged breath and felt a sharp pang of apprehension and anticipation shiver keenly through his blood. It was the rust-red sheen of familiar adrenaline, the bitten-tongue tang of his adventurous youth. Despite everything, the intervention of almost a decade, he could do nothing to stop the grin taking over his face as he snatched up his phone and selected the pinned contact at the top.

The phone only got through two rings before Smiley picked up, her voice still bright and vibrant despite the hour; their friends sometimes teased that she sounded like a fancy secretary, but Phil had held a secret fondness for that invariable bubble-brightness.

"Smiley? They're back. The aliens I mean, not the goose."

Everyone sounds farther away on the phone; Smiley, situated in a university only just out of town, sounded to be more distant than the stars. Phil would always tell himself it was because he missed her, and that it was definitely not because his beyond-ancient phone and unreliable network made every call sound like it came from a bygone era.

"Oh? Oh! Really? Are you sure? No, no; of course you're sure... alright, alright." He could hear her drawing a determined breath, the scuffle of desk items being shuffled about, the felt-lined whumpf of a heavy notebook falling closed. "I'm on my way."

He could see her in his mind's eye, snatching her keys from the counter near the door of her university suite, throwing her coat on and bolting out in to the night. It was an hour long drive to his place, maybe less if traffic was good. She would be able to see the fresh scar burned in to the sky, smell the charred clouds. A not inconsiderable part of him wanted more than anything to keep her on the line, to know what she thought of it, how she felt, what bit of coursework she was putting off to rejoin a game seven years postponed, but there were more important things to be getting on with.

"Alright, text me when you're close. I'll leave my location on so you can find me. Love you."

Another call to Zach, who lived a few streets away, and one to Phred to let him know that Smiley would pick him up, and Phil felt he could relax. The cavalry was on its way. Feeling invincible and detached from reality, Phil slipped out of his apartment complex and in to the chill, gliding dance of shadows, in pursuit of the runaway calamity.

He remembered Smiley's convoluted explanation of how time would function—or rather cease to function—on board the ship. Because it was a moving object, orbiting the Earth at a high speed, time would pass more quickly for the people inside. One year on earth could be only an hour ship-time. Add to that the fact that they were using an unspecified temporal device to do strange things to the space-time continuum, and it could be years before anything actually happened. "Best to leave it for now," she had said, with the strange wisdom of an eleven year old who has quite literally seen the world. "We just have to look out for it when it happens."

As it turned out, he didn't have to look particularly hard.

Just outside the city where the buildings grew destitute and scattered, there was a disused football field that was bordered on its far side by a small forest. Admittedly, 'forest' was something of a generous description; it was a vast but scraggly collection of greyed trees, with gnarled branches that twisted and clutched at each everything in reach in a vain attempt to keep upright. Barren for as long as Phil could remember, crisp packets became their poisonously vibrant leaves, discarded bottles their fallen fruit, scraps of wet newspaper the dank clumps of moss that clung to the shrivelled trunks. Everyone Phil knew avoided the place, even the underage smokers and the punks with their spray paint; it exuded the despair of eras past in the same way a ruin did, the empty shell of something that had been dignified and enjoyed left to rot. Old cheers and victory chants still echoed from the empty stadium and the trees had a nasty habit of taking the sound and twisting it in to peoples' names.

All of this was why Phil stood alone now, examining shattered branches and gouged ground, following a burnt-black path like a child following a ribbon trail. All of this was why, despite the immense disturbance the crash landing had caused, no one had come to gawp. It was a corner of the world everyone else had managed to forget and so no-one cared to see its destruction.

Shadows writhed in the dying light, the wax and wane of it setting the stage for a spectral rave that Phil felt more than a little uninvited to. There was a sense of intrusion to his careful wanderings, an awareness of his position as an interloper in this dark, secretive, abandoned world. He was not wanted here. He was not needed here. He cast his troubled gaze back towards the blinking city lights and wondered if he should wait until the others arrived...

No. This couldn't wait. After all these years, Phil could recall, clear as day, Viz's obvious, calm satisfaction at the thought of Earth's outright obliteration; Diz's snakeskin strangeness and frothing, choking rage, his love of random destruction; even Quiz had attempted the subjugation of in innocuous Elementary School simply to feel important. Of the aliens, not one of them could be trusted—not fully—and it would be a serious oversight to let any of them slip the net.

Besides, it wasn't as though Smiley and the others stood a chance of overlooking the crash site; short of a neon sign proclaiming 'Over Here!' in bold capitals, there wasn't a way to make it more noticeable. Phil checked the time: 22:28. They would be along soon enough.

With that fortifying thought, Phil set off, following the path of carnage and hoping to whatever deity willing to listen that, if he died, it was because of world-conquering aliens and not some druggie with a pocket knife.


And there, at the end of the path, he found it.

The ship was on fire.

That was just one of the many things happening that was not part of the plan.

Metal has many wonderful qualities, but it's tendency to heat up is one that has a number of noticeable drawbacks. For example, in a ship whose predominant component is metal, conductivity is something that becomes a noticeable issue rather swiftly. Particularly if the ship in question is hurtling through the atmosphere at an ever-increasing speed. Particularly if said ship happens to be on fire.

Despite his prodigious tolerance for heat, Viz felt like a dead thing stuffed in to a furnace; he could feel his skin tightening, flaking off in cracked scraps, boiling blood forcing its ways through the splits. Attempts to imagine the conditions endured by his less prepared companions were forcefully discarded after a whispered suggestion that they might give out under hyperthermia long before the collision had a chance to kill them.

Being able to hold on to Quiz was a mild comfort in all this, a bandage on the seeping, pustulant wound that was the rending of the world around them. Quiz, who had, admittedly, managed to hold his nerve for a good while, had clasped tightly about Viz's waist, seemingly desperate to be in firm contact with something that didn't threaten to melt his flesh. Three of his hands had bunched the fabric of Viz's shirt to the point where it was tearing at the seams, and the fourth was still diligently pressing the hastily added button on the time-mine made to extend the field. The machine had shorted out during the tumult of the entry burn but, as this was also the point at which Quiz had started hysterically screaming, Viz didn't think Quiz had noticed.

There was no way of telling if the circuitry issue was localised specifically to that one, mangled piece of machinery, or if it had also affected the equipment Viz was supposed to be overseeing. He could hardly see the switches through the smoke, hardly feel them with his burned fingers. He had no way of knowing what was going on.

Another jolt. Another scream of abused metal. Blackness punched another hole through Viz's understanding of the world. Quiz gave a high, guttural shriek and threw his fourth arm around Viz's ribs.

All about them, the walls of the ship were convulsing, buckling under the strain, splitting wide open and allowing nubilous smoke to pour through in thick rivers that tasted of metal. It was thick enough to bubble in the lungs, to wind in to the passages of the nose and throat and sit there like chunks of gelatine. It was thick enough that, despite the fact that the helm was only a few feet away, Viz could no longer see Diz at all. The only indication of the other he had was the sporadic coughs and occasional, hoarse fits of cursing as the ship swayed and lurched. Hardly audible over the multitude of other random noises and absent for nearly five minutes now, it was only the fact that they were still airborne—a miracle whose swift and violent end Viz was beginning to anticipate—that kept the commander convinced his helmsman was still standing.

Of course Diz was still standing. There could be no version of this where Diz was not standing; Viz would not allow it. Because, no matter how dreadful it was, this landing was not that landing. That landing was resolutely consigned by time to the evermore distant past, unable to do more than reach its shadowy claws into his mind.

Which it currently was, with a vicious fervour usually reserved for dreams.

It couldn't be said that this was the crew's first crash, and certainly it wouldn't be their last. Their machines were all patchworks, pieced together from other wrecks, cannibal constructions held together with spit and spite. They had suffered through more than their fair share of system failures and impromptu stops when something fell off or refused to work. In the end, it became a matter of practicality to drill crashes on all their projects; Diz proudly kept a scoreboard of how many successful landings each craft had managed under stress ('success' in this case meaning 'broke in to less than three pieces'.) Viz was uncomfortably aware of the fact that these precautions were the only things keeping them from their untimely demise.

For this was, without a shadow of a doubt, the roughest landing any of them had experienced recently (determinedly forgotten past aside.) Caught woefully off guard, they had been left with only the barest security measures and scraped a handful of improvised minutes to prepare. Hardly helping matters was the fact that this particular vessel—designed for the sole purpose of utilising the CryoBeam—was not really built for something as stressful as breaching an atmospheric boundary, much less the trauma of re-entry itself. Zone 5.1 had dragged it through the first trip to Earth, and though Diz had managed to put up the protective shielding on the way back into space, both attempts had sustained damage.

'How much had been too much?' Viz wondered, watching yet another unidentified fragment of the ship fly past his face. 'What pushed us past the point of no return? If we had reacted sooner, would we be okay? If Quiz hadn't interfered, would we be better off now?'

Quiz's body was shuddering with airless sobs; absently, Viz ran an idle finger over the curve of the smaller alien's skull, watching his blood paint shapes on the blue skin. 'I wonder if this is how you get us killed.'

Wires cackled with electricity's mocking laughter; vents bellowed steam; walls, floors, and ceiling grated and screamed in a symphony of agony; the red alert wailed; glass shattered; the battery, somehow audible from its position elsewhere in the ship, was emitting an increasingly worrying hum, threatening to build to a crescendo and vaporise them all. If chaos took on the form of sheer noise, with the intention of beating all order into helpless submission, this was at least an element of that hideous symphony, the waltz that would play at the end of the world.

Very faintly, a discordant sound shot through all the other discord, a distant gunshot in a blizzard. By the time whatever he had heard registered—regrettably it had been rather important—Viz had time for little other than folding his head to his chest, curling an arm over his eyes, and praying that whatever happened next did so quickly.

"Brace for landing!"

Given an eternity to prepare for impact, they would have still been jarred by that rending collision. If one were to be poetic about the sheer force of it, they might say it was enough to smash the stars from their places in the heavens and send them crashing to Earth. If one were to be much more practical in description, they would have to emphasis the sensation of cracked bones attempting to follow the momentum and spear their way through flesh, the sudden exertion of pressure bursting every vein, setting free whole oceans of blood to roll through ruined flesh. Every nerve ending flared as it was thrust violently out of its assigned place in the body, a vast network of viscera reduced to garbled noise, unintelligible meat; sensation meant nothing, the material world made of dribbles and smears, eyes sightless as burst stars.

It was a miracle that all three crewman survived.

The ship rocked in its crater for a second before settling, moving not because the molten underbelly had found any give in the earth below, but because the steel supports had worn thin enough to wobble like constructions of wet paper. Witnessing it, any sensible viewer would have fled for the hills. Mind you, most people watching the landing would have left long before that point, most people having a fairly high regard for personal safety.

With a sound like something dying, the ship split open, like an overripe piece of fruit, like the sides of a rotting corpse, it's melting guts exposed to the open air and sending a plume of smoke spiralling laughingly into the blue of the night. Nothing inside moved.


Well... he'd found the ship. Or rather what was left of it.

Which wasn't much, in the general scheme of things.

In the half-light of a late, summer evening, combed through with flickering ribbons of amber flame, everything took on a harsher guise; it was inordinately difficult to tell what was a warped blade of shrapnel and what was a piece of shattered wood. Phil's shadow stretched out behind him, lengthening, shortening, then falling under his feet altogether, as though darkness wished to keep him close. There was a picture book quality to the starkness of everything, the absolutes of red, and black, and gold. Phil blew out a breath and watched the strange air billow and the sparks dance.

The ship had crumpled in on itself like a tin can, or a lawn chair, or some similar item of little use or consequence. Unlike these items, the Vizion battle ship didn't just become an unsightly blemish; it seeped danger, leaking blazing tongues of fuel to lap at nearby trees, it's last breaths full of ozone. Somewhere towards what had once been the spaceships nose cone, the CryoBeam was whining in confusion, concertinaed upon itself in an attractive mess of lethal frost and glowing circuitry. Winter and summer had collided head on, burning summer heat presiding over fractals and lace-works of snow, orange and gold braided breathtakingly in to white and silver.

For a good few seconds, it was all Phil could do to stand in awe of the utter carnage. Everything about the mutilated vessel seemed to have raised its voice in protest against the rough treatment it had received. Next to it, the tentative crunch of trainers on dirt seemed frail.

"So." Phil's voice was unnaturally human amongst the slew of random, shorted electronics. "This is how you choose to make an entrance, huh? Preferred the lava myself—surprisingly less upsetting."

There was no response. Phil found a rock to kick.

"Not talking to me? Rude. Nothing, not a word for seven years, and you think you can just turn up unannounced and we'll not mind? It's just bad manners. I'm not big on etiquette, but still... a phone call, at least, would have been nice. Maybe leave a card with my butler the next time you want to drop by..."

Another three trees caught fire. A badger ambled past; this was the only sign of life, as badgers do not care for trivialities like death or fire; almost certainly, it is death who should be afraid of badgers.

"... Get it? 'Drop by'? Like dropping out of the sky?"

Silence. Even the crackle of fire seemed to be trying to get away from him, hoarse-voiced and consumed with its own misery. His levity and life were an unforgivable intrusion.

"You've kinda ruined the park. I mean, I'm not mad—no one comes here anymore. I don't know if anyone ever came here actually. It's a place no one likes but I guarantee, now there's a hole in it, people are gonna get real upset. They'll do a newspaper segment, and people with nothing better to do will write into the local council. They'll have to turn it into a duck pond to shut them all up." Phil considered this for a second. "Hey, that's not a bad idea..."

Footsteps sounded behind him, an uneven trio, some hurried, others leisurely. Phil didn't bother turning to greet his friends; the scene before him wasn't one that required an introduction of explanation.

"Wow... just... just wow. How the hell did they manage this?" Far from disturbed, Phred sounded mildly impressed. Phil shrugged, feeling tension slip silently from the air as the darkness, recognising that it was outnumbered, conceded and bade a respectful retreat.

"Don't know. But first contact has been a literal smash hit."

"Second contact. Third? I know they were doing shit behind the scenes before us."

"We'll go with fourth to be safe."

"Never mind all that—look at this. They must have been going for some kind of record." Zach scuffed his shoe over a disembowelled piece of machinery, it's silver entails glistening. "Did anything survive this?"

"The field didn't. This place is looking real dead."

"It's looked this way since before our parents were born, this is just the vibe."

"Nah, it's definitely gotten deader in the last half hour or so."

Fiddling nervously with her hair, a habit she had picked up shortly after growing it all those years ago, Smiley piped up, hesitantly edging in to the field of light. As usual, she was the only one focused on the task at hand.

"Do you think they're alright?"

"Real question Smiley; is this really how we're spending Saturday night?"

"Zach, you knew this was coming." The young man gave a derisive snort, flames jetting from the crown of his head and dancing like an emperor's wreath.

"Yeah, but I don't have to be happy now it's here. These guys were the freakiest thing about my childhood, hands down. Don't tell me I'm the only one who considered just toasting their glorious demise and getting back to the ol' nine to five."

In Phil's opinion, that assessment was a little extreme, if not grandly exaggerated. To put it obfuscatingly simply, their childhoods had been a mess, and the interference of alien life had been a significant—nay, superlative—part of that... but that wasn't to say he resented all of those memories. There had been a certain amount of inescapable wonder to it; standing above the world, looking down at the clouds and countries, had stirred something irrepressible in his blood. Didn't everyone dream of being so dynamic, so powerful, their that decisions formed the cat's cradle holding up the entire world?

Nothing in the past seven years had been even fractionally as interesting as three violent weirdos from space; Phil was refusing to examine the fact that he resented the trio for that more than anything else they'd done.

"Freakiest? Nah. Try coolest."

"You want cool? Look at this—" Zach held out a demonstrative hand, rolling up the sleeve of his beat-up leather jacket to reveal a lightly smoking forearm. "—I can boil pots with this shit. My housemates cook instant ramen on me when I sleep. Most people get their first kitchen porter job as a dishwasher—they have me working as a plate warmer because it's faster than putting them in the oven. Nothing about me is cool. That is their fault."

Phil snorted. Phred, however, took a contemplative standpoint that was as rare as it was unhelpful.

"He's got a point... like, twenty eight percent of a point. What if they want carry on with their whole 'destroy the world' scheme. I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly in a hurry to spend my whole adult life playing superman, saving the Earth and all that jazz. Sounds stressful."

"So the solution is to let three people burn alive..." Smiley frowned, eyes firm as drill-bits. "Because you think in twenty years you might get bored."

"Twenty years is giving me way too much foresight. Call it at like... twenty days. Twenty days of insane alien shenanigans. I work minimum wage, I'm too broke for nonsense."

"And it's not as if they're innocent people to burn," Zach cut in, in a helpful tone of voice. "Hell, it's almost a pity they couldn't hold off until November—this would make one hell of a Guy Fawkes display."

Smiley whirled around, visibly appalled.

"Zach!"

Smartly, the boy beat a retreat, hands placatingly raised scattering sparks like handfuls of coins.

"Just trying to lighten the mood."

It made little headway; once Smiley had something in her grasp, she rarely let it go until she was satisfied. This steadfast dedication had served her well in every endeavour, but did make her resolution an immobile thing.

"There's nothing funny about people being on fire," she said in a slow, firm voice, like someone impressing upon a toddler how vital it is to not touch the stove. Zach, a man who had been on fire since the age of ten, gave a sage nod.

"Well said and thank you, Smiley." He turned to Phred with the attitude of a person, long married, who has just been handed an ally in a long-running, petty quarrel with their partner. "When my dad said my life was a joke, he meant something completely different."

Still on track, Smiley continued.

"I'm not saying we should save them because they necessarily deserve saving," she said crisply, looking to each of them in turn, finally making eye-contact with Phil and holding it. "But I'm better than just... leaving it to happen. No one deserves to die like that, not even them."

"So it's a solid 'no' to the pyre. How do you feel about hanging them?"

"Zach." Smiley's voice was schoolteacher stern.

"What? We can turn the basketball hoop in the park into a gibbet and everything; I'm just staying on theme. You love retro."

"I don't love killing people. That's literally why I'm standing here."

Sighing, Zach put an arm around the girl's shoulder; he was a full head taller than her, all extruded limbs and bony joints.

"Really? Damn. I wildly misread this event. I'm here for s'mores—y'want one?"

Ambiguously sourced and partially melted marshmallow in hand, Zach dodged away cackling as Smiley swiped at him, laughter studiously bitten back but scribbled over her lips. Chronically unserious, he had made an art form over the years out of getting her to stoop to his level, and this was how most debates between them ended.

"Phil?" Phred was watching him sideways and, slowly, Phil came back to his body, which was sweating on one side and freezing on the other.

Still avoiding his friends' eyes, Phil was silent for the longest time.

Seven years was a long time to reflect. With all the doubt and distrust he had harboured stacked to towering heights made monolithic by memory, it was surprisingly difficult to actually commit to a course of action. Sure, it had been fun, but was it truly worth starting it all again? He wouldn't even have to stop them this time—all he had to do was walk away and leave them there.

It would be so easy to leave them in their grave, put the mistakes of the past to rest.

Almost too easy. Too boring. This almost-decade had been so boring.

"Look, whatever we're doing, we need to hurry up." Phil sniffed and straightened, regarding his motley crew (Phred half-asleep but listening, Smiley and Zach frozen in a slap fight.) "People might be willing to ignore the arrival of alien life, but a fire's gonna catch someone's attention, and I don't want to be here when they show up."

As though waiting for its cue, a siren started up somewhere in the distance. A fire engine, perhaps. Time was running out.

Nobody moved.

They stared at the blazing wreck. Belligerently, it stared back, dripping, oozing, red-hot and ruinous. In a word: uninviting.

"You know what we need? A really, really long set of barbecue tongs."

Smiley snickered, glared, then bit her lip and squared her shoulders, steeling herself in a way that seemed almost a threat. Rigid with determination and backlit by flames, it was the most impressive Phil had seen anyone look in faded pyjama bottoms and an old woollen jumper emblazoned with greying pink kittens. Head held high with martyr-like fortitude she marched towards the wreckage. Loyal as knights and wordless, the others followed suit.

("You coming Zach?"

"Of course I'm coming—I showed up, didn't I? Here, let me go ahead; you're all stupidly flammable.")

When they reached the breached hull, the group faltered and became more cautious. Carefully, Zach edged his way past the broken shell rim, pushing aside a fringe of trailing wires. The heat inside was like a blow, hung with a heady, chemical scent that threatened poisoning. Even the air seemed malicious, shot through with energy and drier than dust as it bit and scratched at exposed hands and faces. Everything was shrouded in a chokingly dense smog that poured from every possible surface and outlet. Mercifully, from what Phil could tell, the lava pit was damaged but closed, though for how long...

The distant sirens were growing louder.

Phred nudged his side—everyone had taken an unspoken oath not to speak in the spacecraft, which seemed to be looking for a reason to collapse further—and pointed; Phil followed the direction of his finger. Conveniently close, there was a section of collapsed roofing, still smoking from where the suffocation of collapse had quashed the fire. Protruding from under that, and at an angle Phil would rather forget existed, was a blue skinned arm.

'Well Quiz, you kept your promise.'

Oblivious to the fire climbing his shirt—that fire being somewhat cooler than the man himself—Zach dragged the support beam to one side, indelicate and mouthing expletives throughout. With considerably more care, the other three began dragging the exposed figures from the wreck, stumbling over extra limbs in the process. Phil could feel his heart beating in a way it hadn't since he was a child, each pulse a miniature thrill.

Outside, the shadows leaned back in, reaching long-fingered hands in to their hair and eyes. Phil was deliberately operating on automatic, leery of looking too closely at anything. Whatever he was carrying seemed determined to snag on every corpse of every bush and every shrub. Roots reached up from the ground with the sole intention of catching at his feet. Next to him, he could hear Phred's relentless, whispered swearing.

There was an alley at the edge of the abandoned field, the beginning of a labyrinth that wound its way deep in to the suburbs. This is where the little group converged, sprinting across the overgrown pitch, feet soaked by the long grass, feeling the skyscrapers leaning in to peer at them with the scornful disinterest of people watching bugs.

When they reached the alley entrance, engulfed by the absolute darkness offered by the shadows of rundown houses, Phred dropped his share of the burden without ceremony and doubled back to help the others. Phil sheltered behind a dumpster that was clustered with enough bins to fill a house, listening intently for any signal that they had been followed and shuffling the bodies out of sight.

Zach and Smiley straggled in a few seconds later, tripping about the myriad of bins in a strange dance as they tried to avoid the alien limbs dangling all over the place. Phred followed them loudly whispering that they should hurry.

The sirens were even louder...

Crouched amongst the refuse and feeling like criminals, the quartet watched as cars flashed past—Police, Fire Department, and a bevy of unidentifiable black vehicles. Sound followed the excitement and the four were swiftly left to the void of their own thoughts.

Feeling around, Phil felt unduly thankful for the near absolute darkness; whatever limb he was holding felt broken, the fabric of the shirt wet. The alien—whichever one it was—was deadweight in his grasp. Strangely, he was reminded of the immobile weight of his school bag, a remnant of events from a lifetime ago. Such was the power of association, was briefly transported through time, in a manner more thorough than any machine could hope to manage; a return to a place of peeling wallpaper, an overpoweringly strong scent of stale coffee, and an underlying seam of raw, untapped disappointment that made later life a millionaire in misery. The ringing of a school bell was all he could hear, the end of another day...

A car swished past, speeding wheels spinning arcs of filthy water, and the illusion was broken. They were stuck in a reeking, piss-soaked alley, huddled like disobedient children, rubbish less 'littered about' more 'pressed into a particularly grotesque carpet'. The alien in Phil's grip shifted, a ragged gasp tearing from its chest, and Phil felt the sharp edge of its glasses dig in to his arm. Viz; he was almost tempted to drop him in the muck and let him be the floor's problem.

But the others were looking at him, expectant, troops before a leader who would take them in to battle. Smiley had Diz pulled half over her shoulder in a surprisingly genuine attempt at supporting a figure rather taller than herself. Zach and Phred bore Quiz between them, one apathetic, the other frowning in mild consternation. All of them seemed wide-eyed and blank, nervous without being jittery, determined without much motivation. Phil sighed heavily, the adrenaline wearing off, well aware of what was expected of him and half-glad he had three scapegoats.

"Come on. We all know the plan. Let's get outta here before people find the spaceship and start wondering what asshole decided to park it there."

With that, and four identical, cynical smiles, they skittered clumsily through the dark and vanished into the maze of suburban alleyways, dragging their kidnappers behind them. The city awoke the next morning to a ruined field, confused scientists, and black blood dotted on the pavement. In all the world, only six people knew what to make of it all.

For a peaceful life, that is already far too many.